Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions Part 27

Nevertheless, the same critic confesses that the poetry of Aleardi "is not academically common", and pleases by the originality of its very mannerism.

III.

Like Primal Histories, the Hour of my Youth is a contemplative poem, to which frequency of episode gives life and movement; but its scope is less grand, and the poet, recalling his early days, remembers chiefly the events of defeated revolution which give such heroic sadness and splendor to the history of the first third of this century. The work is characterized by the same opulence of diction, and the same luxury of epithet and imagery, as the Primal Histories, but it somehow fails to win our interest in equal degree: perhaps because the patriot now begins to overshadow the poet, and appeal is often made rather to the sympathies than the imagination. It is certain that art ceases to be less, and country more, in the poetry of Aleardi from this time. It could scarcely be otherwise; and had it been otherwise, the poet would have become despicable, not great, in the eyes of his countrymen.

The Hour of my Youth opens with a picture, where, for once at least, all the brilliant effects are synthetized; the poet has ordered here the whole Northern world, and you can dream of nothing grand or beautiful in those lonely regions which you do not behold in it.

Ere yet upon the unhappy Arctic lands, In dying autumn, Erebus descends With the night's thousand hours, along the verge Of the horizon, like a fugitive, Through the long days wanders the weary sun; And when at last under the wave is quenched The last gleam of its golden countenance, Interminable twilight land and sea Discolors, and the north-wind covers deep All things in snow, as in their sepulchers The dead are buried. In the distances The shock of warring Cyclades of ice Makes music as of wild and strange lament; And up in heaven now tardily are lit The solitary polar star and seven Lamps of the Bear. And now the warlike race Of swans gather their hosts upon the breast Of some far gulf, and, bidding their farewell To the white cliffs, and slender junipers, And sea-weed bridal-beds, intone the song Of parting, and a sad metallic clang Send through the mists. Upon their southward way They greet the beryl-tinted icebergs; greet Flamy volcanoes, and the seething founts Of Geysers, and the melancholy yellow Of the Icelandic fields; and, wearying, Their lily wings amid the boreal lights, Journey away unto the joyous sh.o.r.es Of morning.

In a strain of equal n.o.bility, but of more personal and subjective effect, the thought is completed:

So likewise, my own soul, from these obscure Days without glory, wings its flight afar Backward, and journeys to the years of youth And morning. Oh, give me back once more, Oh, give me, Lord, one hour of youth again!

For in that time I was serene and bold, And uncontaminate, and enraptured with The universe. I did not know the pangs Of the proud mind, nor the sweet miseries Of love; and I had never gathered yet, After those fires so sweet in burning, bitter Handfuls of ashes, that, with tardy tears Sprinkled, at last have nourished into bloom The solitary flower of penitence.

The baseness of the many was unknown, And civic woes had not yet sown with salt Life's narrow field. Ah! then the infinite Voices that Nature sends her worshipers From land, from sea, and from the cloudy depths Of heaven smote the echoing soul of youth To music. And at the first morning sigh Of the poor wood-lark,--at the measured bell Of homeward flocks, and at the opaline wings Of dragon-flies in their aerial dances Above the gorgeous carpets of the marsh,-- At the wind's moan, and at the sudden gleam Of lamps lighting in some far town by night,-- And at the dash of rain that April shoots Through the air odorous with the smitten dust,-- My spirits rose, and glad and swift my thought Over the sea of being sped all-sails.

There is a description of a battle, in the Hour of my Youth, which.

I cannot help quoting before I leave the poem. The battle took place between the Austrians and the French on the 14th of January, 1797, in the Chiusa, a narrow valley near Verona, and the fiercest part of the fight was for the possession of the hill of Rivoli.

Clouds of smoke Floated along the heights; and, with her wild, Incessant echo, Chiusa still repeated The harmony of the muskets. Rival hosts Contended for the poverty of a hill That scarce could give their number sepulcher; But from that hill-crest waved the glorious locks Of Victory. And round its b.l.o.o.d.y spurs, Taken and lost with fierce vicissitude, Serried and splendid, swept and tempested Long-haired dragoons, together with the might Of the Homeric foot, delirious With fury; and the horses with their teeth Tore one another, or, tossing wild their manes, Fled with their helpless riders up the crags, By strait and imminent paths of rock, till down, Like angels thunder-smitten, to the depths Of that abyss the riders fell. With slain Was heaped the dreadful amphitheater; The rocks dropped blood; and if with gasping breath Some wounded swimmer beat away the waves Weakly between him and the other sh.o.r.e, The merciless riflemen from the cliffs above, With their inexorable aim, beneath The waters sunk him.

The Monte Circellio is part of a poem in four cantos, dispersed, it is said, to avoid the researches of the police, in which the poet recounts in picturesque verse the glories and events of the Italian land and history through which he pa.s.ses. A slender but potent cord of common feeling unites the episodes, and the lament for the present fate of Italy rises into hope for her future. More than half of the poem is given to a description of the geological growth of the earth, in which the imagination of the poet has unbridled range, and in which there is a success unknown to most other attempts to poetize the facts of science. The epochs of darkness and inundation, of the monstrous races of bats and lizards, of the mammoths and the gigantic vegetation, pa.s.s, and, after thousands of years, the earth is tempered and purified to the use of man by fire; and that

Paradise of land and sea, forever Stirred by great hopes and by volcanic fires, Called Italy,

takes shape: its burning mountains rise, its valleys sink, its plains extend, its streams run. But first of all, the hills of Rome lifted themselves from the waters, that day when the spirit of G.o.d dwelling upon their face

Saw a fierce group of seven enkindled hills, In number like the mystic candles lighted Within his future temple. Then he bent Upon that mystic pleiades of flame His luminous regard, and spoke to it: "Thou art to be my Rome." The harmony Of that note to the nebulous heights supreme, And to the bounds of the created world, Rolled like the voice of myriad organ-stops, And sank, and ceased. The heavenly orbs resumed Their daily dance and their unending journey; A mighty rush of plumes disturbed the rest Of the vast silence; here and there like stars About the sky, flashed the immortal eyes Of choral angels following after him.

The opening lines of Monte Circellio are scarcely less beautiful than the first part of Un' Ora della mia Giovinezza, but I must content myself with only one other extract from the poem, leaving the rest to the reader of the original. The fact that every summer the Roman hospitals are filled with the unhappy peasants who descend from the hills of the Abruzzi to s.n.a.t.c.h its harvests from the feverish Campagna will help us to understand all the meaning of the following pa.s.sage, though nothing could add to its pathos, unless, perhaps, the story given by Aleardi in a note at the foot of his page: "How do you live here?" asked a traveler of one of the peasants who reap the Campagna.

The Abruzzese answered, "Signor, we die."

What time, In hours of summer, sad with so much light, The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields, The harvesters, as famine urges them, Draw hither in thousands, and they wear The look of those that dolorously go In exile, and already their brown eyes Are heavy with the poison of the air.

Here never note of amorous bird consoles Their drooping hearts; here never the gay songs Of their Abruzzi sound to gladden these Pathetic hands. But taciturn they toil, Reaping the harvest for their unknown lords; And when the weary tabor is performed, Taciturn they retire; and not till then Their bagpipes crown the joys of the return, Swelling the heart with their familiar strain.

Alas! not all return, for there is one That dying in the furrow sits, and seeks With his last look some faithful kinsman out, To give his life's wage, that he carry it Unto his trembling mother, with the last Words of her son that comes no more. And dying, Deserted and alone, far off he hears His comrades going, with their pipes in time Joyfully measuring their homeward steps.

And when in after years an orphan comes To reap the harvest here, and feels his blade Go quivering through the swaths of falling grain, He weeps and thinks: haply these heavy stalks Ripened on his unburied father's bones.

In the poem called The Marine and Commercial Cities of Italy (Le Citta Italiane Marinare e Commercianti), Aleardi recounts the glorious rise, the jealousies, the fratricidal wars, and the ign.o.ble fall of Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Genoa, in strains of grandeur and pathos; he has pride in the wealth and freedom of those old queens of traffic, and scorn and lamentation for the blind selfishness that kept them Venetian, Florentine, Pisan, and Genoese, and never suffered them to be Italian. I take from this poem the prophetic vision of the greatness of Venice, which, according to the patriotic tradition of Sabellico, Saint Mark beheld five hundred years before the foundation of the city, when one day, journeying toward Aquileja, his ship lost her course among the islands of the lagoons. The saint looked out over those melancholy swamps, and saw the phantom of a Byzantine cathedral rest upon the reeds, while a mult.i.tudinous voice broke the silence with the Venetian battle-cry, "Viva San Marco!" The lines that follow ill.u.s.trate the pride and splendor of Venetian story, and are notable, I think, for a certain lofty grace of movement and opulence of diction.

There thou shalt lie, O Saint!{1} but compa.s.sed round Thickly by shining groves Of pillars; on thy regal portico, Lifting their glittering and impatient hooves, Corinth's fierce steeds shall bound;{2} And at thy name, the hymn of future wars, From their funereal caves The bandits of the waves Shall fly in exile;{3} brought from b.l.o.o.d.y fields Hard won and lost in far-off Palestine, The glimmer of a thousand Arab moons Shall fill thy broad lagoons; And on the false Byzantine's towers shall climb A blind old man sublime,{4} Whom victory shall behold Amidst his enemies with thy sacred flag, All battle-rent, unrolled.

Notes:

{1} The bones of St. Mark repose in his church at Venice.

{2} The famous bronze horses of St. Mark's still shine with the gold that once covered them.

{3} Venice early swept the Adriatic of the pirates who infested it.

{4} The Doge Enrico Dandolo, who, though blind and bowed with eighty years of war, was the first to plant the banner of Saint Mark on the walls of Constantinople when that city was taken by the Venetians and Crusaders.

The late poems of Aleardi are nearly all in this lyrical form, in which the thought drops and rises with ceaseless change of music, and which wins the reader of many empty Italian canzoni by the mere delight of its movement. It is well adapted to the subjects for which Aleardi has used it; it has a stateliness and strength of its own, and its alternate lapse and ascent give animation to the ever-blending story and aspiration, appeal or reflection. In this measure are written The Three Rivers, The Three Maidens, and The Seven Soldiers.

The latter is a poem of some length, in which the poet, figuring himself upon a battle-field on the morrow after a combat between Italians and Austrians, "wanders among the wounded in search of expiated sins and of unknown heroism. He pauses," continues his eloquent biographer in the _Galleria n.a.z.ionale_, "to meditate on the death of the Hungarian, Polish, Bohemian, Croatian, Austrian, and Tyrolese soldiers, who personify the nationalities oppressed by the tyranny of the house of Hapsburg. A minister of G.o.d, praying beside the corpses of two friends, Pole and Hungarian, hails the dawn of the Magyar resurrection. Then rises the grand figure of Sandor Petofi, 'the patriotic poet of Hungary,' whose life was a hymn, and whose miraculous re-appearance will, according to popular superst.i.tion, take place when Hungary is freed from her chains. The poem closes with a prophecy concerning the destinies of Austria and Italy." Like all the poems of Aleardi, it abounds in striking lines; but the interest, instead of gathering strongly about one central idea, diffuses itself over half-forgotten particulars of revolutionary history, and the sympathy of the reader is fatigued and confused with the variety of the demand upon it.

For this reason, The Three Rivers and The Three Maidens are more artistic poems: in the former, the poet seeks vainly a promise of Italian greatness and unity on the banks of Tiber and of Arno, but finds it by the Po, where the war of 1859 is beginning; in the latter, three maidens recount to the poet stories of the oppression which has imprisoned the father of one, despoiled another's house through the tax-gatherer, and sent the brother of the third to languish, the soldier-slave of his tyrants, in a land where "the wife washes the garments of her husband, yet stained with Italian blood".

A very little book holds all the poems which Aleardi has written, and I have named them nearly all. He has in greater degree than any other Italian poet of this age, or perhaps of any age, those qualities which English taste of this time demands--quickness of feeling and brilliancy of expression. He lacks simplicity of idea, and his style is an opal which takes all lights and hues, rather than the crystal which lets the daylight colorlessly through. He is distinguished no less by the themes he selects than by the expression he gives them.

In his poetry there is pa.s.sion, but his subjects are usually those to which love is accessory rather than essential; and he cares better to sing of universal and national destinies as they concern individuals, than the raptures and anguishes of youthful individuals as they concern mankind. The poet may be wrong in this, but he achieves an undeniable novelty in it, and I confess that I read him willingly on account of it.

In taking leave of him, I feel that I ought to let him have the last word, which is one of self-criticism, and, I think, singularly just.

He refers to the fact of his early life, that his father forbade him to be a painter, and says: "Not being allowed to use the pencil, I have used the pen. And precisely on this account my pen resembles too much a pencil; precisely on this account I am too much of a naturalist, and am too fond of losing myself in minute details. I am as one, who, in walking, goes leisurely along, and stops every moment to observe the dash of light that breaks through the trees of the woods, the insect that alights on his hand, the leaf that falls on his head, a cloud, a wave, a streak of smoke; in fine, the thousand accidents that make creation so rich, so various, so poetical, and beyond which we evermore catch glimpses of that grand, mysterious something, eternal, immense, benignant, and never inhuman or cruel, as some would have us believe, which is called G.o.d."

GUILIO CARCANO, ARNALDO FUSINATO AND LUIGI MERCANTINI

No one could be more opposed, in spirit and method, to Aleardo Aleardi than Giulio Carcano; but both of these poets betray love and study of English masters. In the former there is something to remind us of Milton, of Ossian, who is still believed a poet in Latin countries, and of Byron; and in the latter, Arnaud notes very obvious resemblances to Gray, Crabbe, and Wordsworth in the simplicity or the proud humility of the theme, and the courage of its treatment. The critic declares the poet's aesthetic creed to be G.o.d, the family, and country; and in a beautiful essay on Domestic Poetry, written amidst the universal political discouragement of 1839, Carcano himself declares that in the cultivation of a popular and homelike feeling in literature the hope of Italy no less than of Italian poetry lies. He was ready to respond to the impulses of the nation's heart, which he had felt in his communion with its purest and best life, when, in later years, its expectation gave place to action, and many of his political poems are bold and n.o.ble. But his finest poems are those which celebrate the affections of the household, and poetize the pathetic beauty of toil and poverty in city and country. He sings with a tenderness peculiarly winning of the love of mothers and children, and I shall give the best notion of the poet's best in the following beautiful lullaby, premising merely that the t.i.tle of the poem is the Italian infantile for sleep:

Sleep, sleep, sleep! my little girl: Mother is near thee. Sleep, unfurl Thy veil o'er the cradle where baby lies!

Dream, baby, of angels in the skies!

On the sorrowful earth, in hopeless quest, Pa.s.ses the exile without rest; Where'er he goes, in sun or snow, Trouble and pain beside him go.

But when I look upon thy sleep, And hear thy breathing soft and deep, My soul turns with a faith serene To days of sorrow that have been, And I feel that of love and happiness Heaven has given my life excess; The Lord in his mercy gave me thee, And thou in truth art part of me!

Thou knowest not, as I bend above thee, How much I love thee, how much I love thee; Thou art the very life of my heart, Thou art my joy, thou art my smart!

Thy day begins uncertain, child: Thou art a blossom in the wild; But over thee, with his wings abroad, Blossom, watches the angel of G.o.d.

Ah! wherefore with so sad a face Must thy father look on thy happiness?

In thy little bed he kissed thee now, And dropped a tear upon thy brow.

Lord, to this mute and pensive soul Temper the sharpness of his dole: Give him peace whose love my life hath kept: He too has hoped, though he has wept.

And over thee, my own delight, Watch that sweet Mother, day and night, To whom the exiles consecrate Altar and heart in every fate.

By her name I have called my little girl; But on life's sea, in the tempest's whirl, Thy helpless mother, my darling, may Only tremble and only pray!

Sleep, sleep, sleep! my baby dear; Dream of the light of some sweet star.

Sleep, sleep! and I will keep Thoughtful vigils above thy sleep.

Oh, in the days that are to come, With unknown trial and unknown doom, Thy little heart can ne'er love me As thy mother loves and shall love thee!

II

Arnaldo Fusinato of Padua has written for the most part comic poetry, his princ.i.p.al piece of this sort being one in which he celebrates and satirizes the student-life at the University of Padua. He had afterward to make a formal reparation to the students, which he did in a poem singing their many virtues. The original poem of The Student is a rather lively series of pictures, from which we learn that it was once the habit of studious youth at Padua, when freshmen, or _matricolini_, to be terrible dandies, to swear aloud upon the public ways, to pa.s.s whole nights at billiards, to be noisy at the theater, to stand treat for the Seniors, joyfully to lend these money, and to acquire knowledge of the world at any cost. Later, they advanced to the dignity of breaking street-lamps and of being arrested by the Austrian garrison, for in Padua the students were under a kind of martial law. Sometimes they were expelled; they lost money at play, and wrote deceitful letters to their parents for more; they shunned labor, and failed to take degrees. But we cannot be interested in traits so foreign to what I understand is our own student-life.

Generally, the comic as well as the sentimental poetry of Fusinato deals with incidents of popular life; and, of course, it has. .h.i.ts at the fleeting fashions and pa.s.sing sensations: for example, Il Bloomerismo is satirized.

The poem which I translate, however, is in a different strain from any of these. It will be remembered that when the Austrians returned to take Venice in 1849, after they had been driven out for eighteen months, the city stood a bombardment of many weeks, contesting every inch of the approach with the invaders. But the Venetians were very few in number, and poorly equipped; a famine prevailed among them; the cholera broke out, and raged furiously; the bombs began to drop into the square of St. Mark, and then the Venetians yielded, and ran up the white flag on the dearly contested lagoon bridge, by which the railway traveler enters the city. The poet is imagined in one of the little towns on the nearest main-land.