Modern Italian Poets; Essays and Versions

by William Dean Howells

There is a description of a battle, in the Hour of my Youth, which. I cannot help quoting before I leave the poem. The battle took place between the Austrians and the French on the 14th of January, 1797, in the Chiusa, a narrow valley near Verona, and the fiercest part of the fight was for the possession of the hill of Rivoli.

Clouds of smoke
Floated along the heights; and, with her wild,
Incessant echo, Chiusa still repeated
The harmony of the muskets. Rival hosts
Contended for the poverty of a hill
That scarce could give their number sepulcher;
But from that hill-crest waved the glorious locks
Of Victory. And round its bloody spurs,
Taken and lost with fierce vicissitude,
Serried and splendid, swept and tempested
Long-haired dragoons, together with the might
Of the Homeric foot, delirious
With fury; and the horses with their teeth
Tore one another, or, tossing wild their manes,
Fled with their helpless riders up the crags,
By strait and imminent paths of rock, till down,
Like angels thunder-smitten, to the depths
Of that abyss the riders fell. With slain
Was heaped the dreadful amphitheater;
The rocks dropped blood; and if with gasping breath
Some wounded swimmer beat away the waves
Weakly between him and the other shore,
The merciless riflemen from the cliffs above,
With their inexorable aim, beneath
The waters sunk him.

The Monte Circellio is part of a poem in four cantos, dispersed, it is said, to avoid the researches of the police, in which the poet recounts in picturesque verse the glories and events of the Italian land and history through which he passes. A slender but potent cord of common feeling unites the episodes, and the lament for the present fate of Italy rises into hope for her future. More than half of the poem is given to a description of the geological growth of the earth, in which the imagination of the poet has unbridled range, and in which there is a success unknown to most other attempts to poetize the facts of science. The epochs of darkness and inundation, of the monstrous races of bats and lizards, of the mammoths and the gigantic vegetation, pass, and, after thousands of years, the earth is tempered and purified to the use of man by fire; and that

Paradise of land and sea, forever
Stirred by great hopes and by volcanic fires,
Called Italy,

takes shape: its burning mountains rise, its valleys sink, its plains extend, its streams run. But first of all, the hills of Rome lifted themselves from the waters, that day when the spirit of God dwelling upon their face

Saw a fierce group of seven enkindled hills,
In number like the mystic candles lighted
Within his future temple. Then he bent
Upon that mystic pleiades of flame
His luminous regard, and spoke to it:
“Thou art to be my Rome.” The harmony
Of that note to the nebulous heights supreme,
And to the bounds of the created world,
Rolled like the voice of myriad organ-stops,
And sank, and ceased. The heavenly orbs resumed
Their daily dance and their unending journey;
A mighty rush of plumes disturbed the rest
Of the vast silence; here and there like stars
About the sky, flashed the immortal eyes
Of choral angels following after him.

The opening lines of Monte Circellio are scarcely less beautiful than the first part of Un' Ora della mia Giovinezza, but I must content myself with only one other extract from the poem, leaving the rest to the reader of the original. The fact that every summer the Roman hospitals are filled with the unhappy peasants who descend from the hills of the Abruzzi to snatch its harvests from the feverish Campagna will help us to understand all the meaning of the following passage, though nothing could add to its pathos, unless, perhaps, the story given by Aleardi in a note at the foot of his page: “How do you live here?” asked a traveler of one of the peasants who reap the Campagna. The Abruzzese answered, “Signor, we die.”

What time,
In hours of summer, sad with so much light,
The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields,
The harvesters, as famine urges them,
Draw hither in thousands, and they wear
The look of those that dolorously go
In exile, and already their brown eyes
Are heavy with the poison of the air.
Here never note of amorous bird consoles
Their drooping hearts; here never the gay songs
Of their Abruzzi sound to gladden these
Pathetic hands. But taciturn they toil,
Reaping the harvest for their unknown lords;
And when the weary tabor is performed,
Taciturn they retire; and not till then
Their bagpipes crown the joys of the return,
Swelling the heart with their familiar strain.
Alas! not all return, for there is one
That dying in the furrow sits, and seeks
With his last look some faithful kinsman out,
To give his life's wage, that he carry it
Unto his trembling mother, with the last
Words of her son that comes no more. And dying,
Deserted and alone, far off he hears
His comrades going, with their pipes in time
Joyfully measuring their homeward steps.
And when in after years an orphan comes
To reap the harvest here, and feels his blade
Go quivering through the swaths of falling grain,
He weeps and thinks: haply these heavy stalks
Ripened on his unburied father's bones.

In the poem called The Marine and Commercial Cities of Italy (Le Città Italiane Marinare e Commercianti), Aleardi recounts the glorious rise, the jealousies, the fratricidal wars, and the ignoble fall of Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Genoa, in strains of grandeur and pathos; he has pride in the wealth and freedom of those old queens of traffic, and scorn and lamentation for the blind selfishness that kept them Venetian, Florentine, Pisan, and Genoese, and never suffered them to be Italian. I take from this poem the prophetic vision of the greatness of Venice, which, according to the patriotic tradition of Sabellico, Saint Mark beheld five hundred years before the foundation of the city, when one day, journeying toward Aquileja, his ship lost her course among the islands of the lagoons. The saint looked out over those melancholy swamps, and saw the phantom of a Byzantine cathedral rest upon the reeds, while a multitudinous voice broke the silence with the Venetian battle-cry, “Viva San Marco!” The lines that follow illustrate the pride and splendor of Venetian story, and are notable, I think, for a certain lofty grace of movement and opulence of diction.

There thou shalt lie, O Saint!{1} but compassed round
Thickly by shining groves
Of pillars; on thy regal portico,
Lifting their glittering and impatient hooves,
Corinth's fierce steeds shall bound;{2}
And at thy name, the hymn of future wars,
From their funereal caves
The bandits of the waves
Shall fly in exile;{3} brought from bloody fields
Hard won and lost in far-off Palestine,
The glimmer of a thousand Arab moons
Shall fill thy broad lagoons;
And on the false Byzantine's towers shall climb
A blind old man sublime,{4}
Whom victory shall behold
Amidst his enemies with thy sacred flag,
All battle-rent, unrolled.