Robert Browning's poetical works Author:Robert Browning Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 167 VII. POMPILIA. I Am just seventeen years and five months old, And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks; 'T is writ so in the church's regi... more »ster, Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names At length, so many names for one poor child, 5 —Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela Pompilia Comparini,—laughable ! Also 't is writ that I was married there Four years ago : and they will add, I hope, When they insert my death, a word or two,— i o Omitting all about the mode of death,— This, in its place, this which one cares to know, That I had been a mother of a son Exactly two weeks. It will be through grace O' the Curate, not through any claim I have; 15 Because the boy was born at, so baptized Close to, the Villa, in the proper church : A pretty church, I say no word against, Yet stranger-like,—while this Lorenzo seems My own particular place, I always say. 20 I used to wonder, when I stood scarce high As the bed here, what the marble lion meant, With half his body rushing from the wall, Eating the figure of a prostrate man— (To the right, it is, of entry by the door) 25 An ominous sign to one baptized like me, Married, and to be buried there, I hope. And they should add, to have my life complete, He is a boy and Gaetan by name— Gaetano, for a reason,—if the friar 30 Don Celestine will ask this grace for me Of Curate Ottoboni: he it was Baptized me: he remembers my whole life As I do his grey hair. All these few things 35 I know are true,—will you remember them? Because time flies. The surgeon cared for me, To count my wounds,—twenty-two dagger-wounds, Five deadly, but I do not suffer much— Or too much pain,—and am to die to-night. 40 Oh how good God is that my babe was born, —B...« less