Florence by David Leavitt

Author:David Leavitt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2002-09-16T07:00:00+00:00

That weeping stand on a distant shore,

My young days darkened for evermore –

O pray for me!

Pray for the homeless, outcast one,

Pray for the life crushed out and done

Ere yet its youth had scarce begun –

O pray for me!

O think of me!

I loved you well in the days gone by, Together,

you said, we’d live and die –

O think of me!

Think then of those imperial years,

Think, think of all my bitter tears,

My racking doubts, my dismal tears –

O think of me!

Yea, dear one, morning, noon, and night,

I think, and weep, and pray for thee,

And through my tears my one delight

Is born of thy dear memory.

My life with thine is past and o’er,

We can but weep for evermore.

Oscar Wilde, reviewing the Songs of Adieu in the Pall Mall Gazette of 30 March 1889, concluded, ‘He has nothing to say and says it’; a quip that did not keep Somerset from entertaining Wilde when he came to Florence to visit Lord Alfred Douglas in 1894. ‘Podge’, as Somerset was known, was as tragicomic an eccentric as the hero of ‘The Soul’s Gymnasium’. Osbert Sitwell, who made something of a career out of memorializing Anglo-Florentine dinosaurs, portrayed him as ‘Milordo Inglese’ in one of the poems that comprise ‘On the Continent’, the third section of his 1958 collection Poems about People, or England Reclaimed. Here Podge is ‘Lord Richard Vermont’, whom ‘some nebulous but familiar scandal / Had lightly blown … over the Channel, / Which he never crossed again.’

Thus at the age of twenty-seven

A promising career was over,

And the thirty or forty years that had elapsed

Had been spent in killing time – or so Lord

Richard thought,

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