The description of the tumultuous pursuit of this Satyr calls up so vividly the Polyphemus in the Triumph of Galatea that we are convinced that Tasso must have been influenced by Raphael's great painting in the Farnesina.
"Not all am I
A despicable thing,..."
He makes the Satyr say;
"This ruddy russet front, these shoulders huge,
These nervy bull-thewed arms, this silky breast,
And these my velvet thighs are manhood's mould robust.
Ill favoured I? Not so!"
As one listens to the delirious nightingales in the dim, green-arched allées, one forgets the trysting trees in other Italian gardens and is sure that only here could Daphne have drawn her argument for love from their caresses.
"Daphne:
The gentle, jocund spring,
Smiling and wantoning,
Makes all things amorous.
Thou only thus,
Untamed wild creature, wilder than the rest,
Deniest love the harbourage of thy breast.
List to yon nightingale
Singing within the vale
'I love, love, love.'
With what renewed embracement vine clasps vine,
Fir blends its boughs with fir, and pine with pine.
Beneath the rugged bark
May'st thou mute inward sighings mark,
And wilt thou graceless be
Less than a vine or tree—
To keep thyself unloving, loverless?
Bend, bend thy stubborn heart
Fool that thou art."
But the physical peculiarity which actually identifies Villa d'Este as the locale of the poem is its cliff, the "sheer crag" from whence Amyntas leaps in his despair.
"Now did he lead me where the cloven steep
Among the rocks and solitary crags
Looms pathless and breaks sheer above a vale.
There paused we, and I, peering far below,
Shuddered, drew from the brink.
. . . . . . . . .
'Sylvia, I come, I follow!' So he cried:
Then headlong leaped,—and left me turned to stone."
There are other poems of Tasso's which refer to his residence at Villa d'Este, and infer Leonora's presence at that time. We may cite in particular the canzone to Leonora at her uncle's villa, beginning "Al nobil colle ove in antichi marmi":
"To the romantic hills where free
To thine enchanted eyes
Works of Greek art in statuary
Of antique marbles rise,
My thought, fair Leonora, roves,
And with it to their gloomy groves
Fast bears me as it flies.
For far from thee, in crowds unblest,
My fluttering heart but ill can rest.
"There to the rock, cascade, and grove,
On mosses dropt with dew,
Like one who thinks and sighs of love
The livelong summer through,
Oft would I dictate glorious things
Of heroes to the Tuscan strings
On my sweet lyre anew,
And to the brooks and trees around
Ippolito's high name resound."