Poems (Piatt)/Volume 2/Beatrice Cenci
BEATRICE CENCI.[SEEN IN A CITY SHOP-WINDOW.]
Out of low light an exquisite faint face Suddenly started. Goldenness of hair,A South-look of sweet-sorrowful eyes, a trace Of prison-paleness: what if these were there,When Guido's hand could never reach the grace That glimmered on me from the Italian air— Fairness so fierce, or fierceness half so fair?
"Is it some Actress?" a slight school-boy said. Some Actress? Yes. ———The curtain rolled away,Dusty and dim. The scene—among the dead— In some weird, gloomy-pillared palace lay;The Tragedy, which we have brokenly read, With its two hundred ghastly years was grey: None dared applaud with flowers her shadowy way—Yet, ah! how bitterly well she seemed to play!
Hush! for a child's quick murmur breaks the charm Of terror that was winding round me so;And, at the white touch of her pretty arm, Darkness and Death and Agony crouch lowIn old-time dungeons: "Tell me, (is it harm To ask you?) is the picture real, though?— And why the beautiful ladies, all, you know, Live so far-off, and die so long ago?"