Now thou shalt rest forever,
O weary heart! The last deceit is ended,
For I believed myself immortal. Cherished
Hopes, and beloved delusions,
And longings to be deluded,--all are perished!
Rest thee forever! Oh, greatly,
Heart, hast thou palpitated. There is nothing
Worthy to move thee more, nor is earth worthy
Thy sighs. For life is only
Bitterness and vexation; earth is only
A heap of dust. So rest thee!
Despair for the last time. To our race Fortune
Never gave any gift but death. Disdain, then,
Thyself and Nature and the Power
Occultly reigning to the common ruin:
Scorn, heart, the infinite emptiness of all things!
Nature was so cruel a stepmother to this man that he could see nothing
but harm even in her apparent beneficence, and his verse repeats again
and again his dark mistrust of the very loveliness which so keenly
delights his sense. One of his early poems, called “The Quiet after
the Storm”, strikes the key in which nearly all his songs are pitched.
The observation of nature is very sweet and honest, and I cannot see
that the philosophy in its perversion of the relations of physical and
spiritual facts is less mature than that of his later work: it is a
philosophy of which the first conception cannot well differ from the
final expression.
... See yon blue sky that breaks
The clouds above the mountain in the west!
The fields disclose themselves,
And in the valley bright the river runs.
All hearts are glad; on every side
Arise the happy sounds
Of toil begun anew.
The workman, singing, to the threshold comes,
With work in hand, to judge the sky,
Still humid, and the damsel next,
On his report, comes forth to brim her pail
With the fresh-fallen rain.
The noisy fruiterers
From lane to lane resume
Their customary cry.
The sun looks out again, and smiles upon
The houses and the hills. Windows and doors
Are opened wide; and on the far-off road
You hear the tinkling bells and rattling wheels
Of travelers that set out upon their journey.
Every heart is glad;
So grateful and so sweet
When is our life as now?
* * * * *
O Pleasure, child of Pain,
Vain joy which is the fruit
Of bygone suffering overshadowèd
And wrung with cruel fears
Of death, whom life abhors;
Wherein, in long suspense,
Silent and cold and pale,
Man sat, and shook and shuddered to behold
Lightnings and clouds and winds,
Furious in his offense!
Beneficent Nature, these,
These are thy bounteous gifts:
These, these are the delights
Thou offerest unto mortals! To escape
From pain is bliss to us;
Anguish thou scatterest broadcast, and our woes
Spring up spontaneous, and that little joy
Born sometimes, for a miracle and show,
Of terror is our mightiest gain. O man,
Dear to the gods, count thyself fortunate
If now and then relief
Thou hast from pain, and blest
When death shall come to heal thee of all pain!
“The bodily deformities which humiliated Leopardi, and the cruel
infirmities that agonized him his whole life long, wrought in his
heart an invincible disgust, which made him invoke death as the sole
relief. His songs, while they express discontent, the discord of the
world, the conviction of the nullity of human things, are exquisite in
style; they breathe a perpetual melancholy, which is often sublime,
and they relax and pain your soul like the music of a single chord,
while their strange sweetness wins you to them again and again.” This
is the language of an Italian critic who wrote after Leopardi's death,
when already it had begun to be doubted whether he was the greatest
Italian poet since Dante. A still later critic finds Leopardi's style,
“without relief, without lyric flight, without the great art of
contrasts, without poetic leaven,” hard to read. “Despoil those verses
of their masterly polish,” he says, “reduce those thoughts to prose,
and you will see how little they are akin to poetry.”
I have a feeling that my versions apply some such test to Leopardi's
work, and that the reader sees it in them at much of the disadvantage
which this critic desires for it. Yet, after doing my worst, I am
not wholly able to agree with him. It seems to me that there is the
indestructible charm in it which, wherever we find it, we must call
poetry. It is true that “its strange sweetness wins you again and
again,” and that this “lonely pipe of death” thrills and solemnly
delights as no other stop has done. Let us hear it again, as the poet
sounds it, figuring himself a Syrian shepherd, guarding his flock by
night, and weaving his song under the Eastern moon:
O flock that liest at rest, O blessèd thou
That knowest not thy fate, however hard,
How utterly I envy thee!
Not merely that thou goest almost free
Of all this weary pain,--
That every misery and every toil
And every fear thou straightway dost forget,--
But most because thou knowest not ennui
When on the grass thou liest in the shade.
I see thee tranquil and content,
And great part of thy years
Untroubled by ennui thou passest thus.
I likewise in the shadow, on the grass.
Lie, and a dull disgust beclouds
My soul, and I am goaded with a spur,
So that, reposing, I am farthest still
From finding peace or place.
And yet I want for naught,
And have not had till now a cause for tears.
What is thy bliss, how much,
I cannot tell; but thou art fortunate.
* * * * *
Or, it may be, my thought
Errs, running thus to others' destiny;
May be, to everything,
Wherever born, in cradle or in fold,
That day is terrible when it was born.
It is the same note, the same voice; the theme does not change, but
perhaps it is deepened in this ode:
ON THE LIKENESS OP A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN CARVEN
UPON HER TOMB.
Such wast thou: now under earth
A skeleton and dust. O'er dust and bones
Immovably and vainly set, and mute,
Looking upon the flight of centuries,
Sole keeper of memory
And of regret is this fair counterfeit
Of loveliness now vanished. That sweet look,
Which made men tremble when it fell on them,
As now it falls on me; that lip, which once,
Like some full vase of sweets,
Ran over with delight; that fair neck, clasped
By longing, and that soft and amorous hand,
Which often did impart
An icy thrill unto the hand it touched;
That breast, which visibly
Blanched with its beauty him who looked on it--
All these things were, and now
Dust art thou, filth, a fell
And hideous sight hidden beneath a stone.
Thus fate hath wrought its will
Upon the semblance that to us did seem
Heaven's vividest image! Eternal mystery
Of mortal being! To-day the ineffable
Fountain of thoughts and feelings vast and high,
Beauty reigns sovereign, and seems
Like splendor thrown afar
From some immortal essence on these sands,
To give our mortal state
A sign and hope secure of destinies
Higher than human, and of fortunate realms,
And golden worlds unknown.
To-morrow, at a touch,
Loathsome to see, abominable, abject,
Becomes the thing that was
All but angelical before;
And from men's memories
All that its loveliness
Inspired forever faults and fades away.
Ineffable desires
And visions high and pure
Rise in the happy soul,
Lulled by the sound of cunning harmonies
Whereon the spirit floats,
As at his pleasure floats
Some fearless swimmer over the deep sea;
But if a discord strike
The wounded sense, to naught
All that fair paradise in an instant falls.
Mortality! if thou
Be wholly frail and vile,
Be only dust and shadow, how canst thou
So deeply feel? And if thou be
In part divine, how can thy will and thought
By things so poor and base
So easily be awakenèd and quenched?
Let us touch for the last time this pensive chord, and listen to its
response of hopeless love. This poem, in which he turns to address
the spirit of the poor child whom he loved boyishly at Recanati, is
pathetic with the fact that possibly she alone ever reciprocated the
tenderness with which his heart was filled.