Pilgrim swallow! pilgrim swallow!
On my grated window's sill,
Singing, as the mornings follow,
Quaint and pensive ditties still,
What would'st tell me in thy lay?
Prithee, pilgrim swallow, say!
All forgotten, com'st thou hither
Of thy tender spouse forlorn,
That we two may grieve together,
Little widow, sorrow worn?
Grieve then, weep then, in thy lay!
Pilgrim swallow, grieve alway!
Yet a lighter woe thou weepest:
Thou at least art free of wing,
And while land and lake thou sweepest,
May'st make heaven with sorrow ring,
Calling his dear name alway,
Pilgrim swallow, in thy lay.
Could I too! that am forbidden
By this low and narrow cell,
Whence the sun's fair light is hidden,
Whence thou scarce can'st hear me tell
Sorrows that I breathe alway,
While thou pip'st thy plaintive lay.
Ah! September quickly coming,
Thou shalt take farewell of me,
And, to other summers roaming,
Other hills and waters see,--
Greeting them with songs more gay,
Pilgrim swallow, far away.
Still, with every hopeless morrow,
While I ope mine eyes in tears,
Sweetly through my brooding sorrow
Thy dear song shall reach mine ears,--
Pitying me, though far away,
Pilgrim swallow, in thy lay.
Thou, when thou and spring together
Here return, a cross shalt see,--
In the pleasant evening weather,
Wheel and pipe, here, over me!
Peace and peace! the coming May,
Sing me in thy roundelay!
It is a great good fortune for a man to have written a thing so
beautiful as this, and not a singular fortune that he should have
written nothing else comparable to it. The like happens in all
literatures; and no one need be surprised to learn that I found the
other poems of Grossi often difficult, and sometimes almost impossible
to read.
Grossi was born in 1791, at Bollano, by lovely Como, whose hills and
waters he remembers in all his works with constant affection. He
studied law at the University of Pavia, but went early to Milan, where
he cultivated literature rather than the austerer science to which he
had been bred, and soon became the fashion, writing tales in Milanese
and Italian verse, and making the women cry by his pathetic art of
story-telling. “Ildegonda”, published in 1820, was the most popular of
all these tales, and won Grossi an immense number of admirers, every
one (says his biographer Cantù) of the fair sex, who began to wear
Ildegonda dresses and Ildegonda bonnets. The poem was printed and
reprinted; it is the heart-breaking story of a poor little maiden in
the middle ages, whom her father and brother shut up in a convent
because she is in love with the right person and will not marry the
wrong one--a common thing in all ages. The cruel abbess and wicked
nuns, by the order of Ildegonda's family, try to force her to take the
veil; but she, supported by her own repugnance to the cloister, and,
by the secret counsels of one of the sisters, with whom force
had succeeded, resists persuasion, reproach, starvation, cold,
imprisonment, and chains. Her lover attempts to rescue her by means of
a subterranean vault under the convent; but the plot is discovered,
and the unhappy pair are assailed by armed men at the very moment
of escape. Ildegonda is dragged back to her dungeon; and Rizzardo,
already under accusation of heresy, is quickly convicted and burnt at
the stake. They bring the poor girl word of this, and her sick brain
turns. In her delirium she sees her lover in torment for his heresy,
and, flying from the hideous apparition, she falls and strikes her
head against a stone. She wakes in the arms of the beloved sister who
had always befriended her. The cruel efforts against her cease now,
and she writes to her father imploring his pardon, which he gives,
with a prayer for hers. At last she dies peacefully. The story is
pathetic; and it is told with art, though its lapses of taste are
woful, and its faults those of the whole class of Italian poetry to
which it belongs. The agony is tedious, as Italian agony is apt to
be, the passion is outrageously violent or excessively tender, the
description too often prosaic; the effects are sometimes produced
by very “rough magic”. The more than occasional infelicity and
awkwardness of diction which offend in Byron's poetic tales are not
felt so much in those of Grossi; but in “Ildegonda” there is horror
more material even than in “Parisina”. Here is a picture of Rizzardo's
apparition, for which my faint English has no stomach:
Chè dalla bocca fuori gli pendea
La coda smisurata d' un serpente,
E il flagellava per la faccia, mentre
Il capo e il tronco gli scendean nel ventre.
Fischia la biscia nell' orribil lutta
Entro il ventre profondo del dannato,
Che dalla bocca lacerata erutta
Un torrente di sangue aggruppato;
E bava gialla, venenosa e brutta,
Dalle narici fuor manda col fiato,
La qual pel mento giù gli cola, e lassa
Insolcata la carne, ovunque passa.
It seems to have been the fate of Grossi as a poet to achieve fashion,
and not fame; and his great poem in fifteen cantos, called “I Lombardi
alla Prima Crociata”, which made so great a noise in its day, was
eclipsed in reputation by his subsequent novel of “Marco Visconti”.
Since the “Gerusalemma” of Tasso, it is said that no poem has made so
great a sensation in Italy as “I Lombardi”, in which the theme treated
by the elder poet is celebrated according to the aesthetics of the
Romantic School. Such parts of the poem as I have read have not
tempted me to undertake the whole; but many people must have at least
bought it, for it gave the author thirty thousand francs in solid
proof of popularity.
After the “Marco Visconti”, Grossi seems to have produced no work of
importance. He married late, but happily; and he now devoted himself
almost exclusively to the profession of the law, in Milan, where he
died in 1853, leaving the memory of a good man, and the fame of a poet
unspotted by reproach. As long as he lived, he was the beloved friend
of Manzoni. He dwelt many years under the influence of the stronger
mind, but not servile to it; adopting its literary principles, but
giving them his own expression.