Like Primal Histories, the Hour of my Youth is a contemplative poem,
to which frequency of episode gives life and movement; but its scope
is less grand, and the poet, recalling his early days, remembers
chiefly the events of defeated revolution which give such heroic
sadness and splendor to the history of the first third of this
century. The work is characterized by the same opulence of diction,
and the same luxury of epithet and imagery, as the Primal Histories,
but it somehow fails to win our interest in equal degree: perhaps
because the patriot now begins to overshadow the poet, and appeal
is often made rather to the sympathies than the imagination. It is
certain that art ceases to be less, and country more, in the poetry
of Aleardi from this time. It could scarcely be otherwise; and had it
been otherwise, the poet would have become despicable, not great, in
the eyes of his countrymen.
The Hour of my Youth opens with a picture, where, for once at least,
all the brilliant effects are synthetized; the poet has ordered here
the whole Northern world, and you can dream of nothing grand or
beautiful in those lonely regions which you do not behold in it.
Ere yet upon the unhappy Arctic lands,
In dying autumn, Erebus descends
With the night's thousand hours, along the verge
Of the horizon, like a fugitive,
Through the long days wanders the weary sun;
And when at last under the wave is quenched
The last gleam of its golden countenance,
Interminable twilight land and sea
Discolors, and the north-wind covers deep
All things in snow, as in their sepulchers
The dead are buried. In the distances
The shock of warring Cyclades of ice
Makes music as of wild and strange lament;
And up in heaven now tardily are lit
The solitary polar star and seven
Lamps of the Bear. And now the warlike race
Of swans gather their hosts upon the breast
Of some far gulf, and, bidding their farewell
To the white cliffs, and slender junipers,
And sea-weed bridal-beds, intone the song
Of parting, and a sad metallic clang
Send through the mists. Upon their southward way
They greet the beryl-tinted icebergs; greet
Flamy volcanoes, and the seething founts
Of Geysers, and the melancholy yellow
Of the Icelandic fields; and, wearying,
Their lily wings amid the boreal lights,
Journey away unto the joyous shores
Of morning.
In a strain of equal nobility, but of more personal and subjective
effect, the thought is completed:
So likewise, my own soul, from these obscure
Days without glory, wings its flight afar
Backward, and journeys to the years of youth
And morning. Oh, give me back once more,
Oh, give me, Lord, one hour of youth again!
For in that time I was serene and bold,
And uncontaminate, and enraptured with
The universe. I did not know the pangs
Of the proud mind, nor the sweet miseries
Of love; and I had never gathered yet,
After those fires so sweet in burning, bitter
Handfuls of ashes, that, with tardy tears
Sprinkled, at last have nourished into bloom
The solitary flower of penitence.
The baseness of the many was unknown,
And civic woes had not yet sown with salt
Life's narrow field. Ah! then the infinite
Voices that Nature sends her worshipers
From land, from sea, and from the cloudy depths
Of heaven smote the echoing soul of youth
To music. And at the first morning sigh
Of the poor wood-lark,--at the measured bell
Of homeward flocks, and at the opaline wings
Of dragon-flies in their aërial dances
Above the gorgeous carpets of the marsh,--
At the wind's moan, and at the sudden gleam
Of lamps lighting in some far town by night,--
And at the dash of rain that April shoots
Through the air odorous with the smitten dust,--
My spirits rose, and glad and swift my thought
Over the sea of being sped all-sails.
There is a description of a battle, in the Hour of my Youth, which.
I cannot help quoting before I leave the poem. The battle took place
between the Austrians and the French on the 14th of January, 1797, in
the Chiusa, a narrow valley near Verona, and the fiercest part of the
fight was for the possession of the hill of Rivoli.
Clouds of smoke
Floated along the heights; and, with her wild,
Incessant echo, Chiusa still repeated
The harmony of the muskets. Rival hosts
Contended for the poverty of a hill
That scarce could give their number sepulcher;
But from that hill-crest waved the glorious locks
Of Victory. And round its bloody spurs,
Taken and lost with fierce vicissitude,
Serried and splendid, swept and tempested
Long-haired dragoons, together with the might
Of the Homeric foot, delirious
With fury; and the horses with their teeth
Tore one another, or, tossing wild their manes,
Fled with their helpless riders up the crags,
By strait and imminent paths of rock, till down,
Like angels thunder-smitten, to the depths
Of that abyss the riders fell. With slain
Was heaped the dreadful amphitheater;
The rocks dropped blood; and if with gasping breath
Some wounded swimmer beat away the waves
Weakly between him and the other shore,
The merciless riflemen from the cliffs above,
With their inexorable aim, beneath
The waters sunk him.
The Monte Circellio is part of a poem in four cantos, dispersed, it
is said, to avoid the researches of the police, in which the poet
recounts in picturesque verse the glories and events of the Italian
land and history through which he passes. A slender but potent cord
of common feeling unites the episodes, and the lament for the present
fate of Italy rises into hope for her future. More than half of the
poem is given to a description of the geological growth of the earth,
in which the imagination of the poet has unbridled range, and in which
there is a success unknown to most other attempts to poetize the facts
of science. The epochs of darkness and inundation, of the monstrous
races of bats and lizards, of the mammoths and the gigantic
vegetation, pass, and, after thousands of years, the earth is tempered
and purified to the use of man by fire; and that
Paradise of land and sea, forever
Stirred by great hopes and by volcanic fires,
Called Italy,
takes shape: its burning mountains rise, its valleys sink, its plains
extend, its streams run. But first of all, the hills of Rome lifted
themselves from the waters, that day when the spirit of God dwelling
upon their face
Saw a fierce group of seven enkindled hills,
In number like the mystic candles lighted
Within his future temple. Then he bent
Upon that mystic pleiades of flame
His luminous regard, and spoke to it:
“Thou art to be my Rome.” The harmony
Of that note to the nebulous heights supreme,
And to the bounds of the created world,
Rolled like the voice of myriad organ-stops,
And sank, and ceased. The heavenly orbs resumed
Their daily dance and their unending journey;
A mighty rush of plumes disturbed the rest
Of the vast silence; here and there like stars
About the sky, flashed the immortal eyes
Of choral angels following after him.
The opening lines of Monte Circellio are scarcely less beautiful than
the first part of Un' Ora della mia Giovinezza, but I must content
myself with only one other extract from the poem, leaving the rest
to the reader of the original. The fact that every summer the Roman
hospitals are filled with the unhappy peasants who descend from the
hills of the Abruzzi to snatch its harvests from the feverish Campagna
will help us to understand all the meaning of the following passage,
though nothing could add to its pathos, unless, perhaps, the story
given by Aleardi in a note at the foot of his page: “How do you live
here?” asked a traveler of one of the peasants who reap the Campagna.
The Abruzzese answered, “Signor, we die.”
What time,
In hours of summer, sad with so much light,
The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields,
The harvesters, as famine urges them,
Draw hither in thousands, and they wear
The look of those that dolorously go
In exile, and already their brown eyes
Are heavy with the poison of the air.
Here never note of amorous bird consoles
Their drooping hearts; here never the gay songs
Of their Abruzzi sound to gladden these
Pathetic hands. But taciturn they toil,
Reaping the harvest for their unknown lords;
And when the weary tabor is performed,
Taciturn they retire; and not till then
Their bagpipes crown the joys of the return,
Swelling the heart with their familiar strain.
Alas! not all return, for there is one
That dying in the furrow sits, and seeks
With his last look some faithful kinsman out,
To give his life's wage, that he carry it
Unto his trembling mother, with the last
Words of her son that comes no more. And dying,
Deserted and alone, far off he hears
His comrades going, with their pipes in time
Joyfully measuring their homeward steps.
And when in after years an orphan comes
To reap the harvest here, and feels his blade
Go quivering through the swaths of falling grain,
He weeps and thinks: haply these heavy stalks
Ripened on his unburied father's bones.
In the poem called The Marine and Commercial Cities of Italy (Le Città
Italiane Marinare e Commercianti), Aleardi recounts the glorious rise,
the jealousies, the fratricidal wars, and the ignoble fall of Venice,
Florence, Pisa, and Genoa, in strains of grandeur and pathos; he has
pride in the wealth and freedom of those old queens of traffic,
and scorn and lamentation for the blind selfishness that kept them
Venetian, Florentine, Pisan, and Genoese, and never suffered them
to be Italian. I take from this poem the prophetic vision of the
greatness of Venice, which, according to the patriotic tradition of
Sabellico, Saint Mark beheld five hundred years before the foundation
of the city, when one day, journeying toward Aquileja, his ship lost
her course among the islands of the lagoons. The saint looked out over
those melancholy swamps, and saw the phantom of a Byzantine cathedral
rest upon the reeds, while a multitudinous voice broke the silence
with the Venetian battle-cry, “Viva San Marco!” The lines that follow
illustrate the pride and splendor of Venetian story, and are notable,
I think, for a certain lofty grace of movement and opulence of
diction.
There thou shalt lie, O Saint!{1} but compassed round
Thickly by shining groves
Of pillars; on thy regal portico,
Lifting their glittering and impatient hooves,
Corinth's fierce steeds shall bound;{2}
And at thy name, the hymn of future wars,
From their funereal caves
The bandits of the waves
Shall fly in exile;{3} brought from bloody fields
Hard won and lost in far-off Palestine,
The glimmer of a thousand Arab moons
Shall fill thy broad lagoons;
And on the false Byzantine's towers shall climb
A blind old man sublime,{4}
Whom victory shall behold
Amidst his enemies with thy sacred flag,
All battle-rent, unrolled.
Notes:
{1} The bones of St. Mark repose in his church at Venice.
{2} The famous bronze horses of St. Mark's still shine with the gold
that once covered them.
{3} Venice early swept the Adriatic of the pirates who infested it.
{4} The Doge Enrico Dandolo, who, though blind and bowed with eighty
years of war, was the first to plant the banner of Saint Mark on the
walls of Constantinople when that city was taken by the Venetians and
Crusaders.
The late poems of Aleardi are nearly all in this lyrical form, in
which the thought drops and rises with ceaseless change of music,
and which wins the reader of many empty Italian canzoni by the mere
delight of its movement. It is well adapted to the subjects for which
Aleardi has used it; it has a stateliness and strength of its own, and
its alternate lapse and ascent give animation to the ever-blending
story and aspiration, appeal or reflection. In this measure are
written The Three Rivers, The Three Maidens, and The Seven Soldiers.
The latter is a poem of some length, in which the poet, figuring
himself upon a battle-field on the morrow after a combat between
Italians and Austrians, “wanders among the wounded in search of
expiated sins and of unknown heroism. He pauses,” continues his
eloquent biographer in the _Galleria Nazionale_, “to meditate on the
death of the Hungarian, Polish, Bohemian, Croatian, Austrian, and
Tyrolese soldiers, who personify the nationalities oppressed by the
tyranny of the house of Hapsburg. A minister of God, praying beside
the corpses of two friends, Pole and Hungarian, hails the dawn of the
Magyar resurrection. Then rises the grand figure of Sandor Petofi,
'the patriotic poet of Hungary,' whose life was a hymn, and whose
miraculous re-appearance will, according to popular superstition, take
place when Hungary is freed from her chains. The poem closes with a
prophecy concerning the destinies of Austria and Italy.” Like all the
poems of Aleardi, it abounds in striking lines; but the interest,
instead of gathering strongly about one central idea, diffuses itself
over half-forgotten particulars of revolutionary history, and the
sympathy of the reader is fatigued and confused with the variety of
the demand upon it.
For this reason, The Three Rivers and The Three Maidens are more
artistic poems: in the former, the poet seeks vainly a promise of
Italian greatness and unity on the banks of Tiber and of Arno, but
finds it by the Po, where the war of 1859 is beginning; in the latter,
three maidens recount to the poet stories of the oppression which has
imprisoned the father of one, despoiled another's house through the
tax-gatherer, and sent the brother of the third to languish, the
soldier-slave of his tyrants, in a land where “the wife washes the
garments of her husband, yet stained with Italian blood”.
A very little book holds all the poems which Aleardi has written, and
I have named them nearly all. He has in greater degree than any other
Italian poet of this age, or perhaps of any age, those qualities
which English taste of this time demands--quickness of feeling and
brilliancy of expression. He lacks simplicity of idea, and his style
is an opal which takes all lights and hues, rather than the crystal
which lets the daylight colorlessly through. He is distinguished no
less by the themes he selects than by the expression he gives them.
In his poetry there is passion, but his subjects are usually those to
which love is accessory rather than essential; and he cares better to
sing of universal and national destinies as they concern individuals,
than the raptures and anguishes of youthful individuals as they
concern mankind. The poet may be wrong in this, but he achieves an
undeniable novelty in it, and I confess that I read him willingly on
account of it.
In taking leave of him, I feel that I ought to let him have the last
word, which is one of self-criticism, and, I think, singularly just.
He refers to the fact of his early life, that his father forbade him
to be a painter, and says: “Not being allowed to use the pencil, I
have used the pen. And precisely on this account my pen resembles
too much a pencil; precisely on this account I am too much of a
naturalist, and am too fond of losing myself in minute details. I am
as one, who, in walking, goes leisurely along, and stops every moment
to observe the dash of light that breaks through the trees of the
woods, the insect that alights on his hand, the leaf that falls on
his head, a cloud, a wave, a streak of smoke; in fine, the thousand
accidents that make creation so rich, so various, so poetical, and
beyond which we evermore catch glimpses of that grand, mysterious
something, eternal, immense, benignant, and never inhuman or cruel, as
some would have us believe, which is called God.”