Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
Sorrento
By John Edmund Reade (1800–1870)I
Hast spells enchaining; lo, yon bosomed bay
Where the lone crag upheaves its cloven brow,
Round which the blue waves chafe in idle play;
Know’st thou whose mighty spirit casts a ray
O’er its dim cavern? know’st thou who stood there
Embodying in his world-inspiring lay
Its tale? whose genius fills, informs the air,
Whose phantoms round that spot forever shall repair?
I see the sail spread from Lachæa’s isle:
They scale the Cyclop’s cave, a shout, a groan,
In his red eye is plunged the fiery pile!
Lo, with the morning’s light the goats defile
Slowly beneath the blinded monster’s hand:
Free stands at length the hero of the wile;
And now the giant’s clamors fill the strand,
As shouting bound from shore the Ulysséan band!
Of this all wild yet lovely coast is thine;
The Sirens yon gray islets have forsook,
Yet is each vestige of their haunt divine:
Doth not thy awful genius o’er them shine,
Bright as yon setting sun that steeps them o’er
With hues of life? so thy embodying line
From phantasy dost hero life restore,
Until we hear their tongues and see the forms they wore.
Lo, yon blue promontory, Circe’s spell
There changed to brutes the slaves to vice who yielded;
Speaks not thy moral eloquently well?
What herb save reason could her power compel,
And bid her kneel to virtue? o’er the foam
Why sighed the chief in Ithaca to dwell,
Her charms unfelt and loathed her starry dome?
Grave duty showed afar his wife, his son, his home.
No ruined vestige doth its site attest;
A secret nook where love would choose to hide
Its loved one from the world, a haven nest
Of shelter, when of all it asks possessed,
The heart would find or make its earthly heaven
Where only found, in woman’s answering breast;
All other ties save that sole life-tie riven:
The world’s neglect forgot, its injuries forgiven.
Hallowed by suffering and by virtue’s tear,
And this is sanctified by memory
Of venerating bosoms that revere
The martyrs of the past who suffered here;
O’er whom are offered human sympathies,
Heart-flowers, whose dews spiritualize the bier:
A woman by that shore with heedful eyes
Watches a nearing sail whose white whig homeward flies.
Recalls again affection’s wasted force
In exiled Tasso: other loves endure
To perish, lighted at an earthlier source,
Satiate with passion, buried in remorse;
If the heart own one pure receptacle,
One feeling flowing holier in its course,
Love that a spirit might not blush to tell,
’T is when a sister’s heart to thine doth fondly swell.
The blighted hope, the inexpiable wrong,
To soften here in solitude regret
Of a love stamped immortal in his song,
That but for him had lain the dead among;
Vain essay! if thou wouldst the thought conceal,
Or forms that ghost-like to the past belong,
If the heart’s wounds corroding thou wouldst heal,
That solitude thou seek’st to thee shall all reveal:
Vibrations thrilling along memory’s chain,
Felt in the chords of being till they wear
Its pulse away: so did he feel how vain
To realize his boyhood’s hope again;
Till his last refuge from self-tyranny,
He flew from nature’s ever-populous reign
Back to the desert of humanity,
To bear hate, scorn, repulse, to madden, and to die.