Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
San Nicolo in Carcere
By Lord Byron (1788–1824)T
What do I gaze on? Nothing; look again!
Two forms are slowly shadowed on my sight,—
Two insulated phantoms of the brain:
It is not so; I see them full and plain,—
An old man, and a female young and fair,
Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein
The blood is nectar;—but what doth she there,
With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?
Where on the heart and from the heart we took
Our first and sweetest nurture, when the wife,
Blest into mother, in the innocent look,
Or even the piping cry of lips that brook
No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives
Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook
She sees her little bud put forth its leaves—
What may the fruit be yet?—I know not—Cain was Eve’s.
The milk of his own gift: it is her sire
To whom she renders back the debt of blood
Born with her birth. No; he shall not expire
While in those warm and lovely veins the fire
Of health and holy feeling can provide
Great Nature’s Nile, whose deep stream rises higher
Than Egypt’s river: from that gentle side
Drink, drink and live, old man! heaven’s realm holds no such tide.
Has not thy story’s purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds: O holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss
To thy sire’s heart replenishing its source
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.