Explore "De Gustibus" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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 -- 't is 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!