Explore "Sordello" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
And the font took them: let our laurels lie! / Braid moonfern now with mystic trifoly / Because once more Goito gets, once more, / Sordello to itself! A dream is o'er, / And the suspended life begins anew; / Quiet those throbbing temples, then, subdue / That cheek's distortion! Nature's strict embrace, / Putting aside the past, shall soon efface / Its print as well -- factitious humors grown / Over the true -- loves, hatreds not his own -- / And turn him pure as some forgotten vest / Woven of painted byssus, silkiest / Tufting the Tyrrhene whelk's pearl-sheeted lip, / Left welter where a trireme let it slip / I' the sea, and vexed a satrap; so the stain / O' the world forsakes Sordello, with its pain, / Its pleasure: how the tinct loosening escapes, / Cloud after cloud! Mantua's familiar shapes / Die, fair and foul die, fading as they flit, / Men, women, and the pathos and the wit, / Wise speech and foolish, deeds to smile or sigh / For, good, bad, seemly or ignoble, die.
The last face glances through the eglantines, / The last voice murmurs, 'twixt the blossomed vines, / Of Men, of that machine supplied by thought / To compass self-perception with, he sought / By forcing half himself -- an insane pulse / Of a god's blood, on clay it could convulse, / Never transmute -- on human sights and sounds, / To watch the other half with; irksome bounds / It ebbs from to its source, a fountain sealed / Forever. Better sure be unrevealed / Than part revealed: Sordello well or ill / Is finished: then what further use of Will, / Point in the prime idea not realized, / An oversight? inordinately prized, / No less, and pampered with enough of each / Delight to prove the whole above its reach. / "To need become all natures, yet retain / The law of my own nature -- to remain / Myself, yet yearn. as if that chestnut, think, / Should yearn for this first larch-bloom crisp and pink, / Or those pale fragrant tears where zephyrs stanch / March wounds along the fretted pine-tree branch! / Will and the means to show will, great and small, / Material, spiritual, -- abjure them all / Save any so distinct, they may be left / To amuse, not tempt become! and, thus bereft, / Just as I first was fashioned would I be! / Nor, moon, is it Apollo now, but me / Thou visitest to comfort and befriend!