Ravenna - Analysis

From English March to an Italian burnished sky

The poem’s central claim is that Ravenna exerts a strange, enduring power precisely because it is a city of endings: it makes the speaker feel how quickly beauty turns into history, and how history turns into silence. Wilde begins by insisting he can praise home: the northern Spring is fair, with its flower of March, bright-starred daffodil, and the kingfisher flashing like a flame of blue. But the refrain A year ago! immediately makes that English freshness feel like a consolation prize. The Italian past is hotter, louder, more mythic: the turquoise sky burns into burnished gold as he rides toward a city whose very name feels ancient. The tone here is almost intoxicated—boyish passion, galloping, racing the sun—so that the later stillness will land as a shock.

The first great turn: a city that offers forgetting

That shock arrives at the start of section II: How strangely still! The poem pivots from motion and song to an eerie absence: no laughing shepherd-boy, no children at their play. Ravenna becomes seductive not as a tourist spectacle but as a psychological refuge—a man might dwell apart and watch the seasons pass with no thought of sorrow. Yet Wilde undercuts the fantasy by naming it a kind of drug: Lethe’s waters and the fatal weed that makes you forget your fatherland. The tension is already sharp: Ravenna’s peace is real, even sweet, but it is also morally suspect, because it tempts the visitor into a beautiful amnesia.

Ravenna as guardian: Proserpine among ashes

To explain that moral doubleness, Wilde personifies the city as a mythic custodian: Like Proserpine, with a poppy-laden head, she stands amid lotus-meadows guarding holy ashes. Poppies and lotuses deepen the poem’s idea of forgetfulness: they are flowers of sleep, oblivion, underworld bargains. And yet the speaker doesn’t condemn Ravenna. He praises her fidelity to the dead—Thy noble dead are with thee!—and insists that tombs can wake men’s hearts to dreams of things sublime. That is Ravenna’s paradoxical gift: it is both a Lethe and a shrine, both the place where memory dissolves and the place where memory becomes most intense.

Tombs that reorder fame: Gaston, Theodoric, then Dante

Section III stages a gradual re-ranking of greatness through burial sites. First comes Gaston de Foix, the Prince of chivalry, slain by an untimely star; nature elegizes him with lance-like reeds and oleanders blooming deeper red where his youth ran crimson. Then Theodoric appears, Huge-limbed and exhausted, his stronghold broken by wind and rain, proof that Death is mighty lord of all. But Wilde’s real point is that military power—whether the knight’s bright death or the king’s weary empire—is poor and vain beside the poet’s grave. Dante’s shrine lies open to the air, and the sculpted face holds contradictions the warrior monuments cannot: passionate love and scorn, a mouth that sang Heaven and…Hell, and a weariness that feels earned rather than defeated. Ravenna, in this telling, does not merely store the dead; it teaches the living which kinds of human achievement last.

Exile as a shared wound: Dante and the speaker’s longing

When Wilde cries Alas! my Dante! the poem briefly becomes intimate, almost possessive. He lingers on the humiliations Dante knew—the exile’s galling chain, the steep stairs in kings’ houses—and then turns that suffering into a moral rebuke of nations. Florence is named as a cruel queen who crowned Dante with thorns, and now begs in vain for his ashes. The tension here isn’t just political; it’s emotional. Ravenna is praised for guarding what a homeland rejected. And that praise reflects back on the speaker: a young Irish poet, wandering far from the wave-circled islands of home, feels the romance and bitterness of belonging at once. Ravenna becomes a place where the hurt of being “outside” is transformed into dignity.

Byron, Greece, and the poem’s uneasy worship of liberty

Section IV widens Ravenna’s meaning by placing Byron inside it: the palace is lone, its chain rusting, weeds splitting marble. Byron is likened to Antony, but Wilde insists he resisted the Egyptian queen of pleasure because a mighty cry called him to Greece. The tone becomes oratorical—O Hellas! Hellas!—and Ravenna is no longer merely a sleep-drug; it is the staging ground for a leap into history. Still, the poem can’t quite settle the contradiction. It thrills to Liberty and praises Byron’s lyre and sword, yet the surrounding Ravenna remains a ruin where snakes and lizards run. Even the language that honors Byron can’t stop thinking in tomb-and-ivy terms: glory is imagined as wreaths, garlands, leaves that stay fresh and green—a botanical afterlife rather than a living republic.

Hellenic daydream, then a bell that brings back Gethsemane

In section V, Wilde makes the temptation of escape almost embarrassingly vivid. The woods offer forest liberty; the blood runs hotter; the old gods return, and he hopes to see goat-foot Pan or a Dryad-maid or Queen Dian in the chase. Then comes another hinge: O idle heart! The convent’s vesper bell breaks the spell, and with it arrives a darker religious memory—black Gethsemane. The poem’s tension tightens: pagan beauty is not dismissed as false, but it is shown to be a kind of drowning, sweet and honied yet engulfing like some encroaching sea. Ravenna’s loveliness keeps trying to anesthetize the speaker; conscience keeps dragging him back to suffering.

A ruined queen during Risorgimento: rest, wake, or be left behind

Section VI turns Ravenna into a political symbol: once Caesar’s city, then a queen until the Goth and Hun, now discrowned and deserted by the sea, with sheep where ships once floated. Wilde contrasts Ravenna’s sleep with Italy’s reawakening—Rome has a king again; Venice is new risen; the cry of Light and Truth rings; Dante’s dream…no more a dream. Yet Ravenna remains a grey…candle-flame under new Italia’s noon. Here the poem argues with itself. Wilde both mourns Ravenna’s failure to drink the wine of liberty and then urges, wake not, telling the city to rest thee well and mock all human greatness. He wants her to be a monument against ambition, even as he aches for her to join the living nation.

Adieus and the cycle that love refuses

The final section turns the whole poem into a leave-taking, measured by seasons: spring to summer to autumn to winter, and from youth to manhood to locks of snow. Against that lawful cycle Wilde places one defiant exception: Love only knows no winter. It’s a risky claim, and the poem admits the risk by admitting weakness—my weak lips may falter—yet it insists on endurance. The last images—evening star, the moon as a silver lamp—quietly stitch together what the poem has kept apart: Dante sleeping and Byron loving, tomb and desire, art and action. Ravenna finally becomes not just a city but a test of what the speaker can carry away: not conquest, not certainty, but a love strong enough to outlast both ruins and revolutions.