Give me again, ye fountains and ye streams,
That flood of life, not yours, that swells your front
Beyond the natural fulness of your wont.
I gave, and I take back as it beseems.
And thou dense choking atmosphere on high
Disperse thy fog of sighs--for it is mine,
And make the glory of the sun to shine
Again on my dim eyes.--O, Earth and Sky
Give me again the footsteps I have trod.
Let the paths grow where I walked them bare,
The echoes where I waked them with my prayer
Be deaf--and let those eyes--those eyes, O God,
Give me the light I lent them.--That some soul
May take my love. Thou hadst no need of it.
This rough and exceedingly obscure sonnet, in which strong feeling has
condensed and distorted the language, seems to have been written by a
man who has been in love and has been repulsed. The shock has restored
him to a momentary realization of the whole experience. He looks at the
landscape, and lo! the beauty has dropped out of it. The stream has lost
its power, and the meadow its meaning. Summer has stopped. His next
thought is: "But it is I who had lent the landscape this beauty. That
landscape was myself, my dower, my glory, my birthright," and so he
breaks out with "Give me back the light I threw upon you," and so on
till the bitter word flung to the woman in the last line. The same
clearness of thought and obscurity of expression and the same passion is
to be found in the famous sonnet--"_Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun
concetto_,"--where he blames himself for not being able to obtain her
good-will--as a bad sculptor who cannot hew out the beauty from the
rock, although he feels it to be there; and in that heart-breaking one
where he says that people may only draw from life what they give to it,
and says no good can come to a man who, looking on such great beauty,
feels such pain.
It is not profitable, nor is it necessary for the comprehension of the
poems, to decide to whom or at what period each one was written. There
is dispute about some of them as to whether they were addressed to men
or women. There is question as to others whether they are prayers
addressed to Christ or love poems addressed to Vittoria. In this latter
case, perhaps, Michael Angelo did not himself know which they were.
Vittoria used to instruct him in religion, and he seems to have felt for
her a love so deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touching that the
words are alive in which he mentions her.
"I wished," he writes beneath a sonnet which he sent her, evidently in
return for some of her own religious poems, "I wished, before taking the
things that you had many times deigned to give me, in order that I might
receive them the less unworthily, to make something for you from my own
hand. But then, remembering and knowing that the grace of God may not be
bought, and that to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, I confess
my fault, and willingly receive the said things, and when they shall
arrive, not because they are in my house, but I myself as being in a
house of theirs, shall deem myself in Paradise."
We must not forget that at this time Michael Angelo was an old man,
that he carried about with him a freshness and vigor of feeling that
most people lose with their youth. A reservoir of emotion broke loose
within him at a time when it caused his hale old frame suffering to
undergo it, and reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope with it. A
mystery play was enacted in him,--each sonnet is a scene. There is the
whole of a man in each of many of these sonnets. They do not seem so
much like poems as like microcosms. They are elementally complete. The
soul of man could be evolved again from them if the formula were lost.