A minister of God, praying beside
the corpses of two friends, Pole and Hungarian, hails the dawn of the
Magyar resurrection. Then rises the grand figure of Sandor Petofi,
'the patriotic poet of Hungary,' whose life was a hymn, and whose
miraculous re-appearance will, according to popular superstition, take
place when Hungary is freed from her chains. The poem closes with a
prophecy concerning the destinies of Austria and Italy." Like all the
poems of Aleardi, it abounds in striking lines; but the interest,
instead of gathering strongly about one central idea, diffuses itself
over half-forgotten particulars of revolutionary history, and the
sympathy of the reader is fatigued and confused with the variety of
the demand upon it.
For this reason, The Three Rivers and The Three Maidens are more
artistic poems: in the former, the poet seeks vainly a promise of
Italian greatness and unity on the banks of Tiber and of Arno, but
finds it by the Po, where the war of 1859 is beginning; in the latter,
three maidens recount to the poet stories of the oppression which has
imprisoned the father of one, despoiled another's house through the
tax-gatherer, and sent the brother of the third to languish, the
soldier-slave of his tyrants, in a land where "the wife washes the
garments of her husband, yet stained with Italian blood".
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