14 
LAND & WATER 
Gabriele d'Annunzio 
By Arthur Symons 
August 30, 1917 
POETRY, as Rossetti has wisely said, must indeed be 
as " amusintj " as prose ; but it is not anuismg first 
and poetrv afterwards. But fiction, dealuig with 
circumstance, wliich is the accident of time, and 
character, which is tlie accident of temperament ; with 
"society which is the convention of external intercourse ; 
with life seen from its own level, and judged by its temporary 
laws ■ has been a sort of composite art, working at once for 
two masters. It has never freed itself from the bondage 
of mere " truth " (likeness, that is, to appearances), it is only 
now. faintly and hesitatingly, beginning to consider beauty 
as its liighest aim. No art can be supreme art if it does not 
consider beauty as its highest aim. It may be asked, it 
may even be doubted, whether such an aim will ever be 
practically possible for the novel. But to answer m the 
negative "is to take away the novel's one chance of becoming 
a great imaginative art. . 
This aim, at all events, has always been clearly the aim ot 
d'Annunzio'; and with d'Annunizo it is important to remember 
that he was a poet long before he ever wrote novels, and that 
his novels, as he gets inorc and more mastery over his own 
form, become more and more of the nature of poetry. His 
early stories were crude, violent, done after the French models 
of that day ; the man himself coming out in them only in the 
direct touch, there already, on physical pain, more than on 
physical pleasure. But with 11 Piacere he has begun, a 
little uncertainly, to mould a form of his own, taking the hint 
not only from some better French models, but also from an 
Englishman, Pater.. There is still much that is conventional 
and unskilful in a book which, it must be remembered, was 
written at the age of twenty-five ; but how it suggests, already, 
the free form ot the Trionfo della Morte and Le Virgini delle 
Koccel how the imaginative feeling of the descriptions 
of Rome struggles with the scraps of tedious conversation 
between " golden " young men at the club or on the course. 
It is the book of youth, and has the over-plenitude of that 
prosperous age. L'Innocenie, which shows a new influence, 
the Russian intimacy of Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, deviates 
in form, but narrows the interest of the action still tighter 
about two lonely figures,' seeming to be cut off from the world 
by some invisible, impassable line. 
"In the Trionfo della Morle, fonn and subject are both 
found. This study in the psychology of passion is a book 
scarcely to be read without terror, so insinuatingly does it 
show the growth, change, and slowly absorbing dominion of 
the flesh over the soul. 'Nee sine te ncc tecum vivere possum," 
the epigraph upon the French translation, expresses, if we 
add to it the " Odi et amo " of Catullus, that tragedy of 
desire unsatisfied in satisfaction, yet eternal in desire, which 
is perhaps the most profound tragedy in which the human 
soul can become entangled. Antony and Cleopatra, Trvitan 
and Isolde : it might have seemed as if nothing new could be 
said on a subject which is the subject of those two supreme 
masterpieces. But d'Annunzio lias said something new, 
for he has found a form of his own, in which it is not Antony 
who is." so ravished and enchanted of the sweet poison" 
of the love of Cleopatra, nor Tristan who " chooses ttrdie that 
he may live in love," for the sake of Isolde, but two shadows 
who are the shadows of whatever in humanity flies to the lure 
- of earthly love. Here is a man and woman, I can scarce- 
ly remember their Christian names, I am not even sure if we 
are ever told their surnames, and in this man and woman 
I see myself, you, everyone who has ever desired tlie in- 
finity of emotion, the injjnity of surrender, the finality of 
possession. Just because they arc so shadow}', because they 
may seem to be so unreal, they have another, nearer, more 
insidious kind of reality than that reality by which Antony 
is so absolutely Antony, Tristan so' absolutely heroic love. 
These live in themselves with so intense a personal or tragic 
life that thc-.y arc for ever outside us ; but the lovers of the 
Trionfo della Morte might well be ourselves, evoked in some 
clouded crystal, because they have only so much of humanity 
as to have the desires, and dangers, apd possible ecstasies, 
and possible disasters, whch are common to all lovers who have 
loved without limitation and without wisdom. 
II. 
In Laudi del Cielo, del Mare, delta Terra e .degli Eroi, the 
substance is infinitely interesting ; the form shows a wide range 
of accomphshment. Never, indeed, has d'Annunzio shown 
himself a more complete musician of the art of verse, and there 
is here and there a poem perhaps more genuinely poetic than 
anything he has yet written. The first section of the book is 
largely a song of heroes; there are poems on Garibaldi, the 
King, Nietzsche, Victor Hugo, Verdi, with . a series of sonnets 
on "Le Citta di Silenzio," in which tlie glories of Italian cities 
are celebrated and a " canto angiirale per la nazione eletta." 
In all this there is a great deal of fervid and eloquent 
writing, but, except in some of the descriptions, little that 
seems sincere with more than the orator's sincerity of the 
moment, little that does not become tedious with the tedium 
of unfelt emotion. Page follows page, and soon we 
are wearied of this orator in verse, who expects to be listened 
to because he has a beautiful voice. Much in the latter part 
of the book has something of the same quality of tedium, 
especially the four " Ditirambi," which are all gesture, and 
some of the classical studies, which are no more than elegant 
scholastic exercises done with great purity of style. But, 
among these classical studies there 'are some which have a 
genuine personal quality, and a feeling for what was at the 
root of classical mythology. The dialogue in sonnets, " La 
Corona di Glauco," has fine outlines and moves to the sound of 
steady music: " Versilia," the nymph of the woods and 
Udulna," the nymph of the water, speak as if with the 
actual life of sap and of springs. With these may be classed 
a series of poems which render with extraordinary subtlety 
certain natural sensations ; the joy of sunlight in " Meriggio," 
the singing of water in " L'Onda ' and " Intra du'Arno ," the 
delight of rain among the trees in " Im Pioggia nel I^ineto," 
with all that is expressed in the title " iMUgo I'Affrico nella 
sera di giiigno dopo la pioggia." They might be called " poems 
and lyrics of the joy of earth." though with a significance 
by no means the same as Meredith's. Their joy is a joy from 
which not only the intellect but the reason itself is excjuded ; 
they render the sensations of animal pleasure in merely living 
and being conscious of life. Within these limits of sensation 
they have infinite delicacies ; and this verse which is so often 
eloquent without sa\'ing anything, becomes suddenly precise, 
with a new beauty of exactitude. A whole new order of rhy- 
thms comes into d'Annunzio 's work in the search for some 
means of expressing almost inarticulate meanings. 
What is curious, however, in this book, as in much Italian ' 
poetry, is the hcense which permits, in verse of fine technical 
accomplishment , a paucitj' and irregularity of rhyme which 
does not exist in the verse of any other language. Poems written 
entirely without rhyme are arranged in the form of stanzas : 
for what purpose ? Poems, in which only the last line of each 
stanza, of perhaps eight lines, rhymes, disconcert at all events 
the foreign ear, which refuses to carry on a sound so remotely 
recurrent. There is one poem here, " Albasia," which con- 
sists of two stanzas of nineteen lines each, in which the last 
lines of the two stanzas rhyme together. And in many places 
assonances are allowed to stand for rhymes, bad rhymes like 
" Coperchio " and " Specchio " are used, or lines are suddenly 
left unrhymed for no apparent reason. ' Is there, one asks, 
a reason for all these things, and is it a reason which can be 
realised outside Italy ? For it is quite certain that d'Annunzio 
never wrote a line carelessly or left it other than as he intended 
it to be. 
In this book for the first time, it seems to me, with the 
possible exception of Franccsca da Eimini, d'Annunzio 
the poet has brought his technique to the point which 
d'Annunzio the prose-writer had long ago reached. The 
verse becomes less formal, less formally accomplished within 
too narrow limits ; it becomes at last a means of speech. 
What has always been most significant in the novels and in 
the plays is the power of rendering sensation, vvith a directness, 
an acuteness, ahnost painful. Tliat power is only now fully 
evident in the verse ; and it is because I find that power 
in this volume of verse, only now fully evident, that I am 
inclined to welcome it as, still with the possible exception of 
Francesco, the most important book of poetry that 
d'Annunzio has yet given us. 
III. 
I never realised the full charm of the Italian language 
until J heard the " Parable of the Wise arid Foolish Virgins " 
read by Gabriele d'Annunizo at Count Primoli's, and 
d'Annunzio reads Italian more beautifully than any one 1 
ever heard. Delicately articulated, all those triple endings, 
avano, arano, ovono, ringing like bells, fatigued the ear as 
the blue of the Mediterranean fatigues the eye ; there were 
no grey shades, and there was also no brief, emphatic pause 
in the music. I realized then that it is a language of beauti- 
ful exteriorities, and that its beauty is without subtlety ; 
the typical feminine language. But the day when I made this 
discovery is worth remembering for other reasons as well ; 
for tlie ceremony of tlie reading, in tliat interesting house. 
