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 bean-flowers’ 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 —‘ tis 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 today — the king Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm 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!
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