Italy In Arms

Of all my dreams by night and day, One dream will evermore return, The dream of Italy in May; The sky a brimming azure urn Where lights of amber brood and burn; The doves about San Marco’s square, The swimming Campanile tower, The giants, hammering out the hour, The palaces, the bright lagoons, The gondolas gliding here and there Upon the tide that sways and swoons. The domes of San Antonio, Where Padua ’mid her mulberry-trees Reclines; Adige’s crescent flow Beneath Verona’s balconies; Rich Florence of the Medicis; Sienna’s starlike streets that climb From hill to hill; Assisi well Remembering the holy spell Of rapt St. Francis; with her crown Of battlements, embossed by time, Stern old Perugia looking down. Then, mother of great empires, Rome, City of the majestic past, That o’er far leagues of alien foam The shadows of her eagles cast, Imperious still; impending, vast, The Colosseum’s curving line; Pillar and arch and colonnade; St. Peter’s consecrated shade, And Hadrian’s tomb where Tiber strays; The ruins on the Palatine With all their memories of dead days. And Naples, with her sapphire arc Of bay, her perfect sweep of shore; Above her, like a demon stark, The dark fire-mountain evermore Looming portentous, as of yore; Fair Capri with her cliffs and caves; Salerno drowsing ’mid her vines And olives, and the shattered shrines Of Pæstum where the gray ghosts tread, And where the wilding rose still waves As when by Greek girls garlanded. But hark! What sound the ear dismays, Mine Italy, mine Italy? Thou that wert wrapt in peace, the haze Of loveliness spread over thee! Yet since the grapple needs must be, I who have wandered in the night With Dante, Petrarch’s Laura known, Seen Vallombrosa’s groves breeze-blown, Met Angelo and Raffael, Against iconoclastic might In this grim hour must wish thee well!