Classic Poem

TERRA DI LAVORO

Beautiful valley! through whose verdant meads
 Unheard the Garigliano glides along;—
The Liris, nurse of rushes and of reeds,
 The river taciturn of classic song

The Land of Labor and the Land of Rest,
 Where mediæval towns are white on all
The hillsides, and where every mountain's crest
 Is an Etrurian or a Roman wall

There is Alagna, where Pope Boniface
 Was dragged with contumely from his throne;
Sciarra Colonna, was that day's disgrace
 The Pontiff's only, or in part thine own?

There is Ceprano, where a renegade
 Was each Apulian, as great Dante saith,
When Manfred by his men-at-arms betrayed
 Spurred on to Benevento and to death.

There is Aquinum, the old Volscian town,
 Where Juvenal was born, whose lurid light
Still hovers o'er his birthplace like the crown
 Of splendor seen o'er cities in the night.

Doubled the splendor is, that in its streets
 The Angelic Doctor as a school-boy played,
And dreamed perhaps the dreams, that he repeats
 In ponderous folios for scholastics made.

And there, uplifted, like a passing cloud
 That pauses on a mountain summit high,
Monte Cassino's convent rears its proud
 And venerable walls against the sky.

Well I remember how on foot I climbed
 The stony pathway leading to its gate;
Above, the convent bells for vespers chimed,
 Below, the darkening town grew desolate.

Well I remember the low arch and dark,
 The courtyard with its well, the terrace wide,
From which, far down, the valley like a park,
 Veiled in the evening mists, was dim descried.

The day was dying, and with feeble hands
 Caressed the mountain — tops; the vales between
Darkened; the river in the meadow-lands
 Sheathed itself as a sword, and was not seen

The silence of the place was like a sleep,
 So full of rest it seemed; each passing tread
Was a reverberation from the deep
 Recesses of the ages that are dead

For, more than thirteen centuries ago,
 Benedict fleeing from the gates of Rome,
A youth disgusted with its vice and woe,
 Sought in these mountain solitudes a home

He founded here his Convent and his Rule
 Of prayer and work, and counted work as prayer;
The pen became a clarion, and his school
 Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air

What though Boccaccio, in his reckless way,
 Mocking the lazy brotherhood, deplores
The illuminated manuscripts, that lay
 Torn and neglected on the dusty floors?

Boccaccio was a novelist, a child
 Of fancy and of fiction at the best!
This the urbane librarian said, and smiled
 Incredulous, as at some idle jest.

Upon such themes as these, with one young friar
 I sat conversing late into the night.
Till in its cavernous chimney the wood-fire
 Had burnt its heart out like an anchorite

And then translated, in my convent cell,
 Myself yet not myself, in dreams I lay,
And, as a monk who hears the matin bell,
 Started from sleep;—already it was day.

From the high window I beheld the scene
 On which Saint Benedict so oft had gazed,—
The mountains and the valley in the sheen
 Of the bright sun,—and stood as one amazed.

Gray mists were rolling, rising, vanishing;
 The woodlands glistened with their jewelled crowns;
Far off the mellow bells began to ring
 For matins in the half-awakened towns.

The conflict of the Present and the Past,
 The ideal and the actual in our life,
As on a field of battle held me fast,
 Where this world and the next world were at strife.

For, as the valley from its sleep awoke,
 I saw the iron horses of the steam
Toss to the morning air their plumes of smoke,
 And woke, as one awaketh from a dream.