Thoroughly Italian and of the best period is Pascoli in the exquisite propriety of his words; in the sharpness with which he outlines the little pictures, which are characteristic, especially, of his earlier work. In these respects one feels his close affinity with the Latin poets—above all Virgil—who are his Gods, and from whom the early Italian poets immediately derive. Less Italian—using the word in the stereotyped sense which would exclude Leopardi altogether from Italian song—less Italian is he in the mode and direction of his thought. No gay love-songs, no easy sentimentality have come from his pen: the passion of love is in fact strangely absent from his work. He is a child not so much of Italy, as of his age, in his attitude of enquiry towards the great questions of life and death; in the gravity, the earnestness resulting, especially in his later works, from this attitude.

Nor is this individuality to be wondered at; for Pascoli’s muse was cradled in sorrow. He was but a lad when his father, returning home, among the hills of Romagna and within sight of the mediÆval republic of S. Marino, was treacherously murdered by an unknown hand. His mother died not very long after, having never really recovered from the shock; then three brothers and a sister; so that Giovanni found himself at a very early age head of a family of a brother and two sisters.

A hard struggle enabled him to form a home for them. One of the little poems to his mother which mark, year after year, the anniversary of her death, refers to this struggle as follows:—

Know—and perhaps thou dost know in the churchyard—
the child with long gold ringlets
and that other for whom thy last tear fell—
know that I fostered them, that I adore them.

For them I gathered up my shattered courage
and I wiped clear my soul for them;
they have a roof, they have a nest—my boast:
my love it is that feeds them, and my toil.

They are not happy, know it, but serene;
theirs is the smile but of a pious sadness:
I look on them—my sole, lone family—

and ever to my eyes I feel there comes
that last unfinished tear that wet thy lids
in the death-agony.

He now lives either at Messina, where he is Professor of Latin, or among the chestnut woods that clothe the hills round Barga near Lucca, with one of his sisters. This is Maria, the careful, winning housewife whom all readers of her brother’s poems love—herself known also in the world of letters as a graceful poetess and an accomplished Latin scholar. Two or three verses of the little poem entitled “Sorella” reflect the bond that unites them.

I know not if she be to him more mother
or more daughter, the sister, gently serious;
she—sweet, and grave and pious—
corrects, consoles and counsels;

Presses his hair, embraces him
care-burdened; speaks:—“What is it?”
Conceals her face against his breast,
Speaks, in confusion:—“Know’st not?”

She keeps on her pale face
and in her eyes quick glancing,
ah! for when he leaves, the smile;
the tears for his return.

Two principal influences, then, have gone to the moulding of Pascoli’s genius: one, the potent attraction of the Augustan poets; the other, the shock, strain and struggle which have fixed his thoughts on the most painful problems of existence; which have, by the very breaking up of his home, accentuated the longing for the domestic affections above that for amorous passion; and have tinged the whole of his work with an autumn-like sadness.

Both these influences reveal themselves in Pascoli’s first published work; a small volume of little poems entitled MyricÆ, and bearing the legend Arbusta juvant, humilesque myricÆ. The shock was at that time, however, still too near to have exerted its full influence on the poet’s character. It kept his mind fixed not so much on the philosophical as on the sentimental and physical side of death: on the churchyard with its cypresses, its driving showers and gleams of golden sunshine, its rainbow, its groups of merry children playing “Touch” round the great cross—but, also, with its dead lying through the long nights of rain and wind. Even here, however, where triteness would seem inevitable, Pascoli is individual. He never contemplates physical decay: worms and skulls are not so much as hinted at. It is the loneliness of his dead that rivets the poet’s thoughts, their vain longing for news of those they left on earth:—

Oh, children—groans the father ’mid the black
swish of the water—ye whom I hear no more
for many years! Another churchyard

perhaps received you, and maybe you call
your mother as you shiver naked
’neath the black hissing rainstorms.

And from your far-off dwelling you stretch out
your arms to me, as I do mine to you,
oh sons, in vain despair.

Oh, children, children! Could I only see you!
For I would tell you how in that one instant
for an entire eternity I loved you.

In that one minute ere I died
I raised my hand up to my bleeding head,
and blessed you all, my children.

And again:—

They weep. I see, see, see. They form
a circle, wrapped in the ceaseless booming.
They still wait, and they must wait.

The dead sons cling about the father
unavenged. Sits in a tomb,
I see, I see in midst of them, my mother.

Sunt lacrymae rerum. Pascoli returns to his father’s death more than once in these early poems: never with impotent cries against man or destiny, but with a sense as it were of wide-eyed wonder at the pity of the thing. Here are a few verses characteristic of his attitude; characteristic, too, of his daring simplicity of expression, relieved, just as there is a fear of its sinking into mere prose, by some equally daring conception that throws a vivid light over all that has gone before.

August 10th.

St. Laurence’ day. I know’t, because so many
stars through the quiet air
burn, fall; because so great a weeping
gleams in the concave sky.

A swallow was returning to her roof;
they killed her; ’mid the thorns she fell
She had an insect in her beak:
the supper for her nestlings.

Now she lies there as on a cross, and holds
that worm out to that far-off sky;
and in the shadow waits for her her nest;
its chirping fainter comes and fainter.

A man, too, was returning to his nest.
They killed him; he spoke: Pardon!
And in his open eyes remained a cry.
He bore two dolls as gifts....

There in the lonely cottage, now,
in vain they wait and wait for him:
He motionless, astonished, shows
the dolls to the far-off sky.

And thou, oh sky, from far above the worlds
serene—infinite sky, immortal—
oh! with thick-falling tears of stars inundate
this atom dark of Evil.

Such poems bear, however, but a small proportion to the rest of the work even in the first edition of the MyricÆ, and a still smaller proportion in the later editions. The note is struck and left for a time: heard again, it has been developed into a theme whose harmonies are rich and deep.

The MyricÆ, now in its fifth edition, is a collection of the shortest of poems. Many of them are but a few lines long, that pass in Italian like the brush of wings and cannot be rendered in our heavier English. Now it is a little picture, cut like a sixteenth century cameo, of some detail of the country or of country life, generally with just a touch at the end that relieves the feeling of pure objectiveness, and suggests the Infinite which lies around and behind the fragment presented; now it is some philosophical maxim or reflection which has evidently become part of the poet’s individuality; now an impression of infancy, childhood, girlhood, old age; now a fine-wrought point of irony to prick the ignorance and arrogance of the Philistine.

A consideration of Pascoli’s relation to Nature and the peasantry immediately suggests a comparison with Wordsworth. It is, however, a curious fact that the more one attempts to fix the similarity between the two, the more elusive does it prove to be. We might say, tentatively, that Pascoli is both more pagan and more human, notwithstanding Margaret and Michael, than Wordsworth. He is more pagan in that his delight in the beauty of a natural object is more self-sufficing, therefore more intense; it is a delight that suggests no defined religious or quasi-religious ideas, though there is always a feeling, conscious or sub-conscious, that the object is an organic part of the Universe. He is more human in that the peasants too attract him more for their own sakes than for the moral reflections to which they may give rise. They are, moreover, peasants in the full sense of the word. They are an inseparable part of their surroundings, and their interest derives from their unbroken contact with Nature, who now favours, now destroys their toil. A carefully thought out parallel study of the two poets would without doubt be interesting: it would have to set out from the fact that the fundamentals of the philosophy of the two men are essentially different: the Christianity and Platonism of the English poet being replaced in the Italian—citizen of a nation which is rapidly casting off metaphysical speculation—by a frank facing of the possibilities and probabilities opened up by modern scientific research, by a passionate longing for truth built upon the rock of scientific fact. A reference to the poet’s lecture entitled L’Era Nuova (The New Era) will put this point beyond dispute.

Among the poems which mark most strongly this fundamental difference and this elusive similarity between Wordsworth and Pascoli is that published in the Marzocco of August 19th, and entitled Inno del Mendico. The simplicity of the diction, the spaciousness of the atmosphere, the patient resignation of the beggar-man, his harmony with the upland and the lake which form a setting for him, at once suggest Wordsworth; but the details of the poem are so totally different from any conception of Wordsworth’s that a second reading shows the likeness to be superficial. Pascoli is too thoroughly modern in his scientific attitude, notwithstanding his Latin affinities (or perhaps if the matter be well thought out partly in consequence of them), to have many points of contact with any of the early Victorian English poets.

As for the MyricÆ, the poems are so varied that it is difficult to characterise or to illustrate them. Some of the most individual and attractive—“Dialogue” (between sparrows and swallows), “Hoof-beats,” and others—are very delicate word-imitations of movements, of sounds, of mental states even: and the verbal imitation is quite inseparable from the conception. The poet himself groups his little “swallow-flights of song” under a number of heads; but is nevertheless constrained to leave many standing alone. Thus we have a set of ten headed “From Dawn to Sunset,” in which occurs the “Hoof-beats” already mentioned; another group entitled “Remembrances” in which is the little poem above quoted on the anniversary of his mother’s death; another headed “Thoughts”—short but pregnant reflections of a philosophical character; “Young Things”—five tiny pieces which reveal a tender sympathy with young illusions, springing from a deep sense of the contrast between the world of the children and the reality into which they have been born. We may perhaps quote a couple as they emphasize the feeling for contrasts visible in other parts of Pascoli’s work.

Fides.

When evening was glowing all ruddy,
and the cypresses seemed made of fine gold,
the mother spoke to her boy-child:—
“a whole garden’s up there, made like that.”
The baby sleeps and dreams of golden boughs,
of golden trees, of forests of pure gold:
meanwhile the cypress in the murky night
weeps in the rainstorm, fights against the wind.

Orphan.

Slowly the snow falls, flake on flake:
listen, a cradle rocks so gently.
A baby cries, with tiny thumb in mouth;
an old dame sings with chin in hand.
The old dame sings:—“Around thy little bed
roses and lilies grow, a lovely garden.”
The baby in the cradle falls asleep:
the snow falls slowly, flake on flake.

It will be perceived that it is not only the child in age whose illusions are touched on. The wider symbolism is at once apparent.

From the sixteen poems included in “The Last Walk,” we may perhaps quote one that illustrates Pascoli’s tendency to parable.

The Dog.

We, while the world goes on its road
eat out our hearts, and double is our torment,
because it moves, because it moves so slowly.

So, when the lumb’ring waggon passes by
the cottage, and the heavy dray-horse
imprints the soil with thudding hoofs,

the dog springs from the hedgerow, swift as wind,
runs after it, before it; whines and bays.
The waggon has passed onward slowly, slowly;

the dog comes sneezing back to the farm-yard.

“In the Country” includes eighteen charming little pieces in which the precision of the poet’s wording reveals itself with striking clearness. One tiny picture we may translate. Each object in it is distinct; and a feeling of aerial perspective is given to it by the long-drawn notes of the stornello which are suggested at its close.

October Evening.

Along the road, see, on the hedge
laugh bunches of red berries;
in the ploughed fields move homewards to the stall

slowly the oxen.

Comes down the road a beggar-man who drags
his slow step through sharp-rustling leaves:
in the fields a maiden raises to the wind her song:

Flower of the thornbush!

Two specially charming collections occur under the heading “Primavera” and “Dolcezze.” One little touch in the latter may perhaps be given.

With the Angels.

They were in flower, the lilacs and the olives:
and she sat sewing at a bridal dress:
nor had the air yet opened buds of stars,
nor the mimosa folded yet a leaf,
when she laughed out; yea, laughed, oh small black swallows;
laughed suddenly. But with whom, at what?
She laughed, so, with the angels, with those
clouds of gold, those clouds of rose-colour.

Girls sewing or weaving, it may be remarked in passing, occur often in Pascoli’s verse: one feels in them the pulse of the strong domestic affections that course through the poet’s inner life.

In “Tristezze” Nature breathes different suggestions: it has the sweet languidness of a fine autumn day, with recollections of a gentle melancholy. A good many people have written about empty nests; but the touch, in the following quotation, of the feather on the point of being blown away, yet clinging on, is surely individual.

The Nest.

From the wild rose-bush, just a skeleton,
there hangs a nest. How in the spring
bursts from it, filling all the air,
the twitter of the chattering housemates!

Now there’s but one small feather. At the wooing
of the wind it hesitates, beats lightly;
like to some ancient dream in soul severe
that ever flies and yet is never fled.

And now the eye turns downward from the heavens—
the heavens to which one last full harmony
rose glorious, and died into the air—

and fixes on the earth, on which the leaves
lie rotting; whilst in waves the wind
weeps through the lonely country.

We must not close this most inadequate notice of the MyricÆ without mentioning the refined tenderness of one of the closing poems, too long to quote, entitled “Colloquio.” The poet’s mother, a figure of infinite sweetness, mute and shadowy, yet real, revisits the familiar house-places with her son; and a few incidental touches put before us an idyllic sketch of the home with its plants and the two housewifely sisters, so different in character.

As a contrast to the details of the MyricÆ we may here quote a poem that appeared (December 1897) in the Nuova Antologia. Breadth of silent space has as great a fascination for Pascoli as have the tender details of home and country life. He had already in one of the “Poemetti” dwelt with longing on the northern regions whither the wild swans fly, where the aurora borealis lights up the infinite polar gloom, where mountains of eternal ice rest on the sea as on a pavement; and AndrÉe’s balloon expedition to the Pole especially fired his imagination. The poem that bears the traveller’s name was written when, after long silence, there was a report that human cries had been heard on the Sofjord. In the Italian, the first part, broken by questionings and doubtings has an effect of uncertainty, like the uneasy straining of the balloon at its rope; from it the second part rises with a sure, strong leap and sinks gently at the end.

ANDRÉE.
I.

No, no. The voice borne faint athwart the gloomy
air from the realms of ice, like human cries,
was but the petrel’s screech,
that loves the lonely rocks, the storms
unheard. Or maybe (was it not like children’s
wailing?) maybe the sea-gull’s.
A sound uplifts itself of wailful limboes
far in remotest shade untrodden:
that is the gulls, they say. Or divers, maybe?
Or the skua? Perhaps the skua—for when it flies
above the icefields, from a thousand nests
rises a strident cry; since with it draws a-near
Death’s self. Or was’t vain voiceless crying
in thine own heart? Nay, but the look-out heard them;
and in the look-out’s ear thou trustest.
Yea, but ’twas, sure, the roar of breakers,
crashing of rocks, howling of wind, the pant
of storms far off, yet nearing,
the sky, the sea, oh Norman seafarer!

II.

AndrÉe was’t not. Centaur, to whose swift course
the cloud is mud, the empty wind firm ground,
towards the Great Bear he flew.
Followed his flight the hornÈd elks at first;
then no one more; so that there was at last
but his great heart beating above the Pole.
For he had reached the confines of the evening,
and on the Polar peak immovable
stood, as on rock black eagle.
High overhead the ocean’s star burnt on
pendent, eternal lamp—
and in the lofty shadow seemed to sway.
And fixÈd on his heart saw he, from this
wave, and from that, of every savage sea,
amid the calm, amid the roar of the tempest,
millions of eyes illumÈd in the ray
that burned above his head; and instantly
cried he to all those eyes of that vast mirage
I reach my goal!

III.

And then, below him, solemn rose the hymn
of holy swans hyperborean; slow
and intermittent ring of unknown harps;
the knell, far off and lone amid the wind,
of bells, the closing of great gates,
hard-turning with clear clang of silver.
Nor ever sounded erst that song more loud,
more suave. They sang, that all around,
alone, pure, infinite was Death.
And o’er the wingÈd man came scorn of days
that rise and fall; hatred of all the vain
outgoings that foresee the garrulous return.
High was he on the peak; with human fate
beneath him. AndrÉe felt himself alone,
great, monarch, God!
Now died the hymn of the sacred flock away
in tremulous trumpet blast.
Then silence. O’er the Pole the star burnt on,
like the lonely lamp of a tomb.

With the “Poemetti,” published in 1897, we find ourselves in the second phase of Pascoli’s work. He and his sister have left their home in S. Mauro, with its heart-rending associations, and are settled in Barga. The trouble can be contemplated from a distance, can be reflected upon in its general outlines, and brought into harmony with life as a whole. But the poet’s mind has not taken refuge in the religion of the Church; he is very far from the sentiment of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. He finds his comfort in the delicious consciousness of quiet joy known only to those who have suffered without weakness; he finds his strength in the new perspective of life that is obtained by a fixed contemplation of the insignificant place our world holds in the Universe—of the reality of death, which for him ends all things. And this philosophy renders him very human: it focusses his affections upon his fellow mortals. Love, brotherly love, alone can keep our consciences at rest, and fully satisfy our aspirations—such is the earnest cry of this man across the threshold of whose life the hatred of a fellow man stretched the corpse of a murdered father.

The note of this philosophy is given at once in the preface of the “Poemetti,” addressed to his sister Maria. He gives a short indication, rather than description, of his new home with its church-towers and bells, its mountains and its rivers, its field-birds, its swallows, martins and rock-swallows, and then exclaims, addressing them:—

“Oh yes, there was a time when we did not live so near you. And if you knew what grief was ours then, what weeping, what noisy solitude, what secret and continuous anguish!”—“But come, man, think not on it,” you say to me.—“Nay, let us think on it. Know that the long sweetness of your voices is born of the echoes they arouse of that past grief: that things would not be so beautiful now had they not been so black before: that I should not find so much pleasure in small motives of joy, had the suffering not been so great; had it not come from all sources of grief, from Nature and from Society; and had it not wounded me soul and body, mind and feeling. Is it not so, Maria? BlessÈd, then, blessÈd be grief.”

And then, further on, after a charming picture of a martin that feeds, under his eaves, the abandoned nestlings of her enemy the swallow, he breaks out:—

“Men, I will speak as in a fable for children: Men, imitate that martin. Men, be content with little, and love each other within the limits of the family, of the nation, of humanity.”

Twice the poet returns to the same subject. A collection of four short pieces entitled “The Hermit,” compact with thought, ends as follows:—

IV.

And the pale hermit veiled his eyes,
and lo throughout his heart there streamed
the sweet sleep of his weary life.
When he awoke (he was dropping
down broad, still writers in a drifting ship)
he cried: Let me remember, Lord!
God, let me dream! Nothing is more sweet,
God, than the end of grief, but ’tis
grievous to forget it; for ’tis hard
to cast away the flower that only smells when plucked.

In “The Two Children” two little ones, having come to blows in heroic fashion at their play one evening, are ignominiously swept off to bed by their mother. In the dark, full of denser shadows, their sobbing gradually ceases, they draw nearer to each other, and when the mother comes to look at them, shading the light with her hand, she finds them pressed close together, good beyond their wont, asleep. And she tucks them in with a smile. The third part takes up the parable as follows:—

III.

Men! in the cruel hour when the wolf is lord,
think on the shade of destiny unknown
that wraps us round, and on the silence awesome

that reigns beyond the short noise of your brawling,
the clamour of your warring—
just a bee’s hum within an empty hive.

Peace, men! in the prone earth
too great’s the mystery, and only he
who gets him brethren in his fear errs not.

Peace, brethren! and let not the arms
that now ye stretch, or shall, to those most near,
know aught of strife or threat.

And like good children sleeping ’twixt the sheets
placid and white, be found,
when unseen and unheard, above you bends
Death, with her lighted lamp.

The poet’s thought on death is given, with the insistence of one who is very much in earnest, in two recently delivered lectures, “L’Era Nuova,” and “La Ginestra,” (“Flower of the Broom,” a development of Leopardi’s exquisite poem); and again in two of his most beautiful poems, “La Pace” (published after the Milan riots), and “Il Focolare” (“The Hearth”).

In the “Ginestra” Pascoli expounds Leopardi as follows:—

“And look at the stars. Reflect that there was a time when they were thought to be what they appear; small, mere atoms of light.... Instead, it is the earth that is small, a mere grain of sand. To believe the earth large and stars small; or to believe, as is the case, that the stars are infinite in number and size, and the earth very small; these are the two religions, this is the s??t?? and the f??: darkness and light. Look at Vesuvius the destroyer, the glare of the lava glowing in the darkness. Look at Death. Look it in the face, without drooping the head cowardly, without erecting it proudly. You will feel the necessity of being at peace with your fellow-men. And say not that all men know they are mortal, but that that has never kept anyone from doing ill. I tell you it is not enough to know it; you must have your soul saturated with it, and have but that in your soul. Men know, too, that the stars are large, or rather they give an idle assent to the learned who say so. They know it, that is, but they do not think it as yet. Will the time come when they will think it?” And in the “Era Nuova” he continues:—Man “sought illusions and found them. The brute knows not that he will die: the man said to himself that he knows he will not die. So they again came to be like each other.... And thenceforth Death being denied, no longer received from man his sad and entire assent. Man feared not to sadden his fellow, feared not to kill him, feared not to kill himself, because he no longer felt the Irreparable. I know the Peisithanatos (Death-persuader) who it is. I know who persuaded man to violate life in himself and in others. It is he, who, in our souls, first violated Death.... This is light. Science is beneficent in that in which she is said to have failed. She has confirmed the sanction of Death. She has sealed up the tombs again.... The proof, moved against her, is her boast. Or rather it will be when from this negation the poet-priest shall have drawn the moral essence. Who can imagine the words by which we shall feel ourselves whirling through space? by which we shall feel ourselves mortal? We know this and that: we do not feel it. The day we feel it ... we shall be better. And we shall be sadder. But do you not see that it is exactly by his sadness that man differs from the brute beasts? And that to advance in sadness is to advance in humanity?... Man, embrace your destiny! Man, resign yourself to be man! Think in your furrow, do not rave. Love—think it—is not only the sweetest but the most tremendous of actions: it is adding new fuel to the great pyre that flames in the darkness of our night.”

Many will not agree with Pascoli’s method of arriving at his conclusions; for men’s minds are infinite in number, and but few think alike. But all will recognise the reverent earnestness of his belief, and respect the man whom hatred has moulded into a fervent apostle of love.

To understand Pascoli’s power of differentiating character and handling dialogue, we must turn, not to his Italian, but to his Latin poems. These are not in any sense of the word academic exercises: they are instinct with life and of extraordinary vivacity. The crowd in which the laughing Horace finds himself wedged, in the “Reditus Augusti”—the poetical rivalry in the tavern between Catullus and Calvus, in the “Catullo Calvos”—the witty yet serious discussion between MÆcenas, Varius, Virgil and Plotius in the “Cena in Caudiano NervÆ”—these are charming in the extreme, and have all the piquancy of the Horatian satire. The other two poems, “Jugurtha” and “Castanea,” are of a different stamp. The first is a powerful conception of the ravings and sufferings of the blinded Numidian king, in the Roman dungeon where he dies of hunger and thirst; the second is a description of the gathering and preparation of the chestnut crops, with an invocation to the tree on which alone the inhabitants of the Tuscan Apennines depend for warmth and food in winter. The peasant household is truly Virgilian in the conciseness and sympathy with which it is presented.

Truly Virgilian, too, is an Italian poem entitled “La Sementa” (The Sowing) published in the “Poemetti.” There is a simple dignity in all the actions and sayings of the peasants which prevents any feeling of the triviality which the poet might so easily have suggested; prevents at the same time that sentiment of unreality which enthusiastic and romantic writers on the subject are so apt to provoke.

It is perhaps in the quiet intimateness of “La Sementa” that the fundamental difference between the classic inspiration of Pascoli and that of the older poet Carducci is epitomised. Carducci is a born polemist. Son of the Risorgimento, he passed his youth in the midst of a great epic movement, stigmatizing shams and tyrants with the resources which a wide vocabulary placed at the disposal of an exceptionally energetic and enthusiastic nature. Carducci’s classicism is to a great extent formal. His verse imitates the Horatian metres, his periods are often more Latin than Italian in their construction, his women bear Latin names. And this Latin brevity, this careful exclusion of all superfluous words, this precision in the use of the smaller parts of speech (Carducci’s prepositions are a study in themselves) combined with the broad imagery and ample conception that seem inseparable from the age of Garibaldi, provoke in the reader a sense of exquisite form and of impressive grandeur. The grandeur, however, sometimes degenerates into rhetoric. Pascoli is more reflective; he has more quiet sentiment. He lives in a quieter age, when the enthusiastic hopefulness of the Risorgimento has found its reaction in a feeling of despondency concerning the accomplished reality. He is in no sense of the word a polemist. The form of his verse and of his period is Italian, though he has, it is true, revived the Latin meaning of many Italian words. He has less grandeur than Carducci, but on the other hand he is never rhetorical. The Latin spirit has taken such complete possession of him that it has become part of himself; it leavens his whole work, but leaves it strictly individual in form and conception, and admits the expression of a sense of mystery and vagueness which is rather of the romantic than of the classic mind. As illustrative of the difference in conception between the two poets we may compare their sonnets to “The Ox.”

The Ox. (Pascoli.)

At the narrow brook, amid uncertain mists
gazes the wide-eyed ox: in the plain
far stretching to a sea that recedes ever,
go the blue waters of a river:

loom large before his eyes, in the misty
light, the willow and the alder;
wanders a flock upon the grass, now here now there,
and seems the herd of an ancient god.

Shadows with talons spread broad wings
in the air: mutely chimeras move
like clouds in the deep sky:

the sun goes down, immense, behind
huge mountains: already lengthen, black,
the larger shades of a much larger world.

The Ox. (Carducci.)

Oh pious ox, I love thee; and a gentle feeling
of vigour and of peace thou pour’st into my heart;
whether, solemn as a monument,
thou gazest at the field so free and fruitful,

or whether, bowing gladly to the yoke,
the agile work of man thou gladly aidest;
he pricks and urges thee and thou repliest
with the slow turning of thy patient eye.

From thy broad nostril damp and dark
smokes forth thy breath, and like a joyful hymn
thy lowing rises through the quiet air;

and in the austere sweetness of thy grave
and glaucous eye, ample and quiet is reflected
the green and godlike silence of the plain.

Another side of Pascoli’s mind reveals itself in his studies on Dante. The hope which is company for me, he writes, is to go down to posterity as an interpreter of Dante, as an illustrator of the great Poet’s mind and thought. He has already published a book, La Minerva Oscura, for professional Dantisti; and is about to issue a series of articles for the general public.

Pascoli is now occupied on a translation, in hexameters, of the Homeric poems; and will shortly publish the glottological studies and the experiments by which he has prepared himself for his task. That he is capable of treating Greek subjects with Greek directness and simplicity, and without any affectation of Greek forms (a pitfall into which D’Annunzio continually stumbles) will be seen in the poem which closes this paper.

The Sleep of Odysseus.
I.

Nine days, by moon and sun, the black ship sped,
Wind-borne, helm-guided, while the creaking ropes
Were governed by Odysseus’ cunning hand;
Nor—wearied—did he yield them, for the wind
Bore him on ever toward his country dear.
Nine days, by moon and sun, the black ship sped,
The hero’s eye seeking unwaveringly
The rocky isle ’mid the blue-twinkling waves:
Content if, ere he died, he saw again
Its smoke-wreaths rising blue into the air.
The tenth day, where the ninth day’s setting sun
Had vanished in a blinding blaze of gold,
He, peering, saw a shapeless blot of black:
Cloud was’t he saw, or land? And his grave eye
Swam, conquered by the sweetness of the dawn.
Far off Odysseus’ heart was rapt by sleep.

II.

And, moving towards the ship’s swift flight, it seemed,
Behold a land! that nearer, nearer sailed
In misty blue, ’mid the blue-twinkling waves.
Anon a purple peak that stormed the sky;
Then down the peak the frothing gullies leaped
’mid tufts of bristling brushwood and bare rock;
And on its spurs sprang into view long rows
Of vines; and at its feet the verdant fields
Fleecy with shimmering blades of new-sprung grain,
Till it stood out entire—a rocky isle,
Harsh, and not pasture fit for neighing steed,
Altho’ good nurse for oxen and wild goats.
And here and there, upon the airy peaks,
Died, in the clearness of the wakening dawn,
The herdsmen’s fires: and here and there shot up
The morning swirl of smoke from Ithaca—
His home at last—! But King Odysseus’ heart
Floating profound in sleep, beheld it not.

III.

And lo! upon the prow o’ the hollow ship
Like angry gulls, words fly; like screaming birds
With hissing flight. The forward-straining ship
Was coasting then the high peak of The Crow
And the well-circled fount, and one could hear
The rooting of the boar-pigs; then a pen
Of ample girth appeared, with mighty rocks,
Well-builded, walled around, and hedged about
With wild-pear and with hawthorn all a-bloom.
The godlike herdsman of the boar-pigs, next,
Upon the seashore, with sharp-edgÈd axe
Spoiled of its bitter bark an oakling strong,
And cut great stakes to strengthen that fair pen,
With harsh and gleaming axe-bites. Fitfully
Amid the water’s wash, came o’er the sea
The hoarse pant of his strokes—that herdsman good—
Faithful EumÆus—But Odysseus’ heart,
Sunk deep in slumber, heard them not at all.

IV.

And now above the ship, from prow to stern,
The sailors’ furious words like arrows sped
In shuddering flight. The eager-homing ship
Abreast the harbour of Phorkyne sailed.
Ahead of it stood out the olive tree,
Large, goodly-boughed; and near to it a cave,
A cave sonorous with much-busied bees
As they in wine-bowls and in jars of stone
Perform sweet task of honey. One could see
The stony street o’ the town; the houses white
Climbing the hill; distinguish, ’mid the green
Of water-loving alders, the fair fount,
The altar white, the high-raised, goodly roof—
Odysseus’ high-raised steading. Now, perchance,
The shuttle whistled through the warp, and ’neath
The weary fingers grew again the web
Ample, immortal.—Yet, nor saw, nor heard
Odysseus’ mighty heart, quite lost in sleep.

V.

And in the ship, now entering the port,
The worse part won the day. The men untied
The leathern bags, and straight the winds out-whistled
Furious; the sail flung wide, and flapped as doth
A peplum by a woman left outspread
To dry i’ the sun upon some airy peak.
And lo! the labouring ship hath left the haven—
The haven where, upon the shore, there stood
A goodly youth propped on a spear bronze-pointed.
Under the grey-green olive stood the youth
Silent, with dreaming eyes: and a swift hound
Around him leaped, waving his plumy tail.
Now the dog checketh in his restless play
With straining eyes fixed on the infinite sea;
And, snuffing up the air o’ the briny tracks,
After the flying ship he howls aloud—
Argus his dog. Yet still nor heard nor saw
Odysseus’ heart, in balmy slumber bathed.

VI.

And now the ship coasted a lofty point
Of rocky Ithaca. And, twixt two hills
A garth there was, well-tilled, Laertes’ field,
The ancient king’s: therein an orchard rich
Where pear-trees stood, and apples, row on row,
That once Laertes gave to his dear son
Who thro’ the vineyard followed, begging this
And that, among the slim new-planted trees.
Here now, ten apple-trees and thirteen pears
Stood white with blossom in a close-set clump,
And in the shade of one—the fairest—stood
An old man, turning towards the boundless sea
Where roared the sudden squall—with up-raised hand
Lessening the light above his wearied eyes—
Strained his weak gaze after the flying ship.
This was his father: but Odysseus’ heart,
Floating profound in sleep, beheld him not.

VII.

And as the winds the black ship bore afar
Sudden the hero started from his sleep,
Swiftly unclosed his eyes, to see—perchance—
Smoke rise from his long-dreamed-of Ithaca—
Faithful EumÆus standing in the pen—
His white-haired father in the well-tilled field,
His father dear, who, on the mattock propped,
Stood gazing, gazing at the lessening ship—
His goodly son, who, leaning on his spear,
Stood gazing, gazing at the lessening ship—
And, leaping round his lord, with waving tail,
Argus his dog—Yea, and perchance his house,
His dear sweet home, wherein his faithful wife
Already laboured in the chattering loom.
He gazed again—a shapeless blot of black
He saw across the purpling waste of sea—
Cloud was’t or land?—It faded into air
E’en as Odysseus’ heart emerged from sleep.

Giovanni Pascoli’s sincerity of thought, truth of feeling, breadth of sympathy, temperateness and restraint, mark him out as a poet in the full sense of the word; and place him, artistically and morally, on a higher plane than the decadents who represent Italy to the foreign public.