Serene the silver fishes glide,
Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed!
As, through the aged deeps of ocean,
They glide with wan and wavy motion.
They have no pathway where they go,
They flow like water to and fro,
They watch with never-winking eyes,
They watch with staring, cold surprise,
The level people in the air,
The people peering, peering there:
Who wander also to and fro,
And know not why or where they go,
Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.
_Arturo Giovannitti_
Arturo Giovannitti was born in Abruzzi, Italy, January 7, 1884. He
studied at the college of his native province and came to New York
when he was eighteen years old. Even as a child, Giovannitti had
dreamed of America and had “learned upon the knees of his mother and
father to reverence, with tears in his eyes, the name of the
republic.” With the dream of America as the great liberator in his
heart, his first impressions were shattering. What he saw, through
the eyes of the laborer, was the whiplash and legal trickery, the
few ruling the many, the miseries and exploitation of the helpless.
He thought of becoming a preacher, attended theological school;
sought a greater outlet for his passion for democracy and became an
editor; lectured, wrote pamphlets and worked continually to express
“a multitude of men lost in an immensity of silence.”
Although Giovannitti has written several books in Italian, his one
English volume is _Arrows in the Gale_ (1914). In an eloquent
introduction to the poet’s rough music and rougher mixture of
realism and rapture, Helen Keller writes, “He makes us feel the
presence of toilers behind tenement walls, behind the machinery they
guide.... He finds voice for his message in the sighs, the dumb
hopes, the agonies and thwartings of men who are bowed and broken by
the monster hands of machines.”
Several of Giovannitti’s poems are in rhyme, but his most
characteristic lines move in uplifted prose poems that shape
themselves vividly to their subjects. “The Cage,” with its
restrained anger, and “The Walker” are typical. “The Walker,”
unfortunately too long to quote in its entirety, is remarkable not
only as an art-work but as a document; it is a twentieth-century
“Ballad of Reading Gaol,” with an intensity and mystical power of
which Wilde was incapable.