Laid out for the lust of the eye, you seem to see
The lineaments of gratified desire.
An illusion though, like the smile on a dead face
Which means nothing but our own wish for peace.
Exquisite, yes: but a sense of the past, to be truly
Felicitous, demands some belief in the present,
Some moral belvedere we have not got.
This villa inhabited only by frescoes,
This garden groomed for sightseers – they mirror
Too clearly our lack of prospect or tenable premise.
The cardinals and princes who adorned them,
Lords of an age when men believed in man,
Are as remote from us as the Colosseum
Where high-tiered beasts howled down professional heroes;
Perhaps – it is a comfortless thought – remoter.
Back, then, to Rome. At Tivoli our driver
Stopped again like some house-proud, indelicate devil
To remark the smell of sulphur. Presently,
Held in a crook of Rome’s old city wall
Close by St. Paul’s gate under the pagan shadow
Of Gaius Cestius’ pyramid, we found
The English cemetery. An ox-eyed, pregnant,
Slatternly girl opened the gate for us
And showed us round the desirable estate.
Here is one comer of a foreign field
That is for ever garden suburb. See,
In their detached and smug-lawned residences,
Behind a gauze of dusty shrubs, the English
Indulge their life-long taste for privacy.
Garish Campagna knocks at the back door,
Rome calls en grande tenue: but ‘not at home’
Murmur these tombs, and ‘far from home they died,
‘The eccentric couple you have come to visit –
‘One spitting blood, an outsider and a failure,
‘One sailing a boat, his mind on higher things.’
Somewhere close to the pyramid a loud-speaker
Blared jazz while we lingered at Keats’ shabby mound,
But the air was drowned by the ghost of a nightingale;
The ground was swimming with anemone tears
Where Shelley lay.
We could feel at home here, with
This family of exiles. It is our people:
A people from whose reticent, stiff heart
Babble the springtime voices, always such voices
Bubbling out of their clay …
So much for Rome.
Tomorrow we shall take the bus to Florence.
1 The Colosseum was built by Vespasian on the site of the Golden House of Nero.
PART FOUR
Bus to Florence
In the white piazza Today is barely awake.
A well-water breeze freshens
Her nakedness, musky with love, and wafts about
Her breath of moist carnations.
Oh the beautiful creature, still in a dream pinioned,
A flutter of meadowsweet thighs!
How she clings to the night, whose fingertips haunt her waxen
Body! Look at the eyes
Opening – pale, drenched, languid as aquamarines!
They are open. The mere-smooth light
Starts glancing all over the city in jets and sparklets
Like a charm of goldfinches in flight.
The tousled alleys stretch. Tall windows blink.
Hour of alarum clocks and laces.
Sprinklers dust off the streets. The shops hum gently
As they make up their morning faces.
And today comes out like a bride, a different woman,
Subtler in hue, hazier,
Until the pensive mist goes, shyly avowing
Such a zenith of shameless azure.
This is our day: we mean
To make much of her, tune to her pitch. The enchanting creature
Travels with us. For once
There will be no twinge of parting in a departure.
So eager she is to be off,
Spilling her armful of roses and mignonette,
Her light feet restlessly echoed
From campanile and wristwatch (will they forget?
Be late?) What a stir and lustre
Ripple the white square at a lift of her hand!
Look! she has seen us, she points to
That blue bus with the scarab-like trailer behind.
We went the Cassian Way, a route for legions,
We and the May morning.
Rome flaked off in stucco; blear-eyed villas
Melancholiac under their awnings.
Rome peeled off like a cataract. Clear beyond us
A vision good to believe in –
The Campagna with its longdrawn sighs of grass
Heaving, heaving to heaven.
This young-old terrain of asphodel and tufo
Opening its heart to the sun,
Was it sighing for death like Tithonus, or still athirst for
Immortal dews?… We run
Towards Tuscany now through a no-man’s-land where stilted
Aqueducts dryly scale
The distance and sport the lizard his antediluvian
Head and tendril tail.
But soon the road rivers between flowerbanks:
Such a fume and flamboyance of purple
Vetch, of campions, poppy, wild rose, gladioli,
Bugloss! The flowery people,
Come out in their best to line our route, how they wave
At the carnival progress! And higher,
The foothills flush with sanfoin, salutes of broom
Are setting the rocks on fire.
Sutri, Viterbo, Montefiascone passed:
Each village, it seemed, was making
A silent bar in the music, the road’s hurdy-gurdy
Winding, the tambourine shaking
Of sunlit leaves. You tatterdemalion townships –
Elegance freaked with decay –
Your shuttered looks and your black doormouths gaping
Dumb in the heat of the day
Reject, unanswered, the engine’s urgent beat.
But now, groves of acacia
Swing their honeybells peal upon peal to welcome us
Over the vibrant, azure,
Deep organ chords of Bolsena, the silvery wavelets
Trilling tranquillamente.
That music followed us for miles, until
We came to Acquapendente.
Eyes grown used to the light, we were finding our form and meeting
Impressions squarely.
Yet, where all was new, changeful, idyllic, it saddened
To think how rarely
More than a few snippets remain from the offered fabric,
And they not always
The ones we’d have chosen. It’s sequence I lack, the talent to grasp
Not a here-and-there phrase
But the music entire, its original stream and logic. I’d better
Accept this, perhaps,
As nature’s way: matter, the physicists tell one, is largely
A matter of gaps.
Another stage, and a change of key. Listen!
Rosetted oxen move –
The milky skins, the loose-kneed watersilk gait of
Priestesses vowed to Love.
A road stubborn with stone pines. Shrines at the roadside.
A sandstone cliff, where caves
Open divining mouths: in this or that one
A skeleton sibyl raves.
Signs and omens … We approached the haunts of
The mystery-loving Etruscans.
Earth’s face grew rapidly older, ravine-wrinkled,
Shadowed with brooding dusk on
Temple and cheek. Mountains multiplied round us
And the flowery guise shredded off as we
Climbed past boulders and
gaunt grass high into
A landscape haggard as prophecy,
Scarred with bone-white riverbeds like veins
Of inspiration run dry.
Still what a journey away the apocalypse! See it –
A tower, a town in the sky!
A child from the flowering vale, a youth from the foothills
May catch glimpses of death
Remote as a star, irrelevant, all of a lifetime
Ahead, less landmark than myth.
For ages it seems no nearer. But imperceptibly
The road, twisting and doubling
As if to delay or avoid it, underlines
That Presence: the man is troubled,
Feeling the road beneath him being hauled in now
Like slack, the magnetic power
Of what it had always led to over the dreaming
Hills and the fable of flowers.
So, while the bus toiled upwards and the Apennines
Swirled like vapours about it,
That town in the sky stayed constant and loomed nearer
Till we could no more doubt it;
And soon, though still afar off, it darkly foretold us
We were destined to pass that way.
We passed by the thundercloud castle of Radicofani
At the pinnacle of our day.
The wrack of cloud, the surly ruinous tower
Stubborn upon the verge of recognition –
What haunts and weights them so?
Memory, or premonition?
Why should a mouldering finger in the sky,
An hour of cloud that drifts and passes, mean
More than the flowering vale,
The volcanic ravine?
A driven heart, a raven-shadowing mind
Loom above all my pastorals, impend
My traveller’s joy with fears
That travelling has no end.
But on without pause from that eyrie the bus, swooping,
Checking and swooping, descends:
The road cascades down the hillface in blonde ringlets
Looped up with hairpin bends.
The sun rides out. The calcined earth grows mellow
With place-names sleek as oil –
Montepulciano, Montalcino, Murlo,
Castiglione. The soil
Acknowledges man again, his hand which husbands
Each yielding inch and endures
To set the vine amid armies, the olive between
Death’s adamantine spurs.
Presently, on a constellation of three hills,
We saw crowning the plain
A town from a missal, a huddle of towers and houses,
Mediaeval Siena.
A gorge of a street, anfractuous, narrow. Our bus
Crawled up it, stemming a torrent
Of faces – the faces impetuous, proud, intransigent
Of those who had fought with Florence
For Tuscany. Was it a demonstration they flocked to?
A miracle? Or some huger
Event? We left the bus stranded amongst them, a monster
Thrown up from their fathomless future,
And strolled into a far-off present, an age
Where all is emblematic,
Pure, and without perspective. The twining passages,
Diagrams of some classic
Doctrinal knot, lap over and under one another.
The swan-necked Mangia tower
With its ruff stands, clear as Babel, for pride: beneath it,
Shaped like a scallop, that square
Might be humility’s dewpond, or the rose-madder
Shell from which Aphrodite.
Once stepped ashore. And the west front of the Duomo –
How it images, flight upon flight, the
Ascending torrent, a multitude without number
Intent on their timeless way
From the world of St. Catherine, Boccaccio and Fiammetta
Towards the judgment day!
A township cast up high and dry from an age
When the whole universe
Of stars lived in man’s parish
And the zodiac told his fortune, chapter and verse.
A simple time – salvation or damnation
One black and white device,
Eternity foreshortened,
Earth a mere trusting step from Paradise.
O life where mystery grew on every bush,
Saints, tyrants, thrills and throes
Were for one end! – the traveller
Dips into your dreams and, sighing, goes.
After two hours we went on, for our destination
Called. The adagio dance
Of olives, their immemorial routine and eccentric
Variations of stance;
The vines that flourished like semaphore alphabets endlessly
Flagging from hill to hill:
We knew them by heart now (or never would), seeing them tiny
And common as tormentil.
Florence invisibly haled us. The intervening
Grew misted with expectations,
Diminished yet weirdly prolonged, as all the go-between
World by a lover’s impatience.
Through Poggibonsi we glided – a clown’s name
And a history of hard knocks:
But nothing was real till at length we entered the nonpareil
City … A hand unlocks
The traveller’s trance. We alight. And the just coming down to
Earth, the pure sense of arrival,
More than visions or masterpieces, fulfil
One need for which we travel.
This day, my bride of a day,
Went with me hand in hand the centuried road:
I through her charmed eyes gazing,
She hanging on my words, peace overflowed.
But now, a rose-gold Eve,
With the deep look of one who will unbosom
Her sweetest to death only,
She opens out, she flames and falls like blossom.
A spray that lightly trembles
After the warbler’s flown. A cloud vibrating
In the wash of the hull-down sun.
My heart rocks on. Remembering, or awaiting?
PART FIVE
Florence: Works of Art
Florence, father of Michelangelo,
Dante, da Vinci, Fra Angelico,
Cellini, Botticelli, Brunelleschi.
Giotto, Donatello, Masaccio! –
We shall not see their like, or yours, again.
Painters depart, and patrons. You remain,
Your bridges blown, your glory catalogued,
A norm for scholars and for gentlemen.
Reverend city, sober, unperplexed,
Turning your page to genius annexed
I breathe the mint and myrrh of Tuscan hills,
The tart aroma of some classic text.
Shields and medallions; overshadowing eaves
Like studious brows; the light that interleaves
Your past with amber: all’s definitive, all
In changeless chiaroscuro one conceives.
I sometimes think that the heart is ne’er so dead
As where some vanished era overspread
The soil with titan foliage, scattering down
Eternal rubies when its bloom was shed.
Where rode Lorenzo, panoplied and plumed,
Where Savonarola burned, and Ruskin fumed,
The lady artist set her easel up,
The tourist with mild wonder is consumed.
Yet still the Arno navigably flows,
And saunterers past the Ponte Vecchio’s
Jewel shops cast a shadow: here is still
A taste for life, a market for the rose.
Ah no, it’s not the Florentines who fade
Before the statued loggia, the arcade,
The cliffs of floral stone. They live enough
In a pure tongue and a congenial trade.
Should the past overawe them? It’s not theirs,
More than a mansion is the caretaker’s.
A church by Giotto does as well as any
Other for this day’s rendezvous or prayers.
What if along the pot-holed boulevards
Slogans are scrawled, not cantos? if postcards
Stand in for masterpieces, and ice cream
Says more to them than edifying façades?
The past is all-encroaching; and unless
They lopped its tentacles, stemmed its excess
To clear the air for some domestic seed,
They’d soon be strangled by a wilderness.
It’s not the Florentine who pales beside
That vast, rank efflorescence. The pop-eyed
Tourist it is who rushes on his doom,
Armed with good taste, a Leica and a guide.
The primitive forest, the renaissance range
So massive are, surely they will estrange
Him from himself, or send him yelping home
To plastic novelties, to art’s small change.
Plodding the galleries, we ask how can
That century of the Uncommon Man,
Sovereign here in paint, bronze, marble, suit
Complete Poems Page 33