Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 6: Dante.

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

Dante.

THOU’RT but a pensive, dreaming Boy, when first

To thy sad eyne the sight of Love appears

With blessèd Beatrice. Nine circling years

Name thee the wounded Lover, whose sweet thirst

Is never sated, nor whose fever less.

At Campaldino thou’rt the mailèd Knight;

Savage to spur thy City on toward right

Thou’rt driven, its scape-goat, to the wilderness.

There, in the stranger’s house whose stairs are pain

To mount, whose bread is bitter to thy mouth,

Dawns thy Great Vision, mid thy soul’s last drouth;

And, past Hell’s flame and Purgatory’s round,

Greets thee thy love most gentle, once again,

Thou frowning Florentine with laurels crowned!