Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
— — (If our loves remain)
— — In an English lane,
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice —
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
— — Making love, say, —
— — The happier they!
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
— — With the beanflowers' boon,
— — And the blackbird's tune,
— — And May, and June!

What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,
And come again to the land of lands) —
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree — 'tis a cypress — stands
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water's edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, forever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there's news to-day — the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:
— She hopes they have not caught the felons
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary's saying serves for me —
— — (When fortune's malice
— — Lost her Calais)
— — Open my heart and you will see
— — Graved inside of it, " Italy. "
— — Such lovers old are I and she:
— — So it always was, so shall ever be!