Dante

Strong forms were those of the New Life, that stoodAround thy cradle,O Master of the song that looks above!

A brave young giantess,Unknown before to Greek or Latin shores,Daring in love and hate, and fair withal,Came Tuscan Libertade, and the childAlready with bounteous breast did comfort thee.

And all a-glowing with her spheral rays,Mild and austere in one,Came Faith: and she, across a shoreObscure with crowds of visions and of shades,Opened for thee the Gate of the Infinite.

Sighing and pensive, yet with locks aglowWith rosy splendour from another air,Love made long stay.And such the gentle thingsHe talked to thee with bashful lips, so sweetlyHe entered all the chambers of thy heart,That no one ever knew to love like thee.

But soon away from lonely meditating,O youthful recluse,Wild clamour and fierce tumult tore thee, andThe fury of brothers seeking brothers' blood.Thou heard'st the hissing flames of civil warOn neighbour's walls; thou heardest women shriekTo heaven that altars and the marriage bed,The dear hearth-stone and the infant's cradle,—All that made fair the marital abode,Were swept away in one great gulf of flame.Their men had rushed from their embrace to arms;The youth breathed only anger and destruction.Thou sawest the raging of swordsSeeking the breast-plunge;Thou heardest the dying warriorBlaspheme and curse:Before thee, streaming with gore,Gold locks and grey;And the Furies offeringTo Liberty the execrated hostOf human victims;And Death, the cruel arbiter of fates,Crumbling the mighty towers and openingThe long-barred gates.Amid wild scenesSo grew thy Italian soul,And prayed that the long civil hate might end.

Meanwhile he sawOf love such pure revealings and so strange,The which depicted in the shadeOf a young myrtle-tree,Each one who saw must bow the head in reverence.

But o'er this gentle dreamThere came the voice of weeping,Bitterly sounding from the maternal source.Alas! broken by the whirlwind,Lies the fair myrtle,And with wide-spread wingsThe dove of sweet affection is flown forthTo seek a purer aura for its flight.

He, driven here and thereIn the thick darkness of the turbulent age,Sought refuge with the famous shades of old;So learned to hate himself and present things.And in the twilight came he forth a giant,Seeming a shade himself—an angry shadeWho through the desert went from tomb to tomb,Now questioning and now embracing them:Until before him rose across the ruinAnd dust of these barbaric ages gone,Like a cloudy pillar, the ancient Latin valour.Then all that such a ruin tells did burstUpon the silent air in one great cry.In the exalted visionArose the poet divine; and now, disdainingHis stricken land and time that only wastedIn petty aimless strife the ancient strength,He, in the seeing of his heart's desire,Saluted thee, O modern Italy,—One, in thy valiant arms, thy laws, thy speech.

And then, to truly tellWhat such a vision meant, he sought to knowThe life that rolls through all the sea of being.From beneath the dust of buried centuriesHe made things good and ill to tell their taleThrough him the fatal prophet: till his voiceResounded through the world, and made the agesTurn and behold themselves. Judge and lord,He placed them where they could themselves behold,Admired and wept, disdained and laughed at them;Then shut them up in his eternal song,Well pleased that he had power to do this much.

And meanwhile this poor tangleWhere the weeping and the wailing still goes on,This endless fraud and shadowWhich has the name of life and is so base,—All this didst thou despise! Thy sacred museExplored the depths of all the universe.Following the good gentile PhilosopherWho placed thee in the midst of secret things,Thou didst desire to see as angels seeThere where there is no intervening veil;And thou wouldst love as they do love in heaven.Up through the ways of loveThe humble creaturePushing his way to the Creator's presence,Wished to find rest in that eternal TruthWhich taught thee the great love and the great thought.Here Virgil failed thee,And thou, deserted,A lonely human spirit as if drownedWithin the abyss of thy immense desire,Didst vanish overwhelmed in doubt,—When as on wingsAngelical there came unto thy griefShe who is love and light and visionBetween the understanding and the True.No mortal tongue like mine may give her name,But thou who lovedst didst call her Beatrice.And so from sphere to sphere'T was naught but melody that thou didst hear,'T was naught but one great light that thou didst see,And every single sense thou hadst was love,And verse and spirit made one harmonyLike unto her who there revealed herself.Alas! what caredst thou thenFor thy poor country and the endless strifeThat rent its cities like, alas! even thoseThat make forever dark the vales of hell!From heaven descending thou didst thrice bring downThe Hymn Supreme, and all the while there shoneUpon thy brow a radiance divineLike his who spake with God in Sinai.

Before thee shiningIn all the splendour of the holy KingdomFlashed in its crimson light the mortal fieldOf Montaperto, and along the wastesDeserted and malignant came the sound,Dreary and dull, of dying warriors' sighs:To which far off respondedWith a great cry of mingled human woeThe cursed battle-field of Campaldino.And thou, Rea Meloria,Didst rise from the Tuscan seaTo tell the glory of this horrid slaughter,And of the Thyrrenian shores made desolateWith this our madness, and the sea's great bosomAll stained with blood, and far Liguria's strandFilled with the moan of lonely Pisan exilesAnd children born for fratricidal war.