Doth no one fight for thee, no one defend thee,
None of thy own? Arms, arms! For I alone
Will fight and fall for thee.
Grant me, O Heaven, my blood
Shall be as fire unto Italian hearts!
Where are thy sons? I hear the sound of arms,
Of wheels, of voices, and of drums;
In foreign fields afar
Thy children fight and fall.
Wait, Italy, wait! I see, or seem to see,
A tumult as of infantry and horse,
And smoke and dust, and the swift flash of swords
Like lightning among clouds.
Wilt thou not hope? Wilt thou not lift and turn
Thy trembling eyes upon the doubtful close?
For what, in yonder fields,
Combats Italian youth? O gods, ye gods,
For other lands Italian swords are drawn!
Oh, misery for him who dies in war,
Not for his native shores and his beloved,
His wife and children dear,
But by the foes of others
For others’ cause, and cannot dying say,
“Dear land of mine,
The life thou gavest me I give thee back.”
This suffers, of course, in translation, but I confess that in the original it wears something of the same perfunctory air. His patriotism was the fever-flame of the sick man’s blood; his real country was the land beyond the grave, and there is a far truer note in this address to Death.
And thou, that ever from my life’s beginning
I have invoked and honored, Beautiful Death! who only
Of all our earthly sorrows knowest pity:
If ever celebrated
Thou wast by me; if ever I attempted
To recompense the insult
That vulgar terror offers
Thy lofty state, delay no more, but listen
To prayers so rarely uttered:
Shut to the light forever,
Sovereign of time, these eyes of weary anguish!
I suppose that Italian criticism of the present day would not give Leopardi nearly so high a place among the poets as his friend Ranieri claims for him and his contemporaries accorded. He seems to have been the poet of a national mood; he was the final expression of that long, hopeless apathy in which Italy lay bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his governments, and the re�stablishment of all the little despots, native and foreign, throughout the peninsula. In this time there was unrest enough, and revolt enough of a desultory and unorganized sort, but every struggle, apparently every aspiration, for a free political and religious life ended in a more solid confirmation of the leaden misrule which weighed down the hearts of the people. To such an apathy the pensive monotone of this sick poet’s song might well seem the only truth; and one who beheld the universe with the invalid’s loath eyes, and reasoned from his own irremediable ills to a malign mystery presiding over all human affairs, and ordering a sad destiny from which there could be no defense but death, might have the authority of a prophet among those who could find no promise of better things in their earthly lot.
Leopardi’s malady was such that when he did not positively suffer he had still the memory of pain, and he was oppressed with a dreary ennui, from which he could not escape. Death, oblivion, annihilation, are the thoughts upon which he broods, and which fill his verse. The passing color of other men’s minds is the prevailing cast of his, and he, probably with far more sincerity than any other poet, nursed his despair in such utterances as this:
TO HIMSELF.
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 overshadow�d
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 sa
ys, “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 bless�d 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 awaken�d 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.
TO SYLVIA.
Sylvia, dost thou remember
In this that season of thy mortal being
When from thine eyes shone beauty,
In thy shy glances fugitive and smiling,
And joyously and pensively the borders
Of childhood thou did’st traverse?
All day the quiet chambers
And the ways near resounded
To thy perpetual singing,
When thou, intent upon some girlish labor,
Sat’st utterly contented,
With the fair future brightening in thy vision.
It was the fragrant month of May, and ever
Thus thou thy days beguiledst.
I, leaving my fair studies,
Leaving my manuscripts and toil-stained volumes,
Wherein I spent the better
Part of myself and of my young existence,
Leaned sometimes idly from my father’s windows,
And listened to the music of thy singing,
And to thy hand, that fleetly
Ran o’er the threads of webs that thou wast weaving.
I looked to the calm heavens,
Unto the golden lanes and orchards,
And unto the far sea and to the mountains;
No mortal tongue may utter
What in my heart I felt then.
O Sylvia mine, what visions,
What hopes, what hearts, we had in that far season!
How fair and good before us
Seemed human life and fortune!
When I remember hope so great, beloved,
An utter desolation
And bitterness o’erwhelm me,
And I return to mourn my evil fortune.
O Nature, faithless Nature,
Wherefore dost thou not give us
That which thou promisest? Wherefore deceivest,
With so great guile, thy children?
Thou, ere the freshness of thy spring was withered.
Stricken by thy fell malady, and vanquished,
Did’st perish, O my darling! and the blossom
Of thy years sawest;
Thy heart was never melted
At the sweet praise, now of thy raven tresses,
Now of thy glances amorous and bashful;
Never with thee the holiday-free maidens
Reasoned of love and loving.
Ah! briefly perished, likewise,
My own sweet hope; and destiny denied me
Youth, even in my childhood!
Alas, alas, belov�d,
Companion of my childhood!
Alas, my mourn�d hope! how art thou vanished
Out of my place forever!
This is that world? the pleasures,
The love, the labors, the events, we talked of,
These, when we prattled long ago together?
Is this the fortune of our race, O Heaven?
At the
truth’s joyless dawning,
Thou fellest, sad one, with thy pale hand pointing
Unto cold death, and an unknown and naked
Sepulcher in the distance.
III
These pieces fairly indicate the range of Leopardi, and I confess that they and the rest that I have read leave me somewhat puzzled in the presence of his reputation. This, to be sure, is largely based upon his prose writings — his dialogues, full of irony and sarcasm — and his unquestionable scholarship. But the poetry is the heart of his fame, and is it enough to justify it? I suppose that such poetry owes very much of its peculiar influence to that awful love we all have of hovering about the idea of death — of playing with the great catastrophe of our several tragedies and farces, and of marveling what it can be. There are moods which the languid despair of Leopardi’s poetry can always evoke, and in which it seems that the most life can do is to leave us, and let us lie down and cease. But I fancy we all agree that these are not very wise or healthful moods, and that their indulgence does not fit us particularly well for the duties of life, though I never heard that they interfered with its pleasures; on the contrary, they add a sort of zest to enjoyment. Of course the whole transaction is illogical, but if a poet will end every pensive strain with an appeal or apostrophe to death — not the real death, that comes with a sharp, quick agony, or “after long lying in bed”, after many days or many years of squalid misery and slowly dying hopes and medicines that cease even to relieve at last; not this death, that comes in all the horror of undertaking, but a picturesque and impressive abstraction, whose business it is to relieve us in the most effective way of all our troubles, and at the same time to avenge us somehow upon the indefinitely ungrateful and unworthy world we abandon — if a poet will do this, we are very apt to like him. There is little doubt that Leopardi was sincere, and there is little reason why he should not have been so, for life could give him nothing but pain.
De Sanctis, whom I have quoted already, and who speaks, I believe, with rather more authority than any other modern Italian critic, and certainly with great clearness and acuteness, does not commit himself to specific praise of Leopardi’s work. But he seems to regard him as an important expression, if not force or influence, and he has some words about him, at the close of his “History of Italian Literature”, which have interested me, not only for the estimate of Leopardi which they embody, but for the singularly distinct statement which they make of the modern literary attitude. I should not, myself, have felt that Leopardi represented this, but I am willing that the reader should feel it, if he can. De Sanctis has been speaking of the Romantic period in Italy, when he says:
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1397
