The anchor-sheet is broken: let it be.
No hope of mending. Give it up, go home!
Turn into scourges, cordsman, and halter-nooses
Thy bitter twine.
Vilely supine lies the Third Italy,
A harlot-people put to basest uses,
And in her holy oak-grove’s shadow, Rome
Pastures her swine.[28]
But Rome, the eternal City, could only obscure her destiny, not efface it; disillusion founded on her moments of self-oblivion was itself the vainest of illusions. That is the faith of the new Italian Renascence, and d’Annunzio, the fiercest chastiser of her oblivious fatuities, attains his loftiest note of ‘praise’ in the Ode which prophetically arrays Rome in glory as the future centre of the embodied Power of Man.
It is based on the legend, told by Ovid,[29] of the ship of the Great Mother, stranded in the Tiber mud, and drawn to shore by the Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta. The opening stanzas tell the story—the dearth in the city, the Sibylline oracle’s counsel to bring the image of the Mater Magna, the arrival of her ship in the river, the stranding in the mud, the vain efforts of the entire city to extricate it, until a Vestal Virgin, without an effort, draws it to bank. Then the poet interprets the symbolic legend: