XIX ON A SAINT PETER'S EVE
I remember the sun across the red vapours descending,
and falling into the sea like a great shield of brass,
which shines wavering over the bloody field of war,
then drops and is seen no more.
Little Castiglioncello, high amid heaps of oaks,
blushing in her glazed windows, returned a coquettish smile.
I, meanwhile, languid and sad [with fever still lingering in me,
and my nerves all heavy and lifeless as if they were weighted with lead],
looked from my window. Swiftly the swallows
wove and rewove their crooked flight around the eaves,
while in shadows malarious the brown sparrows were chattering.
Beyond the wood were the varied hills and the plain
partly razed by the scythe, partly still yellow and waving.
Away through the grey furrows rose the smoke of the smouldering stubble,
and whether or no did there come through the humid air
the song of the reapers, long, distant, mournful, and wearied?
Everywhere brooded a heaviness, in the air, in the woods, on the shore.
I gazed at the falling sun—“Proud light of the world,
Like a Cyclops heavy with wine thou lookest down on our life”—
Then screamed the peacocks, mocking me from among the pomegranates,
and a vagrant bat as it passed me grazed my head.
Odi Barbare.