Explore "Sordello" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Is it the same Sordello in the dusk / As at the dawn? -- merely a perished husk / Now, that arose a power fit to build / Up Rome again? The proud conception chilled / So soon? Ay, watch that latest dream of thine -- A / Rome indebted to no Palatine -- / Drop arch by arch, Sordello! Art possessed / Of thy wish now, rewarded for thy quest / To-day among Ferrara's squalid sons?
Are this and this and this the shining ones / Meet for the Shining City? Sooth to say, / Your favored tenantry pursue their way / After a fashion! This companion slips / On the smooth causey, t' other blinkard trips / At his mooned sandal. "Leave to lead the brawls / Here i' the atria? " No, friend! He that sprawls / On aught but a stibadium. what his dues / Who puts the lustral vase to such an use? / Oh, huddle up the day's disasters! March, / Ye runagates, and drop thou, arch by arch, / Rome! / Yet before they quite disband -- a whim -- / Study mere shelter, now, for him, and him, / Nay, even the worst, -- just house them! Any cave / Suffices: throw out earth! A loophole? Brave! / They ask to feel the sun shine, see the grass / Grow, hear the larks sing? Dead art thou, alas, / And I am dead! But here's our son excels / At hurdle-weaving any Scythian, fells / Oak and devises rafters, dreams and shapes / His dream into a door-post, just escapes / The mystery of hinges. Lie we both / Perdue another age. The goodly growth / Of brick and stone! Our building-pelt was rough, / But that descendant's garb suits well enough / A portico-contriver. Speed the years -- / What's time to us? At last, a city rears / Itself! nay, enter -- what's the grave to us?