Yet d’Annunzio’s vision of power, his appetency of enormous and
abnormal things, was now to assume a new form. The grandiose dream of
the Superman expands into the dream of the Super-nation. The discovery
of Rome had taught him something of the pride of citizenship, and more
than the nascent pride of nationality. But in the last year of the
century he underwent an experience which turned this nascent emotion
into a passion, and the poet himself into a prophet and preacher in
its service, an ‘announcer’ as he was fond of saying, of the cause and
creed of _Italianità_.
He had as yet seen nothing of Europe beyond the Alps. In 1900 he made
an extensive tour, but in no tourist spirit. An Italian had no need
to go abroad for beauty of nature or of art, and d’Annunzio’s keen
eyes were turned in quite other directions--to the great Transalpine
nations with their vast resources and their high ambitions; and he
measured their several capacities for success in the conflict which
he, among the first, saw to be impending. He was impressed by the
threatening growth of Germany, and by ‘the extraordinary development
of race-energy’ in England. Everywhere the force of nationality was
more vehement than ever before. ‘All the world is stretched like a bow,
and never was the saying of Heracleitos more significant: “The bow is
called Bios (life), and its work is death.”’
But where was Italy in this universal tension of the national spirit?
Where was _her_ strung bow? How was _she_ preparing to hold her own
with the great progressive nations of the North? D’Annunzio flung down
these challenging questions in his eloquent pamphlet, _Della coscienza
nazionale_ (1900). To the foreign observer the trouble with Italy did
not seem to be defective ambition. She had rather appeared to take
her new rôle as a great Power too seriously, blundering into rash
adventures abroad when she ought to have been spreading the elements of
civilization at home. But d’Annunzio had seen the race for empire in
the North, and his call to Italy was the call of an imperialist; a call
for unity of purpose, for concentration of national wealth and strength
in the interest of a greater Italy, mistress of the Adriatic, if not of
the Mediterranean. It was the beginning of a new phase of d’Annunzio’s
career. He was henceforth a public man, whose voice, the most resonant
and eloquent then to be heard in Italy, counted, as poetic voices so
rarely do, in the direction of public affairs. He entered Parliament, a
proclaimed disciple in policy of Crispi, the Italian Bismarck.
How did these enlarged ideals affect d’Annunzio’s work in poetry?
In part, as has been hinted, disastrously. The enlarged ideals lent
themselves with perverse ease, in a mind already obsessed with
_sovrumanità_, to a mere megalomania, a rage for bigness, only more
mischievous in practice, and nowise better as literature, because it
was conveyed in terms of navies and transmarine dominions. He had
already in his fine series of _Odi Navali_ (1893) fanned to some
purpose the naval ambitions of his country. He now sounded a loftier
note, suited to the vaster horizons of an Italian Mediterranean. These,
for instance, are some stanzas from the opening hymn or prayer prefixed
to his colossal naval tragedy, _La Nave_ (1908):
O Lord, who bringest forth and dost efface
The ocean-ruling Nations, race by race,
It is this living People by Thy grace
Who on the Sea
Shall magnify Thy name, who on the Sea
Shall glorify Thy name, who on the Sea
With myrrh and blood shall sacrifice to Thee
At the altar-prow.
Of all Earth’s oceans make Our Sea, O Thou!
Amen!
The fourth book of the _Laudi_ is a lyric celebration in this spirit,
of the Tripoli adventure ‘beyond the sea.’ But megalomania was happily
not the whole result. The older and deeper instincts planted or
quickened in d’Annunzio by his earlier experience--the feeling for
race and for historic continuity--coalesced with the new and vehement
passion of nationality, communicating to it, in moments of vision,
something of their human intimacy, and undergoing in their turn an
answering enlargement of range and scope. If his _Italianità_ was
something more significant than a resonant cry for more ships and
territory, it was because it drew warmth and insight from the home
sentiment for his Abruzzan province deep-rooted in the poet’s heart;
while the Abruzzan province, in its turn, was seen in the larger and
grander setting of the Italian people and the Roman race, but without
the distorting nimbus of megalomaniac dreams. This fortunate harmony
found expression chiefly in certain poems of the years shortly before
and after the beginning of the new century, the golden period of
d’Annunzio’s production. To these years belong his two most notable
attempts to give to Italy a tragic poetry built upon Italian history.
In the material for tragic poetry no country was richer, but it had
been left to the genius of foreign dramatists to give world-wide fame
to the stories of Romeo and Juliet, Beatrice Cenci, and Torquato Tasso.
Alfieri, the greatest of Italian tragic poets, had devoted his austere
art almost solely to classical subjects; and his _Don Garzia_ and
_Congiura de’ Pazzi_, with Niccolini’s _Arnaldo da Brescia_, Monti’s
_Galeotto Manfredi_, and Manzoni’s _Conte di Carmagnola_ and _Adelchi_
stood almost alone, as remarkable Italian tragedies on Italian themes.
In the story of Francesca of Rimini, d’Annunzio found to his hand a
native tragic subject of the first order, not yet touched by a tragic
poet of genius, Italian or other. That it had been made his own by
the supreme poet of Italy hardly disturbed d’Annunzio, deeply as he
revered the poet whose words, in the fine phrase of his Dante Ode,
clothed Italy like the splendour of day. He was not going to challenge
comparison with Dante’s marmoreal brevity. And the poet of Pescara had
some title to regard this story of the adjacent Adriatic sea-board
of Rimini and Ravenna, as his by right. But the story itself has
also exerted its moderating control upon the natural prodigiosity of
his invention, so that in his Francescan tragedy it is possible to
recognize a general conformity to traditional technique.
It is even possible that Shakespeare’s handling of his Italian tragedy
may have afforded a hint. The ruin of Romeo and Juliet results from the
feud of the rival houses. The ruin of d’Annunzio’s Francesca and Paolo
is similarly rooted ultimately in the feud of Guelf and Ghibelline. Her
father, a great Guelf captain, has sold her to the lord of Ravenna, as
the price of support against the Ghibellines. But when her hand is thus
plighted, she has already seen his brother Paolo, with his feminine
beauty and luxuriant locks, pass under her window, and the seed of
their passion is sown. Francesca has grown up ‘a flower in an iron
soil,’ and love throughout is set in a frame of war. But she would be
no d’Annunzian heroine if she did not respond to the call of life and
light. When about to leave Rimini on her marriage she replies to the
pleading of her devoted young sister who cannot live without her, ‘I am
going, sweet life, where thou canst not come, to a deep and solitary
place, where a great fire burns without fuel.’ Fire is d’Annunzio’s
haunting symbol for terrible and splendid things, a symbol, too, for
the strange union of cruelty and beauty in his own mind and art, and
it does not here forecast only the Inferno flames in which she will
move with Paolo so lightly before the wind. In the palace at Ravenna
we see her among her ladies, chafing at her dull seclusion, while the
Ghibelline siege rages without. A Florentine merchant displays his
gorgeous wares before them, a feast of scarlet and gold. Presently
Francesca has climbed to the tower where her husband’s brothers are
on guard. Bolts and arrows crash against the walls or through the
loophole. A cauldron of Greek fire stands ready for use. Francesca, to
the horror of the soldiers, fires it, and breaks into wild ecstasy at
the ‘deadly beauty’ of this ‘swift and terrible life.’ A moment later a
bolt pierces the curls of Paolo. She thinks he is wounded, and clasps
his head. In that embrace he stammers the first word of love. ‘They
have not hit me, but your hands have touched me, and have undone the
soul within my heart!...’ _Francesca_: ‘Lost! Thou art lost!’ Thus,
again, Francesca’s fate, like Juliet’s, is provoked by the irrelevant
feud of parties without. But presently the same irrelevant feud thrusts
the lovers apart. Paolo is sent as General of the Guelf forces to
Florence. Francesca in his absence reads the Lancelot romance with her
ladies. But Paolo, unable to endure his exile, posts back to Ravenna,
and rushes to her chamber. The romance of Lancelot lies open on the
lectern. The place where the reading stopped is marked; it is where
Galeotto is urging Lancelot’s suit upon Ginevra. They bend over the
book together. The following dialogue replaces Dante’s single pregnant
line:
_Pa._ Let us read a page, Francesca!
_Fr._ Look at that swarm of swallows, making a shadow
On the bright water!
_Pa._ Let us read, Francesca.
_Fr._ And that sail that is glowing like fire!
_Pa._ (_reading_). ‘Assuredly,
Lady,’ says Galeotto, ‘he does not dare,
Nor will he ask ye anything of love,
Being afraid, but I ask in his name, and if
I did not ask, you ought to seek it, seeing
You could in no wise win a richer treasure.’
And she says--
(_drawing Francesca gently by the hand_)
Now do you read what she says,
Be you Ginevra.
_Fr._ (_reading_). And she says: ‘Well I know it, and I will do
What you command. And Galeotto said:
Grammercy, lady; I beg that you will give him
Your love....’
(_she stops._)
_Pa._ Read further!
_Fr._ No, I cannot see
The words.
_Pa._ Read: ‘Certainly ...
_Fr._ Certainly,’ she says,
‘I give it him, but so that he be mine
And I utterly his, and all ill things
Made good’ ... Paolo, enough.
_Pa._ (_reading with a hoarse and tremulous voice_).
‘Lady, he says, much thanks; now in my presence
Kiss him, for earnest of true love’--You, you!
What says she now? What now?
(_Their pale faces bend over the book, so that their cheeks
almost touch._)
_Fr._ (_reading_). She says: ‘Why should
He beg it of me? I desire it more
Than you....’
_Pa._ (_continuing with stifled voice_). ‘They draw apart.
And the Queen sees
The Knight dare go no further. Then she clasps him
About the chin, and with a long kiss kisses
His mouth....’
(_He kisses her in the same way. When their mouths separate
Francesca reels, and falls back on the cushions._)
Francesca!
_Fr._ (_with hardly audible voice_).
No, Paolo!
The sequel is too long drawn out, and is marred by the duplicity of
all the persons concerned. Malatestino’s sleuth-hound cunning brings
about the husband’s vengeance, but his strategy is animated only by
ferocious hatred of the lovers, not by any care for justice. By his
contrivance the rough soldier, who has never suspected his own wrongs,
returns prematurely from the march, and thunders at the lovers’ chamber
door: ‘Open, Francesca!’ The wretched Paolo tries to escape through
a trapdoor, but is dragged up by the hair to be slain. But Francesca
rushes to clasp him, and the husband’s sword pierces her. _Francesca da
Rimini_, though a brilliant drama, with innumerable beauties of detail,
misses, like the _Dead City_, the quality of great tragedy. Of the
principal characters Francesca alone excites a fitful sympathy, while
Paolo’s effeminacy provokes a contempt which diminishes our compassion
for the woman whose love he has won. These coward ‘heroes’ who leave
their mistresses in mortal peril, or slay their sisters, or see their
brides borne to execution in their place, seem to haunt the egoist
imagination of the poet, to the grievous hurt of his work. Yet when all
is said, _Francesca_ is one of the most arresting, though dramatically
by no means one of the best, plays produced in Europe during the first
decade of the century.
If the _Francesca_ owed much to the stimulus and the control of a
great historic and literary tradition, the rarer beauty of _La Figlia
di Iorio_ (1904) was nourished on the old intimate passion for his
Abruzzan race and home. In language the more moving, because in
d’Annunzio so seldom heard, he dedicated ‘To the land of Abruzzi, to
my Mother, to my Sisters, to my Brother in exile, to my Father in his
grave, to all my Dead, to all my People between the Mountains and the
Sea, this song of the ancient blood.’ It betokened, indeed, no mere
recurrence to the scenes and memories of his childhood, but a recovery,
through them, of the more primitive sensibilities and sympathies which
the complexities of an ultra modern culture had obscured or submerged.
The shepherds and peasants of this ‘pastoral tragedy’ live and move in
an atmosphere fanatically tense with the customs and beliefs of their
catholicized paganism; but no believing poet ever drew the ritual of
rustic unreason with more delicate sympathy, or rendered its wild
prayers and incantations in more expressive and beautiful song. For
the poetry is not exotic or imposed; like the songs of peasants in
opera, it is found and elicited. The young shepherd, Aligi, is drawn
into a kind of mystic relationship to Mila di Codra, a witch-maiden
dreaded and abhorred over the whole countryside. But a bride has been
chosen for him by his family, and the scene opens on the morning after
their nominal bridal. Aligi’s three sisters are seen kneeling before
the old carved oak chest, choosing her bridal robes, and vying with
each other in joyous morning carols. A band of scarlet wool is drawn
across the open door, a crook and a distaff lean against it, and by
the doorpost hangs a waxen cross as a charm against evil spells. Aligi
looks on in dreamy distraction, his thoughts far away. The women of
the neighbouring farms come in procession bearing gifts of corn
in baskets on their heads. An unknown girl follows in their train.
Presently angry cries are heard in the distance. The reapers are in
pursuit of Mila, whose spells have spoilt their harvest; they have
seen her enter the house, and now they clamour at the door for her
surrender. The frightened women tremble, but Mila has crouched down
on the sacred hearth, whence it would be sacrilege to remove her, and
Ornella, the youngest of the sisters, who alone secretly pities Mila,
draws the bolts. The storm of menace grows louder, till Aligi, roused
from his dreamy absorption by the taunts of the women, raises his hand
to strike the suppliant on the hearth. Immediately the horror of his
sacrilege seizes him, he implores her pardon on his knees, and thrusts
his guilty hand into the flame. Then he hangs the cross above the door
and releases the bolts. The reapers rush in, but seeing the cross, draw
back in dismay, baring their heads. Aligi has saved his ‘sister in
Christ;’ but his guilt is not effaced.
In the second Act, Aligi and Mila are living together, as brother and
sister, in a mountain cavern. He would fain go with his flocks to Rome
to seek dissolution of his marriage; but she knows that happiness is
not for her, and she will not hurt him with her passionate love. But
in his home they know only that the witch-maiden has decoyed the son
away from his mother and his virgin bride; Ornella, the compassionate
sister, is thrust out of doors, and now the father, who had returned
home only after the reapers had gone, arrives at the mountain cavern
in Aligi’s absence, and peremptorily summons Mila. She holds him
defiantly at bay. He is about to seize her, when Aligi appears on the
threshold. In the great scene which follows the Roman authority of the
Abruzzan father over the son overpowers for the moment even the lover’s
devotion. Not softened by Aligi’s humble submission, Làzaro binds him,
flogs him savagely, and turns upon Mila, now wholly in his power.
At the moment when he has seized her Aligi breaks free, rushes upon
his father, and kills him. The third act opens with the mourning for
Làzaro, in long-drawn lyric dirges. Then harsher and fiercer notes are
heard, and Aligi, deeply penitent, appears black-robed and bound, borne
by the angry mob to bid farewell to his mother before being led to the
parricide’s death. ‘To call you mother is no more permitted me, for my
mouth is of hell, the mouth that sucked your milk, and learnt from you
holy prayers in the fear of God. Why have I harmed you so sorely? I
would fain say, but I will be silent. O most helpless of all women who
have suckled a son, who have sung him to sleep in the cradle and at the
breast, O do not lift this black veil to see the face of the trembling
sinner....’ The crowd tries to comfort her in its rough way, and the
mother gives her son the bowl of drugged wine. Suddenly, confused
cries are heard in the rear, and Mila breaks her way impetuously
through the throng. ‘Mother, sisters, bride of Aligi, just people,
justice of God, I am Mila di Codra. I am guilty. Give me hearing!’
They call for silence, and Mila declares that Aligi is innocent, and
she the murderer. Aligi protests: ‘Before God thou liest.’ But the
crowd eagerly turns its fury upon the dreaded sorceress who owns her
guilt, and the cry goes up: ‘To the flames! To the flames!’ Aligi
protests again, but with growing faintness, as the deadening potion
masters and confuses his brain; till at length, when the bonds have
been transferred from his limbs to Mila’s, he lifts up his hands
to curse her. At this felon stroke her spirit breaks down. With a
piercing shriek she cries: ‘Aligi, Aligi, not thou, thou canst not,
thou must not!’ She is hurried away to the stake, only Ornella crying
aloud: ‘Mila, Mila, Sister in Jesus, Paradise is for thee,’ while Mila
herself, now full of the d’Annunzian exultation in glorious ruin, goes
to her death crying: ‘Beautiful Flame, Beautiful Flame!’
A brief résumé such as this inevitably brings into undue emphasis
the melodramatic elements of the plot. Yet it is the most human and
natural, as it is the most beautiful, of d’Annunzio’s dramas. For the
strangest things that happen in it are no mere projections of the
poet’s inspired ferocity or eroticism, as so often elsewhere, but are
grounded in the real psychology of a primitive countryside. We see its
fear, love, hatred, now mysteriously mastered by superstitious awe, now
breaking rebelliously from its control, now wrought by its mystic power
to else inexplicable excesses.
V
But even the finest dramatic work of d’Annunzio makes clear that his
genius is fundamentally lyrical. The greatest moments of _La Figlia
di Iorio_ and _Francesca_ are uttered in a vein which thrills and
sings; while, on the other hand, these moments are often reached by
summary short cuts, not by the logical evolution of great drama. And
it is fortunate that while he continued to be allured by drama--giving
in particular a very individual rendering of the tragedy of Phædra
(1909)--d’Annunzio’s most serious and ambitious poetry took the form
of a festival of sustained song, the _Laudi_ (1903 onwards). We have
already quoted from the picture of his childhood drawn retrospectively,
in the opening book, by the poet of forty. But these passages, though
not at all merely episodic, hardly disclose the deeper sources of
inspiration in this series of lyric cycles. ‘Praises,’ he calls
them, ‘Praises of the Sky, of the Sea, of the Earth, of its Heroes.’
The glory of earth, and sea, and sky had drawn more majestic praise
from the poet of the 123rd Psalm, though in his naïve Hebrew way he
‘praised’ only their Maker, not these ‘wonderful works’ themselves.
D’Annunzio’s ‘praise’ expresses simply the ravishment of acute
sensibilities in the presence of the loveliness and sublimity of
Nature and the heroism of man, an emotion Greek rather than Hebraic.
Our poet is perhaps the least Hebraic of all modern poets of genius;
and if his barbaric violence alienates him almost as completely from
the Hellenic temper, he is yet akin to it by his inexhaustible joy in
beauty. And in these years of the _Laudi_ Hellas had become more than
ever the determining focus about which his artistic dreams revolved,
the magnet to whose lure even the barbarian in him succumbs. The
first book, called _Maia_, after the mother of Hermes, describes
the poet’s spiritual journey to the shrine of that god of energy and
enterprise, whose Praxitelean image, the most magnificent expression
of radiant virility ever fashioned by the chisel, had not long
before been unearthed at Olympia. It is a journey of discovery, and
d’Annunzio invokes for it the symbolism of the last voyage of the
Dantesque Ulysses to seek the experience that lay ‘beyond the sunset.’
D’Annunzio turns his prow east, not west, but he, too, is daring peril
in the quest of the unknown. A splendid Proem in _terza rima_, ‘To
the Pleiads and the Fates,’ takes us to a rocky promontory by the
Atlantic shore, where, on a flaming pyre, the helm of the wrecked ship
of Ulysses is being consumed--the fiery consummation which crowns most
of d’Annunzio’s heroic careers. The modern venturer, too, must disdain
safety, not like Galileo turning back into the secure haven, but
fronting the pathless sea of fate with no anchor but his own valour.
The sequel does not, it is true, accord completely with this Ulyssean
vision. Symbolic imagery is interwoven, in this ‘spiritual journey,’
to the ruin of poetic coherence, with scenes from an actual voyage to
Greece, leaves from a tourist’s notebook, incidents of steamer-life,
games and talk on board, sketches of fellow-passengers, the squalor and
vice of Patras. Presently the ship reaches Elis, and then, as we enter
the ruins of Olympia, the great past, human and divine, rises up before
us. Pericles, Alcibiades, Themistocles obliterate the tourist memories,
and the poet holds high colloquy with Zeus, and offers up a prayer,
nine hundred lines long, to Hermes--a lurid picture of the future of
humanity, as d’Annunzio imagined it, wrought by the genius of Energy
and Enterprise, Invention and Will; a future dominated by men of rocky
jaw, who chew care like a laurel leaf, precipitate themselves on life,
and impregnate it relentlessly with their purposes,--a significant
image, for the d’Annunzian Hermes is fused with Eros (v. 2904). Eros
was, indeed, indispensable, it might well be thought, to a quite
satisfying d’Annunzian divinity. Yet in the fine colloquy with Zeus,
which precedes, he touches a deeper note, rare with him, of desperate
and baffled struggle with his own ‘vast sensuality.’ He begs Zeus for a
sign. ‘I am at war with many monsters, but the direst are those, ah me!
which rise within me from the depths of my lusts.’ ‘Thou wilt conquer
them,’ replies Zeus, ‘only if thou canst transform them into divine
children.’
The monsters, nevertheless, continued to haunt his later art. But
happier moods were interposed, when he found relief from their urgency
in poetic communing with the passionless calm of Nature and of the dead
things that cannot die.
Such moods in the second and third books of the _Laudi_, _Elettra_
and _Alcione_, both mainly written before the _Maia_. The _Alcione_,
in particular, is the record of a true ‘halcyon’ season--of hours or
moments--in the poet’s stormy course. It opens, indeed, with a savage
denunciation--in perfectly handled _terza rima_--of the demons, within
and without, that he has striven with. But now for a while he calls a
truce:
Washed clean from human foulness in cool springs,
I need but, for my festival, the ring
Of the ultimate horizons of the earth.
The breezes and the radiant air shall weave
My new robe, and this body, purged from sin,
Shall dance, light-hearted and alert, within!
Air and light and water do indeed play a large and significant part
in this benign experience, and in the poetry which renders it. Water,
we know, had peculiar allurements for his imagination; but now the
obsession of fleets and arsenals is overcome, and he looks out over the
wide levels of the Arno mouth, where fishing boats with their hanging
nets are seen, transfigured in the effulgence of the west, like cups
or lilies of flame upon the water; or ‘on a June evening after rain,’
when ‘the gracious sky, tenderly gazing at her image in the earth she
has refreshed, laughs out from a thousand mirrors.’ The solidity of the
material world seems to remain only in its most delicate and attenuated
forms--the crescent moon ‘slender as the eyebrow of a girl,’ the
lean boughs and tapering leaves of the olive, the seashore sand, not
‘ribbed’ as Wordsworth put it, but delicately traced like the palate
or the finger-tip. The poet is visibly striving through these frail
and delicate things to escape his obsession into a realm of spirit he
divines, but cannot reach:
A slender wreath suffices, with few leaves,
Lest it with weight or any shadow burden
The gracious thoughts of dawn!
This is the language of no sensualist, but of a mystic. And d’Annunzio
in these poems again and again approaches the poetic mysticism of
Wordsworth, and of Shelley and Dante. As he watches the dewy loveliness
of evening, the earth seems to dissolve in the ‘infinite smile,’ which
for Shelley ‘kindled the universe’;[25] and for the Italian it is the
smile of Beatrice. In the child, who hardly exists for him before, the
poet of pitiless virility now sees not only ‘the father of the man,’
but the soul implicitly aware of the Truth we only guess at:
The immense plenitude of life
Is tremulous in the light murmur
Of thy virginal breathing,
And Man with his fervours and griefs.
* * * * *
Thou art ignorant of all, and discernest
All the Truths that the Shadow hides.
If thou questionest Earth, Heaven answers,
If thou speak’st with the waters, the flowers hear.[26]
There are hints, perhaps reminiscences, of Wordsworth here; but
d’Annunzio’s more obvious affinity is doubtless with Shelley, whose
Roman grave he saluted in an ode of lofty eulogy and sculptured grace.
The lyric eloquence of _Alcione_ undoubtedly recalls the rush of
Shelley’s music and the æthereal liquidity of his style. Yet they
touch across a gulf of profound disparity. D’Annunzio, for all his
preoccupation with air and light and water, never, either as man or
as artist, escapes the earth. The hard stuff of his egoism is never
really transmuted in the flame of love; nor does the clear and delicate
precision of his style ever really dissolve in radiant suffusion.
D’Annunzio’s nature-world, like Shelley’s, is peopled with imagined
shapes, in which the myths of old Greece are created anew. But here
too their divergence asserts itself. Shelley’s Prometheus is not
really earth-born, and his Asia is the hardly embodied symbol of the
ideal passion of his own soul. While d’Annunzio’s Triton and Dryad are
recognizably akin to the sea or woodland life they spring from, hued
like the salt deep, and full of the sap of earth. D’Annunzio is the
greater artist, Shelley the finer and the rarer soul.
But these gracious idylls were, as has been hinted, an episode.
Nature could not replace man; beyond ‘earth’ and ‘sea’ and ‘sky,’ the
‘heroes,’ and especially the heroes and heroic memories of Italy,
called for his ‘praise.’ Here, he felt, was the home of his spirit. The
gracious valley of Arno might be
A cradle of flowers and dreams and peace;
But the cradle of my soul
Is the crashing chariot’s furrow
In the stone of the Appian Way.
The _Elettra_, the second book of the _Laudi_, is mainly devoted
to the memories of these vanished glories. The resonant herald
of the Third Italy wanders, for instance, among the ‘Cities of
Silence’--decayed, half grass-grown capitals of vanished dukes and
extinct republics--Ferrara, Pisa, Pistoja; oldest and grandest of all,
Ravenna, the ‘deep ship’s hull, heavy with the iron weight of empire,
driven by shipwreck on the utmost bounds of the world.’[27] Of the
sequence of lyrics on the great enterprise of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand,’
_La Notte di Caprera_, it is enough to say that it is worthy of being
put beside Carducci’s Ode. After a quarter of a century Garibaldi’s
glory was no whit dimmed. On the contrary, Italians who knew how many
gross blots defiled the Italy he had helped to win, saw Garibaldi as
a figure of ideal splendour and purity on the further side of a foul
morass. The bitter disillusion of such minds is powerfully painted in
the moving piece: ‘To One of the Thousand.’ An old Garibaldian sailor
brings his broken anchor-cable to the ship cordwainer to be mended. He
looks on, sombre, dejected, silent, but thinking what he does not say;
and his thoughts are like this:
The anchor-sheet is broken: let it be.
No hope of mending. Give it up, go home!
Turn into scourges, cordsman, and halter-nooses
Thy bitter twine.
Vilely supine lies the Third Italy,
A harlot-people put to basest uses,
And in her holy oak-grove’s shadow, Rome
Pastures her swine.[28]
But Rome, the eternal City, could only obscure her destiny, not efface
it; disillusion founded on her moments of self-oblivion was itself the
vainest of illusions. That is the faith of the new Italian Renascence,
and d’Annunzio, the fiercest chastiser of her oblivious fatuities,
attains his loftiest note of ‘praise’ in the Ode which prophetically
arrays Rome in glory as the future centre of the embodied Power of Man.
It is based on the legend, told by Ovid,[29] of the ship of the Great
Mother, stranded in the Tiber mud, and drawn to shore by the Vestal
Virgin Claudia Quinta. The opening stanzas tell the story--the dearth
in the city, the Sibylline oracle’s counsel to bring the image of the
Mater Magna, the arrival of her ship in the river, the stranding in
the mud, the vain efforts of the entire city to extricate it, until
a Vestal Virgin, without an effort, draws it to bank. Then the poet
interprets the symbolic legend: