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4 hours ago
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Four rispetti from Tuscan Olives
I
The colour of the olives who shall say?
In winter on the yellow earth they’re blue,
A wind can change the green to white or grey,
But they are olives still in every hue;
But they are olives always green or white,
As love is love in torment or delight;
But they are olives, ruffled or at rest,
As love is always love in tears or jest.
II
We walked along the terraced olive-yard,
And talked together till we lost the way;
We met a peasant, bent with age and hard,
Bruising the grape-skins in a vase of clay;
Bruising the grape-skins for the second wine.
We did not drink, and left him, Love of mine;
Bruising the grapes already bruised enough.
He has his meagre wine and we our love.
III
We climbed one morning to the sunny height
Where chestnuts grow no more, and olives grow;
Far off the circling mountains cinder-white,
The yellow river and the gorge below.
‘Turn round,’ you said, O flower of paradise;
I did not turn, I looked upon your eyes.
‘Turn round,’ you said, ‘turn round, look at the view!’
I did not turn, my Love. l looked at you.
IV
How hot it was! Across the white hot wall
Pale olives stretched towards the blazing street;
You broke a branch, you never spoke at all,
But gave it me to fan with in the heat;
You gave it me without a sign or word,
And yet, my love, I think you knew I heard.
You gave it me without a word or sign:
Under the olives first I called you mine.
I was delighted to discover a remarkable seven-poem sequence this week by a writer whose name, regrettably, was entirely unfamiliar to me. The sequence, from which I’ve chosen the first four poems, is Tuscan Olives: Seven Rispetti, the writer, the prolific and versatile Anglo-French poet Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857-1944).
Tuscan Olives was published in Robinson’s The New Arcadia and Other Poems (1884), a collection bearing the dedication “to Vernon Lee” – the pseudonym of the writer Violet Paget. Paget was Robinson’s lover and travelling companion for a number of years. The seven poems of Tuscan Olives trace the joyous beginnings of their relationship and a decline which remains, for Robinson, deeply unresolved.
The rispetto, a form originating in Tuscan folk verse, is an expression of loving respectfulness. It thrives on repetition, and Robinson extends that device across much of the sequence through, for example, the recurrence of the same clear bright colours, and the rhyme echoes.
There are two quatrains to each rispetto, rhyming abab/ccdd. These are coupled by Robinson into one eight-lined stanza, the first quatrain being (as printed originally) indented in lines two and four. The second quatrain often makes graceful play with repeated phrases. In the first rispetto, “But they are olives” occurs three times, forming a kind of inner refrain, emphasising that olives are olives, despite their strikingly unexpected and changing colours, “As love is love in torment or delight”. The simile becomes more insistent with the revision, “As love is always love in tears or jest.” There’s a disturbance, a “ruffling” in the air that suggests uncertainty.
In rispetto II, the lovers wander, lost in talk, through an olive-yard where a peasant is working. His repeated action of “bruising” the grape-skins against the “vase of clay” seems symbolic. We’re reminded that, although the lovers seem immune to self- doubt, a human body is a kind of “vase of clay” and love susceptible to bruising, perhaps to be reduced eventually to the “meagre” equivalent of the “second wine”.
As the lovers climb to the olive groves, emotion heightens with them. “Love of mine” was the endearment the speaker used earlier. Her expression now becomes rather more intense: “O flower of paradise.” These, I think, are retrospective expressions of the poet’s love as she writes, not terms she used at the time. Robinson shows there is a courteous restraint between the couple. When her companion urges her to look at the view, the poet resists simply by not moving. These are wonderful lines, where “turn” keeps returning while the speaker describes her inability to turn. But even in the insistence of her gaze there’s a delicacy. She doesn’t look “into” but “upon” the eyes she loves.
Robinson skilfully sustains an increasingly complex narrative over the subsequent rispetti. In V, the two women are at Lucca, perhaps on a return visit “for the autumn festival” and notice, above the other trees, “the two lonely olives” over the Guinigi Tower. “Crowning the tower, far from the hills above, / As on our risen love our lives are grown.” But in VI, a year later, the poet understands their separation will be unavoidable.
The last rispetto recalls the incident in the fourth poem where the poet’s companion broke off an olive branch and gave it to her for her to use as a fan. Now, post-separation, she calls out in anguish, “Reach up and pluck a branch and give it me, / That I may hang it in my Northern room, / That I may bind it there, and wake, and see / – Not you! – Not you! – dead leaves and wintry gloom. / O senseless olives, wherefore should I take / Your leaves to balm a heart that can but ache? / Why should I take you hence, that can but show / How much is left behind? I do not know.”
The whole sequence is essential reading, and can be accessed here.
