'Mongst us phantoms of Italians,--
Mummies even from our birth,--
The very babies' nurses
Help to put them under earth.
'T is a waste of holy water
When we're taken to the font:
They that make us pay for burial
Swindle us to that amount.
In appearance we're constructed
Much like Adam's other sons,--
Seem of flesh and blood, but really
We are nothing but dry bones.
O deluded apparitions,
What do _you_ do among men?
Be resigned to fate, and vanish
Back into the past again!
Ah! of a perished people
What boots now the brilliant story?
Why should skeletons be bothering
About liberty and glory?
Why deck this funeral service
With such pomp of torch and flower?
Let us, without more palaver,
Growl this requiem, of ours.
And so the poet recounts the Italian names distinguished in modern
literature, and describes the intellectual activity that prevails in
this Land of the Dead. Then he turns to the innumerable visitors of
Italy:
O you people hailed down on us
From the living, overhead,
With what face can you confront us,
Seeking health among us dead?
Soon or late this pestilential
Clime shall work you harm--beware!
Even you shall likewise find it
Foul and poisonous grave-yard air.
O ye grim, sepulchral friars
Ye inquisitorial ghouls,
Lay down, lay down forever,
The ignorant censor's tools.
This wretched gift of thinking,
O ye donkeys, is your doom;
Do you care to expurgate us,
Positively, in the tomb?
Why plant this bayonet forest
On our sepulchers? what dread
Causes you to place such jealous
Custody upon the dead?
Well, the mighty book of Nature
Chapter first and last must have;
Yours is now the light of heaven,
Ours the darkness of the grave.
But, then, if you ask it,
We lived greatly in our turn;
We were grand and glorious, Gino,
Ere our friends up there were born!
O majestic mausoleums,
City walls outworn with time,
To our eyes are even your ruins
Apotheosis sublime!
O barbarian unquiet
Raze each storied sepulcher!
With their memories and their beauty
All the lifeless ashes stir.
O'er these monuments in vigil
Cloudless the sun flames and glows
In the wind for funeral torches,--
And the violet, and the rose,
And the grape, the fig, the olive,
Are the emblems fit of grieving;
'T is, in fact, a cemetery
To strike envy in the living.
Well, in fine, O brother corpses,
Let them pipe on as they like;
Let us see on whom hereafter
Such a death as ours shall strike!
'Mongst the anthems of the function
Is not _Dies Irae_? Nay,
In all the days to come yet,
Shall there be no Judgment Day?
In a vein of like irony, the greater part of Giusti's political poems
are written, and none of them is wanting in point and bitterness, even
to a foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point
and the _tang_ of their local expressions. It was the habi
the satirist, who at least loved the people's quaintness and
originality--and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to
demand of a poet--it was Giusti's habit to replenish his vocabulary
from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his
satires a racy local flavor; and though he cannot be said to have
written dialect, since Tuscan is the Italian language, he gained by
these words and phrases the frankness and fineness of dialect.
But Giusti had so much gentleness, sweetness, and meekness in his
heart, that I do not like to leave the impression of him as a satirist
last upon the reader. Rather let me close these meager notices with
the beautiful little poem, said to be the last he wrote, as he passed
his days in the slow death of the consumptive. It is called