Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/362

342 enough in "Avenge, Lord!" to burn up the whole of Chiabrera's canzoniere.

Chiabrera was happier, and perhaps rendered as great a service to Italian poetry, in his lighter scherzi and canzonette.  Stimulated by the new developments in music, and taking Ronsard for his model, he found a midway "tra la via grece e'l bel cammin francese." He released the Italian lyric from its somewhat slavish bondage to the hendecasyllable and the septenar, experimenting in shorter lines and sonorous masculine rhymes. Tripping trochaic cadences like the following were comparatively new in Italian verse:— Belle rose porporine Che tra spine Sull' aurora non aprite: Ma, ministri degli amori Bei tesori Di bei denti custodite; Dite, rose prezïose Amorose; Dite, ond' è che s' io m' affiso Nel bel guardo vivo ardente, Voi repente Discioglete un bel sorriso? Unusual also, though they had been used by Dante, are the rhymes in the second, fourth, and sixth lines of each verse in the following:— "O man leggiadra, o bella man di rose;                       Rose non di giardin,                    Che un oltraggio di sole a mezzo giorno                        Vinte conduce a fin;                    Ma rose che l' Aurora in suo ritorno                        Semina sul mattin.