Transcribed from the 1909 Constable & Co. Ltd. edition by DavidPrice, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Contents:
Ceres’ Runaway
A Vanquished Man
A Northern Fancy
Laughter
Harlequin Mercutio
The Little Language
Anima Pellegrina!
The Sea Wall
The Daffodil
Addresses
The Audience
Tithonus
The Tow Path
The Tethered Constellations
Popular Burlesque
Dry Autumn
The Plaid
Two Burdens
The Unready
The Child of Tumult
The Child of Subsiding Tumult
One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary pictureof a Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop—at least while thecharming quarry escapes, as it does in Rome. The Municipalitydoes not exist that would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growthof green in the high places of the city. It is true that therehave been the famous captures—those in the Colosseum, and in theBaths of Caracalla; moreover a less conspicuous running to earth takesplace on the Appian Way, in some miles of the solitude of the Campagna,where men are employed in weeding the roadside. They slowly uprootthe grass and lay it on the ancient stones—rows of little corpses—forsweeping up, as at Upper Tooting; one wonders why. The governorsof the city will not succeed in making the Via Appia look busy, or itsstripped stones suggestive of a thriving commerce. Again, at thecemetery within the now torn and shattered Aurelian wall by the PortaSan Paolo, they are often mowing of buttercups. “A lightof laughing flowers along the grass is spread,” says Shelley,whose child lies between Keats and the pyramid. But a couple ofactive scythes are kept at work there summer and spring—not thatthe grass is long, for it is much overtopped by the bee-orchis, butbecause flowers are not to laugh within reach of the civic vigilance.
Yet, except that it is overtaken and put to death in these accessibleplaces, the wild summer growth of Rome has a prevailing success andvictory. It breaks all bounds, flies to the summits, lodges inthe sun, swings in the wind, takes wing to find the remotest ledges,and blooms aloft. It makes light of the sixteenth century, ofthe seventeenth, and of the eighteenth. As the historic ages growcold it banters them alike. The flagrant flourishing statue, thehaughty façade, the broken pediment (and Rome is chiefly thecity of the broken pediment) are the opportunities of this vagrant gardenin the air. One certain church, that is full of attitude, canhardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon of great stature and manystalks and blossoms is standing on its furthest summit tiptoe againstits sky. The cornice of another church in the fair middle of Romelifts out of the shadows of the streets a row of accidental marigolds. Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the Renaissance early and late,the newer modern, this wild summer finds its account in travertine andtufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco and stone. “A birdof the air carries the matter,” or the last sea-wind, sombre andsoft, or the latest tramontana, gold and blue, has lodged in a littlefertile dust the wild grass, wild wheat, wild oats!
If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hueand cry, this is Ceres’. The municipal authorities, hot-foot,cannot catch it. And, worse than all, if they pause, dismayed,to mark the flight of the agile fugitive safe on the arc of a flyingbuttress, or taking the place of the fallen mosaics and coloured tilesof a twelfth-century tower, and in any case inaccessible, the grassgrows under their discomfited feet. It actually casts a flushof green over their city piazza—the wide light-grey pavementsso vast that to keep them weeded would need an army of w