From the horrible profound
Of the voiceless sepulcher
Comes, or seems to come, a sound;
Is't his Grace, the Duke, astir?
In his trance he hath been laid
As one dead among the dead!
The relentless stone he tries
With his utmost strength to move;
Fails, and in his fury cries,
Smiting his hands, that those above,
If any shall be passing there,
Hear his blasphemy, or his prayer.
And at last he seems to hear
Light feet overhead go by;
“O, whoever passes near
Where I am, the Duke am I!
All my states and all I have
To him that takes me from this grave.”
There is no one that replies;
Surely, some one seemed to come!
On his brow the cold sweat lies,
As he waits an instant dumb;
Then he cries with broken breath,
“Save me, take me back from death!”
“Where thou liest, lie thou must,
Prayers and curses alike are vain:
Over thee dead Gismond's dust--
Whom thy pitiless hand hath slain--
On this stone so heavily
Rests, we cannot set thee free.”
From the sepulcher's thick walls
Comes a low wail of dismay,
And, as when a body falls,
A dull sound;--and the next day
In a convent the Duke's wife
Hideth her remorseful life.
Of course, Carrer wrote much poetry besides his ballads. There are
idyls, and romances in verse, and hymns; sonnets of feeling and of
occasion; odes, sometimes of considerable beauty; apologues, of such
exceeding fineness of point, that it often escapes one; satires and
essays, or _sermoni_, some of which I have read with no great
relish. The same spirit dominates nearly all--the spirit of pensive
disappointment which life brings to delicate and sensitive natures,
and which they love to affect even more than they feel. Among Carrer's
many sonnets, I think I like best the following, of which the
sentiment seems to me simple and sweet, and the expression very
winning:
I am a pilgrim swallow, and I roam
Beyond strange seas, of other lands in quest,
Leaving the well-known lakes and hills of home,
And that dear roof where late I hung my nest;
All things beloved and love's eternal woes
I fly, an exile from my native shore:
I cross the cliffs and woods, but with me goes
The care I thought to abandon evermore.
Along the banks of streams unknown to me,
I pipe the elms and willows pensive lays,
And call on her whom I despair to see,
And pass in banishment and tears my days.
Breathe, air of spring, for which I pine and yearn,
That to his nest the swallow may return!
The prose writings of Carrer are essays on Aesthetics and morals, and
sentimentalized history. His chief work is of the latter nature.
“I Sette Gemme di Venezia” are sketches of the lives of the seven
Venetian women who have done most to distinguish the name of their
countrywomen by their talents, or misfortunes, or sins. You feel,
in looking through the book, that its interest is in great part
factitious. The stories are all expanded, and filled up with facile
but not very relevant discourse, which a pleasant fancy easily
supplies, and which is always best left to the reader's own thought.
The style is somewhat florid; but the author contrives to retain in
his fantastic strain much of the grace of simplicity. It is the work
of a cunning artist; but it has a certain insipidity, and it wearies.
Carrer did well in the limit which he assigned himself, but his range
was circumscribed. At the time of his death, he had written sixteen
cantos of an epic poem called “La Fata Vergine”, which a Venetian
critic has extravagantly praised, and which I have not seen. He
exercised upon the poetry of his day an influence favorable to lyric
naturalness, and his ballads were long popular.