Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/24

INTRODUCTION example of his success—to achieve rhetorical vigour, but for the most part his poems are damned by their verbose exuberance, their tortured circumlocutions, their utter lack of simplicity and a sense of the real. Filicaia was more successful in breaking free from the bonds of garish ornament, but he, too, has a fatal fluency; all his rhetorical thunder is apt to fail suddenly—to change into the feeblest kind of falsetto; he ‘cracks a weak voice on too lofty a note’. Even in the vigorous, though slightly forced canzone which has a place in this volume he breaks off to address the ‘vero Giove’ in this strain:—

Che s'egli è pur destino, E ne' volumi eterni ha scritto il fato, Che deggia un dì all'Eusino Servir l'ibera e l'alemanna Teti E 'l suol cui parte l'Appenin gelato, A' tuoi santi decreti Pien di timore e d'umiltà m'inchino. Vinca, se così vuoi, Vinca lo Scita, e 'l glorioso sangue Versi l'Europa esangue Da ben mille ferite. I voler tuoi Legge son ferma a noi: Tu sol se' buono e giusto...

From the point of view of piety, of course, such a sentiment is admirable, but it is perhaps slightly inappropriate to a patriotic poem. No doubt it pleased the Jesuits; it is in their best manner. Filicaia's sonnets are far finer than his attempts in larger forms, though many of them are marred by his irritating habit of asking half a dozen rhetorical questions in as many lines. 24