Or any human attitude of mind,

We blame all human happiness or grief

Upon a place, make figures of our feeling

And move them, as a story-teller might

Move modern heroes into ancient legends,

Into the solid and receptive land.

For who can keep a grief as pure grief

Or hold a happiness against the heart?

Noble indeed to impute our worthiest thoughts

To a serene and splendid countryside,

And therefore logical to let our loathing

See a storm looming in the Summer light,

The hills about to learn of landslides and

The entire landscape be quite swallowed up

In a surrender – a type of our death.

II First Reflections

No one would need to find a logic for

Living within this city; no man need

Have cause to ponder out his livelihood.

In other places far from sun or sea

Even the certain man has had to brood

Upon the nature of his certainty

And think of other ways to live instead.

Legends and allegories grow from such

Strong doubt. It is those cities where men look

Within themselves to wonder where they are

That shadows of great stories stir and stretch.

Myths are built up not where men love but where

They feel most ill at ease. Our fables reach

Back to the places where our hearts could break.

III The Islands: Torcello

Here you may find the purest style, a way

To be direct. This little island floating

On the same sea where Venice preens herself

Is island only, smells of sea and soil:

The style is in the toil,

Seamen with boat or farmer with his hay.

All is an action, nothing merely waiting.

Words would come easily and aptly here.

There is no grandeur to disturb

The mind, no squares where our selves disappear

Into a sense of wonder. Here we may

Partake of the particular

And put all generalities away.

Soil, salt and peasants with one tower to ride

The sky – and this is all.

Calmly our statements step away,

Substance and form elide.

Nothing of symbol’s here, no rhetoric,

Yet we who are obsessed with what we make

Everything mean, yes even here compile

Torcello an archetype, a new and simpler style.

IV Piazza San Marco, The Mystics and Makers

Now they return to the one world we know

And do you recognise this man who comes

Rubbing the marble flakes between his fingers,

Pulling a splinter from his thumb? Are you

Prepared to welcome him to this one place

Which we, for lack of closer truth, declare

Is common ground for every one of us?

Mystics and sculptors come together here:

One feels a vision fading from his mind

And needs renewal from this downward world;

The other, so collected round his carving,

Is still withdrawn. Then bring him back to life –

Wine and the dusty sandal and our talk.

We, questioning ourselves, never believe

Entirely in a world that we can share.

Our characters, our faiths are where we move