Miller in Italy: Lake Como

I’m walkin’ with Joaquin this month in Italy, where he spent many months in the mid-1870s after establishing himself in London. As I ride trains from place to place, I’m reading his Complete Poetical Works, which he put together in The Hights in 1897, and pulling out tidbits and advice for writers. Miller not only collected his poems (the ones he would stand by, he wrote; the rest were reactions to his times, ruined by critics), he talks about them—about where he wrote them and what they meant to him.

They’re beautiful.

With the rhythm of the rails, I sound out the meter in my head, my fingers correcting the paragraph breaks where the archived text has clumped things wrong. Miller's writing is incredibly lyrical, and whatever reputation he had for gaining fame before he fully developed his craft, he certainly mastered it with the help of his masters, whom he sought in libraries and museums in his European travels.

Robert Browning invited him to Venice, where Miller wrote some poems about his existential crisis, American "heroes," and riding in a gondola. On the west coast and in Rome, he made a literary pilgimage to the places Byron and the Shelleys had lived. In Naples, he bought land to start an arts colony with an unnamed English poet. They both caught malaria, and his friend died. Heartbroken, he met with politicians to suggest they plant eucalyptus trees to reduce Malaria, which seems to have worked. Charles Stoddard suggests that his novel, The One Fair Woman—featuring a protaganist named "Murietta"—draws heavily from his affair with Miriam Leslie, in Rome, which inspired a number of poems. And as for that arts colony, Miller would bring that dream to life in Oakland a decade or two later. 

I’m writing this from the lively shore of Lake Como, where majestic white swans bob nonchalantly on the raucous waves left by passing ferries. Their pristine white feathers shine gold among the reflections of the villas and apartments cast across the water in the late afternoon sun. On my walk here today, just before I bought gelato, I was drawn into the historic Hotel Metropole Suiss, where Miller might have stayed in the late 1800s. In the introduction to his collection, Songs of Italy, which he wrote right here in Como, he wrote a dedication to his parents that whispers of his understanding of his pivotal role in Western literature, and his feeling that he had left America for good.

“Three times now I have ranged the great West in fancy, as I did in fact for twenty years and gathered unknown and unnamed blossoms from mountain top, from desert land, where [white] man never ranged before, and asked the West to receive my weeds, my grasses and blue-eyed blossoms. But here it ends. Good or bad, I have done enough of this work on the border. The Orient promises a more grateful harvest but I have been true to my West. She has been my only love. I have remembered her greatness. I have done my work to show to the world her vastness, her riches, her resources, her valor and her dignity, her poetry and her grandeur. Yet while I was going on working so in silence, what were the things she said of me? But let that pass, my dear parents. Others will come after us. Possibly I have blazed out the trail for great minds over this field, as you did across the deserts and plains for great men a quarter of a century ago."

Unlike the many writers who visited and wrote about the beauty of Lake Como during the 18th and 19th centuries, Miller was perhaps jaded by sights he'd seen in the West of Mt. Shasta, the Rockies and the Sierras. His passionate and dramatic poem entitled "Como" reads like a Spaghetti Western. 

COMO

The lakes lay bright as bits of broken moon

Just newly set within the cloven earth;

The ripen'd fields drew round a golden girth

Far up the steeps, and glittered in the noon;

And when the sun fell down, from leafy shore

Fond lovers stole in pairs to ply the oar;

The stars, as large as lilies, fleck'd the blue;

From out the Alps the moon came wheeling through

The rocky pass the great Napoleon knew.

A gala night it was, — the season's prime.

We rode from castled lake to festal town,

To fair Milan— my friend and I; rode down

By night, where grasses waved in rippled rhyme:

And so, what theme but love at such a time?

His proud lip curl'd the while with silent scorn

At thought of love; and then, as one forlorn,

He sigh'd; then bared his temples, dash'd with gray;

Then mock'd, as one outworn and well blasé.

A gorgeous tiger lily, flaming red,—

So full of battle, of the trumpets blare,

Of old-time passion, uprear'd its head.

I gallop'd past. I lean'd, I clutch'd it there

From out the stormy grass. I held it high,

And cried: "Lo! this to-night shall deck her hair

Through all the dance. And mark! the man shall die

Who dares assault, for good or ill design,

The citadel where I shall set this sign."

O, she shone fairer than the summer star,

Or curl'd sweet moon in middle destiny;

More fair than sun-morn climbing up the sea,

Where all the loves of Adriana are

Who loves, who truly loves, will stand aloof:

The noisy tongue makes most unholy proof

Of shallow passion . . . . All the while afar

From out the dance I stood and watched my star,

My tiger lily borne, an oriflamme of war.

Adown the dance she moved with matchless grace.

The world— my world— moved with her.

Suddenly I question'd whom her cavalier might be? 'Twas he!

His face was leaning to her face! I clutch'd my blade;

I sprang, I caught my breath,— 

And so, stood leaning cold and still as death.

And they stood still. She blushed, then reach'd and tore

The lily as she pass'd, and down the floor

She strew'd its heart like jets of gushing gore.

Notes: 

• Milan is a major city about 40km from Como
• An Adriana poem often describes an idealized or classical feminine beauty
• An oriflamme of war was a sacred battle standard of the French king in the Middle Ages.