Page:The Poems of Oscar Wilde.pdf/26

 And Naples hath outlived her dream of pain,

And mocks her tyrant! Venice lives again,

New risen from the waters! and the cry

Of Light and Truth, of Love and Liberty,

Is heard in lordly Genoa, and where

The marble spires of Milan wound the air,

Rings from the Alps to the Sicilian shore,

And Dante's dream is now a dream no more.

But thou, Ravenna, better loved than all,

Thy ruined palaces are but a pall

That hides thy fallen greatness! and thy name

Burns like a grey and flickering candle-flame,

Beneath the noonday splendour of the sun

Of new Italia! for the night is done,

The night of dark oppression, and the day

Hath dawned in passionate splendour: far away

The Austrian hounds are hunted from the land,

Beyond those ice-crowned citadels which stand

Girdling the plain of royal Lombardy,

From the far West unto the Eastern sea.

I know, indeed, that sons of thine have died

In Lissa's waters, by the mountain-side

Of Aspromonte, on Novara's plain,—

Nor have thy children died for thee in vain:

And yet, methinks, thou hast not drunk this wine

From grapes new-crushed of Liberty divine, 12