It is doubtful whether this poem, which Giudici calls the sublimest lyrical composition modern literature has produced, will stir the English reader to enthusiastic admiration. The poem is of its age—declamatory, ambitious, eloquent; but the ideas do not seem great or new, though that, perhaps, is because they have been so often repeated since. De Sanctis declares it the “earliest lyrical note of the new literature, the affirmation of the rehabilitated conscience of the new manhood. A law of the Republic—“the French Republic”— prescribed the equality of men before death. The splender of monuments seemed a privilege of the nobles and the rich, and the Republicans contested the privilege, the distinction of classes, even in this form ... This revolutionary logic driven to its ultimate corollaries clouded the poetry of life for him.... He lacked the religious idea, but the sense of humanity in its progress and its aims, bound together by the family, the state, liberty, glory—from this Foscolo drew his harmonies, a new religion of the tomb.”....
He touches in it on the funeral usages of different times and peoples, with here and there an episodic allusion to the fate of heroes and poets, and disquisitions on the aesthetic and spiritual significance of posthumous honors. The most-admired passage of the poem is that in which the poet turns to the monuments of Italy's noblest dead, in the church of Santa Croce, at Florence:
The urnèd ashes of the mighty kindle
The great soul to great actions, Pindemonte,
And fair and holy to the pilgrim make
The earth that holds them. When I saw the tomb
Where rests the body of that great one,{1} who
Tempering the scepter of the potentate,
Strips off its laurels, and to the people shows
With what tears it doth reek, and with what blood;
When I beheld the place of him who raised
A new Olympus to the gods in Rome,{2}—
Of him{3} who saw the worlds wheel through the heights
Of heaven, illumined by the moveless sun,
And to the Anglian{4} oped the skyey ways
He swept with such a vast and tireless wing,—
O happy!{5} I cried, in thy life-giving air,
And in the fountains that the Apennine
Down from his summit pours for thee! The moon,
Glad in thy breath, laps in her clearest light
Thy hills with vintage laughing; and thy vales,
Filled with their clustering cots and olive-groves,
Send heavenward th' incense of a thousand flowers.
And thou wert first, Florence, to hear the song
With which the Ghibelline exile charmed his wrath,{6}
And thou his language and his ancestry
Gavest that sweet lip of Calliope,{7}
Who clothing on in whitest purity
Love in Greece nude and nude in Rome, again
Restored him unto the celestial Venus;—
But happiest I count thee that thou keep'st
Treasured beneath one temple-roof the glories
Of Italy,—now thy sole heritage,
Since the ill-guarded Alps and the inconstant
Omnipotence of human destinies
Have rent from thee thy substance and thy arms,
Thy altars, country,—save thy memories, all.
Ah! here, where yet a ray of glory lingers,
Let a light shine unto all generous souls,
And be Italia's hope! Unto these stones
Oft came Vittorio{8} for inspiration,
Wroth to his country's gods. Dumbly he roved
Where Arno is most lonely, anxiously
Brooding upon the heavens and the fields;
Then when no living aspect could console,
Here rested the Austere, upon his face
Death's pallor and the deathless light of hope.
Here with these great he dwells for evermore,
His dust yet quick with love of country. Yes,
A god speaks to us from this sacred peace,
That nursed for Persians upon Marathon,
Where Athens gave her heroes sepulture,
Greek ire and virtue. There the mariner
That sailed the sea under Euboea saw
Flashing amidst the wide obscurity
The steel of helmets and of clashing brands,
The smoke and lurid flame of funeral pyres,
And phantom warriors, clad in glittering mail,
Seeking the combat. Through the silences
And horror of the night, along the field,
The tumult of the phalanxes arose,
Mixing itself with sound of warlike tubes,
And clatter of the hoofs of steeds, that rushed
Trampling the helms of dying warriors,—
And sobs, and hymns, and the wild Parcae's songs!{9}
Notes:
{1} Question of Machiavelli. Whether “The Prince” was written in earnest, with a wish to serve the Devil, or in irony, with a wish to serve the people, is still in dispute.
{2} Michelangelo.
{3} Galileo.
{4} Newton.
{5} Florence.