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ilmanzoni text integral passage complete quotation of the sources works historical five may poetry ode napoleon the fifth may in verses prologue, operaomnia # Written by Rev. J.F. Bingham The great Hymn of the Pentecost, perhaps the chef-d'oeuvre of all the great author's poetical work, during many years' incubation, was slowly perfected and finished five years later than the last of the other Sacred Hymns and one year after the civil masterpiece, Il Cinque Maggio. The Poet was then at the ripest of his powers, physical and mental, natural and acquired, and the printing of the Napoleonic Ode had then lifted him to a European fame. A quality of the Sacred Hymns, and most of all of the Pentecost, which entailed upon the Poet a greatly complicating difficulty of execution lay in his self-imposed restriction of never introducing for poetical effect material not found expressed or implied in the sacred record. All the force and fire of his nature, all the skill of trained experience, every device of accomplished art for arresting the attention and pleasing the cultivated taste, every effective instrument for pricking the sensibilities of high and low, -- the whole artillery of figures, of poetical diction, of metre, of rhyme, of curious unrhymed interloping lines he uses in the full abandon of invincible genius, marching steadily on, trampling down every difficulty, curbing himself only within the limits of " the faith once delivered," and often -- too often for the contentment of the unbelieving critic -- this faith expressed in the very words of the BOOK. Of this conjunction of genius with the mystic sentiment in the Pentecost LUIGI VENTURI says: "Taking for his subject the establishment of that society which was to renovate the earth, the poet fructified the theme in an amplitude and universality of conceits unknown to modern poesy; and as the light of day while illuminating warms the world, so in these verses, from the meditations of the mind, rays out the affection of the heart, because by it inspired. After the last cantos of the Paradiso, of Dante, never has any Italian poet's word struck out a strain so lofty, nor a match in artistic force, nor of equal riches in rare forms of language. The Pentecoste finished, the Poet closed the series of the Sacred Hymns. Was it that he would end like the eagle, which having spread his last flight hides himself in the inaccessible peaks of the Alps?" ARGUMENT. -- Seizing on the great fact that the descent of the HOLY SPIRIT was the beginning and foundation of the diffusion of the Faith and the constitution of the Church, in place of lingering to narrate the evangelic story like S. Ambrose, the greater part of whose Pentecostal hymns dwell on the minute particulars (drawn from the record in the book of The Acts), which accompanied the descent of the tongues, MANZONI opens abruptly his lyric strain with a fervid and eloquent apostrophe to the Church herself, now mighty and glorious, then beginning in low estate, small, fearful, hiding from the sight of wicked and hostile men. Slightly touching next, on the Pentecostal miracle, by means of a simile drawn from the fructifying power of light in the natural world, the lyric song goes on picturing the invincibly established Church (under the diffusion of her inspired faith, and under the rising of a generation of holy freemen), as Mother of a sanctified family renewing and to renew the Earth. This constitutes the first part, including stanzas I--X. In the second part, stanzas XI--XVIII, the Hymn is amplified and concluded by that celebrated peroration an extended and minutely particularized Invocation for the gifts of the Paraclete--gifts of faith, of illumination, of peaceableness, of love, of comforting hope, of a virtuous life, of modest and successful activity, of sanctified age and a victorious dying-bed. The profoundly religious and even 'orthodox' coloring and flavor, unsuited to the taste or faith of some, may cause them to feel less forcibly the literary perfections of La Pentecoste in comparison with Il Cinque Maggio, but wherever the perception and enjoyment are not dulled by such disrelish, this Hymn to the HOLY SPIRIT will ever stand the most perfect and beautiful monument of his poetic genius which MANZONI has left to the world. |
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