Browning sets up a gentle English scene—a ghost slipping through a poppy-lined lane, young lovers murmuring among the hazels—then turns away from it. What he really loves, with a fierce, possessive ache, is Italy. Not the Italy of tourist views, but a jagged, weathered world: a clifftop castle battered by mountain winds, a southern shore where cicadas shrivel in the heat, a solitary cypress rusted with age. He imagines a barefoot girl dumping melons and gossiping about a king’s assassination. History, decay, and raw life all pulse through these lines. The mood is a strange mix of longing and defiant certainty. Where the English idyll feels fleeting, the Italian landscape is a love tattooed inside him—old, battered, and eternal. Queen Mary had “Calais” on her heart; he has “Italy,” and the poem’s final line makes clear this devotion will outlast everything.
"De Gustibus--" — Summary
Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (If our loves remain) In an English lane, By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies. Hark, those two in the hazel coppice-- A boy and a girl, if the good fates please, Making love, say,-- The happier they! Draw yourself up from the light of the moon. And let them pass, as they will too soon, With the beanflower's boon, And the blackbird's tune, And May, and June!
What I love best in all the world Is a castle, precipice-encurled, In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine. Or look for me, old fellow of mine, (If I get my head from out the mouth O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands, And come again to the land of lands)-- In a sea-side house to the farther South, Where the baked cicala dies of drouth, And one sharp tree--'tis a cypress--stands, By the many hundred years red-rusted, Bough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted, My sentinel to guard the sands To the water's edge. For, what expands Before the house, but the great opaque Blue breadth of sea without a break? While, in the house, forever crumbles Some fragment of the frescoed walls, From blisters where a scorpion sprawls. A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons, And says there's news to-day--the king Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing, Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling: --She hopes they have not caught the felons. Italy, my Italy! Queen Mary's saying serves for me-- (When fortune's malice Lost her, Calais) Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, "Italy." Such lovers old are I and she: So it always was, so shall ever be!