Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A NIGHT IN NAPLES, by LEWIS MORRIS (1833-1907)


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A NIGHT IN NAPLES, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: This is the one night in all the year
Last Line: It is long, long ago; it was far, far away!
Subject(s): Naples, Italy


THIS is the one night in all the year
When the faithful of Naples who love their priest
May find their faith and their wealth increased;
For just as the stroke of midnight is here,

Those who with faithful undoubting mind
Their "Aves" mutter, their rosaries tell,
They without doubt shall a recompence find;
Yea, their faith indeed shall profit them well.

Therefore, to-night, in the hot thronged street
By San Gennaro's, the people devout,
With banner, and relic, and thurible meet,
With some sacred image to marshal them out.

For a few days hence, the great lottery
Of the sinful city declared will be,
And it may be that Aves and Paters said
Will bring some aid from the realms of the dead.

And so to the terrible place of the tomb
They issue, a pitiful crowd, through the gloom,
To where all the dead of the city decay,
Waiting the trump of the judgment day.

For every day of the circling year
Brings its own sum of corruption here;
Every day has its great pit, fed
With its dreadful heap of the shroudless dead.

And behind a grated rust-eaten door,
Marked each with their fated month and day,
The young and the old, who in life were poor,
Fester together and rot away.

Silence is there, the silence of death,
And in silence those poor pilgrims wearily pace,
And the wretched throng, pitiful, holding its breath,
Comes with shambling steps to the dreadful place.

Till before those dark portals, the muttering crowd
Breaks at length into passionate suffrages loud,
Waiting the flickering vapour thin,
Bred of the dreadful corruption within.

And here is a mother who kneels, not in woe,
By the vault where her child was flung months ago;
And there is a strong man who peers with dry eyes
At the mouth of the gulph where his dead wife lies.

Till at last, to reward them, a faint blue fire,
Like the ghost of a soul, flickers here or there
At the gate of a vault, on the noisome air,
And the wretched throng has its low desire;

And with many a praise of favouring saint,
And curses if any refuses to heed,
Full of low hopes and of sordid greed,
To the town they file backward, weary and faint.

And a few days hence, the great lottery
Of the sinful city declared will be,
And a number thus shown to those sordid eyes,
May, the saints being willing, attain the prize.

Wherefore to Saint and Madonna be said,
All praise and laud, and the faithful dead!

* * * *

It was long, long ago, in far-off Judaea,
That they slew Him of old, whom these slay to-day;
They slew Him of old, in far-off Judaea, --
It is long, long ago; it was far, far away!





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net