Pietro Bembo

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Introduction to An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry

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SOURCE: Nichols, Fred J. Introduction to An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry, edited and translated by Fred. J. Nichols, pp. 1-84. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.

[In the following excerpt, Nichols judges “Benacus” one of Bembo's finest poems in Latin.]

The most influential figure of the generation of Latin poets which reached its literary maturity toward the end of the [sixteenth] century was Pietro Bembo (1470-1547). Bembo's fame as a literary figure, notably because of the part he played in enabling serious writers to regard Italian as a language worthy of cultivation, has obscured an appreciation of the consummate literary skill he displays in his own Latin writings. The very polish of his work has tended to put off modern critics who assume that such an attention to surface must entail a corresponding deficiency of substance.

His long poem “Benacus,” an encomium dedicated to Bishop Giberti of Verona, a man who showed himself worthy of Bembo's praise, although perhaps not in the way Bembo envisioned, is representative of the poet's best work in Latin and of the difficulties his poetry presents to a modern reader. In the first place we are suspicious of encomiastic verse, living as we do in a century already glutted with bad poetry ringing out dubious praises of bad causes and worse leaders. Secondly, we suspect the formality of such poetry. In Bembo's resonant ambiguities and elegant hyperbole we find no sense of a human figure to which the poem has responded. It is in fact the superb impersonality of the speaking voice that makes us doubt the poem's sincerity.

Yet this poem repays close examination. It begins with the creation of an elaborate mythological context, for it is not a human voice but the voice of the god of Lake Garda that will sing Giberti's praises, calling him finally to his domain, involving him—as the beginning of the poem suggests—in the very fabric of the poem itself. This mythological scene, so carefully described, is one of perfect harmony. It is noon, but it is cool in the grottoes; even the sun is precisely balanced in the center of the sky. It is appropriate that the god of the lake should speak, for he sees in Giberti one who can create in the human world the kind of harmony these aquatic deities enjoy in the world of nature. The gods of the rivers of northern Italy assemble, and become the refrain of Garda's song.

The bringing of water is the central thematic action of the poem. The endless gathering force of the rivers is evoked after the enunciation of each of the young man's heroic qualities and accomplishments. It is work of civic restoration he will first accomplish, repairing both the social and the natural order with his ability to persuade and to discipline the powers of nature. The poem's complex patterns—and the energy of its design reflects the energy it compliments its hero for possessing—culminate in the exaltation of Giberti as the very focal point of nature's energies, as well as of poetic and heroic endeavors; the poem ends with a twin vision of the land parched and the land blooming. We recall that the poem began in the heat of noon when the reigning harmony operated to provide compensating coolness and repose amid activity. The refrain that ends the description of the drought becomes a plea that has been answered before the poetic voice can speak the next line. A man who has so consistently been able to succeed by exercising his gifts in harmony with the social and the natural, brings the harmony and consequent fertility of nature into the landscape that he enters. The final plea (in which the Venetian poet invites the newly named bishop to reside in his diocese in Venetian territory) has in a sense already been answered. The restoration of social coherence and natural fertility that the poem evokes is a sign that Giberti's presence is already at work in the land. It is then not his individual personality but his persona as an organizing focus of the activities of men and of natural processes that counts. In the poem's impersonality lie both the force of its compliment and the poetic value of its evocation of the possibility that man can find a way to live in harmony in nature, to refresh himself in the noonday heat.

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