Quite as womanly, though entirely different, is this lament, which the poet attributes to his sister for their brother, who fell at Palmanuova, May 14, 1848.
THE SISTER.
(Palma, May 14, 1848.)
And he, my brother, to the fort had gone,
And the grenade, it struck him in the breast;
He fought for liberty, and death he won,
For country here, and found in heaven rest.
And now only to follow him I sigh;
A new desire has taken me to die,—
To follow him where is no enemy,
Where every one lives happy and is free.
All hope and purpose are gone from this woman's heart, for whom Italy died in her brother, and who has only these artless, half-bewildered words of regret to speak, and speaks them as if to some tender and sympathetic friend acquainted with all the history going before their abrupt beginning. I think it most pathetic and natural, also, that even in her grief and her aspiration for heaven, her words should have the tint of her time, and she should count freedom among the joys of eternity.
Quite as womanly again, and quite as different once more, is the lyric which the reader will better appreciate when I remind him how the Austrians massacred the unarmed people in Milan, in January, 1848, and how, later, during the Five Days, they murdered their Italian prisoners, sparing neither sex nor age.{1}
Note {1}: “Many foreigners,” says Emilie Dandolo, in his restrained and temperate history of “I Volontarii e Bersaglieri Lombardi”, “have cast a doubt upon the incredible ferocity of the Austrians during the Five Days, and especially before evacuating the city. But, alas! the witnesses are too many to be doubted. A Croat was seen carrying a babe transfixed upon his bayonet. All know of those women's hands and ears found in the haversacks of the prisoners; of those twelve unhappy men burnt alive at Porta Tosa; of those nineteen buried in a lime-pit at the Castello, whose scorched bodies we found. I myself, ordered with a detachment, after the departure of the enemy, to examine the Castello and neighborhood, was horror-struck at the sight of a babe nailed to a post.”
THE LOMBARD WOMAN.
(Milan, January, 1848.)
Here, take these gaudy robes and put them by;
I will go dress me black as widowhood;
I have seen blood run, I have heard the cry
Of him that struck and him that vainly sued.
Henceforth no other ornament will I
But on my breast a ribbon red as blood.
And when they ask what dyed the silk so red,
I'll say, The life-blood of my brothers dead.
And when they ask how it may cleanséd be,
I'll say, O, not in river nor in sea;
Dishonor passes not in wave nor flood;
My ribbon ye must wash in German blood.
The repressed horror in the lines,
I have seen blood run, I have heard the cry
Of him that struck and him that vainly sued,
is the sentiment of a picture that presents the scene to the reader's eye as this shuddering woman saw it; and the heart of woman's fierceness and hate is in that fragment of drama with which the brief poem closes. It is the history of an epoch. That epoch is now past, however; so long and so irrevocably past, that Dall' Ongaro commented in a note upon the poem: “The word 'German' is left as a key to the opinions of the time. Human brotherhood has been greatly promoted since 1848. German is now no longer synonymous with enemy. Italy has made peace with the peoples, and is leagued with them all against their common oppressors.”
There is still another of these songs, in which the heart of womanhood speaks, though this time with a voice of pride and happiness.