Carducci’s first volume appeared in 1857, and the events of the following years called forth a number of occasional poems, clearly indicating the representative poet of the people and the time. In 1865, the vigorous “Hymn to Satan” provoked the controversy which the poet had no doubt designed. His Satan, it hardly need be said, is not the monarch of the fallen seraphim, but the spirit of revolt against social and ecclesiastical tyranny, more of a Luther than a Lucifer. Levia Gravia (1867) greatly extended the poet’s reputation. Odi Barbare (1877) excited a literary controversy almost as virulent as the theological. The splendour of the diction was beyond question, but what was to be said to the novel or exotic forms in which the poet had thought fit to clothe it? To us, the naturalisation of the Alcaic and Sapphic metres appears most successful, although in the former the writer has permitted himself some deviation from the Horatian model, and the form is perhaps too deeply impressed with his own personality to become frequent in Italian literature. Most of the other forms, including the hexameters and pentameters, seem to us either too stiff or too intricate to be quite satisfactorily manipulated even by Carducci himself; but the study of them must be a valuable training for practitioners in more facile metres. If the form be sometimes too elaborate, there can be no dispute as to the weight and massive majesty of the sense. Carducci has solved the problem which baffled the Renaissance, of linking strength of thought to artifice of form. The Rime Nuove brought him new laurels, and his poetical career has paused for the present with a noble ode on the tercentenary of Tasso in 1895. The jubilee of his connection with the University of Bologna was celebrated by a great demonstration in 1896, and, reconciled with the monarchy which he once opposed, he enjoys the honour of a Senator of the Kingdom. A Liberal but a Royalist, a freethinker but a theist, he is happily placed to exert a reconciling and moderating influence alike in the political and the intellectual sphere.
The difficulties of translating Carducci’s more characteristic poems are almost insuperable. He is not in the least obscure, but his noble and austere form is indissolubly wedded to the sense, and in reproduction his bronze too often becomes plaster. Many versions, moreover, would be required to render justice to the various aspects of his many-sided genius—his love of country, his passion for beautiful form, his Latin and Hellenic enthusiasm, his photographic intensity of descriptive touch, his sympathy for honest labour and uncomplaining poverty, his capacity for caressing affection and scathing indignation. The following poem powerfully exhibits his intense devotion to the past, and faith in the future of his Italy. The subject is the statue of Victory in the Temple of Vespasian at Brescia; but to appreciate the full force of the poem, it must be known that the statue was a recent discovery of happiest augury (1826), and that Brescia had been the scene of an heroic defence and a cruel sack in the uprising against the Austrians in 1848:
Hast thou, high Virgin, wings of good augury
Waved o’er the crouching, targeted phalanxes,
With knee-propt shield and spear protended,
Biding the shock of the hostile onset?
Or hast thou, soaring in front of the eagles,
Led surging swarms of Marsian soldiery,
With blaze of fulgent light the neighing
Parthian steed and his lord appalling?
Thy pinions folded, thy stern foot haughtily
Pressing the casque of foeman unhelmeted;—
Whose fair renown for feat triumphant
Art on the orb of thy shield inscribing?
An archon’s name, who boldly in face of Wrong
The freeman’s law upheld and immunity?
A consul’s, far and wide the Latin
Limit and glory and awe enlarging?
Thee throned on Alpine pinnacle loftily,
Radiant 'mid tempest, heralding might I hear,
Kings and peoples, here stands Italy,
Weaponed to strike for her soil and honour.
Lydia, the while, a garland of flowerets,
By sad October strewn o’er the wreck of Rome,
To deck thee braids, and gently bending,
Questioneth, as at thy foot she lays it:
“What thoughts, what visions, Victory, came to thee,
Years on years in the humid imprisonment
Of earth immured? the German horses
Heardest thou stamp o’er thy brow Hellenic?”
“I heard,” she answers, flashing and fulminant,
“Heard and endured, for glory of Greece am I,
And strength of Rome, in bronze immortal
Sped without flaw through the fleeting ages.