Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/354

334 Marino's sonnets and madrigals. One gets it usually in the compliment which is the point of the poem. The following pastoral sonnet, for example, opens delightfully—

"Pon giù l' urna gravosa ò bionda Spio,               Ah troppo lunge è del volturno il fonte:                Ti mostrero (se vuoi) di quà dal monte                E men lontano, e più tranquillo un rio";

but instead of closing—as the sonnet quoted above does—in an appropriate and natural sentiment, passes into a conceit hyperbolical and ingenious, but cold as the frost-work on a window-pane—

"vedrai poi           Volto il fiume in argento, e l' acqua in foco            S' avvien che specchio ei sia de' gli occhi tuoi."

And in another suggested by Theocritus's beautiful idyll, which tells how he fell in love with the young girl as she gathered fruit beside her mother, the passionate cry which Virgil translated

"Ut vidi, ut perii! ut me malus abstulit error!"

becomes a poor conceit—

"Io stava in parte rimirando, e quante              Cogliea la bianca man rose e ligustri               Tante m'erano al cor facelle e piaghe."

Marino rehandles all the hackneyed images of the sonneteers—fire and ice, love's arrows and nets, hearts which migrate, mirrors, and little dogs; but even when absurd his conceits are both ingenious