Rhodes swam at her god's bidding upward from the waves.

One example will serve as well as many to illustrate the false attitude
assumed by Chiabrera when he posed as a new Pindar in the midst of
seventeenth-century Italians. I will select the Ode to Don Cesare
d'Este. There is something pathetically ridiculous, in this would-be
swan of the Dircean fount, this apostle of pagan virtues, admonishing
the heir of Alfonso II to prove himself an obedient son of the Church by
relinquishing his Duchy of Ferrara to the Holy See. The poet asks him,
in fine classic phrases, whether he could bear to look on desecrated
altars, confessionals without absolving priests, chapels without
choristers, a people barred with bolt and lock from Paradise. How
trivial are earthly compared with heavenly crowns! How vulgar is the
love of power and gold! The exhortation, exquisite enough in chastened
style, closes with this hypocritical appeal to Cesare's aristocratic
prejudices:

Parli la plebe a suo volere, e pensi--
Non con la plebe hanno da gir gli Estensi.

That is to say, nobility demands that the House of Este should desert
its subjects, sacrifice its throne, crawl at a Pontiff's feet, and
starve among a crowd of disthroned princes, wrapping the ragged purple
of its misery around it till it, too, mixes with the people it contemns.

Hopeless as the venture was, Chiabrera made it the one preoccupation of
his life, in these untoward circumstances, to remodel Italian poetry
upon the Greek pattern. It was a merit of the Sei Cento, a sign of
grace, that the Italians now at last threw orthodox aesthetic precepts
to the winds, and avowed their inability to carry the Petrarchistic
tradition further. The best of them, Campanella and Bruno, molded vulgar
language like metal in the furnace of a vehement imagination, making it
the vehicle of fantastic passion and enthusiastic philosophy. From their
crucible the Sonnet and the Ode emerged with no resemblance to
academical standards. Grotesque, angular, gnarled, contorted, Gothic
even, these antiquated forms beneath their wayward touch were scarcely
recognizable. They had become the receptacles of burning, scalding,
trenchant realities. Salvator Rosa, next below the best, forced
indignation to lend him wings, and scaled Parnassus with brass-bound
feet and fury. Marino, bent on riveting attention by surprises, fervid
with his own reality of lust, employed the octave stanza as a Turkish
Bey might