Presses his hair, embraces him
care-burdened; speaks:—“What is it?”
Conceals her face against his breast,
Speaks, in confusion:—“Know’st not?”
She keeps on her pale face
and in her eyes quick glancing,
ah! for when he leaves, the smile;
the tears for his return.
Two principal influences, then, have gone to the moulding of Pascoli’s genius: one, the potent attraction of the Augustan poets; the other, the shock, strain and struggle which have fixed his thoughts on the most painful problems of existence; which have, by the very breaking up of his home, accentuated the longing for the domestic affections above that for amorous passion; and have tinged the whole of his work with an autumn-like sadness.
Both these influences reveal themselves in Pascoli’s first published work; a small volume of little poems entitled Myricæ, and bearing the legend Arbusta juvant, humilesque myricæ. The shock was at that time, however, still too near to have exerted its full influence on the poet’s character. It kept his mind fixed not so much on the philosophical as on the sentimental and physical side of death: on the churchyard with its cypresses, its driving showers and gleams of golden sunshine, its rainbow, its groups of merry children playing “Touch” round the great cross—but, also, with its dead lying through the long nights of rain and wind. Even here, however, where triteness would seem inevitable, Pascoli is individual. He never contemplates physical decay: worms and skulls are not so much as hinted at. It is the loneliness of his dead that rivets the poet’s thoughts, their vain longing for news of those they left on earth:—
Oh, children—groans the father ’mid the black
swish of the water—ye whom I hear no more
for many years! Another churchyard
perhaps received you, and maybe you call
your mother as you shiver naked
’neath the black hissing rainstorms.
And from your far-off dwelling you stretch out
your arms to me, as I do mine to you,
oh sons, in vain despair.
Oh, children, children! Could I only see you!
For I would tell you how in that one instant
for an entire eternity I loved you.
In that one minute ere I died
I raised my hand up to my bleeding head,
and blessed you all, my children.
And again:—