A funeral dower of present woes and past

On thy sweet brow is sorrow ploughed by shame,
And annals graved in characters of flame.
Oh, God! that thou wert in thy nakedness
Less lovely or more powerful, and couldst claim
Thy right, and awe the robbers back, who press
To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress;

XLIII

Then might'st thou more appall; or, less desired,
Be homely and be peaceful, undeplored

For thy destructive charms; then, still untired,
Would not be seen the armèd torrents1 poured
Down the deep Alps; nor would the hostile horde
Of many-nationed spoilers1 from the Po

Quaff blood and water; nor the stranger's sword1
Be thy sad weapon of defence, and so,

Victor or vanquished, thou the slave of friend or foe.

XLIV

Wandering in youth,2 I traced the path of him,
The Roman friend of Rome's least-mortal mind,

he loved and sung about so nobly- Venice, Florence, and Rome - all are members of one enlightened government, and again, after ages, are enjoying both prosperity and peace.

1 The armed torrents: this might refer to Hannibal's passage through the Alps into Italy (218 B.C.); to Charles VIII's invasion, in 1494 A.D.; or to other incursions; but more probably it refers to the then recent invasion by Napoleon. The "many-nationed spoilers" are chiefly the French and the Austrians: the French conquered, but gave northern Italy to Austria. "From the Po" (1.6) is an adverbial phrase modifying "quaff." "The stranger's sword" is probably Napoleon's, who had overrun Italy and held her against the nations of the north; or it may be the sword of the Austrian.

2 Wandering in youth: his trip to Asia Minor, Greece, and Albania, in 1809-1811, which furnished material for the first two cantos of Childe Harold. For another allusion to this tour, see stanzas CLXXV and CLXXVI.

The friend of Tully:1 as my bark did skim
The bright blue waters with a fanning wind,
Came Megara before me, and behind
Ægina lay - Piræus on the right,

And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined
Along the prow, and saw all these unite
In ruin

even as he had seen the desolate sight;

XLV

For Time hath not rebuilt them, but upreared
Barbaric dwellings on their shattered site,
Which only make more mourned and more endeared
The few last rays of their far-scattered light,
And the crushed relics of their vanished might.
The Roman saw these tombs in his own age,
These sepulchres of cities, which excite

Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page

The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage.

XLVI

That page is now before me, and on mine
His country's ruin added to the mass

Of perished states he mourned in their decline,
And I in desolation: all that was

Of then destruction, is; and now, alas!

Rome

Rome imperial, bows her to the storm,

In the same dust and blackness, and we pass

The skeleton of her Titanic form,

Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm.

1 The friend of Tully: Tully," Rome's least mortal mind," is Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), the greatest of Roman orators and prose writers. His friend was Servius Sulpicius, who wrote to Cicero a description of his voyage past the coast of Greece, where he saw, even then in ruins, the places mentioned by Byron in stanza XLIV (see also stanza CLXXIV).

XLVII

Yet, Italy through every other land

Thy wrongs should ring — and shall from side to side;

Mother of Arts! as once of Arms; thy hand
Was then our Guardian, and is still our Guide;
Parent of our Religion! whom the wide
Nations have knelt to for the keys of heaven!1
Europe, repentant of her parricide,

Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven,
Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven.

XLVIII

But Arno wins us to the fair white walls,
Where the Etrurian Athens 2 claims and keeps
A softer feeling for her fairy halls :
Girt by her theatre of hills, she reaps

Her corn, and wine, and oil, and Plenty leaps
To laughing life, with her redundant horn.
Along the banks where smiling Arno sweeps
Was modern Luxury of Commerce born,

And buried Learning rose, redeemed to a new morn.

1 The keys of heaven: it was Rome rather than Italy who was "the parent of our religion," and who, as the seat of the Popes, successors to St. Peter, held the "keys of heaven" (see Matthew xvi, 19).

2 The Etrurian Athens: Florence, often called the "Modern Athens," is in the province known to the ancient Romans as Etruria (now Tuscany), and is built on both sides of the river Arno. Its prosperity first arose from its commerce and great banking institutions —“modern luxury of Commerce born." Its merchants were princes, the wealthiest and most powerful of whom, the Medici, became the leaders of the city. This great family, one of the most remarkable known to history, patronized all the arts and sciences to an extent never known before. Under the patronage of the Medici, Florence, during the Age of the Renaissance (about 1400-1550), produced numberless men of science, scholars, architects, painters, and poets. Around Lorenzo de' Medici, the "Magnificent," gathered Machiavelli (see note 4, p. 78), Michelangelo (see note 1, p. 78), Politian, the scholar, Ghirlandajo, the painter, and a host of other men of genius. Florence is still one of the most beautiful and interesting cities in the world. A roll of the great men associated with her name reads like a history of civilization.

XXI

Existence may be borne, and the deep root
Of life and sufferance make its firm abode
In bare and desolated bosoms: mute
The camel labors with the heaviest load,
And the wolf dies in silence,

not bestowed

In vain should such example be; if they, Things of ignoble or of savage mood, Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay May temper it to bear, it is but for a day.

XXII

All suffering doth destroy, or is destroyed,
Even by the sufferer; and, in each event,

Ends:

Some, with hope replenished and rebuoyed, Return to whence they came — with like intent, And weave their web again; some, bowed and bent, Wax gray and ghastly, withering ere their time,

And perish with the reed on which they leant;

Some seek devotion toil

war

-

- good or crime,

According as their souls were formed to sink or climb.

XXIII

But ever and anon of griefs subdued

There comes a token like a scorpion's sting,
Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued ;
And slight withal may be the things which bring
Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside forever it may be a sound

A tone of music - summer's eve or spring

A flower the wind the ocean which shall wound,

Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound;

XXIV

And how and why we know not, nor can trace
Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind,
But feel the shock renewed, nor can efface
The blight and blackening which it leaves behind,
Which out of things familiar, undesigned,
When least we deem of such, calls up to view
The Spectres whom no exorcism can bind

The cold

- the changed — perchance the dead, anew The mourned, the loved, the lost — too many! yet how few!

XXV

But
my Soul wanders; I demand it back
To meditate amongst decay, and stand
A ruin amidst ruins; there to track
Fallen states and buried greatness, o'er a land
Which was the mightiest in its old command,
And is the loveliest, and must ever be

The master-mould of Nature's heavenly hand;
Wherein were cast the heroic and the free

The beautiful, the brave — the lords of earth and sea.

XXVI 1

the Men of Rome!

The Commonwealth of Kings

And even since, and now, fair Italy!

Thou art the Garden of the World, the home

Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree;

1 Stanza XXVI: with this should be read the following, from Canto III:

"Italia! too, Italia! looking on thee,

Full flashes on the soul the light of ages,

Since the fierce Carthaginian almost won thee,

To the last halo of the chiefs and sages

Who glorify thy consecrated pages;

Thou wert the throne and grave of empires; still
The fount at which the panting mind assuages
Her thirst of knowledge, quaffing there her fill,

Flows from the eternal source of Rome's imperial hill."