Adapted From The Vita Nuova Of Dante.

Which, like thee to those in sorrow,Comes to bid a sweet good-morrowTo the rough Year just awakeIn its cradle on the brake.The brightest hour of unborn Spring,Through the winter wandering,Found, it seems, the halcyon MornTo hoar February born.Bending from heaven, in azure mirth,It kiss’d the forehead of the Earth;And smiled upon the silent sea;And bade…

I bear light shade for the leaves when laidIn their noonday dreams.From my wings are shaken the dews that wakenThe sweet buds every one,When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,As she dances about the sun.I wield the flail of the lashing hail,And whiten the green plains under,And then again I dissolve it in rain,And…

Which we buried in Love’s sweet bowers,Heaping over their corpses coldBlossoms and leaves, instead of mould?Blossoms which were the joys that fell,And leaves, the hopes that yet remain.II.Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yetThere are ghosts that may take revenge for it,Memories that make the heart a tomb,Regrets which glide through the spirit’s gloom,And with…

Crowned with a ring of oaks, you may beholdA dark and barren field, through which there flows,Sluggish and black, a deep but narrow stream,Which the wind ripples not, and the fair moonGazes in vain, and finds no mirror there.Follow the herbless banks of that strange brookUntil you pause beside a darksome pond,The fountain of this…

Hark! night ravens loudly sing,Tidings of despair and death.–Horror covers all the sky,Clouds of darkness blot the moon,Prepare! for mortal thou must die,Prepare to yield thy soul up soon–Fierce the tempest raves around,Fierce the volleyed lightnings fly,Crashing thunder shakes the ground,Fire and tumult fill the sky.—Hark! the tolling village bell,Tells the hour of midnight come,Now…

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.And on the pedestal these words appear —‘My name is…