Frank Oliver Call imagines a wild grapevine spreading through the ruins of an ancient temple. Fallen pillars and broken statues of fauns, youths, and maidens lie half-hidden under dark leaves, while bees move among the grape-flowers in the heavy noonday heat. The scene feels both drowsy and sorrowful: nature is not simply destroying the old art but wrapping it in something like a funeral wreath. The speaker seems drawn to the strange closeness between life and death, youth and decay. The vine clings to the pale stone figures the way an unhappy lover might cling to a dead mistress, mixing wild growth with mourning. The overall mood is lush, still, and quietly haunting—an old beauty is disappearing, but the living vine makes that loss feel intimate and even tender.
Wild Grape — Summary
Beneath the crawling shadow Of a crumbling temple to gods long-forgotten, The wild grape twines amid the fragments Of shattered pillars prone upon the ground, And its dark leaves hide from sight the broken sculptures Of faun and youth and maiden, That once stood in the temple pediment, Young, naked, beautiful. In wild freedom it climbs over the carved acanthus leaves of the crumbling columns, And weaves a funeral wreath over their dead beauty. The wild bees hum and buzz Among the grape-flowers, heavy with honeyed perfume, Under the drowsy noonday sun, That spills its amber wine from a full goblet over the thirsting hillside. Wanton and wild, Like an unhappy lover Clinging to the breast of his dead mistress, The vine clings in voluptuous embrace About the naked, pallid forms, And mingles there with the eternal beauty Of youth and age And life and death.