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FOREVER and forever shalt thou be | |
Unto the lover and the poet dear, | |
Thou land of sunlit skies and fountains clear, | |
Of temples, and gray columns, and waving woods, | |
And mountains, from whose rifts the bursting floods | 5 |
Rush in bright tumult to the Adrian sea: | |
O thou romantic land of Italy! | |
Mother of painting and sweet sounds! though now | |
The laurels are all torn from off thy brow, | |
Yet, though the shape of Freedom now no more | 10 |
May walk in beauty on thy piny shore, | |
Shall I, upon whose soul thy poets lays, | |
And all thy songs and hundred stories, fell | |
Like dim Arabian charms, break the soft spell | |
That bound me to thee in mine earlier days? | 15 |
Never, divinest Italy,thou shalt be | |
For aye the watchword of the heart to me. | |
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Famous thou art, and shalt be through all time: | |
Not that because thine iron children hurled | |
Like arrows oer the conquest-stricken world | 20 |
Their tyrannies, but that, in a later day, | |
Great spirits, and gentle too, triumphing came; | |
And, as the mighty day-star makes its way | |
From darkness into light, they toward their fame | |
Went, gathering splendor till they grew sublime. | 25 |
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Yet first of all thy sons were they who wove | |
Thy silken language into tales of love, | |
And fairest far the gentle forms that shine | |
In thy own poets faery songs divine. | |
O, long as lips shall smile or pitying tears | 30 |
Rain from the eyes of beauty,long as fears | |
Or doubts or hopes shall sear or soothe the heart, | |
Or flatteries softly fall on womans ears, | |
Or witching words be spoke at twilight hours, | |
Or tender songs be sung in orange bowers, | 35 |
Long as the stars, like ladies looks, by night | |
Shall shine,more constant and almost as bright, | |
So long, though hidden in a foreign shroud, | |
Shall Dantes mighty spirit speak aloud: | |
So long the lamp of fame on Petrarchs urn | 40 |
Shall, like the light of learning, duly burn; | |
And he be loved,he with his hundred tales, | |
As varying as the shadowy cloud that sails | |
Upon the bosom of the April sky, | |
And musical as when the waters run | 45 |
Lapsing through sylvan haunts deliciously. | |
Nor may that gay romancer who hath told | |
Of knight and damsel and enchantments old, | |
So well, be eer forgot; nor he who sung | |
Of Salems holy city lost and won, | 50 |
The seer-like Tasso, who enamoured hung | |
On Leonoras beauty, and became | |
Her martyr,blasted by a mingled flame. | |
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