Cisterns and stones; the fig-tree in the wall <br />Casts down her shadow, ashen as her boughs, <br />Across the road, across the thick white dust. <br />Down from the hill the slow white oxen crawl, <br />Dragging the purple waggon heaped with must, <br />With scarlet tassels on their milky brows, <br />Gentle as evening moths. Beneath the yoke <br />Lounging against the shaft they fitful strain <br />To draw the waggon on its creaking spoke, <br />And all the vineyard folk <br />With staves and shouldered tools surround the wain. <br />The wooden shovels take the purple stain, <br />The dusk is heavy with the wine's warm load; <br />Here the long sense of classic measure cures <br />The spirit weary of its difficult pain; <br />Here the old Bacchic piety endures, <br />Here the sweet legends of the world remain. <br />Homeric waggons lumbering the road; <br />Virgilian litanies among the bine; <br />Pastoral sloth of flocks beneath the pine; <br />The swineherd watching, propped upon his goad, <br />Urder the chestnut trees the rootling swine <br />Who could so stand, and see this evening fall, <br />This calm of husbandry, this redolent tilth, <br />This terracing of hills, this vintage wealth, <br />Without the pagan sanity of blood <br />Mounting his veins in young and tempered health? <br />Whu could so stand, and watch processional <br />The vintners, herds, and flocks in dusty train <br />Wend through the golden evening to regain <br />The terraced farm and trodden threshing-floor <br />Where late the flail <br />Tossed high the maize in scud of gritty ore, <br />And lies half-buried in the heap of grain <br />Who could so watch, and not forget the rack <br />Of wills worn thin and thought become too frail, <br />Nor roll the centuries back * <br />And feel the sinews of his soul grow hale, <br />And know himself for Rome's inheritor?<br /><br />Victoria Sackville-West<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/tuscany/
