English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Robert Browning
671. A Toccata of Galuppis
O
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, ’tis with such a heavy mind!
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,
Where St. Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
… Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:
I was never out of England—it’s as if I saw it all.
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head?
—She, to bite her mask’s black velvet—he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—“Must we die?”
Those commiserating sevenths—“Life might last! we can but try!”
—“Then, more kisses!”—“Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?”
Hark, the dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to!
“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!”
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.
While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.
“Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,—you’ll not die, it cannot be!
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
Dear dear women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.