THE VOLCANONe'er have I slept; I labour endlessly,Enriching space with many a masterpieceThat lives and dies in a day.Over the baking of the chiselled rocksUpon the vitrefaction of the many-coloured sandsI keep my watchSo well that the clay 'neath my fingersWill metamorphoseTo a porcelain of perfect rose,Which I shatter with the buffets of my steam.My accomplice is the Strait of MessinaWhich dozes in the dawn, couching white and glossyAs an Angora cat...My accomplice is the Strait of MessinaLolling like a cushion of lazy turquoise silk,With soft Arabian words embroidered by the wakeOf clouds and languorous sails,Words woven silently methinksWith a fair silver thread upon the ocean's robe.The perfidious moon is my accomplice,The arch-courtesan of the painted stars,For nowhere are the moon's cajoleriesSo luring and persuasive.And nowhere does the moon cast such assiduous eyesTo seduce the hard red funnels of the steamers,Those surly strollers SouthWith a fat cigar in their mouthWhose smoke they spit against the azure sky.And nowhere does the moon throw such a tender showerOf soft and violet ashes,As that which lulls to sleep the lava petrifiedOn the black houses hanging on my flanks.And nowhere has the moon such poignancyOf inundations of light and ecstasy,As on the gashed pathsCarved by my surgical fire.But woe to those who follow the bleating light of the moon,And the plaintive bells of the flocks,And the bitter flutes of the shepherds whose world-weary notesAre long, long threads that vanish in the blue!Woe to those who refuse to make their galloping bloodKeep step with the gallop of the blood of my devastation!And woe to those who wish to root their heads,To root their feet and housesIn a craven hope of eternity!A truce to building, for ye must encamp!Nay, am I not shaped even as a tentWhose truncated top fanneth my wrath?I only love the acrobatic starsWho balance on the rolling balls of smokeWherewith I juggle!MYSELFI can dance to them, and juggle in mid air,And shower my song on the reverberationsOf thy storms that breedIn subterranean depths!...And I descendTo hear the diapasons of thy voice.So make a pauseIn the electrical discharges of thy tubesThat tear from thy base the underlying rocks.Enjoin to silence all thy babbling grottoes,That all a-flutter quiver ceaselessly.Gag with thick cindersThe basaltic echoes whose chorus rings thy praise.What good are thy volcanic bombsThat serve as punctuations for the growlings of thy speech?And what care I for the ruddy jetsOf thine aggressive foam?Thy deluges of mud have soiled my wings of white,But check me not, for proof against thine avalancheOf scoria I descend, gilded and aureoledBy all the powdery shower of thy dumbfounded gold.
It is also relevant to mention that M. Marinetti has been recently formulating new rules and principles for his new literary code. Among the more drastic phases of this stylistic revolution we would mention the employment of mathematical signs and symbols, the rebellion from too rigid and pedantic a syntax, the minimum use of the adjective and the infinitive, the opening up of new fields of images and metaphors, and the freer and more increased use of onomatopœia. These ideas are succinctly, though no doubt extravagantly, set out in the two manifestos entitledWireless Imagination and Words at LibertyandThe Futurist Anti-Tradition.
Space vetoes more than the enumeration of the other Futurist poets—Luccini, Palazzescho, Folgore, and Altomare—though we may perhaps mention the recently publishedPoesie Electrichieof Govoni, and theA Claude Debussyof Paolo Buzzi, which won the first prize of the first international competition of "Poesia," and which transfers into a marvellously fluid Italian verse the at once ethereal and faunish emotions of the composer's music.
But if, finally, we may speculate on the Future ofFuturism, its real prospects and its real significance are to be found in the fact that, though extravagant and aggressive, it is in essence a concentrated manifestation of the whole vital impetus of the twentieth century. Its relationship to Nietzscheanism we have already examined. Almost equally close is its affinity to the standpoints of such representative spirits of the real genius of this particular age as Verhaeren and Mr. Wells; Verhaeren, the gazer on theMultiple Splendourof theTumultuous Forcesof theVisages of Life, with his motto, "Life is to be mounted and not to be descended; the whole of life is in the soaring upwards," who expresses in the strenuous majesty of his verse the whole raging complex of our psychological and material civilisation; Mr. Wells, too, the glorifier of all the new machinery of our scientific fabric; Mr. Wells, who, with all his intoxication for the "gigantic syntheses of life," expresses himself most effectually by the maxim, "The world exists for and by initiative, and the method of initiative is individuality."
Even if we go to more concrete and more topical manifestations, there is not wanting evidence that the fiery blast of the Futurists is fanned by the huge bellows of our own labouringZeitgeist.
If indeed we may meddle with the very latest metaphysical terminology, we would suggest that it is by a singularly brilliant and apposite stroke of intuition on the part of, the newly discoveredélan de viethat, at a time which is moving at an unprecedented rapidity, at a time when the two great brother nations of the Teutonic race are preparing their rival sacrifices for the God of War with all the mocking and drastic fraternity of a Cain and of an Abel; when the air is thick with the wings of a new and regenerated France; when the militantmænads of both the West and the East, under the inspiration of their dashing and elusive Pythoness, are waging with foaming fanaticism a Holy War of Sex; when even one of the most responsible of our lawyers is coquetting dangerously with both the theory and the practice of the superior ethical value of Active Resistance; when the most venerable of our Lord Justices recently interpolated a homily on the Law of Change into the middle of an otherwise purely legal judgment; when the two young, but patrioticcondottieriof either political party are fast leaping into a more and more aggressive prominence; when the insurgent masses of our industrial proletariat have made a vehement and not entirely unsuccessful charge against existing economic fabric of the country; when Mr. Thomas Hardy has attended, in the pages of even theFortnightly Review, the funeral of the old God of pity, and when Bergsonism, judiciously advertised in the masquerade of a religious revival, has replaced the old Eternal Absolute with the creative activity of an endless Movement, the Futurists should now exalt the sublime vehemence of war, and the aggressive fury of youth, while M. Marinetti chants the strident hallelujahs of the new God of sweat and agony and tension, and Signor Russolo and hisconfrèresexhibit to us in the actual canvases of the Sackville Galleries the rampant hordes of rebellion and the painting of Movement itself.