To woodland fount or solitary cave
In sunlit hour I plained my amorous teen;
Or wove by light of Luna’s lamp serene
My song, while yet to song and love I clave;
Nor by thy side the sacred steep to brave
Refused, where rarely now is climber seen;
But cares and tasks ungrateful intervene,
And like the weed I drift upon the wave.
And idly thus my barren hours are spent
In realms of fountain and of laurel void,
Where but vain tinsel is accounted blest.
Forgive, then, if not wholly unalloyed
My pleasure to behold thee eminent
On pinnacle no other foot hath prest.
ANGELO DI COSTANZO (1507-91), already noticed as an historian, is another example of a writer of sonnets who rose from the crowd by the individuality which he contrived to impress upon his performances. His great characteristic is an exquisite elegance, not, as in some other instances, veiling inanity, but usually the accompaniment of something well worth saying. The following piece is a good instance of his power of enhancing, by ingenious embellishment, a thought interesting and attractive in itself:
River, that from thy Apennine recess,
Swollen with surge of tributary snow,
Com’st foaming, and thy tawny overflow
Hurlest on Samnian vales with headlong stress;
Thy farther shore, inhere Love awaits to bless,
I seek, and by thy wrath unharmed would go;
If thou intendest not my overthrow,
With stringent curb thy furious flood repress.
But art thou verily resolved to kill,
And purposest that this conclusive day
Shall jointly terminate my good and ill,
Grant me but once to stem thy shock and spray:
My happy errand I would fain fulfil;
Me going spare, returning sweep away.
The general passion for verse naturally extended to the refined and accomplished ladies of the time. Only two, however, have gained a permanent position in Italian literature, as much by their characters as by their poetry. The muse of VITTORIA COLONNA (1490-1547) chiefly prompted the apotheosis of her husband, the Marquis of Pescara, “a sworded man whose trade was blood,” and who, though a great captain, scarcely possessed a single amiable or magnanimous trait of character. The pathos of the situation surpasses that of the verse which it called forth. As a woman, Vittoria evoked the enthusiastic admiration of her contemporaries, and lives for posterity more in the strains of Michael Angelo than in her own.
The unhappy fate of GASPARA STAMPA (1524-53), who literally died of love, would have preserved her name without her verse; she was, nevertheless, a true poetess, and might have been a great one had she not, like so many poetesses, struck upon the fatal rock of fluency. Could her centuries of sonnets be concentrated into a dozen, she would rank high.
More truly a poet than any of the stricter Petrarchists is a Neapolitan, LUIGI TRANSILLO, although his advantage is rather intensity of feeling than superiority in the poetic art. He must indeed be admitted to have derogated in some measure from the high standard of taste then generally prevalent, and to have foreshadowed, though but in a very trifling degree, the extravagances of the seventeenth century. This may be forgiven to his southern ardour and liveliness, and foreign critics are not likely to perceive the little technical defects so severely visited upon him by his countrymen. He had the unspeakable advantage over his competitors of being devoted to no ideal nymph, but to a real and very great and very cold lady, the Marchioness del Vasto, wife of the Viceroy of Naples. Such an attachment was necessarily Platonic on his part, and imaginary, if so much, on the lady’s. The first rapture is magnificently expressed in the sonnet in which the poor knight and military retainer, whose business in life was to help in clearing the Mediterranean of Turks, compares his rash love to the flight of Icarus:
Now that my wings are spread to my desire,
The more vast height withdraws the dwindling land,
Wider to wind these pinions I expand,
And earth disdain, and higher mount and higher:
Nor of the fate of Icarus inquire,
Nor cautious droop, or sway to either hand;
Dead I shall fall, full well I understand;
But who lives gloriously as I expire?
Yet hear I my own heart that pleading cries,
Stay, madman, whither art thou bound? descend!
Ruin is ready Rashness to chastise.
But I, Fear not, though this indeed the end;
Cleave we the clouds, and praise our destinies,
If noble fall on noble flight attend.
Suspicion, jealousy, bitterly wounded feeling, open breach, and hollow reconciliation make up the remainder of the sonnets, the best of which have few superiors in any literature for fire and passion. His other poetical performances are far from inconsiderable. The best known is the sin of his youth, theVendemmiatore, whose ultra-Fescennine truth to rustic manners and the licence of the vintage brought it into the Index, and its author into gaol. In quite a different key are his delightful didactic poems,Il Podere, on the management of an estate, andLa Balía, on the care of children, translated by Roscoe. Some of his familiarCapitoli are very pleasing, and some of his miscellaneous poems are very fine, especially this on the Spaniards slain by the Turks at Castel Nuovo, on the coast of Dalmatia:
Hail, scene of fated Valour’s final stand,
Revered far these sad heaps of whitening bone,
Their trace who other monument have none,
Pyreless and tombless on this desert strand;
Who hitherward from far Iberian land
To Adria’s shores on blast of battle blown,
With streaming blood of foemen, and their own,
Came to empurple foreign sea and sand.
Three hundred Fabii gave immortal name
To ancient Tiber; what to Spain by death
Heroic of three thousand shall be given?
Greater the host, more excellent the aim
Of warrior martyrs; those their dying breath
Resigned to Italy, and these to heaven.
The graceful poets who thus tuned their harps to the notes of Petrarch sang within the hearing of a spirit of another sort, whose verses, had they known them, they would have compared unfavourably with their own elegance, but whose appearance in their circle would have been like that of Victor Hugo’s Pan at the banquet of the Olympians. MICHAEL ANGELO, the greatest Italian after Dante, had not, like Dante, acquired the secret of poetic form. He indites as on marble with mallet and chisel; but the inscription is everlasting. “Ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed or obscure in thought,” as Symonds describes them, Michael Angelo’s sonnets are yet priceless as a revelation of the man, more distinct than that vouchsafed by his painting or sculpture. These tell of his tremendous force; the deep springs of tenderness in his nature are only to be learned from the poems, the most important of which are consecrated to Love, now ideal and impersonal, now expending itself upon some fair object, masculine or feminine, but in either case Platonic. Vittoria Colonna and Tommmaso de’ Cavalieri are the objects of the poet’s deepest attachment. The following sonnet was most probably inscribed to Cavalieri: