A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields/Dante (Auguste Barbier)
DANTE.
Dante, old Ghibelin! when I see only in passing
The plaster white and dull of this mask so puissant
That Art has bequeathed us of thy features majestic,
I cannot help feeling a slight shudder, O poet!
So strongly the hand of genius and that of misfortune
Have imprinted upon them the dark seal of sorrow.
Under the narrow cap that on thine ears closely presses,
Is it Time's mark, or the furrow of thought and of vigils
That traverses thy forehead with laborious indenture?
Was it in fields of exile in thy dark degradation
That thy mouth closed thus tightly, as after deep curses?
Thy last thought, is it in this smile sinister apparent—
The smile that Death on thy lips has nailed with his fingers?
Ah! Disdain suits well the mouth of a man such as Dante,
For the daylight dawned on him in a city most ardent,
And his natal pavement was made of flint and of gravel
That tore a long time the soles of his feet ever restless.
Dante saw like us, daily, human passions in conflict
Roll around him with fortunes strange, sudden, and diverse;
He saw the citizens cut each other's throats in madness;
The parties crushed, spring up again one after another;
He beheld on the scaffold the torch applied to the victims;
He saw during thirty years pass of crime the wild surges;
And the word 'Fatherland' flung to the winds of all quarters
Without profit for the people or the cause of fair freedom.
O Dante Alighieri of Florence! Poet immortal!
I understand to-day thy sufferings poignant and deathful!
O lover of Beatrice,—to exile condemned from thy country,
I understand that eye hollow, and that gaunt forehead wrinkled,
The disgust of the things of this world, the terrible heartache
Endless—the hatred profound and all but eternal,
That in whipping up thy humours made thee atrocious,
And flooded thy pen and thy heart with bitterness savage.
Thus, after the manners of thy town, manners long vanished,
Artist, thou paintedst a canvas that holds us still spellbound,
A picture of perversity—of the loosed human passions,
With such energy, such grandeur, such truth, and such courage,
That little children who saw thee by day in Ravenna,
Traversing some plain lonely, or some street in the distance,
Cried out in contemplating thy brow livid and clouded,
'Lo! lo! The man that comes back from the regions infernal!'