Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions

by William Dean Howells

So all the wild earth was tamed to the hand of man, and the wisdom of the stars began to reveal itself to the shepherds,

Who, in the leisure of the argent nights,
Leading their flocks upon a sea of meadows,

turned their eyes upon the heavenly bodies, and questioned them in their courses. But a taint of guilt was in all the blood of Cain, which the deluge alone could purge.

And beautiful beyond all utterance
Were the earth's first-born daughters. Phantasms these
That now enamor us decrepit, by
The light of that prime beauty! And the glance
Those ardent sinners darted had beguiled
God's angels even, so that the Lord's command
Was weaker than the bidding of their eyes.
And there were seen, descending from on high,
His messengers, and in the tepid eyes
Gathering their flight about the secret founts
Where came the virgins wandering sole to stretch
The nude pomp of their perfect loveliness.
Caught by some sudden flash of light afar,
The shepherd looked, and deemed that he beheld
A fallen star, and knew not that he saw
A fallen angel, whose distended wings,
All tremulous with voluptuous delight,
Strove vainly to lift him to the skies again.
The earth with her malign embraces blest
The heavenly-born, and they straightway forgot
The joys of God's eternal paradise
For the brief rapture of a guilty love.
And from these nuptials, violent and strange,
A strange and violent race of giants rose;
A chain of sin had linked the earth to heaven;
And God repented him of his own work.

The destroying rains descended,

And the ocean rose,
And on the cities and the villages
The terror fell apace. There was a strife
Of suppliants at the altars; blasphemy
Launched at the impotent idols and the kings;
There were embraces desperate and dear,
And news of suddenest forgivenesses,
And a relinquishment of all sweet things;
And, guided onward by the pallid prophets,
The people climbed, with lamentable cries,
In pilgrimage up the mountains.
But in vain;
For swifter than they climbed the ocean rose,
And hid the palms, and buried the sepulchers
Far underneath the buried pyramids;
And the victorious billow swelled and beat
At eagles' Alpine nests, extinguishing
All lingering breath of life; and dreadfuller
Than the yell rising from the battle-field
Seemed the hush of every human sound.
On the high solitude of the waters naught
Was seen but here and there unfrequently
A frail raft, heaped with languid men that fought
Weakly with one another for the grass
Hanging about a cliff not yet submerged,
And here and there a drowned man's head, and here
And there a file of birds, that beat the air
With weary wings.

After the deluge, the race of Noah repeoples the empty world, and the history of mankind begins anew in the Orient. Rome is built, and the Christian era dawns, and Rome falls under the feet of the barbarians. Then the enthusiasm of Christendom sweeps toward the East, in the repeated Crusades; and then, “after long years of twilight”, Dante, the sun of Italian civilization, rises; and at last comes the dream of another world, unknown to the eyes of elder times.

But between that and our shore roared diffuse
Abysmal seas and fabulous hurricanes
Which, thought on, blanched the faces of the bold;
For the dread secret of the heavens was then
The Western world. Yet on the Italian coasts
A boy grew into manhood, in whose soul
The instinct of the unknown continent burned.
He saw in his prophetic mind depicted
The opposite visage of the earth, and, turning
With joyful defiance to the ocean, sailed
Forth with two secret pilots, God and Genius.
Last of the prophets, he returned in chains
And glory.

In the New World are the traces, as in the Old, of a restless humanity, wandering from coast to coast, growing, building cities, and utterly vanishing. There are graves and ruins everywhere; and the poet's thought returns from these scenes of unstoried desolation, to follow again the course of man in the Old World annals. But here, also, he is lost in the confusion of man's advance and retirement, and he muses:

How many were the peoples? Where the trace
Of their lost steps? Where the funereal fields
In which they sleep? Go, ask the clouds of heaven
How many bolts are hidden in their breasts,
And when they shall be launched; and ask the path
That they shall keep in the unfurrowed air.
The peoples passed. Obscure as destiny,
Forever stirred by secret hope, forever
Waiting upon the promised mysteries,
Unknowing God, that urged them, turning still
To some kind star,—they swept o'er the sea-weed
In unknown waters, fearless swam the course
Of nameless rivers, wrote with flying feet
The mountain pass on pathless snows; impatient
Of rest, for aye, from Babylon to Memphis,
From the Acropolis to Rome, they hurried.
And with them passed their guardian household gods,
And faithful wisdom of their ancestors,
And the seed sown in mother fields, and gathered,
A fruitful harvest in their happier years.
And, 'companying the order of their steps
Upon the way, they sung the choruses
And sacred burdens of their country's songs,
And, sitting down by hospitable gates,
They told the histories of their far-off cities.
And sometimes in the lonely darknesses
Upon the ambiguous way they found a light,—
The deathless lamp of some great truth, that Heaven
Sent in compassionate answer to their prayers.
But not to all was given it to endure
That ceaseless pilgrimage, and not on all
Did the heavens smile perennity of life
Revirginate with never-ceasing change;
And when it had completed the great work
Which God had destined for its race to do,
Sometimes a weary people laid them down
To rest them, like a weary man, and left
Their nude bones in a vale of expiation,
And passed away as utterly forever
As mist that snows itself into the sea.