by GIOSUE CARDUCCI - World eBook Library

Preface
plaining of the struggle which it was his to make, he
bursts out
" O all along the wind the whispering line
Of poplars ! O
dark shades where thick trees hide
That rustic churchyard seat on feasts divine,
Whence, bare and brown, the ploughed plain stretching
wide
And green the fields are seen and green the sea
Scattered with sails, the burial ground beside."
While the
feeling more lightly dwelt on runs right
through the charming poem called " Davanti San Guido,"
where the poet returns to the home of his childhood and
confides to his old
playmates, the cypresses,
grown learned and celebrated, they hearing
half-contemptuous pity. Perhaps
that he is
him out with
the most characteristic of
his poems is the sonnet on the ox, the "pio bove," whom
he saw at work. It will be found on page 59, and next
to it that other sonnet to Virgil, applicable perhaps to
Carducci himself.