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

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