If thou questionest Earth, Heaven answers,
If thou speak’st with the waters, the flowers hear.[26]
There are hints, perhaps reminiscences, of Wordsworth here; but d’Annunzio’s more obvious affinity is doubtless with Shelley, whose Roman grave he saluted in an ode of lofty eulogy and sculptured grace.
The lyric eloquence of Alcione undoubtedly recalls the rush of Shelley’s music and the æthereal liquidity of his style. Yet they touch across a gulf of profound disparity. D’Annunzio, for all his preoccupation with air and light and water, never, either as man or as artist, escapes the earth. The hard stuff of his egoism is never really transmuted in the flame of love; nor does the clear and delicate precision of his style ever really dissolve in radiant suffusion. D’Annunzio’s nature-world, like Shelley’s, is peopled with imagined shapes, in which the myths of old Greece are created anew. But here too their divergence asserts itself. Shelley’s Prometheus is not really earth-born, and his Asia is the hardly embodied symbol of the ideal passion of his own soul. While d’Annunzio’s Triton and Dryad are recognizably akin to the sea or woodland life they spring from, hued like the salt deep, and full of the sap of earth. D’Annunzio is the greater artist, Shelley the finer and the rarer soul.
But these gracious idylls were, as has been hinted, an episode. Nature could not replace man; beyond ‘earth’ and ‘sea’ and ‘sky,’ the ‘heroes,’ and especially the heroes and heroic memories of Italy, called for his ‘praise.’ Here, he felt, was the home of his spirit. The gracious valley of Arno might be
A cradle of flowers and dreams and peace;
But the cradle of my soul
Is the crashing chariot’s furrow
In the stone of the Appian Way.
The Elettra, the second book of the Laudi, is mainly devoted to the memories of these vanished glories. The resonant herald of the Third Italy wanders, for instance, among the ‘Cities of Silence’—decayed, half grass-grown capitals of vanished dukes and extinct republics—Ferrara, Pisa, Pistoja; oldest and grandest of all, Ravenna, the ‘deep ship’s hull, heavy with the iron weight of empire, driven by shipwreck on the utmost bounds of the world.’[27] Of the sequence of lyrics on the great enterprise of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand,’ La Notte di Caprera, it is enough to say that it is worthy of being put beside Carducci’s Ode. After a quarter of a century Garibaldi’s glory was no whit dimmed. On the contrary, Italians who knew how many gross blots defiled the Italy he had helped to win, saw Garibaldi as a figure of ideal splendour and purity on the further side of a foul morass. The bitter disillusion of such minds is powerfully painted in the moving piece: ‘To One of the Thousand.’ An old Garibaldian sailor brings his broken anchor-cable to the ship cordwainer to be mended. He looks on, sombre, dejected, silent, but thinking what he does not say; and his thoughts are like this: