Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
Michael Angelo Buonarotti
By Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892)T
Of him who won a place
Above all kings and lords;
Whose various skill and power
Left Italy a dower
No numbers can compute, no tongue translate in words.
His genius to the rule
Art’s sternest laws required;
Yet, by no custom chained,
His daring hand disdained
The academic forms by tamer souls admired.
Awoke those shapes of might,
Once known, that never die;
Forms of Titanic birth,
The elder brood of earth,
That fill the mind more grandly than they charm the eye.
Ideal graces rose
Like flowers on gnarléd boughs;
For he was nursed and fed
At Beauty’s fountain-head,
And to the goddess pledged his earliest, warmest vows.
Imaginations passed
Into his facile hand,
By adverse fate unfoiled,
Through long, long years he toiled;
Undimmed the eyes that saw, unworn the brain that planned.
The State’s disastrous wars
Kept closer to his youth.
Though rough the winds and sharp,
They could not bend or warp
His soul’s ideal forms of beauty and of truth.
That takes the earliest fire
Of morn, he towered sublime
O’er names and fanes of mark
Whose lights to his were dark;
Facing the east, he caught a glow beyond his time.
Or wrought in stone, or hung
The Pantheon in the air;
Whether he gave to Rome
Her Sistine walls or dome,
Or laid the ponderous beams, or lightly wound the stair;
On Tuscan battlements,
Fired with the patriot’s zeal,
Where San Miniato’s glow
Smiled down upon the foe,
Till Treason won the gates that mocked the invader’s steel;
With Poesy’s delights
He cheered his solitude;
In sculptured sonnets wrought
His firm and graceful thought,
Like marble altars in some dark and mystic wood,—
The way his vision swept,
And scorned the narrower view.
He touched with glory all
That pope or cardinal,
With lower aims than his, allotted him to do.
Not theirs, but his—was thrown
O’er old and wonted themes.
The fires within his soul
Shone like an aureole
Around the prophets old and sibyls of his dreams.
His glowing thoughts he told
On canvas or on stone,
He needed not to seek
His themes from Jew or Greek;
His soul enlarged their forms, his style was all his own.
Florence and Rome shall stand
Stamped with the signet-ring
He wore, where kings obeyed
The laws the artists made.
Art was his world, and he was Art’s anointed king.
Four hundred years ago;
So grandly still he stands,
Mid lesser worlds of art,
Colossal and apart,
Like Memnon breathing songs across the desert sands.