I. <br /> <br />Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees, <br /> (If our loves remain) <br /> In an English lane, <br />By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies. <br />Hark, those two in the hazel coppice--- <br />A boy and a girl, if the good fates please, <br /> Making love, say,--- <br /> The happier they! <br />Draw yourself up from the light of the moon, <br />And let them pass, as they will too soon, <br /> With the bean-flowers' boon, <br /> And the blackbird's tune, <br /> And May, and June! <br /> <br /> II. <br /> <br />What I love best in all the world <br />Is a castle, precipice-encurled, <br />In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine <br />Or look for me, old fellow of mine, <br />(If I get my head from out the mouth <br />O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands, <br />And come again to the land of lands)--- <br />In a sea-side house to the farther South, <br />Where the baked cicala dies of drouth, <br />And one sharp tree---'tis a cypress---stands, <br />By the many hundred years red-rusted, <br />Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted, <br />My sentinel to guard the sands <br />To the water's edge. For, what expands <br />Before the house, but the great opaque <br />Blue breadth of sea without a break? <br />While, in the house, for ever crumbles <br />Some fragment of the frescoed walls, <br />From blisters where a scorpion sprawls. <br />A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles <br />Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons, <br />And says there's news to-day---the king <br />Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing, <br />Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling: <br />---She hopes they have not caught the felons. <br />Italy, my Italy! <br />Queen Mary's saying serves for me--- <br /> (When fortune's malice <br /> Lost her---Calais)--- <br />Open my heart and you will see <br />Graved inside of it, ``Italy.'' <br />Such lovers old are I and she: <br />So it always was, so shall ever be!<br /><br />Robert Browning<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/de-gustibus/
