Fonte Branda, wrote Ruskin, I last saw

under the same arches where Dante saw it.

He drank of it then

                               and every time the near

pentameters of his prose recur to me,

I too see the place again:

the loggia of red brick, in white stone

the jutting bestial heads

                                      and within,

shade and the still pool.

Whenever the Englishman went there he would find

rage at injustice,

true words that pinion falsehood and cupidity,

bitterness in the sweet spring, the hiss

of white hot metal plunged in the cool water

as he drank.

                    I think of that sad face,

the charred brain behind it, the word flow.

And in my thought, as if toward the calm

of memory, he stoops to drink.

And every time he stoops the Florentine

in his pink coat, not crowned with laurel yet,

moves into range

                            much as another’s words

return to the quiet mind.