Lest it with weight or any shadow burden
The gracious thoughts of dawn!
This is the language of no sensualist, but of a mystic. And d’Annunzio in these poems again and again approaches the poetic mysticism of Wordsworth, and of Shelley and Dante. As he watches the dewy loveliness of evening, the earth seems to dissolve in the ‘infinite smile,’ which for Shelley ‘kindled the universe’;[25] and for the Italian it is the smile of Beatrice. In the child, who hardly exists for him before, the poet of pitiless virility now sees not only ‘the father of the man,’ but the soul implicitly aware of the Truth we only guess at:
The immense plenitude of life
Is tremulous in the light murmur
Of thy virginal breathing,
And Man with his fervours and griefs.
* * * * *
Thou art ignorant of all, and discernest
All the Truths that the Shadow hides.