Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/360

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EUROPEAN LITERATURE—1600-1660.

retain the "concetti metafisici ed ideali" of Italian poetry.[1] Efforts were made, however, to adopt the form and also the themes of the classical ode. Trissino, Alamanni, and Minturno experimented in the Pindaric structure, writing laudatory odes to the French King or the Emperor divided into volta, rivolta, and stanza, just as Ben Jonson later addressed "that noble pair Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison" in a Pindaric ode with turn, counter-turn, and stand. These experiments were isolated and unsuccessful. Better results were achieved in the moralising Horatian ode by Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato, whose epic has been mentioned in a previous volume. His Odi,[2] written in short stanzas of mingled hendecasyllabics and septenars, are too often artificial addresses, in the style of Horace, to gods and goddesses; but one of them is a moving description of his own sorrows, and two—that on the Dawn, which has the colour and sentiment of Drummond's "Phœbus arise!" and that on the Shepherd's Life—are finely conceived and executed. Bernardo Tasso's Odi were the first decisive movement from the canzone in the direction of the ode of Chiabrera, Testi, Redi, and a line of descendants down to Leopardi, Carducci, and D'Annunzio.

Chiabrera's first Pindaric odes were published seventeen years after Bernardo Tasso's. It was only in his later work that he made any serious effort to reproduce

  1. See the interesting article Dello Svolgimento dell' Ode in Italia, by Giosue Carducci, Nuova Antologia, June 1902. The article has been republished in the selections from Carducci's prose works, 1905.
  2. Published in the Rime di Messer B. Tasso, 1560.