Polinnia,[1] by a series of pictures which might have enriched the Galleria, and by fresh variations on the endless theme of kisses and roses, versions in ottava rima of the Canzone dei Baci and La Rosa (Lira II.) The outcome was a poem of over forty thousand lines, in which a voluptuous and licentious story is expanded by endless digressions and diffuse, facile, irrelevant descriptions. All the conventional ornaments of cinquecentist poetry are heaped upon one another in Marino's glittering and fluent stanzas—conceits, antitheses, alliterative and other artificial sound-effects, gorgeous descriptions in which nature is embellished by art (trees have emerald leaves and golden fruit, teeth are pearls and lips are rubies), hackneyed and allegorical personifications and frigid hyperboles.[2] The taste for detailed picturesque description which had come down to the Italian poets from medieval romance, and had been intensified by the influence of classical idyll and contemporary art, divorced from everything else became a mania in
- ↑ This is one of the numerous works enumerated in the preface to the third book of the Lira, and was apparently to be a scientific poem, dealing with the structure of the universe from the elements up to God, in hymns in the style of Pindar, and of the choruses in tragedy. In the same preface the Sampogna is said to consist of fifty or sixty idylls. The Polinnia, if ever written, was never published: the Sampogna as published contains only twelve idylls, to which some additions were made in a second part. What I venture to suggest is that some of the material of these poems passed into the Adone, into whose texture are woven many myths besides that of Adonis, and which contains two allegoric-scientific cantos, the tenth and eleventh (Le Maraviglie and Le Bellezze), in which the hero visits the heavens and is instructed by Mercury.
- ↑ See Canevari, op. cit.
