Pacchiarotto - Prologue

Oh, the old wall here! How I could pass     Life in a long midsummer day,     My feet confined to a plot of grass,     My eyes from a wall not once away!     And lush and lithe, do the creepers clothe     Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green:     Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loth,     In lappets of tangle they laugh between.     Now, what is it makes pulsate the robe?     Why tremble the sprays? What life oer brims     The body, the house, no eye can probe,     Divined as, beneath a robe, the limbs?     And there again! But my heart may guess     Who tripped behind; and she sang perhaps:     So, the old wall throbbed, and its lifes excess     Died out and away in the leafy wraps!     Wall upon wall are between us: life     And song should away from heart to heart!     I, prison bird, with a ruddy strife     At breast, and a lip whence storm-notes start     Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing     Thats spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free;     Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring     Of the rueful neighbors, and forth to thee!