Drifting

A boat becomes a bird on the Vesuvian Bay, sailing past purple peaks while Vesuvius raises gray smoke above the shore. For the speaker, the water seems to loosen every tie to the noisy world.

In this late-nineteenth-century lyric, Thomas Buchanan Read lets the mind drift through blue inlets, Sorrento’s palms and vines, and the bay’s slow swell. A fisher’s child sings on the sand; a hand trails in the cool shadow of a sail, and distant ships seem to carry an invitation. Yet this is more than a pretty passage across the sea: the speaker longs to rest beneath the “walls of Paradise,” beyond the world’s uproar. How far can a drifting boat carry a restless spirit?

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