“_’Mid the harvest-shining plain_
_Where the peasant heaps his grain_
_In the garner of his foe._”
In the noontide, safe and free,
Basks the plain of Lombardy.
Never now, nor near nor far
Looms the lurid form of War
That to overspread it came
With her wings of smoky flame.
Unmanured with blood the plain
Yields in peace its yearly grain;
And the milk-white broad-browed pair
Of huge bullocks in the glare
Drag the fruit of Freedom’s tillage
Through each straggling Lombard village
Which no Croat thirsts to pillage.
Not a foe, save where unseen
In the rice-swamp’s treacherous green
Fever lurks, while wade and reap
Through the sparkling waters deep
Girls ill-sheltered from the sun,
Which shoots down to scorch and stun,
By their crimson kerchiefs light,
And who there in Fever’s spite
Cheer their souls with laugh and song
As the noontide creeps along;
Not a foe, save when o’erflows
Adige big with melted snows,
Or when Po’s dark whirling foam
Threatens many a thriving home,
Rolling all its bridges under
With a dull unceasing thunder,
Till it sweeps ere close of day
Bridge and dyke and home away.
Through the broad Subalpine plain
Peace and work and freedom reign.
Here and there in monstrous heaps
Some vast ossuary keeps
For men’s wondering eyes the bones
Of the nation’s slaughtered sons;
But no other traces show
Where a few short years ago
Countless balls of iron ploughed
Through the serried quivering crowd--
Where the broadcast Austrian lead
Fell on furrows live and dead--
Where for miles and miles were heaped
The human harvests freshly reaped--
Where the routed fled like chaff
At the canon’s thunderous laugh,
While the gun-wheels made red mud
Of men weltering in their blood.
Times are changed, and memories hold
In the breasts but of the old.
On Custozza’s once red earth
By the Lombard peasant’s hearth
Now the Austrian may sit
Where no brows with hate shall knit:
Who would dream that there can be
Such a thing as tyranny?
Italy appeals no longer
To God’s throne against the stronger;
And the Poet loves her now
For the beauty of her brow,
Not for that great crown of woe
Whence the blood-drops used to flow.
Lands are freed, and lands enslaved;
But your name is there engraved
In the hearts of those now freed
Ye who helped them in their need!
Nor do they remember now
Those who lent them all the glow
Of their genius and their feeling,
And Compassion’s balm that’s healing,
And the thunder of their curse
In a heaven-shaking verse.
Reckon not on thanks for long,
Ye who fight with sword or song
For the weak against the strong:
Give your help for justice’ sake,
Caring no reward to take.
Freedom’s face is not less fair
For remembering not your share;
And the sheaves of sacred wheat,
Which spring up beneath her feet
From the liberated plain,
Not less full of golden grain.
Years ago one day I stood,
In the autumn’s sunset flood,
Looking down with sweeping sight
From a bastion’s terraced height
On the then unconquered plain
Of the fair and French Lorraine.
Scarce was autumn’s first leaf yellow;
Ripened Earth had made air mellow.
Like a snake inert and blue,
Winding slowly corn-fields through,
Wound the broad Moselle afar
To the horizon’s utmost bar,
Catching on each burnished fold
Restless gleams of molten gold
Till the sun was near to sink,
When it caught a flaming pink
From the crimson clouds slow sailing
Where the amber light was failing.
And surveying that expanse,
What, I thought, is fair as France?
Now the Prussian sentries stand
Where I stood, and scan the land,
Which for ever seems their own,
With their ugly Prussian frown;
And the sullen land has nought
But the freedom of its thought,
Of its thought that hopes and hates
And from year to year awaits.
And what of thee upon whose head
All evil’s phials have been shed--
Thou whom those who now have gotten
Their own freedom, have forgotten--
Thou whose name is never heard,
Thou whose hope is aye deferred,
Thou whose tongue thy foes outroot,
Thou whose sons they chain and shoot--
Poland, heiress of the knout?
Lo, the century grows old
And thy hour has not yet tolled.
On thy form benumbed and bruised,
Whence the life-blood half has oozed,
Lies the dark Colossus still
Whom his own sons now would kill--
Tormentors that like vipers start
From his huge frame’s every part;
But he holds thee all the tighter
While thy bloodless face grows whiter,
And his limbs that on thee weigh
Grow more rotten day by day.
Hark! I hear a muffled sound
Deep beneath the frozen ground
Where a buried Poland pines
In the dark Siberian mines,
In the sunless vaults that ape
Those of Hell in gloom and shape,
Where the gangs who death await
Unlearn to think, but not to hate:
Is’t a growl of joy that runs
Where are chained half Poland’s sons?
Ay, a growl of joy it is
To each mine’s extremities,
And for once Despair has laughed
In each black pestiferous shaft:
He who sent them there lies dead
On his gory Imperial bed--
He who made them walk in chains,
In long goaded staggering trains,
Through the endless snow-clad plains
To the grave in which they lie,
Not yet dead, but soon to die:
Even he has found his hour,
Murdered in his boundless power
By his own, and rots in death
As they rot who here draw breath.