Cursing the dawn that only calls him back to his bondage.
Next to the emotion of the supernatural, we are struck with the intense sympathy with nature both animate and inanimate, which gives so lively a glow to Carducci's description. The sonnet on “The Ox” [IX] I have referred to in the previous essay; here I would call attention to that addressed “To a Horse” [XVII], which, if the former can be called Homeric, can equally claim to be Phidian in the pure outline of the drawing and the Olympic spirit that seems to quiver in the poet's words:
O that for thee might blaze the sands Elean,
For thee great hymns the godlike Pindar sing,
Following thee there upon the waves Alphaean!
Keats proves how deeply he has imbibed the Greek poetic spirit in his sonnet on the “Grasshopper and the Cricket”; for here he expresses the same intense joy of communion with a certain soul in nature which caused Theocritus to never tire of singing, or having his Sicilian goatherds sing, of the bees that fed the imprisoned Comatas all through the springtime, of the Oaks that sung the dirges of the shepherd Daphnis, of the “shegoats feeding on the hill,” of “the young lambs pasturing on the upland fields when the spring is on the wane,” of “the white calves browsing on the arbutus,” of the “cicada to cicada dear,” “the prattling locusts,” and “lizards that sleep at midday by the dry stone wall.”
With the same zest Carducci delights to sing of the “forests awaking with a cool shiver” at the rising of Aurora, of “the garrulous nests that mutter amid the wet leaves” in the early dawn, of the “grey gull far off that screams over the purple sea,” “the sorrel colt breaking away with high lifted mane and neighing in the wind,” and “the pack of hounds, wakeful, answering from their kennels.” What Mr. Lang says of Theocritus may be as truly said of Carducci: “There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense of nature.... It is as true to nature as the statue of the native fisherman in the Vatican.” [Introduction to Theocritus.] Especially are we aware of the almost oppressive feeling of nature's languor and sweet melancholy on reading Carducci's poems on “A Dream in Summer” [XVIII] and “On a Saint Peter's Eve” [XIX]. Here, indeed, the feeling is more modern than ancient, but the mode of expressing it is the same. How like Homer is the picture of
The sun across the red vapours descending,
And falling into the sea like a shield of brass
Which shines wavering over the bloody field of war,