Tuscan folk-lore and sketches, together with some other papers

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: