He takes this fruitful theme, because he feels it to be alive with eternal interest, and rejects the well-worn classic fables, because
Under the bushes of the odorous mint
The Dryads are buried, and the placid Dian
Guides now no longer through the nights below
Th' invulnerable hinds and pearly car,
To bless the Carian shepherd's dreams. No more
The valley echoes to the stolen kisses,
Or to the twanging bow, or to the bay
Of the immortal hounds, or to the Fauns'
Plebeian laughter. From the golden rim
Of shells, dewy with pearl, in ocean's depths
The snowy loveliness of Galatea
Has fallen; and with her, their endless sleep
In coral sepulchers the Nereids
Forgotten sleep in peace.
The poet cannot turn to his theme, however, without a sad and scornful apostrophe to his own land, where he figures himself sitting by the way, and craving of the frivolous, heartless, luxurious Italian throngs that pass the charity of love for Italy. They pass him by unheeded, and he cries:
Hast thou seen
In the deep circle of the valley of Siddim,
Under the shining skies of Palestine,
The sinister glitter of the Lake of Asphalt?
Those coasts, strewn thick with ashes of damnation,
Forever foe to every living thing,
Where rings the cry of the lost wandering bird
That, on the shore of the perfidious sea,
Athirsting dies,—that watery sepulcher
Of the five cities of iniquity,
Where even the tempest, when its clouds hang low,
Passes in silence, and the lightning dies,—
If thou hast seen them, bitterly hath been
Thy heart wrung with the misery and despair
Of that dread vision!
Yet there is on earth
A woe more desperate and miserable,—
A spectacle wherein the wrath of God
Avenges him more terribly. It is
A vain, weak people of faint-heart old men,
That, for three hundred years of dull repose,
Has lain perpetual dreamer, folded in
The ragged purple of its ancestors,
Stretching its limbs wide in its country's sun,
To warm them; drinking the soft airs of autumn
Forgetful, on the fields where its forefathers
Like lions fought! From overflowing hands,
Strew we with hellebore and poppies thick
The way.
But the throngs have passed by, and the poet takes up his theme. Abel sits before an altar upon the borders of Eden, and looks with an exile's longing toward the Paradise of his father, where, high above all the other trees, he beholds,
Lording it proudly in the garden's midst,
The guilty apple with its fatal beauty.
He weeps; and Cain, furiously returning from the unaccepted labor of the fields, lifts his hand against his brother.
It was at sunset;
The air was severed with a mother's shriek,
And stretched beside the o'erturned altar's foot
Lay the first corse.
Ah! that primal stain
Of blood that made earth hideous, did forebode
To all the nations of mankind to come
The cruel household stripes, and the relentless
Battles of civil wars, the poisoned cup,
The gleam of axes lifted up to strike
The prone necks on the block.
The fratricide
Beheld that blood amazed, and from on high
He heard the awful voice of cursing leap,
And in the middle of his forehead felt
God's lightning strike....
....And there from out the heart
All stained with guiltiness emerged the coward
Religion that is born of loveless fears.
And, moved and shaken like a conscious thing,
The tree of sin dilated horribly
Its frondage over all the land and sea,
And with its poisonous shadow followed far
The flight of Cain....
.... And he who first
By th' arduous solitudes and by the heights
And labyrinths of the virgin earth conducted
This ever-wandering, lost Humanity
Was the Accursed.
Cain passes away, and his children fill the world, and the joy of guiltless labor brightens the poet's somber verse.
The murmur of the works of man arose
Up from the plains; the caves reverberated
The blows of restless hammers that revealed,
Deep in the bowels of the fruitful hills,
The iron and the faithless gold, with rays
Of evil charm. And all the cliffs repeated
The beetle's fall, and the unceasing leap
Of waters on the paddles of the wheel
Volubly busy; and with heavy strokes
Upon the borders of the inviolate woods
The ax was heard descending on the trees,
Upon the odorous bark of mighty pines.
Over the imminent upland's utmost brink
The blonde wild-goat stretched forth his neck to meet
The unknown sound, and, caught with sudden fear,
Down the steep bounded, and the arrow cut
Midway the flight of his aerial foot.