Di novo è giunt'.
Lo: here hath come an errant knight
On a barbed charger clothed in mail:
His archers scatter iron hail.
At brow and breast his mace he aims;
Who therefore hath not arms of proof,
Let him live locked by door and roof;
Until Dame Summer on a day
That grisly knight return to slay.
Poliziano's treatment of the octave stanza for Rispetti was comparatively popular. But in his poem of 'La Giostra,' written to commemorate the victory of Giuliano de' Medici in a tournament and to celebrate his mistress, he gave a new and richer form to the metre which Boccaccio had already used for epic verse. The slight and uninteresting framework of this poem, which opened a new sphere for Italian literature, and prepared the way for Ariosto's golden cantos, might be compared to one of those wire baskets which children steep in alum water, and incrust with crystals, sparkling, artificial, beautiful with colours not their own. The mind of Poliziano held, as it were, in solution all the images and thoughts of antiquity, all the riches of his native literature. In that vast reservoir of poems and mythologies and phrases, so patiently accumulated, so tenaciously preserved, so thoroughly assimilated, he plunged the trivial subject he had chosen, and triumphantly presented to the world the spolia opima of scholarship and taste. What mattered it that the theme was slight? The art was perfect, the result splendid. One canto of 125 stanzas describes the youth of Giuliano, who sought to pass his life among the woods, a hunter dead to love, but who was doomed to be ensnared by Cupid. The chase, the beauty of Simonetta, the palace of Venus, these are the three subjects of a book as long as the first Iliad. The second canto begins with dreams and prophecies of glory to be won by Giuliano in the tournament. But it stops abruptly. The tragic catastrophe of the Pazzi Conjuration cut short Poliziano's panegyric by the murder of his hero. Meanwhile the poet had achieved his purpose. His torso presented to Italy a model of style, a piece of written art adequate to the great painting of the Renaissance period, a double star of poetry which blent the splendours of the ancient and the modern world. To render into worthy English the harmonies of Poliziano is a difficult task. Yet this must be attempted if an English reader is to gain any notion of the scope and substance of the Italian poet's art. In the first part of the poem we are placed, as it were, at the mid point between the 'Hippolytus' of Euripides and Shakspere's 'Venus and Adonis.' The cold hunter Giuliano is to see Simonetta, and seeing, is to love her. This is how he first discovers the triumphant beauty:[[47]]
White is the maid, and white the robe around her,
With buds and roses and thin grasses pied;
Enwreathèd folds of golden tresses crowned her,
Shadowing her forehead fair with modest pride:
The wild wood smiled; the thicket where he found her,
To ease his anguish, bloomed on every side:
Serene she sits, with gesture queenly mild,
And with her brow tempers the tempests wild.
[47] Stanza XLIII. All references are made to Carducci's excellent edition, Le Stanze, l'Orfeo e le Rime di Messer Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano. Firenze: G. Barbéra. 1863.
After three stanzas of this sort, in which the poet's style is more apparent than the object he describes, occurs this charming picture:—
Reclined he found her on the swarded grass
In jocund mood; and garlands she had made
Of every flower that in the meadow was,
Or on her robe of many hues displayed;
But when she saw the youth before her pass,
Raising her timid head awhile she stayed;
Then with her white hand gathered up her dress,
And stood, lap-full of flowers, in loveliness.
Then through the dewy field with footstep slow
The lingering maid began to take her way,
Leaving her lover in great fear and woe,
For now he longs for nought but her alway:
The wretch, who cannot bear that she should go,
Strives with a whispered prayer her feet to stay;
And thus at last, all trembling, all afire,
In humble wise he breathes his soul's desire:
'Whoe'er thou art, maid among maidens queen,
Goddess, or nymph—nay, goddess seems most clear—
If goddess, sure my Dian I have seen;
If mortal, let thy proper self appear!
Beyond terrestrial beauty is thy mien;
I have no merit that I should be here!
What grace of heaven, what lucky star benign
Yields me the sight of beauty so divine?'
A conversation ensues, after which Giuliano departs utterly lovesick, and Cupid takes wing exultingly for Cyprus, where his mother's palace stands. In the following picture of the house of Venus, who shall say how much of Ariosto's Alcina and Tasso's Armida is contained? Cupid arrives, and the family of Love is filled with joy at Giuliano's conquest. From the plan of the poem it is clear that its beauties are chiefly those of detail. They are, however, very great. How perfect, for example, is the richness combined with delicacy of the following description of a country life:—
BOOK I. STANZAS 17-21.
How far more safe it is, how far more fair,
To chase the flying deer along the lea;
Through ancient woods to track their hidden lair,
Far from the town, with long-drawn subtlety:
To scan the vales, the hills, the limpid air,
The grass and flowers, clear ice, and streams so free;
To hear the birds wake from their winter trance,
The wind-stirred leaves and murmuring waters dance.
How sweet it were to watch the young goats hung
From toppling crags, cropping the tender shoot,
While in thick pleachèd shade the shepherd sung
His uncouth rural lay and woke his flute;
To mark, mid dewy grass, red apples flung,
And every bough thick set with ripening fruit,
The butting rams, kine lowing o'er the lea,
And cornfields waving like the windy sea.
Lo! how the rugged master of the herd
Before his flock unbars the wattled cote;
Then with his rod and many a rustic word
He rules their going: or 'tis sweet to note
The delver, when his toothèd rake hath stirred
The stubborn clod, his hoe the glebe hath smote;
Barefoot the country girl, with loosened zone,
Spins, while she keeps her geese 'neath yonder stone.
After such happy wise, in ancient years,
Dwelt the old nations in the age of gold;
Nor had the fount been stirred of mothers' tears
For sons in war's fell labour stark and cold;
Nor trusted they to ships the wild wind steers,
Nor yet had oxen groaning ploughed the wold;
Their houses were huge oaks, whose trunks had store
Of honey, and whose boughs thick acorns bore.
Nor yet, in that glad time, the accursèd thirst
Of cruel gold had fallen on this fair earth:
Joyous in liberty they lived at first;
Unploughed the fields sent forth their teeming birth;
Till fortune, envious of such concord, burst
The bond of law, and pity banned and worth;
Within their breasts sprang luxury and that rage
Which men call love in our degenerate age.