SOURCE: Donadoni, Eugenio. “Giosuè Carducci.” In A History of Italian Literature, pp. 455-87. New York: New York University, 1969.

[In the following essay, Donadoni follows Carducci's career path and classifies Carducci's poems chronologically into groupings of landscape, introspection, political poetry, and lyrics that combined these characteristics.]

Writing within a prevailingly Romanticist or Manzonian generation, the figure of Giosuè Carducci was that of a restorer of the classical tradition. His style and language, as though reverting to the somewhat solemn modes of Foscolo, departed from the “spoken” character of Manzonian prose and recovered a native literary flavor. Drawn more from the wellspring of writers than from the ordinary popular language, they raised even the speech of the people to the special tone of the more distinctly literary tradition. In so doing, there was no contriving or willful capriciousness, because such was the spontaneous tendency of the poet.

Furthermore, a large part of Carducci's poetry touched on themes which seemed to depart from the atmosphere of the Romantic nineteenth century. It carried human nostalgia back, not towards the Middle Ages, but towards Hellenism and the Roman spirit. Nonetheless Carducci was a poet, and poetry is incompatible with polemical schemes and principles. While on the one hand he was in accord with the Classicists of the pre-Manzonian and pre-Romantic tradition, on the other hand he brought to his poetry and even to his prose the affections and the ways and the forms of a more intense Romanticism.

As always happens with true poets, he had at one and the same time the visage of tradition and that of innovation. D'Annunzio and Pascoli later were to take their treatment of the poetic image from his example, and from him D'Annunzio derived the form of his prose phraseology, although directing it to other ends.

Carducci was born on July 27, 1835 in Val di Castello, a hamlet of Pietrasanta in Versilia, Lunigiana (near Viareggio), to Dr. Michele and his wife Ildegonda Celli. His father was among those affected by the great patriotic aspirations that resulted in the Italian Risorgimento, and because of his ideas he had been confined for a year in Volterra.

In 1838 young Giosuè followed his father to Bólgheri, a hamlet of Castagneto in the Maremma region. It was in that place that the world of his affections and imagination was formed. We might say that the nostalgic foundation of Carducci's poetry, that which nourished the melancholy of his great odes came from this experience directly, because in poetry it brought him recollections of that land, and also indirectly, because the first movement of his meditations upon the “enormous mystery of the universe,” upon the change of forms in the immutability of life, was always joined to an image of that sunny and funereal land which was an illustrious burial place of the Etruscans and revealed some of their abandoned ruins. Thereafter, in whatever place he happened to be, he always silently compared the landscape with that of the Maremma in which he spent his childhood.

From Alfieri he received his first images of poetry and his first civic affections, and it was with Alfieri's tragedies that his mother taught him to read. The emotional force of the Carduccian style, in its best virtues and also in its defects, would sometimes seem the natural result of such teaching. He learned Latin from his father, and it was by that path that the heroic myths of classical antiquity entered his mind. Homer and Vergil attracted him far more than Manzoni, whom his father, a “fervent Manzonian,” never succeeded in making him truly like. He read Roman history and was passionately drawn to the French Revolution.

In 1848, the year when the movement for independence seemed close to victory and then was miserably disappointed, Dr. Michele, opposed by the reactionaries and even struck by peasants, was obliged to abandon that inhospitable country and move, first to Laiatico and later to Florence. The boy went to finish his studies in the humanities and rhetoric with the padres of the Scuole Pie [religious schools] and stayed there until 1852. His teacher of rhetoric was Father Geremia Barsottini, to whom the poet rendered homage for his prose translation of all the odes of Horace and to whom he always remained devoted.

These studies revealed to him the greatness of poetry. In awaiting Italian unification, his feeling drew from the liberalism of his father and his favorite authors, such as Mazzini and Foscolo. Because of the privations of his impoverished home, the mind of the adolescent was tempered in lofty passions including the supreme passion of poetry, and there too was formed that difficult, disdainful character which often made difficulties for him in social encounters.

When he had completed his secondary education, he went for a year to Celle on Monte Amiata, following his father's peregrinations, but towards the end of 1853 he won a competition for a resident scholarship in the Normal School of Pisa. In 1856 he received his doctor's degree and the degree for teaching.

In that year, with his friends Gargani, Targioni and Chiarini, he founded the literary society of the Amici Pedanti [Pedantic Friends]. This was an anti-Romantic and pagan movement, which quickly aroused violent arguments, as may be seen in the writing which Carducci published in December, Giunta alla derrata. Meanwhile, in October, he had begun teaching rhetoric in the secondary school of San Miniato al Tedesco.

In July, 1857, the first book of poems by Giosuè Carducci appeared, the Rime. It contained twenty-five sonnets, twelve cantos, and three lyrics entitled “Saggi di un canto alle Muse” [“Essays of a Song to the Muses”]. The poet had repudiated any poems which testified to a romantic immediacy, and here he soberly published what best represented him. He was still far from his great poetry, but already, in certain places, the particular accent of the poet was discernible, that accent which was to sound purer and higher in the Rime Nuove and in the Odi Barbare.

In that same year, he was the winner in a competition for the chair of Greek in the secondary school of Arezzo, but his appointment was not approved by the granducal government. Thereupon he went to Florence, where he existed in dignified poverty by giving some lessons. Meanwhile, he was studying and reading.

In November of that year his brother Dante took his own life, casting the darkest sorrow into the heart of Carducci, who penned heartbroken lines to his dead brother. And a new misfortune struck the poet the following year, the death of his father; he found now himself the head of the ruined family. In August of 1858, he took his mother and his brother Walfredo to a very poor house in the Borg'Ognisanti section of Florence and set to work to earn a living by giving private lessons and editing the texts of the Bibliotechina Diamante of the publisher Gaspare Barbèra. In March, 1859, he married young Elvira Menicucci.

On April 27 of that year, the union of Tuscany to Italy became a fact; times were changing, and the free spirits of the Risorgimento felt that their hour had struck.

Toward the end of the year the poet went to take the chair of Greek in the secondary school of Pistoia and remained there until November, 1860. Terenzio Mamiani, the minister of education, appointed him to the chair of Italian eloquence in the University of Bologna. On the 27th of that month, the poet gave his inaugural lecture. At first he felt uncomfortable; he felt the conflict between his own poetry and the obligations of philology. But while he fortified his knowledge of the classics at Bologna, he also turned his attention to the poetry and prose of other nations.

The political life of Italy, only just emerging from the great travail of the Risorgimento, was pressing everywhere and urgently with all its passions. Many hopes seemed to be disappointed, because the highest-minded men always found that everything that was accomplished was inferior to their great dream. Hence, criticism and discontentment were born.

Carducci had been a monarchist, and now, after the tragic event of Aspromonte in Calabria (where Garibaldi was wounded and captured by government troops, August 29, 1862), he felt himself a republican. For a man of Carducci's stature, however, being a monarchist or a republican did not mean shutting oneself up within a party; it meant rather having a feeling for whichever party might seem best fitted to further the development of Italy. Faithful to this important truth, in his riper years Carducci could look toward the monarchy with new sympathy without being unfaithful to his principles.

So now Carducci was a republican, and an impatient one. His nature was too impetuous for him to realize what a great effort the men coming after the heroic period were making to weld a unity so recently achieved. He felt too much urgency, and his language was impregnated with that sense of urgency, losing expressive force in proportion to its increase in violence; just as when a man falls prey to rage, his voice changes to strangled, inarticulate sound. Many of his poems of this period bear in their lines the aggressive impetuosity which he could not give vent to in political action.

Then, under the pseudonym of Enotrio Romano, he wrote his polemical poems, those which would be called Giambi [Iambi], the name which one of his books of collected poems later bore. In 1863 he wrote his famous “Inno a Satana” [“Hymn to Satan”].

In 1868 the volume Levia Gravia appeared; then in 1871 the volume of Poesie, which, in addition to the preceding collections, contained the Giambi ed Epodi and is divided into three parts: Decennali (1860-1870); Levia Gravia (1857-1860); and the Nuove Poesie (1872).

Having suffered so many trials, the poet finally freed himself of that sort of fieriness which sometimes kept him from being poetical. By now, more than one of the poems that were to form the Rime Nuove (Eng. tr., 1916, New Rhymes), in which is found the best of Carducci's art, had been composed. In 1873 the poet began the Odi barbare, of which the first series appeared in July, 1877.

With the Odi barbare the poet intended to depart from the old meters: “I hate the outworn poetry,” he wrote. This was a momentary hate, but it is certain that he felt an urge for new melodic forms, which would give to the Italian language the swirls and spirals of the ancient meters: the hexameter and the pentameter, the Alcaic, the Asclepiad and the Sapphic. The result was an amplification of his own melodic ability. Even when Carducci turned back to the usual meters of Italian poetry, he bore the musical experience that he had acquired in the Odi barbare and reached a more inward and original melodiousness.

From 1881 Carducci's fame, especially with the younger generation, grew stronger and more assured. It was helped by new literary periodicals, such as the Fanfulla della Domenica, the Cronaca Bizantina, and the Domenica Letteraria. His poems were awaited by his followers with an anticipation of beauty that was never disappointed. His words as a teacher and a great Italian brought light to their minds and encouraged them.

The Nuove Odi barbare appeared in 1882, and in that year he delivered his famous speech “On the Death of Giuseppe Garibaldi,” a full-voiced oration in which, with epical accent, the legend of the hero in the years to come is foretold. In 1883 the sonnets of the Ça ira appeared. Then in 1887 the Rime Nuove, followed in 1889 by the third series of Odi barbare.

The last volume of Carducci's poetry, Rime e Ritmi, appeared in 1899. Then the poet collected all his poetic work from 1850 to 1900, and in farewell set the famous lines:

Fior tricolor,
Tramontano le stelle in mezzo al mare
E si spengono i canti entro il mio core.

.....

[Three-colored flower,
The stars set in the sea
And in my heart the songs die away.]

He had written them one joyous evening, with other stornelli [ditties] in the office of the Cronaca Bizantina in Rome. He detached them and included them with a different meaning in that collection.

The last years of his life were sad. Illness had already set in by 1885. Then in 1899 hemiplegia deprived him of the use of one hand and made speech difficult. Nevertheless, he kept on working, but in 1904 he had to resign from teaching. He had been made a senator in 1890, and the Italian Parliament decreed him a pension. The poet answered: “Who am I that a national pension should be given me? What have I done, except love the fatherland, this poor and great and lovely Italy, even when I seemed most provoked with her! I have done this and nothing more. But it is little.” In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, but that prize came to a man exhausted and almost destroyed by illness. On February 16, 1907, Giosuè Carducci died in his modest house in Bologna.

In various ways the critics have indicated certain ideal stages in the development of Carducci's poetry, grouping the various compositions according to their spontaneous affinity. This is a matter of chronological, not inward phases. In this study we shall make use of this expedient, arranging the various moods of inspiration in groupings which best serve interpretation of that poetry.

A first stage is the landscape: the vision of nature; yet in which human history is present, for there is no fragment of earth where the memory of man is not alive. But the poet's mind clings closer to the vision of nature than to the appeal of human history, or to a need to retire into himself and to resolve the landscape into an inner meditation. The heights to which this Carduccian poetry of the elementary landscape can reach are shown in the verses of “San Martino” or of “Mezzogiorno alpino.” (I say “elementary” to distinguish it from the landscape on which the imprint of human history is stronger than nature.)

In “San Martino,” that rough land, that sea howling and lashed to whiteness under the mistral, and the mist, the odor of the wine, the first crackling under the spit, and the hunter who whistles and watches the migration of the flights of birds black as “exiled thoughts,” make up in sharp focus, a simple town, which has the same the enchantment of a fata morgana (of a mirage).

Even more inward is “Mezzogiorno alpino” [“Alpine Noontime”], which was written on August 27, 1895, at Courmayeur. The silence of “the great circle of the Alps” is expressed with solemn quietness in eight lines, in which even the rhyme of the fourth and the last lines, accented and broken off, contribute to the creation of a new musicality as a prelude to more modern styles:

Nel gran cerchio de l'alpi, su'l granito
Squallido e scialbo, su' ghiacciai candenti,
Regna sereno intenso ed infinito
Nel suo grande silenzio il mezzodi.
Pini ed abeti senza aura di venti
Si drizzano nel sol che gli penètra,
Sola garrisce in picciol suon di cetra
L'acqua che tenue tra i sassi fluì.

.....

[In that great circle of the Alps, on the granite
Bleak and pale, above shining glaciers,
Intense and infinite in its great silence
Serenely reigns midday.
Pines and firs in the still air
Stand in the sun which pierces them,
Only the water with faint sound of lyre
Murmurs softly as between the stones its flows.]

But sometimes landscapes are partly real, partly of desire, as in a sonnet from Iuvenilia:

Candidi soli e riso di tramonti
Mormoreggiar di selve brune a' venti
Con sussurio de fredde acque cadenti
Giú per li verdi tramiti de' monti …

.....

[Bright suns and laughter of sunsets,
Murmuring of dark woods in the winds,
With whispering of icy waters falling
Down, beside green pathways in the mountains …]

In these landscapes of desire (“and bright moonlight which whitens the silent paths”), there is often a thought of woman (“And the cherished appearance of my lady”), and sometimes recollections of history, but not such that taking them unto himself the poet creates a personal, almost autobiographical lyric, as he does at other times.

In “Mattutino e Notturno” [“Matinal and Nocturne”], thought of a woman is linked with a landscape: in the morning purified by rain, the poet's thought wings back to a woman “like the trill of an ascending lark”: in the moonlit night, “he admires the moon glimpsed from the lone hillocks …” The same is true also in “Sol e Amore” [“Sun and Love”]; “Primavera classica” [“Classical Spring”]; “Autunno romantico,” and so on.

“Vendette della Luna” [“Moon's Revenge”] is a lunar landscape seen above a moon-white girl, and in it are visual touches of rare lightness, “a green night of April,” and a sweet and gentle ending:

Com'uom che va sotto la luna estiva
Tra verdi susurranti alberi al piano
Che in fantastica luce arde la riva
Presso e lontano,
Ed ei sente un desio d'ignoti amori
Una lenta dolcezza al cuor gravare,
E perdersi vorria tra muti albori
E dilaguare.

.....

[As one who to the plain goes through green trees
Rustling beneath the summer moon
Which bathes in wond'rous light the shore,
Both near and far,
And feels desire of unknown loves
Etch slow a sweetness on his heart,
And gladly mid the silent trees would lose himself
And vanish.]

Then there is the “Notte di Maggio” [“May Night”], a Petrarchan sonnet, elegant in its purely melodic play of rhymes and echoes: notte, stelle, onde, verde, colli, luna. It is a nostalgic landscape, but one where the remembrance is something still fleeting and tenuous: “Alas! how much of my early youth I saw again at the top of the shining hills.” There is something of a diffused, pale moonlight in the lines. For no matter how Carducci vituperated the moon, and in spite of lines like “I hate your stupid round face” (Classicismo e Romanticism), the moon is still an essential part of much of his poetry.

“La Madre” is landscape, and one of the finest in Carducci. The sight of the sculptured group in which Adriano Cecioni had shaped a mother and her child, creates in the poet's mind a landscape over which questioning and hopes arise concerning the “pious justice of work.” The dawn saw this woman who is now tossing her little one in the air: “watched her as with rapid bare feet she passed through the dewy odor of the hay” (where one must admire that dexterous juxtaposition, that callida junctura of the roridi odori “dewy odors” still more daring than the “green silence” which was so much discussed). The landscape takes sharper focus in the luminous lines that follow. “As she bent her broad back at noon over the blond furrows, the elms white with dust heard her humming defiance of the raucous crickets on the hillocks.”

At another time, this landscape will be that of “Il Bove” [“The Ox”] where all the images that depict the “pious ox” create around him the broad atmosphere of the countryside, that divin del piano silenzio verde [divine silence of the green plain], which is one of the boldest and most charming expressions of the poet.

Even the ideal image of a poet will, for Carducci, resolve itself into a landscape, as in the sonnet “Virgilio.” An extended melody evokes lyrical reminiscences of Vergil: the “compassionate moon,” which over the “parched fields” “diffuses the impending summer coolness,” the river bank, the “hidden nightingale,” and the vast serenity. Here Carducci has composed a landscape in words which will close with a line taken from Vergil, and before Carducci, was translated by Tasso: Tale il tuo verso a me, divin poeta. [So is thy verse to me, divine poet].

In this poetry of landscapes, not yet affected by the inspiration of history, the sonnet “Momento epico” has a place. The epos rises to the poet's mind from the vision of “rich Bologna,” passing on to “epic Ferrara,” and in his heart “once more the sun kindles the immortal fantasies”—a sonnet of grave and powerful beauty. Here too is the place of the pathos of the sonnet “Santa Maria degli Angeli” in which the poet invokes Fra Francesco as an image of that landscape. Also the poem “Fiesole”:

Su le mura, dal rotto etrusco sasso,
La lucertola figge la pupilla,
E un bosco di cipressi a i venti lasso
Ulula, e il vespro solitario brilla.

.....

[On the walls, from the crumbled Etruscan rock,
the lizard stares,
And a weary wood of cypresses wails in the wind,
and the lonely evening shines].

“Courmayeur” is a vast landscape in which the view suggests this introspective movement. “The soul strays in slow wandering, coming from its regretted memories, and reaches eternal hopes.”

This sense of landscape will touch still more tenuous, ghostly, and dreamlike forms, as in “Visione,” which ends: “Without memories, without sorrow, yet like an island, green, afar, in a pale serenity.”

The vignette, or sketch, also has some relation to landscape; for example, those lines which Carducci himself named “Vignetta,” in which he sketches a girl in a “tender forest,” and in that sketch entitled “Egle.” Sometimes the landscape is a recollection, as in the beautiful hexameters of “Un Sera in San Pietro” [“An Evening in Saint Peter's”].

Although dominated by his sense of landscape, the poet voiced an invective against “old Nature” in “Idillio di Maggio.” “Oh, how shabby is this masquerade of roses and violets! This vaulted sky, how closed! How wan thou art, O Sun!” But it is a pose; the first impulse of Carducci's heart is to cling to Mother Earth, not to the old but to eternal Nature.

Whereas in this first stage of the Carduccian lyric, the landscape, external nature, prevails over the inward affections of the poet and over history made by men. In the second stage the poet contemplates his own heart, his own joys and sorrows, and questions himself, binding those feelings to the landscape and at times attaining the highest nostalgia.

Levia Gravia, the book in which there is already more apt gracefulness of images and rhythms than in his polemical poems, opens with the “Farewell” which, as it announces “the new hymns,” sings:

Addio, serena etate,
Che di forme e di suoni il cor s'appaga;
O primavera de la vita, addio!
Ad altri le beate
Visioni e la gloria, e a l'ombra vaga
De' boschetti posare appresso il rio
E co 'l queto desio
Far di sé specchio queto al mondo intero:
Noi per aspro sentiero
Amore e odio incalza austero e pio,
A noi fra i tormentati or convien ire
Tesoreggiando le vendette e l'ire.

.....

[Farewell, serene age
Which appeases the heart with forms and sounds,
O springtime of life, farewell!
For others the blessed visions,
And the glory and, in the pleasant shade
Of woods to rest at water's edge
And, moved by calm desire,
To serve as quiet mirror of all the world:
We must needs tread the rough harsh path,
By love and hate pursued, stern and devout,
Our lot 'tis now to mingle with tormented men,
Treasuring the vengeance and the wraths.]

The fact is that that “springtime of life” in the poetry of Carducci is an ideal time that acts as a “quiet mirror of all the world.” It is a moment which he is going to find in every epoch of his life: in th[at] of Juvenilia and Giambi [“Iambuses”] as well in that of Rime nuove and of Odi barbare.

One of the first and clearest examples of this introspective poetry is the “Ripresa” [“Resumption”] between Books I and II of Giambi ed Epodi: Avanti! avanti! [“Forward!”] of October, 1872. Here attention to word and rhythm is greater than in previous compositions. The invocation to glory, with that withdrawal of the poet within himself, has with a certain expressive ease the marks of high poetry: the words to Mameli are intimately pure.

The lines to the author of Il Mago are part of this introspective poetry: “O Severino [Ferrari], the dwelling of thy songs, the haunt of thy dreams, I know it well.” The sonnet “Francesco Petrarca,” in Levia Gravia, is an idyllic desire of the world to raise an altar to the poet of Laura “in the green darkness of the woods,” “with a nightingale singing 'mid the fronds.”

Then there are the poems which might be called “songs of Maremma nostalgia.” Such a nostalgic song is “Colli Toscani” [“Tuscan Hills”]. Another is fittingly called “Nostalgia” and contains these rough, unforgettable lines:

Dove raro ombreggia il bosco
Le maligne crete, e al pian
Di rei sugheri irto e fosco
I cavalli errando van,
Là in Maremma ove fiorio
La mia triste primavera,
Là rivola il pensier mio
Con i tuoni e la bufera.

.....

[Where the scarce woods shade
The evil clays, and on the plain
Bristling and dark with cork oaks
The horses go awandering,
There in Maremma, where flowered
The sad springtime of my youth,
There on the wings of the gale
With the thunder flies my thought.]

The poem entitled “Davanti San Guido” [“Before San Guido”] is famous, almost popular. As he rides by on the train, the poet sees again the great cypress-lined road that leads from San Guido to Bólgheri, where he had spent his childhood. The beloved earth calls to him, and everything thereabouts has a part in the life and griefs of the poet, who had learned the myths of the past there, and had dreamed of the future. Even the dead call to him, and in his memory his grandmother Lucia appears, she who was sleeping in “the lonely cemetery up there.” Even the cypress trees speak to him as though they had divined his hidden sorrow: “You can tell your human sadness and your grief to the oaks and to us.” They recall to him the vital sense of holy Nature; they bring to mind the cherished illusions of the countryside. “And eternal Pan, who goes on the solitary heights at that hour and on the lonely plains, alone, will sink the discord of thy cares, O mortal, in the divine harmony.”

In “Traversando la Maremma Toscana” [“Crossing the Tuscan Maremma”], the poet finds a promise of peace in the land of his childhood: “Oh, that which I loved, that which I dreamed, was all in vain; and always I ran and never reached the end; and tomorrow I shall fall. But from afar your hills say, peace, to the heart, with their dissolving mists and the green plain laughing in the morning rains.”

The “Idillio maremmano” [“Maremma Idyll”], another song of pungent nostalgia, is also famous and rightly committed to memory. It is a poem in which the poet compares his literary life with that of the people who work the Maremma land, as he saw in childhood: “Oh how cold thereafter was my life, how obscure and disagreeable it has been!” He says it would have been better to remain there in the fields, to be a peasant of the Maremma, to marry blond Maria, and to forget himself in labor: “Better to forget, while working, without inquiring, this huge mystery of the universe.” Here the nostalgia for the Maremma gives rise to a deep meditation and a discouragement with life. And who will forget the gentle sweetness of that “Sogno d'estate” [“Dream of Summer”] from the Odi barbare? “I dreamt, quiet things of my childhood dreamt.”

With this poetry of evocative themes can be included “Tedio invernale” [“Winter Boredom”]; “Maggiolata” [“May Song”]; and even “Dipartita” [“Departure”]; “Disperata” [“Song of Despair”]; “Serenata” [“Evening Song”]; and “Mattinata” [“Morning Song”], where the poet reveals in himself a sort of popular vein of ancient knowledge. Here is where almost all Carducci's love poetry should be placed, whether as in “Ruit hora” [“Time is Fleeting”] where he is singing of wine and love to Lidia in the “yearned-for green solitude”; or as in the sorrowful lines of “Alla Stazione in una Mattina d'Autunno” [“At the Railroad Station on an Autumn Morning”], by which he sketches the feeling of the season and the monstrous life of the train: “Oh what a fall of leaves, icy, mute, heavy, upon the soul!” The same kind of poetry is found in the “Elegia del monte Spluga” [“Elegy to Mount Spluga”: Swiss, Splügen], a love elegy of the mature poet; and in that winged song for the birthday of M. G. entitled “Sabato santo” [“Holy Saturday”]: “the bells are singing with waves and flights of sounds from the cities on hillocks distantly green.”

There are songs of domestic sorrow, the verses for his dead brother and his dead son. In “Funere mersit acerbo,” he entrusts his brother Dante, a suicide, with his little son who bore the same name and who is dead too: “It is my little boy who is knocking on your lonely door. …” In “Pianto antico” [“Ancient Lament”], the most felicitous poem that Carducci ever wrote in short lines, a serene sorrow makes him compare the green pomegranate tree, which is flowering again, with the little boy who stretched out toward that tree la pargoletta mano [his little hand] and now is dead, and never again will flower.

At another time he may meditate on death. He does so in “Colloqui con gli alberi” [“Conversations with Trees”], which in places recalls one of Zanelli's poems that Carducci greatly admired, Egoismo e Carità [Selfishness and Charity]. He no longer admires the “thoughtful oak” or craves the “unprolific laurel”; now he loves the vine: “… compassionate of me, thou ripenest the wise forgetfulness of life.” But he honors the fir most: “he, between four planks, a simple coffin, finally closes the obscure tumults and the vain desiring of my thought.” And in “Nevicata” [“Snowfall”] he pronounces a gentle chant of farewell to the world: “Soon, O dear ones, soon—be calm, unconquered heart—down into the silence I shall go, in the shade I shall rest.”

Another stage is that of the civil poetry, from which, in celebrating heroes and memorable deeds, he passes on to the calm contemplation of history, to the epos.

The first style of Carducci's civil or political poetry is more a fine oration from the platform than a form of lyric poetry, but little by little it is purified, losing the violence of the direct polemic. In Juvenilia a fierce hymn “Alla Libertà rileggendo le opere di Vittorio Alfieri” [“To Liberty, On Rereading the Works of Vittorio Alfieri”] is found, and one day he would exclaim: “Would that I had lived to exterminate tyrants, with you, Rome and Athens. …” And he develops a long ode “Agli Italiani” [“To the Italians”] to remind them of the great examples, and he sings a hymn “Alla Croce di Savoia” [“To the Cross of Savoy”]. He invokes Victor Emanuel, “a new Marius” for the redemption of Italy. He sings of Garibaldi, and he evokes the battles of the liberation: Montebello, Palestro, and so on. He sings “Sicilia e Rivoluzione.” Then in the second book of Levia Gravia, he chants “Per la Proclamazione del Regno d'Italia” [“For the Proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy”]; and “In Morte di G. B. Niccolini” [“On the Death of G. B. Niccolini”]; “Roma o morte;” “Dopo Aspromonte” [“After Aspromonte”]; “Carnevale;” “Per la Rivoluzione di Grecia” [“The Greek Revolution”]; “Per il Trasporto delle Reliquie di Ugo Foscolo in Santa Croce” [“Transfer of the Remains of Ugo Foscolo to Santa Croce”]; all political and heroic poems.

From Pieve Santo Stefano, on August 23, 1867, he sent out the violent and nostalgic quatrains “Agli Amici della Valle Tiberina” [“To Our Friends of the Tiber Valley”] where the landscape with its memories runs to the fatal prora d'Enea [the fated prow of Aeneas]. And there is the polemical shout “Death to the tyrants” and the violent close: “And flames instead of water to unworthy Rome, to the cowardly Capitol, I will send.”

For January 19, 1868, he readied the poem “Per Eduardo Corrazzini,” who died of wounds received in the Roman campaign of 1867. A violent invective against the Pope closes these burning lines. Then, for November 30, 1868, he composed the epode “Per Giuseppe Monti e Gaetano Tognetti,” martyrs to Italian efforts to claim Rome, a poem in which, among other things, as a contrast to the violent words spoken against Pope Pius IX occur the fine quatrains on the Messiah which end thus: “The little ones smiled their profound sky-blue smile at the humble prophet; He weeping caressed their blond curls with pure and slender hand.” The poem “In morte di Giovanni Cairoli” [“On the Death of Giovanni Cairoli”] is dated January, 1870, and begins in the style of the musical ariosa: “O Villagloria, from Crèmera, when the moon mantles the hills …” (Villa Glóri was a vineyard outside the Porta del Popolo of Rome where, on October 23, 1867, Enrico and Giovanni Cairoli and sixty-eight comrades heroically resisted the papal troops in desperate battle).

As was remarked above, Carducci often wrote violent polemics rather than poetry, but already in the lines “A certi Censori” [“To Certain Censors”], which bear the date December 19, 1871, he was transmuting his activity as a political poet into beautiful strophes: “When I ascend the mountain of the centuries sad-faced and alone, like falcons the strophes rise and flutter around my brow.” Then the strophes assume the substance of mythical nymphs:

Al passar de le aerëe fanciulle
Fremon per tutti i campi
L'ossa de' morti, e i tumoli a le culle
Mandan saluti e lampi.

.....

[As the airy maidens pass,
In all the fields
The bones of the dead quiver, and the tombs to the cradles
Send greetings and lightnings.]

Therefore he can say to them: “Fight against every evil power, against all tyrants.”

Closer to poetry and often completely poetical are the praises of artists, poets, and saints: “Niccolò Pisano,” “Carlo Goldoni,” “Dante,” “Petrarca,” “Ariosto,” and other Italian poets, as well as Homer [“Omero”], “Virgilio,” and even “Jaufré Rudel” in the famous novenari (verse lines of nine syllables), which relate the romantic love and the romantic death of the troubadour, and even “Martino Lutero” [“Martin Luther”], in a sonnet which closes with a lofty, so very human, prayer: “Yet, looking behind him, he sighed: Lord, call me to Thee: weary am I; pray I cannot without cursing.” We can even include “San Giorgio di Donatello” [“Donatello's Statue of Saint George”], a poem in which the voice of the prophet is heard: “Worthy, Saint George (oh that I might see it with these weary eyes), that a conquering people of heroes under arms should pass before you in review.” Finally, the sonnet to Giuseppe Mazzini, of February, 1872, has lines of high poetry: “And a dead people formed ranks behind him. Ancient exile, to a sky mild and stern raise now thy countenance that never smiled, ‘Thou alone,’ thinking, ‘O ideal, art true.’”

The ode to Victor Hugo is beautiful and songlike: “From the mountains smiling in the morning sun, descends the epic of Homer, which like a divine river peopled with swans goes flowing across the green Asian plain.” And the expectancy of the close is clear and wholesome in that ode: “Sing to the new progeny, O divine old man, the age-old song of the Latin people; sing to the expectant world: ‘Justice and Liberty.’”

There are lyrics inspired by a deed or by a historical figure, such as “La Sacra di Enrico Quinto” [“The Consecration of Henry V”]; with the pace of a romantic ballad, full of skulls and bones, it is a hearty thing. So too are “La Leggenda di Teodorico,” which is even more delightful, and “Nina Nanna di Carlo V” [“The Lullaby of Charles V”].

As the years passed, the praises grew purer and more calmly expressed. The poet reached the time of the odes entitled “Alla Regina d'Italia” [“To the Queen of Italy”], “Il Liuto e la Lira” [“The Lute and the Lyre”], “A Giuseppe Garibaldi,” “Scoglio di Quarto” [the little port from which Garibaldi and his Thousand set forth on the conquest of Sicily, May 6, 1860], “Saluto Italico,” “Per la Morte di Eugenio Napoleone,” “Alla Vittoria” [“To Victory”], “Sirmione” [birthplace of Quintus Valerius Catullus], “Miramar” [Adriatic castle near Trieste, from which Maximilian departed to become Emperor of Mexico]. In these poems, every image transfigures the vehemence of his passion. The sonnets of the Ça ira are violent and explosive, but beautiful just the same and harmonious with great self-possession.

Then come the odes of serene, historical contemplation, which were to culminate in the epos, the stupendous preface to which is the inspired ode “Ad Alessandro d'Ancona” with its strophe of lyrical pride: “Slothful terrors of the Middle Ages, black progeny of barbarism and mystery, pale swarms, away! The sun is rising, and Homer sings.”

Already in Juvenilia, songs of love, landscapes, nostalgia, there is the call to Greece, to “free human genius,” to “Mother Rome,” to “thou, enigmatic Rome of our people,” and the poets also sings hymns to Phoebus Apollo and Diana Trivia. Then he composed in great strophes the passion for the Roman spirit which he nourished within his bosom. “And everything in the world which is civilized, great, august, it is Roman still,” he sang in the ode bearing the title “Nell'annuale della Fondazione di Roma” [“On the Anniversary of the Founding of Rome”]. And in the ode entitled “Roma,” he said: “I do not come to thee curious about little things: Who looks for butterflies under the Arch of Titus?” But he gave a still more austere, almost religious feeling of the Roman spirit in the ode “Dinanzi alle terme di Caracalla” [“Before the Baths of Caracalla”] with that severe landscape: “Between the Celio and the Aventine the clouds run darkly: the wind blows damp from the dreary plain: in the background stand the Alban Hills, white with snow.” He describes the place in solemn, awe-struck lines, and in contrast to the present time which those Baths recall. He also invokes Fever, calling on that goddess to repulse “the new men” and “their trifling affairs; this horror is religious: here sleeps the goddess Rome.” Here the Roman spirit is represented as a sacred sentiment in the form of high melancholy.

Indeed, this religious emotion that arose when he looked at history was to inspire the Carducci of maturity and old age. A limpid strength, softened by a calm melancholy, generated the poet's new odes, such as the one entitled “Furi alla Certosa di Bologna” [“Outside the Monastery of Bologna”]: “Here at the foot of the hill sleep the Umbrian forebears who first, with sound of axes, broke thy sacred silences, O Appennine: sleep the Etruscans descended with the horn [lituus], with the spear, with eyes fixed aloft on the green mysterious slopes, and the great, ruddy, red-haired Celts running to wash away the slaughter in the cold Alpine waters which they hailed as Reno, and the noble race of Rome, and the long-haired Lombard, who was last to camp on the wooded peaks.”

There are praises of a people, or of a district, such as the odes “Piemonte,” “Cadore,” “Alla città di Ferrara,” “Bicocca San Giacomo,” “Le due Torri” [“The Two Towers”], “La Moglie del Gigante” [“The Giants's Wife”], “Davanti il castel vecchio di Verona” [“Before the Old Castle of Verona”], “A una Bottiglia di Valtellina del 1848” [“A Bottle of 1848 Vintage Valtellina”]. In each of these poems there are passages of high beauty; for example, the opening of “Piemonte,” which begins like a majestic dance, or the beginning of the second part of the ode to Ferrara: “O pensive land fading out to sea in the lowering sullen air, between gray sands and motionless pools of water, now shaded only by a few oaks, where rarely the wild boar roots,” and so on.

“L'Antica Poesia Toscana” [“Ancient Tuscan Poetry”] or “I Poeti di Parte Bianca” [“The Poets of the White Faction of Dante's Florence”] bring us again to historical evocations. The lines that begin: Era un giorno di festa e luglio ardea [“It was a holiday and July was waxing hot”], take us back to the joy of seeing again in imagination an old, old story.

“La Canzone di Legnano,” epically serene and sorrowful, sketches in whole hendecasyllables almost without syntactical breaks, the victory of the Lombard over Barbarossa, and the figure of Alberto di Giussano stands out in masculine greatness: “And his voice like thunder in May.”

Among the newest and most inward historical odes of Carducci—and among the most beautiful of modern poetry—are the odes entitled “Sui Campi di Marengo” [“On the Fields of Marengo”], “Faida di Commune” [“A Communal Feud”], and “Il Comune rustico” [“The Rustic Commune”]. The first of these has fitted the Alexandrine verse, which in Italian poetry almost always has a facile and slovenly musicality, to a sustained and elegant rhythm which permits strophes such as the one which depicts the emperor:

Solo, a piedi, nel mezzo del campo, al corridore
Suo presso, riguardava nel ciel l'imperatore:
Passavano le stelle su'l grigio capo; nera
Dietro garria co'l vento l'imperial bandiera.”

.....

[Standing alone in mid-field, hard by his passageway,
The emperor was looking up at the heavens:
The stars passed above his gray head;
Black behind him the imperial banner fluttered in the wind].

In “Faida di Comune,” history takes concrete shape in lyrical poetry without any residue. It is all infused with an ineffable love for that Tuscan landscape which played such an important role in the heart of Giosuè Carducci. There are the fertile hillocks where

… lieti
Ne l'april svarian gli ulivi!
Bacchian li uomini le rame,
Le fanciulle fan corona,
E di canti la collina
E di canti il pian risona,
Mentre pregni d'abbondanza
Ispumeggian i frantoi
Scricchiolando.

.....

[… joyous
In April the olive trees in their changes!
The men knock the olives from the branches
as the girls form a circle,
and with songs, the hill
With songs the plain resounds,
While, rich in abundance,
The olive-crushers foam,
Creaking.]

There are also the rough stubble of the fields, all silvery with frost,” the “languid olive groves,” and the “stripped grapevines.” Together with the historical incident which brought the Pisans and the Lucchese face to face, there is the airy and storied feeling of an ancient legend:

Bel castello è Avane, e corte
Fu de i re d'Italia un giorno.
Vi si sente a mezza notte
Pe' querceti un suon di corno.
Vi si sente a mezza notte
La real caccia stormire,
Dietro ad una lepre nera
Un caval nero annitrire.

.....

[Avane is a fine castle,
And once upon a time it was the court of the Italian kings.
At midnight there, a sound of horns
Is heard through the oak groves;
There, is heard at midnight
The royal hunt thundering by,
Hard after a black hare,
And a black horse neighing.]

The “Comune rustico” is a landscape out of ancient history, sketched with a purity of images and of language that induce in the heart that Olympian melancholy which constitutes the effect of the loftiest poetry. “And the red heifers on the meadow / Beheld the little senate passing by, / As the light of noon shone down upon the fir trees.” This last line tells the meaning of that sun at highpoint in the heavens which shines on the fields and stills the air of high noon. Carducci rarely reached such an intense and hidden understanding in the music of his verse.

It might be said that the ultimate stage of Carducci's poetry gathers together all these motifs into a cosmic vision in which objective history, landscape, and memories arrange themselves so as to express the high meaning of life, the supreme melancholy of living. In such moments Carducci, reaching a new serenity, feels “the Hellenic life flowing tranquilly in his veins.” His poetry might be compared to the serene Hebe whom he extols in a landscape, like the one which surrounds “the gentle daughter of Jesse, all enwrapped in golden sparks,” and she “contemplates, ethereal,” villas, fields, rivers, harvests, and “the snows radiant upon the Alps,” and smiles amid the clouds “at the flowering dawns of May, at the sad sunsets of November.”

Examples of this Carduccian poetry are to be found in all the volumes of Carducci, without regard to chronological consideration. The stages of Carducci's poetry, which have been seen in landscape, in subjective, as well as nostalgic moments, in civil praise and political celebration and in history, and finally, in moments more complex and yet spontaneous in which all the others are mingled and fused, are ideal stages and therefore belong to any period of the poet.

In this last stage, the “Canto dell 'Amore” should also be included, although it has passages in which eloquence forces the lyrical quality somewhat. Here a historical recollection sets fire to his imagination: the Paolina fortress, which once stood in the very place from which the poet now is contemplating the valley, was destroyed by the people in September, 1860—it was a symbol of tyranny. But now the poet, overcome by the beauty of springtime, raises his eyes above the human struggles and feels the song of love rising within him: “… but like sapphire I feel every thought of mine shining.” Now he no longer cares about the priests and the tyrants whom he detested; he would become reconciled with the pope: “Open up the Vatican. I want to embrace him who is his own old prisoner. Come, I drink a toast to liberty. Citizen Mastai [Count Giovanni Mastai Feretti, Pope Pius IX], drink a glass!” And the whole composition is just a bit intoxicated with this last glass of wine so that sometimes it seems just too plebeian, but it is wholesome, and even amusing in certain benign sarcasms. There are unhackneyed lines of real poetical worth: “Do madonnas still walk the rose-colored pathway of these mountains? The madonnas seen by Perugino descending in the pure sunsets of April, with their arms opened in adoration over the child with such gentle divinity?”

“In una Chiesa Gotica” [“In a Gothic Church”] expresses a sentiment of pagan life (while he has amorous Lydia sitting beside him) against the Semitic god. It is the same impulse that would inspire him to pen the invective against the Galilean with the red locks. Now, however, the Carduccian form has lost the quite physical vehemence of certain epodes, and here, as in the ode “Alle Fonti del Clitunno” [“The Sources of the Clitumnus”], his protest against Christianity has the tone of poetry. But poets' songs are fleeting, universal sentiments; it was not much later that Carducci was to welcome even Christian poetry, and in the “Chiesa di Polenta” [a church of the eighth century], which is one of the great odes of Rime e Ritmi, he would feel the religious fascination of the Ave Maria.

The ode “Alle Fonti del Clitunno” is famous, and justly so: the initial landscape in itself would suffice to make it so, with its stern energy and its verdant freshness; here the reminiscence of the classical images naturally brightens into a genuine sensation.

Next to these odes should be placed the Primavere elleniche [Hellenic Springs] to which Carducci gave such an eminent position in his work; “La Moglie del Gigante” [“The Wife of the Giant”]; or “I due Titani,” which is more mature in feeling and in form, and in which Prometheus and Atlas curse the tyrant Jove in a sort of new hymn to Satan.

“Su l'Adda [“On the River Adda”] is mainly love poetry; nevertheless, the presence of Lydia does not destroy the voice of history that the landscape evokes in the poet's heart; in vain he has exclaimed: “Adieu, history of man.”

In “Presso l'Urna di P. B. Shelley” [“Close by Shelley's Grave”], however, the loving woman stands before the poet as a cherished being to whom he addresses a serene yet sorrowful discourse: “Lalage, I know what dream wells up from the bottom of thy heart.” The presence of the woman infuses the words of the poet with tenderness: “The present hour is in vain; it but strikes and flees; only in the past is beauty, only in death is truth.”

The thought of death inspired in him the powerful couplets with the title of “Mors”:

Quando a le nostre case la diva severa discende,
da lungi il rombo de la volante s'ode,
e l'ombra de l'ala che gelida gelida avanza
diffonde intorno lugubre silenzïo.
Sotto la veniente ripiegano gli uomini il capo,
ma i sen feminei rompono in aneliti.
Tale de gli alti boschi, se luglio il turbine addensa,
non corre un fremito per le virenti cime:
immobili quasi per brivido gli alberi stanno,
e solo il rivo roco s'ode gemere

.....

[When to our abodes the stern goddess descends,
From afar is heard the roar of her flight,
And the shadow of the wing that advances coldly, coldly,
Spreads all about a mournful silence.
Beneath the goddess who comes, men lower their heads,
But feminine breasts burst into sobs.
So from the high woods, if July condenses the whirling storm,
Not a quiver runs along the verdant peaks:
Motionless as though gripped by horror stand the trees,
No sound is heard but the moaning of the stream.]

In the verses “All'Aurora” [“To the Dawn”], he fuses in a new melody the ancient myth of Aurora and her daily birth upon the world of today. He tells of her beauty and the bondage of those whom she awakens. He lifts the heart to a lofty new religious myth: “Carry me,” he says, “Aurora, on thy steed of flame! Into the fields of stars, carry me, whence I may see the earth, all smiling once again in thy rosy light.”

A deep melancholy converts the words of the ode entitled “Nella Piazza di San Petronio” into the purest of sounds; for example, he describes a sunset: “It is the soft sweet hour when the sun about to die hails thy towers and thy temple, holy Petronius.” In that sunset, it seems as though the sun “reawakens the soul of the centuries … and a sad desire through the stern air awakens, a desire of red Mays, of hot, fragrant evenings, when the pagan women danced in the square, and the consuls were returning with defeated kings.”

In “Su Monte Mario” [“On Mount Marius”], there is a sorrowful and pagan vision of a dying world. The poet says, “Pour out, atop the luminous hill, pour, friends, the blond wine, and let the sun be refracted in it. Smile, lovely women: tomorrow we shall die.” Rarely has his poetry reached the heights of these following lines:

Addio, tu madre del pensier mio breve,
terra, e de l'alma fuggitiva! quanta
d'intorno al sole aggirerai perenne
gloria e dolore!
fin che ristretta sotto l'equatore
dietro i richiami del calor fuggente
l'estenuata prole abbia una sola
femina, un uomo,
che ritti in mezzo a' ruderi de' monti,
tra i morti boschi, lividi, con gli occhi
vitrei te veggan su l'immane ghiaccia,
sole, calare.

.....

[Adieu, earth, thou mother of my brief thought
And of my fugitive soul!
How much glory, and sorrow,
Wilt thou whirl around the everlasting sun,
Until, forced beneath the equator
In search of waning warmth,
thy exhausted progeny shall number
One woman only, one man,
Who standing among the ruins of the mountains,
amid the dead woods, livid and with glassy eyes
Shall over the vast cruel ice see thee,
Sun, set!]

The power of this vision that pictures the ultimate catastrophe of the world has few equals in modern European poetry.

But against this sadness of the death of the earth, Carducci could set the joyous song of love: “Everything passes and nothing can die.” That prodigious “Canto di Marzo” [“March Song”], transcribes even more clearly the sentiment previously expressed in the “Canto d'Amore.” Here the art of Carducci is in its moment of grace, and this March, this spring, without any symbolical meaning, becomes naturally the myth of the eternal change and renewal of the world. Here are the enchanting lines on “the forest which puts on its first throbs,” or those which describe how “… the shadow of the clouds passes in splashes over the green as the sun pales and brightens,” or the others which paint a vivid country scene: “Here comes the rush of rain and the grumble of thunder; the calf pokes its head out of the wet cowshed, the hen, shaking her wings, makes a din, deep in the orchard the cuckoo sighs, and on the threshing floor the children jump.”

Such was the poetry of Giosuè Carducci. Beside it must be set the best part and the spirit of the Carduccian prose, which fills several volumes: Discorsi storici e letterari [Historical and Literary Lectures], which include “Lo Studio di Bologna, Dello Svolgimento della letteratura nazionale” [“Development of the National Literature”], L'Opera di Dante [“The Works of Dante”], “Per la Morte di Giuseppe Garibaldi,” and writings on Vergil, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and so on; Archeologica Poetica, essays on Petrarch, Matteo Frescobaldi, and on the Italian popular lyric of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Studi letterari, on the poems and varying fortune of Dante, and on music and poetry in the fourteenth century, and so forth; Cavalleria e Umanesimo [Chivalry and Humanism], in which are found, among others, an essay on poetry and Italy in the Fourth Crusade, and a long essay on Poliziano; Studi su L. Ariosto e T. Tasso; Melica e Lirica del Settecento [Melic and Lyrical Poetry in the Eighteenth Century]; Il Parini Maggiore [The Greater Works of Parini]; and Il Parini minore. There are also various essays in the volumes Primi Saggi, Studi Saggi e Discorsi, Bozzetti e Scherme [Sketches and Polemics], Poesia e Storia, Confessioni e Battaglie, as well as in Ceneri e faville [Ashes and Sparks]. The poet also personally chose and brought together in one volume his most representative prose writings.

In so many pages of prose, what really strikes the reader is the poetical power of the style, though supported in part by ideas that he drew from the culture of his time and even from De Sanctis, the criticism of Carducci is above all useful for an understanding of the strength of his own style. That does not mean that the Carduccian studies of literary history do not have great importance. There is in them the soundness and the experience of a man of taste, and the authority of a man who felt poetry and who also wrote it. His remarks on the structure of a canto, of an expression, and of a poetical line serve to explain the essence of a poet: even the use of the schemata of the literary genres is redeemed in him by the way he groups them historically to grasp affinities, influences, and sources. From all his prose works it is possible to extract a Carduccian history of Italian literature; but, nevertheless, the real interest of Carducci's prose is not in the value of the criticism and history.

Carducci's prose always has a tendency to become poetry. And he worked on it as one would poetry: attentive within each phrase to the music in the accents, pauses, and contractions of the diphthongs; attentive to the creation of an imaginative and decorative substance around each idea, imparting to the very impetus of an invective the grave mischievous composure which redeems its passion. It is necessary to say that in prose polemics Carducci preserved a sense of limit, which, on the contrary, he seemed to lose in certain overly vigorous verses. Truly, the poetical prose of which Leopardi had spoken in connection with the Operette Morali is here displayed in full bloom.

The language that Carducci draws from the noblest literary tradition is enlivened by the new warmth with which he infuses the words, especially because of the poetical tendency that impregnates their rhythm and imagery; for example, the beginning of the five lectures on the development of the national literature (Dello svolgimento della letteratura nazionale) where he describes the men at the start of the year one thousand, and his pages on the ottava rima of Lodovico Ariosto, or the prose Eterno femminino regale, or the polemic for Ça ira.

Carducci's literary expression always seeks a poetic aura; and this is the great novelty of the prose of his time.