Page images
PDF
EPUB

to say; the witnesses are not to be relied on. We may perhaps consider it as originating in feelings common to all, and gradually etherialised into a sentiment such as Dante and Petrarch have celebrated at greater length but scarcely in a sweeter strain. Her identity with Nerina is disputed, but the circumstances set forth in the two cases are so nearly alike that they can hardly refer to different people. Teresa Fattorini is certainly Silvia; she also appears as the nameless girl-figure in 'Il Sogno,' written shortly after her death; and the change of name to Nerina may be accounted for in many ways, even by the exigencies of verse. The poem is an acknowledged masterpiece, and to find another of equal beauty on a similar theme we must go to the Ayrshire hills.

This ode was written in 1828, ten years after the death of the young girl whom love of music, sad destiny, and the chance circumstance of nearness to the Leopardi household unite for ever with one so much her superior in rank and culture. As this is the first example we give of the 'free verse' Leopardi evolved from the form of the classical ode in which his earlier compositions were written, it may be well to say that, in the version, the order of the rhymes and exact length of each line are not preserved. These are matters which depend on circumstances that differ in different languages, and the translator requires equal freedom with his original. This invention of Leopardi's has, in his hands, much of the dignity of blank verse, and avoids the occasional oversweetness of rhyme, also the recurrence of too familiar endings. The Ode to Silvia' is the first in which he departs, in rhyme, from a regular stanza formation, and reveals his later manner. Concerning it he wrote to his sister Paolina, May 2, 1828: After two years I have made some verses this April; verses such as I used to write, with all my old heart in them.' It is indeed with becoming pride that Italians dilate upon the beauty of the picture here presented in the contrast between the girl at her cottage door, singing while she weaves or spins, and the studious youth stirred to the depths of his being by the fresh young voice, which his parents had failed to exclude, entering through the heavy casements of old Monaldo's library.

[ocr errors]

'To Silvia.

'Silvia, rememberest thou

Still thy glad time on earth

When beauty dwelt with thee, and thy glad eyes,
Shyly, in meditation or in mirth,

Turned t'ward the flowery verge

Where youth in womanhood would merge?

To thy sweet singing

The walks around me and my quiet room

Sounded perpetually;

The while thou, on some female labour bent,
Wouldst sit content

In dreamful thought of happy hours to come.
It was the odorous May; and so each day
For thee sped brightly by.

I, my loved studies

Leaving at times, and the o'erlaboured page
Whereon I spent the better part of me,
Of my yet tender age,

Stole near the casement in my father's home
And listened to that voice, and to the sound
Of thy swift hands about the arduous loom.
The serene heaven above,

The sunny lanes, our garden, and the hills
Around, I gazed on, and the distant sea
No living tongue can tell

What thoughts then stirred in me.

What radiant dreams were ours;

How high our hearts, our hopes, O Silvia mine!

Life, and man's destiny,

How fair they seemed to us!

When I bethink me thus

Of all we then believed

My spirits droop and pine; disconsolate,

In bitterness, I sorrow o'er my fate.

O Nature, Nature, why

Didst thou the promise of that Spring belie?

Why are thy children ever thus deceived?

Ere Winter seared each leaf,

Disease, insidious, met thee on thy way,

Sweet maid, and brought thee death. To thee not shown
The flower of life; unknown

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

With sweet discourse of love on festal days.

So even for me ere long

The tender hope I cherished waned and died;
All springtime gladness to my years denied.
Alas, alas, how thou didst fly from me,
Gentle companion of those earlier days,
My vanished, mourned for, hope!

Is this the world, this our expected doom,
Love, joy, ambition, and the lofty ways
We pondered oft together? Is the race
Of man thus frustrate ever?

Truth her face

Unveiling, hope fell down; and with her hand
Showed to me from afar

Death and an empty tomb.'

Shortly after composing the 'Ode to Silvia,' and under dire stress of poverty, Leopardi, who had been supporting himself by literary work at Florence and Pisa, returned for the last time to his father's house at Recanati-the 'Borgo Selvaggio' where none could understand him, and where he seems to have felt himself more in sympathy with the peasants, for whom he always shows a kindly regard, than with those of his own class. The deadening influences of the place were so strong that he conceived an active dislike of his native town, declaring at times that his patriotism related only to Italy. But in this as in other matters, inconsistencies abound in the poems. While expressing horror and detestation of Recanati as a place to dwell in, he paints it in most delightful colours and associates it with his tenderest emotions; while asserting with constantly renewed vehemence that he has found life fruitless and barren, he shows a capacity for refined enjoyment and exquisite sensation that can only excite our envy. But, as one of his ablest commentators truly says, the high poetic value of the verse is frequently evolved in great measure from this very inconsistency-from the ceaseless battle raging within him between his convictions and his sentiments, between the philosopher and the poet, between his mental energy and his physical weakness. Although, in any circumstances,

one so constituted was foredoomed to suffer acutely, the accidents of his early life intensified this suffering almost to an unendurable degree. For this doubtless his

parents must be held chiefly responsible, particularly the Countess Adelaide, her husband Monaldo being much under her direction. She seems to have been cold to her children, careless (it is said) even of their continued existence; and it remains on record that she paid no regard to her brother's powerfully worded protest* against the unremitting course of study which her son was encouraged to pursue, and which debilitated and deformed his naturally delicate frame. Possibly she may have considered robust health hardly desirable in an ecclesiastic-Giacomo having originally been intended for the priesthood-as likely to divert his mind to more attractive prospects.

With so stern and harsh a parent it is little surprising that an imaginative youth should have transferred the maternal physiognomy to Nature, the universal mother, and have come to consider that a certain malignity reigned in the world as well as in the household at Recanati. Seeing also that those responsible for much of his suffering were very scrupulous in all religious exercises, it may have occurred to him that the Power they worshipped shared their indifference to human sorrow. At any rate irreconcilable divergence of opinion on religious matters soon manifested itself between Giacomo and his parents. He declined to pursue an ecclesiastical career, and, finding himself completely miserable at home, made shortly after his twenty-first birthday an abortive attempt at flight. It was not however until three years later (November 1822) that he succeeded in quitting Recanati; after which, with his father's consent, he passed the winter in Rome. During the next few years he lived alternately at Recanati and Bologna, and later for about a year in Florence, and Pisa, where the Risorgimento' and the lines to Silvia were composed. In November 1828 he was compelled, as we have said, to return to Recanati, and probably the sixteen months that followed, before his final escape from paternal domination, were the saddest in his life. His health suffered so

* Chiarini, Vita,' cap. ii, p. 43. Letter from Carlo Antici.

severely that a report of his death was at one time generally believed, and the letters written by him during these months are pitiful in the extreme, reminding one of Tasso's lamentations, addressed to all quarters of Italy from his prison in Ferrara. But there is evident relief that the cloud mentioned in Il Risorgimento' had passed away; and the poems which belong to this period are second to none in the 'Canti.'

The poem that follows, Memories,' as the name implies, is a record of Leopardi's previous life, the greater part of which had been passed at home. It savours of the soil of Recanati, and little imagination is required to conjure up the scenes pictured to us in the verse. Heard in the original, each successive mood of the poet is so melodiously conveyed that one seems to be listening to a symphony by some famous composer; and, although less violent, the successive moods and emotions played on with such admirable taste and feeling change as frequently, yet far more artfully, than those awakened in the breast of Alexander by the rival of St Cecilia. Blank verse, always handled by Leopardi with great skill, though weakened in Italian by the addition of an eleventh syllable, is the medium employed, reducing the difficulty of transference to our idiom to a minimum. The selfportraiture is more complete here than in any other of the odes. Lovers of Pope will recognise an old friend towards the close of 'Le Ricordanze' (see below, p. 24), a jewel three words long to which a splendid setting is accorded (eterno sospiro mio). And indeed it is an eternal sigh that comes from the soul of this 'delicate Ariel' imprisoned in a body which he must have found as much a thing of torment as the pine tree, chosen by Caliban for the abode of Shakespeare's most ethereal creation.

'Le Ricordanze (Memories).

'Stars of the radiant Bear, I little thought,
Communing with you nightly as of old,
To find you shining o'er my father's garden
And from these windows greet you yet again,
Hither returned, where I in childhood dwelt
And saw the end of every joy once mine.

* First published in the Florentine edition of 1831; composed at Recanati between Aug. 26 and Sept. 12, some months after Leopardi's return in 1829.

« PreviousContinue »