Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions

by William Dean Howells

The poet views this growth of nations from youth to decrepitude, and, coming back at last to himself and to his own laud and time, breaks forth into a lament of grave and touching beauty:

Muse of an aged people, in the eve
Of fading civilization, I was born
Of kindred that have greatly expiated
And greatly wept. For me the ambrosial fingers
Of Graces never wove the laurel crown,
But the Fates shadowed, from my youngest days,
My brow with passion-flowers, and I have lived
Unknown to my dear land. Oh, fortunate
My sisters that in the heroic dawn
Of races sung! To them did destiny give
The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness
Of their land's speech; and, reverenced, their hands
Ran over potent strings. To me, the hopes
Turbid with hate; to me, the senile rage;
To me, the painted fancies clothed by art
Degenerate; to me, the desperate wish,
Not in my soul to nurse ungenerous dreams,
But to contend, and with the sword of song
To fight my battles too.

Such is the spirit, such is the manner, of the Prime Storie of Aleardi. The merits of the poem are so obvious, that it seems scarcely profitable to comment upon its picturesqueness, upon the clearness and ease of its style, upon the art which quickens its frequent descriptions of nature with a human interest. The defects of the poem are quite as plain, and I have again to acknowledge the critical acuteness of Arnaud, who says of Aleardi: “Instead of synthetizing his conceptions, and giving relief to the principal lines, the poet lingers caressingly upon the particulars, preferring the descriptive to the dramatic element. Prom this results poetry of beautiful arabesques and exquisite fragments, of harmonious verse and brilliant diction.”

Nevertheless, the same critic confesses that the poetry of Aleardi “is not academically common”, and pleases by the originality of its very mannerism.

III.

Like Primal Histories, the Hour of my Youth is a contemplative poem, to which frequency of episode gives life and movement; but its scope is less grand, and the poet, recalling his early days, remembers chiefly the events of defeated revolution which give such heroic sadness and splendor to the history of the first third of this century. The work is characterized by the same opulence of diction, and the same luxury of epithet and imagery, as the Primal Histories, but it somehow fails to win our interest in equal degree: perhaps because the patriot now begins to overshadow the poet, and appeal is often made rather to the sympathies than the imagination. It is certain that art ceases to be less, and country more, in the poetry of Aleardi from this time. It could scarcely be otherwise; and had it been otherwise, the poet would have become despicable, not great, in the eyes of his countrymen.

The Hour of my Youth opens with a picture, where, for once at least, all the brilliant effects are synthetized; the poet has ordered here the whole Northern world, and you can dream of nothing grand or beautiful in those lonely regions which you do not behold in it.

Ere yet upon the unhappy Arctic lands,
In dying autumn, Erebus descends
With the night's thousand hours, along the verge
Of the horizon, like a fugitive,
Through the long days wanders the weary sun;
And when at last under the wave is quenched
The last gleam of its golden countenance,
Interminable twilight land and sea
Discolors, and the north-wind covers deep
All things in snow, as in their sepulchers
The dead are buried. In the distances
The shock of warring Cyclades of ice
Makes music as of wild and strange lament;
And up in heaven now tardily are lit
The solitary polar star and seven
Lamps of the Bear. And now the warlike race
Of swans gather their hosts upon the breast
Of some far gulf, and, bidding their farewell
To the white cliffs, and slender junipers,
And sea-weed bridal-beds, intone the song
Of parting, and a sad metallic clang
Send through the mists. Upon their southward way
They greet the beryl-tinted icebergs; greet
Flamy volcanoes, and the seething founts
Of Geysers, and the melancholy yellow
Of the Icelandic fields; and, wearying,
Their lily wings amid the boreal lights,
Journey away unto the joyous shores
Of morning.

In a strain of equal nobility, but of more personal and subjective effect, the thought is completed:

So likewise, my own soul, from these obscure
Days without glory, wings its flight afar
Backward, and journeys to the years of youth
And morning. Oh, give me back once more,
Oh, give me, Lord, one hour of youth again!
For in that time I was serene and bold,
And uncontaminate, and enraptured with
The universe. I did not know the pangs
Of the proud mind, nor the sweet miseries
Of love; and I had never gathered yet,
After those fires so sweet in burning, bitter
Handfuls of ashes, that, with tardy tears
Sprinkled, at last have nourished into bloom
The solitary flower of penitence.
The baseness of the many was unknown,
And civic woes had not yet sown with salt
Life's narrow field. Ah! then the infinite
Voices that Nature sends her worshipers
From land, from sea, and from the cloudy depths
Of heaven smote the echoing soul of youth
To music. And at the first morning sigh
Of the poor wood-lark,—at the measured bell
Of homeward flocks, and at the opaline wings
Of dragon-flies in their aërial dances
Above the gorgeous carpets of the marsh,—
At the wind's moan, and at the sudden gleam
Of lamps lighting in some far town by night,—
And at the dash of rain that April shoots
Through the air odorous with the smitten dust,—
My spirits rose, and glad and swift my thought
Over the sea of being sped all-sails.