University of Virginia Library

Night under Monte Rosa

ODE FROM ITALY IN TIME OF WAR

I

We will go up for help unto the hills.
Since in their tent together by a sword
The nations sleep divided; since the seas
Of memory sever; and the cauldrons formed
Of old time make wind-craters full of tongues
Opposed, and zones of different decrees;
Since hatred trembles in the singing chord,
And in ourselves still the old savage throngs
Lurk on, cave-dwellers in the gentle breast;
Since stone-age man sits as our right-hand guest,
And secular coils of chthonian energies,
Dark trains of purpose script will never know,
Involve in wrestlings blind the polities
And interlock the peoples to their woe;
In soul, aim, stature diverse, we are stormed
By battle yet, and are the sport of fears
Through the rushing of unstable atmospheres;
Since thus, thus, thus, and thus we fail,
And enmities exhaustless us assail,
Is it in vain for innocence we strive—
In vain that we are now alive?
We are earth creatures. If essential strife
Be stampt in the very make of the globe itself,
What help, to look for help unto the hills?
Yet will we go.
We will go up and wrestle with the hills;
Not for their blessing, but their utterance.
Speak they our weal or woe, or naked'st Chance—
Until they speak we will not let them go.

II

Our dearest, our young sons, have gone to slay.
But we, denied with them to march and die,
Angry-mooded yet at being disused,
Racked by the fray—
The wound in Europe's side from shore to shore—
To-night have climbed up from the plains confused
To foothills that look forth on Lombardy,
To the mountain of the herdsmen, prow
Of Mergozzòlo, flanked by torrents hoar,
Ship of granite and of porphyry,
Which, anchored between deep gulfs, keeps its bow
Toward Ossola's mighty vale's debouching snow,
Whence glaciers primordial southward pressed.
Stark ship of granite and of porphyry!
It clove the invading glaciers on its breast,
So that one branch Orta scooped, and one the lake
Maggiore. Darkness falls. We have come far
By goat-foot path, shrine, ridge far-seen,
Round steep flanks dyked with rills,
Up from soft chestnut-woods to fell and scar;
Scaling the forest-dark ravine—
Where the mountain's ancient passion yields its tones
Dash'd broken, young and pure, against the stones—
To see the dawn from the cloud-bearing hills
Of shepherds, and with herdsmen to take rest.

III

IV

Therefore, O Latin barrier, when day breaks,
Far as your sea-republics and faint shapes,
Floating islands, divine cities luminous,
Defiant nursed under the Rhaetian capes,
We, strangers, fast in spirit your allies—
Have you not framed, have you not founded us?—
Now will take counsel of your heads of white,
Snowy conclave of the arena bounded
By the Alps, the amphitheatre of peaks;
Pelasgian and Ligurian hear,—sea-races
Still surging, murmuring, creating, round your bases
Since Pytheas joined them to the Orcades;
That, when the silver tubes of Dawn are sounded
Over Sesia and the shining tributaries,
Congiora and the tribes of promontories,
From Resegone to the Graian wall—
Padua to Monte Viso—when outleap
Cataracts of pure fire into the lakes,
And eyelids of the land Hesperia
Uplift, we also may shake off our sleep,
Put off the dark barbaric spell,
Arise, and thinking of the risen glow
When Hellas thrilled with rays the vine of night
Hesperia, watch her great plains boil with light,
As an olive holds her wide cup to the sun
In endless battle-furrows of that glebe:
And stand to hearken what yon silent say,
Tongues of white fire, immarcescible;
And grow to calm, if calm may be attained
And clear-soul'd Justice from on high be deigned.

V

The kine-herd's pipe comes home beneath the hill
Along Vergente's upland valley
Blocked by the snowcapt mountains; kine and sheep
Tawny and dark, slow following, graze their fill,
Neck-bells wander round the bastions steep,
Wandering fingers teach the stops at will
Melodies cool as water, soft as sleep. . . .
Dark heavens, that take no part in all our stir,
Dark heavens, that arbiter
The fellow vault of fire, the brain of man,
Now from that height and depth—your fastness
Confer on the ephemeral your vastness!
O stream of time, the sunrise-colour'd flood
Alive with tremour of ten thousand stars
Dissolved therein like memories in the blood,
Arouse us at this dawn to wake indeed!
But for the instant a street-door unbars
And lets be heard the storming multitude
Trampling the unjust fortress-prison doors,
Make us alive to those whom we succeed!
Make us alive to our inheritors!
We must not fail the hour for which they bleed,
But hear, within, the Pure and the Outlasting
Blow their sharp summons through the soul,
To become, in our turn, paean and forecasting.
Now on our ears, through gates of Death and Pain,
Let the rhythms incommensurable roll,—
And change. When we too must take up the strain
We join, above the tempests and expanses
That blindly move in ecstasies and trances,
Into an inner rite, which is not blind,
Where equanimity may reign,
The grave and the fraternal rite of Mind.

VI

VII

Not all in vain ye die
Whose veins of blazing granite forge the lime
To marble, and the mean to the sublime.
Embraced, each fierce antagonist
Takes in the other's virtue, and so locked
Become they fountain-heads, on hard foundations,
That might not, but for your ambitions blocked—
Your gorges with the muddied glacier choked—
Your beautiful strengths, wasted on death—subsist,
To slake the thirsts of the divided nations.

VIII

IX

X

And now, upon that watcher in the air,
Outpost Promethean, Earth's protagonist,
That nothing saw beyond our realms of mist,
Slow from the zenith is downbreathed the rose.
(Hush, the world's candle!—every star grows pale)
Until the nine-peak'd ocean-mantling mass
Lit—every cleft and cranny of his snows
And sea-curved crystals into which arose
The groaning precipices—with peace superb
Becomes the altar of the soul of Dawn.
Prostrate night-vapours travel down each vale
In darkness, the obscurers, and the frail—
But the ancient iron summit in his shroud
Of radiance, every pike and bastion dour
Belted with awe of glacier and crevasse,
Floats up, transfigured, at this limpid hour,
A walled and heavenly city, clear as glass—
A new acropolis of mourning rosed,
Aerial, lighter than a branch in flower—
An absolute, but of our strifes composed.