“Accursed,” adds Settembrini, “be the Italian who forgets GABRIELE ROSSETTI.” Rossetti (1785-1854) assuredly will not be forgotten by England, for which he has done what no other inhabitant of these isles ever did in begetting two great poets. His claims to the gratitude of his countrymen are of quite another sort, resting chiefly upon the spirit and fluency of his political poems, which helped to keep the flame of patriotism alive at home, while the exiled author was teaching Italian at King’s College. His life is well known as an appendage to the biography of his more celebrated son. It is one of the most interesting speculations imaginable what kind of poetry Dante Gabriel Rossetti would have written if he had been born and brought up in Italy; certain it is that no prefigurement of his singular alliance of purity and transparency of feeling with intricacy of thought and opulence of illustration, or of his objectivity and marvellous pictorial gift, is to be found in his father’s simple, natural, rather overfluent verse. The elder Rossetti may, nevertheless, be ranked among the poets of the romantic school; and a similar place belongs to the amiable Luigi Carrer (1801-53) on account of his ballads, the most successful of his works. Francesco dall’ Ongaro, a good lyric poet in other departments, applied the popular stornello to the purposes of patriotic poetry with eminent success.
Two poets of more importance enjoyed for a time great renown, but their reputation, without becoming extinct, has considerably declined. GIOVANNI PRATI (1815-54), a native of the Italian Tyrol, gained great reputation in 1841 by a narrative poem in blank verse, Edmenegarda, founded upon a tragic event in the family of the great Venetian patriot Daniele Manin. It is a poor apology for adultery, but in sentimentality, though not in morality, belongs to the school of Lamartine, whose Jocelyn was then at the meridian of its celebrity. In consequence, notwithstanding much real poetical merit, it bears that fatal impress of the boudoir which disfigures so much of the best pictorial as well as poetical work of the time. Its success encouraged Prati to produce several volumes of lyrics, spirited, melodious, but too fluent. His facility, like Monti’s, approached the faculty of improvisation, but Monti’s tawny torrent has shrunk in Prati into a silver rill, equally swift but by no means equally majestic. He is nevertheless a poet, and in a particular manner the poet of the brief interval of hope and joy which accompanied the uprising of 1848. The national feeling of the time remains embodied in these verses, the most permanently valuable of his writings; for the more imaginative and ambitious productions of his later years, such as Satana e le Grazie or Armando, though interesting, belong to the fundamentally unsound genre of adaptation from Faust.
Another poet once in the enjoyment of a popularity which he has failed to retain is ALEARDO ALEARDI (1812-78). He has too much elegance and feeling to be forgotten, but wants force; his general attitude seems not inaccurately indicated in his own description of his heroine Arnalda da Roca as she appeared in the act of blowing up a shipload of Turks:
“Placidamente fulminò la palla.”
The expression is rarely at the height of the sentiment to be expressed. If this can be overlooked, the reader who does not wish his emotions to run away with him may find much to admire in the languid grace of the poems, generally descriptive, didactic or idyllic, which form the most important part of Aleardi’s work. It is rather a reproach than an honour to his patriotic lyrics that their strong point should be not eloquence but description, which is always excellent.
The reputation of the good priest and good patriot, GIACOMO ZANELLA (1820-89), has, on the contrary, gone on increasing, and with justice, for his verse is usually at the level of his thought, and his thought, if more frequently graceful than striking, sometimes attains a commanding elevation, as in his odes to Dante and on the opening of the Suez Canal. His Psyche and Egoism and Charity are clearly and exquisitely cut as Greek gems. Zanella’s speciality, however, is his effort to ally science with poetry, and though he cannot always prevail upon them to shake hands, one of his lyrics of this character, The Vigil, a meditation upon Evolution from a theologian’s point of view, is perhaps his masterpiece. Another very striking poem is the colloquy between Milton and Galileo, in which Galileo’s dread of the sceptical tendency of the science to which he has imparted such an impulse is represented as determining Milton “to justify the ways of God to man.” Zanella, a native of the Vicenzan district, was a gentle, tender, melancholy man, not unlike Cowper, and his reason, under the stress of domestic affliction, at one time seemed in danger of suffering the same eclipse. Recovering, he forsook the career of college professor for a cottage near Vicenza, where:
Dopo sparsi al vento
Tanti sogni superbi e tanto foco
Di poesia dagl’ anni inerti spento,
Voluntario romito in questo loco,
Tra pochi arbori e fior vivo contento.
This retirement, nevertheless, produced some of Zanella’s most delicate poetry, comprised in his dainty little volume Astichello ed altre Poesie, not yet included in his works. One of the most beautiful of his poems, The Redbreast (Il Pettirostro), marvellously resembles the idylls of Coleridge, with whose works Zanella betrays his acquaintance. Charming, also, are the sonnets celebrating the various aspects of the local river, the little Astichello, such as this upon the sympathy between man and Nature in time of drought, a “pathetic fallacy,” perhaps, but none the worse for that:—
Shrunk to a thread, the dwindling waters stray
Where Astichello 'neath the poplar flows
With languid tide that scarce avails to sway
The moss that nigh the midmost channel grows.
Sirius the while, ablaze with fiery ray,
Above the unsheltered meadow throbs and glows;
And all the blithe fecundity of May
One withering waste of dismal yellow shows.