Approach To Venice On A November Day Poem by Sir John Hanmer

Clear shines the sun, but yet the cloud is grey,
And the fresh breeze comes scented with the spray
Of the wild billow, that with thundering fall,
Broke its huge mass 'gainst Malamocco's wall;
Then bade its rider, ever fierce and free,
To Winter bear the homage of the sea.
On Styria's peaks his gathering storms repose,
And shroud the giant on his couch of snows,
Ere yet descending through the howling air
He bends the pine, and strips the poplar bare,
Ere the tall cypress, 'mid the naked scene,
'Gainst the white tower shall rise with deeper green,
And the broad oxen, from the swelling Po,
To their warm stalls, and sheltering village go;
While houseless beggars in the biting cold
Sit numbed to sleep, and dream of feasts and gold.
By empty villas and by mouldering vines
Gleams the pale ray, that warms not though it shines;
Yet these but late their clustering grapes have shed,
To glad the living,-those are of the dead:
These still shall wake with Nature wakening,
And tint the landscape with the hues of spring.
They come no more, no more shall beauty's hand
Strike the soft harp, in halls Palladio plann'd,
No more, last refuge of despairing pride,
Luxurious pomp a people's fall shall hide.
But vaulted roofs with hollow sound reply,
When Brenta's breezes sweep careering by,
And bear the leaves in gathering heaps to rest
At gates which hailed a monarch once their guest.
Alike the eagle's wide-spread lineage bind
The hosts he sought, the realm he left behind;
And for the subjects of his sires, o'er them
The sword must hang, to guard the diadem
That crowns another-vanished race and fame,
Fit guest of Venice now, the Valois' name.


I saw a pilgrim on a jutting stone
High on the Alps, which, ages long agone,
The thoughtful traveller from Lombardy
Has marked when mountain shadows gather nigh,
And they who come up on the other side
Alike its marble ridges have descried,
And spring to welcome what with fond regret
They leave, who mid-way in the path have met.
Exile he seemed, as one whom hard-eyed fate
Had shut, stern portress, from his palace gate,
And bade the spider, unmolested there
Weave the grey web, that none should turn to tear;
But an old Jew, with contemplative smile
Watch the congenial insect's cunning wile,
Smile in those stately halls that this should be,
Where once he cringed, no lowlier knave than he,
In the long pageant of departed years,
Pomp, power, ambition, all that life endears
To the bond-servants of its gilded chain,
The proud, the great, the glorious, and the vain.


There had he come betimes, and waited long,
With hate untired, as rivers ever strong,
But humble guise, as if his life had been
Made but to serve the lordly Nazarene,
And there with staff and garb of sable hue,
Oft had he sat when gayer souls withdrew,
And fed on bitter thoughts that use had nursed,
Till second nature had become the first;
And there till Lido's waste, and briny wave
Shall mark him still an outcast, and his grave
In the dead grass and barren sand be made,
Where shrine is none, nor prayer was ever prayed,
Save of his worn and stern and weary race,
Above their last, and desolate dwelling place;
Still shall he sit, as seasons glide away,
O'er the proud pile, contemptuous of decay,
And his vile count of usance mutter o'er,
A serpent coiling on the untrodden floor,
Last of the living links, that men may see
'Twixt what was there, and what remains to be;
Ere from the lonely rooms and shattered wall
Rent by his hand the very frescos fall,
And sordid ruin, with a drear repose,
Broods o'er that scene of long-forgotten woes,
Whose name so glorious once, the peasant scarcely knows.


Yet once he knew it, or his fathers knew,
When Genoa's banner at Chiozza flew,
In joy of triumph or extreme of ill,
Honoured and loved, and sought, and trusted still;
And deem not fancy wayward, that she wrought
Thus for that stranger with creative thought
A lofty race and heritage, and stood
Dreaming such dreams, by Brenta's falling flood.
From his yet sleeping form, and forehead pale,
Spoke the high air, that want could ne'er assail,
And through the gloomy shadows of distress
Yet broader beamed the lights of nobleness;
There dimly stretched his native plains, before
Rose misty peaks, with forests covered o'er,
And scanty terraces on mountains high,
And thin spread hamlets, and a colder sky;
And he to German cities, far away
Fared wearily, or farther still than they,
And this of his own Italy, had been his latest day.
I gazed until it seemed my wandering thought
His sleeping vision's self-illusion caught;
And then we stood together, in the pile
Which he had left, a short-a bitter while:
Nor yet the glories of his ancient race,
Torn from their old hereditary place,
Had left cold shadows on the naked walls
To chase each other through deserted halls.
Thoughts of his youth, they came there back again,
And his heart drank them, as the earth the rain.
There was that true and strange epitome
Of human life, and all that man can be,
Where to the present's ever-changing moods
Speaks the old past, with fixed similitudes;
There Titian's hand a warrior Doge portrayed,
And there some idler of the summer shade;
There bent a maiden, with a glad surprise
O'er gems, but foil to pleasure's beaming eyes;
And there her merchant sire, who trafficked far
With wary thrift, to Balkh, or Istakhar;
Her with bright tresses Giorgione drew,
As when love saw, and kindled at the view,
And bore her fame of beauty far away,
Past Este's towers, and Montefeltro's sway;
Him Tintoretto's rapid hand designed,
And fixed each passing thought that floated in his mind.
The subtle priest that watched the late accord
Of conclave's votes, and started up their lord,
And bade avaunt dissembled age and pain,
And grasped the crozier, like a charger's rein;
The smooth-tongued envoy, ready still to lie,
Sharp as his sword and cold, with piercing eye,
And they who raised, and they who threw away
Fortune and fame, with folly's vain display,
Alike in that wild trance were imaged there;
But they are past, and know no earthly care:
And all of their old splendour that remains
Surrounds their dust, in time-defying fanes.
The porphyry pillar, and the sable stone,
Sure test of gold-that 'twere of virtues known,
And marble monuments, and faint perfume
Of burning censers, and the gorgeous gloom
That broods in silence, o'er each sacred place,
As present were the angel of their race,-
These vanish not, though all beside is fled;
But their last son must know another bed
In life and death, and lay in humbler guise his head.
Oh visions bright, of unforgotten hours,
Bright, and yet wan, as grief's declining flowers,
Wherewith o'er sepulchres she wreaths her head,
And calls, how vainly! on the lost and dead!
Thus did my fancy fill that pilgrim's brain
With ye, and feign the airy past again,
And call up phantoms of ancestral fame,
And power, and love, and give them all a name,
Albeit fleeting, as Autumnal gleams.
Ye wild waves dashing 'gainst the low-mouthed streams,
That pour their floods far over the lagoons
With turbid tide, in winter's watery moons;
Ye winds that wailing through the city go,
And fill no sails, and bear no banner now,
But waft the sea's corroding salt, to fade
Some glorious fresco, in its lone arcade;
Ye tapering towers, far scattered, whence the bell
Sounds through the air, with melancholy swell;
Ye shades, companions of the breeze, that float
With a strange power, o'er isle, and quay, and boat,
Now distant, and now nearer, and suffuse
The landscape ever with chamelion hues;
So let me look on ye, and dream once more,
And summon back the tales, and songs of yore
From Arquà's poet vale, to Venice' farthest shore.