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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
DE GUSTIBUS', by ROBERT BROWNING Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees Last Line: So it always was, so shall ever be! Subject(s): Travel; Journeys; Trips | |||
YOUR ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (If our loves remain) In an English lane, By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies. Hark, those two in the hazel coppice -- A boy and a girl, if the good fates please, Making love, say, -- The happier they! Draw yourself up from the light of the moon, And let them pass, as they will too soon, With the beanflowers' boon, And the blackbird's tune, And May, and June! What I love best in all the world Is a castle, precipice-encurled, In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine. Or look for me, old fellow of mine, (If I get my head from out the mouth O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands, And come again to the land of lands) -- In a sea-side house to the farther South, Where the baked cicala dies of drouth, And one sharp tree -- 't is a cypress -- stands By the many hundred years red-rusted, Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted, My sentinel to guard the sands To the water's edge. For, what expands Before the house, but the great opaque Blue breadth of sea without a break? While, in the house, forever crumbles Some fragment of the frescoed walls, From blisters where a scorpion sprawls. A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons. And says there's news to-day -- the king Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing, Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling: -- She hopes they have not caught the felons. Italy, my Italy! Queen Mary's saying serves for me -- (When fortune's malice Lost her, Calais) Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, "Italy." Such lovers old are I and she: So it always was, so shall ever be! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...RICHARD, WHAT'S THAT NOISE? by RICHARD HOWARD LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL by RICHARD BLANCO RIVERS INTO SEAS by LYNDA HULL DESTINATIONS by JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN THE ONE WHO WAS DIFFERENT by RANDALL JARRELL THE CONFESSION OF ST. JIM-RALPH by DENIS JOHNSON SESTINA: TRAVEL NOTES by WELDON KEES TO H. B. (WITH A BOOK OF VERSE) by MAURICE BARING CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME' by ROBERT BROWNING |
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