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(Died March 6, 1475)
THIS is the rugged face | |
| Of him who won a place | |
| Above all kings and lords; | |
| Whose various skill and power | |
| Left Italy a dower | 5 |
| No numbers can compute, no tongue translate in words. | |
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| Patient to train and school | |
| His genius to the rule | |
| Art’s sternest laws required; | |
| Yet, by no custom chained, | 10 |
| His daring hand disdained | |
| The academic forms by tamer souls admired. | |
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| In his interior light | |
| Awoke those shapes of might, | |
| Once known, that never die; | 15 |
| Forms of Titanic birth, | |
| The elder brood of earth, | |
| That fill the mind more grandly than they charm the eye. | |
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| Yet when the master chose, | |
| Ideal graces rose | 20 |
| Like flowers on gnarléd boughs; | |
| For he was nursed and fed | |
| At Beauty’s fountain-head, | |
| And to the goddess pledged his earliest, warmest vows. | |
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| Entranced in thoughts whose vast | 25 |
| Imaginations passed | |
| Into his facile hand, | |
| By adverse fate unfoiled, | |
| Through long, long years he toiled; | |
| Undimed the eyes that saw, unworn the brain that planned. | 30 |
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| A soul the Church’s bars, | |
| The State’s disastrous wars | |
| Kept closer to his youth. | |
| Though rough the winds and sharp, | |
| They could not bend or warp | 35 |
| His soul’s ideal forms of beauty and of truth. | |
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| Like some cathedral spire | |
| That takes the earliest fire | |
| Of morn, he towered sublime | |
| O’er names and fames of mark | 40 |
| Whose lights to his were dark; | |
| Facing the east, he caught a glow beyond his time. | |
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| Whether he drew, or sung, | |
| Or wrought in stone, or hung | |
| The Pantheon in the air; | 45 |
| Whether he gave to Rome | |
| Her Sistine walls or dome, | |
| Or laid the ponderous beams, or lightly wound the stair; | |
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| Whether he planned defence | |
| On Tuscan battlements, | 50 |
| Fired with the patriot’s zeal, | |
| Where San Miniato’s glow | |
| Smiled down upon the foe, | |
| Till Treason won the gates that mocked the invader’s steel; | |
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| Whether in lonely nights | 55 |
| With Poesy’s delights | |
| He cheered his solitude; | |
| In sculptured sonnets wrought | |
| His firm and graceful thought, | |
| Like marble altars in some dark and mystic wood,— | 60 |
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| Still, proudly poised, he stepped | |
| The way his vision swept, | |
| And scorned the narrower view. | |
| He touched with glory all | |
| That pope or cardinal, | 65 |
| With lower aims than his, allotted him to do. | |
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| A heaven of larger zone— | |
| Not theirs, but his—was thrown | |
| O’er old and wonted themes. | |
| The fires within his soul | 70 |
| Shone like an aureole | |
| Around the prophets old and sibyls of his dreams. | |
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| Thus self-contained and bold, | |
| His glowing thoughts he told | |
| On canvas or on stone, | 75 |
| He needed not to seek | |
| His themes from Jew or Greek; | |
| His soul enlarged their forms, his style was all his own. | |
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| Ennobled by his hand, | |
| Florence and Rome shall stand | 80 |
| Stamped with the signet-ring | |
| He wore, where kings obeyed | |
| The laws the artists made. | |
| Art was his world, and he was Art’s anointed king. | |
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| So stood this Angelo | 85 |
| Four hundred years ago; | |
| So grandly still he stands, | |
| Mid lesser worlds of Art, | |
| Colossal and apart, | |
| Like Memnon breathing songs across the desert sands. | 90 |
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