Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions

by William Dean Howells

I

In the month of March, 1848, news came to Rome of the insurrection in Vienna, and a multitude of the citizens assembled to bear the tidings to the Austrian Ambassador, who resided in the ancient palace of the Venetian Republic. The throng swept down the Corso, gathering numbers as it went, and paused in the open space before the Palazzo di Venezia. At its summons, the ambassador abandoned his quarters, and fled without waiting to hear the details of the intelligence from Vienna. The people, incited by a number of Venetian exiles, tore down the double-headed eagle from the portal, and carried it for a more solemn and impressive destruction to the Piazza del Popolo, while a young poet erased the inscription asserting the Austrian claim to the palace, and wrote in its stead the words, “Palazzo della Dieta Italiana.”

The sentiment of national unity expressed in this legend had been the ruling motive of the young poet Francesco Dall' Ongaro's life, and had already made his name famous through the patriotic songs that were sung all over Italy. Garibaldi had chanted one of his Stornelli when embarking from Montevideo in the spring of 1848 to take part in the Italian revolutions, of which these little ballads had become the rallying-cries; and if the voice of the people is in fact inspired, this poet could certainly have claimed the poet's long-lost honors of prophecy, for it was he who had shaped their utterance. He had ceased to assume any other sacred authority, though educated a priest, and at the time when he devoted the Palazzo di Venezia to the idea of united Italy, there was probably no person in Rome less sacerdotal than he.

Francesco Dall' Ongaro was born in 1808, at an obscure hamlet in the district of Oderzo in the Friuli, of parents who were small freeholders. They removed with their son in his tenth year to Venice, and there he began his education for the Church in the Seminary of the Madonna della Salute. The tourist who desires to see the Titians and Tintorettos in the sacristy of this superb church, or to wonder at the cold splendors of the interior of the temple, is sometimes obliged to seek admittance through the seminary; and it has doubtless happened to more than one of my readers to behold many little sedate old men in their teens, lounging up and down the cool, humid courts there, and trailing their black priestly robes over the springing mold. The sun seldom strikes into that sad close, and when the boys form into long files, two by two, and march out for recreation, they have a torpid and melancholy aspect, upon which the daylight seems to smile in vain. They march solemnly up the long Zattere, with a pale young father at their head, and then march solemnly back again, sweet, genteel, pathetic specters of childhood, and reënter their common tomb, doubtless unenvied by the hungriest and raggedest street boy, who asks charity of them as they pass, and hoarsely whispers “Raven!” when their leader is beyond hearing. There is no reason to suppose that a boy, born poet among the mountains, and full of the wild and free romance of his native scenes, could love the life led at the Seminary of the Salute, even though it included the study of literature and philosophy. From his childhood Dall' Ongaro had given proofs of his poetic gift, and the reverend ravens of the seminary were unconsciously hatching a bird as little like themselves as might be. Nevertheless, Dall' Ongaro left their school to enter the University of Padua as student of theology, and after graduating took orders, and went to Este, where he lived some time as teacher of belles-lettres.

At Este his life was without scope, and he was restless and unhappy, full of ardent and patriotic impulses, and doubly restricted by his narrow field and his priestly vocation. In no long time he had trouble with the Bishop of Padua, and, abandoning Este, seems also to have abandoned the Church forever. The chief fruit of his sojourn in that quaint and ancient village was a poem entitled II Venerdì Santo, in which he celebrated some incidents of the life of Lord Byron, somewhat as Byron would have done. Dall' Ongaro's poems, however, confess the influence of the English poet less than those of other modern Italians, whom Byron infected so much more than his own nation.

From Este, Dall' Ongaro went to Trieste, where he taught literature and philosophy, wrote for the theater, and established a journal in which, for ten years, he labored to educate the people in his ideas of Italian unity and progress. That these did not coincide with the ideas of most Italian dreamers and politicians of the time may be inferred from the fact that he began in 1846 a course of lectures on Dante, in which he combated the clerical tendencies of Gioberti and Balbo, and criticised the first acts of Pius IX. He had as profound doubt of Papal liberality as Niccolini, at a time when other patriots were fondly cherishing the hope of a united Italy under an Italian pontiff; and at Rome, two years later, he sought to direct popular feeling from the man to the end, in one of the earliest of his graceful Stornelli.

PIO NONO.
Pio Nono is a name, and not the man
Who saws the air from yonder Bishop's seat;
Pio Nono is the offspring of our brain,
The idol of our hearts, a vision sweet;
Pio Nono is a banner, a refrain,
A name that sounds well sung upon the street.
Who calls, “Long live Pio Nono!” means to call,
Long live our country, and good-will to all!
And country and good-will, these signify
That it is well for Italy to die;
But not to die for a vain dream or hope,
Not to die for a throne and for a Pope!

During these years at Trieste, however, Dall' Ongaro seems to have been also much occupied with pure literature, and to have given a great deal of study to the sources of national poetry, as he discovered them in the popular life and legends. He had been touched with the prevailing romanticism; he had written hymns like Manzoni, and, like Carrer, he sought to poetize the traditions and superstitions of his countrymen. He found a richer and deeper vein than the Venetian poet among his native hills and the neighboring mountains of Slavonia, but I cannot say that he wrought it to much better effect. The two volumes which he published in 1840 contain many ballads which are very graceful and musical, but which lack the fresh spirit of songs springing from the popular heart, while they also want the airy and delicate beauty of the modern German ballads. Among the best of them are two which Dall' Ongaro built up from mere lines and fragments of lines current among the people, as in later years he more successfully restored us two plays of Menander from the plots and a dozen verses of each. “One may imitate,” he says, “more or less fortunately, Manzoni, Byron, or any other poet, but not the simple inspirations of the people. And 'The Pilgrim who comes from Rome,' and the 'Rosettina,' if one could have them complete as they once were, would probably make me blush for my elaborate variations.” But study which was so well directed, and yet so conscious of its limitations, could not but be of great value; and Dall' Ongaro, no doubt, owed to it his gift of speaking so authentically for the popular heart. That which he did later showed that he studied the people's thought and expression con amore, and in no vain sentiment of dilettanteism, or antiquarian research, or literary patronage.

It is not to be supposed that Dall' Ongaro's literary life had at this period an altogether objective tendency. In the volumes mentioned, there is abundant evidence that he was of the same humor as all men of poetic feeling must be at a certain time of life. Here are pretty verses of occasion, upon weddings and betrothals, such as people write in Italy; here are stanzas from albums, such as people used to write everywhere; here are didactic lines; here are bursts of mere sentiment and emotion. In the volume of Fantasie, published at Florence in 1866, Dall' Ongaro collected some of the ballads from his early works, but left out the more subjective effusions.

I give one of these in which, under a fantastic name and in a fantastic form, the poet expresses the tragic and pathetic interest of the life to which he was himself vowed.

THE SISTER OF THE MOON.
Shine, moon, ah shine! and let thy pensive light
Be faithful unto me:
I have a sister in the lonely night
When I commune with thee.
Alone and friendless in the world am I,
Sorrow's forgotten maid,
Like some poor dove abandoned to die
By her first love unwed.
Like some poor floweret in a desert land
I pass my days alone;
In vain upon the air its leaves expand,
In vain its sweets are blown.
No loving hand shall save it from the waste,
And wear the lonely thing;
My heart shall throb upon no loving breast
In my neglected spring.
That trouble which consumes my weary soul
No cunning can relieve,
No wisdom understand the secret dole
Of the sad sighs I heave.
My fond heart cherished once a hope, a vow,
The leaf of autumn gales!
In convent gloom, a dim lamp burning low,
My spirit lacks and fails.
I shall have prayers and hymns like some dead saint
Painted upon a shrine,
But in love's blessed power to fall and faint,
It never shall be mine.
Born to entwine my life with others, born
To love and to be wed,
Apart from all I lead my life forlorn,
Sorrow's forgotten maid.
Shine, moon, ah shine! and let thy tender light
Be faithful unto me:
Speak to me of the life beyond the night
I shall enjoy with thee.