Inside a house somewhere in the Italian mountains, a speaker urgently asks his companion, Mary, to listen. He doesn’t describe a gentle breeze—the Apennine wind “bursts on the roof like the thunder’s roar” and surges like a northern sea heard from a cave where prisoners are trapped. The sound feels enormous, dangerous, and strangely imprisoned. By day, the mountain is just a dim, gray mass dividing earth and sky. But at night, chaos spreads across the starlight, and the Apennine itself seems to stand up and stride through the storm, shrouding itself in darkness. The fragment ends there, but its force is complete: it’s a moment of raw, Romantic awe before a landscape that becomes a living, threatening presence. The mood is both intimate and overwhelming—a whispered command to share in the terror and wonder of a world that refuses to stay still.
Passage of the Apennines — Summary
Listen, listen, Mary mine, To the whisper of the Apennine, It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar, Or like the sea on a northern shore, Heard in its raging ebb and flow By the captives pent in the cave below. The Apennine in the light of day Is a mighty mountain dim and gray, Which between the earth and sky doth lay; But when night comes, a chaos dread On the dim starlight then is spread, And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm, Shrouding...