Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CAMP SANTO AT PISA, by AUBREY DE VERE


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CAMP SANTO AT PISA, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: There needs not choral song, nor organ's pealing
Subject(s): Italy


I.
THERE needs not choral song nor org
Thoughts breathed like hymns from spiritual choirs
While shades and lights in soft succession stealing
Along it creep, now veiling now revealing
Strange forms here traced by Painting's earliest sires,
Angels with palms and purgatorial fires
And Saints caught up and demons round them reeling.
Love, long remembering those she could not save
Here hung the cradle of Italian Art:
Faith rocked it: hence, like hermit child, went forth
That heaven-born Power which beautified the earth:
She perished when the world had lured her heart
From her true friends, Religion and the grave.


II.
LAMENT not thou: the cold winds as they pass
Through the ribbed fret-work with low sigh or moan
Lament enough; let them lament alone
Counting the sear leaves of the innumerous grass
With thin, soft sound like one prolonged alas!
Spread thou thy hands on sun-touched vase or stone
That yet retains the warmth of sunshine gone,
And drink warm solace from that ponderous mass.
Gaze not around thee. Monumental marbles
Time-clouded frescoes mouldering year by year
Dim cells in which all day the night-bird warbles
These things are sorrowful elsewhere not here:
A mightier Power than Art's hath here her shrine:
Stranger! thou tread'st the soil of Palestine!






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