"Elles chantent, les benjohs hystériques et sauvages,
comme des chattes énervées par l'odeur de l'orage.
Ce sont des nègres qui les tiennent
empoignées violemment, comme on tient
une amarre que secoue la bourrasque.
Elles miaulent, les benjohs, sous leurs doigts frénétiques,
et la mer, en bombant son dos d'hippopotame,
acclame leurs chansons par des flic-flacs sonores
et des renaclements."
More aery and fantastic in their radiance are the Little Dramas of Light, which in the same volume play outside the walls of La Ville Charnelle. For pushing the pathetic fallacy to the extreme limit of pantheism, or anthropomorphism, as one cares to put it, our author constructs his miniature scenes out of the interplay of plants, elements, and the very fabrics of human invention, all participating in something of the mingled dash, despair, and desire which go to weave the somewhat complex tissue of our ultra-modern humanity.
Even the titles of a few of these delicate poems give some idea of their darting beauty—"The Foolish Vines and the Greyhound of the Firmament" (the Moon), "The Life of the Sails," "The Death of the Fortresses," "The Folly of the Little Houses," "The Dying Vessels," "The Japanese Dawn," "The Courtesans of Gold" (the Stars).
Observe, also, the eminently twentieth-century temperament of the "coquettish vessels," who, "half-clothed in their ragged sails, and playing like urchins with the incandescent ball of the sun," have yet experienced "amid the disillusioned smile of the autumn evenings" the desire for a fuller and more tumultuous life than is afforded by the "ventriloquist soliloquies of the gurgling waters of the quays."
"C'est ainsi, c'est ainsi que les jeunes Navires
implorent affolées délivrance,
en s'esclaffant de tous leurs linges bariolés,
claquant au vent comme les lèvres brulées de fièvre.
Leurs drisses et leurs haubans se raidissent
tels des nerfs trop tendus qui grincent de désir,
car ils veulent partir et s'en aller
vers la tristesse affreuse (qu'importe?) inconsolable
et (qu'importe?) infinie
d'avoir tout savouré et tout maudit (qu'importe?)."
We can perhaps best formulate the dynamic élan de vie, which pulses through every line of M. Marinetti's poems, by indulging in the perversion of the great line of Baudelaire, so that we can give to our poet for his motto:
"Je haïs la ligne qui tue le mouvement."
M. Marinetti's activity, however, is not limited to the sphere of verse. In 1905 he published Le Roi Bombance (Mercure de France), a satyric tragedy, compound of the scarcely harmonious temperaments of Rabelais and Maeterlinck, a wild extravaganza of anthropophagy and resurrection, which satirises the prominent figures in contemporary Italian politics, including the recently dead Crispi, Ferri, and Tenatri, and contains withal a profound undercurrent of sociological truth. Poupées Electriques (Sansot) followed in 1909, a play which, with all its brilliance and originality, somehow just misses the real dramatic pitch.
Far more significant are the belles lettres of Les Dieux s'en vont D'Annunzio reste (Sansot, 1908), with its steely dash of style and its criticism at once singularly acute and delightfully malicious of the official protagonist of all Italian culture, and the recently published Futurisme (Sansot, 1911).