In “Tristezze” Nature breathes different suggestions: it has the sweet languidness of a fine autumn day, with recollections of a gentle melancholy. A good many people have written about empty nests; but the touch, in the following quotation, of the feather on the point of being blown away, yet clinging on, is surely individual.
The Nest.
From the wild rose-bush, just a skeleton,
there hangs a nest. How in the spring
bursts from it, filling all the air,
the twitter of the chattering housemates!
Now there’s but one small feather. At the wooing
of the wind it hesitates, beats lightly;
like to some ancient dream in soul severe
that ever flies and yet is never fled.
And now the eye turns downward from the heavens—
the heavens to which one last full harmony
rose glorious, and died into the air—
and fixes on the earth, on which the leaves
lie rotting; whilst in waves the wind
weeps through the lonely country.
We must not close this most inadequate notice of the Myricæ without mentioning the refined tenderness of one of the closing poems, too long to quote, entitled “Colloquio.” The poet’s mother, a figure of infinite sweetness, mute and shadowy, yet real, revisits the familiar house-places with her son; and a few incidental touches put before us an idyllic sketch of the home with its plants and the two housewifely sisters, so different in character.
As a contrast to the details of the Myricæ we may here quote a poem that appeared (December 1897) in the Nuova Antologia. Breadth of silent space has as great a fascination for Pascoli as have the tender details of home and country life. He had already in one of the “Poemetti” dwelt with longing on the northern regions whither the wild swans fly, where the aurora borealis lights up the infinite polar gloom, where mountains of eternal ice rest on the sea as on a pavement; and Andrée’s balloon expedition to the Pole especially fired his imagination. The poem that bears the traveller’s name was written when, after long silence, there was a report that human cries had been heard on the Sofjord. In the Italian, the first part, broken by questionings and doubtings has an effect of uncertainty, like the uneasy straining of the balloon at its rope; from it the second part rises with a sure, strong leap and sinks gently at the end.
ANDRÉE.
I.
No, no. The voice borne faint athwart the gloomy
air from the realms of ice, like human cries,
was but the petrel’s screech,
that loves the lonely rocks, the storms
unheard. Or maybe (was it not like children’s
wailing?) maybe the sea-gull’s.
A sound uplifts itself of wailful limboes
far in remotest shade untrodden:
that is the gulls, they say. Or divers, maybe?
Or the skua? Perhaps the skua—for when it flies
above the icefields, from a thousand nests
rises a strident cry; since with it draws a-near
Death’s self. Or was’t vain voiceless crying
in thine own heart? Nay, but the look-out heard them;
and in the look-out’s ear thou trustest.
Yea, but ’twas, sure, the roar of breakers,
crashing of rocks, howling of wind, the pant
of storms far off, yet nearing,
the sky, the sea, oh Norman seafarer!