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Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 18: Longings.
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About This Book

A collection of verse that shifts between brisk depictions of modern life—motor races and city heat—and intimate lyrical sonnets exploring love, memory, and devotional longing. Classical and medieval references recur alongside pagan pastoral fantasies that imagine escape to woodland Hesperides, while formal experiments include songs, sonnets, ballades, rondeaux and a pantoum. A seasonal sequence maps moods across spring to winter, and a concluding suite treats mortality through elegy and dark humor. The poems balance energetic narrative scenes with reflective, sometimes elegiac meditations on desire, nature, and death.

Longings.

“... Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria...”
Inferno, V, 121.
FAR from the sea-girt City that I love,
My wandering ways by care attended lie;
Cold is the azure of this foreign sky,
And strange these clustered stars that burn above.
Out from this loveless land would I remove
To seek thy spring Pierian, never-dry,
Thou thrice-crowned City! Hear my fainting cry.
Let not my passionate longing fruitless prove!
Would I once more might see the dome of gold
Burning aloft, beneath my native sky!
The river, winding near my home of old,
And once again to breathe before I die,
The evening breeze, may it be granted me,
In that fair city by the distant sea!...