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POPULAR ITALIAN POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE

The semi-popular poetry of the Italians in the fifteenth century formed an important branch of their national literature, and flourished independently of the courtly and scholastic studies which gave a special character to the golden age of the revival.  While the latter tended to separate the people from the cultivated classes, the former established a new link of connection between them, different indeed from that which existed when smiths and carters repeated the Canzoni of Dante by heart in the fourteenth century, but still sufficiently real to exercise a weighty influence over the national development.  Scholars like Angelo Poliziano, princes like Lorenzo de’ Medici, men of letters like Feo Belcari and Benivieni, borrowed from the people forms of poetry, which they handled with refined taste, and appropriated to the uses of polite literature.  The most important of these forms, native to the people but assimilated by the learned classes, were the Miracle Play or ‘Sacra Rappresentazione;’ the ‘Ballata’ or lyric to be sung while dancing; the ’Canto Carnascialesco’ or Carnival Chorus; the ‘Rispetto’ or short love-ditty; the ‘Lauda’ or hymn; the ‘Maggio’ or May-song; and the ‘Madrigale’ or little part-song.

At Florence, where even under the despotism of the Medici a show of republican life still lingered, all classes joined in the amusements of carnival and spring time; and this poetry of the dance, the pageant, and the villa flourished side by side with the more serious efforts of the humanistic muse.  It is not my purpose in this place to inquire into the origins of each lyrical type, to discuss the alterations they may have undergone at the hands of educated versifiers, or to define their several characteristics; but only to offer translations of such as seem to me best suited to represent the genius of the people and the age.

In the composition of the poetry in question, Angelo Poliziano was indubitably the most successful.  This giant of learning, who filled the lecture-rooms of Florence with students of all nations, and whose critical and rhetorical labours marked an epoch in the history of scholarship, was by temperament a poet, and a poet of the people.  Nothing was easier for him than to throw aside his professor’s mantle, and to improvise ‘Ballate’ for the girls to sing as they danced their ‘Carola’ upon the Piazza di Santa Trinita in summer evenings.  The peculiarity of this lyric is that it starts with a couplet, which also serves as refrain, supplying the rhyme to each successive stanza.  The stanza itself is identical with our rime royal, if we count the couplet in the place of the seventh line.  The form is in itself so graceful and is so beautifully treated by Poliziano that I cannot content myself with fewer than four of his Ballate.[30] The first is written on the world-old theme of ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.’