The Woodman and the Nightingale

A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune

(I think such hearts yet never came to good)

Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,

One nightingale in an interfluous wood

Satiate the hungry dark with melody;--

And as a vale is watered by a flood,

Or as the moonlight fills the open sky

Struggling with darkness--as a tuberose

Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie

Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,

The singing of that happy nightingale

In this sweet forest, from the golden close

Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,

Was interfused upon the silentness;

The folded roses and the violets pale

Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss

Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear

Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness

Of the circumfluous waters,--every sphere

And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,

And every wind of the mute atmosphere,

And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,

And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,

And every silver moth fresh from the grave

Which is its cradle--ever from below

Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,

To be consumed within the purest glow

Of one serene and unapproached star,

As if it were a lamp of earthly light,

Unconscious, as some human lovers are,

Itself how low, how high beyond all height

The heaven where it would perish!--and every form

That worshipped in the temple of the night

Was awed into delight, and by the charm

Girt as with an interminable zone,

Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm

Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion

Out of their dreams; harmony became love

In every soul but one.

...

And so this man returned with axe and saw

At evening close from killing the tall treen,

The soul of whom by Nature's gentle law

Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green

The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,

Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene

With jagged leaves,--and from the forest tops

Singing the winds to sleep--or weeping oft

Fast showers of aereal water-drops

Into their mother's bosom, sweet and soft,

Nature's pure tears which have no bitterness;--

Around the cradles of the birds aloft

They spread themselves into the loveliness

Of fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowers

Hang like moist clouds:--or, where high branches kiss,

Make a green space among the silent bowers,

Like a vast fane in a metropolis,

Surrounded by the columns and the towers

All overwrought with branch-like traceries

In which there is religion--and the mute

Persuasion of unkindled melodies,

Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the lute

Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast

Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,

Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has passed

To such brief unison as on the brain

One tone, which never can recur, has cast,

One accent never to return again.

...

The world is full of Woodmen who expel

Love's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,

And vex the nightingales in every dell.

Let those who pine in pride or in revenge,

Or think that ill for ill should be repaid,

Who barter wrong for wrong, until the exchange

Ruins the merchants of such thriftless trade,

Visit the tower of Vado, and unlearn

Such bitter faith beside Marenghi's urn.

A massy tower yet overhangs the town,

A scattered group of ruined dwellings now...

...

Another scene are wise Etruria knew

Its second ruin through internal strife

And tyrants through the breach of discord threw

The chain which binds and kills. As death to life,

As winter to fair flowers (though some be poison)

So Monarchy succeeds to Freedom's foison.

In Pisa's church a cup of sculptured gold

Was brimming with the blood of feuds forsworn:

A Sacrament more holy ne'er of old

Etrurians mingled mid the shades forlorn

Of moon-illumined forests, when...

And reconciling factions wet their lips

With that dread wine, and swear to keep each spirit

Undarkened by their country's last eclipse...

...

Was Florence the liberticide? that band

Of free and glorious brothers who had planted,

Like a green isle mid Aethiopian sand,

A nation amid slaveries, disenchanted

Of many impious faiths--wise, just--do they,

Does Florence, gorge the sated tyrants' prey?

O foster-nurse of man's abandoned glory,

Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendour;

Thou shadowest forth that mighty shape in story,

As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender:--

The light-invested angel Poesy

Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee.

And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught

By loftiest meditations; marble knew

The sculptor's fearless soul--and as he wrought,

The grace of his own power and freedom grew.

And more than all, heroic, just, sublime,

Thou wart among the false...was this thy crime?

Yes; and on Pisa's marble walls the twine

Of direst weeds hangs garlanded--the snake

Inhabits its wrecked palaces;--in thine

A beast of subtler venom now doth make

Its lair, and sits amid their glories overthrown,

And thus thy victim's fate is as thine own.

The sweetest flowers are ever frail and rare,

And love and freedom blossom but to wither;

And good and ill like vines entangled are,

So that their grapes may oft be plucked together;--

Divide the vintage ere thou drink, then make

Thy heart rejoice for dead Marenghi's sake.

10a.

Marenghi was a Florentine;

If he had wealth, or children, or a wife

Or friends, or cherished thoughts which twine

The sights and sounds of home with life's own life

Of these he was despoiled and Florence sent...

...

No record of his crime remains in story,

But if the morning bright as evening shone,

It was some high and holy deed, by glory

Pursued into forgetfulness, which won

From the blind crowd he made secure and free

The patriot's meed, toil, death, and infamy.

For when by sound of trumpet was declared

A price upon his life, and there was set

A penalty of blood on all who shared

So much of water with him as might wet

His lips, which speech divided not--he went

Alone, as you may guess, to banishment.

Amid the mountains, like a hunted beast,

He hid himself, and hunger, toil, and cold,

Month after month endured; it was a feast

Whene'er he found those globes of deep-red gold

Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,

Suspended in their emerald atmosphere.

And in the roofless huts of vast morasses,

Deserted by the fever-stricken serf,

All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses,

And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf,

And where the huge and speckled aloe made,

Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,--

He housed himself. There is a point of strand

Near Vado's tower and town; and on one side

The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,

Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide,

And on the other, creeps eternally,

Through muddy weeds, the shallow sullen sea.

Here the earth's breath is pestilence, and few

But things whose nature is at war with life--

Snakes and ill worms--endure its mortal dew.

The trophies of the clime's victorious strife--

And ringed horns which the buffalo did wear,

And the wolf's dark gray scalp who tracked him there.

And at the utmost point...stood there

The relics of a reed-inwoven cot,

Thatched with broad flags. An outlawed murderer

Had lived seven days there: the pursuit was hot

When he was cold. The birds that were his grave

Fell dead after their feast in Vado's wave.

There must have burned within Marenghi's breast

That fire, more warm and bright than life and hope,

(Which to the martyr makes his dungeon...

More joyous than free heaven's majestic cope

To his oppressor), warring with decay,--

Or he could ne'er have lived years, day by day.

Nor was his state so lone as you might think.

He had tamed every newt and snake and toad,

And every seagull which sailed down to drink

Those freshes ere the death-mist went abroad.

And each one, with peculiar talk and play,

Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away.

And the marsh-meteors, like tame beasts, at night

Came licking with blue tongues his veined feet;

And he would watch them, as, like spirits bright,

In many entangled figures quaint and sweet

To some enchanted music they would dance--

Until they vanished at the first moon-glance.

He mocked the stars by grouping on each weed

The summer dew-globes in the golden dawn;

And, ere the hoar-frost languished, he could read

Its pictured path, as on bare spots of lawn

Its delicate brief touch in silver weaves

The likeness of the wood's remembered leaves.

And many a fresh Spring morn would he awaken--

While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron

Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken

Of mountains and blue isles which did environ

With air-clad crags that plain of land and sea,--

And feel ... liberty.

And in the moonless nights when the dun ocean

Heaved underneath wide heaven, star-impearled,

Starting from dreams...

Communed with the immeasurable world;

And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated,

Till his mind grew like that it contemplated.

His food was the wild fig and strawberry;

The milky pine-nuts which the autumn-blast

Shakes into the tall grass; or such small fry

As from the sea by winter-storms are cast;

And the coarse bulbs of iris-flowers he found

Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground.

And so were kindled powers and thoughts which made

His solitude less dark. When memory came

(For years gone by leave each a deepening shade),

His spirit basked in its internal flame,--

As, when the black storm hurries round at night,

The fisher basks beside his red firelight.

Yet human hopes and cares and faiths and errors,

Like billows unawakened by the wind,

Slept in Marenghi still; but that all terrors,

Weakness, and doubt, had withered in his mind.

His couch...

...

And, when he saw beneath the sunset's planet

A black ship walk over the crimson ocean,--

Its pennon streaming on the blasts that fan it,

Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion,

Like the dark ghost of the unburied even

Striding athwart the orange-coloured heaven,--

The thought of his own kind who made the soul

Which sped that winged shape through night and day,--

The thought of his own country...

...