Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Americas: Vol. XXX. 1876–79.
The Corcovado
By William Gibson (1826–1887)O
Or River of January, so miscalled
By the old voyagers, who deemed that here
Some mighty stream, rivalling the Amazon,
Emptied its wealth of waters; oft my fancy
Had soared to the Sublime, scaling the heights
Around me, with all Beauty at its feet:
But I had been content, with bodily foot
Planted upon no loftier pinnacle
Than the ship’s deck, to gaze, not undelighted,
Upon this lucid harbor-sheet, embosomed
In its sweet zone of hills, so wild and lovely
That Nature seems, in her most frolic mood,
To have shaped out and richly pranked them forth,
Lavish of light and generous with her green.
Up the steep bed of mountain streams, beside
The gray-mossed aqueduct, through forests dense,
Shut from the wind but open to the sun,
With limbs grown languid and quick-panted breathing;
And I have reached the topmost crag which crowns
The Corcovado: its peculiar peak,
Seen from below, with one precipitous side,
Not all unlike a superincumbent billow
Walled up against the shore in act to break,—
So pausing “on the curl” forevermore.
But here, on its high summit all-commanding,
What view is mine? Alas! a blinding mist
Is all, which, swept from seaward by the breeze,
Foldeth the mountain in its white cloud-fleeces.
There is a heavy sound upon the wind,
Whether from over, under, or around,
A roaring like the noise of many waters,
A roll like thunders long reverberate,
Filling the wide air with sustainèd pealing.
As did Ixion, in the Grecian fable,
I have stretched forth my hand to clasp a goddess,
Seeking and yearning for the Beautiful
In its divinest essence,—and I meet
The embraces of a cloud;—and angry Jove
Threatens with the loud thunder all the while!
Which travels inland, riding on the wind,—
And, lo! the blue Atlantic, breaking white
Upon the white-beached mainland and the islands,
With a long roll and a loud roar,—in chorus
Booming the mighty multitudinous Deep!
All lesser tumult heard not at this height,
I listen to the voice of sovereign Power;
Power, the majestic, the unchainable,
The infinite and eternal Power of God!
Here speaks it ever.—But how solemnly
Is the primeval and enduring Force
Of all things stamped on these insensate cliffs!
There was a time, when, silent as they stand,
Hard now and steadfast, chaos rocked and raged,
And they, with fierce heat liquid, were upheaved
Into these forms fantastic: so convulsed
Was never Ocean in his stormiest hour.
The lapsing ages leave them as they are,
Revealing yet Earth’s strong original frame,
But showing, too, how Strength is loved of Beauty,
Whose gentler spirit, like a younger Nature,
Doth, with caressing tendrils clasping it,
Make, as Love ever doth, its object lovely:
Hebe had bound, with rosy-taper fingers,
A chaplet thus on brows of Hercules:
So doth a childish sister love to sport
With a stern elder, dear to her withal:
The very rocks, the great rocks ramparting
The dusk ravines, are, by her summer breath,
Made gay, laughing out into lustrous flowers;
And all the massy tropical foliage
Glows, in her sunlight, of so glad a green
It welcometh the wanderer from the sea
With the warm welcome of a loved one’s smile!
Of dark Vesuvius, I have seen the sun
Rise diamond-clear upon thy rosy sea,
Thy mountain-islands and romantic shores,
O Naples, beautiful in boyish dreams!
Disparagement seems sacrilege to thee,
And thy domains, divine Parthenope!
Yet may the New World claim fair rivalry,
Her birthright, dowered by the Beautiful,
As here, with such exuberant natural charms
They need no other ornament, and ask
No interest borrowed from the storied past.
What though no monuments nor memories,
No mythic legend and no ethnic verse,
Haunt land and sea, and hallow all the air?
Lo! down this precipice I could drop the plummet
Into a bay surpassing Baia,
By Virgil lined with his Elysian Fields:
There, where its beauty nestles in the mountains,
Gardens are mapped beneath me, dark and rich
With bowers, wherein no Queen of old Romance
Hath woven enchantments and no antique Grace
Breathed sanctity, yet to whose bloomy shades
Dear Nature, visioned like Egeria,
Might come, though universal as the air,
And look into the heart of him who loved her
With a peculiar smile for him alone:
There, in the mountain-shadows glossy green,
Undimpled as the face of quiet thought,
Its waters scarcely crisp enough to mark
Their margin on the silver-sanded shore,
And the ear catches not their cadencing—
Sweet bay of Botofogo! Far away,
Yon Organ Mountains, through whose pipes stupendous,
Shooting up miles into the cloudless ether,
Nature might swell eternal anthem-music
To the beneficent Heaven,—with what superb
Disdain would they o’erlook the Apennines!
Capri and Ischia,—what are they to these
Islands and towery isolations round me,
At once so picturesque and so imposing?
Earth has no equal, glorious as thou art,
Sea of the Siren! to this ocean-flood,
Rolled up among the mountains and the hills;
Sweeping into deep coves with sheltering headlands,
With long curves of white beach and creamy foam;
Its whole broad surface like a shield of silver,—
A noble shield, large as the giant-gods,
Who, climbing Heaven, piled Pelion upon Ossa,
Might have upheld; a glittering shield, embossed
With massive emeralds; such those linkèd hills
And lovely isles seem in their gem-like green.
Upon its bosom the tall thronging ships
Show like a fleet of their own boats at anchor;
And, on its shores, the imperial capital
Of the Brazils is dwarfed so by the distance
It might beseem the court of Liliput,
A populous ant-hill metropolitan:
Yet scarce less spacious the still waters seem
Than when I viewed them from the ship or shore,
Though from this lofty rock o’erlooking them,
O’erlooking with the mountains—my compeers!
And actual elevation, these huge piles
Of senseless granite look like things of life,
And I am of them—they are my compeers!
I drink in something of the strong delight
Which plumes the eagle, drinking of the morning,
Ere, soaring upward from his rock-built eyrie,
He melts away, a star into the sunlight.
And I can fancy wingèd Mercury,
When, having stolen Jove’s sceptre for a time,
He lords it from the top of high Olympus,—
The Universe beneath his feathered heel!
This interfusion with sublimer things
And this perception of diviner power
Than oft are given us, live within my soul!
Long shall this grandeur live upon my eye,
When, with its imagery magnificent,
Its shadows broad and sunbright colorings,
The panorama shall have passed away!