The monsters, nevertheless, continued to haunt his later art. But happier moods were interposed, when he found relief from their urgency in poetic communing with the passionless calm of Nature and of the dead things that cannot die.
Such moods in the second and third books of the Laudi, Elettra and Alcione, both mainly written before the Maia. The Alcione, in particular, is the record of a true ‘halcyon’ season—of hours or moments—in the poet’s stormy course. It opens, indeed, with a savage denunciation—in perfectly handled terza rima—of the demons, within and without, that he has striven with. But now for a while he calls a truce:
Washed clean from human foulness in cool springs,
I need but, for my festival, the ring
Of the ultimate horizons of the earth.
The breezes and the radiant air shall weave
My new robe, and this body, purged from sin,
Shall dance, light-hearted and alert, within!
Air and light and water do indeed play a large and significant part in this benign experience, and in the poetry which renders it. Water, we know, had peculiar allurements for his imagination; but now the obsession of fleets and arsenals is overcome, and he looks out over the wide levels of the Arno mouth, where fishing boats with their hanging nets are seen, transfigured in the effulgence of the west, like cups or lilies of flame upon the water; or ‘on a June evening after rain,’ when ‘the gracious sky, tenderly gazing at her image in the earth she has refreshed, laughs out from a thousand mirrors.’ The solidity of the material world seems to remain only in its most delicate and attenuated forms—the crescent moon ‘slender as the eyebrow of a girl,’ the lean boughs and tapering leaves of the olive, the seashore sand, not ‘ribbed’ as Wordsworth put it, but delicately traced like the palate or the finger-tip. The poet is visibly striving through these frail and delicate things to escape his obsession into a realm of spirit he divines, but cannot reach:
A slender wreath suffices, with few leaves,