The Flame

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

Under the new spell of enchantment, the poet threw off his winged words, harmonious as lyric strophes. He described the Queen City palpitating with ardor within her thousand green girdles, extending her marble arms toward the wild Autumn, whose humid breath reached her, balmy with the delicious death of the fields and islands, making her sigh like a bride awaiting her hour of joy. By the magic of his words, Venice seemed to be possessed of marvelous hands, with which she wove for herself the inimitable tissue of allegory that covered her.

"And since, in all the world, poetry alone is truth, he that knows how to contemplate it, and to draw it into his own soul by the virtue of his thought, will be very near to mastering the secret of victory over life."

In pronouncing these last words, Stelio sought the eyes of Daniele Glauro, and saw that they sparkled with happiness beneath that large, meditative brow, which seemed swollen by the weight of an unborn world. The mystic doctor was there, near the platform, with several of those unknown disciples that he had described to the master as eager and anxious, full of faith and expectation, impatient to break the chain of their daily servitude, and to know the free intoxication of joy and sadness. Stelio noted that they were grouped, like a nucleus of compressed force, against the great red bookcases, wherein lay buried innumerable volumes of useless and forgotten lore. He marked their eager and attentive faces, their long hair, their lips, half parted with child-like absorption, or closed tightly in a kind of violent sensitiveness, their bright eyes, to which the breath of his words carried lights and shadows, as a changeful breeze stirs a parterre of delicate flowers. He felt that in his own hand he held all their souls blended into one spirit, which he could at will agitate, crush, tear, or burn, as if it were a filmy scarf.

While his mind expanded and relaxed, in its continued effort, he still retained a strange power of exterior investigation, a faculty of material observation which became the clearer and more penetrating with the warmth and quickening of his eloquence.

Suddenly he saw with his mental vision the picture he wished to present, and his verbal expression of it was after the manner of the master painters that had reigned in that place, with the luxuriance of Veronese, and the fire of Tintoretto.

"All the vitalities and all the transfigurations of the ancient stones, where Time has accumulated so many mysteries, and where glory has set her emblems; all the alternations of marvelously easy creations and destructions were reflected in the water; the effulgence of a jubilant light glittered between the crosses of cupolas inflated by prayer, and the slender saline crystals hanging under the arch of the bridges. Like a sentinel on a rampart uttering his shrill cry to him that listens for the signal, so the golden angel from the summit of the highest tower at last flashed out the announcement.

"And He appeared! The Bridegroom appeared, seated in his fiery chariot, which he turned toward the Queen of Cities, and in his youthful, superhuman countenance was a strange fascination springing from an animal-like cruelty and delicacy contrasting with the deep eyes, full of all knowledge. His blood rioted through his veins, from the tips of his fingers to his nimble feet; mysterious, occult things veiled his being, concealing joy as the grape in bloom conceals the vine; and all the tawny gold and purple that surrounded him were like the vestment of his senses.

"With what passion, throbbing under her thousand emerald girdles, and the richness of her jewels, the Queen of Cities gave herself to the magnificent god!"

Swept up in this rushing flight of words, the soul of the multitude seemed to reach the sentiment of Beauty, as if it were a summit never before attained. The pulse of the people and the voice of the poet seemed to give back to those ancient walls their former life, and to reawaken in that cold museum its original spirit: a flood of powerful ideas, concrete, and organized in the most durable substance to attest the nobility of a great race.

The splendor of divine youth descended upon the women, as it might have descended in a sumptuous alcove, for each felt within herself the breathlessness of expectation and the joy of yielding, like that of the Queen of Cities. They smiled with vague languor as if wearied by the strain upon their emotions; their cool, polished shoulders rose from their corollas of jewels.