Florence, father of Michelangelo,
Dante, da Vinci, Fra Angelico,
Cellini, Botticelli, Brunelleschi.
Giotto, Donatello, Masaccio! –
We shall not see their like, or yours, again.
Painters depart, and patrons. You remain,
Your bridges blown, your glory catalogued,
A norm for scholars and for gentlemen.
Reverend city, sober, unperplexed,
Turning your page to genius annexed
I breathe the mint and myrrh of Tuscan hills,
The tart aroma of some classic text.
Shields and medallions; overshadowing eaves
Like studious brows; the light that interleaves
Your past with amber: all’s definitive, all
In changeless chiaroscuro one conceives.
I sometimes think that the heart is ne’er so dead
As where some vanished era overspread
The soil with titan foliage, scattering down
Eternal rubies when its bloom was shed.
Where rode Lorenzo, panoplied and plumed,
Where Savonarola burned, and Ruskin fumed,
The lady artist set her easel up,
The tourist with mild wonder is consumed.
Yet still the Arno navigably flows,
And saunterers past the Ponte Vecchio’s
Jewel shops cast a shadow: here is still
A taste for life, a market for the rose.
Ah no, it’s not the Florentines who fade
Before the statued loggia, the arcade,
The cliffs of floral stone. They live enough
In a pure tongue and a congenial trade.
Should the past overawe them? It’s not theirs,
More than a mansion is the caretaker’s.
A church by Giotto does as well as any
Other for this day’s rendezvous or prayers.
What if along the pot-holed boulevards
Slogans are scrawled, not cantos? if postcards
Stand in for masterpieces, and ice cream
Says more to them than edifying façades?
The past is all-encroaching; and unless
They lopped its tentacles, stemmed its excess
To clear the air for some domestic seed,
They’d soon be strangled by a wilderness.
It’s not the Florentine who pales beside
That vast, rank efflorescence. The pop-eyed
Tourist it is who rushes on his doom,
Armed with good taste, a Leica and a guide.
The primitive forest, the renaissance range
So massive are, surely they will estrange
Him from himself, or send him yelping home
To plastic novelties, to art’s small change.
Plodding the galleries, we ask how can
That century of the Uncommon Man,
Sovereign here in paint, bronze, marble, suit
The new narcissism of the Also-Ran.
As many men, so many attitudes
Before the artifact. One writhes: one broods:
One preens the ego and one curls the lip:
One turns to stone, one to adjacent nudes.
Each man must seek his own. What do I seek?
Not the sole rights required by snob and freak,
The scholar’s or the moralist’s reward,
Not even a connoisseur’s eye for technique;
But that on me some long-dead master may
Dart the live, intimate, unblinding ray
Which means one more spring of the selfhood tapped,
One tribute more to love wrung from my clay.
And if I miss that radiance where it flies,
Something is gained in the mere exercise
Of strenuous submission, the attempt
To lose and find oneself through others’ eyes.