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| OF all my dreams by night and day, | |
| One dream will evermore return, | |
| The dream of Italy in May; | |
| The sky a brimming azure urn | |
| Where lights of amber brood and burn; | 5 |
| The doves about San Marco’s square, | |
| The swimming Campanile tower, | |
| The giants, hammering out the hour, | |
| The palaces, the bright lagoons, | |
| The gondolas gliding here and there | 10 |
| Upon the tide that sways and swoons. | |
| |
| The domes of San Antonio, | |
| Where Padua ’mid her mulberry-trees | |
| Reclines; Adige’s crescent flow | |
| Beneath Verona’s balconies; | 15 |
| Rich Florence of the Medicis; | |
| Sienna’s starlike streets that climb | |
| From hill to hill; Assisi well | |
| Remembering the holy spell | |
| Of rapt St. Francis; with her crown | 20 |
| Of battlements, embossed by time, | |
| Stern old Perugia looking down. | |
| |
| Then, mother of great empires, Rome, | |
| City of the majestic past, | |
| That o’er far leagues of alien foam | 25 |
| The shadows of her eagles cast, | |
| Imperious still; impending, vast, | |
| The Colosseum’s curving line; | |
| Pillar and arch and colonnade; | |
| St. Peter’s consecrated shade, | 30 |
| And Hadrian’s tomb where Tiber strays; | |
| The ruins on the Palatine | |
| With all their memories of dead days. | |
| |
| And Naples, with her sapphire arc | |
| Of bay, her perfect sweep of shore; | 35 |
| Above her, like a demon stark, | |
| The dark fire-mountain evermore | |
| Looming portentous, as of yore; | |
| Fair Capri with her cliffs and caves; | |
| Salerno drowsing ’mid her vines | 40 |
| And olives, and the shattered shrines | |
| Of Pæstum where the gray ghosts tread, | |
| And where the wilding rose still waves | |
| As when by Greek girls garlanded. | |
| |
| But hark! What sound the ear dismays, | 45 |
| Mine Italy, mine Italy? | |
| Thou that wert wrapt in peace, the haze | |
| Of loveliness spread over thee! | |
| Yet since the grapple needs must be, | |
| I who have wandered in the night | 50 |
| With Dante, Petrarch’s Laura known, | |
| Seen Vallombrosa’s groves breeze-blown, | |
| Met Angelo and Raffael, | |
| Against iconoclastic might | |
| In this grim hour must wish thee well! | 55 |
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