Ah! September quickly coming,
Thou shalt take farewell of me,
And, to other summers roaming,
Other hills and waters see,--
Greeting them with songs more gay,
Pilgrim swallow, far away.
Still, with every hopeless morrow,
While I ope mine eyes in tears,
Sweetly through my brooding sorrow
Thy dear song shall reach mine ears,--
Pitying me, though far away,
Pilgrim swallow, in thy lay.
Thou, when thou and spring together
Here return, a cross shalt see,--
In the pleasant evening weather,
Wheel and pipe, here, over me!
Peace and peace! the coming May,
Sing me in thy roundelay!
It is a great good fortune for a man to have written a thing so
beautiful as this, and not a singular fortune that he should have
written nothing else comparable to it. The like happens in all
literatures; and no one need be surprised to learn that I found the
other poems of Grossi often difficult, and sometimes almost impossible
to read.
Grossi was born in 1791, at Bollano, by lovely Como, whose hills and
waters he remembers in all his works with constant affection. He
studied law at the University of Pavia, but went early to Milan, where
he cultivated literature rather than the austerer science to which he
had been bred, and soon became the fashion, writing tales in Milanese
and Italian verse, and making the women cry by his pathetic art of
story-telling.
Pages:
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198