“leave/The monstrous ledges there to slope and spill/Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke”

For Poetry Monday, something that is, again, longer than my 50-line rule-of-thumb -- thus a cut.


The Daisy, Alfred the Tennyson

O love, what hours were thine and mine
In lands of palm and southern pine,—
    In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.

What Roman strength Turbìa showed
In ruin, by the mountain road;
    How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco, basking, glowed.

How richly down the rocky dell
The torrent vineyard streaming fell
    To meet the sun and sunny waters,
That only heaved with a summer swell.

What slender campanili grew
By bays, the peacock’s neck in hue;
    Where, here and there, on sandy beaches
A milky-belled amaryllis blew.

How young Columbus seemed to rove,
Yet present in his natal grove,
    Now watching high on mountain cornice,
And steering, now, from a purple cove,

Now pacing mute by ocean’s rim
Till, in a narrow street and dim,
    I stayed the wheels at Cogoletto,
And drank, and loyally drank to him.

Nor knew we well what pleased us most,
Not the clipt palm of which they boast;
    But distant color, happy hamlet,
A mouldered citadel on the coast,

Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen
A light amid its olives green;
    Or olive-hoary cape in ocean;
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,

( Where oleanders flushed the bed ... My fancy fled to the South again. )

This was written in 1853 while his wife was recovering from some pretty serious surgery; they took the described Italian tour in 1851, the year after they finally married. (Emily Tennyson was, btw, the niece of arctic explorer John Franklin.) In 2015, the first draft manuscript was sold for £12,500.

---L.

Subject quote from "Come down, O maid," from "The Princess," by Alfred the Tennyson.