Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Let us remember, too, that an event which once filled us with joy may be recalled with pain and sorrow, and that it is our present condition that determines the atmosphere. Browning’s Patriot will illustrate this.
The untrained reader is altogether too prone to imitation; but let him bear in mind that imitation, if ever art, is its lowest form. The province of the reader is to manifest, through his interpretation, the innermost spirit of the poem. Very often by imitating, by literally reproducing the voice, manner, and movements, we obscure the underlying spirit of the line, paragraph or poem. There are certain readers, for instance, who sing, Non ti scordar di me, in Aux Italiens. For the sake of argument, we might admit, that at the end of the poem there might be some slightest justification for this procedure; but in the beginning, it is absolutely indefensible. The speaker is in a deep reverie; he dwells in the past. His mind goes back to a visit to the opera-house in Paris, years before. The opera is Il Trovatore; and the heroine comes before us seeking her lover, who has been snatched from her arms through the jealousy of another. She arrives before the monastery as the monks chant the Miserere. Her prayer ascends heavenward; and when she ceases, there rises clear and passionately the voice of her lover from within his cell, singing, Non ti scordar di me (Forget me not). As the audience in the opera-house hear these words, their minds go back to the past. The king goes back to his early triumphs; the queen’s mind reverts to her life in Spain; the wife of the Marquis of Carabas lets her thoughts glide back to her first husband; and to the speaker’s mind there comes the vision of his early love. Non ti scordar di me, then, is the source of the poem. The tie that binds us to the past is the poet’s theme, “Old things are best.” Now let us look at the stanza at the end of which occurs the line we are discussing:
The moon on the tower slept soft as snow,
And who was not thrilled in the strangest way,
As we heard him sing while the gas burned low,
“Non ti scordar di me.”
In the first place, when one sings these lines, he is just a little likely to be deemed presumptuous when it is recalled that the previous stanza has said: