De Gustibus --

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,     (If our loves remain)     In an English lane,     By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.     Hark, those two in the hazel coppice     A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,     Making love, say,     The happier they!     Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,     And let them pass, as they will too soon,     With the bean-flowers boon,     And the blackbirds tune,     And May, and June!     What I love best in all the world     Is a castle, precipice-encurled,     In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine     Or look for me, old fellow of mine,     (If I get my head from out the mouth     O the grave, and loose my spirits bands,     And come again to the land of lands)     In a sea-side house to the farther South,     Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,     And one sharp tree tis a cypress stands,     By the many hundred years red-rusted,     Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-oercrusted,     My sentinel to guard the sands     To the waters edge. For, what expands     Before the house, but the great opaque     Blue breadth of sea without a break?     While, in the house, for ever crumbles     Some fragment of the frescoed walls,     From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.     A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles     Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,     And says theres news to-day the king     Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,     Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:     She hopes they have not caught the felons.     Italy, my Italy!     Queen Marys saying serves for me     (When fortunes malice     Lost her, Calais)     Open my heart and you will see     Graved inside of it, Italy.     Such lovers old are I and she:     So it always was, so it still shall be!