Poems

FONTE BRANDA IN SIENA

            Ruskin, Praeterita III, iv, §86
            Dante, Inferno xxx, 49-90 (Adamo di Brescia)

Fonte Branda, wrote Ruskin, I last saw
under the same arches where Dante saw it.
He drank of it then
                   and every time the near
pentameters of his prose recur to me,
I too see the place again:

the loggia of red brick, in white stone
the jutting bestial heads
                         and within,
shade and the still pool.

Whenever the Englishman went there he would find
rage at injustice,
true words that pinion falsehood and cupidity,
...