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Robert Browning - De Gustibus---
Work rating: Medium

I.

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 bean-flowers` boon, 
    And the blackbird`s tune,
    And May, and June!

	II.

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, for ever 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!
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