Renaissance

Beautiful Europe of endeavour,
Inexhaustibly conversing with the past!
The dream will not perish
Of sublimity and order,
These buildings, books and pictures,
These songs will draw us on.

In Ferrara, Ariosto sits in chiaroscuro,
Amphibious diplomat of worlds,
Filling his quill with all the humours,
Nonchalantly soaring on a hippogriff to the moon.

The portico of Corinthian columns
In the Foundling Hospital in Florence:
Mathematics of shadow and light
Interpenetrating, shifting in the mind
To stimulate new designs.
So Brunelleschi made to balance
His life in stone,and will a good world
Into being, against all afflictions.

In the palace on Urbino’s crag,
Castiglione sits writing his treatise,
Adumbrating the mysteries of court,
Where life depends on word and gesture,
On some divine indefinable grace,
Rough politics and brute desire
Disguised as the congress of angels.

Francis I stands, a bearded lady,
With sword upheld,and caduceus
In hand,the King and Queen
Of France,and,amid the forest
Raises Fontainebleau’s gold chalice
To the sun.Among the trees,
Diana fondles her subdued stag,
Fixing the observer with a wink.
On Cellini’s silver salt cellar
Venus and Vulcan, pleasantly weary,
Recline in intellectual equipoise.