lived," yet she often thinks herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares.
The world is ineffably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is starving for
love.
Ada Negri illustrates the other extreme of genuineness and is desperately in
earnest.[29] She began to teach school in a squalid, dismal Italian village, and at
eighteen to write the poetry that has made her famous. She lived in a dim room
back of a stable, up two flights, where the windows were not glass but paper, and
where she seems to have been, like her mother, a mill head before she was a
teacher. She had never seen a theater, but had read of Duse with enthusiasm; had
never seen the sea, mountain, or even a hill, lake, or large city, but she had read
of them. After she began to write, friends gave her two dream days in the city.
Then she returned, put on her wooden shoes, and began to teach her eighty
children to spell. The poetry she writes is from the heart of her own experience.
She craved "the kiss of genius and of light;" but the awful figure of misfortune
with its dagger stood by her bed at night. She writes:
"I have no name—my home a hovel damp;
I grew up from the mire;
Wretched and outcast folk my family,
And yet within me burns a flame of fire."There is always a praying angel and an evil dwarf on either side. The black abyss
attracts her yet she is softened by a child's caress. She laughs at the blackest
calamities that threaten her, but weeps over thin, wan children without bread.
Her whole life goes into song. The boy criminal on the street fascinates her and
she would kiss him. She writes of jealousy as a ghost of vengeance. If death
comes, she fears "that the haggard doctor will dissect my naked corpse," and
pictures herself dying on the operating-table like a stray dog and her well-made
body "disgraced by the lustful kiss of the too eager blade" as, "with sinister smile
untiring, they tear my bowels out and still gloat over my sold corpse, go on to
bare my bones, and veins at will, wrench out my heart," probe vainly for the
secrets of hunger and the mystery of pain, until from her "dead breast gurgles a
gasp of malediction." Much of her verse is imprecation. "A crimson rain of
crying blood dripping from riddled chests" of those slain for liberty falls, on her
heart; the sultry factories where "monsters, of steel, huge engines, snort all day,"