The yearning in a patriot ode
Construed as treason; trial none;
Prolonged captivity profound;
Vain liberation late. All this,
With pity for impoverishment
And blight forestalling age’s wane.
Hillward the quelled enthusiast turned,
Unmanned, made meek through strenuous wrong,
Preluding, faltering; then began,
But only thrilled the wire—no more,
The constant maid supplying voice,
Hinting by no ineloquent sign
That she was but his mouth-piece mere,
Himself too spiritless and spent.
“Pausilippo, Pausilippo,
Pledging easement unto pain,
Shall your beauty even solace
If one’s sense of beauty wane?
“Could light airs that round ye play
Waft heart-heaviness away
Or memory lull to sleep,
Then, then indeed your balm
Might Silvio becharm,
And life in fount would leap,
Pausilippo!
“Did not your spell invite,
In moods that slip between,
A dream of years serene,
And wake, to dash, delight—
Evoking here in vision
Fulfillment and fruition—
Nor mine, nor meant for man!
Did hope not frequent share
The mirage when despair
Overtakes the caravan,
Me then your scene might move
To break from sorrow’s snare,
And apt your name would prove,
Pausilippo!
“But I’ve looked upon your revel—
It unravels not the pain:
Pausilippo, Pausilippo,
Named benignly if in vain!”
It ceased. In low and languid tone
The tideless ripple lapped the passive shore.
As listlessly the bland untroubled heaven
Looked down, as silver doled was silent given
In pity—futile as the ore!
VI
GIVING way to thoughts less cheerful than archaic, he is checked by a sportive sally from the Rose. But is anew troubled, catching sight of an object attesting a Power even more nitrous and menacing than the Bomb-King himself. In short, another and greater crowned artilleryman, a capricious dominator, impossible to dethrone, and reigning by right incontestably divine. Pondering which discouraging fact, once more our genial friend is twitted by the revelling Mentor.
“Signor, turn here?” And turn we did,
Repassing scenes that charmed erewhile
Nor less could charm reviewed even now.
What blandishment in clime, or else
What subtler influence, my Rose,
From thee exhaled, thou Lydian one,
Seductive here could flatter me
Even in emotion not unfelt
While fleeting from that warmish pair!
If, taking tone indeed from them,
No lightsome thought awhile prevailed,
Devious it wandered like a dream.
I mused on Virgil, here inurned
On Pausilippo, legend tells—
Here on the slope that pledges ease to pain,
For him a pledge assuredly true
If here indeed his ashes be—
Rome’s minstrel in Rome’s palmy time;
Nor less whose epic’s undertone
In volumed numbers rolling bland,
Chafing against the metric bound,
Plains like the South Sea ground-swell heaved
Against the palm-isle’s halcyon strand.
O world, to Rome’s wreathed laureat known
Even as to England’s now;
Melancholy sphere,
Ruled by the primary impulse given—
Forever revolving on;
Whose shade brings light, whose light brings shade;
And naught can stand, against the eternal round,
Opinion and vogue recurring still,
Though life’s too brief to note some long returns;
Where never innocence is lord;
Where reason, that gladdens not the wise,
The innocent Alarms;
Where more’s to fear from life than death;
When truth takes falsehood graft,——and hence
Equivocal fruit——
But here came check.
For brooding thus, I bowed the head,
Downcast in mood that comes to mortals all
And ah the flower on my lapelle
So saucy looked, gay Belle-et-Bonne—
So wise, sad Sir? she cut me short
And archly laughed me down.
And slopes of Paradise rolled between,
Till the Great Mountain seemed a Claude,
His world a picture born of Art serene;
When, lo, across the blue sunned bay—
Is it the Fiend at Eden’s gate?—
What Mohawk of a mountain lours!
A scalp-lock of Tartarian smoke
Thin streaming forth from tawny brow,
One heel on painted Pompeii set,
And one on Hercules’ whelmed town!
The Siren’s seat for pleasurists lies
Betwixt two threatning bombardiers,
Their mortars loaded, linstocks lit—
Vesuvius yonder—Bomba here.
Events may Bomba’s batteries spike:
But how with thee, sulphurious Hill
Whose vent far hellward reaches down!
Ah, funeral urns of time antique
Inwrought with flowers in gala play
Where faun and bacchanal dance in freak,
Even as of pagan time ye speak,
Type ye what Naples is alway?
Yes, round these curved volcanic shores,
Vined urn of ashes, bed on bed,
Abandonment as thoughtless pours
As when the revelling pagan led.
And here again I droopt the brow,
And, lo, again I saw the Rose,
The red red ruddy and royal Rose!
Expanded more from bud but late
Sensuous it lured, and took the tone
Of some light taunting Cyprian gay
In shadow deep of college-wall
Startling some museful youth afoot—
“Mooning in mind? Ah, well-a-day!”
I turned me short; and, timely now,
Beheld this scene: damsels sun-burnt,
In holiday garb with tinsel trimmed;
And men and lads behind them ranged
About a carpet on the beach
Whereon a juggler in brocade
Made rainbows of his glittering balls,
Cascading them with dexterous sleight;
And as from hand to hand they flew
With jinglings of interior din,
He trilled a ditty deftly timed
To every lilted motion light:—
“The balls, hey! The balls,
Cascatella of balls—
Baseless arches I toss up in air!
Spinning we go,—
Now over, now under;
High Jack is Jack low,
And never a blunder!
Come hither—go thither:
But wherefore nowhither?
I lose them—I win them,
From hand to hand spin them,
Reject them, and seize them,
And toss t
hem, and tease them,
And keep them forever in air,
All to serve but a freak of my glee!
“Sport ye thus with your spoonies, ye fair,
For your mirth? nor even forbear
To juggle with Nestors your thralls?
Do ye keep them in play with your smiling and
frowning,
Your flirting, your fooling, abasing and crowning,
And dance them as Fortune her balls?”—
With that, and hurrying his two hands,
Arching he made his meteors play;
When, lo, like Mercury dropped from heaven,
Precipitate there a tumbler flew,
Alighting on winged feet; then sang,
Dancing at whiles, and beating time,
Clicking his nimble heels together
In hornpipe of the gamesome kid:
“Over mines, by vines
That take hot flavor
From Vesuvius—
Hark, in vintage
Sounds the tabor!
“In brimstone-colored
Tights or breeches
There the Wag-Fiend
Dancing teaches;
“High in wine-press
Hoop elastic
Pigeon-wings cut
In rite fantastic;
“While the black grape,
Spirting, gushing,
Into red wine
Foameth rushing!
“Which wine drinking,
Drowning, thinking,
Every night-fall,
Heard in Strada,
Hiss the doves
And coos the adder!”
VII
UNINFLUENCED by the pranks and rhymes of certain Merry Andrews of the beach, he unaccountably falls into an untimely fit of historic reminiscences. For which dereliction, the Rose, now in a pleading mood, touchingly upbraids him. But again he relapses, notwithstanding an animated call, subsequently heard, to regale himself with ruddy apples and sweet oranges.
While yet I listened, vivid came
A flash of thought that carried me
Back to five hundred years ago.
I saw the panoramic bay
In afternoon beneath me spread—
All Naples from siesta risen
Peopling the beaches, barges, moles.
Cooled over blue waves tinkling bland
Came waftures from Sorrento’s vines,
And Queen Joanna, queen and bride,
Sat in her casement by the sea
Twining three strands of silk and gold
Into a cord how softly strong.
“For what this dainty rope, sweet wife”?
It was the bridegroom who had stolen
Behind her chair, and now first spoke.
“To hang you with, Andrea,” she said
Smiling. He shrugged his shoulders; “Nay,
What needs? I’ll hang but on your neck.”
And straight caressed her there; and when she
Sat mutely passive, smiling still.
For jest he took it? But that night
A rope of twisted silk and gold
Droopt from a balcony where vines
In flower showed violently torn;
And, starlit, thence what tassel swung!
For offset to Eve’s serpent twined
In that same sleek and shimmering cord,
Quite other scene recurred. In hall
Of Naples here, methought I stood
Before the pale mute-speaking stone
Of seated Agrippina—she
The truest woman that ever wed
In tragic widowhood transfixed;
In cruel craft exiled from Rome
To gaze on Naples’ sunny bay,
More sharp to feel her sunless doom.
O ageing face, O youthful form,
O listless hand in idle lap,
And, ah, what thoughts of God and man!
But, intervening here, my Flower,
Opening yet more in bloom the less,
Maturing toward the wane,—low breathed,
“Again? and quite forgotten me?
You wear an Order, me, the Rose,
To whom the favoring fates allot
A term that shall not bloom outlast;
No future’s mine, nor mine a past.
Yet I’m the Rose, the flower of flowers.
Ah, let time’s present time suffice,
No Past pertains to Paradise.”
Time present. Well, in present time
It chanced a lilting note I heard—
A fruit-girl’s, and her cry was this:
“Love-apples, love-apples!
All dew, honey-dew,
From orchards of Cyprus—
Blood-oranges too!
“Will you buy? prithee, try!
They grew facing south;
See, mutely they languish
To melt in your mouth!
“’Tis now, take them now
In the hey-day of flush,
While the crisis is on
And the juices can gush!
“Love-apples, love-apples,
All dew, honey-dew
From orchards of Cyprus—
Blood-oranges too!”
Warbling and proffering them she went,
And passed, and left me as erewhile,
For the dun annals would not down.
Murky along the sunny strand
New spectres streamed from shades below,
Spectres of Naples under Spain,
Phantoms of that incensed Revolt
With whose return Wrath threatens still
Bomba engirt with guards.—Lo, there,
A throng confused, in arms they pass,
Arms snatched from smithy, forge and shop:
Craftsmen and sailors, peasants, boys,
And swarthier faces dusked between—
Brigands and outlaws; linked with these
Salvator Rosa, and the fierce
Falcone with his fiery school;
Pell-mell with riff-raff, banded all
In league as violent as the sway
Of feudal claims and foreign lords
Whose grinding heel provoked the spark
That fired the populace into flame.
And, see, dark eyes and sunny locks
Of Masaniello, bridegroom young,
Tanned marigold-cheek and tasseled cap;
The darling of the mob; nine days
Their great Apollo; then, in pomp
Of Pandemonium’s red parade,
His curled head Gorgoned on the pike,
And jerked aloft for God to see.
A portent. Yes, and typed the years,
Red after-years, and whirl of error
When Freedom linkt with Furies raved
In Carmagnole and cannibal hymn,
Mad song and dance before the ark
From France imported with The Terror!
To match the foison, mock the clime,
Hell’s cornucopia crammed with crime!
Scarce cheerful here the revery ran.
Nor did my Rose now intervene,
Full opening out in dust and sun
Which hurried along that given term,
She said would never bloom outlast.
VIII
HE encounters a prepossessing little tatterdemalion Triton, shell in hand, dewy in luminous spray of a rainbowed fountain.
By marbles where a fountain rose
; In jubilant waters skurrying high
To break in sleet against the blue,
I saw a thing as freshly bright—
A boy, who holding up a shell
Enameled part, with pinkish valve
New dipped in rainbows of the spray,
By mute appeal, with deference touched
As if invoking Naples’ monarch
Not her mob, attention craved.
A weed of life, a sea-weed he
From the Levant adventuring out;
A cruiser light, like all his clan
Who, in repletion’s lust for more,
And penury’s strife for daily bread,
As licensed by compassionate heaven
To privateer it on their wits,
The Mid Sea rove from quay to quay,
At home with Turban, Fez, or Hat;
Ready in French, Italian, Greek—
Linguists at large; alert to serve
As chance interpreters or guides;
Suave in address, with winning ways—
Arch imps of Pandarus, a few;
Others with improvising gift
Of voweled rhyme in antic sort,
Or passionate, spirited by their sun
That ripens them in early teens;
And some with small brown fingers slim
Busier than the jackdaw’s bill.
But he, what gravity is his!
Precociously sedate indeed
In beauty sensuously serene.
White-draped, and ranked aloft in choir,
A treble clear in rolling laud,
Meet would he look on Easter Morn.
The muster round him closing more,
How circumspect he plays his part;
His glance intelligent taking in
The motley miscellaneous groups:
Large-chested porters, swarthy dames
In dress provincial that beseems;
Fishermen bronzed, and barbers curled;
Fat monk with paunched umbrella blue;
The quack, magnific in brocade
Chapeau and aigulets; the wight
That cobbles shoes in public way;
Mariners in red Phrygian caps.
But, twinkling brief, his liquid glance
Skims one poor figure limp that leans
Herman Melville- Complete Poems Page 82