The bird and the bell, with other poems

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
No numbers can compute, no tongue translate in words.

II.

Patient to train and school
His genius to the rule
Art's sternest laws required;
Yet, by no custom chained,
His daring hand disdained
The academic forms by tamer souls admired.

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III.

In his interior light
Awoke those shapes of might,
Once known, that never die;
Forms of Titanic birth,
The elder brood of earth,
That fill the mind more grandly than they charm the eye.

IV.

Yet when the master chose,
Ideal graces rose
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.

V.

Entranced in thoughts whose vast
Imaginations passed
Into his facile hand,
By adverse fate unfoiled,
Through long, long years he toiled;
Undimmed the eyes that saw, unworn the brain that planned.

279

VI.

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
His soul's ideal forms of beauty and of truth.

VII.

Like some cathedral spire
That takes the earliest fire
Of morn, he towered sublime
O'er names and fames of mark
Whose lights to his were dark;
Facing the east, he caught a glow beyond his time.

VIII.

Whether he drew, or sung,
Or wrought in stone, or hung
The Pantheon in the air;
Whether he gave to Rome
Her Sistine walls or dome,
Or laid the ponderous beams, or lightly wound the stair;

280

IX.

Whether he planned defence
On Tuscan battlements,
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;

X.

Whether in lonely nights
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,—

XI.

Still, proudly poised, he stepped
The way his vision swept,
And scorned the narrower view.
He touched with glory all
That pope or cardinal,
With lower aims than his, allotted him to do.

281

XII.

A heaven of larger zone—
Not theirs, but his—was thrown
O'er old and wonted themes.
The fires within his soul
Shone like an aureole
Around the prophets old and sibyls of his dreams.

XIII.

Thus self-contained and bold,
His glowing thoughts he told
On canvas or on stone,
He needed not to seek
His themes from Jew or Greek;
His soul enlarged their forms, his style was all his own.

XIV.

Ennobled by his hand,
Florence and Rome shall stand
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.

282

XV.

So stood this Angelo
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.

University of Virginia Library

MICHAEL ANGELO BUONAROTTI.

I.

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