"De Gustibus—" (original) (raw)

"DE GUSTIBUS—"

1.Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,(If loves remain)In an English lane,By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.Hark, those two in the hazel coppice—A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,Making love, say,—The happier they!Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,And let them pass, as they will too soon,

With the beanflowers' boon,And the blackbird's tune,And May, and June!

2.What I love best in all the world,Is, a castle, precipice-encurled,In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.Or look for me, old fellow of mine,(If I get my head from out the mouthO' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,And come again to the land of lands)—In a sea-side house to the farther south,Where the baked cicalas die of drouth,And one sharp tree ('tis a cypress) stands,By the many hundred years red-rusted,Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,My sentinel to guard the sandsTo the water's edge. For, what expandsWithout the house, but the great opaque

Blue breadth of sea, and not a break?While, in the house, for ever crumblesSome fragment of the frescoed walls,From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.A girl bare-footed brings and tumblesDown on the pavement, green-flesh melons,And says there's news to-day—the kingWas shot at, touched in the liver-wing,Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling.—She hopes they have not caught the felons.Italy, my Italy!Queen Mary's saying serves for me—(When fortune's maliceLost her, Calais.)Open my heart and you will seeGraved inside of it, "Italy."Such lovers old are I and she;So it always was, so it still shall be!