...Poems - Tapa blanda

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Is still "Rejoice!" — his word which brought rejoicing indeed. So is Pheidippides happy for ever, — the noble strong man Who could race like a god, bear the face of a god, whom a god loved so well, He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began.1 So to end gloriously — once to shout, thereafter be mute: " Athens is saved!" — Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed. MY LAST DUCHESS FEBKARA This poem — published in Bells and Pomegranates — is the first direct progenitor of Andrea del Sarto and the other great blank-verse monologues; in it we see the form, save for the scarcely appreciable presence of rhyme, already developed. The poem is a subtle study in the jealousy of egoism — not a study so much as a creation; and it places before us, as if bitten out by the etcher's acid, a typical autocrat of the Renaissance, with his serene self-composure of selfishness, quiet uncompromising cruelty, and genuine devotion to art. The scene and the actors in this little Italian dramastand out before us with the most natural clearness; there is some telling touch in every line, an infinitude of cunningly careless details, instinct with suggestion, and an appearance through it all of simple artless ease, such as only the very finest art can give. That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's 1 hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said " Fra Pandolf " by design, for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance, The depth and passion of its earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I ...