First publ. B & P vii (DR & L), 6 Nov. 1845; repr. 1849 with changed title, 1863 (when it was placed in Romances), 18652, 1868, 1872 (with a change in line-length— see below), 1888. Our text is 1845. EBB. saw an unfinished draft in the summer of 1845, when the subtitle was ‘Autumn at Sorrento’; all her comments recorded in the notes derive from Wellesley MS, unless otherwise stated. The poem is written in the same five-stress metre, divided into long and short lines, as the unfinished Saul (see II 286). In the completed Saul (III 491), B. amalgamated the long and short lines into single long lines, and in 1872 (and its corrected reissue, 1884) he did the same with England, adjusting the punctuation and capitalization accordingly. Cp. the similar experiment with a long line in Cristina (see headnote, I 774). The first six lines read:
Fortù, Fortù, my beloved one, sit here by my side,
On my knees put up both little feet! I was sure, if I tried,
I could make you laugh spite of Scirocco. Now, open your eyes,
Let me keep you amused, till he vanish in black from the skies,
With telling my memories over, as you tell your beads;
All the Plain saw me gather, I garland—the flowers or the weeds.
The poem was written after B.’s return from his second trip to Italy (Aug.–Dec. 1844). There is an allusion to the ‘isles of the syren’ (see l. 199n.) in a letter to EBB. dated 15 Apr. 1845 (Correspondence x 166); the bulk of the source material in the letters to EBB. comes at the end of Apr. and the beginning of May (see below), and the poem was probably begun then. EBB. first saw it on 6 Aug., and gave B. her criticisms on 12 Aug.; he replied the same day that she was ‘too indulgent by far’ to ‘treat these roughnesses as if they were advanced so many a stage’ (ibid. xi 26); EBB. replied on 13 Aug. that she understood ‘that it is unfinished, & in a rough state round the edges’ (ibid. 27). In her letter of 21–22 Oct., when she had seen the poem in proof, EBB. remarked on B.’s additions: ‘The end you have put to “England in Italy” gives unity to the whole . . just what the poem wanted. Also you have given some nobler lines to the middle than met me there before’ (ibid. 134). The ending refers to debates in Parliament about the Corn-Laws; it was probably written in Sept. 1845, when these debates were at their height. The added lines in the ‘middle’ of the poem cannot be distinguished.
B. visited the Sorrento peninsula in 1844; the ‘Piano’ (Plain) extends eastward across the peninsula from the town of Sorrento itself, which lies on the north coast, 25 km south of Naples. Sorrento is said to derive its name from the sirens (see ll. 200–8n.). The speaker of the poem is lodging, as B. may have done, with a local peasant family; probably on the south-eastern coast, as there is regular contact with towns on the Gulf of Salerno (see ll. 53, 69). Orr (Handbook 287 n. 1) states, probably on B.’s authority, that every detail is ‘given from personal observation’. However, B. may also have consulted a guidebook, Notes on Naples … by a Traveller (1838), which he owned and later lent to EBB. (see LK 721 n.4). This describes the Piano di Sorrento as ‘one sea of ever-living leaf and fruit … such flowers and such plants … you are enabled to see from any part of its slope, as from a theatre, the whole of the marvellous scenery of the gulf spread out before you’ (p. 99). Notes on Naples has B.’s spelling of ‘scirocco’ (see l. 5n.), and an account of a climbing excursion similar to that described in ll. 133–228: ‘Among vineyards and olive-grounds, the fruit shaken by the wind dropping on us as we passed, and orchards, where grows the sorbo, the most beautiful fruit-tree in the world, and where the red pomegranate bends to the ground with its own richness; among these we wound our tortuous way, through rocky gully and up green ravine, mounting to surmount the mountain chain that crowns the siren shore’ (pp. 125–6). There is also a description of the Piedigrotta fête, which mocks Catholic ritual in the same way that B. does both in the poem (see ll. 246–85) and in an important letter to EBB. which forms part of the background to the composition of the poem. This background may be traced in a series of letters between B. and EBB. from late Mar. to early May 1845 (Correspondence x 132–205) centred upon Hans Christian Andersen’s novel The Improvisatore, recently translated by Mary Howitt (2 vols., 1845). EBB. recommended it warmly (17 Apr.), and B. spoke of seeing journal extracts ‘full of truth & beauty’ (30 Apr.). Their discussion of Andersen’s book became linked to exchanges about the artistic advantages of travel, and the alleged incapacity of Italian writers to describe Italian landscape, A review of The Improvisatore in the Athenaeum (8 Mar., p. 236), which B. almost certainly saw, quoted lengthy passages and commented: ‘It is strange that we know of no descriptions of Italy equal to those which travellers have given us … To these must Andersen’s pages henceforth be added’. On 30 Apr., B. wrote to EBB.: ‘That a Dane should write so, confirms me in an old belief—that Italy is stuff for the use of the North, and no more … strange that those great wide black eyes should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them!’ (Correspondence x 184). On 3 May, in the course of elaborating this argument, he gives descriptions of his own, closely paralleled in the poem (see ll. 133–71n.), and cites lines from Shelley’s Marenghi which are a specific source for ll. 138–40. He also criticizes Catholic ritual and superstition in a manner close to ll. 246–85 in the poem: ‘does not all Naples-bay and half Sicily, shore and inland, come flocking once a year to the Piedigrotta fête only to see the blessed King’s Volanti, or livery servants all in their best, as tho’ heaven opened? and would not I engage to bring the whole of the Piano (of Sorrento) on its knees to a red dressing gown properly spangled over, before the priest that spread it out on a pole had even begun his story of how Noah’s son Shem, the founder of Sorrento, threw it off to swim thither, as the world knows he did? Oh, it makes one’s soul angry, so enough of it’ (ibid. 200–1). For a detailed discussion, see D. Karlin, ‘The Sources of The Englishman in Italy’, BSN xiv, no. 3 (Winter 1984–5) 23–43. In a letter to Isa Blagden of 19 May 1866 (when he had left Italy after EBB.’s death but was writing Ring, set in Italy) B. again comments on the Italians, and his own relation to them: ‘I agree with you, & always did, as to the uninterestingness of the Italians individually, as thinking, originating souls: I never read a line in a modern Italian book that was of use to me,— never saw a flash of poetry come out of an Italian word: in art, in action, yes,—not in the region of ideas: I always said, they are poetry, don’t and can’t make poetry— & you know what I mean by that,—nothing relating to rhymes and melody and lo stile [style]: but as a nation, politically, they are most interesting to me … my liking for Italy was always a selfish one,—I felt alone with my own soul there: here, there are fifties and hundreds, even of my acquaintance, who do habitually walk up & down in the lands of thought I live in,—never mind whether they go up to the ends of it, or even look over them,—in that territory, they are,— and I never saw footprint of an Italian there yet’ (Dearest Isa 238–9).
DeVane (Handbook 159) suggests Shelley’s Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples as an inverse source, but a likelier one is Lines written among the Euganean Hills, and cp. also Ode to the West Wind. The Romantic period saw the development of what may be called the versified travelogue (as distinct from the 18th-century ‘loco-descriptive’ poem), most notably Byron’s Childe Harold; Samuel Rogers’ Italy (1822–34), a uniformly solemn production, may have stimulated the very different tone of England. The climb up a mountain which leads to a revelatory vision is a familiar Romantic (esp. Wordsworthian) topic, with strong biblical connotations: Moses at Pisgah (Deuteronomy xxxiv 1–4), Christ’s transfiguration (Mark ix 2–10); B. reworked it in a later poem, La Saisiaz (1878), and cp. A Grammarian (p. 586). For the contrast between the (warm, sensual) life of Italy and the (cold, pettifogging) life of England, cp. Byron, in particular Beppo 321–92. In B.’s work, the unfinished Saul (II 286) is closest to the poem in tone, outlook, and structure. Among treatments of Italian scenery and contemporary life, cp. Pippa, De Gustibus (III 25), By the Fire-Side (p. 456), Up at a Villa (III 143), Love Among the Ruins (p. 528), Two in the Campagna (p. 556), and Prologue (Asolando, 1889). For B.’s reaction to the contemporary Catholic Church, cp. esp. Christmas-Eve (III 46), Bishop Blougram (p. 279), and, later, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873). Some details of the storm in ll. 117–28 reappear in Caliban 284–91 (pp. 640–1).
EBB. responded enthusiastically to the specific descriptions in the poem (see e.g. ll. 54–64n.); in her concluding comments, she (perhaps only half-seriously) objected to the narrative frame: ‘I think it will strike you when you come to finish this unfinished poem, that all the rushing & hurrying life of the descriptions of it, tossed in one upon another like the grape-bunches in the early part, & not “kept under” by ever so much breathless effort on the poet’s part [ll. 73–80], . . can be very little adapted to send anybody to sleep . . even if there were no regular dinner in the middle of it all [ll. 101–15]. Do consider. For giving the sense of Italy, it is worth a whole library of travel-books’. W. S. Landor echoed the passage about the sirens (ll. 197–228) in his poem To Robert Browning, written after receiving a presentation copy of DR & L, and published in the Morning Chronicle, 22 Nov. 1845. The poem ends: ‘warmer climes / Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze / Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on / Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where / The Siren waits thee, singing song for song’. This poem profoundly affected both B. and EBB., and, as Kintner says, ‘came to sound like prophecy to the two poets when they were planning their marriage and escape to Italy … the Siren became a recurrent image in these letters from here on’ (LK 273 n.7).
Fortù, Fortù, my loved one,
Sit by my side,
On my knees put up both little feet!
I was sure, if I tried,
5 I could make you laugh spite of Scirocco:
Now, open your eyes—
Let me keep you amused till he vanish
In black from the skies,
With telling my memories over
10 As you tell your beads;
All the Plain saw me gather, I garland
—Flowers prove they, or weeds.
’Twas time, for your long hot dry Autumn
Had net-worked with brown
15 The white skin of each grape on the bunches,
Marked like a quail’s crown,
Those creatures you make such account of,
Whose heads,—specked with white
Over brown like a great spider’s back,
20 As I told you last night,—
Your mother bites off for her supper;
Red-ripe as could be,
Pomegranates were chapping and splitting
In halves on the tree:
25 And ’twixt the loose walls of great flintstone,
Or in the thick dust
On the path, or straight out of the rock side,
Wherever could thrust
Some starved sprig of bold hardy rock-flower
30 Its yellow face up,
For the prize were great butterflies fighting,
Some five for one cup:
So I guessed, ere I got up this morning,
What change was in store,
35 By the quick rustle-down of the quail-nets
Which woke me before
I could open my shutter, made fast
With a bough and a stone,
And look thro’ the twisted dead vine-twigs,
40 Sole lattice that’s known;
Sharp rang the rings down the bird-poles
While, busy beneath,
Your priest and his brother were working,
The rain in their teeth.
45 And out upon all the flat house-roofs
Where split figs lay drying,
The girls took the frails under cover:
Nor use seemed in trying
To get out the boats and go fishing,
50 For under the cliff
Fierce the black water frothed o’er the blind-rock—
Arrive about noon from Amalfi,
—Our fisher arrive,
55 And pitch down his basket before us,
All trembling alive
With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit,
—Touch the strange lumps,
And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner
60 Of horns and of humps,
Which only the fisher looks grave at,
While round him like imps
Cling screaming the children as naked
And brown as his shrimps,
65 Himself too as bare to the middle
—You see round his neck
The string and its brass coin suspended,
That saves him from wreck.
But to-day not a boat reached Salerno,
70 So back to a man
Came our friends, with whose help in the vineyards
Grape-harvest began:
In the vat half-way up in our house-side
Like blood the juice spins
75 While your brother all bare-legged is dancing
Till breathless he grins
Dead-beaten, in effort on effort
To keep the grapes under,
For still when he seems all but master
80 In pours the fresh plunder
From girls who keep coming and going
With basket on shoulder,
And eyes shut against the rain’s driving,
Your girls that are older,—
85 For under the hedges of aloe,
And where, on its bed
Of the orchard’s black mould, the love-apple
Lies pulpy and red,
All the young ones are kneeling and filling
90 Their laps with the snails
Tempted out by the first rainy weather,—
Your best of regales,
As to-night will be proved to my sorrow,
When, supping in state,
95 We shall feast our grape-gleaners—two dozen,
Three over one plate,—
Maccaroni so tempting to swallow
In slippery strings,
And gourds fried in great purple slices,
100 That colour of kings,—
Meantime, see the grape-bunch they’ve brought you,—
The rain-water slips
O’er the heavy blue bloom on each globe
Which the wasp to your lips
105 Still follows with fretful persistence—
Nay, taste while awake,
This half of a curd-white smooth cheese-ball,
That peels, flake by flake,
Like an onion’s, each smoother and whiter—
110 Next sip this weak wine
From the thin green glass flask, with its stopper,
A leaf of the vine,—
And end with the prickly-pear’s red flesh
That leaves thro’ its juice
115 The stony black seeds on your pearl-teeth
… Scirocco is loose!
Hark! the quick pelt of the olives
Which, thick in one’s track,
Tempt the stranger to pick up and bite them
120 Tho’ not yet half black!
And how their old twisted trunks shudder!
The medlars let fall
Their hard fruit—the brittle great fig-trees
Snap off, figs and all,
125 For here comes the whole of the tempest!
No refuge but creep
Back again to my side and my shoulder,
And listen or sleep.
O how will your country show next week,
130 When all the vine-boughs
Have been stripped of their foliage to pasture
The mules and the cows?
Last eve I rode over the mountains—
Your brother, my guide,
135 Soon left me to feast on the myrtles
That offered, each side,
Their fruit-balls, black, glossy and luscious,
Or strip from the sorbs
A treasure, so rosy and wondrous,
140 Of hairy gold orbs!
But my mule picked his sure, sober path out,
Just stopping to neigh
When he recognised down in the valley
His mates on their way
145 With the faggots, and barrels of water;
And soon we emerged
From the plain where the woods could scarce follow,
And still as we urged
Our way, the woods wondered, and left us,
150 As up still we trudged
Though the wild path grew wilder each instant,
And place was e’en grudged
’Mid the rock-chasms, and piles of loose stones
Like the loose broken teeth
155 Of some monster, which climbed there to die
From the ocean beneath—
Place was grudged to the silver-grey fume-weed
That clung to the path,
And dark rosemary, ever a-dying,
160 Which, ’spite the wind’s wrath,
So loves the salt rock’s face to seaward,—
And lentisks as staunch
To the stone where they root and bear berries,
And—what shows a branch
165 Coral-coloured, transparent, with circlets
Of pale seagreen leaves—
Over all trod my mule with the caution
Of gleaners o’er sheaves:
Foot after foot like a lady—
170 So round after round,
He climbed to the top of Calvano;
And God’s own profound
Was above me, and round me the mountains,
And under, the sea,
175 And with me, my heart to bear witness
What was and shall be!
Oh heaven, and the terrible crystal!
No rampart excludes
The eye from the life to be lived
180 In the blue solitudes!
Oh, those mountains, their infinite movement!
Still moving with you—
For ever some new head and breast of them
Thrusts into view
185 To observe the intruder—you see it
If quickly you turn
And, before they escape you, surprise them—
They grudge you should learn
How the soft plains they look on, lean over,
190 And love, they pretend,
—Cower beneath them—the flat sea-pine crouches,
The wild fruit-trees bend,
E’en the myrtle-leaves curl, shrink and shut—
All is silent and grave—
195 ’Tis a sensual and timorous beauty—
How fair, but a slave!
So I turned to the sea,— and there slumbered
As greenly as ever
Those isles of the syren, your Galli;
200 No ages can sever
The Three—nor enable their sister
To join them,—half way
On the voyage, she looked at Ulysses—
No farther to-day,
205 Tho’ the small one, just launched in the wave,
Watches breast-high and steady
From under the rock, her bold sister
Swum half-way already.
O when shall we sail there together
210 And see from the sides
Quite new rocks show their faces—new haunts
Where the syren abides?
Oh, to sail round and round them, close over
The rocks, tho’ unseen,
215 That ruffle the grey glassy water
To glorious green,—
Then scramble from splinter to splinter,
Reach land and explore
On the largest, the strange square black turret
220 With never a door—
Just a loop that admits the quick lizards;
—To stand there and hear
The birds’ quiet singing, that tells us
What life is, so clear;
225 The secret they sang to Ulysses,
When ages ago
He heard and he knew this life’s secret
I hear and I know!
Ah see! O’er Calvano the sun breaks:
230 He strikes the great gloom
And flutters it over his summit
In airy gold fume!
All is over. Look out, see the gypsy,
Our tinker and smith,
235 Has arrived, set up bellows and forge,
And down-squatted forthwith
To his hammering under the wall there;
One eye keeps aloof
The urchins that itch to be putting
240 His jews’-harps to proof,
While the other thro’ locks of curled wire
Is watching how sleek
Shines the hog, come to share in the windfalls
—An abbot’s own cheek!
245 All is over! wake up and come out now,
And down let us go,
And see all the fine things set in order
At church for the show
Of the Sacrament, set forth this evening;
250 To-morrow’s the Feast
Of the Rosary’s virgin, by no means
Of virgins the least—
As we’ll hear in the off-hand discourse
Which (all nature, no art)
255 The Dominican brother these three weeks
Was getting by heart.
Not a post nor a pillar but’s dizened
With red and blue papers;
All the roof waves with ribbons, each altar’s
260 A-blaze with long tapers;
But the great masterpiece is the scaffold
Rigged glorious to hold
All the fiddlers and fifers and drummers,
And trumpeters bold,
265 Not afraid of Bellini nor Auber,
Who, when the priest’s hoarse,
Will strike us up something that’s brisk
For the feast’s second course.
And then will the flaxen-wigged Image
270 Be carried in pomp
Thro’ the plain, while in gallant procession
The priests mean to stomp.
And all round the glad church stand old bottles
With gunpowder stopped,
275 Which will be, when the Image re-enters,
Religiously popped.
And at night from the crest of Calvano
Great bonfires will hang,
On the plain will the trumpets join chorus,
280 And more poppers bang!
At all events, come—to the garden,
As far as the wall,
See me tap with a hoe on the plaster
Till out there shall fall
285 A scorpion with wide angry nippers!
… “Such trifles” you say?
Fortù, in my England at home,
Men meet gravely to-day
And debate, if abolishing Corn-laws
290 Be righteous and wise
—If ’tis proper Scirocco should vanish
In black from the skies!
Subtitle. Piano di Sorrento: the Plain of Sorrento.
1. Fortù: a diminutive of Fortuna or Fortunata. loved one] beloved one (1849–88).
2. Sit by] Sit here by (1849–88).
4. was] am (1884). A very rare example of a reading unique to this ed.
5. Scirocco: more usually ‘sirocco’: ‘a warm wind which blows most frequently in the spring and autumn when depressions in the Sahara and western Mediterranean move eastward … It can blow for days or weeks on end and is always dry … it often precedes a fresh cyclonic storm in the western Mediterranean’ (Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia). B. conflates the sirocco itself with its stormy aftermath. Notes on Naples 89 has B.’s spelling. In the diary of his 1838 trip to Italy, B. recorded ‘Fresh wind. Scirocco’ on 26 May in the Adriatic (Correspondence iv, p. xii).
7–8. EBB. quoted ‘While I talk you asleep till he’s o’er / With his black in the skies’, and commented: ‘I don’t like “he’s o’er” much, or at all perhaps. There is something to me weak & un-scirocco-like in the two contractions. Would “till he carries / His black from the skies—” be more active’.
9–10. Cp. By the Fire-Side 148–50 (p. 470): ‘Let us now forget and then recall, / Break the rosary in a pearly rain, / And gather what we let fall!’
11–12. ‘I put together all the experiences, good or bad, that I had in the Plain’. 11.] All the memories plucked at Sorrento (1849).
12.] —The flowers, or the weeds. (1849–88).
13. ’Twas time,] Time for rain! (1849–88). EBB. quoted ‘Twas time, for your long dry autumn’, and commented: ‘I just doubt if “and dry” might not improve the rhythm—doubt. Only if the emphasis is properly administered to “long”, nothing of course is wanted—only, again, it is trusting to the reader!’
18. specked with white] speckled with white (1870); speckled white (1875–88). B. may have adapted a mispr. in 1870, the first corr. reissue of 1868; 1870 provided the copy-text for 1875.
25. ’twixt] betwixt (1849–88).
29. starved] burnt (1849–88).
32. Some five] Five foes (18652). Cp. Two in the Campagna 16–18 (p. 559).
34. EBB. quoted ‘What was in store’, and commented: ‘Surely “what change” or “what fate” or some additional word shd assist the rhythm in this place. The line is brokenly short’.
35. quail-nets: ‘nets spread to catch quails as they fly to or from the other side of the Mediterranean. They are slung by rings on to poles, and stand sufficiently high for the quails to fly into them’ (Orr Handbook 287 n. 1).
40. i.e. the only form of lattice known to the peasants with whom the speaker is lodging.
41.] Quick and sharp rang the rings down the net-poles, (1849–88).
43. were working] tugged at them (1849–88).
47. frails: large baskets made of rushes. Cp. Tomb at St. Praxed’s 41 (p. 239).
51. blind-rock: a concealed rock, lying just below the surface (see ll. 214–16).
52–4. i.e. ‘there is no chance of seeing the fisherman arrive about noon [as usual] from Amalfi in his skiff ’. ‘No seeing’ governs both ‘our skiff / Arrive’ and ‘Our fisher arrive’.
53. Amalfi: a town on the north coast of the Gulf of Salerno, about 19km west-south-west of Salerno itself (see l. 69n.).
54–64. EBB. quoted l. 58 and commented: ‘I do like all this living description . . living description which never lived before in poetry . . & now will live always. These fishes have suffered no earth-change, though they lie here so grotesquely plain between rhyme & rhyme. And the grave fisher too! & the children “brown as his shrimps”!’ In a letter to John Kenyon (undated, but before July 1845 and probably before B. began corresponding with EBB.), B. wrote of an unidentified ‘novel’ which he was sending to Kenyon: ‘Let it figure among your books (at the house-top) as one sees from time to time in the shop of a Bondstreet Fishmonger some thorny queer lump-fish suspended as a show over all the good quiet ordinary turbots and salmon—not that such a prodigy is to be eaten by any means, but to show what the “vast sea’s entrail” can produce on occasion’ (ABL MS).
57. sea-fruit: seafood; translating It. ‘frutti di mare’. Not OED.
58. —Touch] You touch (1849–88).
66. EBB. suggested ‘And you see round his neck’, ‘for rhythm. The line stops you: & you need not stop, when you are looking at him, to “see round his neck” ’. This was one of the rare occasions on which B. did not follow her advice.
69. Salerno: a major port lying west of the mouth of the Irno river in the Gulf of Salerno, 54 km east-south-east of Naples.
73–8. EBB. commented: ‘The treading of the grapes is admirable painting—that “breathless he grins”, so true to life—& the effort to “keep the grapes under”! —all, admirable’.
74. spins: gushes or spirts (OED 8).
77. Dead-beaten: usually ‘dead-beat’: OED does not record B.’s form, which was perhaps adopted to allow a secondary sense, ‘completely defeated’ (by the grapes).
79. For still] Since still (1849–88).
86–7. on its bed / Of the orchard’s black mould, the love-apple: i.e. the tomato on its bed of richly manured earth (‘orchard’ is a transferred sense from ‘love-apple’). The cultivation of the ‘love-apple’ by ‘lavishing manure’ recurs in a complex figure in Fifine (1872) 1325ff.
91. the] this (1863–88).
92. regales: choice articles of food, dainties.
97–100. Maccaroni … strings … kings] With lasagne … ropes … popes (1849– 88).
103. heavy] leaden (B & P BYU).
109. onion’s] onion (1863–88).
113–15. Cp. Andersen’s Improvisatore (see headnote) i 114: ‘delicious green water-melons which … shewed the purple-red flesh with the black seeds’, quoted in both the Athenaeum and the Spectator.
116–125. Cp. B.’s description of ‘la bora’ in a letter to EBB. of 13 July 1845, esp. (with ll. 123–4): ‘you see the acacia heads snap off, now one, then another’ (Correspondence x 305–6). Cp. also Caliban 284–91 (pp. 640–1).
117. the quick pelt] the quick, whistling pelt (1849–88, except ‘quick whistling’, 1868–88).
121.] How the old twisted olive trunks shudder! (1849–88, except ‘shudder,’, 18652,
1868–88).
122. medlars: probably Mespilus germanica, whose fruit is eaten only when decayed; note ‘hard fruit’ in l. 123. The poem’s location might also suggest Crataegus azarolus, the ‘Neapolitan Medlar’.
123. fruit—the] fruit, and the (1849–88).
126–8. Cp. Sordello iii 758–9 (I 578): ‘So sleep upon my shoulder, child, nor mind / Their foolish talk’.
127. EBB. quoted ‘Back to my side’, and commented: ‘Is not some word, some dissyllable, (as if you were to write “Back again” &c,) wanted for rhythm,—reading it with the preceding line?’
128^129.] there is no division at this point in 18652.
133–71. Cp. B. to EBB., 3 May 1845: ‘and which of you eternal triflers was it called yourself “Shelley” and so told me years ago that in the mountains it was a feast “when one should find those globes of deep red gold—which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear, suspended in their emerald atmosphere,” so that when my Mule walked into a sorb-tree, not to tumble sheer over Monte Calvano, and I felt the fruit against my face, the little ragged bare-legged guide fairly laughed at my knowing them so well’ (Correspondence x 200). The quotation is from Shelley’s Marenghi 72–5. But B. had mistaken the ‘strawberry-tree’ for the sorb; it is actually the arbutus (see next note).
139–40.] A treasure, or, rosy and wondrous, / Those hairy gold orbs! (1868–88). Presumably B. made the change after realizing that his description of the sorb, derived from Shelley’s ‘strawberry-tree’ (see prec. note), actually applied to the arbutus. But the original description is not inaccurate, since the sorb does have reddish-yellow fruits.
149–50. left us, / As up] left us. / Up, up (1872, 1884).
152. place was e’en grudged: to the ‘fume-weed’ of l. 157, where the phrase is repeated because of the intervening image.
157. fume-weed: fumitory (Fumaria officinalis), a weed which grows close to the ground; apparently B.’s coinage (not OED), from the Latin derivation of fumitory, ‘fumus terrae’ (smoke of the earth).
160. Which] That (1849–88).
161. rock’s face] rock-face (18652).
162–3. The lentisk is the mastic tree, an evergreen shrub. Cp. Sordello iv 798–807 (I 640).
169. Foot] Still, foot (1849–88). Foot after foot: cp. Wordsworth, Strange fits of passion 21–2: ‘My horse moved on; hoof after hoof / He raised, and never stopped’.
170. So] Still (1872, 1884); Till (1888).
171. Calvano: a contraction of Vico Alvano, in the southern part of the Piano. It is 642 metres high and commands a sweeping view, north across the plain and south over the Mediterranean, including the Galli islets (see l. 199n.). B. told Furnivall he was unsure of the name, which he had ‘heard … in Sorrento … but the names are greatly changed in the dialect there’ (BSP i [1881] 170).
172–4. Cp. Shelley, The Triumph of Life 27–8: ‘the deep / Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head’.
172. profound: used in the same sense of ‘sky, firmament’ in La Saisiaz 19.
175. with me] within me (1849–88).
177. Oh heaven,] Oh, heaven (1863–65, 1868–88); Oh heaven (18652). terrible crystal: cp. Ezekiel i 22: ‘And the likeness of the firmament … was as the colour of the terrible crystal’. Cp. Saul (1855) 99–101, Sordello iii 440, Prince Hohenstiel 1334, and Aristophanes 45: ‘Above all crowding, crystal silentness’.
179. The] Your (1849–88).
181–7. EBB. admired this passage as ‘finely true’.
183. EBB. quoted ‘For some’, and suggested ‘With ever some’.
189–91. EBB. quoted ‘How the soft plains they look on & love so / As they would pretend / Lower beneath them’, and commented: ‘I do not see the construction. The “lower” put here as a verb? & if correctly, is it clearly, so, put?’ In the margin B. wrote ‘Cower’, and explained in his letter of 12 Aug. 1845: ‘So you can decypher my utterest hieroglyphic? Now droop the eyes while I triumph: the plains Cower, Cower beneath the mountains their masters’ (Correspondence xi 26). The changes were presumably not suggested by her. See also l. 272n.
191. flat] black (1872, 1884).
194. EBB. quoted ‘All’s silent & grave’, and suggested the present reading: ‘The rhythm gains by it, I think’.
196.] How fair! but a slave. (1865–88).
198. EBB. quoted ‘Greenly as ever’, and commented: ‘Would not “As greenly as ever” take the rhythm on better?’
199. Li Galli (The Cocks) are three rocky little islets (la Castelluccia, la Rotonda, and il Gallo Lungo), off the south-eastern coast of the Sorrento peninsula. They are known also as the Syrenusae, from their association with the Homeric sirens, though this title is not unique to them (see next note). In his letter to EBB. of 15 Apr. 1845, B. made a little sketch of ‘the green little Syrenusae where I have sate and heard the quails sing’ (Correspondence x 166). See ll. 223–4n.
200. EBB. quoted ‘Years cannot sever’, and suggested ‘And years’ or ‘For years’.
200–8. In a letter of 12 May 1846, B. told EBB., ‘there are three siren’s isles, you know’ (Correspondence xii 320), but despite this he refers to five islets here. The furthest from the coastline are the Galli, the ‘Three’ of l. 201, which form a distinct group. ‘Their sister’ is the islet of Vetara, roughly midway between the Galli and the coast; and the ‘small one’ of l. 205 is the islet of Isca, close inshore— ‘just launched in the wave’. All these are ‘isles of the syren’: see N. Douglas, Siren Land (1957) 29. Vetara, swimming to join the Galli, had got half-way there when she ‘looked at Ulysses’, and has got no further; though this still seems impressive to Isca watching from the safety of the shallows. It is not clear what variant of the myth of Ulysses and the sirens B. is alluding to. The sirens are said to have thrown themselves into the sea after failing to lure Ulysses from his ship with their singing, either out of shame and vexation or in order to follow him; and to have been metamorphosed into islets, their original home being a headland on the peninsula, where they later had a famous sanctuary (Strabo, Geography I ii 12). Possibly B. refers to their respective positions when the metamorphosis occurred. But he goes on to combine the idea of the islets being the sirens themselves with that of their being the sirens’ home (ll. 209–12), and further on he interprets their song as the ‘birds’ quiet singing’ (ll. 222–8).
205. EBB. quoted ‘Though the one breast-high in the water’ and suggested ‘bosom-high’, ‘for rhythm’. In proof she jotted down ‘in the water / Watches’ without comment. B. transferred ‘breast-high’ to l. 206 (whose original version cannot be recovered) and altered the rhythm of l. 205 in accordance with EBB.’s suggestion.
209. O when] Fortù, (1849–88). EBB. quoted ‘When’ and suggested that B. restore ‘O’, which he had erased, ‘for rhythm & expression’.
213. Oh, to sail] Shall we sail (1849–88). EBB. quoted ‘Oh to sail round them, close over’, and commented: ‘The line is broken I think. Should it not either be “And oh, to sail round them”, or “Oh, to sail round & round them” ’.
215. EBB. quoted ‘That ruffle the grey sea-water’, and suggested ‘ocean-water’, ‘for rhythm’. She added: ‘All beautiful description’.
219–20. A cistern remains of a tower built on il Gallo Lungo (see l. 199n.) in 1330 by King Robert of Naples. See Sordello vi 779–85n. (I 763)
219. EBB. quoted ‘The square black tower on the largest’, and commented: ‘Did you write “built on the largest”—because [of ] the eternal rhythm!’ In proof, she jotted down ‘The strange square black turret on the largest / Built with never a door’, without comment.
221. that admits] to admit (1849–88).
222. —To] Then, (1849–88).
223–4. B. may refer to the singing of quails (see l. 199n.). N. Douglas (Siren Land 30) says that on one of the Galli ‘the laminated strata are broken to form a melodious sea-cave … the haunt of countless … swifts who raise their families in the shelving rock’. The sirens were winged or bird-bodied women; the Muses plucked their wings after defeating them in a singing contest.
225–8. Cp. Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, or Urne Buriall (1658), whose final chapter opens: ‘What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture’; B. quotes this in his letter to EBB. of 8 Apr. 1846 (Correspondence xii 226). In fact Ulysses recounts the song at the court of Alcinous (Odyssey xii). The sirens wooed him in flattering terms, promising him knowledge of all that happened on earth, in heaven, and in the underworld. For the speaker’s visionary assertion in l. 228, cp. Saul 312 (III 519).
229. Ah, see! The sun breaks o’er Calvano— (1849–88, except ‘Calvano;’, 1863–70, 1875, 1888; ‘Calvano.’, 1872, 1884).
230. EBB. quoted ‘Strikes the great gloom’, and commented: ‘For clearness, the personal pronoun is wanted, I fancy. What “strikes?” ’
231. over his] o’er the mount’s (1849–88).
233–44. Cp. the Gypsies in Flight of the Duchess 350–89 (II 312–13).
240. jews’-harps] jews’-harp (1872, 1884).
241. locks of curled wire: the Gypsy’s wiry hair.
243. windfalls] windfall (1863–88).
244. Chew, abbot’s own cheek! (1872, 1884, 1888; a rare example of 1888 agreeing with a rev. introduced in a vol. of selections, not a collected ed.). Cp. Holy-Cross Day 19–24 (pp. 545–6).
245. EBB. quoted ‘And now come out, you best one’ and suggested: ‘And now come out, come out, you best one’.
247.] And see the fine things got in order (1849–88).
248–9. the show / Of the Sacrament: the ceremonial display of the Host.
250–1. the Feast / Of the Rosary’s virgin: the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, initially commemorating the Christian victory over the Turks at Lepanto, 7 Oct. 1571. In 1716, after another victory over the Turks in Hungary, Pope Clement XI directed its observance throughout Christendom every 7 Oct.
253–6. Cp. (noting the context of anti-Catholic satire) Marvell, Upon Appleton House 93–6: ‘And oft she spent the summer suns / Discoursing with the subtle nuns. / Whence in these words one to her weaved / (As ’twere by chance) thoughts long conceived’.
253. we’ll] you’ll (1849–88).
255. Dominican brother: members of the Dominican order were chiefly responsible for spreading the use of the rosary as a devotional exercise.
257.] Not a pillar nor post but is dizened (1863–88). dizened: adorned.
259. altar’s] altar (1849–88).
265. Bellini: Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35), Italian composer, best known for the operas Norma and I Puritani. Auber: Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782–1871), French composer of light operas, including Fra Diavolo (1830).
272. EBB. quoted ‘The priests mean to stamp’, and commented: ‘But is this word “stamp”, & is it the rhyme to “pomp”. I object to that rhyme—I!!’ B. wrote ‘stomp’ in the margin, and explained to EBB. in his letter of 12 Aug. 1845: ‘the priests stomp over the clay ridges, (a palpable plagiarism from two lines of a legend that delighted my infancy, and now instruct my maturer years in pretty nearly all they boast of the semi-mythologic era referred to—“In London town, when reigned King Lud, His lords went stomping thro’ the mud”—would all historic records were half as picturesque!)’ (Correspondence xi 26). OED records B.’s use as being only ‘to obtain a rime’.
273. And all] All (1868–88). stand] lie (1849–88).
286–92. B. alludes to the bitter debates in Parliament over the repeal of the Corn-Laws, which imposed heavy duty on the import of foreign grain. The controversy was at a peak of intensity in Sept. 1845, after the renewed failure of the potato crop in Ireland, and the consequent famine. B.’s refs. to the Corn-Laws in his letters are uniformly hostile. Cp. Byron, Beppo 375–7: ‘I like a parliamentary debate, / Particularly when ’tis not too late; // I like the taxes, when they’re not too many’.
290. Be] Is (1849).
291–2. ‘It would be as absurd to debate gravely the obvious benefit of the storm ending, as it is to debate the repeal of the Corn-Laws.’ Some reviewers misconstrued the passage into the opposite sense, based on the reading, ‘if [abolishing Corn-laws] were proper, then Scirocco would vanish [i.e. an event against the natural order, the permanent extinction of the sirocco, would occur]’; B.’s revisions if anything progressively encouraged this error (see l. 291n.), but ‘should’ confirms the overall syntax.
291. ’tis] ’twere (1863–88). proper Scirocco] proper, Scirocco (1849–88).