Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions

by William Dean Howells

THE FAIR PRISONER TO THE SWALLOW.
Pilgrim swallow! pilgrim swallow!
On my grated window's sill,
Singing, as the mornings follow,
Quaint and pensive ditties still,
What would'st tell me in thy lay?
Prithee, pilgrim swallow, say!
All forgotten, com'st thou hither
Of thy tender spouse forlorn,
That we two may grieve together,
Little widow, sorrow worn?
Grieve then, weep then, in thy lay!
Pilgrim swallow, grieve alway!
Yet a lighter woe thou weepest:
Thou at least art free of wing,
And while land and lake thou sweepest,
May'st make heaven with sorrow ring,
Calling his dear name alway,
Pilgrim swallow, in thy lay.
Could I too! that am forbidden
By this low and narrow cell,
Whence the sun's fair light is hidden,
Whence thou scarce can'st hear me tell
Sorrows that I breathe alway,
While thou pip'st thy plaintive lay.
Ah! September quickly coming,
Thou shalt take farewell of me,
And, to other summers roaming,
Other hills and waters see,—
Greeting them with songs more gay,
Pilgrim swallow, far away.
Still, with every hopeless morrow,
While I ope mine eyes in tears,
Sweetly through my brooding sorrow
Thy dear song shall reach mine ears,—
Pitying me, though far away,
Pilgrim swallow, in thy lay.
Thou, when thou and spring together
Here return, a cross shalt see,—
In the pleasant evening weather,
Wheel and pipe, here, over me!
Peace and peace! the coming May,
Sing me in thy roundelay!

It is a great good fortune for a man to have written a thing so beautiful as this, and not a singular fortune that he should have written nothing else comparable to it. The like happens in all literatures; and no one need be surprised to learn that I found the other poems of Grossi often difficult, and sometimes almost impossible to read.

Grossi was born in 1791, at Bollano, by lovely Como, whose hills and waters he remembers in all his works with constant affection. He studied law at the University of Pavia, but went early to Milan, where he cultivated literature rather than the austerer science to which he had been bred, and soon became the fashion, writing tales in Milanese and Italian verse, and making the women cry by his pathetic art of story-telling. “Ildegonda”, published in 1820, was the most popular of all these tales, and won Grossi an immense number of admirers, every one (says his biographer Cantù) of the fair sex, who began to wear Ildegonda dresses and Ildegonda bonnets. The poem was printed and reprinted; it is the heart-breaking story of a poor little maiden in the middle ages, whom her father and brother shut up in a convent because she is in love with the right person and will not marry the wrong one—a common thing in all ages. The cruel abbess and wicked nuns, by the order of Ildegonda's family, try to force her to take the veil; but she, supported by her own repugnance to the cloister, and, by the secret counsels of one of the sisters, with whom force had succeeded, resists persuasion, reproach, starvation, cold, imprisonment, and chains. Her lover attempts to rescue her by means of a subterranean vault under the convent; but the plot is discovered, and the unhappy pair are assailed by armed men at the very moment of escape. Ildegonda is dragged back to her dungeon; and Rizzardo, already under accusation of heresy, is quickly convicted and burnt at the stake. They bring the poor girl word of this, and her sick brain turns. In her delirium she sees her lover in torment for his heresy, and, flying from the hideous apparition, she falls and strikes her head against a stone. She wakes in the arms of the beloved sister who had always befriended her. The cruel efforts against her cease now, and she writes to her father imploring his pardon, which he gives, with a prayer for hers. At last she dies peacefully. The story is pathetic; and it is told with art, though its lapses of taste are woful, and its faults those of the whole class of Italian poetry to which it belongs. The agony is tedious, as Italian agony is apt to be, the passion is outrageously violent or excessively tender, the description too often prosaic; the effects are sometimes produced by very “rough magic”. The more than occasional infelicity and awkwardness of diction which offend in Byron's poetic tales are not felt so much in those of Grossi; but in “Ildegonda” there is horror more material even than in “Parisina”. Here is a picture of Rizzardo's apparition, for which my faint English has no stomach:

Chè dalla bocca fuori gli pendea
La coda smisurata d' un serpente,
E il flagellava per la faccia, mentre
Il capo e il tronco gli scendean nel ventre.
Fischia la biscia nell' orribil lutta
Entro il ventre profondo del dannato,
Che dalla bocca lacerata erutta
Un torrente di sangue aggruppato;
E bava gialla, venenosa e brutta,
Dalle narici fuor manda col fiato,
La qual pel mento giù gli cola, e lassa
Insolcata la carne, ovunque passa.

It seems to have been the fate of Grossi as a poet to achieve fashion, and not fame; and his great poem in fifteen cantos, called “I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata”, which made so great a noise in its day, was eclipsed in reputation by his subsequent novel of “Marco Visconti”. Since the “Gerusalemma” of Tasso, it is said that no poem has made so great a sensation in Italy as “I Lombardi”, in which the theme treated by the elder poet is celebrated according to the aesthetics of the Romantic School. Such parts of the poem as I have read have not tempted me to undertake the whole; but many people must have at least bought it, for it gave the author thirty thousand francs in solid proof of popularity.

After the “Marco Visconti”, Grossi seems to have produced no work of importance. He married late, but happily; and he now devoted himself almost exclusively to the profession of the law, in Milan, where he died in 1853, leaving the memory of a good man, and the fame of a poet unspotted by reproach. As long as he lived, he was the beloved friend of Manzoni. He dwelt many years under the influence of the stronger mind, but not servile to it; adopting its literary principles, but giving them his own expression.

III

Luigi Carrer of Venice was the first of that large number of minor poets and dramatists to which the states of the old Republic have given birth during the present century. His life began with our century, and he died in 1850. During this time he witnessed great political events—the retirement of the French after the fall of Napoleon; the failure of all the schemes and hopes of the Carbonarito shake off the yoke of the stranger; and that revolution in 1848 which drove out the Austrians, only that, a year later, they should return in such force as to make the hope of Venetian independence through the valor of Venetian arms a vain dream forever. There is not wanting evidence of a tender love of country in the poems of Carrer, and probably the effectiveness of the Austrian system of repression, rather than his own indifference, is witnessed by the fact that he has scarcely a line to betray a hope for the future, or a consciousness of political anomaly in the present.

Carrer was poor, but the rich were glad to be his friends, without putting him to shame; and as long as the once famous conversazioni were held in the great Venetian houses, he was the star of whatever place assembled genius and beauty. He had a professorship in a private school, and while he was young he printed his verses in the journals. As he grew older, he wrote graceful books of prose, and drew his slender support from their sale and from the minute pay of some offices in the gift of his native city.

Carrer's ballads are esteemed the best of his poems; and I may offer an idea of the quality and manner of some of his ballads by the following translation, but I cannot render his peculiar elegance, nor give the whole range of his fancy: