Tuscany

Cisterns and stones; the fig-tree in the wall

Casts down her shadow, ashen as her boughs,

Across the road, across the thick white dust.

Down from the hill the slow white oxen crawl,

Dragging the purple waggon heaped with must,

With scarlet tassels on their milky brows,

Gentle as evening moths. Beneath the yoke

Lounging against the shaft they fitful strain

To draw the waggon on its creaking spoke,

And all the vineyard folk

With staves and shouldered tools surround the wain.

The wooden shovels take the purple stain,

The dusk is heavy with the wine's warm load;

Here the long sense of classic measure cures

The spirit weary of its difficult pain;

Here the old Bacchic piety endures,

Here the sweet legends of the world remain.

Homeric waggons lumbering the road;

Virgilian litanies among the bine;

Pastoral sloth of flocks beneath the pine;

The swineherd watching, propped upon his goad,

Urder the chestnut trees the rootling swine

Who could so stand, and see this evening fall,

This calm of husbandry, this redolent tilth,

This terracing of hills, this vintage wealth,

Without the pagan sanity of blood

Mounting his veins in young and tempered health?

Whu could so stand, and watch processional

The vintners, herds, and flocks in dusty train

Wend through the golden evening to regain

The terraced farm and trodden threshing-floor

Where late the flail

Tossed high the maize in scud of gritty ore,

And lies half-buried in the heap of grain

Who could so watch, and not forget the rack

Of wills worn thin and thought become too frail,

Nor roll the centuries back *

And feel the sinews of his soul grow hale,

And know himself for Rome's inheritor?