The Early Italian Poets From Ciullo D'Alcamo To Dante Alighieri, 1100-1300: In The Original Meters, Together With Dante's Vita Nuova

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Translator)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Poetry

500 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1861

About the author

British poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, brother of Christina Georgina Rossetti, founded the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, a society, in England in 1848 to advance the style and spirit of Italian painting before Raphael (Raffaelo Sanzio); his known portraits and his vividly detailed, mystic poems, include "The Blessed Damozel" (1850).

This illustrator and translator with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais later mainly inspired and influenced a second generation of artists and writers, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the Symbolists, a group of chiefly French writers and artists, who of the late 1800s rejected realism and used symbols to evoke ideas and emotions. He served as a major precursor of Aestheticism, an artistic and intellectual movement or the doctrine, originating in Britain in the late 19th century, that from beauty, the basic principle, derives all other, especially moral, principles.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

If only for one poem (though there are many more here worth reading) this book rates five stars--

one of the most beautiful poems of the 19th century, Rossetti's translation of Dante's sestina "Of the Lady Pietra Degli Scrovigni"--


To the dim light and the large circle of shade
I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills,
There where we see no colour in the grass.
Natheless my longing loses not its green,
It has so taken root in the hard stone
Which talks and hears as though it were a lady.

Utterly frozen is this youthful lady,
Even as the snow that lies within the shade;
For she is no more moved than is the stone
By the sweet season which makes warm the hills
And alters them afresh from white to green,
Covering their sides again with flowers and grass.

When on her hair she sets a crown of grass
The thought has no more room for other lady,
Because she weaves the yellow with the green
So well that Love sits down there in the shade,-
Love who has shut me in among low hills
Faster than between the walls of granite-stone.

She is more bright than is a precious stone;
The wound she gives may not be healed with grass;
I therefore have fled far o'er plains and hills
For refuge from so dangerous a lady;
But from her sunshine nothing can give shade,-
Not any hill, nor wall, nor summer-green.

A while ago, I saw her dressed in green,-
So fair, she might have wakened in a stone
This love which I do feel even for her shade;
And therefore, as one woos a graceful lady,
I wooed her in a field that was all grass
Girdled about with very lofty hills.

Yet shall the streams turn back and climb the hills
Before Love's flame in this damp wood and green
Burn, as it burns within a youthful lady,
For my sake, who would sleep away in stone
My life, or feed like beasts upon the grass,
Only to see her garments cast a shade.

How dark soe-er the hills throw out their shade,
Under her summer-green the beautiful lady
Covers it, like a stone cover'd in grass.

[Johna]

Got this gem from Casey. I know I'll enjoy it!