Eugenio Montale's Poetry: A Dream in Reason's Presence [Course Book ed.] 9781400853434

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
1. INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING
2. THE DESCENT INTO TIME
3. THE OCCASIONS OF EPIPHANY
4. THE PURGATORIAL SYNDROME
5. ANIMAL VITALITY
6. A DREAM IN REASON’S PRESENCE
7. THE WAY OF NEGATION
INDEX OF MONTALE TITLES AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS
GENERAL INDEX

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EUGENIO MONTALE'S POETRY

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EUGENIO MONTALE'S POETRY A Dream in Reason's Presence

Glauco Cambon

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1982 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book This book has been composed in Linotron Palatine Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acidfree paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

TO MARLIS, connoisseur of poetry, who kept encouraging me to write this book

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ix

1

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

3

2

THE DESCENT INTO TIME

34

3

THE OCCASIONS OF EPIPHANY

54

4

THE PURGATORIAL SYNDROME

90

5

ANIMAL VITALITY

153

6

A DREAM IN REASON'S PRESENCE

191

7

THE WAY OF NEGATION

205

INDEX OF MONTALE TITLES AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS

259

GENERAL INDEX

265

PREFACE

In the wake of the Nobel prize awarded to him in 1975, Eugenio Montale's work has been attracting much more attention in the English-speaking world than had formerly been the case, though some critics and translators did not wait for the Stockholm accolade to exercise their talents on his poignant, elusive verse and on his muffled prose. Poets like Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Cid Corman, and Charles Wright had already tried their interpretive and creative mettle in the challenging encounter with some of Montale's finest poems, while long before them (in 1928) T. S. Eliot, a germane voice in some regards, had introduced the Italian writer's sophisticated "Arsenio" to readers of The Criterion in Mario Praz's careful English rendering—without eliciting thereby the widespread response that this kind of intro­ duction should have warranted among scholars and pub­ lishers in the language. Now that Montale's international recognition has significantly increased that response, the time has come to sharpen the focus of analysis, and that is partly the purpose of the present book. But its basic motivation is another. Montale's poetry has accompanied me for a lifetime, and if my various interpre­ tive endeavors from the mid-fifties on have intimated the constancy of this interest on my part, they have been too fragmentary to attain an organic scope. A more sustained effort was in order, and now that its results are ready to meet the public eye in the pages that follow, I hope they

PREFACE

will convey a sense of the steady development of Montale's writing down to the last years, along with the realization of how inexhaustible certain poems can be even if taken by themselves. There is no end to the questions this poetry can elicit, beyond whatever answers it may also provide. Conversing with it is like prolonging beyond the threshold of death the conversation that for so many years I was privileged to have with my friend Eugenio Montale, with the man of an older generation who had been through two world wars and who left us forever in September 1981. Though he told me (in December 1980) that my com­ pleted manuscript met with his approval, I am only too aware of its gaps, since space prevented me from devoting more than a passing reference to several poems I cherish; the book is far from slim as it is. Thanks are posthumously due to Eugenio Montale for his kindness through a quarter century of personal ac­ quaintance, and for having written poetry that has helped me to live. His housekeeper, Ms. Gina Tiossi, is also en­ titled to my gratitude for her helpfulness and for the in­ valuable assistance she gave him in the painful years of his physical decline. Without her, he would not have survived to write what he did in the last years. I am indebted to the Research Foundation of the University of Connecticut and to the Merrill Foundation of New York for travel grants that made it possible for me to consult Montale in Italy and to visit libraries there in summer 1977 and in summer 1978. In the same period, Professors Maria Corti and Maria Antonietta Grignani, both of Pavia University, and their as­ sistants, earned my gratitude by allowing me to examine that university's special collection of modern manuscripts, which includes important early and intermediate drafts of many of Montale's poems from the first as well as from the last books. Chapter Two is translated with minor changes from the original Italian essay, "Carnevale di Gerti," which ap­ peared in Eugenio Montale, profile di uno scrittore, ed. Annalisa Cima and Cesare Segre (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977), © χ

PREFACE

1977 by Rizzoli, and is included in the present book by permission of Rizzoli publishers. Chapter Three is re­ printed with some changes by permission of the Modern Language Association of America from PMLA1 82, no. 7 (December 1967): 471-484, © 1967 by the Modern Language Association of America. The pages in Chapter Four that analyze the poem "Iride" were published as part of a work in progress in Canto 4, no. 1 (June 1981). All the English translations of poetry or prose quoted in this book from Montale's work or from other sources are mine. Montale's poems first appeared in these Italian editions: Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, La bufera e altro, Satura, Diario del '71 e del 72, Quaderno di quattro anni, © 1948, 1949, 1957, 1971, 1973, 1977 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Permis­ sion to quote the Italian version of Montale's poems is granted by New Directions Publishing Corporation, pub­ lisher of Montale's Selected Poems (1965), New Poems (1976), and It Depends: A Poet's Notebook (1980). Permission to use my translations of entire poems and excerpts has been granted by Chatto and Windus Ltd. of London for the part of Montale's work that was published under the title New Poems (1976), translated by Ghyam Singh. An additional permission to the same effect, covering "Mottetti" and "Xenia," has been granted by Agenda Editions of London for their E. M., Xenia and Motets (1980), tr. Kate Hughes. Quotations from Montale's poetry are based on the fol­ lowing edition: Eugenio Montale, Tutte Ie poesie (Milano: Mondadori, 1977). The critical edition of his complete po­ etry by Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini, E. M., L'opera in versi, Edizione critica a cura di Rosanna Bettarini e Gianfranco Contini (Torino: Einaudi, 1980), appeared when my manuscript was already going to press. My short trans­ lated excerpts from Farfalla di Dinard (Butterfly of Dinard) are based on the second edition (Milano: Mondadori, 1961).

EUGENIO MONTALE'S POETRY

1 INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

Ossi di seppia, Cuttlefish Bones: the modest title of Eugenio Montale's first volume of verse (1925) carries the salty breath of the vast element that works on the rugged Ligurian shores and, at the same time, a sense of the inexorable desiccation that the Mediterranean sun can visit on living and inanimate nature alike.1 And the whole book rever­ berates that fierce light and pulses with the rhythms of the sea. It is first and foremost a rhapsody of the four elements, Nature's essentiality confronted by a tried consciousness that keeps wavering between utter disenchantment and glimpsed ecstasy in the reiterated endeavor to regain con­ tact with the lost bliss of childhood. This confers on Ossi di seppia its unique quality, as of "songs of innocence" 1 The Ligurian roots of M.'s poetry have been recognized, without unduly confining implications of regionalism, by Gaetano Mariani in Poesia e tecnica nella lirica del Novecento (Padova: Liviana editrice, 1958), pp. 137168. M.'s connection with fellow Ligurian Camillo Sbarbaro is well known, and with Sbarbaro he shares motifs and tones in his first phase; but he also values other poets from his native region, notably Mario Novaro and Ceccardo Roccatagliata Ceccardi, not to mention Giovanni Boine who, along with Sbarbaro, represented a significant link to the seminal La voce movement of the pre-World War years. In a letter to me, M. has said that his interest in La voce focused on the so-called "moralist" members of that group; Sbarbaro and Boine were two such "moralists," along with nonLigurian Piero Jahier, Scipio Slataper, Gaetano Salvemini, and Giovanni Amendola.

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

intermittently echoing from the prevalent "songs of ex­ perience" or even submerging that somber music in those moments when the young man can put behind him the ordeal of achieved virility (war being tacitly part of that ordeal) and let himself go to the suggestion of a stark but magnificent Nature that welcomes the prodigal son back to her "eternal bosom/womb" (eterno grembo). The wastelandish aspects counterpoint the regenerative ones, which they almost overwhelm, but not quite. Thus the Schopenhauerian, or Buddhist,2 vision of "II male di vivere" (The Pain of Living) reinforces the desolate brilliance of "Meriggiare Pallido e assorto" (Nooning in Pale Absorption), avowedly the earliest piece (1916) in the whole collection; but while "Meriggiare" closes on the note of ineluctable exclusion made concrete (in the image of the bottle-shard topped wall so familiar to northern Italian eyes in the countryside), "II male di vivere" reviews the in­ stances of existence as suffering to find symbolic release in 2 Even if the poet himself had not told me (in 1977) of his interest in Arthur Schopenhauer's ideas, their consonance with certain Montalian formulations in verse and prose is remarkable. This interest is also apparent in a passage from M.'s "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)," the imaginary interview, first published in La Rassegna d'ltalia 1, no. 1 (JanuarY 1946): 84-89; later reprinted in E. M., Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milano: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 561-569, and in Per conoscere Montale, ed. Marco Forti (Milano: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 77-84. Here M. discusses his own philosophical readings, and Schopenhauer's name does not come up, but a central conception of his does. According to M., at the inception of his literary career he "obeyed an urge for musical expression" and sought a breakthrough to "absolute expression" that would have shattered the invisible "glass bell" in which he felt encased. That, he adds, would have been "an explosion, the end of the deceit which is the world as representation"; an unattainable limit to be sure. This echoes the very title of Schopenhauer's masterpiece, The World as Will and Idea (Die Welt als WUle und Vorstellung); and rappresentazione (representation) is the Italian translation of Vorstellung, which M. uses in his passage. "The Pain of Living" is at the same time a Leopardian and a Schopenhauerian expression, and it will be remembered that Schopenhauer pointedly refers to Leopardi as a kindred spirit. The "Buddhist" component in Schopenhauer's thought is explicit, and it comes to mind when M. appeals to "divine Indifference" as a liberation from pain.

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

the countervailing emblems of "divine Indifference": the statue in the midday sun, the free cloud, the high-soaring hawk. And the opening gesture of the voice in the final words ("il falco alto levato") seals that release in the triumph of the liberating vowel "a" (ah), which becomes the mi­ metic vehicle of a total image of freedom. Liquid alliteration contributes to the effect, for Montale, never addicted to self-indulgence in his craft, has nevertheless known from the start how to extract unhackneyed music from his ven­ erable linguistic medium. Pain of living, walled-in exist­ ence, and the negative freedom of detachment: these are keynotes not to be missed, and they resound again and again in this extraordinary first book. But a singular antiphon rings out in "II girasole" (The Sunflower), where the fairly ubiquitous denizen of Ligurian gardens converts blight into bliss, Nirvana-like anni­ hilation into ecstatic fullness: Portami tu la pianta che conduce dove sorgono bionde trasparenze e vapora la vita quale essenza; portami il girasole impazzito di luce. Bring me the plant that leads us where blond transparencies arise and life evaporates into sheer essence; bring me the sunflower, frenzied with light. Decades later (1938), under the gathering storm of a different frenzy, the sunstruck flower of our poef s regional homeland will return as Clizia, the Ovidian girl metamorphosed into a sunflower by the solar godhead from whom she could not avert her eyes; and the ecstasy of annihilation will become mystical union with the unknown, vaguely Christian God who provides the only antidote (reason and communal faith) to Nazi obscurantist folly:

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

. . . Guarda ancora in alto, Clizia, e la tua sorte, tu che il non mutato amor mutata serbi, fino a che il cieco sole che in te porti si abbacini nell'Altro e si distrugga in Lui, per tutti . . . . . . Oh keep looking on high, Clizia, it is your lot, you who, herself changed, harbors unchanging love, until the blind sun you carry in your innermost will be dazzled in the Other and in Him annihilate itself, for the sake of all . . . And in a coeval poem from Le occasioni (The Occasions), "Elegia di Pico Farnese" (Elegy of Pico Farnese),3 the same exorcistic power will be credited to "the sunflower seeds" in an imperious Clizia's keep. This trajectory of symbolic development and semantic enrichment from an intense lyrical perception of Nature to a no less intense mythic personification with historical, ethical, and religious implications characterizes Montale's growth as a poet who keeps faith with the seminal motifs of his initiation without thereby fossilizing them. Seen in diachronic perspective, his books compose a poet's progress, the steps of a dialectic that is no less consistent for being restless in its unpredictable movements. The several volumes accordingly demand to be integrated into a coherent opus, just as each of them, synchronically viewed, presents the 3 Umberto Carpi has published an extremely searching and revealing analysis of this complex poem in his "Elegia di Pico Farnese" (in Letture Montaliane, ed. Comune and Provincia di Genova [Genoa's town administration and provincial administration; Genova: Bozzi publisher, 1977], pp. 127-169. The same scholar had written a more ideologically oriented book on M.'s postwar work from a Marxist point of view: Montale dopo il fascismo dalla "Bufera" a "Satura" (Padova: Liviana editrice, 1971). A textually useful study of "Elegia" for certain lexical and semantic aspects has been done by Luciano Rebay in his "I diaspori di Montale" (Italica 46, no. 1 [Spring 1969]: 33-53).

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

physiognomy of an organic whole, self-contained but not insulated from its predecessor(s) or successor(s). Thus the first member of the series, Ossi di seppia, bears the mark of a unique beginning that contains the main themes and attitudes of all the subsequent works, which in turn move far beyond that beginning, but without ever superseding it. Readers who emphasize the technical and cognitive progress of Le occasioni and La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things) at the expense of Ossi di seppia's value risk doing scant justice to the achievement of a poet who would have left a major mark in the modern scene, and in the landscape of Italian poetry as a whole, even if blind chance had cut his life short just after that rich first book had taken shape. For richness is its prerogative, although this is easy to overlook under the spell of nearly ascetic austerity that radiates from many a sharply delineated scene where eye and pen seem bent on paring visible reality to the bone; and then one remembers Ossi di seppia as but the image of a world of stone, consumed by sun and wind and threatened by an imminent crack, "no water and only rock": "Debole sistro . . . d'una persa cicala" (faint sistrum . . . of a lost cicada), "la vita brulla" (dried up life), "impietrato soffrire senza nome" (stonebound suffering without a name), "crollo di pietrame" (cave-in of rocks). And, in a memorable poem of the series, "Ossi di seppia," which forms a kind of eponymous book within the book, the image crystallizes: Chi si ricorda ρϊύ del fuoco ch' arse impetuoso nelle vene del mondo;—in un riposo freddo Ie forme, opache, sono sparse. Who remembers the fire any more that blazed impetuously in the world's veins;—in a cold repose all shapes, opaque, are sparse.

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

But listen to the contrapuntal motifs in "I limoni" (The Lemons): the small eel caught by little boys in a puddle not far from town, the lemon trees gracing a city courtyard with their sunlike fruits, the "golden trumpets of sunniness" in the spring sky and in the people's hearts. "I limoni" is a poem amounting to a personal manifesto at the very outset of the book after the epigraphlike piece "In limine" (On the Threshold); it proclaims the rejection of stale literary convention in favor of a rediscovery of humble, unadulterated reality and language, fusing the quest for beauty with the quest for truth: il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta nel mezzo di una verita the thread to be unravelled that will finally put us in the midst of a truth (Stanza 3) and it caps these sober statements with the hymning finale heralded by the "golden trumpets of sunniness"—as strong an affirmation of life as one could ever expect from the bemused author and doubting-Thomas persona of Ossi di seppia. The relaxed conversational utterance, the liberal admixture of free verse with regular lines of amply varying length, and the antigrandiose focus, a clear inheritance from the so-called Crepuscular poets who ever since the start of the new century had waged a quiet battle against highfalutin vatic style in verse, might deceive the unwary reader about the real scope of this discreet ars poetica. Rhythmic suppleness, tonal modulation, verbal precision are its secret; and the care that went into its making also shows from the variants exhibited in the modern manuscript collection of Pavia University,4 where a few lexical 4 A checklist of those manuscripts and typescripts, including facsimiles of early letters and poems such as "Crisalide," has been published by Maria Corti and Maria Antonietta Grignani of Pavia University (Autografi di Montale, fondo dell'UniversitA di Pavia [Torino: Einaudi, 1976]).

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

alternatives are weighed or adopted while an entire stanza, the capitally important third one of the four that have always made up the poem from its first publication in the Gobetti edition of 1925 down to the latest Mondadori edition of 1977,5 at one point had been crossed out in the autograph manuscript to be later recast, with some changes, on the back of the same sheet, right after the text of stanza 4. The importance of the recast stanza comes from its being the epistemologically oriented one among its three companion units, which rely on thematics, mood, and scene (with a glance at the stylistic implications of the pertinent choices). Stanzas 1 and 2 outline a literary policy in the very act of describing a locale where "we the poor can have our part of riches,. . . the smell of lemons." Stanza 4 celebrates the victory of spring over winter, of light and color over grayness, of joy over urban tedium, applauding the reward of fidelity to the unadorned truth of simple things. But stanza 3 (and this must have been the reason for the poet's doubt and temporary rejection) goes far beyond that impressionistic approach to probe a further dimension, a clearly intellectual one. "In these silences . . . things/ let themselves go and seem on the verge/ of betraying their ultimate secret"; and characteristically for Montale, that secret is a matter of discovering "a mistake of Nature,/ the dead point of the world, the ring [in the Chain of Being] that does not hold." Thus while the metaphysical truth he seeks can only be glimpsed and not possessed, negatively formulated and not embalmed in foolproof arguments, it becomes for that very reason the magnet of Montale's poetics—a cognitively oriented kind of poetics from the start, sharply separated from aesthetic hedonism however keen its sensuous organs. 5 The textual variants of "I limoni" on the Pavia University manuscripts have been closely analyzed by Marco Forti in his "Esercizio su Ί limoni'," in Eugenio Montale, ed. Annalisa Cima and Cesare Segre (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977), pp. 21-37. The same author had devoted another close study to the definitive text of this poem in his comprehensive book Eugenio Montale: La poesia, la prosa di fantasia e d'invenzione (Milano: Mursia, 1973), pp. 6061.

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

"Lo sguardo fruga d'intorno,/ la mente indaga accorda disunisce" (Eyesight searches everything around,/ mind in­ vestigates harmonizes disjoins): the act of aesthetic per­ ception is one and the same thing with the heuristic process of knowledge, and the very sequence of verbs is significant here, casual though it may sound at first. The eye functions from the start as a cognitive organ; It "searches" (fruga) instead of merely "taking things in." The mind develops that cue on a more abstract level, analysis following sen­ suous prehension and detached "investigation" supersed­ ing the sense-bound, almost tactilely qualified action of "searching." The naive unity of sensuous perception breaks down into different acts or phases, which are not neces­ sarily irreversible: after (or simultaneous with) investiga­ tion comes "harmonizing" (accorda) and its contrary, "dis­ joining" (disunisce). Standard philosophical terminology (especially of the idealist type prevailing when this poem was written—be­ tween November 1922 and May 1924 to judge from the Pavia manuscript), would speak of analysis and synthesis as the two essential operations of speculative intellect, syn­ thesis inevitably superseding analysis. But at this point, the Montalian elf—a learned elf at that—shows his mettle and subverts the established harmony. "Disunisce" (dis­ joins) is the conclusive word in the sequence. Taking apart what has been conventionally joined in language, criticiz­ ing the stereotypes of intellectual currency is germane to the skeptic vein in Montale's thinking, and in this particular context, where one would least expect it, that cleansing operation "in the expanding aroma" (of lemons at twilight) sets the stage for a visionary moment that makes sense of the previous negations: Sono i silenzi in cui si vede in ogni ombra umana che si allontana qualche disturbata Divinita.

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

These are the silences in which one sees in every human shadow vanishing in the distance some disturbed Divinity. The phonic and semantic link between "dtsunisce" (disjoins) and "disturbata" (disturbed) serves to precipitate a final resolution of meaning in "Divinit&," epiphany aided by alliteration. Its radiance will extend to the symmetrically conclusive word "solarit&" (sunniness) of the following and last stanza by way of distant rhyme. The two preceding stanzas ended on the word "limoni" (lemons), an identical rhyme well attuned to the happily literal drift of the first half of the poem: ifs as if the rhyme said, by just being there, that lemons are lemons and nothing else, nor do they need to be anything else, for their significance is in their reality, in their presence. By contrast, the "Divinitasolaritl" rhyme of the two last stanzas introduces a semantic swerve into the unpredictable; even if it is "illusion" (as the first line of stanza 4 says), the epiphany favored by twilight's silence and lemon aroma, which activate the mind in a contemplative direction, suspending the quotidian, will have given us a spiritual break, and we shall then be able to recognize the fullness of reality ("solarita") without having recourse to mere "shadows." But the authorial persona of Ossi di seppia is protean, and his statements of poetics can likewise range through a wide gamut of attitudes. The clearly affirmative note of "I limoni" can rise to nearly triumphant pitch in "Quasi una fantasia" (Almost a Fantasy), where the poetic self envisages a forthcoming spell of its own making that will efface the deadness of daily routine to create a snowlit fairyland and summon up remembrance of all things past—like a recovered childhood; the "solitary mirth" will find its focus in a "March cockerel" alighting on a fence pole. And if in "Quasi una fantasia" the poefs double vision can tilt the scales all the way toward the subjective side and thus momentarily revive the Romantic myth of the poet as wizard, of imagination

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

as a victorious, boundless power, the very first, and obviously programmatic lyric, "In limine," so well analyzed by Emerico Giachery6 and now by Rebecca West,7 sets sharp boundaries to that power and thereby carves out a "liminal" enclosure for the poet's use as his only locus, while the privilege of breaking away is reserved to others, to the ubiquitous and changeable"Thou" the speaker is addressing. This sense of the limit which sets the authorial persona apart from the fullness of unconfined life marks poem after poem and book after book, without, nevertheless, hardening into an unmodifiable idea—for boundary lines (between land and sea, between self and reality, between dream and truth, between reason and imagination) are also there to be transgressed, as the "Mediterraneo" (Mediterranean) series shows. In the versatile first book, statement follows counterstatement and it becomes impossible to pin down the persona that speaks now with Hamlet's saturnine voice and now with Puck's or Ariel's mischievous ease. The true hallmark of Montale's poetics has been seen in the bleak negations of "Non chiederci la parola" (Do not ask us for the word), the introductory piece of the eponymous series "Ossi di seppia" within Ossi di seppia, and it would be rash to ignore the importance (both aesthetic and ethical) of that crabbed statement which replaces any crepuscular languor8 with stark diction, somber tone, and sunburnt imagery to deflate any Romantic or decadent (or political) 6 Emerico Giachery, " 'In limine' e la metamorfosi dell'orto," in Letture Montaliane, pp. 17-33. 7 Rebecca West's study of M.'s poetry, which I was privileged to see in typescript while still working on the present book, has now been published as Eugettio Montale: Poet on the Edge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). A telling advance sample has appeared in Forum Italicum 13, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 147-168, with the title "Montale's 'Forse': The Poetics of Doubt." 8 For this question, see Forti, Eugenio Montale, pp. 45, 70, 124; see also Natale Tedesco, La condizione crepuseolare (Firenze: La nuova Italia, 1970), who extends the range of the historical definition of "crepuscular poetry" to cover the main developments of Italian poetry in this century from Gozzano to Montale and beyond.

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

claim for poetry's consolatory power. Poetry is not reassurance; it is a deeper realization of our human condition. Yet Montale refuses to be trapped even within this virile asceticism, lest it become a formula; and the refusal to "define" himself, generationally uttered in the plural form, the concomitant self-disparagement of poetry as "some crooked syllable dry like a branch," the ironic admiration of the self-assured man without problems who goes along "a friend to himself and to others" without minding his shadow on the sunstruck wall—these are radical gestures that finally keep the vein of possibility open. In a subsequent poem, the authorial persona will lament his "divided soul" and yearn for wholeness, while "anima indivisa," undivided soul, will be part of his eulogy for prophetess CIizia in "L'orto" (The Garden) from La bufera e altro; here, however, he denounces his own generational predicament in such a way that the denunciation of crisis becomes an acknowledgement and therefore the beginning of a possible overcoming, while the blissfully unaware passerby, a clear representative of the self-deluded many who live unproblematically, cannot read the writing (his shadow) on the wall—cannot see his dark double. "Don't ask us for the formula that can disclose worlds to you," "don't ask . . . for the word that will hone out from every side/ our formless soul": the rebellion against formulas is no rebellion against form as such, and the denounced formlessness (informe) of the speaker's mind and of his generation is at the same time a matter of soul-searching by the Great War's survivors and a vindication of the persona's availability, a rejection of closure. Also, the refusal of definition finds an antiphon in the sharp definiteness of the style, where every word tends toward the uttermost semantic focus and phonic function; this poet does not wallow in suggestive vagueness, though he cultivates ambiguity as an expressive enhancement of his object-based vision. But etching, not shading, is his way. The imagery is sharply outlined, vivid, and spare rather than lush; the phrasing is direct, at times relaxed

INTRODUCTION: THE SEA OF BEING

and proliferating in rich syntax, at times tightening into tense, compact units with the help of strict hendecasyllabic meter, as in the case of "Delta," one of the strongest poems to come from Montale's pen, clearly foreshadowing the climate of Le occasioni where ellipse and visionary intermingling of expressionist £lan with objective realism will achieve new depths. Rhymes, whether regular or teasingly imperfect, sustain the scansion of thought, often chiming from afar or playing at hide and seek within the body of verse to disarticulate meter for the sake of resilience, while liquid or crackling dental and guttural alliteration cooperates with the coloratura of vowel scales to make the music more pervasive and less fixed: witness "Corno inglese" (English Horn), the only survivor of a rejected sequence on musical instruments,9 where the alternation of full-throated a's e's and o's does much to set the somber mood, beyond any external onomatopoeia. Montale's early training as an operatic singer (baritone) stands him in good stead as a poet when it comes to avoid­ ing hackneyed bel canto effects in a language that is beset with such traps. Off rhyme, perfect rhyme, or assonance sometimes carries the burden of connotation: the third piece of the "Ossi di seppia" section can supply one of the many examples, with its alternation of ombra-verzura-strapiombacaldura (shadow-greenery-plummets-heat). Here the dark vowels prolonged into the pedal-like nasal resonance of -omb(r) or into the oboelike note of -ura conspire with the hidden alliteration of / (each of the short lines in the first quatrain has a word containing or beginning with that fricative consonant, ri/ugiarti, /olto, /alchetto, /iilmineo) to create a sense of mugginess, of oppression barely stirred by sudden movement. The following quatrain heightens that summer spell to a feeling of universal entropy: 9 Ε. M, "Accordi—Sensi e fantasmi di una adolescente," in Primo Tempo 2 (June 1922): 37-41; later included in E. M., Accordi e pastelli, ed. Vanni Scheiwiller (Milano: Scheiwiller, 1962).

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E ora di lasciare il canneto stento che pare s'addorma e di guardare Ie forme della vita che si sgretola.

It is time to leave the scrawny reed patch which seems to drowse and to look at the shapes of life that crumbles. The imperfect rhyme between s'addorma and forme, and the false rhyme between canneto and sgretola, help to convey the sense of disintegration. The next quatrain shifts to a different phonic register with line endings like pulviscoloiribra-invischia-sfibra (thin dust-vibrates-entangles-unnerves), reiterating the vowel i (= ee), a sound that, in the particular semantic context, takes on a shrill, penetrating quality, well attuned to the effort of breaking the sultry spell, the paralysis of life. Another memorable instance of phonic expressiveness is the conclusion of "Qivo" (Knoll), from the section "Meriggi e ombre" (Noons and Shadows): un crollo di pietrame che dal cielo s'inabissa alle prode . . . Nella sera distesa appena, s'ode un ululo di corni, uno sfacelo. a cave-in of rocks that from the sky tumble all the way to the shores . . . In the barely spread evening one hears a howling of horns, a cosmic dissolution. "Gelo" (sky) touches off the Goetterdaemmerung of "sfacelo" (dissolution), and "ululo di corni" in the last line predominates with its dark vocalic color over the lighter, open vowels that unfold their gamut in the same line.

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The phonic keyboard is as mercurial as the tonal and thematic one, and it is precisely against such somber notes that one can best appreciate the thrill of "Felicita raggiunta" (Happiness Attained) or "Gloria del disteso mezzogiorno" (Glory of the Outspread Noon) in the "Ossi di seppia" section. The awesomeness of a blighted world can occasionally be transfigured into joyful plenitude, however ephemeral, to supersede the terror of a metaphysical emptiness, like Pascal's abyss suddenly yawning behind the persona in the midst of everyday certainties ("... vedro compirsi il miracolo:/ il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietro/ di me, con un terrore di ubriaco": I'll see the miracle happen:/ the nothingness at my back, the void behind/ me, with a drunkard's terror—"Ossi di seppia," poem 14, "Forse un mattino," Perhaps One Morning10). Even when a ferocious sun seems to devour earth and life, its inmate, everything will fade into "the serenity/ of one certainty: light" (to quote from the conclusion of a poem previously discussed). The "Ossi di seppia" section lends itself to intensive analysis because of its lyrical compression and versatility of attitude, which results in some of the most perfect lyrics in the entire Italian canon. A world poised between doomsday and paradise haunts these vibrant pages, dryness eventuating in improbable ecstasy; and every poem probes reality anew, repeatedly distilling wonder from disen­ chantment, against all odds. Tenor, syntax, and meter tend to contract, as if consumed by a force that erodes lan­ guage itself into a gnarled essentiality; at that point the words' resistance to potential disintegration mirrors the imaged world's precarious endurance, and the sky itself appears "finite" ("l'arco del cielo appare/ finito") while forms are frozen into a motionless litter; the cosmogonic fire is extinguished. The previous lines are from the last poem of the "Ossi 10 On this intriguing poem, "Perhaps One Morning," that voices M.'s metaphysical doubts on what he elsewhere will call "the deceit that is the world as representation," see Italo Calvino's analysis, "Forse un mattino andando . . . ," in Letture Montaliane, pp. 37-45.

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di seppia" section, a true cuttlefish bone. But "Mediterraneo," the section immediately following, turns things around, and from the parched relic we go back to the turbulent vastness that was its source. A watery source, as pre-Socratic thinker Thales would have postulated, not a fiery one as Heraclitus and the Stoics believed—though Montale's cosmic mythopoeia wavers between the two conceptions. And although critics like Ramat11 and the poet himself have come up with reservations on the "Mediterraneo" poems, to which Ramat clearly prefers the "Ossi di seppia" section or Ossi brevi, while Montale apparently views "Mediterraneo" as a partial regression from his previous achievement, I for one consider this expansive series vital to the overall economy of the book.12 Unless we want to read Ossi di seppia as a mechanical aggregate of mutually extraneous pieces to be culled and savored independently of the total atmosphere, we shall have to recognize it as an organic work, greater than the sum of its parts and thriving on their reciprocal connections that make it breathe as a whole, in a broader dimension. We catch one such dynamic link in the transition from the shrunk utterance of "Ossi di seppia" to the rhythmic release of "Mediterraneo," and if the identity of title between the former section and the entire book were to suggest that "Ossi di seppia" is by itself the heart of the whole book, closer listening will yield different results. Not the eponymous section per se but its dialectical relationship to the contrastive following one gives us the 11 SUvio Ramat, Montale (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1965, 1968), and Storia della poesia italiana del Novecento (Milano: Mursia, 1976). M. himself has termed "Mediterraneo" a "relapse" and "disintegration" (see "Intenzioni [Intervista immaginaria]"). 12 Among the critics who have recently expressed themselves favorably on "Mediterraneo," one may count Marco Forti, "Montale prima delle Occasioni," in Omaggio a Montale, ed. Silvio Ramat (Milano: Mondadori, 1966), pp. 64-95, and (with more reservations) in Eugenio Montale, pp. 9097; and Giansiro Ferrata, "Pro 'Mediterraneo'," in Eugenia Montale, ed. Cima and Segre, pp. 38-50; also, Elio Gioanola, "Mediterraneo, IV," in Letture Montaliane, pp. 55-68.

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pulse of Ossi di seppia. The metric and mythic systole of "Ossi di seppia" had to reverse itself into the generous diastole of "Mediterraneo"; the former section, with its concentrated beauty and thickening paralysis of world view, was a point of arrival, the consummation of all previous endeavors into a rather Parnassian poetics of finitude, while the latter section is the inevitable new start, the re-immersion of all the "sparse, frozen forms" in the elemental source that is the native Mediterranean Sea but at the same time the "great sea of Being," as Montale's literary ancestor would have said many centuries ago. The shapes of existence as well as the forms of expression will thus undergo a sea change into new life. The finite, the solid, the static makes way for the liquid, tangible infinity to which one can return to lose and find oneself anew. There are no references to God in Ossi di seppia, as Angelo Jacomuzzi has aptly noted,13 but there is an aboriginal god seething at its center, and it is the Mediterranean Sea. Already in "Falsetto," a lovely madrigal in the first part of the book, the Mediterranean was personified as diving Esterina's "divine friend." Now, in the effusive series on which it bestows its name, it takes on the attributes of Proteus (poem 2) and, after the opening composition, is consistently addressed in the remaining eight poems with the "Thou" of ritual reverence. Moreover, to reinforce the religious overtone, in poems 4, 5, and 6, the persona calls the sea father. The process of mythic personification enables the quest­ ing persona to grasp a present godhead that, elusive yet inexhaustibly vital, can make sense of his predicament and give him the answers he seeks. Hence the oblique allusion to Proteus the sleight-of-hand sea god in the second of these poems, which begins with the significant vocative "Antico, sono ubriacato dalla tua voce . . ." (O Ancient one, I am inebriated by your voice . . .) to describe the 13 Angelo Jacomuzzi, La poesia di Montale: Dagli "Ossi" ai"Diari" (Torino: Einaudi, 1978).

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metamorphoses of the demon or godlike element (he has many "mouths" that open up into "green bells" and then dissolve into the surf). That inebriating voice has a mes­ sage, just as Proteus did in Odyssey, book 4, when com­ pelled by MeneIaus to yield his revelation after trying to escape or frighten the struggling hero by taking many dif­ ferent shapes. In that passage, the epithet of Proteus is "Ancient"—Antico in the Italian translation Montale would have remembered even if glancing at the Greek text. The evidence in favor of a Proteus clue in the text at hand finds its completion in the sea's admonitory speech as inter­ preted by the authorial self: . . . Tu m'hai detto primo che il piccino fermento del mio cuore non era che un momento del tuo; che mi era in fondo la tua legge rischiosa: esser vasto e diverso e insieme fisso: . . . . . . You first told me that the small ferment of my heart was but a moment of yours; that at the bottom of my being there was your risky law: to be vast and diverse and yet steady: . . . The recognition of harmony attainable with a living principle in the universe goes hand in hand with a realization of loss, since the possibility of being at one with the cosmic law had dawned on the child who is now returning to the familiar shores and no longer feels himself worthy or capable of such oneness. Not long after this renewed encounter with the perennial source, he will become a disabused Arsenio, surrounded by death not life. To outgrow childhood, as many of Montale's poems say or imply, is no triumph; and one may spend the rest of one's conscious life trying to recapture (in memory at least) that lost innocence

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which was a long communion with the universe. Ungaretti's lines from "I Fiumi" (The Rivers), a text well known to the author of Cuttlefish Bones, come to mind: This is the Isonzo [a river] and here better have I recognized myself a docile fiber of the universe. My torture is when I don't believe myself at one ["in armonia"]. One recognizes here a modern variation on the great theme of Romantic poetry and aesthetics, from Schiller to Blake, from Hoelderlin to Wordsworth and beyond: in individual and/or collective history, the yearning for that lost home that was Greece or childhood, prehistoric bliss, naivete, a harmony or integrity anterior to reason. Yet, in the presence of the Mediterranean sea god, the recovery of innocence seems intermittently possible to the Montalian persona that has weathered the ordeal of exile from childhood and incorrupt Nature. "L'esiliato rientrava nel paese incorrotto" (The exile reentered the incorrupt country, as poem 4 has it). Above all, contact with the elusive, if permanent, source comes about in the expressive act that can still re-create the sea as a mythic presence; and this is the true return to the unattainable home. In evoking those Hellenic sea gods that were the sunrise of Western imagination, Montale is not rehashing a worn-out literary mythology: he may not have consciously thought of Homer's Proteus at all while writing poem 2 of "Mediterranean," it may have been just the cultural memory of the West operating in him at the subliminal level. Reading the poem, we witness the making of a myth, not its self-conscious renaming; a creative process, not the reaffixing of a label; anamnesis, not dqa vu. Allowing for the obvious differences in language and style, it might be Walt Whitman pacing the Long Island beach to catch the rhythms of "the cradle endlessly rocking" and its

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messages of thrilling life, soothing death. And supposedly barbaric Whitman also sang to himself Homer's hexameters while listening to the ocean; while Montale's darting blue jays and happily roaming plovers from "Mediterraneo" would hardly disdain the company of Paumanok's mocking bird. A poet like Montale can go to the source of "primitive" imagination without becoming affectedly infantile. That the mythological correspondence noted above need not be preconceived shows also from the fact that the preceding poem—the very first of the series—has no learned pointers and doesn't even address the sea in the second person but simply describes, in free meter, the element's pervasive power. Personification, then, spontaneously arises from sensuous empathy, as Vico would agree, rather than from a consciously manipulated rhetorical apparatus. As I just mentioned, the sea is not personified at all in the first poem of the series, and in the following ones its personification stops short of making it a dramatis persona; the sea is a presence, not a definite shape, because it can take many shapes, and it is actually the source of all living shapes, like Whitman's "fierce mother." That the Montalian speaker of "Mediterraneo" eventually calls the sea "father" (poem 4) is a consequence of the masculine gender that Italian grammar assigns to the word for "sea" (mare), though it also reflects the stern quality and severe oracular function these poems ascribe to the formidable element. Grammar apart, however, certain motherly aspects also concur in sketching the mythical physiognomy of this demonic/divine interlocutor that provides Montale with an early embodiment of the catalytic Thou he forever needs under whatever guise. In the two last poems of the cycle, the persona's surrender to the sea, with the concomitant wish for annihilation, is a return to the womb, while the confrontation of the sea's demonic otherness in earlier pieces of "Mediterraneo" seems to connote a father-son relationship, the prodigal son having returned home to his parent yet not quite managing to heal the rift ("E questa che in me cresce/ e forse la rancura/ che

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ogni figliolo, mare, ha per il padre": and this which grows in me/ is perhaps the chagrin/ that every son, ο sea, feels toward his father—poem 5, conclusion). At other moments (poem 3), the meeting with the sea (addressed here as "Tu vastita," You vastness, as if to lift it beyond gender specifications) is a joyful event, the discovery of an elemental exultance that communicates its thrill even to dull matter and rock, rescuing the very stones from their "suffering" so that "the immobility of finite things" is itself justified. A universe conceived, in Schopenhauerian fashion, as pain and paralysis is overwhelmed by cosmic joy, and the speaker relives his own happiness, which was like that of a plover (spersa pavoncella) in remembrances of running down to the beach during his boyhood. On a similar note, two darting blue jays had suddenly turned the pensive speaker toward the sea in the background of pine-tree-studded knolls and cliffs at the end of poem 1. Montale is one of the finest birdwatchers in world poetry, and when birds appear in his verse and prose, they bring life, courage, deliverance; witness that later manifestation, the stork that concludes "Sotto la pioggia" (Under the Rain) in Le occasioni by piercing the European sky's clouds to wing its way "toward Capetown." The sprightly birds that now alert the musing persona to the invitation of the rioting surf, or that once shared in hidden identity with him his headlong run from a glen in the hills to the sea, are the very call of life from sheltering closure to challenging openness, and by the same token they signal the awakening of imagination in the erstwhile boy (poem 4). When in tried adulthood (poem 5), he eventually realizes an intermittent discrepancy between his heart and the fatherly-demonic sea's "inhuman heart," his "music" no longer harmonizes with that of the primordial element, and he identifies, existentially, with the stony slope and with the meager plant that grew from it in the teeth of the wind's and surf's fury. But the trauma of adulthood, the final separation from the parent source that also marks the self as a true individual, ushers in the ability

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to face an uncertain future (poem 6) fraught with dark threats without suppressing the hope that a little of the numinous sea's gift will have passed into "the syllables/ we carry within, buzzing bees"; the sea's voice will echo in the poet's memory to nurture "words without noise." Poetry, then, is born of consciousness, not unthinking emotion (a position the older Montale will restate in Sulla poesia, On Poetry), and our writer conceives of it socially, the "we" of this particular poem coming to include not just his artistic brethren but all of those who have ripened as men and will therefore share the gift. (In later years, Wallace Stevens will say in his Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction that poetry comes of our living in a place that "is not our own" and "not ourselves"; poetry, to wit, is our way to cope with alienation.) From poem 5, which rehearses the wound of estrange­ ment from the source, we move on to poem 6, which tells of ways to overcome that impasse, and then to poem 7, an act of soul-searching that deepens the estrangement from the source by stressing the discrepancy between the im­ mune elemental creature the speaker would have wanted to be like (the salt-gnawed pebble) and what he has actually become (an intent consciousness, aware of existence as problem). The crisis returns, and even though the godlike sea drowns it in enthralling "delirium," the differentiated self's distance from its aboriginal matrix will not be denied. It is from this distance that the speaker, now confirmed in his calling as a poet (poem 8), can best measure his ex­ pressive inadequacy; his "awkward meter" (ritmo stento) can hardly capture the sea's divine madness (vaneggiamento), his "stammering speech" (balbo parlare) is not in tune with "the salty words/ wherein nature and art melt into one" (le salmastre parole/ in cui natura ed arte si confondono), and the only tools he has are "the worn letters of dictionaries," while the "dark/ voice that love dictates" (as Dante might have put it) is dimmed into "moaning literature." Yet self-criticism and admission of defeat in the one enterprise that would have reintegrated his lost har-

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mony with himself and the cosmos leads to a kind of Dionysian ecstasy, a total opening of the self to the boundless force of the sea: Ed il tuo rombo cresce . . . M'abbandonano a prova i miei pensieri. Sensi non ho; ne senso. Non ho limite. And your roar grows . . . At the test my thoughts abandon me. No senses have I; no sense. I have no limit. Much later in his career, Montale will again compare his all-too-human language to the total (and incomprehensible) language of God as a mere stammering (balbuzie) to the Word. Here, though, the inspiring yet dwarfing godhead is closer, visible, and tangible, and once the poet persona has conceded defeat, his rejection of literature makes way for a momentary identification with the infinite force of divine Nature that recalls, even stylistically, d'Annunzio's14 orgiastic abandons, or Whitman's. The dialectic of finite and infinite, a pervasive theme in Ossi di seppia and in "Mediterraneo" as such, has for once been transcended, and the poet (through his autobiographical mask) is overcoming what he had earlier called "l'immobilita dei finiti" (poem 3), nor could he now voice the abnegation of "Casa sul mare," "forse solo chi vuole s'infinita,/ e questo tu potrai, chissa, non io" (perhaps he alone who wills it attains infinity,/ and this you may possibly do, not I). It is an extremely rare event in Montale's imaginative adventure, 14 M.'s selective use of d'Annunzio's vitalist legacy and sumptuous lexicon has been pinpointed by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, "Da d'Annunzio a Montale," in Ricerche sulla lingua poetica contemporanea, ed. Gianfranco Folena (Padova: Liviana editrice, 1966), pp. 163-259; reproduced in Mengaldo, La tradizione del Novecento (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975). See also Gioanola, "Mediterraneo, IV," in Letture Montaliane.

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given his insistence on human limits, but for this very reason it validates the prevalent tone and attitude; he does not exclude "miracle." The paradox of poem 8 leads to the qualitative leap of poem 9, the conclusive one, where literature has been left definitely behind and what is in question is the meaning of the speaker's entire existence, a self-accused "whining weakling of a life" that only yearns to "re-enter the circle" of the sea's wholeness from which it arose. He had come into life as a witness to "an order" that he forgot on the way, and "these words" of his proclaim faith in "an impossible event" even while they know nothing of it. The sea revives a dim memory of that lost state and/or event, as if activating in the spellbound listener a kind of Wordsworthian/Platonic anamnesis, and the only thing left for him to do is "to burn," for that is his only significance as a "mere spark" of the universal process. Surrender to the divine element "in humility" has brought out that recognition and acceptance of individual transience, and fire (Heraclitean and Stoic) instead of the predictable water (Thales) turns out to be the appropriate symbol. The very last word is "il mio significato," my meaning: to exist in time as a self-consuming part of reality, in a destructive parable that may entail creativity. If so, defeat has not been total. Infinity has been momentarily attained, and the return to finitude is no relapse into the circumscribed inertia of stone; it is, rather, the finding of a new contact with the lost cosmic harmony. In the preceding poem, individuality was forfeited; in this last one of the "Mediterraneo" cycle, it is recovered on a new level, as a particle of cosmic energy. The incommensurability between human words and the world order they dimly attest still posits a nexus: the sea's "roaring page" and "salty words" blending nature and art were something like a Platonic archetype to spur human creativity. A whole existential cycle has unfolded in this cycle of poems, which articulate at the same time mythopoeia, poetics, and symbolic autobiography. The main leitmotivs of Montale's poetry

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have found here a uniquely outright formulation, as a portent of things to come; and the poet, who rediscovers Wmself by throwing everything into question, has had the best chance to test his verbal medium. "Mediterraneo" orchestrates the language to the full at the opposite pole of "Ossi di seppia." Lyric effusion, grave meditation, naturalist vividness, gnomic statement, and self-satire have all contributed to the protean music. The meter has evinced a freedom matching the moods of the sea, whose "unleashing" (disfrenamento, poem 4) reveals to the careful observer a "stern law." Long lines exceeding the standard hendecasyllable measure alternate with hendecasyllables and shorter lines to embody the swell of the sea; a basic norm persists through frequent trans­ gressions, just as the polarities of land and sea, finite and infinite, individual consciousness and perennial Nature reappear through modifications or momentary fusion, for they are the energizers of imagination, and they arouse that yearning for oneness which finds ephemeral con­ summation in the spark of ecstasy. The "growth of [the] poet's mind" occurs along these lines, for "Mediterraneo" really is Montale's Prelude, and its rich music exhibits a subtlety that parallels the versatility of the central theme: the rehearsed discovery of self through the phases of childhood, adolescence, virility, and antic­ ipation of death, namely differentiation from the source and the longed-for return to it, in multi-layered reminiscence, intent observation, and projection into the future. Discovery of poetry and discovery of life are one and the same thing; nor should we overlook certain formal signals like the absence of rhyme (but for cessare-scoccare toward the end) in the opening piece, while all the eight following ones abound in cannily orchestrated rhymes. In poem 1 itself, the single rhyme we notice occurs only with the rousing flight of the blue jays that supersedes the initial noise, to pinpoint an invitation to harmony. The present tense exclusively governs this first poem, entirely absorbed as it is in the present moment, and the last piece symmetrically returns to a

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predominant present tense that, however, embraces the whole scope of the persona's existence to indicate the attainment of full consciousness, so that the cycle outlined by the nine interconnected poems will have spiraled through a real progress, instead of falling back, Sisyphus-like, to the point of departure. It is also important to notice that the final "lesson" (line 16) the speaker has avowedly taken from his overwhelming interlocutor has to do with its "nearly soundless heaving" in certain "desolate noons," more than with its unleashed "glory." The poetic "I" has taken stock of himself in the sustained conversation with his inspiring native element, and he has ripened into the live calm, the concentration, the steady rhythm that mark a mature consciousness, just as the subdued sound of peaceful waves will dictate to the poet his typically low-keyed lines from now on. Wild breakers crashing on the cliffs, Dionysian fury had greeted him from the start, but he finds, and will cling to, a human measure after confronting the "inhuman heart" of the sea. Montale has skirted the Dionysian mode and opted for a different one—concentration, meditative discipline enduring far beyond unrestrained exuberance; in his later poetry, orgiastic dance and posture will carry a negative sign. Steadiness, not flare-up is his way (but it can be a tireless waiting for the sudden light). Verbs like resistere (to resist) and semantically related ones will add their poignancy to Montale's language in some of his best work. Gianfranco Contini, a leading Italian critic, has aptly entitled his collected essays on Montale Una lunga fedelta (A Long Fidelity).15 In many ways "Mediterraneo" has been the crucial testing of the poet's powers, and to say it in his words from that very source: "dal subbuglio nasceva l'evidenza" (from 15 Gianfranco Contini, Una lunga fedelta: Saitti su Eugetiio Montale (Torino: Einaudi, 1974). The earliest of these essays had appeared before the war in Contini, Esercizi di lettura sopra autori contemporanei (Firenze: Parenti, 1939), after previous publication in the January to March 1933 issue of Rivista rosminiana.

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turmoil the evidence arose).16 Here a new clarity, a new starkness emerge, partly present already in the brief lyrics of "Ossi di seppia" but now compounded with the larger breath the "Mediterranean" initiation has infused into the utterance. Here the residual languors that occasionally soften diction in the early, pre-"Ossi" pieces (a leftover of the "crepuscolare" mode that pervaded the rejected poems, namely the five companion pieces to "Corno inglese" and the "Sonatina"17 in Sergio Solmi's possession) will disappear to make way for subtler modulations. Thus a desolate masterpiece like "Arsenio," so radically different in imagery and tone from "Mediterraneo" that it already announces the grayer climate of Le occasioni (and indeed it was a late addition to Ossi di seppia) would never have been possible without the preliminary exuberance of the mythic cycle that preceded it by a few years. In this poem, the "ancient wave" (onda antica, line 7, stanza 5) of the "Ancient One" (Antico, line 1, poem 2, "Me­ diterraneo") is still seizing the self-critical persona who expects the miracle of a renewal from the sudden storm on the Rapallo seashore, only to find himself surrounded by "an icy multitude of the dead" and skirted by the gesture of a "stifled life." Joining into an ironic oxymoron two salient terms of "Mediterraneo," delirio and immobilita, Arsenio transforms them to suit his negative self-description, "oh troppo noto/ delirio, Arsenio, d'immobilita" (oh too 16 The expression recalls Giuseppe Ungaretti's definition of poetry in an Allegria piece dedicated to Ettore Serra as "la limpida meraviglia/ di un delirante fermento," the terse wonder/ of a delirious ferment. Ungaretti's first book found in M. a responsive reader; see M.'s tribute to his fellow poet in the September to December 1958 issue of Letteratura celebrating Ungaretti's seventieth birthday (p. 325). See also Alvaro Valentini, Semantica dei poeti: Ungaretti e Montale (Roma: Bulzoni, 1970). 17 Sergio Solmi owns the autograph draft of this early poem, first published in Eugenio Montale: Uopera in versi, critical edition by Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini (Torino: Einaudi, 1980); I had read it in the xeroxed copy in the Pavia University collection, and its coy mannerism justifies Solmi's strictures in a letter to the author, now published in Corti and Grignani, Autograft di Montale.

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well known/ delirium, Arsenio, of immobility). The "immobility dei finiti" (immobility of finites) and "impietrato soffrire senza nome" (nameless suffering of the stone) with which the "Mediterraneo" persona was identifying at times in his confrontation of the savage element has absorbed the latter's star-bound "delirium"; the verbal chemistry betrays the increasing shift from a more nature-bound mythical poetics to an internalized poetics of the object, which is emblematized as an expression of the (critically active) self. As the writer himself will explain in his "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)" (Intentions, an Imaginary Interview) of 1946,18 the dividing line between subjective and objective world becomes hard to trace; one thinks of the magical realism of painter Giorgio Morandi, who could invest such eerie meaning in a group of bottles and thereby transmogrify the old naturalist "still life" into an emblematic crystallization of the invisible subject. Later, at the height of his concentrated mode, Montale will people his Occasioni scenes with cryptically and intensely significant objects like the weathercock and compass of "Casa dei doganieri" (The Shorewatchers' House), the spinning top of "Palio," the trap-shooting paraphernalia of "Elegia di Pico Farnese," the ivory mouse of "Dora Markus," the hatbox of "A Liuba che parte" (To Liuba Leaving), the kitschy seashell of the last "Motet," the mill wheel, log, and straw heap of "Notizie dall'Amiata" (News from Amiata). Earlier (in the first part of Ossi di seppia) the attempt to establish a meaningful equivalence between given object and inner mood led to explanatory equations such as La luce si fa avara, amara l'anima Light becomes niggardly, bitter the soul ("I limoni") 18 See note 2. This is certainly the most revealing of M.'s self-descriptive articles and interviews. For an exhaustive list of his publications up to 1977, see Laura Barile, Bibliografia Monialiana (Milano: Mondadori, 1977).

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where the mutual mirroring of the two key words—first the objectively descriptive one, then the subjectively transposing one—is conveyed by juxtaposition and almost total rhyme and aided by chiastic arrangement. Note also: Trema un ricordo nel ricolmo secchio A memory quivers in the brimful bucket ("Ossi di seppia," poem 19) and fa che ricordo non ti rimorda see to it that remembrance won't give you remorse ("Marezzo," Choppy Sea) The later, elliptical poetics, however, would renounce the captivating elegance and lop off one term of the equation— usually the mood-denoting one—to recharge the objective one with implicit meaning, cognitive rather than just emotional. In Ossi di seppia, as I mentioned before, one signal in­ stance of the dawning new poetics is to be recognized in "Delta," which demonstrates its genetic links to "Mediterraneo" in the very act of breaking loose from that marine antecedent. Epiphany comes in the presence of the sea, but not from it, from an inner power identified as "mem­ ory" (of an unspecified person, foreshadowing the later Muses like Gerti, the unnamed Annetta, and Clizia). The interesting trait is that the speaker addresses this surfacing presence in the absolute, without determinations of any kind: ed affiori, memoria, ρϊύ palese and you emerge, a memory, more manifest

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A syntactical ambiguity inheres in the vocative, "memoria," which could be taken as the simple apposition of the Thou addressed by the speaker or, alternatively, as the immediate definition of that Thou—as if the memory of somebody intimately known to the speaker somehow became memory as such (Mnemosyne?), namely the source itself of all inspiring memories. This mental hypostasis supersedes the mythic personification of the Mediterranean as well as the preSoaatic animation of the four elements in the cycle of marine initiation that had come midway through the book. A turbulent sea provides the background and the matrix for this inner Anadyomene of whom the utterly dedicated speaker avowedly knows "nothing," not even if she is an "existing form" or a "delusion" (ubbia) fostered by turbulence of the breakers. "Tutto ignoro di te," I know nothing of you, he says, echoing the earlier declaration in "Mediterraneo," poem 9 ("these words of mine swear allegiance/ to an impossible event, yet know nothing of it"). Ignorance had appeared earlier as a charged word in some "Ossi di seppia" lyrics to counterpoint with some aesthetic complacency the cognitive commitment of the poetic self, but here it acquires a dramatic depth, enhanced by the immediately following qualification "except the silent message" that sustains the speaker on his way. This is another echo of "Mediterraneo," poem 9, where the persona says at lines 7-8 that he had originally come to "attest" an "order" subsequently forgotten "on the way." And the semantic impact of "Tutto" (All) at the beginning of line 1, stanza 3, reverberates in the symmetric negation, "Nulla di te" (Nothing of you) at the beginning of line 1, stanza 4, where the vision's utter estrangement from the sea scene is clinched, with the qualifying afterthought that perhaps the hooting siren of an oncoming tugboat might convey, implausibly, a signal of her presence. The poet is delving deep in his imaginative subsoil to touch on the secret genesis of his life work, and a metaphysical poetics complements at this point the psychological or mythic one that other poems formulated.

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The strength of diction, the sober lexicon, the firm if pulsing rhythm, the sharp focus on physical detail versus unseizable inward event all conspire to make "Delta" an exemplary poem and an even clearer forecast of Le occasioni than "Arsenio" itself. Compared with "Delta," even a longwrought, dramatically developed lyric like "Crisalide" (Chrysalis)19 sounds less vigorous, though its dialectic of finite and infinite, necessity and freedom, development and atrophy surpasses by far the range and depth of other Ossi di seppia pieces. When the author placed "Riviere" at the end of the book in defiance of compositional chronology, he intended to reaffirm life after the mournful accents of "Arsenio"20 and "I morti" (The Dead), but it is "Delta" that affords the real breakthrough. "Riviere," River Banks (like the much starker "Agave sullo scoglio," Agave on the Cliff) is an obvious offshoot of "Mediterraneo," and it offers metamorphic escape into nature as a solution. But how can we stay with that lingering motif, or with the invoked "new blossoming" (rifiorire, echoing riviere at close quarters) that caps poem and book in one, when a different call has been heard? Ossi di seppia, a mature book with the generosity of youth, alternates dirge and celebration, myth and its critical solvent, and it figures forth a prelapsarian world poised this side of history: Is it Limbo or Eden? In the "Ossi di seppia" cycle, "Valmorbia" transmogrifies the ordeal of World War I into a private paradise perpetuated by memory—testimony of how ahistorical the book's vision really is—and let us not forget that "Valmorbia" is the only poem referring, 19 The intensive textual elaboration this important poem underwent before reaching publication can be seen in the variant draft at Pavia University, which has been published both in facsimile and print by Corti and Grignani, Autografi di Montale; it has also been reproduced and critically analyzed by Laura Barile ("Le varianti di 'Crisalide'," in Letture Montaliane, pp. 87-103). 20 "Arsenio," which T. S. Eliot published in The Criterion (in Mario Praz's translation) in 1928, has been closely analyzed by Adriano Seroni in Ragioni critiche (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1944), pp. 95-110, and then by Cesare Federico Goffis in his "Lettura di 'Arsenio'," in Letture Montaliane, pp. 71-83.

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however obliquely, to the dreadful war in which the author took part as a front-line combatant. The following books will mark the descent to time and history. Still, every remarkable development is contained in Ossi di seppia, Montale's seminal book, one of the great mythic formulations of our difficult century.21 21

Ossi di seppia has elicited a similar response from Nicholas Perella in Midday in Italian Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 240-262.

2 THE DESCENT INTO TIME

As we have seen, Montale's first book hovers this side of historical time in the presence of a seaswept, sunstruck Nature that evokes either the memories of a lost childhood Eden or the promise of a Nirvana that will release the conscious self to the point of annihilating it in ecstatic union with the elements.1 From that threshold of timelessness there could be only one way out: the descent into time as harrowing private and communal history, time as the or­ deal of entropy, the cross of self-definition. In such a pre­ dicament, the mirage of fulfillment recedes far beyond the reach of the self locked in time and space to glimmer in­ termittently in the apparitions of Clizia the sunflower lady, the faraway beloved. Ossi di seppia would only harbor un­ conscious intimations of her, notably "Delta"; mythically (and biographically) speaking, she was to take shape in the subsequent phase of Montale's lifework, Le occasioni of 1939 and La bufera e altro of 1956, whose stark scene she illu­ minates along with other, more definite womanly figures. Between Le occasioni ("Mottetti," Motets; "Stanze," Stan­ zas; "Nuove stanze," New Stanzas; "Eastbourne"; "Notizie dall'Amiata"; "Elegia di Pico Farnese") and La bufera, Clizia actually undergoes an apotheosis. She becomes an 1 This chapter originally appeared as an independent essay in Eugenio Montale, ed. Annalisa Cima and Cesare Segre (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977), pp. 51-65, and it appears here in my English translation by permission of Rizzoli publishers of Milan. © 1977 by Rizzoli.

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angelic voice or presence and, eventually, sheer creativity, light's very force, the cosmic antagonist of evil; as a meta­ physical source of salvation, she surpasses even Dante's Beatrice; as feminine deity, she tends to supplant the God of Christian orthodoxy. That is Montale's supreme myth, his anachronistic truth from beyond the pall of doubt and despair, and as its carrier, Clizia survives the competition of La bufera's "Vixen" and of "Xenia" 's "Fly" (La Mosca). But this side of apotheosis, here in the realm of troublesome contingency, we may respond to the call of frailer feminine figures like Esteiina, Dora, Gerti, and then Liuba, and the nameless woman whose unforgettable epitaph happens to be "The Shorewatchers' House" in Le occasioni. Gerti in particular has a hold on us, and the one poem devoted to her in Le occasioni, Montale's second book, in­ dividuates her as a grown-up woman who can be still a child at heart, a white sorceress, victim of the humdrum world who is relegated to the "unblossoming Springs" to share the captivity of her troubadour; Gerti, the defeated sorceress. Her presence grows imperceptibly from line to line, and it is established by gestures rather than by a de­ scribed physiognomy, much as happens with the angelicized ladies who haunted Dolce Stil Nuovo poetry. Like them too, she is talked to and about more than she talks. She takes shape in the encounter with an "occasion" (to use a loaded Montalian term that has provided the title for the volume of verse whose first part includes "II carnevale di Gerti," Gerti's Carnival). The occasion happens to be a carnival festivity, and it is such a carnival as Federico Fellini might have figured forth, something between I vitelloni and Eight and a Half. Indeed in Eight and a Half, characters and symbols from the carnival or circus world finally come to the protagonist's rescue. They bring him back the magic of childhood, as happens in "Gerti's Carnival" 's first strophic units; yet, since the last strophic unit negates the spell, at that point the resemblance to Eight and a Half becomes a resemblance to I vitelloni, a movie where the conclusive carnival scene seals hopeless disenchantment.

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Carnival favors sorcery, but in Gerti's case the enchant­ ment does not arise so much from the calendar-bound fes­ tival as from an unforeseen deflection that transforms the public merriment into a private event of auspicious import: Se la ruota s'impiglia nel groviglio delle stelle filanti ed il cavallo s'impenna tra la calca, se ti nevica sui capelli e Ie mani un lungo brivido d'iridi trascorrenti ο alzano i bimbi Ie flebili ocarine che salutano il tuo viaggio ed i lievi echi si sfaldano giu dal ponte sul fiume, se si sfolla la strada e ti conduce in un mondo soffiato entro una tremula bolla d'aria e di luce dove il sole saluta la tua grazia—hai ritrovato forse la strada che tento un istante il piombo fuso a mezzanotte quando fini l'anno tranquillo senza spari. (Lines 1-15) If the wheel gets entangled in the dash of streamers and your horse rears amid the throng, if on your hair and hands a long shudder, snowlike, alights of passing rainbows or the children raise their feeble ocarinas that greet your journey and their faint echoes fall off from the bridge on the river, if the street clears up and leads you into a world blown into a quivering bubble of air and light where the sun greets your grace—you have found again, perhaps, the way that for an instant the molten lead tried at midnight when the calm year ended without shots.

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Just as the horse rears, so discourse rears up toward an enchanted vision that momentarily transcends workaday reality and the programmed festivity as such. What elicits deliverance from the predictable contingency, from predetermined reality, is an unforeseeable occurrence, an occasion within the occasion: the stalling (line 1) of a horsedrawn carriage that takes Gerti on a promenade through the meny, noisy crowd. This event interrupts the horizontal, earthbound motion that even in the festive occasion we can associate with the irreversible "journey" (viaggio) of everyday life and its unrelieved burdens. It is hard to miss the semantic overtones of the word "wheel" (ruota) in line 1, casual though it may seem in its narrative function. In "Eastbourne" Montale will say "Evil wins . . . The wheel does not stop," taking his sudden emblematic cue from a revolving hotel door that has caught the persona's eye. In "Casa dei doganieri" we shall have a "pitilessly" turning "sooty weathercock"; then in "Palio" the spinning top, the emblem that opens and concludes the poem in addition to alluding to the "race that slows down/ its coils," a negative interpretation, verging on political allegory, of the traditional Siena horse race; finally, in the third part of "Notizie dall'Amiata" we have the "mill wheel" that along with the "old log" sets "ultimate boundaries to the world." An overtone of Karma fatality hovers around the wheel archetype in this poetry, comparable though not identical to Yeats's gyres. As a matter of fact, shortly after the beginning of the fourth and last stanza of "Carnevale di Gerti" we overhear the Montalian speaker addressing Gerti in this way: La tua vita e quaggiii dove rimbombano Ie ruote dei carriaggi senza posa e nulla torna se non forse in questi disguidi del possibile . . . (Lines 55-58)

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Your life is down here, where relentlessly carriages' wheels keep thundering on and nothing ever comes back except perhaps in these derangings of the possible . . . These carriage wheels are ominous and ineluctable, wholly different from the coach that carried Gerti through carnival crowds. Vet at the same time they unmask the reality of that carriage once it is deprived of those "derangings of the possible" that had come up with the stopping of the entangled wheel and the horse's rearing among the throng. Readers familiar with turn-of-the-century Italian poetry may catch here an echo of Giovanni Pascoli's "Last Dream" (Ultimo sogno), where the sinister clatter of nightmare carriages yields to a pause of relief, Pascoli being one of Montale's acknowledged antecedents; but Montale is the kind of poet who uses his sources and is not used by them. In other words, one never catches him napping: either the presumable "source" has been assimilated into an available linguistic humus, or the reference is intentional, and canny. At any rate, the pause created by the carriage's stop in Gerti's "journey" is an individual festivity within the public festival—a holiday from reality: witness the transfiguration that overtakes the surrounding phenomena in stanza 1. The carnival lures a crowd to block town streets and stop Gerti's coach for a while (lines 2-3), but a spell occurs when the street clears up (line 9) so as to introduce her to an imaginary world (lines 10-12) that has the ephemeral grace of a soap bubble (epiphanies being far from durable). Already lines 3-5 sketched a germane image that must be seen as preliminary: the "long shudder/ of passing rainbows" (iridi). One inevitably thinks, extrapolating this motif from the specific text, of "Dora Markus" 's line "le tue parole iridavano come Ie scaglie ..." (your words were iridescent like the scales/ of the dying red mullet), and then of those La bufera lyrics (especially "Iride," Iris) where the rainbow symbol will achieve hypostatic density. Privileged perception shifts phenomenal reality into a

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transcendent sphere. The "rainbows" (iridi) suddenly enveloping Gerti in charmed immunity sprang from the swarming colors of a carnival feast: streamers, confetti, masks, and pinwheels. Passing through what later on (line 16, first of stanza 2) the speaker will call a filtro ("sieve" and "philter" in one), they start shaping an imaginative antiworld, the central charm. Carnival crowds make for a hubbub, but entrance into Gerti's magical world is announced by a softening, a thinning out of sound: listen to the children's "flebili ocarine" and their phonic re­ verberation into the ee-sound chain of impiglia-groviglio-brivido d'iridi-bimbi (lines 1 and 4-6), then take in the semantic and phonic resonances of "sfaldarsi dei lievi echi" in line 7 (faint echoes falling off), and finally dwell on the first stanza's last line "... the calm year without shots" (l'anno tranquillo senza spari, line 15). At its very outset, the following stanza reiterates this ongoing purification of sound ("And now you want to linger where a sieve-philter [filtro]/ strips sounds bare"), as if to confirm that in the sphere of "grace," in Gerti's precarious paradise, the negation of sound is no negative silence, no mere absence of sound but rather ultrasonic music audible only to the initiates who know that "melodies unheard are sweeter." Finally, the "sortilege" is accomplished "in silence" (lines 31-32). A white sorceress, is what I had called Gerti at the outset, and as the good witch she is, she has indeed performed her sortilege, pouring into cold water the molten lead that (according to North European folklore) should foretell the future through the bizarre shapes into which it hardens (lines 13-15). But she is a defeated sorceress. If the end of stanza 1 commemorates the free moment, the instant opening of possibility that the molten lead had provided on New Year's Eve, the poem's conclusion will feature "frozen lead," reality opaque and impervious once more under the vise of stiff limitation: "and perhaps everything is fixed, every­ thing is written,/ and we shall not see freedom,/ miracle arise on the way,/ the fact that was not by necessity bound," as "Chrysalis" (from Ossi di seppia) had lamented earlier.

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The failure of the sortilege after momentary promise defines by force of imagery the scope and movement of the entire poem, a downward trajectory from the initial rearing up. Gerti rebels against entropy, and a wise ArsenioIike persona talks to her; he calls her back to his own hopeless sphere: "return to the way where with you I wilt,/ the one that frozen lead pointed out/ to my evenings, to yours:/ re­ turn to the Springs that do not blossom, lines 58-60, 6467). There is no escape from Arsenio's "icy multitude of corpses," and in the "limbo of stunted existences" the chrysalis will have no chance to ripen into a butterfly. The fourth and last stanza (lines 53-67) symmetrically inverts the semantic direction of the first while repeating its iconic development: stanza 1 moved from a festive image of the carriage to the magically auspicious image of the molten lead; stanza 4 instead goes from oppressively thunderous carriage wheels to the inexorable image of the frozen lead. Recurrence and mutual placement of the key images concur in defining the whole composition's design and enhance its overall meaning by structurally stressing the semantic inversion (from positive to negative value) of the iconic pair vehicle wheel—divinatory lead. The poem circularly returns upon itself thereby outlining a wheel-like emblem of fatality. And yet this fatality has been challenged by Gerti, whose "failed prodigy" (to quote once more from "Crisalide") the Arsenio-Iike speaker witnesses with both sympathy and skepticism. Before redescending to the deadness of a workaday life without openings, she has pointed out an alternative reality (hope and/or mirage), and in so doing she has contested, if only provisionally, the dull reality in which we are trapped. Stanzas 2 and 3, set between those other two that establish the theme's circularity, develop the first stanza's positive cue: they suspend given reality for the sake of an imaginary world of enchantment, for "January opened and in the silence/ the sortilege took place . . ." (lines 31-32). The sortilege is more than the literal act of forecasting the future from molten lead. It is also, by

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extension, the magic of memory that confuses the present carnival with the recent New Year's Eve and (line 38) the Christmas to come: . . . E Carnevale ο il Dicembre s'indugia ancora? Penso che se tu muovi la lancetta al piccolo orologio che rechi al polso, tutto arretrera dentro un disfatto prisma babelico di forme e di colon (Lines 32-37) . . . Is it Carnival or lingering December? I think that if you shift the dial hand on your small wristwatch, everything will recede into a dissolved Babelic prism of shapes and colors Aside from the anthropological fact that Christmas, New Year's Eve, and carnival happen to be variants of one recurrence, namely the renewal of the year cycle, the con­ fusion of times in the speaker's mind is germane to the fusion of lead that, at the very moment when everything is consummated and begins anew, reopens every possibility, the "deranging [disguido] of the possible": a magical suspension, or parenthesis, of time, a momentary victory over mechanical and entropic time, a resurfacing of the significant past into continuity and co-presence. In this parenthesis (which syntax makes literal), even the skeptical persona suspends disbelief to the point of considering Gerti capable of the hardest and most precious spell; and the hypothetical charm wrought by Gerti's shifting of the dial hand blends with the literal charm of the New Year's Eve lead because it extends and clarifies the relevant meaning. Both magical acts link up with the initial stopping of the carriage wheel, if we realize the emblematic affinity between that object-event and the wristwatch cogwheels that Gerti

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might stop and actually turn back against the drift of their motion—the uniform motion that marks her daily "journey." If Gerti does touch the dial hand, we shall have triumphed over time's irreversibility, and reality will return to its magmatic state—the true carnival of Gerti's own making. At this point, her destructive and creative power rever­ berates in the dismayed words "disfatto" and "babelico" (dissolved, Babelic) that the speaker uses to qualify her potential act. He in turn will apparently feel relief at Gerti's failure, at her relapse into the workaday time and space that circumscribe him; this is, to my mind, the overtone of "ridona" (gives back) in the last stanza: . . . e col tempo che ti batte al polso e all'esistenza ti ridona, tra Ie mura pesanti che non s'aprono al gorgo degli umani affaticato, torna alia via dove con te intristisco (Lines 60-65) . . . and with the time that ticks at your wrist and gives you back to existence, within the heavy walls that do not open to the weary crowd of milling humans, return to the way where with you I wilt The poem's economy gains by such a differentiation of the speaker from his fascinating addressee. Child and witch, innocent yet endowed with (however illusory and temporary) science and power, Gerti is apt to arouse both envy and dismay, along with affection and wonder, in the dramatis persona who is describing her. In this context, significance also accrues to the willfulness the speaker ascribes to her in the second stanza ("And now you want to stop . . . ," line 16) and in the third ("Are you asking/ to stop time on the village . . . ," lines 42-43). Interlocutor Gerti has thus a chance to assert herself, to live her own

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life instead of remaining a mere subjective projection of the cherishing persona. There is obviously something childishly wayward in Gerti's wish at lines 20-24, stanza 2, to dwell for awhile in the country where "onagers will bite sugar cubes" from her hands and trees will miraculously sprout at the touch of "the peacocks' beak," namely to perpetuate the charmed instant into privileged space and time, immune from history, a durable wonderland. The following stanza will resume this motif ("Are you asking/ to stop time over the village/ that expands all around?" lines 42-44). Yet it is just this childish waywardness, this challenge to the natural order of things, that endows Gerti with both feminine charm and magical power, so that once again, as in stanza 1, her childhood dream is about to come true and the fairyland country, an Eden of sheltered houses and docile animals, already overwhelms reality: . . . Le grandi ali screziate ti sfiorano, Ie Iogge sospingono all'aperto esili bambole bionde, vive, Ie pale dei mulini rotano fisse sulle pozze garrule. Chiedi di trattenere Ie campane d'argento sopra il borgo e il suono rauco delle colombe? Chiedi tu i mattini trepidi delle tue prode lontane? (Lines 44-52) . . . The big wings, mottled, skirt you, the loggias push out into the open slender blond dolls, alive, the mill wheels turn steadily on the garrulous pools. Are you asking to retain the silver bells over the town and the raucous call of pigeons? Are you asking for the quivering mornings of your distant land?

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The dream of an Eden-like fairyland, with its orientally exotic traits (stanza 2) that become subsequently Nordic and therefore familiar to Austrian Gerti (stanza 3), finally turns out to be just the transfiguring memory of the golden age and country of childhood itself, now remote in time and space. Memory's summoning power, as we saw, is the poem's central sortilege. Its inner sources are manifold, for into remembrances of childhood time there flows a more recent one (tied though it is to the household gods of infancy): the ritual of New Year's Eve, the gifts assigned by lot to Gerti's "faraway friends" (stanza 2, lines 25-32; these gifts included quaint toys, such as diminutive carts, rubber balls, puppets, tiny harquebusses, and miniature kitchen tools). Gerti, alone in her room, drew lots from an urn "in the hour when January began and in the silence/ the sortilege took place." Textual juxtaposition, we may note, revives the etymology of "sortilege" (sortilegio)—in Latin, sortem legere—to read destiny, an operation connected with the contiguously mentioned urn. Similarly, in the first line of stanza 2 the word filtro means both a purifying "sieve" (since in this context it purifies sound) and a "philter" (since this operation is magical and contributes to the initial spell). Nor are these the only cases of semantic reactivation of words. Meanwhile it is easy to see how the toy world that surrounds Gerti in stanza 2, sharpening the pain of homesickness for distant friends and relatives, will grow in size ("si dilata," line 44) and acquire life ("slender dolls/ blond, alive," lines 46-47) in the next stanza; this is another aspect of the "sortilege" or spell that has taken place in Gerti's mind, with the help of an angelic presence (the "big mottled wings" of lines 44-45). Since this magic is sheer infantile desire that must yield to the pressure of workaday reality, the spell will turn into disappointment in the conclusive stanza ("Return/ there among the dead toys where even dying/ is denied" lines 58-60). Diastole ("si dilata," expands) makes way for a painful systole (". . . among the heavy walls that do not open,"

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line 62; and compare line 42 in stanza 3: "within the walls that already crack"); fusion is replaced by the freezing of forms, and not just of the divinatory lead but of all life, as in the earlier lyric from Ossi di seppia "Sul muro grafito" (On the Carved Wall): Chi si ricorda ρΐύ del fuoco ch'arse impetuoso nelle vene del mondo;—in un riposo freddo Ie forme, opache, sono sparse. Who remembers the fire any more that blazed impetuously in the world's veins;—in a cold repose all shapes, opaque, are sparse. The magmatic state, which reopens every possibility and is therefore magical because it contradicts entropy and the chain of causal determinism even though it contains the danger of chaos (stanza 2), is degraded into stiff concretions. There is no breaking through the wall, another basic Montalian symbol (see "Meriggiare," "Crisalide," "Sul muro grafito," "Notizie dall'Amiata"); the "way," the "road" is a "carraia" (a rutted dirt road; see "Incontro," A Meeting, from Ossi di seppia), a groove from which one cannot swerve. In this way several disparate images converge toward what can be called the negative pole of meaning: from the creative dynamism of Bergson's Memoire one passes to the inertia of matiere. The lava of magma-chaos cools off into stone; the fusion-confusion momentarily reattained in Gerti's magical rite (and with the speaker's provisional complicity) was the synecdoche of a new cosmogony that would never come true. To say it with Heidegger: within this kind of poetical metaphysics, no choice is left to the two interlocutors but the fall (or relapse) into the workaday, into measured, monotonous time (". . . time that ticks/ at your wrist and gives you back to existence . . ."). Like other great poems of Montale's, this one weaves its

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sad, virile message into the pattern of iconic recurrences, transformations, and contrasts. But we shall not get very close to its secret if we overlook its rhetorical structure, which has to do with the modulations of the speaker's voice in its dramatic monologue, a monologue that postulates or reabsorbs the other voice, the interlocutory Thou which in turn comes through on its own, by quoted direct speech, only at lines 53-54: "How everything becomes strange and difficult,/ how everything is impossible, you say." Of Gerti so far we had heard only the silences, the unspoken thoughts as mediated by the Arsenio-Iike speaker; now we hear her voice, and it is a subdued voice, utterly remote from Clizia's prophetic imperiousness and, by the same token, so much more human. In Montale's poetical universe Gerti also achieves a marked individuality because eventually she speaks, both to answer her insistent questioner and to utter her bewilderment at the final incommensurability of dream and given reality. In the structure of the present poem particular meaning accrues to the placement of this second voice (hers, as compared to that of the speaker persona); it rings out exactly at the outset of the last stanza, as if to mark a dramatic climax, the coming to direct life of the character who had so far remained a mere object of discourse or, at most, a silent interlocutor. And this intervention of the second voice coincides with the disenchanted resolution of the whole lyric, irrevocably dispelling the charm just as it was beginning to take shape. Actually the monologue, sustained by the first voice, assumes or incorporates a dialogue that becomes explicit in the conclusive strophic unit. Throughout the poem, the first voice, the voice of the Arsenio-Iike dramatis persona, in the very act of presenting and interpreting Gerti had set up a rationalizing counterpoint to the visionary song evoked by her. His initial consensus, which was unreserved as long as it was a matter of seizing the liberating magical moment (stanza 1), modulates into affectionate under­ standing mixed with logical reservations when Gerti tries to prolong the privileged instant (stanza 2) and even to fix

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it forever outside human time (stanza 3; and note those "mill wheels" that "turn steadily [fisse] on the garrulous pools," lines 47-48). Rational reservation already emanates from the first line of stanza 2 ("And now you want to stop . . .") and then from the parenthetical insert that follows within the same metrical unit: "(Oh your Carnival will be even sadder/ tonight than mine . . .)." The latter exclamation offers as a counterpoint to the exotic fairyland dream of the stanza's first part (onagers and peacocks) Gerti's human reality, her loneliness "closeted among the gifts . . . for the loved absent ones" that threatens to degenerate into fetishism; for those toys, after coming to bewitched life in her private paradise, will become "dead" again (stanza 4, line 59), since true life, no matter how limited, pertains only to human communal existence. And then, in stanza 3, the delightful arbitrariness of her desire must come to terms with the sensible reminder of the benefits time will bring: "And Christmas will come and New Year's Eve/ which empties barracks and brings you back/ your scattered friends . . ." (lines 38-40). The reminder in turn is followed up by a related question, which rings both ironic and affectionate: "Are you asking/ to stop time ..." (lines 42-43). This implicit dialogue that the first voice articulates in its thoughtfully argumentative way comes to an end in the last stanza with Gerti's admission of defeat: "How everything becomes strange and difficult,/ how everything is impossible, you say" (lines 53-54). For all that, the Arsenio-Iike persona's wisdom is far from unconditionally negative, because it makes allowances for "derangings of the possible" (epiphanies) and for the fact that mechanically measurable time "gives [Gerti] back to existence as a gift [ridona]." By accepting her human condition as a fellow prisoner within the walls that block any way out to "the weary crowd of milling humans," Gerti brings something of her "grace" (line 12), a glimmer of light, and she actually makes a gift of herself instead of brooding "closeted with the gifts . . . for the absent loved ones." This amounts to a victory of gratuitousness over necessity

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in the very act of sharing the lot of the doomed fellow humans, or at least of those who, like the poem's speaker, understand Gerti's plight and yearning for freedom; the last lines insist on the note of a personally shared predicament ("the way where xvith you I wilt," "to my evenings, to yours"). Despite the bleak prospect of "Springs that do not blossom" after carnival's celebration of winter's imminent demise, the defeat of Gerti and of her interlocutor is not total; integrity is to be saved by facing destiny and not by seeking an escape, however innocent and fanciful. The same will be true of Dora Markus. The overall syntactical strategy does its part to enhance rhetorical flexibility and, with it, the tonal modulation that is vital to Montale's craft in general and to "Carnevale di Gerti" in particular. It is a rich, flexible syntax we have here, alternating lengthy hypotactic sentences with short ones and using parentheses to add a further dimension to the utterance. The hypothetical sentence that unfolds through the fifteen lines of the first stanza with as many ifs as it can take, coming to rest in the qualified assurance, you have found again/ perhaps ("hai ritrovato/ forse . . ."), of the governing clause toward the end, establishes the delicate balance of reality and possibility that the rest of the poem will explore. Stanza 2 syntactically breaks up into two major units, one governed by two declarative clauses in the indicative mood, the other one antiphonally enclosed by parentheses and broken up by a question that follows a commiserating, muffled exclamation which in turn introduces a reflective statement, "I think that . . . ," governing a hypothetical sentence that propounds anew the possibility of miracle— the undoing of clock-time and of discrete forms. Set against the sinuous syntactical compactness of stanza 1, which announced the likelihood of successful magic, this dis­ continuity of stanza 2 signals the precariousness of that event, though its first part dwells on Gerti's exotic fantasy and its second, parenthetic part concludes by restating the possibility of deep sorcery. It is Gerti alone in her rooms

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on carnival night, among the toys, that the persona sadly projects in his bracketed meditation, and not the Gerti welcomed as a princess from fairyland by the festive crowds in the street, whom stanza 1 envisaged. Stanza 3 prolongs the debate between reality and dream by following up a hopeful and realistic statement (which illustrates the reliability of time, "Christmas will come and New Year's Eve/ . . . which brings you back your friends . . .") with a hammering of questions aimed at Gerti's wishful thinking ("Are you asking/ to stop time . . The dramatic argument becomes more poignant when, between the first and the second of these questions, a declarative statement intervenes, couched in a paratactically organized sentence that depicts the coming true of Gerti's dream for a spellbound instant. But the very fact that the final part of the stanza reiterates the rhetorical question, after its beginning had vouched for the promises that time makes good, speaks against Gerti's commitment to fantasy. Once more, discontinuous syntax has contributed to dramatic effect. Stanza 4 can only clinch the point by answering Gerti's childlike remark, "How everything becomes strange and difficult," with a positive statement, "Your life is down here..." and then a repeated imperative that really sounds like an invocation: "Return" among us, in our bleak realm; we need you—It is prayer not command. The latter tone of voice, which averts the danger of didactic condescension on the speaker's part, also depends on the crescendo of iterations involving the verb tornare (to return) and other semantically cognate ones. The cue comes from stanza 3, and then the repetitions thicken to the point of structuring the conclusive stanza, on which they impart a rhythmic scansion above and beyond the metric scansion carried by thirteen regular hendecasyllables, one sevensyllable line, and a final hypermetric hendecasyllable: nulla torna (stanza 4, line 5); Ritorna (end of line 6); ti ridona (semantic assonance at the end of line 9); torna (beginning of line 12); torna (beginning of line 15, the last in the entire stanza). A muffled but penetrating eloquence results from

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such a syntactical and phonic organization; the speaker is really making his final point here, and one thinks of the similar tolling effect that the opening stanza of "La casa dei doganieri" achieves with the anaphoric repetition of "Tu non ricordi" (You don't remember). But within the ambit of the present poem, the iterative pattern functions as a symmetric response to the repeated question of the previous stanza ("Chiedi. . . ?," Are you asking . . . ?) so as to conclude the dramatic monologue with proper finality. Even so, the compactness of this final stanza (and ar­ gument) is metrically undermined at the end, where a shorter line and a conclusive irregular hendecasyllable slacken the solid mesh of the previous thirteen regular hendecasyllables. Rhyme, which was absent in stanza 1 and made a discreet appearance in the two subsequent stanzas, irreg­ ularly constellates stanza 4: diffz'czle-dicz (lines 1 and 2), negflto-affaticflfo-raggekfo (lines 7, 11, and 13), sere-primavere (line 14 and middle of line 15), intristz'sco-fiorzscono. Two hypermetric rhymes centered on the acute vowel i (ee sound) encase the whole stanza, a real feat of sprezzatura, Montale's crafty nonchalance that abhors the all-too-obvious effects; and one could also remember that the same vowel domi­ nated the thin chimes of stanza l's first part. Now that phonosymbolic cue has reached unobtrusive formalization, the ocarinas of the beginning are not forgotten. In addition, the formal if disguised rhymes of the last stanza interact with the (ri)torna iteration, which adds its grave timbre to the overall harmony; and harmony, of a free kind, coun­ terpoints the demure message. A harmony of souls (be­ tween the "I" and the "Thou" and not restricted to them) looms ahead. This existential order—the only one possible in an opaque world—thematically matches the concentra­ tion of formal order in the last stanza, as indicated above. We have seen how decisively the iterative pattern of (n)torna and cognates affects the formal order of the final stanza, and we traced its immediate cue to stanza 3, where the first lines forecast both a New Year's Eve that "riporta" (brings back) Gerti's scattered friends and another carnival

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that "tornera" (will return). But the distant cue comes up much earlier, at lines 12-13 of stanza 1: "hai ritrovato/ forse la strada" (you have found again/ perhaps the way). The rising frequency of this verb and related cluster of verbs toward the poem's end merely elucidates its central se­ mantic relevance. Wheels turn, and the wheel icon, as we saw, has constitutive value here. Yet this iconic consistency of (ri)tornare and cognates at one point covers a semantic contradiction not to be ignored. In stanza 3 the speaker comforts Gerti by telling her that Christmas and carnival will "return" (tornera) with what benefits they can bring, and later on, in stanza 4, line 6, he will start urging her to "return" (Ritorna) among her fellow prisoners of the human condition, but in the pre­ ceding line (no. 5) he has warned her that "nothing ever returns (nulla torna) except "perhaps" in these "derangings of the possible." Here metric and phonic contiguity (torna of line 5 sets up a hidden rhyme with the emphatic ritorna at the end of line 6) sharpen the contrast of meaning. On the other hand, the simultaneous negation and pos­ itive invocation do not cancel each other out, as would happen if the semantic contrast resisted logical mediation. Just because "nothing ever comes back" of the wonderful past except for a fleeting moment that cannot be protracted, Gerti must "come back" to those who need her. Time is irreversible, the wheels of vehicles and watches turn cease­ lessly (unlike the carriage wheel of the very first line), and what they bring back is a calendar recurrence with the rare rewards that daily life can grant—in this case, the return of faraway friends. What the year's revolving wheel cannot bring back is the golden age of childhood, a happiness without bounds in memory's perspective, and not to be revived, not to be fixated because that would be mere mum­ mification. Christmas/New Year's Eve will "return" in the turn of the time-wheel that follows its horizontal course, but "nothing returns" to light, nothing ever durably resurfaces of what we experienced at the intact sources of our life; temps retrouve is a mirage, and Leopardi is right. But Gerti

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can "return" from her hopeless fantasy, namely redescend into the world that needs her grace and her sensibility, into consumable time, into entropy. Three divergent connotations of the verb tornare (to re­ turn), we now see, spring from the semantic clash dis­ cussed above and already foreshadowed, on the symbolic level, by the motif of stanza 1 that now rounds out its curve of development. The entanglement of the carriage wheel had momentarily interrupted the horizontal motion to start an ascensive one (the horse's rearing up) toward paradise lost, but that vertical dash could only be reversed and the horse had to resume his horizontal course after momen­ tarily (and almost magically) transgressing it. The three spatial directions are reflected in the respective temporal meanings of "(ri)tornare"; a symbolic cluster is thus mir­ rored in a semantic-lexical knot that in turn defines three different dimensions of time experience: a cyclical temporalness, mechanical and astronomic, extrinsically measur­ able, versus a subjective, emergent temporalness, perpen­ dicular to it, and made actual only by suspending measurable time, therefore conceivable also as negation of normal time, and finally, temporalness as relapse into measurable time. It is impossible to turn the clock back, to undo the world of space and time into which we are cast to live; at this point the Arsenio-Iike speaker has renounced his momen­ tary complicity with Gerti's wishful magic. Magic, however, inheres in the convergence of images, lexical elements, syntactical modes, and rhythmic devices of "Carnevale di Gerti." It is hard to conceive of a "cre­ puscular" poetry (to borrow a working hypothesis from Natale Tedesco)2 that would surpass the intensity and the self-critical depth of this poem, even if it still remains this side of the political commitment that will inject further poignancy into later Occasioni poems like "Eastbourne," 2 Natale Tedesco, La condizione crepuscolare (Firenze: La nuova Italia, 1970). Tedesco provides a fine analysis of another Occasioni poem, "Notizie dall'Amiata" (pp. 165-200), since by concentrating on one significant text it is possible to throw light on its context.

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"Barche sulla Marna" (Boats on the Marne), "Dora Markus," "Palio," "Elegia di Pico Farnese"—not to mention "Primavera hitleriana" (Hitlerian Spring) from La bufera. With "Arsenio" and "Carnevale di Gerti" our poet is al­ ready descending into time, but not yet specific, historical time.

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As I have pointed out at the end of Chapter Two, Montale's second book, Le occasioni (1939), probes more deeply the experience of time and eventually comes to terms with the hopeless dilapidations of contemporary history, if only in the oblique way that was then germane to him, witness "Dora Markus," "Barche sulla Marna," "Nuove stanze," "Elegia di Pico Farnese," "Palio."1 The progressively more clipped and elliptical diction matches the stark vision. Yet that relentless lucidity in the face of a gathering storm which seemed to bring to a head the crisis of Western civilization also allows for resilient intermittences of grace in the per­ sonal sphere, the locus of Clizia's apparitions. No wonder, then, that twenty "Mottetti" telling the private story of this love should occupy the center of Le occasioni to make a book within the book, while another lyric, "II balcone" (The Balcony), originally part of the same series, now prefaces the whole volume by way of epigraph. The significance of the "Mottetti" in Montale's canon did not escape critics like Ettore Bonora and Silvio Ramat,2 but 1 In slightly different form, this chapter appeared as an independent essay in PMLA 82, no. 7 (December 1967): 471-484. Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association of America. © 1967 by the Modern Language Association of America. 2 Ettore Bonora, La poesia di Montale, Vol. II: Le occasioni, La bufera e altro (Torino: Editrice Tirrenia, 1965); Silvio Ramat, Montale (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1965), pp. 99-117. For a keen and provocative approach, see also the later

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much remains to be done toward formulating an organic understanding of this canzoniere at the very heart of a book that, despite its demure title, decidedly transcends "oc­ casional" poetry to soar into prophetic utterance, ethical denunciation, and the rapture of sublimated eros. Tighter coherence here than among the other poems in the same collection makes the "Mottetti" formally unique and nar­ ratively self-sufficient to a great extent, without thereby severing its innervating contacts with the rest of Le occasioni. The recurrent Clizia love motif offsets the variations of worldly vicissitudes, and this thematic constancy finds its counterpart in a relative constancy of form. Aware of the particular interdependence of the twenty "Mottetti," the author himself rearranged their sequential order to fit a dialectic of the heart in spite of chronological succession. The first three (which, as Montale confirmed to me, were inspired by a lady other than Clizia, while form and tenor assimilate them to the Clizia sequence) are dated 1934 and the last one 1937, with a prevalence of intermingled 1937 and 1938 datings in between. Poem 5 is of 1939 and there­ fore should come at the very end if compositional chro­ nology were the dominant consideration; probably the au­ thor shifted this utterly despondent piece backwards to the fifth position in order to avoid concluding the whole sequence on the hell-haunted keynote on which it be­ gan, especially since he then chose for an epilogue the ironi­ cally resigned ". . . ma cosi sia" (But So Be It) of 1937, which changes the entire perspective. Instead of a develop­ ment coming around full circle to seal a history of despair, Montale formulates a precariously open line of spiritual dy­ namics. Inner time thus supersedes factual time in the final ar­ rangement of artistic experience, as specifically shown by the reshuffling of past and present that, within the magic circle of poem 3, results in a suspension of time. Timediscussion by Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry, Eugenia Montale: The Private Language of Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977), pp. 7083.

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lessness, however, is never durably grasped, just fleetingly glimpsed; it is as if the experiencing persona swam un­ derwater in the stream of time only to surface momentarily into the timeless sphere where he cannot finally breathe— and this metaphor actually materializes in a later, thematically related poem from La bufera e altro, "L'ombra della magnolia" (The Magnolia's Shade), with the poet seeing himself as a fish jumping on dry land at the call of his beloved from "l'oltrecielo," the sky beyond the sky. Here is one source of epiphany, "the point of intersection of the timeless/ with time," to say it with Eliot, and it helps us to understand why in the end time will be accepted. The experience of time is primary, intense to the point of making a reference to Bergson's concept of felt duration almost inevitable. Temporality as a form of consciousness involves a keen sense of the uniqueness of each fully lived moment, thereby placing a special emphasis on contin­ gency, as in the philosophy of Emile Boutroux, another thinker who happens to be relevant to Montale's poetical world (the poet himself publicly acknowledged his strong interest in Boutrox's philosophic de la contingence during his formative years3). Each contingent moment (in Montale's language, "occasion") being unrepeatable, the intimate story outlined by these poems unfolds as a progression from a state of haunted deprivation to a substantially different one, though within this open pattern there occur, analog­ ically speaking, seasonal cycles of the soul: winter to spring and summer, bereavement to budding hope, back to plen­ itude and bereavement once again. Even if the analogy is imperfect, as Walter Ong would warn us,4 it nevertheless operates; analogies are not identities, and this means that the spiritual movement embodied in the overall design of the "Mottetti" is neither linear nor circular but spiral. 3 M. said this in "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)," now reprinted in E. M., Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milano: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 561-569. 4 Walter J. Ong, "Evolution, Myth, and Poetic Vision," Comparative Literature Studies 3, no. 1 (1966): 1-20.

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Montale concentrates on private history, since public his­ tory in his opinion has become the domain of falsity and injustice. The several poems count as heartbeats of the mind engaged in the quest for personal truth and happi­ ness—a fulfilling illumination to exorcize the idola fori of the age. Hence the markedly "occasional" nature of the "Mottetti," in accordance with the programmatic title of the whole book, Occasioni: in a historically deranged world (it's the middle-to-late thirties and the sky is darkening over Europe), in a naturally unyielding cosmos, a possible order of higher truth may reveal itself only by fleeting chance, and obliquely. The "occasional" mode of epiphany deter­ mines the rhapsodically loose structure within whose range each "Motet" can best function as an individual climax of perception that mirrors the previous ones and leads up to the next. The poet's openness to experience will not guarantee an abundance of reliable occasions, yet he will keep trying, for he knows that his only chance (both as man and as poet) is to hope against hope: "Sobre el bolcan la flor," his epigraph from Becquer has it, and it reads like a summary of Leopardi's "La Ginestra," that sober celebration, as a foil to man's disastrous history, of the unconquerable flower that no eruption will finally evict from Vesuvius's inhos­ pitable slopes. The first poem of the sequence voices the despair of an excruciating loss that leaves only "the cer­ tainty of hell": Lo sai: debbo riperderti e non posso. Come un tiro aggiustato mi sommuove ogni opera, ogni grido e anche Io spiro salino che straripa dai moli e fa l'oscura primavera di Sottoripa. Paese di ferrame e alberature a selva nella polvere del vespro. Un ronzio lungo viene dall'aperto,

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strazia com'unghia ai vetri. Cerco il segno smarrito, il pegno solo ch'ebbi in grazia da te. E l'inferno e certo. You know it: I must lose you again and I cannot. Like an accurate shot every action startles me, every shout, and even the salty breeze that brims over the docks and makes the murky Spring of Sottoripa. Landscape of iron structures and of ship masts thick like a forest in the evening's dust. A long whir comes from the open, grates like a nail on windowpanes. I seek the lost sign, the only pledge I received as a grace from you. And hell is certain. Everything conspires to make this "Motet" one of the strongest poetical statements of the century, whether we take it by itself, or as a prologue to the whole allusive story, or as the epilogue of an antecedent development, with its dramatic abruptness, its clipped syntax like a gasping breath, its sharp imagery and crackling syllables interwoven with hidden rhymes (tiro-spiro, lungo-unghia, strazia-grazia, segno-pegno). Word economy reaches a maximum without impinging on the naturalness of utterance; Genoa's harbor is rapidly etched, a merciless landscape (for this contingency) even in the midst of spring, since it can be the scene of unbearable farewells. Spiritual derangement wreaked on the persona by such a departure culminates in the forecast of "hell" at the end, but it has already come through in those poignant similes of the "accurate shot" and the prolonged whir like a nail grating on the panes. Nothing in Auden or Eliot, nothing in Benn surpasses this nervous incisiveness, this assurance of diction that stands out as

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one exemplary embodiment of modern sensibility at its harrowing best. One thinks of the "Preludes," of "Rhapsody on a Windy Night"; and yet somehow Montale's piece throbs with greater urgency. Nothing is explained and everything counts. As so often with Leopardi (an undoubted ancestor), the energy of utterance arches into an I-Thou address that must bridge a gap of absence (whether temporary or final), leaving room only for the essentials of inner existence. We do not see the addressed person, we are not told who she is, only of her importance to the speaker. The following "Mottetti" will make clear why she is so important, without really violating the initial reticence. One thing we know: she is very human and real, yet somehow superhuman, if she can give "pledges of grace." These are of course the hyperboles of love, but in the course of the sequence they will develop into metaphysical attributes. She is not a stable presence; she has come and gone and is going once again, forever—a detail concisely expressed by the verb (riperderti), which makes the whole difference between rhetoric and passion. She is the exceptional visitor from another world (and in more than one sense, as the sequel will show), and she changes everything for Montale, who is left seeking for the "sign" of redemptive power. Cavalcanti's, Dante's, Petrarch's ladies likewise brought peace and torment to their worshipers; the link is not casual, for it does not take long to see how Montale's language is steeped in Dolce Stil Nuovo and (even more) mature Dantesque style. The counterpoint of salvation and dam­ nation appears in the very rhymes of this poem: "tiro" (shot) evokes "spiro" (breath, breeze); "strazia" (tortures) elicits "grazia" (grace); "aperto" (open) is echoed by "certo" (the certitude of hell); while "segno" (sign) tends tonally and semantically to coalesce with "pegno" (pledge), thus giving a musical resolution to the dissonant chords. In other poems of the series, or of the book, the dissonance coagulates into an oxymoron, such as "la tua cara minaccia" (your cherished menace) in poem 7, the war described in terms

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of "night games of Roman candles" and "a feast" in poem 3, or (elsewhere in Le occasiotii) "e una tempesta anche la tua dolcezza" (your very sweetness is a storm) in "Dora Markus." It should be noted that Montale's rather parsimonious use of oxymora doubles their effectiveness. This is one of the traits that sets him apart from his rival Ungaretti, who astonishes the reader just by managing to lavish oxymora with little or no detriment to the poetry. The difference will become clearer if we remember that Ungaretti's elective affinity is for a Petrarch seen through Baroque glasses, while Montale's stylistic instinct goes all the way back to Dante.5 That the two outstanding modernist poets of Italy should thus rehearse in their personal way the basic original alternatives of Italian poetry as formulated six centuries ago is a fact requiring the full attention of critic, historian, and philosopher alike. Just as Dante and Petrarch defined between them the range of nascent Italian poetry for centuries to come, Montale and Ungaretti have performed the same service, by reason of their very opposition, for their experimenting contemporaries; an aboriginal polarity revives its tension in our time of crisis. This realization should supplement Luciano Anceschi's theory that Ungaretti's poetics of elliptical analogism shares the modem domain with Montale's altogether different emblematic objectivism, a thesis that can make its deeper implications felt only if it takes into account the dimension of history in which the 5 Supplementary, if rather indirect, evidence for this view might come from a statistical inquiry conducted on M.'s vocabulary, which shows him to have a significantly larger spectrum of usage, and thus a richer lexicon, than the "neoclassical" type of modernist poet like Paul Valery (or Giuseppe Ungaretti in his Neopetrarchan phase). Dante's rich lexical range was one important differentiating factor vis-a-vis Petrarch's stylizing selectivity. The lexicological essay in question is "Consistenza e distribuzione statistica del lessico poetico di Montale" (Extent and Statistical Distribution of Montale's Poetical Lexicon) by Luigi Rosiello, Rendiconti 11-12 (September 1965): 397-421. Further evidence has come much later from Maggi Rombi, Montale: Parole sensi immagini (Roma: Bulzoni, 1978), who provides a lexical, iconic, and thematic analysis.

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significantly new may very well be a surprising reappearance of the ancient.6 Eliof s conception of the "individual talent" 's relationship to a larger "tradition"7 should here come to our aid, lest we misunderstand historical awareness for an external source hunt. No such thing as Ungaretti's subservience to Petrarch or Montale's domination by Dante is in question but rather their respective uses of each archetypal model—their way, in other words, of being free, modern, original. Coming to our first "Motet" with Dante in mind will result in an enriching recognition of the poem's qualities 6

Luciano Anceschi, Le poetiche del Novecento in Italia (Milano: Marzorati, 1962), pp. 204-214. See also the same author's extensive preface to Luciano Anceschi and Sergio Antonielli, Lirica del Novecento (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1953, 1963), an authoritative anthology of twentieth-century Italian poetry. 7 For the question of affinity and relations between M. and T. S. Eliot, see E. M., "Stile e tradizione" (Style and Tradition), in Il Baretti 2, no. 1 (January 1925): 15; reprinted in E. M., Auto da fi (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1966), pp. 15-19. The closeness of this manifesto-like article to Eliot's "Tradition and Individual Talent" is not just a matter of titles. Also, see E. M.'s translations from Eliot's verse: "Canto di Simeone" (A Song for Simeon), Solaria 4, no. 12 (December 1929): 11-12; "Canto di Simeone," "La Figlia che Piange," "Animula," Circoli 3, no. 6 (November-December 1933): 50-57 (reprinted in E. M., Quademo di traduzioni [Milano: La Meridiana, 1948; Mondadori, 1975]); "Ash Wednesday," a fragment of M.'s translation in autograph facsimile, in E. M., Finisterre, 2nd ed. (Firenze: Barbara, 1945), p. 43. M.'s articles on Eliot are now reprinted in E. M., Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milano: Mondadori, 1976): "Eliot e noi" (Eliot and We), pp. 441-446; "Troppo oscuro troppo chiaro" (Too Obscure, Too Clear), pp. 453-457; "Invito a T. S. Eliot" (An Invitation to T. S. Eliot), pp. 457-465; "Ricordo di T. S. Eliot" (A Remembrance of T. S. Eliot), pp. 516-520. Eliot in turn published Mario Praz's translation of E. M. 's "Arsenio" in The Criterion 7, no. 4 (June 1928): 54-55 (reprinted in E. M., Selected Poems [Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1966], and discussed by Laura Caretti in Γ. S. Eliot in Italia [Bari: Adriatica editrice, 1968], pp. 57-58). Praz contributed an essay entitled "T. S. Eliot and Eugenio Montale" to T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, ed. Richard March and Tambimuttu (London: Editions Poetry, 1948), pp. 245-255. Although Praz makes the wasteland motif the basis for his comparison of the two poets, it seems that M. came to Eliof s Waste Land only after reading the Ariel poems. Both poets, whatever their specific differences, are in an avowedly Dantesque line of traditionminded modernism.

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per se as well as of its structural function in the series. The cutting sounds, the concrete, localized words, the cruel metaphors bring to mind the percussive alliterations of In­ ferno with its concomitantly astringent similes: "come coltel di scardova Ie scaglie"; "si dilegud come da corda cocca"; "come d'un stizzo verde ch'arso sia"; "tal che se Tambernicchi/ vi fosse su caduto, ο Pietrapana,/ non avria pur da l'orlo fatto cricchi." The harbor's "wood of masts and iron" might almost arouse overtones of the Dark Wood; indeed a subjective "hell" is "certain," while the persona appro­ priately keeps looking for the "lost sign," for the pledge of grace his troubling Beatrice had given him. Like the Inferno's prologue, this "Motet" consummates a catastro­ phe and ushers in the possibility of a renewal by way of a perilous quest that should lead the bewildered poet back to his lady. By the same token, it is the questing attitude that makes poetry possible; it describes the nature of Montale's poetry, as in poem 9 (coinddentally commencing with an intentional reference to Dante), which on the most in­ tellectual level may exemplify a relentless search for mean­ ing in the wilderness of phenomena. Ever since "I limoni" (the opening piece of Ossi di seppia, 1925) Montale had hoped to disentangle "the thread . . . / that may instal us in the quick of a truth." This by no means implies that we should burden Montale's swift verse with scholastic analogies that it was never intended to carry. The noted correspondences are a matter of free allusiveness in a different context, not of punctilious mirroring. The "Mottetti" sequence, so nimbly played on the cues of contingency, has nothing to do with the epic scope, systematic doctrine, and narrative continuity of the Divine Comedy, even though Dante's ordeal may be recur­ rently present to the author of our unconventional canzoniere. If hell, purgatory, and heaven were somehow implicit in Dante's lyrical poetry from the start, until they took an explicit ontological shape in the Comedy, the modern rhapsodist experiences them, this side of ontology, as subjective conditions that define the gamut of the soul, and accord-

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ingly reverts to the narrower compass of the lyrical mode, which thrives on implicitness. It is the personal intimacy of a specific love rapport that dominates the "Mottetti" sequence and is itself heaven and hell to the poet's persona. The "prologue," we saw, has set the scene for the development of love's vicissitudes, and the next poem, composed in the same year, begins to retrace them by venturing into the region of memory and thereby supplying some antecedents to the predicament previously expressed. We hear of a crucial year of suffering (disease, as the following poem will show) at a "foreign" (Swiss?) lake, whence his elusive lady came down to her poet with a heraldic token (the "sign" and "pledge" men­ tioned in poem 1?): Molti anni, e uno piu duro sopra il Iago straniero su cui ardono i tramonti. Poi scendesti dai monti a riportarmi San Giorgio e il Drago Many years, and one, harder, on the foreign lake where sunsets blaze. Then you descended from the mountains to bring back Saint George and the Dragon to me If it is true, as Bonora says,8 that the heraldry refers to Genoa's patron saint to signify a love tryst that took place there, we can hardly miss the larger significance of the symbol. As the rest of the poems variously hint, and the whole of Le occasioni makes unequivocally clear (especially in elegies like "Eastbourne" or "Nuove stanze," thematically related to the "Mottetti"), the world is out of joint around the two lovers, and the condition of hell is no idiosyncrasy of the poet's mind; his lady often appears as defiant prophetess or fighting angel against the forces of evil, and thus St. George killing the dragon (of political obscurantism) 8

Bonora, La poesia di Montale, pp. 106-107.

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makes the perfect icon for her to "bring back" to her devotee. It does not matter that the icon is no material object but (given Montale's psychological use of verbs like riportare and ritornare) simply the enshrined memory of a private occurrence. On the transnarrative level, the force of style itself makes it announce emblematically the desperate fight for reason and justice, which concerns both parties here along with the largely unaware world around them. The persona, then, has more than one good reason to wish he could "imprint" the significant image of the "flag" he feels flapping at the sea wind "in my heart": Imprimerli potessi sul palvese che s'agita alia frusta del grecale in cuore . . . E per te scendere in un gorgo di fedelta, immortale. Would I were able to imprint them on the flag that flutters at the whip of the sea wind in my heart . . . And to descend for your sake into a whirlpool of faithfulness, immortal. Not victory but fidelity to the point of sacrifice is for our persona who would joust for his lady's emblem.9 While still keeping his guard against any encroachment of pompousness, he has come a long way from the paralyzing doubt of "Arsenio"; for her he would readily go down in a whirlpool of self-purified passion. The extreme conclusion makes for mythical focus, climaxing in the very Dantesque metonymy (cf. "San Giorgio e il Drago" with "Caino e Ie spine" in Inf. XX. 126, or "il gallo di Gallura" in Purg. VIII. 81) that gives this personal story a decisive turn for the 9 Ibid. Bonora is thinking of the flag customarily hoisted on Ligurian boats for their races, so popular in M.'s native region; but by semantic attraction to the heraldic image of St. George and the dragon, I am led to merge that plausible denotation of the boat flag with the connotation of a medieval tournament.

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legendary. There is enough precision to individualize the persons involved, and enough narrative vagueness to evoke the mysterious aura of a fairytale—a marked success, to be sure, of the tendency to retreat from the explicit into the resourceful realm of the implicit. The rhymes, as usual, reinforce a semantic point, and this is particularly true of "tramonti" (sunsets) and "monti" (mountains), where a sunlike halo accrues to the Transalpine visitor. "Drago" (dragon) shocks us into sharper awareness when we realize its consonance with "lago" (lake). We could even speak of semantic rhyme in the case of the twice-used verb "scendere" (to descend), which in stanza 2 echoes, on the part of the speaker, the ritual action performed by his lady in stanza 1. This leads us to see the responsorial symmetry of the two stanzas, the first of which centers on the lady's person and actions, the second on her poet's response; and the response endures, as the verb tenses show, indefinite present offsetting the definite past of stanza 1: "scendesti" (you descended), "potessi" (could I), "scendere" (descend). TTius memory prolongs and develops the erstwhile occasion into epiphany. The "lake" of stanza 1 makes room for a "whirlpool" (gorgo) in stanza 2; our lady really came as an angel to stir the waters, since everything (stanza 2) is now in commotion in the poet's own self; he views his commitment to her as a tempestuous and dangerous, if enlivening, state: "gorgo di fedelta" (whirlpool of fidelity)— a unique, and uniquely motivated, paradox. If any "Motets" justify their musical title by verbal counterpoint and polyphonic structure, this one does. The first "Motet" generated the second by way of associative reminiscence, and the latter in turn provides a further invitation to memory, thereby giving rise to "Motet" 3. Genoa was the clue that the first "Motet" afforded to the subsequent piece, and hospital and war develop as a contrapuntal poetical situation in the third poem from the appropriate intimations of the second. The mind keeps going back into a further past on the thread of restless memory. Brief mention of the lady's sick confinement now

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summons the vision of her monotonous life in the uncommunicative plight of an Alpine sanitarium. The vision arises as an indefinite present, for the noun-ridden style of stanza 1 admits of no verbs. At the end of the poem (stanza 4) this syntax will focus on a historical present expressing the continuity of memory once struck by the significant moment: E scorsa un'ala rude, t'ha sfiorato Ie mani, ma invano: la tua carta non e questa. A rough wind has brushed past, skimming your hands, but in vain: this was not your card. And remembrance once again transforms the occasion (solitary card games in the hospital) into epiphany (Death's wing brushes past only to indicate the wrong card; the lady's hour has not struck; hope nestles in the nest of pain). Meanwhile, this "exile" of hers in the foreign hospital has reminded the poet of his own exile: the predicament of war by now long weathered. Two manners of solitude, two ways of confronting death; the separately endured ordeals were eventually to bring the two lovers together. So he endured, but to what purpose, asks the poet in poem 4. His purpose was and is to know her, to be with her; the time spent in ignorance of her now appears wasted, and war ("il logorio/ di prima," the distress of the time before) "spared" him only to let him see what an irremediable loss this was. Nevertheless, as memory pushes into door after door of the temps perdu, he is able to say that physical absence did not prevent his being spiritually with her when another ordeal, her father's death, tried her. Everything comes back to him from long ago, and war especially, as he knew it in a given region of the Alps ("Cumerlotti ο Anghebeni"). The particulars of chance expressed by these odd names of Alpine villages add a weird note of individually felt reality to the scene. In a way, war has not ended for

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him since "the distress of the time before" knowing his woman has been followed by a presumable "distress of the time after" losing her—who could alone be his peace, who alone could make sense of his life. "Ridiculous the waste sad time/ Stretching before and after," as the conclusion of "Burnt Norton" has it. Also, war and love have been fugally interweaving through three of these four "Mottetti" like contrapuntal themes that contrast each other but may tend toward a resolving fusion—the fusion, indeed, that will take place in the final stanza of "Notizie dall'Amiata" at the end of Le occasioni, where the key expression is "rissa cristiana," Christian strife, anticipating the even bolder synthesis of "L'ombra della magnolia" in La bufera e altro: "perche la guerra fosse in te e in chi adora/ su te Ie stimme del tuo Sposo" (that war might be in you and in whosoever worships/ in you the stigmata of your Bridegroom). Love may bring peace, but in a psychological and even more in a mystical sense it is also "war." The two descanting themes transform each other in the course of Montale's poetical career. Here it was the verb of active memory ("mi riporta Cumerlotti," etc.) that released a kind of purgatorial revelation by matching different levels of past experience; but we are back in hell with poem 5, which rephrases in an even starker way the situation of poem 1: an ineluctable parting, this time by train, and a hopelessness investing the whole world. Metallic onomatopoeia (of the kind Carducci had already essayed in his "Alia stazione in una mattina d'autunno," At the Station in an Autumn Morning) concurs with coughing asyndeton to structure the nightmare vision: Addi, fischi nel buio, cenni, tosse e sportelli abbassati. E 1'ora . . . Goodbyes, whistles in the dark, nods, coughing, and windows lowered in the train. It is time . . ,

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It is, indeed, the time of parting, of loss, of infernal epiphany: . . . Forse gli automi hanno ragione. Come appaiono dai corridoi, murati! . . . Perhaps the automatons are right. How they appear walled in, from the aisles! "Walled-in automatons": a dehumanized mankind appears, dominated by mechanical power. In the second stanza, this sinister music becomes a dance of death: Presti anche tu alia fioca litania del tuo rapido quest'orrida e fedele cadenza di carioca? Are you too lending to the dim litany of your express train this horrid and faithful cadence of a carioca dance? No wonder Hugo Friedrich chose this one, among so many of Montale's poems, to exemplify the specifically modern traits of convulsive rhythm, clipped syntax, and "dictatorial" (hallucinatory) imagery in contemporary poetry,10 though it should be noted that the irrationality of vision here depends on its suddenness and has to be measured against the implicit standard of reason whose loss is here implied. The poet can express the horror of meaningless automatism because he knows, and keeps seeking for, purpose and meaning in reality. The historical implications are obvious. The first four "Mottetti" compose a cycle that is sealed by the fifth. Then from the zero point another season of the soul begins, and once again we go through the odyssey of waiting and hope and loss, all the stations of the search. 10 Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956).

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But since a definitive separation has intervened, the persona looks for his lady's symbolic presence: everything may become a token, an embodying sign of her. And in this way the process of erotic apotheosis starts, with the absent lady taking on more and more metaphysical attributes. First (as in poem 6) she is what gives meaning to the poet's life, then she becomes the source of all meaning and life, to culminate in the frankly deifying myths of "Eastbourne," "Nuove stanze," "L'orto," and "Iride." The ecclesiastical connotation of the title "Motets" makes itself felt, the more so as we connect the "Mottetti" with those other (thematically related) lyrics. "Motet" 6 still delves in memory, since the poet's light can only come from the past now that his woman is re­ moved from contact: La speranza di pure rivederti m'abbandonava; e mi chiesi se questo che mi chiude ogni senso di te, schermo d'immagini, ha i segni della morte ο dal passato e in esso, ma distorto e fatto labile, un tuo barbaglio . . . The very hope to see you again was abandoning me; and I wondered if this thing that blocks any sense of you, this screen of images, bears the signs of death or, from the past, it has retained, though distorted and fleeting, a glimmer of you . . . In the barrier of blind phenomena ("schermo d'immagini," screen of images) that threaten death because they seem to shut him off from any "sense of" (his lady), the poet wonders whether "a glimmer" (barbaglio) of her can still be found, however faint and distorted. He is once again

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in the purgatorial plight of looking for his salvation, as it were, against odds; and it is against odds that the invoked sign comes in the unlikeliest form. "Cerco il segno/ smarrito . . . ," he said in poem 1; and at times the symbol is not certain, as in the present case, where Clizia is evoked by a liveried lackey pulling two jackals on a leash: (a Modena, tra i portici, un servo gallonato trascinava due sciacalli al guinzaglio). (at Modena, in the porticoes, a liveried servant was dragging two jackals on a leash). Even the fact that this particular remembrance is set in parentheses makes it a problematical epiphany. The revelatory sign generally comes at the unexpected moment, in the chance place, in the unforeseen way; here (if it is the sign), the exotic animals from Africa and the Orient, connected with the sun, remind the poet of sunflowerlike Clizia. They are as incongruous to the scene as was Clizia herself, the visitor from another world. Incongruity may signalize transcendence, as "Motet" 9 will show. Animals often work magically in Montale's world, and if at this point such fairy-tale function has accrued to the exotic jackals, in the next "Motet" (7) it will be the familiar swallows that conjure his faraway lady. Familiar yet winged and migratory, like the daring stork of "Sotto Ia pioggia," they foreshadow the several birdlike avatars of migratory Qizia in La bufera e altro. In "Motet" 7, however, the swallows joyfully shuttling between telegraph poles and the sea act as excruciating reminders of her absence; they are secret signs or emanations of her, but they cannot bring her bodily back, and since she is a real woman to begin with, her troubadour passionately yearns for nothing less than her physical presence. The spell of memory is both sustenance and grief, an

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incomplete magic; whatever temporary relief ("truce") may have come to the natural world and to the pining persona with the end of a rainstorm in the place where he lives, the thought of the lady's final absence will keep troubling him, an unsoothed if "cherished" threat to his peace, as the second part of "Motet" 7 has it—and no paradox could be more poignant: Gia profuma il sambuco fitto su Io sterrato; il piovasco si dilegua. Se il chiarore e una tregua, la tua cara minaccia la consuma. Already the thick elderberry exhales its scent on the dug up earth; the shower fades away. If the light is a truce, your cherished menace now consumes it. In the second "Motet" she had come to stir the waters; to have known her is to have lost one's peace, and no peace would be welcome or indeed possible without her. With the eighth "Motet" she appears symbolically, but (this time) unmistakably, in the tracing of a palm tree's shadow cast on a wall by the sunrise: Ecco il segno: s'innerva sul muro che s'indora: un frastaglio di palma bruciato dai barbagli dell'aurora Here is the sign: it innervates the wall being gilded by the sun: an arabesque of palm leaves burned by the dazzle of the dawn. The Orient sun and the palm tree have to do with Clizia's sunny nature and with her Palestinian ancestry (as indicated by other poems like "L'orto" and "Iride"). For once the

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epiphany coincides immediately with its occasion, and the poet knows a fulfillment; one might say that he has momentarily left hell and purgatory itself behind, though heaven here and now can only be a matter of privileged instants, a dimension tangential to the historically fallen human condition. The sunny sighting conjures auditory and tactile phenomena to make the absent one a total inner presence: Il passo che proviene dalla serra si lieve, non e felpato dalla neve, e ancora tua vita, sangue tuo nelle mie vene. The footstep approaching from the hothouse so lightly is not muffled by the snow, it is still your life, your blood within my veins. The hypostasis of love is here strongly physical, immanent, personal, climaxing in the erotic fusion. Snow and sun, Orient and north make a polarity of milieux to reinforce the rapture, as in Heine's love poem of the pine tree consumed by love for the remote palm tree in the East. But what sets off the modern poem from its Romantic counterpart is a sensual chord produced by the counterpoint of physiological density and airy fantasy. The body, the here and now, the realm of occasion are never abandoned forever, and such swayings confer on Montale's sequence its unique dynamics to preserve it from anemic rarefaction. If this fine "Motet" is the first fulfilling response to the search announced by poem 1 ("cerco il segno/ smarrito"), in the ninth poem the situation is reversed. While this "Motet" is undoubtedly the most abstract and intellectual of the "Mottetti," passion is not excluded; the search for meaning has come to involve the speculative mind along with the heart. In a way, poem 9 marks the beginning of still another cycle within the sequence by picking up the

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doctrinal cue of poem 6, for here we find the questing poet engaged in sifting the phenomena for an evidence of the highest value that only Clizia can impart. The first cycle had culminated in the hellish nightmare of the fifth "Motet," the second consummated itself in the momentarily attained heaven of poem 8, and now, after the respective zero point and high point of moral experience, we find the persona resuming his relentless search, swaying between utter alienation and fulfillment, the two experiential thresholds of the mind. If the heavenly epiphany of the eighth poem bore the earmarks of immediacy, now the mind recoils into the mediating act of thought that negates the occasions supplied by sensory reality to rise to a glimpse of the ineffable. The "screen of images" that makes the world of phenomena might be pierced to attain the noumenal. The poet probes a set of privileged phenomena from various areas of sensory experience within the range of a Ligurian seascape for traces of the transcendent entity his lady seems to have become. But even though their shared quality of instantaneousness made them all candidates for revelatory power, they fail in the end when tested against the utterly "other" nature of the noumenal Thou she is. Whether visual or auditory, the phenomenon consummating itself in the moment is both in and out of time, verging on the timeless and therefore somehow manifesting transcendency; but not so here, where each event remains closed in itself, an opaque unit (as Franco Fortini wrote when analyzing "Estate"11): Il ramarro, se scocca sotto la grande fersa delle stoppie— la vela, quando fiotta e s'inabissa al salto della rocca— 11 Franco Fortini, "Due poesie contemporanee" (in Comuniti, August 1954, pp. 49-52).

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il cannone di mezzodi piu fioco del tuo cuore e il cronometro se scatta senza rumore— e poi? Luce di lampo invano pu0 mutarvi in alcunche di ricco e strano. Altro era il tuo stampo. The green lizard, should it dart under the great whiplash of sunburnt stubblefields— the sail when it flutters and falls at the steep cliff headland— the noontide cannon shot feebler than your heart and the chronometer if it noiselessly clicks— and then? A lightning glory in vain could change you all into something rich and strange. Thy kind was other. The suddenly darting lizard (a Dantesque reference12), the sail vanishing behind a rock, the noontime cannon shot, and finally the ticking of the chronometer: these events can only add up to a series, horizontally as it were, but since 12

Dante, Divine Comedy, Inf. XXV, 79-81: Come Ί ramarro sotto la gran fersa dei di canicular, cangiando siepe, folgore par se la via attraversa As the green lizard under the harsh flail of dog-days heat, shifting from hedge to hedge, looks like a lightning while he crosses the path

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they are still circumscribed by time (and the series happens to end with the action of a mechanical timepiece), the question remains open: "What then?" The poet has weighed them one by one to find them wanting even if they are susceptible to aesthetic transfiguration ("in vain a lightning glory could change you into something rich and strange"). At this point we realize that the quotation from Shakespeare's Tempest is made to carry a definition of the poetic process, and in a poem that questions the ultimate value of aesthetic experience, one can go no further than to begin with Dante and conclude with Shakespeare, the highest authorities on poetry. The religious hypostasis of love has grown to a dizzying height; if the absent lady is not even accessible to poetical revelation because her essence was wholly other, she is godlike, or partakes of godhead. The poem's procedure in reaching that level presents some (probably not fortuitous) similarity to the Negative Way of the mystics who strove to express the ineffability of God by successively discarding every created aspect of beauty or power that could seem to approach Him: God is not this, nor that, nor even that. Like Dante in Purgatorio, Montale is here a poet exploring the limits of his own art and humbly declaring it (along with Nature) unable to capture the transcendent, for the transcendent would be a steady plenitude of light, and poetic epiphanies are intermittent gleams only. The act of sifting and discarding what nature and art have to offer is underscored by the gesture of pronouns: in the two concluding lines the persona first addresses all the pondered phenomena collectively ("mutarvi," change you all), then turns away from them to speak to his lady ("Altro era il tuo stampo," quite other was thy cast). Notice should also be taken of how the enumerative, suspended rhythm of this poem conveys a tone of progressive meditation, unlike the fast and melodious rhythm of the previous one that suited the immediacy of enjoyed revelation. The metaphysical failure of Nature and Art does not stop the persona from pursuing his quest of revelatory analogies

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in the surrounding cosmos, for, should he cling forever to any kind of Negative Way, he would have to renounce poetry altogether. In the tenth "Motet" (which is also chronologically later than the ninth), we see him again waiting for the appearance of his lady. "Why are you delaying?" ("Perche tardi?") he asks her. The scene is set: a squirrel is knocking on the tree, the half-moon is vanishing in the triumphant sun, day has started. But she, now appropriately disembodied into pure light, is hidden in a cloud: A un soffio il pigro fumo trasalisce, si difende nel punto che ti chiude. Nulla finisce, ο tutto, se tu folgore lasci la nube.13 At a gust the sluggish smoke startles, to defend itself at the point that encloses you. Nothing will end, or everything, if you, lightninglike, leave the storm cloud. Her appearance in the world of time-bound phenomena can only be lightninglike; essence manifests itself tangentially in our opaque reality. We do not know if the apocalyptic rendezvous will be kept; we are left to share the waiting. The lightning image harks back to the foregoing "Motet," 13

Compare Divine Comedy, Par. XVI11, 35-36: quello ch'io nomero, Ii fara l'atto che fa in nube il suo fuoco veloce the one I'll name, there will behave as within a cloud its own swift fire does

and Par. Ill, 127-129: e a Beatrice tutta si converse; ma quella folgoro ne Io mio sguardo, si che da prima il viso non sofferse and [my sight] turned wholly toward Beatrice; but she dazzled lightninglike into my eyes, so that at first they could not bear it

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although with reverse import. The "nothing will end, or everything" implies that the longed-for revelation will either save or consume the world. If it pays to compare the occasional convergences of two differently apocalyptic poets, I would point out Hart Crane's "The inclusive cloud/ whose heart is fire shall come" ("Possessions," from White Buildings, 1926) as a supporting text for Montale's cloud imagery here, for it shows once more how modern poetry, through whatever variations of personal style, has been committed to a repeatedly attempted breakthrough into the noumenal. Stylistically speaking, sound matches imagery in Montale's poem, where an emphasis on spirant (f) alliteration in stanza 2 drives home the semantic charge of the Italian word series having to do with smoke, cloud, wind, and lightning as contrasted with the interlocked plosive and vibrant consonantal sets of the introductory stanza. Concurrently, the dominant vowel color in stanza 1 (celebrating the dawn) is light, whereas stanza 2 (announcing a storm) is overcast with dark ο and u sounds heavily stressed (in stanza 1, stressed vowels were mainly broad a's intermingled with I'S and some O's). The phonic structure of stanza 2 offsets that of stanza 1 just as the unpredictable feminine essence chooses to manifest itself (if at all) in a storm instead of in the light of sunrise. Once again the structure of sound and meaning points analogically to polyphonic music. Musical epiphany is indeed what we have in "Motet" 11, where the absent lady makes her presence felt as a disembodied voice that is the soul of the world: La tua voce e quest'anima diffusa. Su fili, su ali, al vento, a caso, col favore della musa ο d'un ordegno, ritorna lieta ο triste . . . Your voice is this diffusive soul. On wires, on wings, at the wind, at random, with the help of the Muse or of an engine, it returns, joyous or sad . . .

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EPIPHANY

The poet's communion with her through the medium of music (no matter how produced) is rigorously private, and he defends it against intruding interlocutors: Parlo d'altro, ad altri che t'ignora e il suo disegno έ 1¾ che insiste do re la sol sol . . . I speak of other things, to another man, who has no idea of you, and its design is there, insistent: do re la sol sol . . . And so the passion of faith has overcome the ascetic denials of the intellectual ninth "Motet." Reality does hold cues to the intangible but of course both in "Motet" 11 and in the next one the intangible is subjective, a revelation the persona refuses to share. The twelfth "Motet" sings the angelic transfiguration of his woman: Ti libero la fronte dai ghiaccioli che raccogliesti traversando l'alte nebulose; hai Ie penne lacerate dai cicloni, ti desti a soprassalti. I rid your forehead of the icicles you gathered winging through the lofty nebulae, your feathers are torn by cyclones, you awaken by fits and starts. That incongruity which manifests transcendence is here stressed by opposing the richness of imaginative subjectivity to the imperiousness of external, social reality: Mezzodi: allunga nel riquadro il nespolo l'ombra nera, s'ostina in cielo un sole freddoloso; e l'altre ombre che scantonano nel vicolo non sanno che sei qui.

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Noontime: in the window frame the medlar tree lengthens its black shadow, a shivering sun persists up here; and the other shadows turning into the alley do not know you are here. Epiphany here (as given in the previous stanza of "Motet" 12) precedes outer reality instead of springing from its cues, and the two moments neatly offset each other. In the process, though, and just because inner reality has been affirmed without qualification, external reality loses its firmness to dissolve (not only optically) into shadows ('Tombra nera . . . ; l'altre ombre"). It is noon (mezzodi), the hour of plenitude, but plenitude comes to the poet only subjectively, from another sphere than that of physical presences; which is perhaps another way of restating the inadequacy of Nature to his glimpsed revelation. "Things as they are," Stevens would say, "are changed upon the blue guitar." Or can they be? Here, at least, things as they are prove irreducible to the substance of a poet's dream. Thus the troubadour must repeatedly exile himself from the certitude of unshared vision, to be lost among men and things: the thirteenth "Motet" features him in an ambig­ uous Venice a la Offenbach, where he is confounded by a vision of his lady disappearing behind a palace door as a throng of masked carnival revelers scatter naughtily laugh­ ing. What is left but some intermittent spurts of life? In watching on the now deserted scene a fisherman with his writhing eel, he emotionally identifies with the man and ultimately with the doomed fish: una sera tra mille e la mia notte e piu profonda! S'agita laggiu uno smorto groviglio che m'awiva a stratti e mi fa eguale a quell'assorto pescatore d'anguille dalla riva. an evening like countless others and my night is deeper! There stirs yonder

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a bleak tangle that rouses me by fits and starts and makes me identical with that intent fisher of eel on the bank. Visionary Venice of remembered love with incidents worthy of Tales of Hoffmann abruptly dissolves into a quotidian, dull, realistic Venice, and the two contradictory moments of experience, each appropriately assigned to one stanza of the poem (in keeping with the dominant pattern of the "Mottetti"), bring forth two opposite realizations: the nightmare of loss at the peak of merriment, and the desolation of fading vitality, as if the persona were re­ entering the world of "Arsenio." Yet Queen Mab is at work and will not let him rest. "Motet" 14 breaks the spell to grasp the analogic presence of the remote lady in the music of hailstorm, whose destructiveness competes with, and finally melts into, her sprightly song of days gone by. The polyphonic resolution of that contrast aptly crowns this poem marked by musical references to a solemn Debussy ("The Submerged Cathedral") and the lighter "Bell Song." As usual, private reference serves to pinpoint the individual nature of the emotional situation; for all the mythical developments or mystical hypostases the situation fosters, it is not just any two lovers who are involved but these two: the lady used to impersonate, in her private singing, the light opera character of Lakme. A freely associative memory here links the most disparate cues of auditory experience into a musical chain of evocations that go from the hailstorm-battered campanulas of a garden to the "Bell Song," from hailstorm patter to mechanical keyboard ("la pianola degli inferi," the player piano of Hades), to the trilling of the now remote singer. And it is into her elfish essence that all those elements appropriately converge: she contains and resolves the contradictory aspects of reality, she is both stormy and serene, she conquers destructiveness—by making music of it. Already the eleventh "Motet" had said how any given occasion could evoke her

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voice: "on wires, on wings, in the wind at random, with the help of the Muse or of an engine." "Motet" 15 returns to a grave note. The beginning of day and the beginning of night, the turning points of man's daily activity, can only assume a human meaning (in the mechanical dispersal of work) from the poet's lady, who keeps threading together the contrary moments of time: al chiaro e al buio, soste ancora umane se tu a intrecciarle col tuo refe insisti. in daylight or in darkness, pauses still human if you keep interlacing them with your thread. This is not the most clear or convincing of the "Mottetti," but for all that it lends itself to interpretation. We notice that in stanza 1 daybreak carries with it a noise of trains in a tunnel, while in stanza 2 nightfall brings the woodworm's creaking in the writer's desk and an ominous "watchman's step," in both cases, an oppressive image of somber closure ("chiusi uomini in corsa," cf. the "automatons" of poem 5). Since stanza 2 is presented from the poet's own point of view (he is more menaced than protected by the approaching "watchman" who apparently has custody of this prisonlike world), and stanza 1 portrays a more objective slice of the humdrum outside world, an opposition arises between public and private reality, outside hustle-and-bustle and interior meditation. The writer is alienated from the surrounding world, and the only way to heal this wound in experience is for him to heed the constant inspirations of his Muse (who handles a thread in a very womanly yet very Fate-like fashion). The transcendental seamstress (unlike her other avatars) appears as a steady presence. Since in this poetry trains seem generally to function as instruments of alienation or separation, it is not surprising to find in "Motet" 16 a funicular railway once more parting the two lovers. A forget-me-not elicits this further painful memory in what could have become an all-too-obvious

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sentimental piece in hands less expert than Montale's; actually, the poem has a captivating simplicity and a freshness all its own. "Motet" 17 is every bit as vivid and far more painterly. Taken by itself, it belongs to Montale's most characteristic achievement. A chastened, yet prehensile sensuousness enables the language to grasp the essentials of a rural scene: late summer fields in the imminence of a storm. A few sober yet dense brushstrokes, as if from the palette of Fattori or Tosi, and tingling pizzicato sounds in a sustained metrical-syntactic flow outline a world peopled only by minimal creatures, with an effect of increased atmospheric vastness. There is no stanza break (unlike the pattern of the other "Mottetti"), and one effect is to stress the suspense of weather; but the coming storm already makes itself felt in a gradual hush, and in no time at all it will burst upon the deceptive peace: dove spenge Ie sue fiaccole un sole senza caldo, tardo ai fiori ronzio di coleotteri che suggono ancora linfe, ultimi suoni, avara vita della campagna. Con un soffio l'ora s'estingue: un cielo di lavagna si prepara a un irrompere di scarni cavalli, alle scintille degli zoccoli. where a sun without warmth snuffs out its torches, there lingers in the flowers a hum of insects that still suck nectar: last sounds, niggardly life of the countryside. With a gust the hour dies out: a slate-gray sky gets ready for the irruption of lean horses, for the spark-striking hooves. The "lean-horses" about to break into the sky, scattering sparks from their hooves, are a demonic and rurally fitting metaphorization of the galloping thunderclouds.

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Nothing more need be said if we take the poem by itself, as the self-contained piece it can certainly be. But as part of the "Mottetti" series, it must possess a resonance far beyond the limited scope of an Impressionist vignette. Those threatening "lean horses" have to do with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.14 The storm (it is 1938) is overshadowing human history and is not just a part of local Nature. The piece is apocalyptic, not impressionist, its contextual position coming to strengthen the intrinsic clue. This also calls to mind the symbolic value of storms in Montale's poetry, all the way down to La bufera e altro. A striking trait in this seventeenth "Motet" (and one that tends to set it apart from the rest) is the absence of any allusion to Clizia; it is an "It," not a "Thou," poem as all the others are. Even at the risk of overly rationalizing what brooks little or no rationalization, I would connect that unique trait with the drama of light and darkness, good and evil, whose positive protagonist Clizia has come to be. Where she is absent, no angel will be left to fight the forces of destruction, and here the world is abandoned to the coming ruin (which may also have a purifying effect, since open war seems better than oppressive stagnation). Although composed in 1937, a year before its predecessor in the series as we now have it, "Motet" 18 seems to form a corollary to the one I have just discussed. It is fall now, and the summer storms are past; another kind of desolation looms on the November landscape where the woodcutter's axe hits the acacia tree: Non recidere, forbice, quel volto, solo nella memoria che si sfolla, non far del grande suo viso in ascolto la mia nebbia di sempre. 14

Ramat (Montale, p. 114), points out that in the original Einaudi edition of Le occasioni (1939) the apocalyptic reference was explicit: "un cielo di lavagna/ si prepara all'irrompere dei tre/ cavalieri! Salutali con me" (a sky of slate/ gets ready for the onset of the three/ horsemen! Greet them with me). He regrets the subsequent change as "calligraphic" and also because,

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Un freddo cala . . . Duro il colpo svetta. E l'acacia ferita da se scrolla il guscio di cicala nella prima belletta di Novembre. Do not cut off, scissors, that visage now left alone in my unpeopled memory, do not make of her great, listening face my perennial fog. Cold weather settles down . . . Hard swings the blow. And the wounded acacia shakes off the cicada shell in the first mire of November. A harsh autumn settles in on the world and in the soul, and the lumberman's hatchet falling on an acacia tree arouses in the speaker's mind the echo of another blow: the mutilating loss of Clizia. Her luminous visage should never set on the horizon of his otherwise dimming consciousness, to which her image alone imparts a focus and a shape. Two chance events from the auditory sphere—the clink of scissors in a domestic interior and the thud of a hatchet outside—start an associative reaction alerting the persona to ominous implications of severance or even death; the two literal blades merge into destiny's metaphoric one to remind him of separation from Clizia and of its bleak aftermath. Hence his prayer to an Atropos figure to stop its murderous scissors, or, more simply, to Time itself, which Dante personified as a ruthless gardener "going around with his shears" (lo tempo va dintorno con Ie force, Par. XVI, 9). His spiritual survival is at stake, but the blow is ineluctable, and it is no wonder that he should recognize himself in the suddenly mutilated acacia tree of stanza 2. Poems in which the persona or the other humans are symbolized as plants abound in by eliminating Clizia as the addressee of the utterance, it isolates the poem from the rest of the sequence. My interpretation might account for the change and its option for an implicit image.

T H E O C C A S I O N S OF E P I P H A N Y

Montale's first three books of verse, witness "Tramontana" (North Wind), "Scirocco" (South Wind), "Arsenio" in Ossi di seppia, "Tempi di Bellosguardo" (Bellosguardo Times) in Le occasioni, "Personae separatae" (Separated Lovers) in La bufera e altro. The cicada shell, likewise emblematic (in Anceschi's sense of the term), adds its funereal note to the realistic aspect of the scene. As a more explicit motif symbolizing the doomed singer, it will recur in "L'ombra della magnolia," a passionate lyric from La bufera e altro: Vibra intermittente in vetta una cicala . . . . . . La lima che sottile incide tacera, la vuota scorza di chi cantava sara presto polvere, e 1'autunno, e l'inverno . . . On the treetop intermittently a cicada shrills . . . . . . The thin cutting file will soon be hushed, the empty husk of the erstwhile singer will soon be dust, it is autumn, it is winter . . . We have come again to a threshold of negative experience signalized by the fact that the speaker no longer addresses Qizia directly but only speaks of her as an imperiled memory (as he does in the following "Motet"); in the last one, it is an open question whether the only possible mention of her there ("il tuo fazzoletto," your handkerchief) really refers to Clizia or to the persona talking to himself. Be that as it may, the two remaining poems of the sequence mark an emotional epilogue of renunciation. In "Motet" 19, a remarkable accomplishment comparable to the pictorial apocalypse of poem 17, we see a spring that is no spring because the inspiring lady has receded into unattainable distance to leave the poet dejectedly scanning the sky for a sign of her in the midst of a gloomy landscape. Time goes on, inexorably, to corrode existence; Clizia was the

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counteracting force capable of (momentarily at least) reversing that entropy: La canna che dispiuma mollemente il suo rosso flabello a primavera; la redola sul fosso, su la nera correntia sorvolata di libellule; e il cane trafelato che rincasa col suo fardello in bocca, oggi qui non mi tocca riconoscere; ma la dove il riverbero piu cuoce e il nuvolo s'abbassa, oltre Ie sue pupille ormai remote, solo due fasci di luce in croce. E il tempo passa. The reed that deplumes languidly its red flabellum in spring; the grass tufts on the ditch banks, over the black stream overflown by dragonflies; and the panting dog that comes home with the day's catch in his mouth, not these here, now, do I have to recognize; but there where the heat reverberates most sharply and the clouds come closer down, beyond her pupils already vanished, only two crossed beams of light. And time wears on. In stanza 1 the recent manifestations of inviting Nature reborn are considered only to be rejected afterwards ("oggi qui non mi tocca riconoscere," "today here I don't have to recognize": the strong prolepsis helps the dialectical inversion of theme, with the key verb "to recognize" acting as the syntactical and semantic hinge of the whole sweeping

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sentence). What the persona has to "recognize" here and now in a sultry, cloudy landscape is the negative sign coming from a chance event in the real scene: "due/ fasci di luce in croce," "two/ crossed beams of light." These beams literally "cross her out"; they appear beyond her now remote pupils. As a cross, they also portend suffering, the suffering that goes with this irretrievable loss. In the twentieth "Motet," the concluding piece of the series, an ironic resignation prevails: . . . ma cosi sia. Un suono di cornetta dialoga con gli sciami del querceto. Nella valva che il vespero riflette un vulcano dipinto fuma lieto. La moneta incassata nella lava brilla anch'essa sul tavolo e trattiene pochi fogli. La vita che sembrava vasta έ piu breve del tuo fazzoletto. . . . but so be it. A sound of comet converses with the swarms of the oakwood. In the seashell that mirrors the twilight a painted volcano gaily smokes. The coin encased in lava likewise shines on the desk and holds down a few sheets of paper. Life which seemed so vast is smaller than your handkerchief. "Cosi sia," "so be it"; life blossoms around the persona, and even his paperweights on the desk—a seashell and an ancient coin encased in a lava chunk—shine serenely. The prayerlike words of the opening (they are the Italian Amen) reveal their irony when we come to the sharp end: "Life which seemed/ so vast is smaller than your handkerchief." Even if by that "you" the poet means distant Clizia, it is as if he were talking to himself; he accepts his deprivation and is aware (with a certain detachment) of the joyously

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reawakened life around him. A painted volcano on the seashell, a piece of hardened lava on the desk remind him that his own life no longer seethes with the ardors of youth (just as the fiery youth of the world seemed inexorably past in "Sul muro grafito," an early Ossi di seppia piece that appears to foreshadow the present "Motet" in more than one respect). The painted volcano (no less than the coin) may also point to the resolution of art that symbolizes riotous life and makes it viable as pure image. Another probable implication of the two focal objects is the chance cooperation of human art and elemental nature: the destructive lava has preserved the precious coin; the shell so beautifully designed by other than human forces has become the receptacle of a diminutive painting. But the main point is the retreat from the infinity that youth had promised under Clizia's inspiration into the frame of the finite; one thinks of the second stanza of "Notizie dall'Amiata," with its invocation to the north wind that "endears to us our chains." The epiphany afforded by this last "Motet" is of the phenomenal, of the limited reality—not of the noumenal, as was formerly the case. Through the ups and downs of inner experience, the persona has known heaven and hell and purgatory; the threshold of hell was touched with "Motet" 5, heaven was felt in "Motet" 8, and the threshold of spiritual death was sighted in "Motet" 18. Now only the stoic acceptance of slowly dwindling life is left, with whatever minor consolations it may offer: neither heaven nor hell, a purgatory perhaps, but with no goal to the purging except death. It would seem that the poet's persona has grown from passionate youth to the sad wisdom of age through the cycles of experienced time. Goethe's concept of Entsagung comes to mind, a renunciation made harder by that poet's cult of das ewig Weibliche. Montale too, in his less ambitious compass, has shown a deep fascination with the myth of the Eternal Feminine and a comparable ability to accept limits and renunciation. It might be added here that Montale pointedly refers to Goethe in one of the Occasioni poems,

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"Nel parco di Caserta" (In the Caserta Park), and that his choice of such a title for the whole book probably stems from Goethe's dictum that his own poetry in a way is all Gelegenheitsdichtung,15 poetry of occasion. That the German humanist poet would not have concurred with Montale's elliptical style, or sympathized with his frequent distrust of Nature's regenerative powers, is beside the point. Montale voices the modern temper, with all the hardships it is heir to.16 15 See Johann Peter Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1948), pp. 48-49: "Alle meine Gedichte sind Gelegenheitsgedichte, sie sind durch die Wirklichkeit angeregt und haben darin Grund und Boden" (All my poems are occasion-bound, they draw their inspiration from reality and in it they find their basis and foundation—Goethe speaking). 16 As the present book was going to press (fall 1980), a new edition of the "Mottetti" with analytical and bibliographical commentary was published: E. M., Mottetti, ed. Dante !sella (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1980).

4 THE PURGATORIAL SYNDROME

When I emphasized the pervasive relevance of Dante's po­ etics to Eugenio Montale's poetry almost a quarter of a century ago,1 I certainly did not imply undue derivativeness on the part of the modern master, nor did I make that undeniable relevance a matter of literary imitation. Montale himself had obliquely acknowledged Dante's importance to him by correlating his Clizia myth with the angelicized ladies of the Dolce Stil Nuovo poets in his "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)" of 1946; to be sure, in that context he had modestly avoided a comparison of his Clizia to Dante's Beatrice, for the transfigured women in question were Mandetta (a minor, episodic figure in Cavalcanti's verse) and Selvaggia (Cino da Pistoia's beloved). But my 1 See Glauco Cambon, "Montale dantesco e bruegheliano," Aut-Aut 35 (September 1956): 371-391; "Eugenio Montale's Poetry: A Meeting of Dante and Brueghel," Sewanee Review 66 (Winter 1958): 1-32, subsequently re­ printed, with minor changes, as a chapter ("Montale e TAItro") of La lotta con Proteo (Milano: Bompiani, 1963), pp. 115-137, and then as a chapter ("Eugenio Montale's Dantesque Style") of Dante's Craft (Minneapolis: Uni­ versity of Minnesota Press, 1969), pp. 161-192. Other critics who empha­ sized M.'s Dantesque propensity were Toni Comello, "Dante e Montale," Dimensioni 5-6 (1961): 65-74; Pietro Bonfiglioli, "Dante Pascoli Montale," in Nuovi studi pascoliani (Bolzano-Cesena: 1963), pp. 35-62; and now Joseph Brodsky (the Russian poet in exile), "The Art of Montale," The New York Review of Books, June 9, 1977, pp. 35-39.

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reasons for stressing the affinity were mainly stylistic; I sensed in Montale's word choices and rhythmic shapes a ruggedness, a resilient tautness that sounded very much like Dante's rime aspre (harsh rimes). Austerity, ethical com­ mitment, philosophical concern went hand in hand with those expressive elements to complete the analogical pic­ ture; and when Montale himself, at the 1965 Dantean cel­ ebrations in Florence, proclaimed his admiration for Dante (of whom he even said "di fronte a Dante non ci sono poeti," vis-a-vis Dante there are no poets to speak of2), I was far from surprised. As a learned poet, Montale could only recognize this ancestral affinity and raise it from the subliminal to the conscious sphere of poetical activity; thus by using two pivotal verbs from the Pier delle Vigne infernal episode in his own "Tramontana" (Ossi di seppia), the modern writer asserted his freedom or "individual talent" in the presence of the "tradition" that claimed his creative resources for a new embodiment. Nobody can accuse "Tramontana" of servile dependency on the formidable medieval source; on the other hand, while the poem functions for the available reader even if he fails to recognize the Dantean cue, this recognition will refocus and deepen, or expand, the initial understanding; for the stalwart, tensive language will make itself more strongly felt when we realize how it can sustain direct confrontation with significant elements of Dante's own dramatic style and effortlessly incorporate them. With this goes, of course, a decoding of the allusion that makes Dante's infernal myth reverberate onto the modern pre­ dicament: the Inferno's suicides and our tendentially sui­ cidal contemporaries are both uprooted trees (and the met­ aphor recurs in Ossi di seppia as well as in La bufera e altro). 2

See "Esposizione sopra Dante," a paper that M. read in Florence at the international meeting commemorating the eighth centennial of Dante's birth in April 1965 and then published as "Dante ieri e oggi" in Atti del Congresso intemaziomle di studi danteschi (Firenze: Sansoni, 1966), 2: 315333. This was subsequently translated by Jonathan Galassi as "Dante, Yesterday and Today" for Canto 2, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 75-94.

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To innovate sometimes means simply to rediscover one's ancestors. But if we want to realize more fully the extent of Montale's Wahlverwandtschaft or elective affinity for Dante, we can do no better than reread certain poems from La bufera that mark a high point of his accomplishment by formulating what must be seen, in the changed modern context of belief, as a close counterpart of Dante's purga­ torial process. Again, literary "derivation" is excluded; it is rather a question of the modern poet's experience, existentially speaking, mirroring itself in the medieval poet's work that has provided something like an archetype in its definitiveness. Mirroring, in this case, involves more than an admission of identity or resemblance; it entails a selfdifferentiation. It is as if the modern poet said: "How much like my ancestor I am, and yet I am really myself; but I should never have known what I am if I had not come to terms with my ancestor." The poems I select for the purpose of my illustrative commentary come from La bufera, Montale's third book, published in 1956 and reflecting his wartime and immediate postwar experiences. They are, then, chronologically and thematically contiguous, although the order in which I dis­ cuss them is not itself chronological. I simply begin with the more narratively autobiographical "Proda di Versilia" (Versilia Shore), then proceed to "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe" (Voice Coming with the Moorhens), which tilts fac­ tual autobiography toward the more visionary side, and then conclude with "Iride," a totally visionary poem, so much so that Montale himself says in his notes that he "transcribed it from an unknown language in a dream." To "Iride" I append "L'ombra della magnolia," a cognate poem. Morphologically, then, the sequence I thereby set up will turn out to be far from arbitrary; it will actually help me to trace a diagram of the transfiguring process by which poetical vision takes shape from the data of exist­ ence.

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I miei morti che prego perche preghino per me, per i miei vivi com'io invece per essi non resurrezione ma il compiersi di quella vita ch'ebbero inesplicata e inesplicabile, oggi pm di rado discendono dagH orizzonti aperti quando una mischia d'acque e cielo schiude finestre ai raggi della sera,—sempre piu raro, astore celestiale, un cutter bianco-alato Ii posa sulla rena. My dead ones whom I pray so that they may pray for me, for my living ones as I instead for them not resurrection ask but the fulfillment of such life as they had unexplained and inexplicable, today more seldom alight from the open horizons when an affray of water and sky discloses windows to evening's sunbeams,—ever more seldom, celestial hawk, a white-winged cutter disembarks them on the sand. Thus begins the introductory stanza of the four-stanza lyric, "Proda di Versilia," that features an autobiographical Montalian persona sitting on the native Tyrrhenian seashore to look out for the increasingly rarer "apparitions" of his lost kinfolk from the restless, generous sea that splashes against a sterile, degraded land. The degradation has been wrought by human greed and neglect (stanza 2), and the persona's eye notices it first in the smaller details (artificially tinted zinnias being watered by sullen old crones, stick and briar-ridden courtyards where "angry voices" deny a famished cat even what is edible in the rubbish, mounds of rubble) before panning on the whole scene of squalid houses and sunshade-speckled beaches. This sand, the persona comments at the end of stanza 2, "does not nurture the trees sacred to [his] childhood: wild pine, figtree and

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eucalyptus." It is, in fact, a wasteland offsetting the private Eden enshrined in his memory; no wonder that his dear departed find it harder and harder to materialize for his contemplation in this refractory ambience. In turn, the Eden reminisced in stanza 3 is far from conventionally idealized; it has to do with childhood siestas spent among mosquitos and cicadas listening to the grownups cleaning fish or raking the garden, and the realism is so vividly clear-cut that it suggested to me a Breughelian scene. Thus the paradisal state simply was the bliss of a harmonious quotidian life, in a sheltered yet open world communicating with nature ("lives still human/ and still knowable gestures," stanza 4), harbored by a circumscribed horizon of sea cliffs. And, in the bemused child's perception, even the creatures of the deep partook of that natural bond, being "Similar to man or close to him even/ in name: the priest fish, the swallow fish,/ the lobster—wolf of the dragnet—who/ forgets his claws at Alice's approach. . . ." If "II condannato" (The Doomed One), one of the last stories of Farfalla di Dinard (Butterfly of Dinard), develops the lobster motif on the level of fictional prose, collaterally reinforcing the theme of conspiratorial brotherhood be­ tween sea animals and children, here in the poem of early reminiscence, the whole fish imagery motif works even more secretly to impart a final twist to the Edenic myth. Suddenly the carefully realistic bourgeois interior of stanza 3 makes way in the last stanza for a world of elemental creatures whom the magic of the word, as if in a child Adam's naming, makes one with a world of still redeem­ able humans. Eden was at one time communion with one's next of kin and with the mute children of the deep. It is this communion that the spreading vulgarity of a sleazy commercial age (stanza 2) has destroyed, and it can only be resurrected in memory. But the memory is so poignant that, without violating the physical appearance of phenom­ ena, it invests them with a fantastic, numinous halo; the fabulous fish of stanza 4 symmetrically balance the apparitional sails of the cutter that, in stanza 1, strikes the per-

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sona's gaze as one and the same thing with the angelpowered boat that brings the new dead to Mount Purga­ tory's shore in Purgatorio II. In fact, because the angels that chase away the intruding snake in ante-Purgatory at the evening of Dante's first day in the realm of purification (Purg. VIII) are called "astor celestiali," celestial hawks, Montale telescopes the two im­ ages from Purgatorio II and Purgatorio VIII, making the in­ nocent cutter itself, with a graphic sleight of hand, a "ce­ lestial hawk" that is meant to evoke the purgatorial atmosphere around the observed scene. The double vi­ sion—immediately sensorial and mediately cultural—coa­ lesces into one, effortlessly. Superimposing the Dantean scene on the present vision actualizes the former while conferring on the latter a sacramental focus. The "return of the dead" (to use Bonfiglioli's phrase3), a personal rem­ iniscence, becomes an epiphany of the kind that can neither claim transitive ontological validity (since it is private and unverifiable) nor be utterly discounted as a delusion, a mere subjective event of psychological import. The latter reduction cannot obtain as long as we stay within the ho­ rizon of the poem, which postulates an exchange of "pray­ ers" between the dead and their musing survivor, and thus a communion of the living and the deceased that, in true Dantesque spirit, albeit poles apart from Dante's Christian orthodoxy, opens the vistas of purgatorial hope. That hope, however, is just an intermittent, receding glow, "rarer and rarer": the "celestial hawk" that could exorcize the tawdriness of the modern wasteland sur­ rounding the persona will not prevail; the joyous meeting of the living and the dead that Purgatory's transatlantic shuttle boat made possible for Dante and Casella on that privileged shore is doomed to occur evermore seldom on Versilia's debased shore. The entropy of values Montale so often decries in his prose as well as in his verse is mir3 Bonfiglioli, "II 'ritorno dei morti' da Pascoli a Montale," in Pascoli: Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi Pascoliani (Santarcangelo di Romagna: 1965), pp. 55-72.

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rored here in a progressive entropy of vision, correspond­ ing to the widening distance between childhood's lost Eden (an Eden that Dante's remote culture would have guar­ anteed) and the disabused old man who is finally casting a jaundiced glance on the modern scene, "an endless sea of clay and slush" (stanza 4, last line). This shapeless reality is incommensurable with the domestic and natural reality he remembers, as well as with the ancient reality of Dante's vision and experience; Montale says it in almost Yeatsian terms: . . . tempo che fu misurabile fino a che non s'aperse questo mare infinito, di creta e di mondiglia. . . . a time that was measurable until this endless sea yawned, of clay and slush. (Yeats, a poet Montale has partly translated, speaks of "this filthy modern tide" and maintains that "measurement began our might"; but I am not trying to hunt down echoes or "influences.") At this point it is clear that the personal vision takes on the traits of a negative historical judgment—a blanket rejection of the present—which in turn shades into a lay eschatology of the pessimistic type, or, if you prefer, into a new myth of the Fall. The fall from innocence, or rather integrity, has taken place in the persona's memory and coincides with the loss of childhood. As other Bufera lyrics such as "L'ombra della magnolia" clarify (not to mention the prose writings collected in Auto da fe, Statements of Belief), the horrors of World War II and, even more, the advent of industrial mass society, a nondescript way of life that Montale equates with formlessness and abdication of individual character and values, have made the sinister difference. The accelerated disintegration of Western civilization in our century makes the surviving bourgeois

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humanism of Montale's childhood still somehow germane to Dante's invoked world view (whose axiology that humanism had retained even while discarding its ontology) and qualitatively different from today's prevalent ideologies and realities. ("Piccolo testamento," A Little Testament, in La bufera bears this out even more forcefully.) "Vite ancora umane/ e gesti conoscibili," still human lives and knowable gestures: the nostalgic definition of that lost world in stanza 4 reverberates throughout the beginning of stanza 1, which posits "the fulfillment of [the dead loved ones's] . . . unexplained and inexplicable . . . life" as the object of the persona's prayer, as, therefore, the epitome of his values; and a further light comes from another Bufera poem, "A mia madre" (To My Mother), where Elysium is said to be the expression of an irreducibly individual entity: . . . La strada sgombra non e una via, solo due mani, un volto, quelle mani, quel volto, il gesto d'una vita che non e un'altra ma se stessa, solo questo ti pone nell'eliso folto d'anime e voci in cui tu vivi . . . . . . The cleared road is not a passageway, only two hands, a face, those hands, that face, the gesture of a life that is no other but itself, only this places you in the Elysium peopled with souls and voices where you live on . . .

Communion, and community, is possible only among individuals and not in a regime of social homogenizing. The thisness of human existence is opposed as essential form to the formless "infinity," or rather endlessness, of the muddy sea Montale identifies with industrialized society. Here a secularized Christian speaks, one who has lost all certainties but this and who, nevertheless, cannot bring

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himself to exclude a metaphysical dimension from life, since he is envisioning the possibility of a perfecting of human individuality after death, just as, in his penultimate book (Quaderno di quattro ami, Notebook of Four Years) he "refuses to believe in death." Protective, enclosed, "narrow" horizons defined the Montalian persona's childhood, in cliff-sheltered bays where he could commune with the fish surfacing from the deep (stanza 4). But doesn't a further aspect emerge here? Freudian dogmatism is not required to descry an amniotic world, the true Eden, with its correlative yearning for a return to the larval state (the fish), especially when we compare the privileged enclosure ("narrow horizons... sheltering human lives") to the "opening" or "yawning" of the endless slushy sea that is modern life. On a sublimated level, it is also from the (prelapsarian) sea that visionary memories of childhood may come (the birdlike boat carrying the persona's deceased family back); and the polarity of bird and fish symbols recurs all over La bufera, notably in "L'ombra della magnolia," to confirm the archetypal source of such revealing imagery. The crisis of bourgeois humanism could hardly find a more convincing expression, the more so as Montale acknowledges the defensive stance of that ideology. He does so through the poetically effective medium of an imagery couched in infinitely resilient rhythms. Persistent hendecasyllables, a blank verse occasionally exceeding its statutory syllabic measure and always varied by the resources of enjambment and caesura, allied to an amplitude of syntax that encompasses a long stanza in each sweeping sentence, as in "L'orto": the resulting cadence works like a sequence of murmuring waves with its own soft, deep tone, at the opposite pole of Montale's characteristic clipped utterances (the short Ossi di seppia, the "Mottetti," "Lampi e dediche" [Flashes and Dedications]), which can be so sharp and incisive. But if we want to learn more about the nature and workings of Montale's post-Christian Purgatory, we must turn to

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"Voce giunta con Ie folaghe," which matches "Proda di Versilia" 's elastically sustained inflection while adding a significant variation to that poem's handling of the "return of the dead" theme by introducing the angelical, Beatrice­ like figure of Clizia to set up a transcendental conversation with the ghost of the Montalian persona's father: eccoti fuor dal buio che ti teneva, padre, erto ai barbagli, senza scialle e berretto, al sordo fremito che annunciava nell'alba chiatte di minatori dal gran carico semisommerse, nere sull'onde alte. L'ombra che mi accompagna alia tua tomba, vigile, e posa sopra un'erma ed ha uno scarto altero della fronte che Ie schiara gli occhi ardenti ed i duri sopraccigli da un suo biocco infantile, l'ombra non ha piu peso della tua da tanto seppellita, i primi raggi del giorno la trafiggono, farfalle vivaci l'attraversano, la sfiora la sensitiva e non si rattrappisce. L'ombra fidata e il muto che risorge, quella che scorporo l'interno fuoco e colui che lunghi anni d'oltretempo (anni per me pesante) disincarnano, si scambiano parole che interito sul margine io non odo; l'una forse ritrovera la forma in cui bruciava amor di Chi la mosse e non di se, ma l'altro sbigottisce e teme che la larva di memoria in cui si scalda ai suoi figli si spenga al nuovo balzo.

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here you are out of the dark which held you, father, standing up at the glimmers, without shawl or cap, at the dull throb that used to announce in the dawn the miners' lighters half submerged by their load, black on the high waves. The shade that escorts me watchfully to your grave and rests upon a herm and proudly shakes her forehead to clear her burning eyes and hard eyebrows from her childlike lock, that shade is no heavier than yours is after so long a burial, the first rays of day pierce her through, lively butterflies cross her, the sensitive plant skims her and will not crumple. The trusty shade and the silent man reawakened, she whom her inner fire disembodied and he whom long years of trans-time (years for heavy me) do keep unfleshing, exchange words that, stiffened by shivers on the edge, I cannot hear; the one perhaps will find again the form wherein blazed love of Him Who moved her and not of herself, but the other is dumbfounded by fear that the larvalike memory wherein he basks to his children be snuffed out at the new jump. Unlike "Proda di Versilia" 's collective epiphany from the sea, a single, specific soul manifests himself here, rising from his tomb among wildflowers, and the sudden apparition depicts him as both different from what he was in everyday life (he no longer wears shawl and cap against the cold) and recognizably himself (he stands up at the sun's first rays and at the noise of the familiar miners'

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barges passing by). In typical Montalian style, precise, sober brush strokes place the whole scene in focus (the rugged path up the hill, the miners' barges that are heard and then seen). No less realistically individualized is the second ap­ parition—a projection, almost a mental ectoplasm, of the living but faraway Clizia, the American lady Montale himself has indicated as the source of his pervasive eternal feminine myth. He catches her in what must be a characteristic gesture, coupled with a distinctive physical trait (the loose lock of a lighter colored hair on the forehead), while at the same time making her weightless (as purgatorial shades ought to be) and utterly transparent, actually bodiless, perceptible only to eyes and ears, not to the touch. In this she shows herself very much like the various shades Dante the pilgrim meets in his journey through ante-Purgatory and Purgatory proper; they repeatedly marvel at his casting a shadow, an anomaly in their realm, for the sunlight goes unbroken through them as it does through Clizia's form in Montale's own purgatorial figuration, which adds the keen detail of the unruffled mimosa and of the cavorting butterflies. Even this aspect, this penchant for minute but ultimate­ ly focal particulars, testifies to Montale's ingrained affinity for Dante, an affinity he has acknowledged as capital indebtedness in a self-interview of the early 1960s where he said that once he steeped himself in Dante's work (during and especially after his school years) there wasn't much room left for other influences. The "influence," of course, is a function of the Wahlverwandtschaft, as Goethe would have remarked. Nobody in his right mind, for example, would make it a matter of conditioning "influence" or supine imitation upon realizing how easily transposable to the Dantesque scenery are the purgatorial landscapes (one Tuscan, one Ligurian) of the two poems we have been scanning, set as they are on a beach or on a rugged yet verdant knoll overlooking the sea. The imaginative use of a congenial source portends freedom, not servitude.

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Montale's cultural memory is part of his imagination, and the same was true of Dante himself. From the start, the purgatorial itinerary to his father's tomb has been equated by Montale with the progress of life itself when he says, at the beginning of stanza 1, that if he looks back the path he has walked so far is much longer than the part that remains to be negotiated in order to arrive "where we shall melt like wax." Here again, if we hold up Dante's poem as a mirror to the modern poet's work, we shall see how free the latter's secularizing approach is, and yet how consonant with the Dantean pattern. First of all, the confrontation with one's father(s) as a test of maturity supplies Dante's poem with one of its dominant themes and structural leitmotifs—even though it is not his literal father he meets in the Beyond but a series of cultural fathers like Virgil, Brunetto Latini, Guido Guinizzelli, Cacciaguida (a father at several generational removes), St. Bernard. Here sound anthropology (especially in a patriarchal culture) goes hand in hand with striking poetry, no doubt. Second, the identification of Purgatory with the pilgrimage of this earthly life, leading to death ("where we shall melt like wax"), diverges in its secular orientation from Dante's transcendent dogma and myth but can poetically relate to it nevertheless because, of the Divine Comedy's three canticles, the Purgatorio features the more essentially normal human condition: it is not set underground or in the stars but in a mountainous locale overlooking the sea and subject to the regular cycle of night and daylight, it shows souls progressing from sin to freedom, not fixed forever in a doomed or perfect shape, and it rehearses the movement of quotidian life and history. Third, the still earthbound shade of Montale's father pathetically clings to his surviving kinsfolk's memory of him, just like the insistent purgatorial shades that ask visitor Dante to remember them to their survivors—though prayers hopefully shortening the time to be spent in the transitional realm (Purg. V, VI) have nothing to do with this modern shade's concern: he simply wants to exist longer in the awareness of his children, much

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like Jean Paul Sartre's characters in Huis Clos (No Exit) who feel it as a second death when people stop talking of them on earth. The secularizing bent of Montale's vision should not be misconstrued as an absolute limit to the modern poet's imagination. Montale is at the same time a lay writer and a tendentially apocalyptic one, a post-Enlightenment humanist whose faith in reason is too undogmatic to bar the possibility of alternative lights and resurgent darkness, a Christian without a church (hence the self-definition "poor bewildered Nestorian" in "Iride," or the sharp attack on official church politics in "Le processioni del '49," The Processions of 1949). Without this problematic stance and openness to apocalypse we could never account for the fairly surprising turn to a mystical, or transcendent, conception in stanza 3 of "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe," no matter how prepared one might be to grant "suspension of disbelief" even to the most disenchanted secular author for the sake of significant fable. How often in critical commentaries on Renaissance or Romantic poetry and fiction, one comes across the statement "Here the writer imagines that . . . ," meaning that the imagined scene, character, or event must be taken as mere fiction with no counterpart in believable reality. Obviously this would not have been the case with Dante's description of the Beyond, so firmly founded on Christian belief even if the fiction of his exceptional privilege to visit that Beyond while still in the flesh need not be taken at face value. Fable and faith, phenomenology and ontology coincided for a poet like Dante, while for a post-Leopardian and post-Arnoldian writer like Montale such coincidence could be hardly expected once the topic happens to be what it is in the present instance: a conversation with the dead. And yet, as the poem progresses from stanza to stanza it seems to introduce us into an order of events that makes no sense in materialist terms. As long as we meet the speaker's father as a ghost and then the wraith of the absent lady unimpeded by the laws of matter (stanzas 1 and 2),

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we can still think of a poetically immediate metaphor for the sudden awakening of deep personal memories within the persona's brooding mind. But when the two shades actually talk to each other, beyond the aural reach of the eavesdropping persona (who will hear them, however, and report their conversation to us in the form of direct speech in stanza 4), when he can say of one of them that he is being "unfleshed" by "long years of trans-time," which can be called years only for the benefit of the flesh-burdened survivor and not in essence, and when, moreover, the ghost father is depicted as fearing to lose his residual boon of memory on his children's part once "the new jump" comes for him, we are drawn into another dimension, whatever ontological judgment can be ventured. Clearly the ancestral Christianity is taking over and superseding any scientifically "rational" Weltanschauung of the kind that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment made all but inevi­ table. Modern subscribers to Christianity, like Chesterton, Claudel, Ungaretti, Eliot, or Lowell and Tate, would be very sympathetic to this development in the poem, only to be (possibly) baffled by Montale's failure to follow it up into official orthodoxy. But this contributes to the tension of the poem and therefore to its strength; the meeting with the father is also a meeting with Dante, on Dante's own ground and not only on the modern author's. Very Dantesque is, in particular, that detail of "the new jump" (il nuovo balzo) that etymologically recalls the "baize" or terraces of Mount Purgatory, even though its meaning in the given context is a bit different (and at any rate those ledges or terraces do sometimes have to be conquered by some "leap" with divine or angelic assistance). What is involved here is a progress of the soul after death, an ap­ proximate equivalent of the purgation process on which the Divine Comedy's second canticle so splendidly depends. As in Dante's description, the progress is marked by long gradual phases (here, apparently just one) and sudden transitions; the "jump" Montale's father is supposed to be taking before long corresponds in its way to the hard pas-

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sage through the wall of flame in Purgatorio XXVII, which will lead to the harrowing but deeply yearned-for reunion with Beatrice. Though we should beware of doctrinal systemization with a writer like Montale, who has taken his critics to task for any such attempts to pin him down, it is possible to surmise that the outcome of the "new jump" after the long period of "unfleshing" or purification would be some kind of spiritual perfecting, the "fulfillment of [individual] inexplicable life" that the Montalian persona invoked for his beloved dead ones and for himself in "Proda di Versilia." The way Montale chose to formulate his poetical idea in that lyric was as far from Christian orthodoxy as Rilke's or Yeats's conceptions can be: "not resurrection but the ful­ fillment of [unique individual] life." In the present lyric, however, a decidedly Christian ingredient is injected into the myth, for the spiritual leap ahead is envisaged, in stanza 4, as a transcendence of earthly attachment or "memory." Another Christian element of note is the unmistakable ref­ erence to a God who is the goal of love: ". . . amor di Chi la mosse e non di se," . . . love of Him Who moved her and not of herself (stanza 3). Conceptually and stylistically, this line harks back to Dante's writing, as anybody can verify for himself by checking the many instances in which the Aristotelian idea of God as the Unmoved Mover joins the Christian concept of Love to animate the Comedy's verse. Beatrice's words to Virgil, as reported by the latter in Inferno II, will suffice:4 "Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare," Love moved me, that makes me speak. God is directly men­ tioned, or alluded to, in La bufera generally, a noteworthy development vis-a-vis the absence of any such references in Montale's two previous books of verse. The phenome­ non can hardly be casual. 4 Alvaro Valentini, in Lettura di Montale: "La bufera e altro" (Roma: Bulzoni editore, 1977), pp. 231-238, notices the same correspondence in his discussion of the poem under consideration, and he has many perceptive things to say, along with useful bibliographical references, in his poemby-poem analysis.

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Neither is the apparently cryptical discourse on memory that Clizia holds for the benefit of Montale's father in stanza 4: —Ho pensato per te, ho ricordato per tutti. Ora ritomi al cielo libero che ti tramuta. Ancora questa rape ti tenta? Si, la battima e la stessa di sempre, il mare che ti univa ai miei Iidi da prima che io avessi 1'ali, non si dissolve. Io Ie rammento quelle mie prode e pur son giunta con Ie folaghe a distaccarti dalle tue. Memoria non e peccato fin che giova. Dopo e letargo di talpe, abiezione che funghisce su s£ . . . — —I have done much thinking for you, I have remembered for the sake of you all. Now you return to the free sky that transmutes you. Does this cliff still tempt you? Yes, the surf line is the same as it always was, the sea which joined you to my shores from the time before I had wings, does not dissolve. I do recall those my shores and yet I have come with the moorhens to detach you from yours. Memory is no sin as long as it helps. After that it is a lethargy of moles, a degradation moulding upon itself ... — As if to underscore the forthcoming "new jump," the poem jumps beyond its previous level when the speaker persona, after declaring himself unable to overhear the conversation between the two wraiths, suddenly lets one of them (Clizia) talk in her own voice to utter the transcendental wisdom that alone can make sense of the situation. What she figures

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forth in her words is the culmination of the entire purgatorial process for the father's reluctant soul, and implicitly for any other. Again, the correspondence to Dante's Purgatory is striking, even when we take into account the inevitable differences. Unlike Beatrice who harshly browbeats her erstwhile lover and lifelong devotee before investing him with the mission of a Christian bard and taking charge of him for the leap into Paradise, Clizia gently admonishes the earthbound ghost to relinquish his cherished locale and accept the momentarily painful but finally liberating detachment for the sake of an ascension that is indeed both a "return" and the condition for a heightening metamorphosis. To wit, she urges him to transcend himself by leaving behind the part of his being that is definitely closed and unsusceptible to further development, just as Dante, once he has completed his purifying climb through Purgatory's terraces, and thereby shed his carnal weight, will take leave of Virgil and undergo a lustral immersion in Lethe and Eunoe so that he can finally fly into Heaven under Beatrice's guidance. The "free sky that transmutes you" is the Montalian character's original home, since his flight into it is described as a "return"; in the same way, Beatrice explains to her astonished charge in Paradise I that he is naturally "returning" to his original "site" by the inversion of gravity that the accomplishment of purification has made possible. In this transcendent homecoming Dante the pilgrim will find freedom, as he tells Beatrice when she takes leave of him in the upper spheres ("tu m'hai di servo tratto a libertate," you brought me from servitude to freedom, Par. XXXI, 85). And this process is a metamorphosis that the medieval poet repeatedly avows himself unable to translate into words ("Trasumanar significar per verba/ non si porria, perd l'essemplo basti/ a cui esperienza grazia serba," "Trans­ mutation into the more than human cannot be conveyed by words,/ therefore let the example suffice/ to those whom Divine grace grants the experience"). Thus we see that in Clizia's few words Montale manages to concentrate the

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Dantesque essence of the transcending process for which the purgatorial condition has provided the basis. A further remarkable trait of Clizia's discourse is her insistence on the act of remembrance and on the nature of memory. She has "remembered" communally, as if to complete for all spirits concerned the cycle of earthly existence that can be transcended only after being accepted and recognized in its form. She also "remembers" her native shores and is therefore no stranger to Montale's father's dilemma; but the dilemma should not become an impasse. Once the memory has accomplished its function, it becomes sterile, parasitic. It is obviously the equivalent, in con­ sciousness, of the sinful burden of carnality that the saved souls in Dante's poem must purge. And here one cannot help thinking of the analogy to the double ritual Dante must perform in the garden of Eden, on top of the holy mountain, to perfect his purification as a preliminary to "rising toward the stars": his immersion into Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and into Eunoe, the river of good memory. Self-contained memory is sheer closure, inertia, and entropy; a character the Montalian persona meets in a dreamed-of afterworld in the short story "Sul limite" (On the Threshold) from Farfalla di Dinard, says to him that the new dead gradually lose their memory to "acquire another one." The short story evidently reverberates on the poem we are discussing, adding to our understanding of it: "I know, the first time one is still clinging to the stories of the time before. It's like what used to happen to me when I was among the living, no, what am I saying?, among the dead of Pre-threshold [Antelimite] from where you are now coming; I would dream and upon waking up I would still remember the dream, then even that memory would fade. The same thing is now happening to you; there is still an earthly fringe to put to sleep in your mind, but it won't take long. Later, when Giovanna shows you the "recording" of what you have called your life, you'll have trouble recognizing

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it. It seems to be so as far as Zone 1, the station where Jack and Fred often go, Fred, the painter who did that portrait of you at Spoleto, remember? Then they say that this memory is lost and a different one is acquired. Neither in the short story nor in the poem does Montale try to define the "different" memory except negatively, by opposition to the earthly one, to the residual "fringe" in the mind that must be eliminated. Needless to say, this reticence suits each context to perfection. Were Montale to give a definite content to the new memory a spirit is supposed to acquire in the Beyond after shedding his or her burden of earthly memory, the resulting myth would amount to a poetical impoverishment because it would deprive both story and poem of the horizon of mystery which they need to breathe. At the same time, the reader is free to imagine what that new, transcendent memory could be, and this is part of the writer's game, who thereby whets his readers' imaginative zest without ever allowing it to exhaust his verbal artifact. A margin of indeterminacy is thus secured for what is otherwise rendered very specifically and in definite terms. Two aspects—mystery and precision—interact in the short story to produce a kind of hallucinatory irony, whereas in the lyric an altogether different tone obtains, with the fa­ miliar locale and its natural scenery effortlessly conjuring the purgatorial vision. The short story projects a Beyond of grotesque bureaucratic efficiency at its inscrutable tran­ scendental task: To tell the truth, Giovanna and I could already have reached our new station; I think that at the Center they have acknowledged our qualifications, but, you know, at Threshold we can be of great use and Giovanna is an invaluable interpreter. She has always had an out­ standing knack for languages, and, believe me, there is quite a need for it here. Certainly at Zone 2 there will be a lot to do for her, at the institute of higher entelechies where the dematerialization process be-

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gins. But the news from there isn't very encouraging; apparently the registering system is fussier and hous­ ing is harder to find. Your father had promised to come to life from there, but for the moment. . . And so we chose to prolong our waiting period at Threshold. The clash between bureaucratic institutions of the kind our society knows and the intangibles that can only be signified in the language of theology, whether Aristotelian or other, tenses the sinews of Montale's low-keyed prose, which thus manages to present the inconceivable as matter-of-fact and, conversely, the dull quotidian as extraordinary. If met­ aphors are essential to poetry, as Aristotle said in his Po­ etics, and if the kind of metaphor that matches utterly dis­ tant images proves especially viable to the modern "wireless imagination," as Futurist Marinetti (and Ungaretti in his wake) said, Montale's narrative is a case in point. Entelechy, in Aristotelian philosophy, means the com­ pleteness of a self-contained being, the perfection of which any existent is capable, a state resulting from the total ac­ tualization of a given entity's potential so that matter will match form. Yoking this basic philosophical idea with a bureaucratic "institution" is a paradox, tinged with sar­ casm, that exposes the hopelessness of human organiza­ tion such as we know it vis-a-vis the ineffable. Yet, since earlier in the narrative the Montalian persona's interlocutor (an old-time Army comrade who died in World War I) has said that here at "Threshold" the earthly perspective is totally reversed, like a "glove turned inside out" (so that the dead are the truly living ones, and the so-called living could better be called dead), the whole world of life in the flesh, from which the story's speaker has just arrived after a highway accident, is reduced to a mere prelude to this, the supposedly real life, and is accordingly called "Antelimite" (Pre-threshold). If so, the reversal of perspective can make paradox itself plausible, and the city of the dead ("dead") that this subtly autobiographical fantasy outlines as devoted to the endless job of self-perfecting becomes no

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more absurd or unthinkable than either the urban world of our common experience or the Dantesque myth of a purgatorial community based on the Church's own dogma. (One could even think of the Church itself as an establish­ ment that, Eliotic hippopotamus that it is, strives to func­ tion as an "institution for higher entelechies.") In the short story, with its narrative requirements, the idea of "entelechy" appears in the ironic but fantasylike trappings described above, but in the poems it asserts itself with naked urgency: "not resurrection but/ the fulfillment of such life as they had/ unexplained and inexplicable" ("Proda di Versilia," and note the verb comptersi, corre­ sponding to the expression "milioni d'incompiuti," mil­ lions of unaccomplished, unfulfilled existences, in "Botta e risposta II," Thrust and Riposte II, from Satura); and "the sense of a life that is itself and not another" ("A mia madre," La bufera e altro). Developed individuality is form, as against the formlessness of industrialized mass society that Montale so insistently decries in the verse written since the last war and in the prose pieces of Auto da fe.5 He notoriously considers this spreading abdication of individuality as more insidious than the Fascist or Nazi unison of aggressive voices ("il tempo dell'unisono vocale," the time of vocal unison, see "L'ombra della magnolia" in La bufera, and also "i brocchi salutati/ da un urlo solo . . . 1'ergotante/ balbuzie dei dannati," the jades greeted/ by one collective yell. . . the incoherent/ stammering of the damned, in "Palio," Le oc­ casion.]). Thus in its peculiar fantasy form, the "Sul limite" story articulates a central concern of Montale's and de­ serves attention both in itself, as a successful piece of fiction worthy of comparison with the accomplishment of Kafka, Borges, and Buzzati along similar lines, and as a divergent yet complementary treatment of the purgatorial theme that has engaged my analytical efforts in "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe." When we come to the nightmarish-grotesque expression 5 E.

Ill

M., Auto da fi (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1966).

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"dematerialization process" from the short story, the eerie humor (which extends to the immediately following ref­ erence to rationing and housing problems in "Zone 2" of this Kafkaesque Purgatory) seems to undercut any attempt to systematize the intangible, the spiritual, whether from ecclesiastical or from lay quarters, "red" and "black" "cler­ ics" being equally abhorrent to Montale as "Piccolo testamento" proclaims. But there is a visionary margin that goes beyond the satirical function here. If the interlocutor ghost from the speaker's war-time past has to express himself in the debased language of modern society, he is still con­ veying an idea worthy of better verbal embodiment, as we can see by juxtaposing this passage with the lines Clizia's wraith utters in "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe" when en­ deavoring to persuade the reluctant ghost of the Montalian persona's father that he should detach himself from his cherished earthly locale and memories: after all, she herself has grown wings. Specific correspondences between the two purgatorial pieces—the wry prose fantasy and the soaring elegy in verse—further emerge into view when we hear from Nicola (in the story) that the persona's mother in "Zone 3" is reported to be doing well but to have a "very reduced memory" since that is the law of the place. The "zones" are a simplified version of the purgatorial terraces, stations of purification from the residual encumbrance of sinfulness or matter-bound carnality, and when the Montalian per­ sona in the story wants to skip a zone (the first zone where a lost love, Giovanna, is still staying—she preceded him there as a victim of Nazi persecution in World War II, and he finds it painful to reopen this wound) and to hurry to his mother's station in Zone 3, Nicola gently insists that he should spend some decades first at the initial station; he adds that "to forget would have been too easy," in sharp counterpoint to Clizia's urging in the poem. The latter tells Montale's father to give up his memories, and her zest keeps clashing with his earthly reluctance; Nicola keeps Montale from forgetting something that should be fully

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actualized in memory before he can go on to the next stage of purification or spiritual liberation, as it should be more properly called. Transcendence after consummation, not supine oblivion, seems to be the point in both cases, how­ ever contradictory they may sound; Lethe is not for Lotophagi. The reluctance of both characters in their respective con­ texts adds a good dramatic touch to both the poem and the short story. "I wanted something in my life that was finished, do you understand me? something that would be eternal by dint of being finished. I cannot start all over again, Nicola, I cannot, take me to my mother . . . if she is there," sighs the Montalian persona in "Sul limite"; we last see him, resigned, with his childhood pet, Galiffa the dog, in his arms. And Nicola's concluding words are "Start again to live like us . . . who came here before you." A portion of innocence, a hope, has been found: the dog sleeps "happily" in his master's loving arms; the perspec­ tive is open, though the moorings in the personal past are not lost. We should beware of taking the dream at face value as we must, instead, take Dante's purgatorial vision at face value: Montale's is not a firm metaphysical faith on which to bank or build, and his oscillations, his dilemmatic stance in ontology, have avowedly more to do with the existential approach of a Heidegger (and of the French contingentist thinkers) than with the serene certainties of an Aquinas. This may help us to absorb the shock that the conclusive stanza five of "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe" will surely ad­ minister to whatever reader unquestioningly accepts the ethical pronouncement of stanza 4 as firm ontology: . . . Il vento del giorno confonde l'ombra viva e l'altra ancora riluttante in un mezzo che respinge Ie mie mani, e il respiro mi si rompe nel punto dilatato, nella fossa che circonda Io scatto del ricordo.

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Cosi si svela prima di legarsi a immagini, a parole, oscuro senso reminiscente, ii vuoto inabitato che occupammo e che attende fin ch'e tempo di colmarsi di noi, di ritrovarci . . . . . . The wind of day commingles the living shade and the still reluctant other one in a medium that repels my hands, and my breathing breaks up in the dilated point, in the ditch hole that surrounds the snap of remembrance. Thus is revealed before tying itself to images, to words, a reminiscent dark sense, the uninhabited void that we once occupied and that waits until it's time to fill itself with us, to find us again . . . The vision springing from the sacred spot at dawn, the uncanny eloquence of shades was just about to establish its message as a consoling truth when daylight exorcises them, actually insulates them from the experiencing persona's reach. He vainly gropes for them in their "other" dimension, like Dante the pilgrim trying to embrace Casella or Statius trying to embrace Virgil in Purgatorio: . . . Frate, non far, che ombra sei, e ombra vedi. . . . Brother, oh don't, for you are a shade, and a shade you see (Virgil to Statius, Purg. Ill) And the reference appears, unequivocal, in one of the "Xenia" poems (from Satura) to the memory of Montale's wife:

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. . . Ma έ possibile, Io sai, amare un'ombra, ombra noi stessi. . . . But it is possible, you know it, to love a shade, ourselves being shades. The shattering, numinous experience—a revelation seeming to confirm the ancestral faith but now deprived of an objective foundation outside of the subjective sphere— cuts the speaker's breath short in the widening gap (of space and time) around the moment of evocation. Mem­ ory's magic can only interrupt the horizontal flow of every­ day reality for an instant; that is a miracle, but unguar­ anteed, inextensible. The interruption wrought by the visionary event on the ordinary dimension of time expands into a disquieting, alien emptiness; and this—the "unin­ habited void" of the conclusion—becomes the one reliable content of the "revelation" that has been occurring. What Heidegger calls the "ecstasy of memory" now lays bare its insubstantial, noumenal foundation, the "nothingness" on which, according to the German existentialist philosopher, existence is based; and Montale animates that void into a numinous presence, something like a transcendental womb from which we came and to which we shall return. It even "remembers" us. What does it have in common with the God alluded to in Clizia's words, or with the "free sky" that "transmutes" the dead? It is a "dark," perennial ma­ trix, anterior to images and words, superseding all gods. Logically, the conclusion undercuts the visionary climax attained by the crescendo of the previous four stanzas. The jolt is rude. An airy, liberating purgatorial vision was taking shape in musical "images and words" compositionally del­ egated to a dramatic figment of the poet's imagination, only to be contradicted by the grave baritone of the speaking "I" who unmasks himself as a nihilist. Where does that leave us? We remember that other dark antiphon, the neg­ ative conclusion of "Proda di Versilia" that sees today's

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world as an endlessly polluted sea. It voiced historical pessimism, the degeneration of a world that the persona still remembered as viable in his childhood; it re-enacted the fall from Eden within a man's contemporary experience, without incurring ideological contradictions. It was, logically, all of one piece. But "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe" delves into metaphysics, beyond (or this side of) history as such, if we discount the fragment of personal history given at the outset. And the two conceptions so poignantly lyricized in the course of the poem can only cancel each other, they cannot certainly converge into a synthesis. What makes the qualitative leap from stanzas 4 and 5 to stanza 6 very hard to understand is the fact that the theological effusion of stanza 4 ("love of Him Who moved her and not of herself") is uttered by the speaker persona himself, the same who in stanza 5 will offer the nihilist comments we saw. Does this alternative supersede the earlier one, or are they merely swaying on the scales? In the peculiar dynamics of the poem (and it is a trait that it shares with others, for instance "Notizie dall'Amiata") we have a shift in attitude on the part of the speaking "I," whose transition from the Dantesque point of view of the first four stanzas to the rather Heideggerian one of the conclusion forms a dramatic graph in itself. In a way, the shift as such is the point of the poem; and if we focus on this structural nucleus, we shall find that the intellectual dialectic that caused so much difficulty in our analysis is not the ultimate dimension of the great lyric. Imagery subtends ideas; it also reaches beyond them, to complicate the message. The poem started with a walk to the father's grave on known ground and continued with his rise from that grave, to culminate in a climax with the imaginative elan of Clizia's eavesdropped speech that soars into the "free sky." This sunward soaring brusquely inverts itself into a descent to the Mothers, to the original generative "Void," to set up a counterpoint of chthonic regression versus solar, heavenly outreach. Thus in a sense the finale is a return to the beginning, a self-burial of the persona.

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Comparison with the analogous inner movement of "Notizie dall'Amiata" will bear out such a pattern. If we want to delve further into mythical archetypes, we can hardly miss the fact that the dominant deity of Clizia's heaven­ ward soar in the first part ("Amor di Chi la mosse e non di se") is masculine, solar, Apollonian, while the "dark reminiscent sense," the "uninhabited void" awaiting us all at the end is unmistakably chthonic, feminine, tellurically womblike, like the addressee of "Notizie dall'Amiata" in the cryptical third part. The movement of the poem, on this level, enacts the cycle of day, from dawn (both physical and spiritual), to ideal noon when Clizia's winged utter­ ance reaches the zenith of vision with the encouragement to soar into the transmuting "free sky," to abrupt sunset and dusk when the appeal of the chthonic void reasserts itself in the persona's consciousness. That this dusk of the spirit occurs at the moment of full daylight, when "the wind of the day" (stanza 6) shatters the purgatorial vision, makes the poem that much more dramatically intriguing. In Montale's modified Ovidian myth, Clizia is still the love-rapt contemplator of the sun; for example, sunflower seeds are her secret antidote to obscurantism in "Elegia di Pico Farnese"6 (from Le occasioni). Even though she doesn't necessarily suffer that kind of love-change (into a sun­ flower) in the Montalian universe, in "Primavera hitleriana" (La bufera) she "harbors unchanging love, changed though she is" and cherishes her exclusive sun for the benefit of the few who can be enlightened; in the "Mottetti" and elsewhere she is evoked by sunny emblems (the locally incongruous jackals, the palm frond)—creatures of the East, which is her ancestral homeland, the cradle of sunrise. Her Jewishness and her avowed Christ-bearing mission are part 6

Certain intriguing lexical aspects of this poem have been clarified by Luciano Rebay in "I diaspori di Montale" (Italica 46, no. 1 [Spring 1969]: 33-53); this article included M.'s previously unpublished letters to his friend Bobi Bazlen, where important details and variants of the poem are discussed. Those letters are now reprinted in E. M., Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milano: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 93-97.

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of this. And she is inevitably connected with open, wide spaces, whether because she lives beyond the ocean, in America, or because she originally hails from the Levant. She, Beatrice-like, is therefore the only suitable agent of purgatorial liberation for the (however reluctant) persona of several poems as well as for the benighted world that remains blind and deaf to her appeal (as in "Iride" and "L'ombra della magnolia"). Confronted with the open spaces Qizia invited him to, the persona (or his vicarious father) may understandably recoil toward the familiar enclosed spaces ("narrow horizons" with amniotic bays, in "Proda di Versilia"; "uninhabited void which we occupied," in "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe"). The Montalian persona's hesitation to venture out into the wide open space (sea or sky) that is the locus of becoming, and his attendant nos­ talgia for the womblike enclosures (or for the safe terra firma), is at the center of his existential dilemma:To become or not to become? To be reborn or not to be reborn? Ago­ raphobia may even make him retreat into the sheltering womb of nonbeing. No such existential regressiveness attaches to "Iride," a poem its author declares to have "first dreamed and then translated from a nonexistent language"; in the same note to the text he adds that perhaps he is "more the medium than the author" of it. Montale has said much later, in "II tu" (The Thou, Saturn, 1969), that he likes to "sidetrack" (depistare) his critics, but surely he did not have "Iride" in mind when he said that. I am willing to take his state­ ment on "Iride" at face value; to consider this poem, ac­ cordingly, as resulting from a sudden accession of vision, anterior to any ratiocinative elaboration, and occurring in the suspended condition of dream. A poem, that is, which its author could not decipher beforehand and did not care to decipher afterward. In view of Montale's emphasis on intellect and deliberate craftsmanship, this must count as an exceptional occurrence, as if a Paul Valery had, for once, turned surrealist. Even so, "Iride" 's exceptional mode of composition does

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not seem to have set it so sharply apart from the rest of Montale's poetry as to make it impossible for readers to recognize the stylistic norm and thematic traits that this particular lyric shares with the others of La bufera's season. No doubt, the utterance is elliptical and the quality of im­ agery has a feverish crypticalness about it, while the de­ ceptively logical transitions, sustained by the firm over­ arching curves of Montalian syntax, baffle us with their impenetrable imperiousness. But a coeval lyric like "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel" exhibits the same characteristics, and yet Montale has not made for it the claim he has for "Iride"; nor is the strangely visionary quality absent from "II giglio rosso" (The Red Lily) or, on a different register, "Serenata indiana" (Indian Serenade) and "II ventaglio" (The Fan). Needless to say, the Clizia theme places "Iride" in the company of "L'orto," "L'ombra della magnolia," and "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe." The rich, sinuous syntax is the same. We should then acknowledge "Iride" as merely a purer precipitate of the same poetics that, never mind how consciously, pervasively operates in the other La bufera poems—in the poems of that phase in Montale's work which marks him as a decidedly apocalyptic poet. He has re­ peatedly said, in the critical essays now collected in Sulla poesia/ that poetry is "a dream one has in reason's pres­ ence," as if to specify that the nonrational element is at the source but needs reason's control to formulate itself. In "Iride" 's case it could be said that rational control, the principle of order, was already present as an objective force in the subconscious genesis of the poem, before its author had a chance to intervene with lens and erasers. The blind­ ing clarity of vision originally included that order, some­ thing which could only have happened to an artist so in­ ured to the discipline of reason and art that it eventually became part and parcel of his subconscious mind. In saying "rational," however, I am not postulating an everyday, 7 See note 6. Actually this definition is quoted by M. from Tommaso Ceva (Sulla poesia, pp. 105, 141).

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common-sense logic but rather the noumenal logic that Immanuel Kant (a thinker Montale tells me has been im­ portant to him8) calls Vernunft, reason beyond analysis. The artesian well of memory, over a lifetime of contem­ plation and meditation, has stored so much that it will occasionally well up at the prompting of chance. Could this be the "other kind of memory" that Nicola mentions to the Montalian persona in "Sul limite"? a memory broader than the individual's selfish range, deeper than his time span in existence? What I feel matters is that there is something like an educated unconscious; that reaching back into his primordial layers, the individual need not tap a chaos but a (potential or actual) cosmos. And this is what happens in "Iride." Quando di colpo San Martino smotta Ie sue braci e Ie attizza in fondo al cupo fornello dell'Ontario, schiocchi di pigne verdi fra la cenere ο il fumo d'un infuso di papaveri e il Volto insanguinato sul sudario che mi divide da te; questo e poco altro (se poco e un tuo segno, un ammicco, nella lotta che me sospinge in un ossario, spalle al muro, dove zaffiri celesti 8 See my article "Summer Days with Eugenio Montale," in Canto 2, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 71-97, a diary-like report of my meetings with him during the previous summer, which the poet read for final approval before pub­ lication. It should be clear too that the distinction between an "empirical" and a "transcendental" self, which M. draws in "La solitudine dell'artista" (now reprinted in E. M., Auto da fe, pp. 55-57), comes from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Neither Kant nor Martin Heidegger (a phi­ losopher whom M. likewise told me he knew) is mentioned in "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)" (first published in La Rassegna d'ltalia 1, no. 1 [January 1946]: 84-89; reprinted in E. M., Sulla poesia, pp. 561-569), where on the other hand Lev Shchestov, Giovanni Gentile, Benedetto Croce, Emile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson are quoted as having been relevant to M.'s intellectually formative phase.

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e palmizi e cicogne su una zampa non chiudono 1'atroce vista al povero Nestoriano smarrito); e quanto di te giunge dal naufragio delle mie genti, delle tue, or che un fuoco di gelo porta alia memoria il suolo ch'e tuo e che non vedesti; e altro rosario fra Ie dita non ho, non altra vampa se non questa, di resina e di bacche, t'ha investito. When suddenly St. Martin pokes around in his embers to revive them at the bottom of the deep Ontario chimney, pops of green pine cones amid the ashes or the steam of a poppy brew and the bloodstained Visage on the shroud that divides me from you; this and little else (if little a sign from you is, a wink, in the struggle which pushes me into an ossuary, my back to the wall, where celestial sapphires and palm trees and storks on one leg do not hide the grisly sight from the poor bewildered Nestorian); is what comes of you from the shipwreck of my people, of yours, now that a fire of frost brings back to mind the soil that you can claim as yours and never saw; and no rosary have I between my fingers, no blaze but this, of resin and berries, has hit you. In his initial listing of events, apparently unrelated, which turn out to be secret signs from his faraway beloved, the

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speaker of the poem is confirming the norm of Montalian poetics, though he does it with the poignancy that only montagelike images crowding one another in a dream can attain. The season is Indian Summer (Martinmas in European terms), and embers in a chimney, pine cones popping in the ashes, an infusion of poppy mark the autumnal atmosphere, much as other details do at the beginning of "Notizie dall'Amiata" in Le occasioni. Similarly, the unexpected emergence of the veronica in the context parallels the "icon" at the beginning of "Notizie." Indian summer, incidentally, is a brief return of light and warmth in the somber fall season, therefore an appropriate time for the manifestation of Clizia who is the (spiritual) sun's devotee. It is part of Montale's accomplishment to have encoded the Indian summer motif in the personalized gesture of a St. Martin who could be any of us tending the fire in the chilly, rainy month. Stirring the embers to revive the fire is like going against the grain in the benighted age to reassert values in the midst of historical entropy. Ontario in the context denotes America, the place where Clizia lives, and the eerie rhyme with "sudario" (sudarium) emphasizes her Christ-bearing mission, with a dissonant reverberation in "ossario" (ossuary) four lines down. At the same time, the veronica (end of stanza 1) "divides" the Montalian persona from the addressee of his utterance, Clizia. The reason for the division thus caused remains implicit; were we to step momentarily outside the magic circle of the poem in search of clues, we should learn from the author himself that Clizia, Christ-bearer though she is, also belongs to the Jewish faith which separates her from her lover.9 (Paradoxically, it is because of this that she can 9 This was a personal statement by the author to me in 1956, the year when La bufera e altro appeared in print; but see also Valentini, Lettura di Montale, p. 219, and Oreste Maori's analysis of M.'s La bufera (especially the Clizia poems) in Realta del simbolo (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1968), pp. 75146. In Le occasioni, Liuba and Dora Markus are also Jewish. Finally, M. said that Clizia was Jewish in an interview granted to L'Europeo 31, no. 45 (November 7, 1975): 40-41.

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bear Chrisf s message to an unresponsive world.) An internal clue to the "division" may also come from the disjunctiveunitive expression "the shipwreck of my people, of yours" at the beginning of stanza 3, eight lines below. "Division" is also, in a way, the fated predicament of the two lovers, the physically unbridgeable distance that amor de Ionh or love from afar presupposes, the ancestral cross of troubadour Jaufre de Rudel, of Dante and Petrarch, and now of their latter-day disciple, the sublimely anachronistic Eugenio Montale. And in his case, the harrowing-nourishing separation compounds all separations, including the religious and ethnic one. When we hear that oblique signs from the absent beloved reach the speaker while he is pushed to the wall "in an ossuary" during the course of a desperate struggle, we realize that the distance between them has become metaphysical; he lives in the hopeless world of the living dead who alternate senseless mass slaughter to the flat curse of anonymity (cross-references to the other Bufera poems and to Auto da fe are handy) while she exists somehow in another dimension, not just another continent or another community but a sphere of ethical transcendence (as already the "Mottetti" and several other poems from Le occasioni— "Eastbourne," "Nuove stanze," "Palio," "Elegia di Pico Farnese"—made clear). In another Bufera poem ("La frangia dei capelli," The Lock of Hair) the wars periodically breaking out among the anonymous, shapeless people of modern society are the affair of "nati morti," of those who were born dead. And in "Sul limite," as we saw, Nicola's ghost turns the tables on the world of the living and says that they are the real dead. In Montale's view, to be deaf to the spirit is to be dead. Although the candid reader might be baffled by the riddle­ like clause "where celestial sapphires/ and palm trees and storks on one leg do not hide/ the grisly sight from the poor/ bewildered Nestorian," this, again, is a thematic cluster that decodes itself once we realize it has to do with a fabulous East, indeed with the fairytale world of infancy as already

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evoked, years before, by "Carnevale di Gerti": a world of powerless innocence, a fantasy doomed. At the same time, Oriental exoticism connects with the Promised Land theme that will appear a few lines below ("the soil/ that you can claim as yours and never saw": Clizia, as a Jewess, belongs to Palestine, land of the sun, though she never was there, for she was born and lives in the United States). In "Dora Markus," one of the finest lyrics in Le occasbni, Dora pointed to her "true country" beyond the Adriatic, eastward. And the "Nestorian" himself, a clear counterpart of Montale the nonconformist,10 lay Christian, fits the Oriental context, for the Nestorian heresy, generated by a fifth-century patriarch of Constantinople who came from Syria, found a following in Eastern lands after being stamped out in the West. The "Eastern" theme is reinforced by the presence of a "celestial sapphire" in the relevant cluster; "oriental" happens to be the canonic attribute of the best kind of sapphire, the one having the brightest hue, and as such, one cannot help noting at this point that Dante mentions it in Purgatorio I to denote the terse blue of the predawn sky: "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," sweet hue of the oriental sapphire. In Montale's poem, the contrast with the "grisly sight" of deathly mementoes in the "ossuary" that is our destructive world could hardly be stronger. In fact, his "Nestorian" persona has a hard time both overcoming the horror that threatens to trap him and finding his way again into the purgatorial direction. In his bewilderment, he prays (to his distant lady? to her or his own God?), characteristically, with a rosary of berries. Berries and resin also supply the fuel for the "blaze" that reaches her in her remote abode, as if to mark a secret correspondence between her and him across the thousands of miles that separate them. The blaze has multiple connotations; it 10 On this point, see M.'s own statements in "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)." The Nestorian heresy emphasized God's incarnational aspect to the point of attributing two persons to Jesus Christ (namely, a divine and a human one) instead of just two natures as Catholic orthodoxy holds.

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obviously connects stanza 3 with the St. Martin motif of the beginning, where there is talk of a literal fireplace along with the temporary relief that Indian summer bestows in "Ontario" (America), but it acquires further meanings as a concrete symbol of love, spiritual illumination, and purgatorial "refining fire." Withal, the dominant tone in this image is one of yearned-for domestic intimacy—the more significant as it proves physically impossible in the hopeless circumstances. As if contrapuntally to stress this particular band of the semantic spectrum in the fire image, stanza 4 extols the wildness of the lady's heart in opposition to symbols of domesticity: Cuore d'altri non e simile al tuo, la lince non somiglia al bel soriano che apposta 1'uccello mosca sull'alloro; ma Ii credi tu eguali se t'awenturi fuor dell'ombra del sicomoro ο e forse quella maschera sul drappo bianco, quell'effigie di porpora che t'ha guidata? Nobody else's heart resembles yours, the lynx looks not at all like the handsome tiger-cat who ambushes the humming bird on the bay-laurel tree; but do you believe them the same if you venture out of the sycamore's shade or is it perhaps that mask on the white cloth, that purple effigy that guided you? Again, the ample, pliable, fully articulate syntax makes the logical transitions from clause to clause, and from image to image, sound like a matter of course; but their logic is dreamlike. As in stanza I, the whole movement finds its resolution in the hallucinatory veronica, which does not logically or factually originate from the particular set of events or objects that compose the framework; it supervenes like an apparition, an image from another sphere, to

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dominate the context. And this trait contributes more than any other to the visionary quality of the whole. Structurally, the apparitional climaxing of stanza 4 repeats the analogous one of stanza 1, since both end on the unanticipated veronica motif, and this structural echo concurs with syntactical strategy—the fact that the first three stanzas unfold within the limits of one supple sentence—to make stanza 4 a new beginning. Part Two of the poem, thus neatly marked, begins by rehearsing the introduction of Part One and consequently develops from the same thematic matrix to bring to fruition the chief elements of that first part. In Part Two, also, syntax changes, for it no longer encompasses three stanzas in one sweep; each of the three stanzas symmetrically making up Part Two is defined by one sentence or, in the case of stanza 6 and its envoy-like coda of two lines, comprises two closely connected sentences. Concomitantly, the focus stays firmly on the nature and mission of the beloved lady, who becomes more and more mythical and superhuman as the poem progresses, much like the Beatrice of the last cantos of Purgatorio—the only imaginable counterpart of this poem in world literature. Dreamlike, hallucinatory, surrealistic as the poem "Iride" avowedly is, it has a firm dynamic shape, with nothing chaotic about it. There is "order" in this "adventure" of Montale's, as Apollinaire might say, just as Clizia-Iris's "adventure" beyond the sheltering shade of the sycamore tree (stanza 4, line 5) makes her the harbinger of an ineffably higher "Order" of being, the order brought by Christ to an unreceptive world that nevertheless is still dark and therefore needs Clizia's missionary work, "in the night of the world" (stanza 5, line 6). She, as cognate poems of La bufera have it, is His "messenger"; and messenger is what the Greek word meant from which our "angel" derives; likewise, Iris was the messenger of the gods. Her transfiguration skirts hypostasis: Perch6 l'opera tua (che della Sua e una forma) fiorisse in altre Iuci

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Iri del Canaan ti dileguasti in quel nimbo di vischi e pugnitopi che il tuo cuore conduce nella notte del mondo, oltre il miraggio dei fiori del deserto, tuoi germani. So that your work (which is a form of His) might blossom in other lights O Iris of Canaan you vanished in that nimbus of mistletoe and holly which leads your heart into the night of the world, beyond the mirage of the desert flowers, your siblings. Once the lady attains her inconceivable status, she dominates the entire scene and makes sense of all the cryptical details that analogically pointed to her: the bestiarylike animals (feline or bird) of stanza 4, the plants of stanzas 4 and 5 (the sycamore as a shrub of the fig family belongs to Syria and the Orient, Clizia's ancestral land, but as a tree of the Platanus genus it is indigenous to North America, her actual habitat; mistletoe and holly are northern plants, defining the "other lights," i.e. climates where Clizia migrated from her aboriginal Palestine—though if holly and mistletoe make a "nimbus," it is partly to suggest the winter weather of the northern hemisphere and partly to insinuate the idea of Christmas; the storm cloud is also a halo; finally, the "desert flowers" are Clizia's "siblings" [germani] not just because her ancestral "Canaan" [Palestine] has plenty of desert in it but because the sunflower is her symbol: she was a creature of the East, of the sun, and she came to us in the Western darkness to bring that light— Christ's light, as the poem clarifies in its dazzling way). The lyrical, prophetic acme reached in stanza 5 seems to subside, with the sixth and final stanza, into the subdued, almost conversational tone of a private memory:

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Se appari, qui mi riporti, sotto la pergola di viti spoglie, accanto all'imbarcadero del nostro fiume—e il burchio non torna indietro, il sole di San Martino si stempera, nero. Ma se ritorni non sei tu, e mutata la tua storia terrena, non attendi al traghetto la prua, non hai sguardi, ne ieri, ne domani; perche I'opera Sua (che nella tua si trasforma) dev'esser continuata.

If you appear, here you bring me again, under the bower of bare grapevines, next to the wharf of our river—and the small boat does not go back, St. Martin's sun dissipates, black. But if you return it is not you, your terrene history has changed, you do not wait for the prow at the landing, you have no glances, no yesterday or tomorrow; because His work (which into yours is transformed) must be kept up.

Just as in Purgatorio XXX when Beatrice appears to the enraptured Dante in the Terrestrial Paradise on top of Mount Purgatory, reminding him of his youthful love and their personal bond (if only to chide him for his eventual unfaithfulness), the apparition of Clizia-Iris in Montale's private Eden brings back to his memory a love tryst at a place in the Italian countryside, on a riverbank, that she and he know only too well; and the time of the tryst was obviously a St. Martin's day, retrospectively accounting for the initial reference in stanza 1. Though Clizia has no reproaches for her devotee, she is as forbidding as Beatrice in her aloofness. Like Beatrice, she is invested with a Christbearing mission and looks beyond the personal past; once more, intimately close though she may be to her troubadour's

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heart, she reasserts her transcendent distance. Allowing for the inevitable differences in ideology and poetics, the unique intensity of an immediate nexus between the personal and the apocalyptic makes itself felt both in Dante and Montale. When Montale says of (and to) Clizia that she is no longer herself, he is conveying the shock of re-cognition that Dante avers when admitting the impact of the "old flame," veteris agnosco vestigia flammae. Does the poet's persona expect his distant interlocutor to recognize a similar flame when he talks of a resin and berry-fed blaze in stanza 3? Perhaps the "fuoco di gelo" (fire of frost) which in that very stanza resurrects in the speaker's memory the ancestral soil Qizia-Iris never saw, perhaps this Petrarchan oxymoron combines the ardor and the distance, the fiery love and the imperious inaccessibility of the beloved and thereby foreshadows the strange conclusion. At the same time, Montale's reliance on the venerable tradition (both literary and religious) that provides him with essential archetypes can only manifest itself in a modern mode. His "individual talent" 's relation to the medieval "tradition" is as free and personal as that of an Eliot, of a Pound, of a Yeats. The apocalypse transfiguring Clizia, and finally removing her from the persona's grasp, springs from his private experience of her and builds on a specific occasion remembered; it is in fact a transcendence of that memory, which nevertheless must be revived to be transcended. The intimate, exclusive tone of the lines commemorating the love tryst at the riverside landing arises from words that, in choice and arrangement, starkly etch the scene; they give it the feeling of uniqueness, of the unrepeatable moment, the there and then that, by memory evoked, would want to become a here and now again. The diction is sober, quite unliterary, while phrasing and rhythm, at least in the first part of this last stanza, are far more relaxed than they were in the previous one, where formal meter was strictly observed (six perfect hendecasyllables, one seven-syllable line) and syntax tightened into hypotactical knots to provide the proper setting for lofty

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expressions like "... Perche opera tua (che della Sua/ e una forma) . . . fiorisse in altre Iuci . . "Iri del Canaan ti dileguasti. . "dei fiori del deserto, tuoi germani." In stanza 6, first part, the meter loosens into free verse constantly overflowing the hendecasyllabic measure, the syntax relaxes into mainly paratactic clauses that in turn slow down the rhythm by frequent caesura and loosening punctuation. This deformalizing of verse and diction accounts for the peculiar kind of low-keyed intensity reached in these first four lines of stanza 6 right after the highstrung compactness of stanza 5 and just before formal tautness takes over again in the rest of the stanza and of the whole poem, where standard meter (five hendecasyllables, one seven-syllable line) supports anew a pro­ phetically concentrated utterance. But this is just the mod­ ulation of which Montale is capable, and it brings us very close to the heart of his poetry. Still waters run deep, witness that sun of St. Martin's day turning black in the fourth line of stanza 6, as if reflected in the river's darkening waters that "dissolve" (stempera) it with the coming of dusk—and of winter—and of impending old age; it is perceptually immediate, and stunningly alien, almost nightmarish, counterpointing the dazzle of sunlike Clizia, and yet it contains those visionary cues. As for the particularizing objects that naturally belong in the fluvial scene, one of them, the little boat ("burchio") that stays put instead of going back to the other shore, also conveys its share of further meanings in accordance with a norm of Montale's object-oriented poetics. The boat refuses to move because it expresses, correlatively, the heart's wish to perpetuate the beautiful instant against the erosion of time; yet freezing the privileged moment of happiness does not help either, if the sun that shone on that day can only fade into blackness. In a much earlier Montalian lyric ("Crisalide") from the 1925 volume Ossi di seppia, the same image operated more hopefully in an altogether different context that still involved the yearning for an unrecoverable past occasion of happiness:

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. . . spunta la barca di salvezza, e giunta: vedila che sciaborda tra Ie secche, esprime un suo burchiello che si volge al docile frangente—e 1& ci attende. . . . the boat of rescue looms, it's there: see, it rides buoyantly among the shallows, it lets loose a skiff that turns toward the compliant breakers—and there awaits us. The poem from the forties incorporates, and varies, the specific motif from the poem of the twenties—a poem, by the way, that also voiced the longing for love and freedom but without the transcendent outcome that the Bufera poem so poignantly articulates in purgatorial fashion. Readers of Montale's verse and prose since World War II know only too well that he is far from having solved the dilemmas of half a century ago: Freedom or the iron chain of causality? God or emptiness? Hope or doom in nature and history? . . . e forse tutto e fisso, tutto e scritto, e non vedremo sorgere per via la liberty, il miracolo, il fatto che non era necessario! . . . and maybe everything is fixed and written down, and we shall never witness on our way freedom, miracle arise, the fact that was not by necessity bound! This cry of metaphysical anguish from "Crisalide" indeed has not lost its relevance to the author of Auto da fe and Satura, but "Iride" seems to utter a different vision, something like an affirmative answer to the harrowing question, albeit not attuned to facile consolation, for GiziaIride does not come to soothe but to challenge and awaken the elect few.

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"Se appari," if you appear: the unqualified verb at the outset of the last stanza establishes Beatrice-like Clizia as probable apparition in the intermittences of the heart and as an epiphany that may very well point to an objective sphere of being, beyond self-locked subjectivity, beyond the precariousness of earthly entropy. So pivotally placed, the verb acts as a semantic hinge between the subjective and the ontological dimension of meaning, and also between the modern poet's language and that of his ancestor, Dante, who—unlike him—had no doubts about the independent, higher reality that could be epiphanized by his lady. Within the economy of the present poem, "appari," besides, works as antiphon to the "ti dileguasti" (you vanished) of the previous stanza: Clizia-Iris disappeared from her aboriginal land of Palestine inasmuch as she is the bearer of a perennial culture or idea and its very embodiment but only to manifest herself in the benighted world that is so remote (spiritually and geographically) from the sunlit Promised Land. Inasmuch as she is an individual person in contingent time and space, loved by the Montalian persona, she vanished from his sight after their intense if short-lived experience, to reappear to him in the inner sanctum of his memory as both the woman he knew and an utterly other one, unknown and perhaps unknowable because totally identified, in his consciousness, with the never-ending mission of Christ's word. "If you appear, here you bring me . . . back. . . . But if you return it is not you ..." Her "terrene history" has "changed" because, as the persona's imagination objectifies her, she has transcended her empirical situation and she refuses to repeat the past; she has "no glances, no yesterday or tomorrow," i.e. she has left behind the consumable earthbound memory that in "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe" Clizia herself urged Montale's father to relinquish, and she now lives in an eternal present to share the transcendent dimension in which alone Christ's word can live on and translate into further attempts at redemption. Could this be the "different memory" promised to the purified dead in the short story "Sul limite"?—an expansion

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of consciousness beyond the limits of individual selfish time? The "return" of Clizia-Iris is impossible if return means repetition of the past; it can take place only if her selftranscendence, her new function and status, is accepted. This is expressed by a series of negations vis-a-vis the familiar reality the persona remembers, culminating in the reiterated affirmation of a Christ-bound task (which had first occurred at the beginning of stanza 5, and now seals the poem as a musical coda, with variations, as if to extract its ultimate significance. A kind of via positiva, as medieval mystics and theologians would have said, replaces the via negativa, as an approach to the ineffable). The momentous coda precipitates the essence of the poem by uniting Beatrice­ like Clizia and (unnamed) Christ, who had dawned on the horizon of utterance very early, and insistently, in the form of a veronica. In the course of the poem, Christ "returns" to parallel the "return" of His messenger and basically structure the whole composition. In Part One, stanza 1, he is a bloodstained visage on the shroud, and Part Two, stanza 1 (the fourth stanza of the lyric) re-presents Him again as a veronica image—but with a telling variation on the theme, for in Part One He was an image of blood and in Part Two He is dignified into "purple"; in addition, in Part One He "divided" the poem's speaker from the poem's addressee, while in Part Two He "guides" her, royally. However, Christ cannot remain an image or He might become the mere object of fetishist cult. Accordingly, in stanza 4 (the second stanza of Part Two, following up the end of the immediately preceding stanza) He becomes a transcending mission (". . . your work [which is a form of His]"), and as such He recurs in the concluding couplet, with a neat musical inversion of phrase and a deeper resonance of the voice signalized by italics, an equivalent of the pedal in piano playing: "for His work (which is transformed/ into yours) must be kept up." Even the fact that the verb "transform" replaces in the coda the noun "form" of stanza

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5 has semantic significance as an activation of meaning in the direction of transcendence. And if we cast a backward glance at the poem's formal itinerary, we shall realize that its binary structure, as identified above, macroscopically mirrors the "return" theme, which has to do with the magical transformations of memory. Obviously the poem, if we accept the author's statements about it, subliminally dawned on him and took shape at one stroke. We have no reason to question what the poet himself has said about his work, but we also have no reason to believe that the peculiar genesis of this poem should set it apart from the others of the same stage of Montale's writing, as if it did not articulate, in its more elliptical way, the same themes and concerns that stirred his pen on those other occasions. Moreover, it does not seem to matter very much if the conscious intervention of reason in this case was minimal or nonexistent, for the dream that was or became the poem still showed the ordered physiognomy which, in Montale's opinion, marks poetry qua poetry— "a dream in reason's presence." And hereby I am far from implying that this poem is the work of a mere rationalist or I could not possibly invoke the formidable precedent of Dante's Purgatorio to spotlight certain essential traits that it shares, in its utterly independent way, with the medieval visionary model. One of these traits has to be recognized in the common investiture both Clizia and Beatrice have received from Christ to reform a degenerated world, an investiture Beatrice openly passes on to her devotee when she entrusts him with the mission of reporting to the "ill living world" the coded vision he has been privileged to witness in Purgatory, while his modern descendant merely insists on the necessity for Clizia to continue her Christ-inspired work. In both cases, the highly structured, formally self-contained poem reaches beyond itself to address those contemporaries—or future readers—who have ears. And neither poet claims to decipher the cryptical message—which must remain hidden in its

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iconic vividness until the mind of man has purified itself for the job of understanding the "visible speech." For both poets (the Dante of the Comedy and the Montale of "hide" in particular but also of several other apocalyptic and/or personal lyrics in La bufera) consider themselves ves­ sels, not creators, of their poetic message. In my opinion Montale's claim in his postscript footnote to "Iride" to have dreamed the poem, to have transcribed it from a non­ existent language, to be "rather its medium than its au­ thor," must be taken very seriously indeed. On the surface it might sound like a flat contradiction to the poetics of literary responsibility that he generally proclaims and prac­ tices, and in that case "Iride" would have to be regarded an unaccountable exception to the norm in Montale's work; but if so, he would hardly have placed it in emphatic po­ sition at the very outset of the fundamental "Silvae" section of La bufera which contains perhaps the most important lyrics in the whole volume, such as "L'orto," "Proda di Versilia," "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe," "Primavera hitleriana," "L'ombra della magnolia," "L'anguilla" (The Eel). These poems are intensely committed to his values, both personal and communal, and they exemplify his lyrical vein in its purest musical abandon. "Iride," then, far from being an oddity in the Montalian canon (his only instance of surrealistlike ecriture automaticjue) ranks as an extreme formulation of values and em­ bodiment of poetics; extreme in its purity, and therefore exemplary. Dream—the immediacy of unreflected vision— has absorbed reason in its nondiscursive logic to acquire what St. John-Perse called 'Tautorite du songe." The au­ thority of dream is all the modern poet has left to rely upon; Hugo Friedrich, in his 1956 book on the structure of modern lyrical poetry (Struktur der modernen Lyrik), talked of "dic­ tatorial imagination," meaning the irrationalist strain in twentieth-century poetry, stemming possibly from Rim­ baud. No irrationalism can be ascribed to Montale, to be sure, though he is painfully aware of the lurking menace

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of chaos to rational order in today's world. Witness his many essays and the Satura poems. Faced with the irrecoverable harmony of Dante's cosmos, which in his 1965 contribution to the Florence celebration of the sixth centennial of Dante's birth he defined as em­ inently rational,11 Montale can catch a glimpse of it in pri­ vate form, and the momentary apocalypse, unguaranteed by any embraced dogma, will flash out to confound what­ ever worldly (or ecclesiastical) "certainties" may surround us. In its incongruity to what passes for reality in our world, the vision will seem and be utterly anachronistic, even absurd. It can only take shape surreptitiously, as a dream, which, on the face of it, seems not to make sense at all. "II sogno e questo," this is the dream, said a poem of the thirties ("Barche sulla Marna," from Le occasioni); and it was simply an idea of the good life that man could have in a peaceful, active, hopeful world. This has become in­ commensurable with contemporary society, and Clizia is accordingly a transcendent hypostasis; today real reason, the formulation of meaningful order in a living community of nations, can only hide in the strangeness of dream. What was or should have been central and normative becomes marginal, eccentric. The mode itself of "Iride" 's compo­ sition implicitly challenges the public conventions of its time just as much as Dante's apocalypse, delegated to Be­ atrice, confronted the crumbling fourteenth-century insti­ tutions with the by then unattainable norm that should have provided their basis. The private dream of the modern poet episodically refracts the sustained vision of his me­ dieval predecessor. The latter, of course, was unshaken in his faith, whose transcendent nature rested on the foundations of such ra­ tional analysis as he knew, while his modern descendant knows reason only as a tentative process without the power to supply final certainties, and, as a consequence, the lost integrity of values that underlay medieval faith in a living 11

See note 2.

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Absolute can only glimmer discontinuously, and unreconstructibly, from the occasional cues that a dispersed ex­ perience can afford. Reality as experienced by the modern mind is opaque and increasingly shapeless. The "occa­ sions" of illumination Montale gleans from the random mass of events contemporary reality offers point the way to a significance, a fullness, that remains nevertheless prob­ lematic, forever elusive to the grasp of systematic thought. This was not the case with Dante and Aquinas, and Montale knows it, but he is too much the lay, disabused postEnlightenment thinker to harbor any naive reliance on a restoration of Thomist intellectual harmony; he is left with his groping search for meaning in a universe that either fails to cohere in a rational order or, worse, hardens into an unbreakable chain of causally connected facts with no room for freedom, for "the fact that was not bound by necessity." Intellectually oriented though he is, he lacks, even refuses, a unified system of thought, and the wav­ erings of his philosophical conceptions as shown by so much of his verse and prose, and by personal conversation, are the surest clue to the predicament that, in the last resort, torments him into poetry. The great lyrics we have been examining already suffice to signal this wavering, for nobody could possibly descry an intellectual agreement between the ontological conception operating at the roots of "Proda di Versilia," "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe," and "Iride," no matter how basically homogeneous the style undoubtedly is. But this makes Montale's yearning for the lost intellec­ tual and ethical Eden that Dante represents with his inte­ grated vision that much more dramatic, as any reader can verify by following from poem to poem the restless graph of searching thought. Montale's antisystematic bent is to be gauged not just against the Thomistic system that underlay Dante's mag­ num opus but even more against the recent or immediate predecessors of Montale's generation in philosophy: Hegel with his identification of reality and rationality and Croce with his post-Hegelian historicism, as the poems on history

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in Diario prove. This helps us to see the positive aspect of his philosophical helplessness, especially when we con­ sider his affinity for French contingentist philosophers like Emile Boutroux or for the criticism of experience that Immanuel Kant so sharply instituted two centuries ago. NeoKantian Lachelier also played a part in his formative years. Montale rejects any hard-and-fast formula that will claim to settle the problem of knowledge once and for all; he prefers to dwell in the precarious, in existential openness. Kant's ideas have been useful to Montale in other ways too. The German thinker's distinction between an empirical and a transcendental self finds a counterpart in Montale's analogous statements from a postwar article, "La solitudine dell'artista," and the poet himself has confirmed the rele­ vance in the interviews we had at Forte dei Marmi in July 1977.12 Then, in a self-interview published by the Milan daily Il corriere della sera on February 7, 1971,13 he said: "In a way, I let myself be written—By whom?—By him, and it is not necessary to give a mystical meaning to my inter­ locutor." And with this, we have come back to the problem of "Iride" 's connection with the other poems from the same season. The "lui" (him, uncapitalized) that is said to act as the creative source of Montale's writing is what the poet once called, in Kantian fashion, the "transcendental self" as dis­ tinguished from the empirical one (if he had Neo-Thomist leanings I might talk of a parallel polarity, active versus passive intellect). Though he discounts mystical interpre­ tations of the formula, he told me in the interview I men­ tioned above that the "lui" can also be viewed as his "dae­ mon"; maybe he had Socrates in mind, and if so, little difficulty remains. But the important element for my pur­ poses lies in his recognition of a modus operandi that, take it as we may, makes the writer a simple vessel of the po­ etical process; the latter in turn originates in something like 12 13

See note 8. Now reprinted in E. M., Sulla poesia, pp. 599-600.

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a deeper self who is responsible for message and (to some extent at least) form. Now when Montale says that he is rather the "medium" (medium in the Italian text, referring to the center of a spir­ itualist seance) than the author of "Iride," he is just re­ stating in radical terms the transcendental poetics I have been discussing; and this will help us to see more clearly the significant nexus between "Iride" and the other com­ positions that are chronologically as well as thematically contiguous to it. Montale the lay thinker, Montale the Christian without a Church, Montale the skeptical inves­ tigator of the contemporary scene and of history as a whole can only speak from a deep center in himself when writing poetry—such an innerly strange entity that it becomes other, "lui," and this vouches for the apocalyptic vein that came so prominently to the fore between Le occasioni and La bufera. Gender apart, this is what Wallace Stevens said in a Ulysses poem from Opus posthumous apropos of the "sybil of the self," and Paul Valery, long before him, had rhap­ sodized about La jeune parque; yet those eminently secular poets, lyrical as they could become about their inner Pythia ("Muse" having by now lost currency and credibility with poets and their readership), would never conceivably in­ dite a visionary poem like "Iride" or its cognate pieces such as "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel," "L'orto," and "L'ombra della magnolia." They were more at home in the world of phe­ nomena than Montale is, with his recurrent drive toward the noumenal; nor could they ever inwardly yield to an apocalypse that challenges the extant order of (historical as well as natural) things. Montale's vatic accessions, when they do come, take the reader by surprise; yet he has care­ fully avoided the label of vates, as the unassuming if at times puzzling statements just reported amply prove. Selfdeflating as he increasingly tended to be even in his verse, from Satura on, he still is the vatic author of "Primavera hitleriana," where political indignation and hope beyond hope add a further Dantesque trait to this purgatorial vi­ sion. One cannot imagine this in a Valery or in a Stevens,

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to both of whom, besides, Montale's statement of belief in (this worldly) "miracles" would have been quite alien—as they would not have been to an Eliot. The 1971 statements concerning the transcendental "he" (Iui) at the source of the writing act have an intriguing ambiguity about them that may reverberate on the Clizia figure as well: In a way I let myself be written. By whom? By him, and it is not necessary to give a mystical meaning to my interlocutor. Nevertheless it is true that I always imply the presence of someone whom the reader can identify as he pleases. (Sulla poesia, p. 600) It seems that the creative "he" within the poet also takes shape as the ubiquitous "thou" (whether identified by name or not) to whom the poems are generally addressed. Yet Montale balked at those critics who maintained that this "thou" was "a [linguistic] institution," as witness the poem "II tu," Saturn's epigraph. There he mockingly apologizes for "sidetracking" them and rebuts them with the mo­ mentous statement: "in me the many are one even if they appear/ multiplied by mirrors. . . ." Apart from his well-known reluctance at being pinned down in any way, it is important to notice the basic identity between the "he" and the "thou," between the source and the addressee of the poetical utterance (in Aristotelian terms, efficient and final cause). Thus even Clizia, that dominant "thou" of the "Mottetti" and La bufera, identifiable though she is with a woman in the flesh whom the writer himself describes as an American Jewess, inasmuch as she myth­ ically operates in the poems must be seen as one form, and function, of the "he-thou." In view of her pervasive, and decisive, presence in the writing, one wonders why Montale chose the masculine pronoun to indicate the spiritual force responsible for his creative activity. The answer might be that, first of all, calling that force a "lei" would have

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trivialized things, inevitably suggesting the rhetorically wornout Muse of yore, while a "lui" retains enough elusiveness to dodge such pitfalls. In the second place, one should not overrate the function of sex or gender at that level of discourse. Emily Dickinson likewise talks of a mysterious "he" in some poems dram­ atizing the source of the poetical act. With an orthodox Christian poet, the "He" would have easily declared him­ self as Christ, bridegroom of the writer's soul, as happens with St. John of the Cross. "Amada en el amado transformada" (the loved-loving one transformed into her lover), as the Spanish mystic says of his soul, could be said of Christ-bearing Clizia-Iris. Actually, Iris appears in the rel­ evant poem as so closely related to a "He" who is obviously Christ himself that first her work is said to be "a form of His" and then, symmetrically, "His work . . . is trans­ formed" into hers. This is a poem in-formed by a sacralized "lui" and addressed to a partly hypostatized feminine "in­ terlocutor" in such a way that the two tend to become one: "He," the source of apocalyptic utterance; she, its desti­ nation. "He" works through her, and she draws the per­ sona out. Similarly, the close interdependence of the two entities reappears in "L'ombra della magnolia," where she takes the form of a bird with "the Bridegroom's stigmata." On a related if divergent line of inquiry, we might notice how Montale's use of the "interlocutor^' he (she) recalls Yeats's idea of the antiself, but without the elaborate apparatus the Irish poet mounted to formalize and justify his vision. There is no denying, of course, that Yeats, if he had been privileged to survive the year of the outbreak of World War II, would have read with great interest both "Iride" and the comments appended to the visionary poem by its Italian author in what sounded very much like a language ger­ mane to the mediumistic conception (and alleged compo­ sition) of A Vision. For all that, even the fact of Montale's acquaintance with Yeats's work (an acquaintance docu­ mented by translation of "Sailing to Byzantium" in Quademo di traduzioni, A Notebook of Translations, 1948) should

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hardly mislead us into considering the remarkable contact just mentioned a matter of external influence or imitation. What Montale shares with Yeats is an independent affinity for apocalypse and an austere sense of poetic diction; but while Yeats's apocalyptic bent was nurtured chiefly by his predilection for Blake as has been amply proved by Hazard Adams and Margaret Rudd14 (theosophy a la Mme. Blavatsky being only an accessory), Dante—as a 1975 inter­ view with Giorgio Zampa declares15—has supplied Montale with his main paragon and incentive. When, therefore, Montale tells us that he has been more the medium than the author of "Iride," and follows it up by acknowledging a passive attitude, as a writer of poetry in general, to his inner interlocutor "lui" (he), we shall not stray from the right path by collating this "lui" with the "dictator" mentioned by Dante the pilgrim and by his fel­ low poet Bonagiunta Orbicciani in Purgatorio XXIV: . . . V mi son un che, quando Amor m'ispira, noto, ed a quel modo Ch'ei ditta dentro vo significando . . . I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and in the very way He inwardly dictates I go signifying. Right after this statement of method vindicating the Dolce Stil Nuovo school whose best-known members had been Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, and Dante himself, Bonagiunta graciously recants his old-fashioned pre-Stil Nuovo poetics by acknowledging that the new school follows much more closely the "dictator" 's bidding than he and his predecessors had done. Love dictates inside, he is a demonic god, a "lui" Dante will eventually learn to identify as God himself, 14 See Margaret Rudd, Divided Image, a study of William Bleike and W. B. Yeats (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953) and Hazard Adams, Blakeand Yeats: The Contrary Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954). 15 Now reprinted in E. M., Sulla poesia, p. 604.

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the "Love that moves the sun and the other stars," and Beatrice, soon to be met on the painfully earned mountaintop, will be instrumental in furthering this process of recognition. Accordingly, her imperiousness matches the dictator's from the very moment of her (re)appearance, and the poet-pilgrim will be the vessel for her revelation, obeying her command to write what he sees. He sees it in cipher, but the deciphering is not his task now, only the writing. Montale in turn, as he claims, has transcribed "Iride" twice. Listening to the dictator inside, and accordingly crediting him with authorship of the message transcribed, does not mean abdicating the responsibility for verbal accuracy, which is the actual point of the transcription. It would never suffice, for Montale as well as Dante, to say "It sings in me" (Es singt in mir) as Rilke did when describing the actual contact with his own creative source. The artificer of "Iride" claims no creativity for himself, just a long fidelity to the inner truth that may come from beyond himself, and he needs to personify that truth so that the originating force may become an interlocutor; there is no discoursing with an impersonal It, and the fidelity to "He" (She) coincides with attention to the craft. Dante needed a long initiation to receive his bardic investiture in Purgatory, from the early days when Beatrice and the god of Love appeared inextricably connected to each other to the moment of recollection on the holy mountain when she returns, Christ-bound and Christlike messenger, to make him a worthy vessel of the revelation she brings. The ascetical exercise of verbal art had found in this crucial moment its true sense. As for Montale, his purgatorial initiation, focused on the woes of present history if metahistorically rhapsodized, takes place in "Primavera hitleriana," "Iride," and "L'ombra della magnolia," those soaring utterances addressed to a sun-bound, Christ-bound Clizia who embodies in her nexus with Christ the wholeness for which the Montalian persona yearns. And just as Beatrice returns in spirit, not in the flesh, Clizia returns in the epiphanies of memory only. The remote meeting in the

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flesh, in both cases, is recalled and transcended. To earn this transfiguring moment of vision, the author of "Iride" had gone through the long exercise of his craft that produced Ossi di seppia and then Le occasioni. The literary pilgrimage from Vita nuova to Purgatorio XXX makes, in retrospect, a long apprenticeship of Dante's writing prior to the "return" of Beatrice; similarly, Clizia's "return" makes an appren­ ticeship of whatever Montale had written before, when proclaiming the inadequacy, the purely negative capability of his language vis-a-vis the endless provocation of reality, be it the sea's boisterousness or the scope of nature and mind in general. Apprenticeship is preparation; it entails ordeals. The crowning initiation makes Dante the prophetic vessel of his "sacred poem" in progress. This is not so with Montale, however, who remains the discontinuous, tentative rhapsodist after his flashes of apocalyptic vision. If Dante's pilgrim-progress brings him, inevitably, beyond Purgatory into the paradisal experience of fullness, Montale his modern descendant has no such chance. For him, fullness can only be glimpsed as an intermittent, distant, or even unachievable possibility; his progress stays, and can only stay, purgatorial. "L'ombra della magnolia," transcribing into pure vision­ ary music the poet's uncomfortable realization that Na­ zism's defeat leaves a more insidious enemy on the scene (and once again it is the elect few that see the danger), has this telling passage: Spendersi era ρΐύ facile, morire al primo batter d'ale, al primo incontro col nemico, un trastullo. Comincia ora la via piu dura . . . To lavish oneself was easier, to die at the first wing beat, at the first encounter with the enemy, child's play. Now begins the harder way . . .

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When the "vocal unison" of crowds frenzied by their dic­ tators prevailed, the previous lines say, the choice was clear, and possibly sacrificing oneself for the cause of hu­ man justice, much easier, whereas now the dehumanizing forces are at work from other quarters and in a pervasive way. As the coeval articles collected in Auto da fe and several poems from the sixties and seventies make clear (Saturn's "Botta e risposta I" is a case in point), what Montale has in mind is mass ideologies of any description and their underlying structure of industrial society that makes for the confusion of values by undermining individual con­ science and conditioning people to accelerated consump­ tion of its products. Herbert Marcuse's concept of "onedimensional man" comes to mind as an equivalent of this idea, though Montale owes nothing to him and does not share his Neo-Marxist views. In "L'ombra della magnolia," in fact, the antidote to that threatening shapelessness comes not from an enlightened (or radicalized) Marxism but from the elite version of Christianity that Montale's lay con­ science has no more trouble accepting than his friend Ben­ edetto Croce had. It will be remembered that the great Neapolitan thinker wrote a book called "Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves Christians"; as for Montale, I per­ sonally remember his recommending to me a book by Piero Martinetti,16 the Neo-Kantian philosopher, on the history of esoteric Christian sects that were often persecuted as here­ sies, from the Gnostics to the Cathars and Lollards, because they represented the purer form of Christ's message. "L'ombra della magnolia," however, voices these con­ cerns in the inspired language of prophetic imagery that marks thematically contiguous poems like "Primavera hitleriana" and "Iride"; we do not find ourselves arguing the ideological statement or implications but rather participat­ ing in the imaginative experience that emerges. When the perennial values to be reasserted against a shallow age take 16

Piero Martinetti, Gesii Cristo e il Cristianesimo (Milano: Il Saggiatore,

1964).

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unpredictable shape in the undaunted flight of a thrush (cesena) over a northern river's banks, we rehearse with the poet his ancient dream of liberation, whether embodied in the "white and blue darting blue jays" of Ossi di seppia or in the dare of the "stork" that pierces the clouds to wing its way "toward Capetown" in Le occasioni. It will stir again, after "L'ombra della magnolia," in the hawks of "Xenia" much later (Satura, 1971). This is the elemental gesture, the imaginative response to early observed bird life, and as such it can energize the accruing symbols that declare its allegorical status: fuggitiva cui zenit nadir cancro capricorno rimasero indistinti perche la guerra fosse in te e in chi adora su te Ie stimme del tuo Sposo, . . . fugitive to whom zenith nadir cancer capricorn remained undifferentiated so that the war could be in you and in those who worship in you the stigmata of your Bridegroom, . . . Since, a few lines before, the miraculous bird is said to be "consumed by the sun" and "rooted," and, immediately following the above-quoted lines, undaunted by "the shudder of frost," it is really an avatar of sunny Clizia, Christ-bearer to the people of the cold west and north (the thrush has His "stigmata"). Actually here the creeping cold has to do with the devitalizing climate of modern Western society at large rather than with weather determined by mere geography; a bleak historical scene is implied. As for the sybilline lines "so that the war could be in you and in those/ who worship in you...," they reflect the evangelical paradox according to which Christ came "to bring a sword," spiritual militancy being the only appropriate response of the enlightened few to the moral formlessness of the times. The even more cryptical phrase about "zenith nadir cancer/

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capricom" expresses, in astronomic terms with a quite Dantesque ring, the angelic bird's disregard of geographic distances in its missionary sweep through the skies. "Frail" though it is proclaimed to be, it dominates space, also inner space, the vertigo of intangible ideas. Hyperbolic as they are, these transcendental feats spring, in the internal economy of the poem, from the bird's natural attributes; in the same way, the natural scene observed at the outset of the lyric—an early fall season with a cicada intermittently shrilling from the now blossomless Japanese magnolia—gave the cue for a symbolic development that crystallizes into allegory, political as well as historical and religious. When the Montalian persona addresses Clizia by name (line 6) to tell her that "it is no longer the time of vocal unison," "the time of the unlimited numen/ who devours his faithful and breeds them anew," the precisely observed season of the year becomes a season of history, and as such it will underscore the lyrical developments until, in the last few lines of the poem, the historical connotation of lateness and antivital cold will blend into a metaphysical dimension of meaning: e l'autunno, e l'inverno, έ 1'oltrecielo che ti conduce e in cui mi getto, cefalo saltato in secco al novilunio. Addio. it is fall, it is winter, it's the sky beyond that leads you, and into it I fling myself, a mullet jumping on dry land at the new moon. Goodbye. The Goyaesque "unlimited numen," as the poet himself confirmed in private conversation in 1977, alludes not only to the dictators and the destructive frenzy they induced in their followers but also to the historically recurrent waves of mass irrationalism that may submerge the human polity in any age, not just the Fascist one. A careful reader will

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hardly miss the decisive subtlety of that first transition in the poem, from the isolated, thin if penetrating, and already tired voice of the cicada to the remembered "unison" of acclaiming crowds that led to abuse and destructive war. Not only does this emphasize the contrast of responsible individual and totalitarian folly; it also enables the poet to make the cicada an emblem of himself, as the later reappearance of the motif will clarify just before the quoted conclusion: . . . La lima che sottile incide tacera, la vuota scorza di chi cantava sara presto polvere . . . . . . The file that thinly incises will be hushed, the empty husk of the erstwhile singer will soon be dust . . . Acoustic precision blends with witty punning and self-irony to define the character of unassuming but truly "incisive" Montale who opposes his thin music to the shallow noise of the age. In this way his fidelity to the Beatrice-like beloved is asserted without pomp, and it is one and the same thing with fidelity to the values they both share. The poem, however, would not be the strange masterpiece it is if it did not reverse its downward movement into the snappy rebound at the end. At her farthest remove from the terrene, birdlike Clizia beckons the singer to her transcendent sphere, and he responds with a qualitative leap into that rarefied dimension that, however, proves as unbreathable to him as air does to stranded fish. One cannot dwell in transcendence (unless one is the transfigured entity Clizia has become), one can only touch it and die. But this death that seals the impossibility of transcending per­ manently the mundane sphere is at the same time a powerful assertion of vitality. This occurs by means of a sudden shift from astronomical, sublimated (the Christ-marked thrush) or diminutive, entropy-ridden imagery (the doomed cicada)

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to the elemental whiplash of the jumping mullet. Once again, it is the unpredictable transition, not just the intrinsic quality of images as such, that powers utterance. Everything is seized in motion; magical transformations take place, and incommens.urables momentarily converge into a climactic resolution countering the rarefaction and progressive degradation of energy that marked the cicada and expiring summer sequence. Condensation (and immediate release) of energy provides the response to the diminution and protracted loss of vitality; it's as if the yearning for quick and meaningful death "at the first encounter with the enemy" found here its unexpected fulfillment. Acceleration of phrasal rhythm in the conclusive lines, breaking up with the abrupt pause before "Addio," gives the whole poem its dynamic musical shape, not unlike a string quartet effusing a thin, sinuous melody of the violins capped by the full sonority of the four instruments dominated by the cello and stopped jerkily on a staccato phrase. Compared with the other purgatorial poems of La bufera I have discussed, "L'ombra della magnolia" evinces its own distinctive physiognomy. It differs in tone and resolution from both the deprecatory "Proda di Versilia" and the ontologically baffling, if lyrically superb, "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe." As for "Iride," whose visionary emblematism and rapt tone "L'ombra della magnolia" shares to some extent, its conclusion is of another kind, for it focuses entirely on the transfigured woman's spiritual mission to leave her earthbound worshiper behind, while "L'ombra della magnolia" finally concentrates on him, on his heroic if frustrated effort to follow her in her unattainable sphere. And if "Iride," as we saw, invites comparison with Purgatorio XXX and XXXI, where the return of Beatrice as other than the prematurely dead young woman Dante remembers, and yet still recognizably herself, signals Dante's painful initiation to vatic poetry of the apocalyptic type, the one point of Purgatorio that could be usefully juxtaposed to "L'ombra della magnolia" is the very end of Canto XXXIII with the immediate sequel of Paradiso I, where the purified

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Dante takes off into the heavens under Beatrice's guidance. Characteristically, this cannot happen to the Montalian per­ sona; the "mullet" jumps and dies to confirm that for the modern poet the purgatorial condition cannot be tran­ scended. For it is human condition as such, the truly his­ torical one unfolding between the two extremes of a "hell" and a "paradise," that defines the limits of consciousness, respectively its negative and positive pole. Allowing for the obvious differences, notably Dante's belief in a concrete afterworld with a physical shape, and his strict adherence to an architectural metaphysics, we can see that even in the Divine Comedy the realm of Purgatory is depicted as the truly human one, where reason is not dead, earth is not forgotten, and time moves visibly on the scale to which we are accustomed on earth; it also happens to be the domain of poets and artists, who are perpetually engaged in shap­ ing passion into image and vision. If, for Montale, the purgatorial condition cannot appar­ ently be left behind, this means also that it consists of the perennial or reiterated effort at (ethical) transcendence, and in this sense the lofty visions suddenly dawning on the horizon of several poems are far from delusory, no matter how contradictory they can be even within the scope of the same lyric, as happens with "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe."The dialectic of doubt, in Montale, qualifies but does not destroy or neutralize his recurrent drive toward a higher truth. He is still the writer who can say that "miracles happen on this earth, all around us," and that he knows nothing of another world, for "we humans are not made to draw distinctions between the world down here and the world beyond, up there."17 And he can still talk of "God" (or of "gods") most fervently in La bufera, or say (in later verse) that he refuses to believe in death. Then again, his version of hell is historical or psycho­ logical, as poems like "Arsenio" and "Primavera hitleriana" show. In the latter, the infernal situation is identified 17 "Autointervista"

600.

(see text p. 138); reprinted in E. M., Sulla poesia, p.

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with a phase of history currently dominated by Nazi and Fascist madness (Hitler is described as an "infernal mes­ senger"), and Clizia and her fellow spirits, those who can "look on high" and transcend the moment, will find the liberation from this nightmare; the poem, written in 1938 at one stroke under the painful impact of Hitler's visit to Florence, ends on a note of purgatorial hope, a vision of Easter with "untied bells" announcing a resurrection of sorts. Then, in "Piccolo testamento," the infernal condition is projected into a "hellish dance" that will seal the collapse of Western civilization, signalled by "a shadowy Lucifer" who "descends on a prow of the Thames, of the Hudson, of the Seine" like a big bat wearily flapping his "wings of bitumen." In the later "Botta e risposta I" (Satura) the poet returns to the historical phase depicted in "Piccolo testa­ mento" to figure forth a hell like the stables of Augias, fecal and oppressive, guarded by the henchmen of a reigning Hitler-like Satan ("Lui") who never shows his face; and the cleansing of the stables, that Herculean labor accom­ plished for us by the Allied forces in World War II, fails to bring about a true liberation because shapelessness, murkiness, and equivocation still linger. The infernal condition can also be implied in the per­ vasively decried state of the spiritually dead compared to the purgatorial attitude of those who are inwardly and ethically alive. Yet, in prose and verse, Montale can also say that the important thing is to be alive (but certainly not in a mindless or perverse way); if the emblematic mullet, that concentrate of animal vitality coming from the sea's matrix, dies upon jumping into thin air, the eel, in a poem that concludes the same section of La bufera, embodies a triumph of life over aridity and, at the same time, attracts to itself the privileged symbol of "iride." Clearly, despite the affinities often noticed from many a quarter, Montale's purgatorial vision has little in common with Eliot's, and La bufera18 corresponds neither to Ash 18

One of the finest analyses of this challenging collection is Oreste

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Wednesday nor to Little Gidding, even though Dante's venerable shade presides over the work of both the Italian and the Anglo-American poet. Eliot is too much the (however sincerely and philosophically) dogmatic Christian to be Montale's brother, whatever their stylistic consonances. They are first cousins. As for Pound, who gave us another impressive purgatorial suite with the Pisan Cantos, again he is too dogmatic (in the political sense) to belong in the same niche. The house of poetry has many mansions, and the three friends—the Italian, the adoptive Englishman, and the cussed American—could still communicate with one another, whatever their differences. Macri's "Esegesi del terzo libro di Montale," in Omaggio a Montale, ed. Silvio Ramat (Milano: Mondadori, 1966), pp. 197-255 (also in Macri, Realta del simbolo, pp. 75-146). Ramat has given further valuable interpretation of M.'s opus (chiefly the post-Bufera books) in La pianta della poesia (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1972), pp. 293-343, 349-351, and in Storia della poesia italiana del Novecento (Milano: Mursia, 1976), pp. 189-241, 382-410, 636-643. Macri has perceptively written on one outstanding part and aspect of M.'s late poetry in "L' 'Angelo nero' e il demonismo nella poesia montaliana," L'Albero 23 (1975): 3-75.

5 ANIMAL VITALITY

If the drive for ethical transcendence, for sublimation and visionary grace (or nightmare) informs so much of Montale's finest verse, in keeping with his Dantesque affinity, this purgatorial attitude could hardly subsist without the contrary push toward life in the flesh. The two aspects, as expressed in the poetry, may become mutually comple­ mentary, or they may make for quite an antinomy—which should dissuade any reader from trying to reduce Montale's artistic coherence to a matter of ideological one-sidedness. In his versatile universe, unsublimated Eros does not get short shrift, for the here and now of experience matters a great deal, without having to be certified by the elaborate metaphysical system that underlay Dante's po­ etical architecture. We have already seen how, in a purgatorial poem like "L'ombra della magnolia," the two complementary forces find an unexpected and utterly original solution to their conflict in the tensile polarity of bird and fish imagery; there the final gesture of the speaker, transformed into a mullet by the Circe of chthonic imagination, reaffirms life in the very act of losing it to the need to follow winged Clizia in her rarefied dimension. But in "L'anguilla,"1 a breathless 1 For specific discussions of this poem, see Silvio Ramat, Montale (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1965), pp. 209-212; Marco Forti, Eugenio Montale: La Poesia, la prosa di fantasia e d'invenzione (Milano: Mursia, 1973), pp. 276-279; Alvaro Valentini, Lettura di Montale: "La bufera e altro" (Roma: Bulzoni

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one-sentence poem of thirty lines which concludes the same section of La bufera that comprises "L'ombra della ma­ gnolia" and the other Clizia-inspired lyrics I have already examined, the irrepressibly pervasive fish whose life cycle encompasses the wide oceans and the inland rivers and rivulets of Europe triumphantly affirms life over aridity, as if to reverse the desolate stoniness of so many poems from Ossi di seppia and Le occasioni. Fish imagery also magically peoples the last stanza of "Proda di Versilia" to bring back the vanished Eden of childhood fraternization with animal life in the poet's native Liguria, and the eel in particular, a privileged sign, inhabits early lines from Ossi di seppia ("I limoni") returning as a very special memory in the halfhumorous, half-nostalgic story "II bello viene dopo" (The Real Thing Comes Later) in Farfalla di Dinard. Here a stylish gentleman takes his girlfriend out to dinner at a high-class restaurant and politely refuses all the gourmet dishes sug­ gested by the headwaiter. What he really would like, he explains, is the kind of diminutive eel he used to capture as a little boy in soapy water puddles and cook on a small stick until it nearly charred. (His spirited friend objects, suggesting that he should drink Manzanillo and get rid of those cumbersome memories that deny him his true free­ dom—and in so doing she harps on the same theme we saw so seriously treated in "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe" and "Sul limite.") For Montale, fish come from both the remote recesses of childhood memory and from the sea, our universal matrix of life: no wonder that they should so prominently figure in what a young critic has recently called Montale's "bes­ tiary" (the poet himself ironically says, in the words of the speaker of "Reliquie," Relics, a short story from Farfalla di Dinard, "Our life is a bestiary, a menagerie . . ."). On the editore, 1977), pp. 249-253; Giorgio Orelli, "L'anguilla/' in Eugenio Mon­ tale, ed. Annalisa Cima and Cesare Segre (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977), pp. 7090. Also (with special relevance to my approach) Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry, Eugenio Montale: The Private Language of Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977), pp. 106-110

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other hand, birds also strike this poet's imagination with a frequency and a poignancy comparable only to Dante's and Pascoli's, Pascoli being one immediate predecessor who counted for something in Montale's literary background. To bear this out, one only has to recall the bird similes of Inferno V—those unforgettable starlings, cranes, and doves that focus Paolo and Francesca's lovestruek fate—or the stork simile in Cocytus, pinpointing the shivers that make ice-stuck sinners' teeth chatter, or again the hawk and eagle similes, more heraldically proffered, of Purgatorio and Pa­ radise (but in one of the later Paradiso cantos there is, at the very outset, the bird-mother eagerly awaiting the dawn to start on her feeding mission). As for Pascoli, who grew up on a Romagna farm, he knew every bird's shape, color, and call, and no ornithol­ ogist could possibly find fault with his bird onomatopoeias. In his more restrained way, Montale (who does not favor onomatopoeia) shares Pascoli's affection for bird life and the related observance that bestows on several poems the mark of uniqueness. The darting "blue-white" blue jays and the "bewildered plover" of the "Mediterraneo" section in Ossi di seppia; the "March cockerel" and "hoopoe" of the same collection; the "balestrucci" (a particular variety of swallows) of the "Mottetti," the stork winging its way to­ ward Capetown in "Sotto la pioggia," the "migratory birds crashing against the lighthouse" in "Dora Markus" (Le occasioni); the black cock hunted down, the grouse to whose short, rapid flight Rimbaud's peculiar career is compared in "Per un omaggio a Rimbaud" (For an Homage to Rim­ baud) from La bufera; the cross-marked thrush, the black­ bird, the doves, the blackcaps from the same poem: it is impossible to disentangle Montale's lines from the flutter of beating wings. Throughout his writings, verse or prose, and even within the compass of individual compositions, a contrapuntal harmony arises from the strange tension between fish and bird imagery. Water and air, silent amniotic enclosures and perilous open spaces; the mute creatures of the deep and

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the singing denizens of the sky; two expressions of vitality, the subliminal and the sublimated, the whence and the whereto. They may conflict, as in "L'ombra della magno­ lia," or they may coexist, as in "Dora Markus" and "Proda di Versilia"; in "L'anguilla" the fish icon overpowers its rival. One can thus hardly escape the inference that on the iconic level the fish-bird polarity mirrors the polarity of life affirmation versus transcendence. The bird soars above and beyond any landlocked scene. But by the same token, a bird's wings are life's energy in action. When Montale says in a self-interview that the ambiguities are many more than Empson's canonic seven, he gives us a clue to his writing— and an implicit warning against schematization. The ambiguities of "L'anguilla" happen to be particularly intriguing. The poem is part of the "Silvae" series, which assumes Clizia as the most frequent addressee. But Clizia's kinship is generally with creatures of the air or of the sun, whether birds or mammals. Thus it is hard to connect the Beatrice-like lady with an expression such as figli dell'uomo, immersi nel tuo fango" (the children of man, immersed in your mud). The poet himself, in his notes appended to the Bufera volume, says that Clizia is the char­ acter appearing "in various Silvae pieces" (my italics), and if so, she may well have nothing to do with "L'anguilla." On the other hand, the concluding lines sum up the eel's vital strength and beauty as a "short" or "brief" rainbow (iride, iris), adding that it is "twin" to the one in the ad­ dressed lady's eyes, shining "intact" among "the children of man," and this is strongly reminiscent of Clizia, not just the Clizia of "Iride" but also of Le occasioni pieces like "PaHo," not to mention "Piccolo testamento," a poem avowedly addressed to her even though the "iris" in that context, instead of appearing as Clizia's own attribute, takes shape as a manifestation of the speaker's own thought and his bequest to her. In this connection one may remember how the origins of the iris, or rainbow icon, in Montale's poetry go farther back than Clizia's stirring appearance on his imaginative

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horizon. Dora Markus's words, in the first part of the Occasioni poem by that title, are said to have been iridescent ("le tue parole iridavano") like the scales of a particular kind of fish ("triglia," red mullet). "Carnevale di Gerti," from the same early part of Le occasioni, has "a long shiver of iridescences [iridi] passing by," with the liberating con­ notation of fairytale magic. Certainly with Clizia the motif culminates into a kind of hypostasis. As the poet has said in an interview,2 the memory of a personal occurrence often takes decades to attain poetical formulation. And the processes of heightening, transfiguration, and thematic coalescence that this long memory entails operate at the center of Montale's imagination. They also account for his personal mythology and for the convergence of early motifs into the myths of Clizia-sunflower, Clizia-migratory bird, Clizia-Iris, "Mosca"-fly and domestic tutelary numen, young woman-Vixen, Clizia-Lady X-Eel. No less than the "iris" motif, the sunflower antedates Clizia in the chro­ nology of Montalian emblems, as the nirvanic poem from Ossi di seppia shows; and the savior-woman myth itself was sketched in "Delta," a strong lyric from the same volume, long before it found an embodiment in Clizia, while foxes are remembered as magic signs of life in the lull of moun­ tain warfare in "Valmorbia," another Ossi di seppia piece. Within the compass of "L'anguilla," the same process of mythic development that from poem to poem and from book to book spanned so many years is recapitulated as the growth of the "rainbow" motif to nearly hypostatic climax. The sirenlike eel, who (like Clizia her probable or partial counterpart) comes from remote seas to penetrate upstream the innermost ramifications of earth's water sys­ tem, flashes at the sunlight "filtered through chestnut trees" in upland puddles or ditches from the Apennine to the Romagna (lines 11-14), it dashes on like a "torch, a whip,/ an arrow of Love on earth" (lines 15-16), it reveals itself a 2 E. M., "Autointervista," first published in the Milan daily Il corriere della sera on February 7, 1971; now in Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milano: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 599-600.

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"green soul" (line 18) seeking life in the very heart of sunscorched desolation (lines 19-20), it becomes a "spark" pro­ claiming that "everything begins" right when "everything seems to char" (lines 21-23), and, finally, to cap this se­ quence of optical and dynamic phenomena, it takes the shape of a "brief iris" (iride breve) akin to the one in the addressed lady's eyes. The metamorphosis of perception has precipitated a spiritual essence through the cumulative heightening of related images, themselves supported in turn by a syntax of uninterrupted reiteration that reflects the marine creature's indomitable energy. At its climax, this elemental energy transcends itself into pure vision and shows its secret kinship, almost an identity, with Clizia's "iris"—the pun being part of the mythic transformation. Animal vitality, water begotten and earthbound, has risen to ethereal status without leaving its proper element; con­ versely, the exalted woman has taken on some of the earthly attributes that belonged to her animal counterpart and seemed initially so alien to her paradisal sphere: mud, the generative slush into which the eel penetrates (line 10) and in which, when it becomes the lady's appurtenance, "the children of man" are immersed (last line but one). The double reversal, so utterly unexpected, verbally hinges on the "paradisi di fecondazione," paradises of fecunda­ tion, of line 19. In a poem celebrating the triumph of life over aridity, the only possible paradise is one connected with fertility, not with abstract sublimation, and Montale, who in another Bufera piece claims to "shy off from the goddess that refuses incarnation," has provided here a sub­ versive reinterpretation of Dante's Paradiso and of Guido Guinizzelli's canzone "Al cor gentil" (To the Gentle Heart). In the latter lyric, which ranks as the earliest manifesto of the Dolce Stil Nuovo school of which GuinizzelIi was the founding father and Dante the greatest disciple, mud is opposed to sunlight to illustrate the incompatibility of higher love and a vulgar nature. The sun can shine a long time on the mud without changing it for the better, for it takes a noble mineral, a gem, to respond to the sun's purifying

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action and then to the stars' enriching power; similarly, Guinizzelli argues, love can only find its receptacle in a "gentle heart"—on which it will work its moral wonder through the agency of an angelicized lady who acts on the susceptible man's soul as a star does on a gem. Given the closeness of Montale's Clizia myth to Dante's Beatrice and to Guinizzelli's angelic lady conception, it is far from arbitrary to postulate, in "L'anguilla," an implicit rejoinder to the medieval Dolce Stil Nuovo poets and a clear antiphon to that part of Montale's own verse, signally "Iride," that seems to follow in their sublimating footsteps. For "L'anguilla" makes mud intrinsically noble inasmuch as it is the seedbed of life, and as such, symbolically germane to Clizia (or the Clizia-Iike lady) who, far from being de­ graded thereby, achieves the fullness, and therefore the "paradise," of which mind and body, nature and spirit are capable—not "garlic and sapphires in the mud" but mud and iris-rainbow, the corporeal and the intangible, vitality and vision. It is not so much a question of dragging Iride's iris down into the slime, as it is, rather, of endowing her with flesh and blood, without which no light can shine or be perceived. Motion, light, and love, the intellectually transfigured forces of Dante's paradise, reappear in Mon­ tale's poem in the earthly guise of the eel, "arrow of Love," with the newfangled Beatrice's blessing—for she, in turn, is transmogrified into an earth goddess, more like Cybele or Venus than like the "Artemis" of another Bufera poem addressed to Clizia. The phallic connotations that could be sensed in the eel (regardless of the feminine gender the word anguilla has in Italian) concur with the clearly sexual denotation of "children of man immersed in your mud" to celebrate the triumph of a love that is utterly liberated Eros, unlike Dante's. The wish expressed thirty years before in Ossi di seppia has been fulfilled: "elegy" has become "hymn." Nor is this the only such instance in Montale's 1956 canzoniere, marked though it is by the searing awareness, and then indelible memory, of World War II, with the attendant purgatorial stance I have discussed above. The poems ad-

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dressed to a girl emblematically defined by the code name or senhal (as the medieval Prove^al poets would have called it) "Volpe" (Vixen) breathe the same heady air of ecstatic eroticism that does not deny the flesh. And this, along with the frequent references and addresses to God, sets the Bufera's hymnal achievement quite apart from whatever Montale had written before as well as from most of what he will write after. There are two "Vixen" sections in the volume, "Lampi e dediche" (which includes poems written between 1948 and 1952) and "Madrigali privati" (Private Madrigals, which comprises, with the exception of the ear­ lier "Le processioni del 1949," only later poems dating from the first half of the fifties). A lighter touch and swifter pace, corresponding to their section title, marks the delightfully elusive lyrics of "Lampi e dediche," many of which ob­ viously arose from the various trips (to England, to Greece, to the Middle East) that the profession of journalism (or his UNESCO membership) required of Montale.3 They often sound like casual jottings tied to ephemeral experience even if dictated by nonephemeral love. Among the short chapters of this love story in verse, it is difficult to choose a favorite, so vividly various they all are, even when, toward the end, they seem to approach the religious solemnity of a Clizia-Iike deification. There is "Verso Siena" (Towards Siena), prompted by the memory of a car ride under the May moon that suddenly scared into flight a herd of piglets on the Ambretta ford; there is, in four lines of uneven length, "Sul Llobregat" (On the Llobregat), registering a small shared experience from an­ other automobile trip, this time in the Pyrenees; and, in "La trota nera" (The Black Trout), there is the humor at the expense of all those "Economics graduates" and "Doc­ tors of Divinity" of the University of Reading who appar­ ently repel the lithe fish in the fountain basin into which they are peering, while the speaker of the poem suddenly 3 These writings are now collected in E. M., Fuori di casa (Milano-Napoli: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1968).

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descries an improbable identity between the mercurial fish's "flash of carbuncle" and his absent beloved's locks of black hair in her bathtub. That unexpected epiphany, springing from veiled laughter, reasserts vitality—the nimbleness of it, not its material denseness—against all devitalizing ab­ stractions and solemnities; but it does so within the airy sphere of unpremeditated immediacy, a chord of black brush strokes this side of sententious apologue. Erotic ecstasy, not humor, sets the tone in the preceding lyric, "Sulla Greve" (On the Greve), which celebrates love's physical presence as a kind of pagan Eucharist. "Ora non ceno solo con Io sguardo" (Now I'm no longer supping on eyesight alone), says the enraptured persona remembering the time when all he could hope for was briefly to see his beloved leaning from her window at the agreed-upon sig­ nal—a whistle. Now, he goes on to say in the second and last of these intense, conspiratorially secretive stanzas, she is his bread and water and wine. For her lover, who takes in the tactile splendor of her velvet dress as it opens flow­ erlike, in a ravishing swish, at the glissando notes of a mandolin in the restaurant orchestra, to dance and dine with her is to commune with the universe—with "the black flight of a swallow" that, at the end of the first stanza, seemed to "cover the world." As is to be expected from the consummate author of the earlier "Mottetti," rhythmic sprezzatura animates the dance of hendecasyllables, both injecting shorter lines at the end of each stanza and prolonging one line (the second one of stanza 2) by one syllable as if to underscore in the hypermetric measure the mandolin's glissando: E m'e pane quel boccio di velluto che s'apre su un glissato di mandolino, . . . Meanwhile rhymes play at hide and seek with our ear, since they neither occur regularly nor cling to line endings; they also happen to be alternately muffled by nestling in

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the midst of a line and, conversely, heightened by strong enjambment: acqua il fruscio scorrente, il tuo profondo respiro vino. water [is] the flowing swish, but your deep breath—wine. To appreciate this effect, we should keep in mind that "profondo" (deep) at the end of the last line but one echoes "mondo" (world) at the very end of stanza 1; and because that word recapitulated a quick succession of cosmic scenes and events (including the swallow's flight), while "profondo respiro" (deep breath, equated with wine) summarizes the woman's inebriating vitality, the rhyme is far from accidental: she rhymes with the universe, with the intact forces of it. Even the contiguousness of "rondine" (swallow) to "mondo" in the arrangement of line endings adds to the spell, for "rondine" almost rhymes with "mondo," therefore becoming the world of nature that its flight overarches. Animal emblem thus conspires with the overall sensuous imagery—an imagery proffered in the form of swift metaphoric identities or simple self-sufficient namings—to create the proper halo around the climactic feminine figure who does not have to be "described" in order to assert her irresistible presence. One thinks of a late love poem by Ungaretti, where it says of the woman addressed: "In te universo e vivere/ mi si svelarono" (In you the universe and life itself/ were revealed to me).4 In Montale's poem, to conclude, the crucial rhyme provides a structural hinge for the two stanzas and embodies the deep-seated analogy between life-giving woman and lifewelcoming world—the IatterrS spaciousness coming to focus in the former's intensity. And if the daring elusiveness of 4 Giuseppe Ungaretti, "Soliloquio" Qanuary-February 1969), in the "Nuove" section of Tutte Ie poesie, ed. Leone Piccioni (Milano: Mondadori, 1969), p. 332.

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the images fits the theme of a secret rendezvous, it also raises it to ritual status; the sensuous metaphors become icons of a private cult, much as had happened earlier with the Clizia series of poems. Clizia's eros is, of course, other than the Vixen's, whose vitality spurs her lover to say Yes to the world while Clizia's summons him to an ethical transcendence that by and large denies the world. And yet, just as Clizia took on some of the Vixen's earth-affirming attributes in "L'anguilla," the Vixen in turn can emulate her rival's Platonic drive toward sublimation as "Incantesimo" (Spell) shows at the conclusion of this first part of the Vixen series. Here, the poet encourages his sprightly beloved to stay "sheltered and free" within the flame of their shared thought, so that the incandescence of her "profane love" may lead her to Galilee to "discoveruncover" (scoprire) the "veil that once betrothed [her] to [her] God." To clinch the Platonic penchant, Diotima, priestess of love in the Symposium, is mentioned halfway in this poem as somebody who "utterly resembled" the present lady, who, in turn, in the previous lyric ("Per un omaggio a Rimbaud") appears as learned and inspired lecturer (and possible disciple) of the French maudit poet whose flight was daring but short, like the grouse's; she is, like him, a "child of the sun." And she should try those heights on butterfly wings ("ali di polline e di seta," wings of pollen and silk). If the sublimating elan hardly obliterates the Vixen's terrestrially erotic traits in these poems, moving on to the "Lampi e dediche" series we find "The Processions of 1949," which casts her in just the prophetic, unworldly role we otherwise associate with the Clizia of Le occasioni and of "Iride" or "L'orto." Indeed, were it not for the poet's own statement to the contrary in his notes to La bufera e altro, mere placement in the Vixen-dominated section of that volume would not be enough to persuade us that the lady of "furiously angelical virtue" who suddenly appears in the midst of a muggy, disheartening scene (the political exploitation of a popular image cult on the part of the then

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ruling clerical party) to chase away the devotees of the "pilgrim Madonna" is any other than imperious Clizia herself. Perhaps the one sign of this lady's earthier identity can be discerned in the mode of her epiphany (lines 9-10): she suddenly manifests herself "in the ditch," within "a bubble of soap and bugs," as a mere whiplash (scarto) that we cannot help associating with the fish life that plays such a pervasive part in Montale's poetical world, beginning with Ossi di seppia (unless a momentary rainbow in the bubble is also hinted at). In any case, what is in question is the minimal phenomenon that can carry vast implications in the Montalian poetical universe. The epiphanic "scarto" (whether we choose to interpret it as zoomorphic or as merely optical) denotes a qualitative transition of sorts, a sudden change connoting in turn the emergence of the new and "other" in the contingent; much later, in Satura II, a similar motif will find an even sharper formulation at the end of "Ex voto" (Dedication): Insisto nel ricercarti nel fuscello e mai nell'albero spiegato, mai nel pieno, sempre nel vuoto: in quello che anche al trapano resiste. I insist on seeking you in the wisp and never in the unfolded tree, never in fullness, always in emptiness: in what resists even the drill. In this poem, the absent lady—a constant in Montale's mythology—becomes indistinguishable from a metaphysical principle: an infinite in reverse, totality seen in the infinitely small. Yet, an intermediate form that retains links with the image of Her (in this case, the Vixen) as a woman in the flesh can

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also occur, for instance, in the delightfully whimsical jotting "Dal treno" (From a Train), back among "Lampi e dediche." There, a chain reaction of ethereal analogies makes Her present at the unexpected moment in the improbable place, through the unpredictable object or event—the diminutive crown topping a bulrush in a pond, momentarily flashing and falling down (this had been propounded by a different cue, the news that a certain species of turtledove had been sighted for the first time in the Sesto Calende area of Lombardy; that bird has a metallically resplendent "collar" too, and the observant persona happens to be travelling by train in that very area). The apparently insignificant event takes over in the viewer's consciousness: . . . E il suo volo di fuoco m'acceco sull'altro. . . . And its fiery flight blinded me to all else. The Clizia-inspired "Motets" in Le occasioni had moved along similar lines, and we can hardly escape the inference that, no matter how individually realized each Muse-like woman is in Montale's poetic pantheon, the transfiguring bent eventually intervenes to make them converge in the metaphysical sphere of essences—or in the arena of political and religious values. Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and Cino da Pistoia are paramount in Montale's ancestry. But this is not to say that the Montalian canzoniere deals in abstractions. The "thisness" or haecceitas of the person, no less than the hie et nunc, the "now and then" of experience, matters to Montale at least as much as it did to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet he admires (as his translation of "Pied Beauty" confirms5). And if the mythic image of the Vixen shows signs of coalescence with that of Clizia the 5 E. M., " 'La bellezza cangiante' da Gerard Manley Hopkins," in Quademo di traduzioni (Milano: Mondadori, 1975), p. 53. With English text en face.

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Sunflower Lady, we emerge from a reading of Le occasioni and La bufera with an unblunted sense of their dialectical relationship—a polarity that makes for intermittent or marginal exchange of attributes. The two figures are complementary, but certainly the Vixen is the one that is wedded to earthly (though not earth-locked) vitality. Montale's version of the eternal feminine archetype is more pluralistic than Dante's.6 In that spectrum, the Vixen as a rule occupies the warmer, thicker color bands, whatever the incidental modulations into the rarefied hues of the opposite end. The "Madrigali privati" bear rich witness to this, much more so than the far less explicit "Lampi e dediche." Unlike Clizia, who is adored at an emphatic distance even if erotic touches are not lacking in her kaleidoscopic portrayal, the Vixen is a passionate presence, and even if Montale characteristically refrains from carnally sexual detail in his verse, full fruition is implied: the Vixen grants actual fulfillment in an ardor that can be of the flesh as well as of the heart and mind. Fire recurs throughout these poems as a key factor of their iconic and emblematic climate. Hence the uniqueness of the Vixen lyrics within Montale's thematic and tonal gamut; if this comet had not glowed through his poetical horizon, we should be much poorer for it. To begin with, the first two pieces (untitled and conspicuously absent from the book's first edition in 1956, which included only the last five pieces of the eight now given) breathe utter happiness, the abandon of mutual love in childlike conspiracy that prompts private reference, private myth, private 6

Montale says of the women in his verse that they are very different from one another because he caught each in her particular traits; some of them actually are just "apparitions." Clizia and the Vixen, he goes on, contrast with one another because the former is a bringer of salvation while the latter is "terrene"; but they are both "Dantesque, Dantesque" (see Eugenio Montale, ed. Cima and Segre, p. 194). Mario Martelli has tried hard (perhaps too hard) to unravel the thread in Il rovescio della poesia (Milano: Longanesi, 1977).

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games—even, at the limit, in language. The privacy that Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry have rightly stressed7 as intrinsic to a poetry like Montale's with its pervasive tendency to exclude the reader from its inner sanctum, to "suppress the occasion" as he himself puts it, here gains additional relevance. Such reticence, combined with such effusiveness, makes us feel that we are granted glimpses of a rare ritual, and the exclusion of some details or clues becomes almost a privilege; the veiling, a revelation. Luxuriating as they do in this exhilarating atmosphere, the two poems in question prove contiguous to "Sulla Greve," the "Lampi e dediche" lyric discussed above; and this is especially true of the first one, beginning with the line "So che un raggio di sole (di Dio?) ancora/ puo incarnarsi . . ." (I know that a ray of the sun (of God?) can still/ find incarnation . . because it is metrically patterned in two short stanzas (quatrains) and it focuses on the swallow image. The regenerative power of love elicits divine hyperbole as prerogative of the beloved, whose magical kiss can animate a statue; she is omnipresent, and each rendezvous, indoors or outdoors, brings light, releases heraldic birds: a swallow, a hawk. Again, an anti-Motet of sorts, to celebrate presence and consummation. The second madrigal offers a tender variation on the theme. Here the privileged intimacy conveyed by the canonic I-Thou formula of utterance nurtures a different miracle, the thaumaturgy of words. It begins with a playful-earnest exchange: the beloved girl has baptized her backyard tree (a cherry tree, as we learn from "Incantesimo," the last of "Lampi e dediche," and from "Anniversario," the last "Madrigali privati") with the speaker's name, and he in return has given hers to an unconfinable array of elements, lives, and events culminating in her own creative "breath": 7 Almansi and Merry, Eugetiio Montale, passim. The pointed subtitle of this book is "The Private Language of Poetry."

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Hai dato il mio nome a un albero? Non e poco; pure non mi rassegno a restar ombra, ο tronco, di un abbandono nel suburbio. Io il tuo l'ho dato a un fiume, a un lungo incendio, al crudo gioco della mia sorte, alia fiducia sovrumana con cui parlasti al rospo uscito dalla fogna, senza orrore ο pieta ο tripudio, al respiro di quel forte e morbido tuo labbro che riesce, nominando, a creare: rospo fiore erba scoglio— quercia pronta a spiegarsi su di noi quando la pioggia spollina i carnosi petali del trifoglio e il fuoco cresce. Have you given my name to a tree? That's no small thing; yet I am not resigned to remain in the shadow, or trunk, of a suburban abandon. Yours I have given to a river, to a long-drawn fire, to the rough play of my destiny, to the superhuman trust with which you spoke to the toad that popped up from the sewer, with no horror or pity or jubilation, to the breath of that strong and soft lip of yours that can, by naming, create: toad flower grass cliff— oak ready to unfold all over us when rain washes off the pollen from the fleshy petals of clover and the fire grows. The joyous release also informs meter and syntax. While metric norm is given by standard hendecasyllables, three lines (numbers 1, 2, and 10) exceed the normative measure. Careful scanning will isolate within each of these hypermetric lines the syllabically and accentually normal hendecasyllable that makes up its bulk: in line 1 this is verified by excising "hai," the first word, and "poco," the last; line 2 would become a perfect hendecasyllable by shedding either its last three syllables in the syntagm "o tronco" or its first

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word, "pure," while to that effect line 10 would have to lose its last four syllables, "erba scoglio." What this means is that the hypermetric lines are still homogeneous to the standard ones because they rhythmically grow from the latter; the overall aural impact amounts to a basic steadiness of pulse with organic, not eccentric, variations, each of which expands the rhythmic unit without obliterating its physiognomy. And the expansion fits the semantic and iconic momentum, particularly in line 10 where the act of naming [rejcreates the pageantry of animal, vegetable, and mineral universe, "rospo fiore erba scoglio." Syntax as a whole translates this momentum into a sustained drive en­ compassing most of the thirteen lines (roughly ten and a half) in one sweeping sentence; the latter depends on basic paratactic cumulation within its governing clause, to which a reiteration of datives (with occasional dependent clauses to qualify them) imparts a growing resilience that rhyth­ mically embodies the "breath" of the girl poet—a child Adam if ever there was one, sex notwithstanding. The syntactical avalanche gains power contrastively, since it is played off against the two short sentences from which it springs. But it is supple, not compact; we never stop hearing a nimbly inflected voice that repeatedly pauses only to resume right away. In the process, it branches syntactically into dependent clauses, of which the second and last (". . . [lip] . . . that can, by naming, create . . .") ramifies in turn into further hypotactic growth (". . . oak ready to unfold . . . when rain washes off . . . and the fire grows"); thus syntactical mimesis irresistibly suggests, or rather enacts in the dynamism of the speaking voice, the "oak" 's taking shape from the girl poet's magical "breath" and "lip." At this point the poem achieves itself by developing to culmination its initial icon, the tree—which first appeared in casual if significant conjunction with the act of naming (line 1), while now it has become its function. This verifies what Edgar Allan Poe would have called "the power of words": his persona in the short story by that title literally

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"spoke" a star into material existence, and the feminine addressee of Montale's poem "speaks" a sheltering oak into vivid presence. There is an undercurrent of childlike wonder throughout the poem to make this miracle possible and indeed inevitable; the beloved girl concentrates that wonder in her own radiant person, and accordingly, if on one existential level she communicates with the adoring speaker persona in creative dialectic, on another level she communes with the elemental creature, the inarticulate toad, who emerges from an underworld of slime and decay with­ out thereby becoming either monstrous or disgusting. An­ imal and vegetable vitality, in turn, thrives on the four elements (earth, water, air, fire, all of them represented in the iconic compass of the poem) and nurtures the word that re-creates them—the world—in the magical conspiracy of the two lovers. The bliss of cosmic and personal harmony is attained—an utterly rare development in Montale!—thanks to the girl, who ends up as the center of the cosmos, whose elements she controls, air having become her creative breath and fire responding to her presence. The very last word of the poem is "cresce" (grows), and though it refers specif­ ically to fire (the fire of love and life), it actually defines and summarizes the whole dramatic shape as analyzed above. The poem indeed keeps growing on the reader who lets its formal and semantic cues work on him. The capriciousness that is part and parcel of its delightful liberty may lead us to unsuspected archetypal depths, as happens with many a fairytale (and fairytales are germane here). The speaker's magical identification with a rooted, limited, confined en­ tity (the suburban tree) is opposed to his girlfriend's iden­ tification with a whole array of apparently unrelated phe­ nomena from all walks of imaginable existence—and they include the four elements: the river for water, the "long fire," the chthonic toad for earth, her own animating breath for air. Thus while she (through her affectionate naming choice) tends to define him, he instead tends to release her from any confining definitions, to identify her with the

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living cosmos as a whole, or even with possibility as such. Yet she retains an individual character of which the "long fire" (the recent war? the fire of passion?) provides one signal component, perhaps potential destructiveness to be offset by the verbal (and transverbal) creativity that even­ tually crowns her magical attributes. Another aspect to be taken into account in this regard is her identification with the "rough play of [the speaker's] destiny." The drive to individualization, countervailing cosmic diffusiveness, is also conveyed by the fact that the speaker comes to bestow her name on her generous trust vis-a-vis the toad and finally on her lips' "strong and soft" creative "breath"—as if to insist that in the end she is above all herself, and herself as a sum of unique qualities, a vital essence. His reward is the magical tree reborn in her nam­ ing to cover them both—an expanding power, not a hope­ lessly pinpointed object. These considerations help us to find our way into the next poem, "Se t'hanno assomigliato" (If They Have Lik­ ened You),8 the most dithyrambic effusion ever to issue from Montale's careful pen, with the possible exception of "L'anguilla." Syntactical exuberance matches rapturous hyperbole and propels the rhythm through intermittent pulsations to an ecstatic climax. One sentence sweeps breathlessly through the thirty lines that, but for numbers 1 and 15 (regular seven-syllable verses) and number 12 (a four-syllable verse), happen to be standard hendecasyllables. This brings to a head the rhythmic impulse already so prominent in the previously analyzed "Madrigali privati," with which the present dithyramb also shares the ability to individualize the addressed woman in the very act of transfiguring her into a fairy-like power with cosmic resonance; and this happens because the dark, disquieting tones are not missing from the hymnic portrayal. She is a ravisher, and as such she contains a destructive witch in her makeup. She is siren and redeemer in one, a living 8

For a challenging interpretation of this poem, see ibid., pp. 113-115.

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oxymoron; and yet she is ineradicably anchored to the in­ dividualizing data of her birthplace and abode, Turin ("your terrace,/ the streets near the Cottolengo asylum, the lawn,/ the tree bearing my name vibrated at it . . . ," lines 5-7). As in the previous lyric (from which comes the naming of her tree after her lover), the girl evinces childlike traits, "la tua mano d'infante" (your infant hand), and above all harbors a deep affinity to the animal world. But if there she could just speak to a telluric creature (the toad) and then name it into poetical existence, here instead she is like certain animal forms that her wildness and freedom evoke: the wily, elegant, cruel fox to begin with, though in this particular poem the speaker, surprisingly, questions the appropriateness of the comparison, which is reproachfully ascribed to a nondescript chorus of "blind people" (lines 19 and 21), while he, and he alone, descries "wings" on her "frail shoulder blades" (line 22). Thereby he is rescuing her from any earthbound state to raise her to the same angelic, if pointedly animal, sphere in which the thrush and the other birdlike embodiments of Clizia move. By the same token, the involved speaker who claims for himself the only adequate vision of his sweetheart's anagogic real­ ity has moved from the realm of mere resemblance (the fox simile) to the realm of actual identity (she doesn't just look like a birdlike angel, she is one, at least in her lover's privileged, and private, eyes). What we have here is nothing less than a discovery, through metaphor, of a nonmetaphoric truth that I could only define in the Dantesque term of anagoge; yet the proc­ ess of discovery takes place in rather un-Dantesque fash­ ion. It is far from direct, and it gets under way with the skeptical formulas ("If," "It may be," "Perhaps") that Re­ becca West, in one of the most brilliant essays on Montale to appear in English so far, has analyzed as characterizing his "poetics of doubt"9 9

See Chapter One, note 7.

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Se t'hanno assomigliato alia volpe sara per la falcata prodigiosa, pel volo del tuo passo che unisce e che divide, che sconvolge e rinfranca il selciato . . . . . .—ο forse solo per l'onda luminosa che diffondi dalle mandorle tenere degli occhi, per l'astuzia dei tuoi pronti stupori, per Io strazio di piume lacerate che puo dare la tua mano d'infante in una stretta If they have likened you to the fox it may be for the prodigious stride, for your flying step that unites and divides, that disarrays and reinforces the pavement . . . . . .—or perhaps only for the luminous wave that you send forth from your eyes' tender almonds, for the cunning of your instant amazements, for the quick twinge of lacerated feathers that your infant hand can inflict at a grip So far the speaker is not rejecting the fox likeness, just considering it, and in so doing he is actually verifying it and, at the same time, portraying his exceptional woman as a radiant center of vitality that affects even inanimate matter. Her savage innocence seems to fit the fox emblem, whose traditional cunning becomes part of a seductive candor, and even her cruelty has to do with a wild sort of grace. But as the conditional opening phrase recurs, midway in the poem, the attitude changes and the fox likeness takes on negative, even sinister traits ("blond carnivore, . . . perfidious genie of the bush"), so that the now indignant speaker ironically asks why the people didn't go as far as

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likening the beguiling girl to the "filthy electrical catfish" that gives ugly shocks to the unwary swimmer. He then blames the offensive fallacy on their blindness to the girl's winged nature and to the "portent" he himself "bloodily graved" on her "incandescent forehead." This portentous mark, however, seems to have both consecrating and damning implications: . . . il solco che vi ho graffiato a sangue, croce cresima incantesimo jattura voto vale perdizione e salvezza . . . . . . the mark I scratched there bloodily, cross chrism enchantment evil spell vow farewell damnation and salvation . . . At this point, the pondering persona has become a worshiper, and the worshiper an ambiguous sorcerer hovering between priestly rites and black magic. The multivalent sign—an erotic initiation of sorts—confirms the enticingly troublesome nature of the girl whom the speaker has appropriated through his marking. In the universe of the poem, the sign also stands for the privileged recognition that poetry amounts to, since it emblematizes the girl's paradoxical quality: wild beast, child, angel in one. But that recognition, that climactic "discovery" (scoperta, fourth line from the end) apparently cannot be shared with others, those others who only saw the wild predatory animal in her ("donnola," weasel, an obvious variant of the "Vixen" emblem) or just the plain "woman" ("donna," and the phonic play between donnola and donna should not be overlooked). The point is that she is not only a woman or only a wild creature but something more, a being that encompasses the merely feral and the merely feminine in a kind of unorthodox transcendence. To share this recognition ("con chi dividerd la mia scoperta," with whom

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shall I share my discovery, fourth line from the bottom) would crown and perpetuate the epiphany, as any sincere founder of a cult would agree. But the recognition, and the poetry it elicits, remain private: deep truth is not for the many, as the last private madrigal will confirm, and the troubled persona must keep his burning revelation ("l'oro che porto," the gold I carry, third line from the bottom; "la brace che in me stride," the live coals sizzling within me, last line but one) all to himself—the uncommunicated ecstasy becomes, for the poet, a torment. The singular conclusion, well underscored by the con­ comitant farewell in the last line when the woman leaves him and turns back once more for a fleeting goodbye while going down the stairway after one of their rendezvous, rescues the poem from the pitfall of formalized allegory to refocus it pointedly on the human experience of love—this love, between these two people, now. The resulting suspense (heightened by the fact that the whole utterance ends with a question) provides the most original finale, with a stirring atmosphere that lingers on after we cease hearing the poet's voice; and here we recall germane vibrations from other lyrics, notably "Notizie dalTAmiata" ("La vita che faffabula e troppo breve/ se ti contiene!" the life that spins fables of you is too short/ if it contains you!), and in the present section of La bufera, "Per album," For an Album, with its cryptically intense ending on the note of an uncontainable ecstatic feeling: . . . ero gi& troppo ricco per contenerti viva. . . . I was already too rich to contain you in me, alive. At the same time, in the earnest rapture of the "private madrigal" under scrutiny one can hardly miss the playful counterpoint of that verbal echo "donnola . . . donna" I referred to above. Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry, in a

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book that does much to illuminate Montale's secretive achievement,10 as their masterly analysis of the madrigal called "Nubi color magenta" (Clouds of a Magenta Hue) can exemplify, have taken that verbal game as evidence of a deliberate tilting of language toward the pole of "insignificance," as if Montale were a Morgenstern; but I prefer to see it as one of the many happy cases of playfulness that relieve the austere poet's diction from possible monotony. Unlike Morgenstern's weasel, Montale's donnola is not there exclusively "for the sake of rhyme," though internal assonance does play its part in evoking the nimble animal to replace the other "blond carnivore," the fox; but the assonance between donnola and donna, weasel and woman, is semantic rather than just phonic. In this connection it would also be instructive to remember Montale's long predilection for diminutive animal life in his rich and peculiar bestiary, from the baby eel, the cicadas, the ants, the lizard, the hoopoe, the March cockerel, and the plover of Ossi di seppia to the hedgehogs of "Amiata" in Le occasioni and the small tortoise of "In un giardino italiano" (In an Italian Garden) from Diario del '71, not to mention the snail of "Un Crollo di cenere" (A Downfall of Ash) in Farfalla di Dinard and the totemic bat in another story from the same book. Even if Montale sometimes avowedly indulges in the verbalist game of using names as semantically depleted phonic counters, as in one piece of the sequence called "Dopo una fuga" (After a Flight, in Satura II), these verbal counters embody the debris of history public or private (for the latter case "Dr. Cap," for instance, in the "Xenia" sequence of Satura). No matter how loose the connection between signifier and signified can occasionally turn out to be, the former never lets entirely go of the latter, and nonsense is sporadically skirted at best, never embraced. Semantic rarefaction is a far less typical occurrence than semantic condensation in Montale's poetical language, as 10

Almansi and Merry, Eugenio Montale, p. 115.

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witness the verbal development in the "Madrigali privati" of ecstasy we have just analyzed. Here indeed, after carefully testing the semantic possibilities of the term "fox" vis-avis the very special woman that has elicited that analogical label from the limited wits of most people, the speaking persona impatiently discards the term as finally inadequate to the subtle task of denoting and connoting his nearly ineffable experience of that woman's identity, which must elude any such unilateral labeling because she is, to say it in the words of another poem from La bufera, "a life that is not another but itself." Accordingly, the only way left to come to terms with that intractable uniqueness is to converge on it from all sides with a massed array of words from the religious and mag­ ical sphere, as we saw. Mystical language has long known such verbal strategies in its inveterate partiality for the ne­ gation of one-sided analogies and for the subsequent oxymora, but in this case the point is the ineffability of the individual as such, the mysterious haecceitas of the "Vixen," and the nuclear fusion of semantic elements that tries to cope with it for expressive purposes leads us back to the persona's dramatic gesture of cruelly marking the girl with the bloody "chrism," the wound of individuality. The signifier has become transverbal, making a condensation of meaning(s) possible in turn. It is at this point that the contrapuntal playfulness of the "donnola-donna" assonance relieves diction from persist­ ent solemnity and modulates into the quite different, and more relaxed, register of a lyric like "Per album." Here verbal playfulness verges on the childlike to set a distinctive keynote for the whole composition. As far as iconic range and semantic dynamism go, "Per album" may count as a spirited if more subdued variation on the theme of "Se t'hanno assomigliato," because, if the latter lyric had taken shape as a search for the elusive girl's quintessential iden­ tity, this one enacts a long search for her presence; a search crowned by success at the unpredictable moment, in un­ expected circumstances, through the apparently insignifi-

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cant catalytic object: the three small kitchen boxes marked for use as containers of sand, soda, and soap (SABBIA SODA SAPONE, line 16) and suddenly transformed, for the speaker's privileged awareness, into a dovecote (piccionaia) from which she "started [her] flight" (line 17). Then (lines 18-22), just as he sees her vanish into the distant sky, the lightninglike epiphany overwhelms him with nearly unbearable fulfillment: Cosi sparisti nell'orizzonte incerto. Non c'e pensiero che imprigioni il fulmine ma chi ha veduto la luce non se ne priva. Mi stesi al piede del tuo ciliegio, ero gia troppo ricco per contenerti viva. Thus you disappeared in the uncertain horizon. There is no thought that can capture lightning but who has seen the light will not renounce it. I lay down under your cherry tree, I was too rich by now to contain you in me, alive. The suddenness of revelation revolutionizes consciousness, leaving a durable aftermath behind. Once again, the memorable climax has religious overtones. These are not linked to any established religion, to be sure, but rather to the kind of numinous experience that, according to Rudolf Otto, author of The Idea of the Holy, precedes and generates any historical cult and dogma. And if love is a private cult, an eros susceptible to catharsis without any denial of the flesh, then the "Vixen," still retaining her identity, meets Clizia in Montale's pantheon because she renews a similar function. She is now his All, his goddess or vehicle of whatever godhead may be conceivable for the secularized Christian. That is why the poem has kept exploring all the forms of life and existence, ransacking the universe in pursuit of her, much as Petrarch's canzone No. 129 ("Di pensiero in pensier, di monte in monte," From thought to thought, from mountain to mountain) and Ungaretti's "Dunja" poems respectively do. And, in intensity

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of diction, the conclusion rivals another Petrarchan poem that says of dead Laura: E m'£ rimasa nel pensier la luce And light has remained in my thought. Given such a final apogee of lyricism, the beginning of "Per album" may sound retrospectively improbable: Ho cominciato anzi giorno a buttar l'amo per te (lo chiamavo "il lamo"). Ma nessun guizzo di coda scorgevo nei pozzi limosi, nessun vento veniva col tuo indizio dai colli monferrini. I have started before dawn to cast the line for you (I called it "the lime"). But no whiplash of tail did I descry in the muddy pools, no wind would bring a sign of you from the Monferrato hills. In my didactically meant rendition I have tried to give an approximate idea of the Italian baby talk distorting the word for "hook" (amo), a key element of the linguistic playfulness mentioned above, particularly because it brings in a childhood memory that deepens and broadens the semantic space of the action being recounted. On the surface, indeed, this seems the story of a day spent in the Piedmontese countryside by an amateur fisherman who recalls his early exposure to the piscatory experience. Soon, however, a different resonance intervenes: this fisherman is not angling for any ordinary catch such as the small eel he used to snatch from the muddy pools of his infancy (see the beginning of "I limoni," at the outset of Ossi di seppia, and the short story "II bello viene dopo" in Farfalla di Dinard).

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He has been trying to catch Her, his feminine inspirer, not in the flesh but as a presence hidden in every form of life: Ho continuato il mio giorno sempre spiando te, larva girino frangia di rampicante francolino gazzella zebu ocapi nuvola nera grandine prima della vendemmia . . . I have continued my day always espying you, larva tadpole fringe of creeper francolin gazelle zebu okapi black cloud hailstorm before vintage . . . The quest goes far beyond any pond or brook to encompass all conceivable creatures, from the lowliest to the loveliest and most exotic (see the story "Reliquie," in Farfalla di Dinard., for the okapi), from animals to plants, and, finally, nature's elements, the very storm cloud. The delightful whimsy of these free associations springs from the childlike attitude already encoded in the linguistic keynote of line 2, and it recalls the verbal exuberance of the dithyramb previously analyzed; but it also recalls an analogous pattern in Petrarch's canzone No. 129, stanza 4: I' l'ho piu volte (or chi fia che m'il creda?) ne l'acqua chiara, e sopra l'erba verde veduto viva, e nel troncon d'un faggio, e 'n bianca nube si fatta che Leda avria ben detto che sua figlia perde Often have I seen her (now who will believe me?) alive in the clear water, and on the green grass, and in the trunk of a beech, and in a white cloud so shaped that Leda would have conceded defeat for her daughter [Helen]

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The dreamlike quest, in its dreamlike scene of relentless metamorphosis, seems doomed to frustration (". . . ho spigolato/ tra i filari inzuppati senza trovarti," I have gleaned between the drenched poplar rows without finding you, lines 12-13) until the unexpected happens; the desired, protean lady materializes for an instant in the one place and guise her seeker had not thought of, and hers will be a fleeting but decisive birdlike apparition, as if to verify the previous poem's crowning vindication of her winged nature, unrecognized by all. Epiphanies cannot be planned. Viewed from the vantage point of its dazzling climax, the poem's scene and time span far exceed the "one day in the [Piedmontese] countryside" that at first appeared to frame its narrative: the poem actually recapitulates an entire lifetime's quest for fulfillment and illumination. There is a clear precedent for this in the Occasioni poem "Accelerato" (Omnibus Train), which describes a routine train ride through a tunnel along the east Ligurian shore—Montale's native grounds—in such an allusive way as to make it actually an essential narrative of the questioning persona's life from boyhood to maturity. Rhythmically, that poem also forecasts the mimetic pattern of "L'anguilla" and "Se t'hanno assomigliato," banking as it does on the drive of un­ interrupted syntax to culminate in a question to the (unspecified) Thou for its own particular purposes; and even though this trait hardly corresponds to the rhythmic physiognomy of "Per album" and of the two subsequent (and last) madrigals, it is interesting to notice how several of these later poems, which exploit remote personal memories of the author persona, formally and thematically "remember" earlier Montalian poems from which they take certain cues. Thus, for instance, "Da un Iago svizzero" (From a Swiss Lake), counterpointing a present situation to a remote one that remains vague to the extent of nearly impenetrable privacy, seems to resume and vary the motifs of "Valmorbia" from Ossi di seppia. The earlier lyric dreamily reminisces about the World War I experience of mountain warfare in the Valmorbia valley. In retrospect, only the lovely Alpine

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scene and the lulls of battle retain a hold on the speaker's memory, who recalls the "oblivion of the world" induced in him and in his fellow soldiers by the protracted military predicament; even the signalling flares become instant flowers of light, the anxious nights are remembered as "all one dawn," with no sunset, and the foxes that came to the speaker's cave sound like a magical gift. In the "Private Madrigal" on hand, we have the emblematic Fox or Vixen ("Mia volpe" are the first two words), a cave among the hazelnut trees, fire present and past, and a direct reference to Apollinaire, the author of "The Assassinated Poet" who was one of the countless victims of World War I; the Montalian persona actually identifies with him ("Mia volpe, un giorno fui anch'io il 'poeta/ assassinato': la nel noccioleto/ raso, dove fa grotta, da un falo," My Vixen, once I too was the "assassinated poet": there in the hazelnut wood/ razed, where it arches into a grotto, by a bonfire . . .). Although vague tenor goes hand in hand with vivid vehicle in the metaphors involved, the reference to Apollinaire and his title would seem to place the remembered scene in that World War I situation which had inspired "Valmorbia" decades before and which now re-emerges, reshaped by transfiguring memory almost beyond recognition, to qualify the present experience—the speaker persona watching fireworks over a Swiss lake and thinking of his absent "Vixen." It is in any case the poem, not the conscious author, that remembers the earlier poem. This may explain the semantically unfocusing effect of certain objects that obviously trigger a chain of multiple metaphors: the "tondo di zecchino" (a sequin disc, line 4) seems at first to be just a coin or medal, but then (in line 5) it is said to have "lit her visage" (accendeva il tuo viso). And then one wonders whether the appropriate translation should be lit or lit up? The immediate sequel, however, makes a meaning like "drew, shaped, evoked" more probable since it delineates the descent of the luminous object (a Bengal light? the

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sun?)11 down to extinction in a cloud mass ("un nimbo, ove stemprarsi," line 7). More puzzling, the last three and one half lines (7-10) of the first stanza introduce the Vixen herself as the object of the speaker's thoughts in that remote situation which antedated her: he "anxiously/ invoked the end on that deep/sign of [her] open, bitter life,/ atrociously frail and yet strong." Either the recollected situation is recent (but then, what are we to make of the other circumstantial details?) or the speaker at this point telescopes into one or two distinct layers of his memory two phases of his existence, as if to imply that an intimation of her already dawned in him long before he knew her, or that his present acquaintance with her retrospectively colors and requalifies his much earlier experience. Whatever the answer, in stanza 2 it is the present situation that takes over to reaffirm his love's fiery intensity through and beyond the appropriate symbols. Light and fire denote her essence ("Sei tu che brilli al buio?" Is it you that shines in the dark?), and the speaker can only be attracted into her "redhot streaking trail" looking for the track of her "light predator paw," an "almost invisible star-shaped footprint": Is he descrying a fox paw in the radiating burst of fireworks? He says emphatically "again," and he defines himself as "stranger" (straniero); then, to cap the strange epiphany, a duck rises from the far end of the lake and "shows [him] the way to the new/ bonfire, to burn." Erotic ecstasy (with overtones of war's destructiveness that reinforce the implication of life's transiency?) is the consummation of everything in the poem and of the poem itself; it may well hark back, underneath it all, to that early consummation of a "Mediterraneo" poem in Ossi di seppia, "I know it well: to burn,/ this, and no other, is my purpose and meaning," one of the few Dionysian fervors in Montale's poetical career, which the Vixen now comes to rekindle and bring to fruition. 11 Answering a query of mine in spring 1980, M. has written to me that the tondo di zecchino (sequin disc) is a sunbeam filtered through the foliage. But the entire imagery of this poem is as ambiguous as it is poignant.

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All in all, there is something inviolable in this vivid poem, a matter of semantic indeterminacy (so aptly stressed by Almansi and Merry in general) that does not weaken im­ agery and music, as if the poet offered his words to the reader with the same undecipherable urgency with which experience offered him its signs to be verbally interpreted. The semantic ellipses and iconic superimpositions are cubistic; the poem can be enjoyed even if incompletely under­ stood. And once more the Vixen leads us a dance into vital ineffables, her conclusive sign, a bird soaring from water into fire. She keeps sprouting wings. Pervasive animal vitality underlies such metamorphic soarings into the kind of transcendence that can succeed without denial of the flesh and the heart. The Vixen gathers this force in herself and imparts it to her lover, to the point where even one fleeting apparition delegated by her to whatever phenomena cross the persona's visual field makes him rearrange his own life's perspective. A final summing up of the process released by her several presences and absences occurs in "Anniversario," the last "Madrigali privati"—a far more straightforward poem narratively speak­ ing than its immediate predecessor, if quite as puzzling on another level. Both lyrics address the Vixen with the very senhal or code name that the dithyrambic "Se t'hanno assomigliato" in this series had criticized as inadequate be­ cause coined by the crude ("blind") people who could not see her richer aspect, her irreducible—and transcending— vitality. "Mia volpe," My vixen, the speaker calls her now, as if forgetting his earlier rejection of that emblem. But contradictions can be the soul of poetry, and what he had resented in the "blind" people who so branded her was above all their appropriation of a private endearing nick­ name, its attendant banalization, the implicit reduction of the extraordinary girl's exuberant qualities to one bestiary stereotype. After making the point that she is much more than just a fox, he can obviously reappropriate the confi­ dential label that was conspicuously absent from the two

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lyrics following the dithyramb: "Nubi color magenta" and "Per album." The passionate address of "Nubi color magenta" (where the Vixen's dark hair becomes an "ebony wing" that "oc­ cupies the whole horizon/ with a long, unbearable shud­ der," causing the speaker to confess that living and dying are to him one in the acme of consummation with her) leads, along with the other analogous effusions, to the sacramental hyperbole of "Anniversario," which makes the Vixen a paramount cult object and a vehicle of deification. As with Clizia, though on a different expressive register, the experience of a uniquely intense love has led the re­ served, skeptically oriented Montale to something like a private religion of sorts, a religion that finds its only em­ bodiment in some of the most vibrantly unorthodox poetry ever to come from his pen. The poetry actually dramatizes the rise of that private religion in his introverted mind: Dal tempo della tua nascita sono in ginocchio, mia volpe. E da quel giorno che sento vinto il male, espiate Ie mie colpe. From the time of your birth I have been kneeling, my vixen. It is from that very day I feel evil conquered, my guilts expiated. The Vixen is younger than her singer by one generation, and his initial statement in this first quatrain should not be taken literally; as the second quatrain will intimate, he first knew her during the World War II years, when "a blaze burned long" and he "saw horror erupt on [her] roof,/ on [his] own," while "espying" her growth into adolescence "during the cooling lulls" of air war. Here we do not have a coalescence of contrary meanings (love and war) in the fire image, as in the previous lyric; but what matters is the adoration that has retrospectively raised the Vixen's birthday

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to Christmas status, for she turns out to have been his child Redeemer. No other interpretation can do justice to the two stanzas under scrutiny. Yet not even this heresy is enough for the speaker: in the conclusive third stanza he sees himself as deified (by her): Resto in ginocchio: il dono che sognavo non per me ma per tutti appartiene a me solo, Dio diviso dagli uomini, dal sangue raggrumato sui rami alti, sui frutti. I remain on my knees: the gift I envisioned not for myself but for all belongs to me alone, a God divided from humans, from the blood still clotted on the tall branches, on the fruits. Elsewhere (in "Verso Finistere," Toward Finistere, from "Lampi e dediche") the Vixen's lover had said that she might very well be his only proof that "God sees [him]" and that "[her] aquamarine pupils gaze on [His] behalf," and in another lyric from the same series ("Siria," Syria) he at first doubted that the ancient saying according to which "poetry is a ladder unto God" could apply to his own writing, while the puzzling conclusion of "Verso Siena," the first of "Lampi e dediche," mentioned a God (his own) who "threw the mask" and "blasted the rebel." Now the speaker, thanks to his Vixen-lady—the same mighty Muse for whose sake he "found [his] voice again" ("Siria")—has come to identify with God, or at least to conceive of himself as one, although he is frustrated by the realization that the "gift" (the liberating vision elicited by her) is for himself only and not for his fellow men as he had once hoped. This is unquestionably the hyperbole that surpasses all others

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in Montale's verse and universe,12 something that no reader of his earlier books could have foreseen, considering his general aversion to any kind of irrational ravings or selfglorifying posture. He is no d'Annunzio,13 regardless of some incidental affinity for that great poefs art, and he could never have written a "Song of Myself'; his self-critical inclinations are too strong, and so is his suspicion of metaphysical dogma. But surprise at this extraordinary development yields to discrimination when we consider how this self-apotheosis has no ontological implication, just a poetically descriptive import. To begin with, the speaking persona is not referring to himself as "God," i.e. he believes himself to have become godlike through his feminine awakener's gift. Poems from the subsequent collections like Satura and Diario del '71 e del '72 (Diary of 1971 and 1972) will state belief in godheads that walk around, unrecognized, in human form—a belief Montale avowedly shares with Hoelderlin. Then again there is something very unusual about a god who kneels in contrite adoration, recognizing defeat in the very act of proclaiming himself divine. Once more, we should beware of taking his poetical statements too literally, and in the light of the restless dialectic of aspirations, recognitions, and identi­ fications throughout "Madrigali privati" (and indeed the entire Bufera cycle), to be "God" at this juncture can only mean, for Montale, to have attained spiritual fulfillment. 12 Since

syntactically speaking the expression "Dio diviso etc." in this poem could also be interpreted as a vocative, in 1977 I made a point of asking the poet if such was the case, and he answered in the negative. The crurial syntagm must then be read as an apposition qualifying the autobiographical speaker, "me solo" (myself alone). For once, ambiguity is out of the question, though it avowedly plays an important role in M.'s poetry, as D'Arco Silvio Avalle has confirmed in his thorough analysis of "Gli orecchini" (The Earrings), in Tre saggi su Montale (Torino: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 21-90. 13 But see Mengaldo's linguistic analysis, as mentioned in Chapter One, note 14, and also his anthology of twentieth-century Italian poetry, Poeti italiani del Novecento (Milano: Mondadori, 1978), pp. xiii-lxxvii and 517531.

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This is the still point at which converge the intellectual plenitude that sublimating Clizia provided from afar and the vital fullness imparted by the Vixen's closeness in the triumph of her "animal" yet winged vitality: a liberating experience distilled into encompassing vision. Hence the need to share it with the rest of mankind, and the tragic realization that failure to achieve such a communion "divides," relegates the deified poet persona to a private station (paradise or limbo?) far removed from mankind and their suffering. It is bitter irony to have achieved godlike fulfillment—vital experience that is not blind or dumb, poetry that is more than just words, idea that is no mere abstraction, power that is grace—only to see its truth ignored or denied. The two poems immediately following "Anniversario" in La bufera's arrangement, respectively titled "Piccolo testamento" and "II sogno del prigioniero" (The Prisoner's Dream), provide the significant aftermath to that frustrating acme; they are offered as "Conclusioni prowisorie," Provisional Conclusions (the label of the book's seventh and last section) to mythify the poet's fidelity to his doomed dream of enlightened humanism (a frail "rainbow" or iride gleaming in his mind or discerned in the cobwebs of a prison cell) amid the impending collapse of Western civilization and then in the massively repressive circum­ stances that will supposedly follow that prophesied disaster. The obscurantist drift of the Cold War years left no better prospects for his disputed (humanist) "faith" and for the related "hope" that had "burned slower than a hard log on the hearth." This brings us to the historical relevance of even a selfstyled private madrigal like "Anniversario," which con­ tradicts its title by interpreting in its poetical mode the essential public events of World War II and postwar political stalemate. The singer of cosmic aridity (Ossi di seppia) and existential or historical entropy (Le occasioni) had already abandoned the posture of passive resistance to Fascist totalitarianism for one of coded protest in many a poem from his second book, and with "Primavera hitleriana" of

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1938 (a poem that could only be published after the war, in La bufera), the protest had reached an outspokenly messianic tone. Active hope for a better future, for a humane civilization after the defeat of Nazism likewise informed much of what Montale wrote in verse and prose between the last years of World War II and the immediate aftermath of the liberation (1945-1947), during which he even joined the progressive-liberal "Action Party" (Partito d'Azione). Concomitant statements are to be found in the short stories of Farfalla, for instance "Dominico" where the author benevolently smiles at a harmless Italian-American eccentric of pre-war Florence, a would-be avant-garde poet, with the final comment that even though Dominico Braga was an innocent (whatever his politics), salvation achieved only on the individual level cannot mean very much. Comparison with the differently pitched conclusion of "Anniversario" will show that political disappointment on the part of our fastidious poet was genuine, and his resort to "privacy" anything but smug. The deep-seated idea to be traced through so much of his work, and mythically expressed in La bufera—that fulfillment of individual po­ tentiality is the true goal of man—had here converged with the realization that such fulfillment could only happen, or make sense, within a socially liberated community. The dominance of mutually paralyzing mass ideologies (and political blocs) after the brief interval of liberation killed such a hope in Montale's case,14 until, in Satura, "Botta e risposta II," he would see only suicide as the logical answer for an acquaintance who had been forced to live "among millions of unaccomplished people." His retreat into wholesale political and social pessimism— 14 The journalism collected in the first pages of E. M.'s Auto dafe (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1966), and the story of Dominico Braga ("Dominico") in Farfalla di Dinard (Milano: Mondadori, 1970), pp. 88-92, prove that political engagement had been genuine on M.'s part and reverberate on poems like "Primavera hitleriana" or "Piccolo testamento" in the last section ("Conclusioni prowisorie") of La bufera, which some critics (for instance, Almansi and Merry) would read apolitically.

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a consequence of the post-World-War-II disappointment that seemed to rehearse the earlier postwar crisis though in a less obvious, and therefore more insidious way—has drawn predictable fire from engage quarters, and the poet himself has replied with pointed epigrams in the by now prevalent satirical-gnomic vein of his verse. The latter's drift toward a willfully prosaic relaxation and grayness retrospectively throws into sharper relief the vivid lyrical soarings of La bufera, Montale's belated youth, his one season of faith fulfilled, when fruition was experience and personal hope kindled hope for mankind in an apocalyptic hour. The animals, tutelary gods of his childhood, had flocked back to him in that hour, to nourish his language, to quicken his vision. A hymnal "Yes" temporarily superseded the stoic "No."

6 A DREAM IN REASON'S PRESENCE

Poetry, said a remote Genoese litterateur whom Montale repeatedly quotes with approval in his 1976 collection of critical essays, Sulla poesia, is "a dream dreamed in reason's presence" (un sogno fatto in presenza della ragione). The statement can supply a clue to Montale's poetic practice no less than to his literary preferences and criteria vis-avis other writers. How else are we to account, say, for his interest in contemporaries like Paul Valery or T. S. Eliot, for his rejection of Surrealism and any irrationalist posture, for his vindication of Croce's beneficial impact on Italian letters that the Neopolitan master allegedly preserved from the twin corruptions of Decadent morbidity and academic stagnation, or for his assertion that Dante's highly struc­ tured poetry was at the same time a monument of ration­ alism and an expression of the miraculous? Broadly considered, Montale's work as a whole receives light from the axiom under consideration, unless one wants to ignore his constant commitment to a cognitive poetry in defiance of all closed systems of thought—hence his early affinity, beyond Croce's idealist historicism, for Emile Boutroux's antimechanist philosophy of contingency as well as for Immanuel Kant's critique of reason against all claims of reason's omnipotence. There is no other way to under­ stand, in the lyrics and short stories we owe to the 1975

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Nobel laureate, the alternation or interweaving of the ear­ nest will to know with the Puck-like whimsy that seems to make light of it and is only the other side of an insuppressible need to transcend the obvious, the circumscribed, the predictable, to seek reality beyond "reality," truth be­ yond labels. Montale—like Baudelaire, like James, like VaIery, and of course Dante—is a writer in whom the poet and the critic coexist: sometimes harmoniously, sometimes rather as "eternal wrestlers, implacable brothers." For the dream may at times become nightmare, and the presence of reason will then be invoked to exorcise or con­ tain it. Thus, in La bufera's "Piccolo testamento," the poet's persona by lucidly facing the disintegration that he feels coming upon his entire Western society can at least pro­ visionally keep at bay the "bitumen-winged Lucifer" of collective derangement, and in "Sogno del prigioniero" (the next piece in that book) he symbolically survives within a Kafkaesque projection of totalitarian terror by clinging to the "rainbow" of that humane vision which was once shared in the daylight of reason and is now reduced to the pre­ carious status of a private dream. The besieged liberal con­ sciousness had known earlier ordeals of the kind, as we can see from various poems of Montale's previous volume, Le occasioni, notably "Corrispondenze" where his absent beloved inspirer suddenly appears to the poet's inner eye in the midst of a country landscape as a "shepherdess without flocks" (pastora senza greggi) who descries some invisible cipher beyond the present tumult of Dionysian fury (Bassareo); she is a leader without followers because few or none are the devotees of prophetic reason in a world stained by "irrational streams of blood," and at this point (but the development is common to many another lyric, such as "Eastbourne," "Palio," "Nuove stanze") she has shed any individual traits to become an embodiment, or hypostasis, of the poet's deepest longing for justice and freedom, the "dream" sketched fleetingly in "Barche sulla Marna"—a "vast, interminable day" of uneclipsed light

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punctuated by "man's good work,/ the veiled tomorrow that intimates no horror." The humanist vision of the good life in a just society becomes Utopia in the menacing circumstances of war-torn Europe in the thirties and in the stagnation that has suc­ ceeded World War II: obscurantism has the upper hand, "evil wins, the wheel will not stop." And so, reason (in the largest sense of the word) becomes a hermit glimmer within the scene depicted by all these Montalian poems, but as the shaping spirit that inhabits the poet's conscious­ ness it governs that scene; it is one and the same thing with active form. And to take an ostensibly apolitical lyric from the first part of Le occasioni, the sharpest weapon that watchful reason, or will to form, can at times use to exorcise the nightmare that threatens consciousness itself from the inside is syntax, which gives us the key to "Buffalo," an otherwise impenetrable poem. The name, as Montale ex­ plains in a footnote, refers to a Paris Velodrome, a big cov­ ered ampitheater for bicycle and motorcycle races, where the persona remembers witnessing a speed contest of "stayers" (bicyclists riding after motorcycles). Montale's well-known distaste for mass gatherings casts a lurid light on the scene, which the very first line expressionistically summarizes as a "dolce inferno" (sweet hell) combining the blare of megaphones, the inrush of motley crowds from unloading trucks, and the muggy heat in the steaming enclosure to conjure a weird hallucination: the big arena with its hustle-and-bustle just before the sports event be­ comes a "teeming gulf" crossed by "rafts" under the de­ monic eyes of a dozing "Negro" (a big poster?) spotlighted by a projector beam in the darkness, while equally demonic "laughing and soft women" wait for the arrivals, and the oval track figures forth a "stream" about to be crossed by a crowd that might be confronting Acheron as well.1 There is a dangerous seductiveness in the hallucination, 1 The Inferno references in this poem have been seen by Arshi Pipa, in Montale and Dante (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), pp. 48-52, but differently utilized for the purposes of exegesis.

Λ DREAM IN REASON'S PRESENCE

"sweet hell" that it is, and as the persona feels about to yield, he suddenly reacts by uttering to himself "Buffalo!", a successful exorcism: "e il nome agi," and the name worked. Why and how did the name work? First of all, it abruptly recalls the persona from the hallucination about to sub­ merge him in the hard facts of present reality: he is here in this covered stadium witnessing a sports event, and not in a Dantesque hell. Second, "Buffalo" has the liberating intimations of a free Elsewhere that will dawn in several subsequent poems of the same volume: those having to do with American Clizia ("Verso Capua," Toward Capua, for instance, featuring her apparition in the presence of the Stars and Stripes, "la bandiera stellata"). The sobering ef­ fect of the exorcism is described in the last six lines and a half: . . . Precipitavo nel limbo dove assordano Ie voci del sangue e i guizzi incendiano la vista come lampi di specchi. Udii gli schianti secchi, vidi attorno curve schiene striate mulinanti nella pista. . . . I was falling headlong into the limbo where blood roars with deafening voices and assails the eyesight as if with the flash of blinding mirrors. I heard the sharp crackles, I saw bent, striped backs whirling around on the track. Just as the chaotic id was about to engulf the persona, consciousness rescued him, restoring rational dominion over the troubling scene, which now came to be perceived in objective terms. Plosive alliterations, guttural or dental, intertwine with sibilants to pinpoint the astringent change of perspective from shapelessness to precision. Rhyme, a

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concomitant phonic signal of this recovery of dominance over chaos, appears in the end part ("pista," last line, echoing "vista," fifth line from the bottom, while "specchi," fourth line from the bottom, reverberates in "secchi," at the middle of the following line). Hearing and sight, the avenues of perception, can finally focus on their object after being temporarily confused or overpowered from within. But the clinching factor in the whole semantic process has to be seen in the alternation of verb tenses. The progressive past denoting indefinite duration (Italian imperfetto, "addensava," "precipitavo," etc.) dominates the first part of the poem to strengthen the sense of drifting, while the refocusing of consciousness is conveyed by the perfect tenses denoting punctual, definite events ("Mi dissi:/ 'Buffalo!'—e il nome agi," I said to myself: "Buffalo!"—and the name worked; "Udii gli schianti secchi, vidi attorno/ curve schiene . . .," I heard the sharp crackles, I saw/ bent backs . . . ; cf. "Precipitavo," I was falling headlong . . .). Of course the clearly perceived scene of the whirling racers is far from auspicious in itself, if we but think of the ominous implications in other Occasioni poems delineating circular movement, for instance "Palio" with its circling horses or the "wheel" of an evil historical Karma in "Eastbourne"; but the point is that now consciousness faces the scene squarely instead of being overpowered or seduced by it. Reason, after a crisis, has subdued nightmare. Not so in "D ritorno" (The Return), a strange piece further on in Le occasioni that nestles in taunting privacy to exclude the uninitiated reader from the secret of its "occasion"— biographical or just simply narrative. On these levels the poem resists interpretation; we are obviously not supposed to identify the (presumably feminine) Thou and must be content with looking at a short but climactic movie sequence, a snippet excerpted from an undecipherable whole that purposely eludes us. This typical Montalian strategy teases the reader who feels at the same time the privilege of getting confidential information and the frustration of being denied the clue. It's like being invited into a great palace only to

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be finally refused admittance into the private chamber of the host. And private it is indeed in the elliptical narrative of these relentless twenty-six lines that tell in driving syntactical tempo the preliminaries of a tryst in a country hideaway, well-known only to the two people involved.2 The cinematic sweep of one sentence scanned by the hammering reiteration of clauses hinging on the gesture of "Ecco," Here is, conveys in its paratactic way the approach to the house and into the room where the lady puts a (disquieting) record on the phonograph to conjure intimations of hell and the speaker declares himself "ready" for her "dark bite of tarantula." What are we to make of this odd climax? John Donne's persecutory "spider Love" of 'Twickenham Garden" comes to mind, and the reference is far from gratuitous in view of Montale's avowed interest in that metaphysical poet, but conscious imitation or unintentional echo is not the point here; it is rather a matter of independent analogy in the imagery that objectifies, with both poets, the experience of dark, destructive love—an experience that is merely the other side of rapture, as the singer of "The Extasie" and the modern troubadour of the "Mottetti" and "Iride" or the "Vixen" series well know. One only has to remember, within Montale's canon, the otherwise incomprehensible "Serenata indiana" in the "Finisterre" section of La bufera, where the absent beloved (Clizia herself, if we are to believe the author's notes) is likened to or actually identified with an octopus, just as Petrarch, in a sonnet lamenting his obsession with Laura, demonized her into a voracious, nightmarish lion. Such is the dialectic of eros. And "Π ritorno" dramatizes just this love as nightmare in a kind of lucid delirium that develops in a direction contrary to that of "Buffalo," where the dark forces of the irrational ultimately 2 For a description of the landscape involved and an assessment of the poem's free relation to it, see Vittorio Sereni, "II ritorno," in Letture Montaliane, ed. Comune and Provincia di Genova (Genoa's town administration and provincial administration; Genova: Bozzi publisher, 1977), pp. 191-195.

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fail to overwhelm consciousness. In both poems, syntax plays a central role because it is pure mimetic rhythm. We saw how it worked in "Buffalo"; in "II ritorno," on the other hand, it subliminally reinforces the progression of nightmare to its dark climax by enacting an uninterrupted series of iterations through anaphora that achieve a unique heightening effect. Once again the syntax of nightmare is symmetrical to the syntax of ecstasy, if we but think of "Se t'hanno assomigliato." The spider motif recurs in conjunction with the dream theme in a remarkable short story from Farfalla di Dinard that explicitly centers on Clizia ("Clizia a Foggia," CIizia at Foggia). The story is impersonally told, but strictly from her point of view, as if transcribed from first to third person narrative, and it moves with absolute ease from the level of circumstantial realism to surrealist fantasy and back. Having missed her noon train from the sunstruck southern town of Foggia, Clizia drifts from the flypaper studded waiting room of the railroad terminal into the town hall auditorium where two American professors are offering a public debate on metempsychosis with practical experi­ ments for those willing to cooperate. An illustrative pam­ phlet she buys before the talk begins shows Pythagoras in his south Italian garden discussing his own earlier incar­ nations with a group of disciples. Under the eyes of Pro­ fessor Peterson, who thinks she is a promising subject, Clizia falls asleep and dreams of being a spider in Pythagoras's garden where she eventually drowns in some honey; in the midst of her struggles, she wakes to Peterson's and Dobrowsky's elated urgings. Convinced that the dream must have revealed one of her previous existences as singer or poet (since she admits to a bias towards singing), the professors call her to the podium for the enlightenment of the audience. But when she insists that she has only dreamt of being a spider, not Sappho or la Malibran, they think she is being frivolous and show her out. The humor, the light touch, do not mean that the writer takes his theme lightly. Quite the contrary; the two pom-

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pous professors who reprimand Clizia, and the conniving audience of dupes that laugh her out of court, are the real targets, and the last laugh is on them for peddling preten­ tious cliches or, conversely, taking them seriously, while Clizia's strange experience claims the author's full imagi­ native commitment. What does it feel like to be a spider? Montale overlooks no detail in answering that existential question, and he places us (through Clizia) in the per­ spective of the spider with its many eyes, its horizontal vision, its diminutive size vis-a-vis the human world, and its incomparably light and resourceful body. In this way we come to feel the otherness of the utterly nonhuman creature, but as a wonder, not a monstrosity—and as the magical instrument for a rediscovery of reality. The world in spider-Clizia's view grows to ecstatic size, and in her metamorphosis she enjoys a mute communication with Py­ thagoras, whose admiration of her dew-beaded cobweb in the moonlight is not lost on the new Arachne. Indeed, the transformation conjured here recalls Ovid even more than Kafka—Ovid, from whose Metamorphoses Clizia's name and sunflower myth also come. The feat of imaginative identification with the utterly alien form of life eventually leads the writer to speak of the spider objectively as "il ragno" instead of "Clizia," with the grammatical consequence that from that moment to the terrifying end of the dream the masculine instead of the feminine pronoun is used, the latter reappearing only in the sentence describing Clizia's reawakening; and since her name is not used at this point, the unexpected pronoun shift imparts a shock well suited to the abrupt transition. The discontinuity between dream and waking has become the more drastic because Clizia (along with the impersonal narrator who mediates her relived experience to us) had come to take her spider existence for granted; in the con­ clusive part of the dream narrative the spider kills and eats flies and experiences many unspecified days in Pythago­ ras's courtyard—that is to say, a temporal sequence is es­ tablished that depicts the spider's life as normal and utterly

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incommensurable to the time dimension the dreamer re­ enters upon awakening. In "Clizia a Foggia" the flexibility of narrative prose has enabled Montale to push the experience of sympathetic identification with animal life even farther than in such coeval La bufera poems as "II gallo cedrone" (The Black Cock), where the speaker achieves ecstatic union with the lordly (and finally divine, "Jupiter"-like) wild bird in its agony and death. If that poem reaches a point of no return at the climax when "Jupiter is buried" (Giove e sotterrato), Clizia's return to waking life in the short story is ironically anticlimactic because the Petersons and Dobrowskys of this world deal only in stereotypes and cannot possibly begin to understand the extraordinary experience that had come upon her. Her dream was certainly more real than the publicly certified reality that waits to take her back at the end not just because of its hallucinatory vividness and not at all in the sense of sanctioning a belief in zoomorphic metempsychosis of the kind Peterson and Dobrowsky might envisage but because in its private, incommunicable way it was authentic. The tables are turned on what (Ε. E. Cummings') "mostpeople" take for reality (even occult, privi­ leged, "spiritual" reality). Clearly Montale (along with his Clizia) might accept the Pythagorean or Hindu belief in reincarnation as an imaginative hypothesis and as such it is put to work in the story; but they can only frown on any attempt to make a glib dogma of it, an impoverishment of reality and imagination alike. Reincarnation experiences, if one admits their possibility, cannot be had at the drop of a hat; epiphanies cannot be mechanized. And for all that, Clizia's spider dream, surrealistic as it undoubtedly is, does take place "in the presence of rea­ son." Unlike Kafka's insect metamorphosis, which invades the space of waking life and has no explanatory antecedents in the story by that title, Montale's occurs strictly within the boundaries of a private dreamworld and can be ration­ ally accounted for by some things Clizia had noticed in the railroad terminal (flypaper ribbons in which a big spider

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was stuck) and in the lecture hall (the pamphlet about Pythagoras, whose traits and milieu as pictured there reap­ pear, emphasized, in the dream). Clizia's dream (also fos­ tered by the intense heat and the languor it induces) de­ velops those cues and, in typically Montalian fashion, combines them in creative coalescence. The story in its entirety, therefore, can also be taken to illustrate the pro­ cedure of Montalian imagination, whether he got the topic from an actual confidence of Clizia herself or simply made it up and used Clizia as a convenient alter ego in his fiction. (In a letter to me, the poet pointed out that he always worked from the tangible data of experience rather than from preordained symbols.)3 But we should do an injustice to Montale's short story if we just dwelt on its rationalizing aspects. The dream is not to be mechanically explained in terms of its "causes" in waking life; in other words, it is not to be explained away. Montale rejects any dictatorially reductive concep­ tion of reason. The dream emerges in its weird coherence from and above whatever random perceptual data may have occasioned it in a particularly alert mind, just as the poem emerges in the poet's mind at the hint of seemingly insig­ nificant "occasions" that it—once achieved—supersedes. Nor should one forget Montale's partiality for the tiny object or creature as releaser of significance, witness the short story "Un crollo di cenere" in the same volume to which "Clizia a Foggia" belongs. In that story, devoid as it is of any surrealist elements, the focus of the characters' awareness is on a snail's progress on a little wall, and a game is improvised among them: Will the snail make it to climb over the wall before the ashes fall from somebody's lit cigarette? The characters in question are supposed to be watching the colossal outdoor staging of a militant Fascist play sometime in the thirties. The revenge of the private sphere on public noise and mass coercion could not be 3 Published as "Su 'Giorno e notte/ una lettera di Eugenio Montale e una nota di Glauco Cambon" in Aut-Aut 67 (1962): 44-45.

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more elfishly outlined, while the agoraphobic revulsion to big crowds has reminded some critics of the "Buffalo" framework. One remembers also Montale's remark, elsewhere in Farfalla, to the effect that nugae (trifles) are somehow of the essence as far as civilization is concerned; megaphones are not to be outshouted by megaphones. Such trifles are far from inane in his poetry if we but think of Dora Markus's little ivory mouse—the amulet that shares her handbag with powderpuff, nail file, and lipstick to embody the de­ fiance of her feminine frailty against the hopeless times; and what about Liuba's caged cat (or Collodian cricket, a reference not to be resisted), the diminutive Noah's Ark that carries the Lares of her "dispersed family" to protect her flight from persecution.4 What about the bat, in Farfalla's story by that name, which takes on totemic traits to remind the protagonist of his father; and the butterfly itself, in the eponymous final story of that volume, which may be a messenger from the speaker's distant beloved but is visible only to him, a private epiphany then, a waking dream, a dream in reason's presence? And if one were to object to the choice of the housefly for an affectionate em­ blem, La Mosca, the poet's wife never resented her nick­ name, nor would she, presumably, take exception to her flylike avatars in "Xenia" and in other poems dictated by fond remembrance of her. Humor and apocalypse con­ verge in the diminutive emblem (or should we call it a reincarnation?); she is credited with seeing through every­ thing, especially through the masks phony people wear in polite society, and she has the status of a chthonic house­ hold goddess. Even as late as 1975, Montale insists that the only poem he transcribed from a dream is "Iride," as we saw, while the others have all been "rational enough."5 But the reason watching over his dreams (or nightmares) is open, not re4 For an attempt to fathom the deep structure of this poem, see D'Arco Silvio Avalle, Tre saggi su Montale (Torino: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 93-99. 5 L'Europeo 31, no. 45 (November 7, 1975): 40-41.

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pressive, and that is why without its assistance they could never take verbal shape. Reason is form, if by form we mean the movement of articulation rather than a precon­ ceived mold, and therefore, at the limit, it is one and the same with imagination; Montale's imagination is alert to the small thing or creature, to the diminutive event that can make all the difference. In that case, to dream is to see: perhaps "infinity in a grain of sand," "eternity in an hour." Unless—as happens in "Retrocedendo" (Going Back­ wards) from Diario del '71—the infinity glimpsed in the flash of dreamwaking elicited by the tiny sound of a tiny creature (a woodworm overheard in an old chest of drawers) turns out to be a Piranesian nightmare of never-ending incar­ cerations in Chinese-box spaces; the man listening to the unseen insect is in turn drilling through unknown wood to the annoyance of an invisibly huge listener who unwit­ tingly plays woodworm to somebody or something incommensurably bigger, and so on. The poet who has spent a lifetime probing reality for a glimmer of light, a sign of meaningfulness, of salvation, does not shirk the alternative vision of unrelieved negativity, of possible formlessness. Formlessness or, more exactly, incommensurability—within rather than beyond given reality, an inverted transcend­ ence, as of an irrational number. If, however, this night­ marish sense of the incommensurable as endless retrogres­ sion yields to an imaginative grasp of the dialectical relation between the endlessly small and the overwhelmingly big, a bracing dizziness replaces the mathematical vertigo of displacement and an imaginary space arises within which the mind can move without terror. This is the case with "Angelo nero" (Black Angel) from Satura, where the "angelic" entity invoked by the persona with litanylike insistence keeps swaying between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic scale with a final effect of exhilaration. Humor and realist brushstrokes contribute to the subjective apocalypse (the angel is "fuligginoso," sooty, and later on "di carbone," made of coal; he nestles in the shawl of the roast chestnut vendor after covering the world

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with his wings, finally to become a dimensionally contra­ dictory "great angel/ of ashes and smoke, chimney-sweep­ ing/ miniangel"). The obsessive monochrome calls forth its negative, for the "great angel of ebony" (stanza 4) might also be "white," and then we have the negative of a (pho­ tographic) negative. Thus by embracing the negative element, imagination has transmogrified the nightmare of smog pollution in the modern city into a propitiatory myth with authentic sur­ realist power. It's an apotropaic visionary act, a dream dreamed beyond the normal boundaries of reason—to ex­ pand it, not to destroy it. Iterative syntax, prayer-like rhet­ oric, oxymoric imagery coupled with heightening repeti­ tion add up to a religious (even Dionysian) hymn in reverse. In MirabelI, James Merrill later achieved something com­ parable by conceiving of his cosmogonic devils as huge angelic bats who also inhere in atomic structure; but unlike him, Montale eschews any attempt to rationalize his own vision. Montale's art at this point verges on nonsense verse, if only to essay a different kind of coherence; he is an admiring connoisseur of Lewis Carroll. By the same token, he could be an admirer of futurist Bruno Munari, whose pragmatic description of imagination's unpredictable ways6 seems to illustrate (without referring to it) the creative pro­ cedure of "Angelo nero," the black angel that the pixy or the child in world-weary Montale has conjured from the very materials of workaday urban experience, freely re­ shuffling them to set up an alternative world (in the same way, says Munari, schoolchildren taking their cue from common objects create alternative worlds of their own with paper, cloth, wood, pencil, brush, etc.). Decades earlier, in "Piccolo testamento" (La bufera), Montale had used the same shadowy materials to shape an ominous Lucifer that comes shaking his fatigued "wings of bitumen" to an­ nounce the end of our civilization. Now he takes up the mournful image in utter playfulness to exorcize the omen, 6 Bruno

Munari, La fantasia (Bari: Laterza, 1977).

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to change the value sign of his black angel from negative to positive. In a like spirit of creative freedom, the diehard humanist become jongleur and child had turned reality upside down in the Farfalla stories where the perspective of dream, in­ stead of being relegated by waking reason to a comer of narrative space and time, takes over altogether to set the norm; it's the case of "Slow," of "Sul limite," of "II regista" (The Movie Director), of "La piuma di struzzo" (The Os­ trich Feather). The elf converges with the philosopher to challenge the credibility of visible reality when, in "Xenia," the widowed persona winks at his remembered wife to mock the assurance of those who believe "that reality is what one sees." In the same series of commemorative poems, the elf again empathically credits her with having had "bat's radar" sensitivity to what is impervious to normal eyes and ears, and the elflike thinker (who debunks any philosophy that lays claim to a global explanation of reality) persists in seeking his ultimate value or entity "in the wisp, not in the full grown tree," "in the void, not in fullness," "in what resists/ even the drill" ("Ex voto," Satura ΙΓ); in fact, "the still point is an All/ nullified" ("Che mastice tiene insieme," What Putty Holds Together, Satura II). Dream or reason? The playful seriousness of Montale, this invet­ erate challenger of closed systems, results in aleatory meta­ physics.

7 THE WAY OF NEGATION

Though negation seems to grow into a dominant function in Montale's verse (and prose) after the brief season of lyrical rapture and positive political commitment that marked La bufera's utterance, it had been part and parcel of his poetical mode from the very start. Negation tolls frequently in Ossi di seppia to underscore the vision of cosmic aridity that offsets the green memories of childhood in the rugged, if still beautiful, native landscape of sea-bordering Liguria. It can take the form of a negative self-definition against the bleak (post-World War I) times, as when the poet says: "This is the only thing we can tell you now:/ what we are not, what we do not want." Or it may take a turn for nirvanalike ecstasy in "II girasole," where the enraptured voice eventually asserts that "to disappear is, then, the luckiest lot"—a statement that gains relevance if juxta­ posed with the coeval poem "II male di vivere," which casts a Schopenhauerian look at all of existence to conclude that the only boon ever glimpsed by the speaker was the "divine Indifference" of the cloud, of the high-soaring hawk, of the statue in slumberous noontide. Actually, Ossi di seppia's first poem in chronological order "Meriggiare pallido e assorto" (1916), embodies negation in an existential image of exclusion, a wall topped by bottle shards to be followed for as long as the persona lives. And the negative word "non" punctuates the diction, often in imperative clauses—a formal counterpart of the refractory

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stoniness that pervasively confronts the speaker's eyes. Occasionally denial can make for release from oppressive certitude, from the blockade of a hopeless reality, as when, in the "Mediterraneo" series, the persona surrenders his identity to the limitless element in a Dionysian climax that is utterly rare in Montale's universe. There is also, sporad­ ically, the relief of not knowing, a blissful unknowing ("dolce ignoranza"), or the kind of unknowing that amounts to a suspenseful promise of fulfillment ("Delta": "Tutto ignoro di te fuor che il messaggio," I know nothing of you save the message). But "Arsenio" of 1928, the last piece (chron­ ologically, not in the general arrangement of the book), is a triumph of unrelieved negation, the image of life as pa­ ralysis, "delirium . . . of immobility." And even though the poet chose to conclude the book with the more hopeful lyric "Riviere," which ends on the note of "new flowering" (rifiorire), it is the stark, somber note of "Arsenio" that remains with us, or the desperate cry of "Crisalide": e noi andremo innanzi senza smuovere un sasso solo della gran muraglia; e forse tutto e fisso, tutto e scritto e non vedremo sorgere per via la liberta, il miracolo, il fatto che non era necessario! and we shall keep on going without dislodging even one rock in the big wall; and maybe everything is fixed and written down and we shall never witness on our way freedom, miracle arise, the fact that was not by necessity bound! This holds the key to the ultimate reach of Montale's concerns, which are cognitive, ethical, and/or metaphysical and are mostly conveyed by doubt and denial. The result is not nihilism, of course, but a relentless questioning of reality for the sake of those values that, being unguaranteed,

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make all the difference and yet seem at best tangential to human history. As Wallace Stevens puts it in another context, "under every No/ lay a passion for Yes that had never broken."1 The no's that permeate Montale's writing in his second book, Le occasioni, are a vital part of its nerve. We only have to think of poems like "Costa San Giorgio" (San Giorgio Hill Road), with its line "il cerchio non s'apre," the circle will not open; "Casa dei doganieri," with its tolling refrain "Tu non ricordi," You do not remember; "L'estate" (Summer), with its view of nature as a tragic waste of lives ("Occorrono troppe vite per fame una," Too many lives are needed to make just one); "Eastbourne," with its contemplation of the fatality of history ("Vince il male . . . La ruota non s'arresta," Evil wins . . . The wheel does not stop); "Notizie dall'Amiata," with its autumnal landscape precipitating, at the end of stanza 2, the negative apocalypse of "living death" (la morte, la morte che vive). In La bufera absence, the impossibility to communicate with the beloved who is physically (and at times even spiritually) worlds apart, the horror of war, the inanity of its aftermath—this compounded negative predicament counterpoints the sallies of ecstatic memory or fruition, as we saw. A poem like "Primavera hitleriana" stands out as unique in the Montalian canon because here, for a change, the authorial persona relinquishes his customary stoic resignation to come passionately to grips with the dire political situation of the eve of World War II; the voice bitterly denounces present evil, and its No! in prophetic thunder becomes, at the end, the Yes of a generous hope. The exclamatory style, so untypical of Montale, portends a rejuvenation of language and existential stance that will reach another acme with the postwar Vixen poems before subsiding once again into the disenchanted tone. Within "Primavera hitleriana" itself an unforgettable acme is attained 1 Wallace Stevens, "Esthetique du Mai," in Transport to Summer (New York: Knopf, 1947), and then in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1960), st. 8,11. 21-22, pp. 319-320.

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in the last part, when the speaker urges his sunflowerlike lady to counteract present obscurantism with the fire of divine (because universally human) love: . . . Guarda ancora in alto, Clizia, e la tua sorte, tu che il non mutato amor mutata serbi, fino a che il cieco sole che in te porti si abbacini nell'Altro e si distrugga in Lui, per tutti . . . . . . Oh keep looking on high, Clizia, it is your lot, you who, herself changed, harbors unchanging love, until the blind sun you carry in your innermost will be dazzled in the Other and in Him destroy itself, for the sake of all . . . The Ovidian fable of the girl (Clytia) who by dint of keeping her eyes fixed on the sun was turned into a sunflower here becomes a parable of ethical self-transcendence. The personal values Clizia cherishes—her private vision and dedication— must stop being private (a "blind sun" is a flame of love that misses its proper object and ultimate range, blindness here having to do with opacity, incommunicability).2 "Far other, and greater, is earth's trouble now" (Ben altro e sulla terra), as another poem of the same series has it; so the thing to do for a chosen spirit like Clizia is to transcend her purely personal concerns, even her love for the faraway persona who is addressing her from war-threatened Europe, and concentrate on the very source of all values, of love: the "Other," the unknown God who only now, in La bufera, makes his appearance within Montale's poetical universe. No mere metaphysical abstraction, this "Other" is, rather, 2 For this interpretive equation of "blind" with "opaque" and "private" I am indebted not only to my own exegetical efforts but to Montale's confirmation at Forte dei Marmi, summer 1977.

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the fountainhead of communal spirit personified, in keeping with a lay religion. Sacrificial intimations resonate in this incandescent music that turns to account a Dantean score (from the doubtful sonnet to Giovanni Quirini) along with the Petrarchan fondness for melodious oxymora that also stem from the language of mystics. The central paradox consists of the negation of a negation, Clizia opposing her individual values to an obscurantist world and then having to deny her own heart for the sake of a higher and broader commitment that involves mankind as such and its God-sanctioned bond. Accordingly, the poem that began as a denunciation of hell triumphant (Hitler and his henchmen officially visiting Florence) will now end as a prophecy of purgatorial release, with the untied Easter bells celebrating the future outcome of a new Passion week. Since the poem was written before the outbreak of the war itself, it ranks as a prophecy of sorts, passionately contradicting the desolate stoicism of "Eastbourne" that had envisaged the victory of evil, and prophetic tone, culminating into mystical overtones, strengthens the utterance to a rare extent. The poet is not talking to himself, as he usually does, but, through his Clizia, to mankind as such, in the name of the dignity of man. These can be the uses of negation in the vitalizing dialectic of youth regained; but from the peaks of "Primavera hitleriana," "Iride," "L'anguilla," and the Vixen madrigals, the way is downhill, and mournfulness pervades "Conclusioni prowisorie," the two pieces that seal La bufera as an anticipation of the still more depressed Satura and of its sequel, Diario del '71 e del '72 and Quaderno di quattro anni, in the seventies. When I say "downhill" I do not imply a worsening of poetical performances per se but a lowering of tone, a change of register making for a far more prosaic mode than ever before. In this essentially antilyrical mode, marked by relaxed diction, injections of demotic vocabulary, topical themes, and more liberal use of free verse than in

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the earlier books,3 the incidental risks are not always overcome and flat discursiveness does occasionally prevail but snappy epigram or scarified humor and insight are the far from infrequent reward. After the soarings of La bufera, Montale debunks himself to avoid the trap of an official vatic posture, and this allows him in turn to aim more effective barbs at the Europe of the industrial boom he so much dislikes. "Botta e risposta I," one of the earliest pieces in Satura,4 allegorizes as an ironic survival the author's predicament through the years of Fascist dictatorship and the (to him) anticlimactic postwar (Cold War) dispensation: the Augean stables of prewar political oppression are cleansed by the Alpheus-Iike onrush of the Liberation war, only to be flooded with excremental waters and infested with antlike beings that are essentially no better than the former Fascist henchmen. In all of this, the persona's role has been passive, and he retorts to his eager interlocutor that now that she knows everything of him, "from a mouse no eagle can come to birth." "Botta e risposta II" and "Botta e risposta III" are, by contrast, anything but allegorical, for they depend on episodic narrative, describing the persona's lounging by the shore with other bathers and, respectively, his memories of a recent trip to Greece and combining them with a blend of wistfulness and humor that fails to transcend the episodic occasion, while the persona's self-portrait, if somewhat deflating, contains elements of modest vindication. All in all, these poems exemplify the new departure of Montalian poetics vis-a-vis its previous embodiment in Le occasioni and La bufera. With the former book, as the author 3 Maria Corti, " 'Satura' e il genere 'diario poetico'," Strumenti critici 15 (June 1971): 217ff.; reprinted in Per conoscere Montale, ed. Marco Forti (Milano: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 273-296. 4 On this poem and its nexus between eschatology and scatology, see Andrea Zanzotto, "Sviluppo di una situazione montaliana," in Omaggio a Montale, ed. Silvio Ramat (Milano: Mondadori, 1966), pp. 157-173; Angelo Jacomuzzi, La poesia di Montale: Dagli "Ossi" ai "Diari" (Torino: Einaudi, 1978), pp. 57-91; and Mario Martelli, Il ravescio delk poesia (Milano: Longanesi, 1977), pp. 39-52.

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himself stated in "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)" of 1946, the point was to contain (in the finished poem) the motivation "without revealing or, better, flaunting it"; in the "balance between the outer and the inner, between the occasion and the objectified work [opera-oggetto] it was necessary to express the object and be silent about its propelling occasion [esprimere l'oggetto e tacere l'occasionespinta]." This involved favoring the implicit, exposing the reader to an objective image that refused to explain itself because it was (as Henry James might have put it) "charged with the unspoken"; lyrics such as "A Liuba che parte," "Mottetti," "Notizie dall'Amiata" were an obvious illus­ tration of the procedure. After La bufera, on the other hand, in most instances the poem turns out to be narratively explicit, its "occasion" having surfaced on the page. The poet himself has recognized this by entitling his post-Satura verse Diario del '71 e '72 and Quaderno di quattro anni, both diary and notebook having to do with the jotting down of day-to-day experiences.5 This preoccupation with narrative does not prevent a sequence like "Xenia,"6 which occupies its own special space in Satura, from attaining intermittent lyrical release in its extremely low-keyed fashion; the reminiscing voice is a murmur freely scanning anecdotes or long phases of time shared, the process of mutual acculturation whereby man and wife had come to define each other in alternative uni­ son and antagonism. Death has interposed an enhancing distance between the chronicler of the humorous conspir­ acy that family life was and the catalytic subject of his evocation, whimsical "Mosca," the "hellish fly" who now 5

See note 3. On this cycle of poems, see a very precise analysis by Maria Antonietta Grignani, " 'Xenia/ appunti per uno studio dei materiali elaborativi," in Strumenti critici 25 (October 1974): 352-382; and Grignani's textual study, "Per una storia del testo di 'Xenia'/' in Studi di filologia italiana 32 (1974): 359-386. See also Stefano Agosti, "Forme trans-comunicative in 'Xenia'," in Il testo poetico, teorie e pratiche di analisi (Milano: Rizzoli, 1972), pp. 191207. 6

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haunts his memory like an anti-Clizia and anti-Vixen, a household goddess. The low-toned music she inspires, at the other end of the wavelength spectrum that peaks in the high frequencies of the verse addressed to Clizia, re­ verberates in depth: Ascoltare era il solo tuo modo di vedere. Il conto del telefono s'e ridotto a ben poco. Listening was your one way of seeing. The phone bill has come down to almost nothing. Utterly relaxed, unmetrical, the cadence is a mere recitativo, each of the two lines being generated by a conversational phrase rhythmically banking on four natural tonic stresses, while the two lines are connected by a bridging silence of meditation; and the meditation itself follows the unusual course from general statement to the particular evidence, for the brooding persona is not trying to demonstrate a logical truth in a potentially public kind of utterance but is only confirming to himself, with casual afterthought, the insight ripened from years of affectionate observation. In another "Xenion" ("Xenia II," 5), the insight supervenes in the wake of narratively more protracted commemoration: Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale e ora che non ci sei e il vuoto ad ogni gradino. Anche cosi e stato breve il nostro lungo viaggio. Il mio dura tuttora, ne piu mi occorrono Ie coincidenze, Ie prenotazioni, Ie trappole, gli scorni di chi crede che la realta sia quella che si vede. Ho sceso milioni di scale dandoti il braccio non gia perche con quattr'occhi forse si vede di ρϊύ. Con te Ie ho scese perche sapevo che di noi due Ie sole vere pupille, sebbene tanto offuscate, erano Ie tue.

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I went, arm in arm with you, down a million stairs at least and now without you it's emptiness at every step. Even so it has been short, our long journey. Mine is still going on, nor do I need any more connections, reservations, the traps, the mockeries of those who think that reality is what one sees. I have gone down millions of stairs arm in arm with you not because four eyes may see more than two. I went there with you because I knew that of the two of us the only true pupils, no matter how dimmed, were yours. Here realization of her ability to see despite and beyond a diminished physical eyesight is a muted and therefore moving tribute to the departed wife; it would have sounded pompous to credit her with truthful spiritual vision in any but these prosaic, casual terms that cap a telescoped reminiscence of a lifetime spent together. The daily routine of going down so many stairs in city apartment houses and hotels takes on in retrospect the deeper meaning with which memory can endow the accidental and everyday experience, for the speaker is thereby reviewing his married life as a downward journey, downward to death and, also, to knowledge. This knowledge is in fact posthumous, the bitter fruit of bereavement; in a sense, the speaker persona has died too. He certainly has died to mundane, busy "reality," which he now rejects as a snare and deception, a senseless show to be denied. Concomitantly, poetry denies itself, ascetically renouncing soaring song; the abnegation of verse parallels and mirrors the cognitive negation of visible, measurable reality. Many are the uses of negation, and it can deny death itself:

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La morte non ti riguardava. . . . E neppure t'importava la vita e Ie sue fiere di vanita . . . Una tabula rasa; se non fosse che un punto c'era, per me incomprensibile, e questo punto ti riguardava. Death was no concern of yours. . . . Nor, on the other hand, did life concern you, life and its vanity fairs . . . A tabula rasa; were it not that a point was there, incomprehensible to me, and this point did concern you. ("Xenia II," 5) If both the solemn spectacle of death and the frivolous show of life (such as we see them in our social pageantry) are denied, the "incomprehensible point" beyond both, which is supposed to have alone claimed the concern of La Mosca, involves a transcendence, ethical and/or cognitive. This recalls the Otherness predicated of Clizia in Motet 9 and, more obliquely, in "Stanze" where the speaker defined himself unable to find, in his ceaseless quest, the "point wherefrom moved/ the blood nourishing [her], a neverending/ retrocession of circles beyond the brief/ space of human days. . . ." Thus the metaphysical concern from which so much earnest metaphysical poetry originated has been with Montale from way back, before the war, and now he delegates it to his dead spouse. In "Xenia," however, the qualitative leap is achieved from a demure basis of anecdotal family chronicle (including even mention of La Mosca's mother with her rice-and-frogs recipe), as if to test once more the resilience of Montale's

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language. Even in his tendentially discursive and narrative post-Bufera poetics, where the motivating "occasion" of the poem is not suppressed as it was in Le occasioni and La bufera, there seems to be room for epiphany, or at least for a negative kind of epiphany, the ability to postulate a "still point" that is "an All/ nullified" (un tutto/ nientificato, conclusion of "Che mastice tiene insieme," in Satura ΙΓ). This enables the understanding elect (like the poet and his lady) to challenge the preposterousness of official reality without having to replace it with an alternative, coherent system, since the point, the Other they refer to is like the fulcrum Archimedes needed outside the earthly globe to move it. On the other hand, unreflected life itself, in its incorrupt spontaneity, can challenge the tyranny of the obvious: "Xenia II," 12, identifies that rebellious energy with the hawks our traveling couple saw at Etretat in France and near Delphi in Greece, "a tussle of soft feathers, two young/ and harmless beaks." The gnomic conclusion appended to this delightful remembrance (after a meditative pause) credits La Mosca with having liked . . . la vita fatta a pezzi, quella che rompe dal suo insopportabile ordito. . . . life torn to pieces, the kind that breaks through its unbearable warp. One remembers the several poems from Montale's first and second book where the yearning for a "varco," a breakthrough, found poignant expression, and one recognizes the continuity of his outlook through so many variations. At the same time, one sees that the congeniality so deftly posited between the authorial persona and his wife in "Xenia" is authentic; there is no mistaking it for a mere self-projection of the author in the remembered woman, whose individualized portrait emerges from the whole series

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of epitaphs with the warmth that only affectionate humor can radiate. Her laughter, her whims, her naughtiness are part of the portrait, along with her privileged power to see through appearances to the core of life's paradox ("Xenia I," 14): Tu sola sapevi che il moto non e diverso dalla stasi, che il vuoto e il pieno e il sereno e la piu diffusa delle nubi. You alone knew that motion does not differ from stasis, that emptiness is fullness and a clear sky the diffusest of clouds. This eerie freedom of the mind, worthy of Heraclitus, well suits the Pythian function that La Mosca has assumed in her posthumous avatars; but it would hardly register unless anchored, in gripping tension, to the constraining mold that physical existence had become for her: Cosi meglio intendo il tuo lungo viaggio imprigionata tra Ie bende e i gessi. In this way I better understand your long journey incarcerated as you were by plaster bandages. Again, the contingent experience has leavened in memory to encompassing emblem. Mrs. Montale's bouts with a chronic illness that already forced her limbs into a cast during the last days of the battle for Florence (spring 1944) have established her painful condition in the poet's mind as existentially significant, and we see this in "Ballata scritta in una clinica" (Ballad Written in a Hospital) from La bufera,7 7 See Marziano Guglielminetti, "La 'Ballata scritta in una clinica/ " in Letture Montaliane, ed. Comune and Provincia di Genova (Genoa's town administration and provincial administration; Genova: Bozzi publisher,

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as well as in the later "Gli ultimi spari" (The Last Shots), where the end of the World War II battle coincides with her victory in the struggle for life; yet the sign of her deliverance is grotesque, for in her jerky motion to get "the last dried fig" in a basket she looks like "a spring-driven puppet." The prisoner of an illness that is here seen as lifelong, and therefore equated with life itself, is the one who is capable of liberating insight. One sees how she becomes the counterpart of the poet's own predicament as allegorized in "II Sogno del prigiomero" from La bufera and "Botta e risposta I" from Satura I. Indeed his authorial persona has said, to conclude "Xenia I," 14, "whether there is one or two of us we are one and the same thing." It is this inner identification with the ailing woman forever etched in his memory that eventually enables him to say, in the ironically self-vindicating conclusion of "Botta e risposta II": Nel buio e nella risacca piu non m'immergo, resisto ben vivo vicino alia proda, mi basto come mai prima m'era accaduto. E'questione d'orgoglio e temperamento . . . In the dark and in the surf I no longer dip, I hold out quite alive near the shoreline, I suffice myself as never before had happened. It's a matter of pride and temper . . . In this poem, in fact, La Mosca appears earlier as "the short­ sighted woman/ who bore my name and still does where she is" (and, in Jung's terms, it can be said that she has become the poet's "anima" in his old age). "Living among millions of unaccomplished people" as they both had to, they must have been, Montale comments with Franklin1977), pp. 199-211. This searching essay is followed in the same volume by a shorter piece on the same poem: Natalino Sapegno, "Nel solco dell'emergenza," pp. 215-219.

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like humor, "two uncorrected proofs that the Printer/ did not deign to glance at," and so was, he continues, an unnamed acquaintance of theirs, "the American lady from Brunnen" who committed suicide. Maladjustment can be the cross of an election, even though suicide was not the solution adopted by the poem's speaker and his wife in their struggle to uphold their unfashionable values in modern mass society—that society which the poem depicts as the motley crowd of sunbathers on a Tyrrhenian beach. But the speaker himself cannot avoid mixing with them and, at least externally, being one of them for the day's duration; despite his wryly proclaimed intellectual pride, he also sees himself as another "mussel [dattero di mare] clinging in a cluster to a cliff" and incapable of liberation. So, after differentiating himself from the vulgar "unaccomplished" mass, he turns the tables against himself to purge that pride, questioning even Porphyry's statement that "the souls of wise people/ can survive. Those few/ think see love without eyes/ or body or any shape." For, he answers the ancient Neoplatonic philosopher, there was no such guaranty of protection for himself and his friends in the time of trouble when truth was one "feeble wick" that would have left them in the dark if it went out. Once again Montale reaffirms the precariousness of the human condition, physical as well as moral, against all-too-sure claims of spiritual immunity and privilege. The wavering within this confessional poem (or is it a defensive dialectic) matters more than its discursive artistry, which only humor and irony rescue from prosaic flatness. Does its author, or doesn't he, consider himself the member of a doomed elite? He seems to, in the end, though he also turns the weapons of irony against himself in the self-deflating posture we had already noticed in "Botta e risposta I." The general darkness that would have followed the extinction of truth's besieged light in totalitarian times would not have enveloped everybody ("Non per tutti, Porfirio") but just "the mussel cluster that we are," the "razza di chi rimane a terra" (the kind that stays back on land), as the finale of a lovely Ossi

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di seppia poem, "Falsetto," has it. And so the author includes himself in the elite of those who held on to unpopular truth under duress but disclaims any ability or courage to fight for it in case the obscurantist (political) cause had finally won. This corresponds to the modest self-description at the end of "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)," where he says that others did "much, much more" for the just cause even if they were not writers. The limits Montale acknowl­ edges are those of the (by now) nonengaged intellectual, a socially powerless figure, a nontragic Cassandra who still cannot help uttering the unheeded prophecy, or critique, to a society that is either too smug or too fanatical to understand. And this, one might add, is the truly negative part of Montale's negations, a threatening indifference against which he has to rouse himself, if only by the satirical anti-Marxist fulminations of "Fanfara" (Fanfare) and "Dialogo" (Dia­ logue). It is certainly not the "divine Indifference" of cosmic import that "II male di vivere" (Ossi di seppia) had Buddhistically envisaged. It is a dubious condition, entailing the possibility that nothing really matters since all political alignments (red or black), all social developments are equally suspect; and if so, where shall one look for the alternative values? those values that could still find an earnest poetical formulation in the "dream" of "Barche sulla Marna" (envisaging a just, humane, and fulfilled society) and then in the passionate anti-Nazi protest of "Primavera hitleriana"? Will Clizia be lost in "the night of the world"? Tempted by stoic "apathy" or indifference to all worldly things, Montale alternately reacts against attempts to cast him into a convenient stereotype by talking back to his critics, whether Professor Asor Rosa or P. P. Pasolini ("Lettera a Malvolio"), or he mocks himself as a "cardinal in pectore" forgotten by the dying pope ("Intercettazione telefonica," Telephone Interference), for he realizes that his denial of prevalent values (or what passes for values) in today's world places him in a rather awkward position: in but not of the world, in fact out of it when it comes to taking a metaphysical

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stand, yet without an established system, an identified transcendence or church to hold on to. Montale's denial attacks all systematic conceptions of history in "La storia," a poem that tolls with "notis" in relentless cadence, and all of tangible reality in "Realismo non magico" (Nonmagical Realism), a poem that makes short work, axiologically speaking, of our variegated experience. Montale has never been so discursive, so polemical, so explicit in his formulations and so aggressively demotic, even journalistic, in his lexicon. At times one may grow impatient with this style; the reader never becomes accustomed to a Montale who insists on explaining himself. Paradoxically, he has been most worldly (in language) at the time when his unworldliness has become most acute. No matter how topically explicit and articulately polemical his rejoinders, he questions the very possibility of language in "Incespicare" (Stumbling): Ma la balbuzie non basta e se anche fa meno rumore e guasta lei pure. Cosi bisogna rassegnarsi a un mezzo parlare. Una volta qualcuno parlo per intero e fu incomprensibile. Certo credeva di essere l'ultimo parlante. Invece e accaduto che tutti ancora parlano e il mondo da allora e muto. But stuttering is not enough and even if less noisy it too is rotten. Thus one must be resigned to a half speaking. Once somebody spoke completely and was incomprehensible. Certainly

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he thought he was the last one to speak. Instead it happened that all still speak and the world since then is dumb. Not Heraclitus, as I had surmised, but Christ—Quist among other representatives of the seer-type—is supposed to be the "somebody" who "spoke completely/ and was in­ comprehensible," if I can trust the answer that the poet himself gave me on this point in 1977. Apparently a total speech, a language embodying the whole of truth transcends the possibilities of human understanding while consum­ mating the possibilities of human language; Christ the Word made nonsense of everything that was said (or written) after He spoke, for he was an end, not a beginning. Measured against this absolute standard, any other language is inadequate or false. The poet "must be resigned/ to a half speaking," uneasily suspended as he is between the empty public noise of the word as verbiage and the unattainable completeness (perfection) of the Word that people such as Christ uttered. In Emily Dickinson's words, "Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant" (if the ambition of telling all the truth can still be attributed to a writer of Montale's views as set forth in "Incespicare"). Actually, in his collection from the seventies, Montale seems intent on mimicking the debased language of public intercourse, even the mass media vernacular, for parodistic purposes, and in so doing he becomes the disabused chron­ icler of contemporary life, with the risk of chattiness that so far had never beset his creative career. At times, indeed, we descend to the flat vulgarity of "II principe della festa (The Prince of the Feast), where the last two lines talk of "new buttocks" that must replace those of the still prev­ alent godhead on the throne.8 Or else, as in "Figure" (Fig8 In this regard I must point out that the poet himself told me in 1977 how here as in "Botta e risposta I" a degraded God is meant. At any rate, the title "Prince of the Feast" avowedly comes from Holderlin's

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ures), Montale will indulge in puns like "trappole per i tropi" (tropi = tropes, recalling topi = mice) to mock the selfcomplacent poet. A vastly more successful satirical piece is "Un poeta" ('Quaderno di quattro anni), aimed at the poets of political flattery; here the persona avers that he will be able to ded­ icate his songs "to the next tyrant" without fears of political or literary ostracism because "in poetry, what matters is not content/ but Form." In "Divinita in incognito" (Deities in Disguise), another poem of satirical import but ad­ dressed to a specifically named critic ("Asor"), poetry is defined by negations, just as God is in "II mio ottimismo" (My Optimism)—which does not prevent Montale from talking of "gods" as people in the flesh whom we may briefly meet in our earthly career. We remember that one of the short stories added to Farfalla's later editions bears the title "La poesia non esiste" (Poetry Does Not Exist). Satire, said Northrop Frye, is the poetry of winter, and this may well describe Montale's late mode. Hope itself, reads "Lettera a Malvolio" (a veiled attack on the late populist writer and movie director Pasolini), today can only be sought "in its negative." And even though some of the poems from this final season skirt a garrulous triviality, Montale would not be Montale if he failed to strike the right note in quite a few others. I am not thinking so much of "La poesia" and "Le rime," tastefully humorous as they are in their description of poetry's odd inevitability, but rather of the poem in memory of Leone Traverso that opens Diario del '71, or of "La mia Musa" (My Muse) from the same volume, where the self-denial of language and the self-mockery of the poet converge in a kind of ascetic laughter that incredibly re­ affirms what had been so radically demystified. In the for­ mer poem, Leone Traverso, the noted Germanist who had played a leading role in the prewar literary milieu of Flor"Friedensfeier" (The Feast of Peace), and I have it from Montale that he rejects any anthropomorphic idea of God while recognizing a personal aspect in Him.

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ence, particularly as verse translator of Rilke and other German modernists, provides the Montalian persona with the catalytic Thou that we have seen to be so protean and indispensable. There ensues a delightfully naughty con­ versation with the deceased friend and fellow litterateur on the subject of poetry, that whimsical entity one finds it utterly hard to "seize by her toupet" when she "plays hide and seek." Neither is it "of any avail to let oneself go on the stream/ as the neoteric Goethe found out." Mouldy tomes, sumptuously bound, seldom if ever satisfy her wishes ("non si confanno, ο raro, alle sue voglie": an unexpectedly sustained hendecasyllable of Dantesque ring, for it recalls Paradiso I, 30, "colpa e vergogna dell'umane voglie," guilt and shame of human wishes, where Dante is berating the scarce ambition of most poets and political leaders). But, Part I concludes, the poem's addressee knew poetry at first hand: Pure tu l'incontrasti, Leone, la poesia in tutte Ie sue vie, tu intarmolito si, ma rapito sempre e poi bruciato dalla vita. Yet, Leone, you did meet poetry in all her ways, you mothlike perhaps but enraptured always and then burned by life. Those who happened to know the aloof Traverso in his old age can best appreciate the affectionately caricaturing touch of that untranslatable modifier, "intarmolito," which is the epitome of a portrait and, at the same time, insinuates the idea of a being who—like the moth of bestiary emblems— is attracted by a devouring flame. The focal word "rapito" (enraptured) strengthens that surreptitious connotation, which then moves to incontrovertible prominence with the "bruciato" (burned) that seals a perfect hendecasyllable only to complete its semantic trajectory when the final image,

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"vita" (life), takes over as the ultimate agent. Life is both poetry and death to such as Traverso (and Montale)—even if the burning takes a long time to attain consummation. The semantic suspense created by enjambment between "bruciato" and "dalla vita" contributes to the overall effect; the flippant tone has become grave, and it conjures echoes of Montale's poetical youth from the "Mediterraneo" section of Ossi di seppia, where the speaker in a rare Dionysian moment said of himself: . . . Non sono che favilla d'un tirso. Bene Io so: bruciare, questo, non altro, e il mio significato. . . . I am nothing but the spark from a thyrsus. I know it well: to burn, this, and no other, is my meaning. In the poem of old age, however, the same Dionysian ecstasy can be attributed only to the Montalian persona's alter ego, and very discreetly at that, in the muffled voice we have been hearing. In part 2, the poem commemorating Traverso shifts its focus to the commemorator who, in comical self-deprecation conveyed by the demotic language of part l's beginning, disclaims for himself the achievement so handsomely credited to his late friend. He had also, way back, dreamed of being a great troubadour, a "mestre/ de gay saber," but "it was a vain hope," for "dry laurel cannot give leaves/ even for a roast." With "gauche fingers" he tries the celesta or vibraphone keyboard, but music recedes more and more; it never was "music of the Spheres." Through the ironic mask and the sprezzatura exploits, negation has now involved the core of Montale's being, his artistic vocation, a lifetime of dedicated effort. And, not surprisingly, a new kind of poetry arises from the negation. The once consonant or emulative echo of Dante's voice has reversed itself into self-parodying use; the unmistakable cue (in sound and image) of Paradiso I reverberates from part 1 into part 2

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through the foglie (leaves)-voglie (wishes) rhyme and the attendant laurel reference, and the self-directed cruelty has a confessional tone that is even more moving because of the apparent casualness. One may even think of Dante's ordeal in Purgatory at the hands of Oderisi who sermonizes him on the vanity of artistic fame. A delayed semantic charge makes itself felt in the modern poef s self-humiliation. But of course that self-humiliation is complemented by a quantum of humor that tempers the fierceness of denial; and the unmistakably Montalian upshot can be seen in the cognate lyrics "L'arte povera" (immediately following the commemorative piece on Traverso) and "La mia Musa," a few poems later in the same volume. Arte povera in this case is something other than "poor art/' no matter how self-deflating Montale can decide to be; the title refers much more pointedly to the cheapness of materials employed by him in his diminutive paintings: "blue wrapping paper" (of the kind European grocers use for sugar) or "corrugated packaging paper" to paint upon; and as for colors, "wine and coffee, traces of tooth-paste/ if in the background there was a sea susceptible of whitecaps," and occasionally, "at Sainte-Adresse where/ Jongkind found his chilly lights," even "ash and coffee grounds." Montale's well-known amateur painting does reflect his general predilection for cold, muffled tints and unemphatic tone in poetry, but it is certainly not the part of his work on which he has ever staked his reputation as an artist. Yet it is precisely on this unassuming hobby of his that we find his authorial persona staking his existential significance at the end of this modestly winsome poem: Έ la parte di me che riesce a soprawivere del nulla ch'era in me, del tutto ch'eri tu, inconsapevole. This is the part of me that manages to survive of the nothing that was in me, of the all that you were, unknowingly.

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If his "destitute art" as a painter has been a matter of making something out of nothing, then his whole life as such has been the nothing out of which his departed inspirer (obviously La Mosca, but blending, via the functional Thou, with Annetta, the girl who died early) made something. The attitude recalls that of Michelangelo in his poems to Vittoria Colonna, who is likewise addressed as the spiritual shaper of the unworthy artist; tone and vocabulary do not. The thematic choice of his least committed, thoroughly marginal activity as a metaphor for his entire existence as artist and man is characteristic of Montale at his low-keyed best. The way of negation leads to the discovery of differential values. That fairly describes also "La mia Musa," a piece where Montale attacks the problem of his craft head on rather than obliquely. Again, a flourish of negations opens the poem: La mia Musa e lontana: si direbbe (e il pensiero dei piu) che sia mai esistita. Se pure una ne fu, indossa i panni dello spaventacchio alzato a malapena su una scacchiera di viti. My Muse is far: one would say (a majority thought) that she never existed. If one ever was, she wears the clothes of the scarecrow awkwardly hoisted on a checkerboard of grapevines. Negation translates into self-debunking humor to pave the way for an improbable rescue, which, needless to say, can only come from the irreducible residue of affirmation that an image is, no matter how grotesque. Ridicule and, even worse, hollowness attaches to the scarecrow figure; but from the very moment the destructive thought finds visual embodiment, poetry takes it over. Poetry is affection: Sventola come puo; ha resistito a monsoni restando ritta, solo un po' ingobbita.

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Se il vento cala sa agitarsi ancora quasi a dirmi cammina non temere, finche potrd vederti ti dar6 vita. She flaps as she best can; she withstood monsoons unwielding, only a little hunched. If the wind dwindles she can still stir as if to tell me keep going have no fear, as long as I can see you I'll give you life. Only a poet of Montale's seasoned type could extract such a discreet reassertion of life from the core of negation without falling into any rhetorical pitfall. And, whether or not the reference was intentional at the moment of writing, it does no injustice to this poem to read it as a response to Yeats's passage in "Sailing to Byzantium": An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, . . . And this is so especially considering Montale's interest in the Irishman's poem, which he included in his own volume of translations (nor was this the only lyric by Yeats to be so favored by him). If the full splendor of Byzantium "is no country for old men"—and Montale agrees, to judge from the tone and tenor of his verse since La bufera—there is an alternative country for the senior citizens of poetry. This country, as evidenced by Montale's old age writing, is a no man's land open to those who dare stake their claims there, those who can face the bareness of their human condition along the stations of a long pilgrimage to death. They will have nothing but "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" to rely upon. They will have to see through all the delusions it had fostered, and when Montale, in his third and final stanza, says that this scarecrow Muse has come from a costumier's closet, and that "whoever used to wear her for a dress" was "high society," he is stripping

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himself bare of the last delusion (if it was one): the delusion of poetry as an ultimate, transcendent value, the last resort of a disabused spirit. In the perspective of quasi-nihilist humor, poetry turns out to be nothing more than an empty garment, a theatrical make-believe handed down from one practitioner to the next on life's (or art's) stage. He himself, says the authorial persona, once filled the role and made the Muse proud of wrapping him (actor or manikin?). Yet, now that she has come way down from her high tradition, she is left with "one sleeve" and thereby "conducts a quartet/ of straws." This, he concludes, "is the only music [he] can stand." The apparent destructiveness of this satirical self-portrait is balanced, or outweighed, by a quantum of possibility affirmed in the very teeth of global negation. The adynaton of music made by "a quartet of straws" (un quartetto/ di cannucce) points the way to the inaudible as the only aesthetic value remaining in an age of wholesale noise; Keats's line on melodies unheard being sweeter comes to mind, silence becoming, for the latter-day poet, a form of negative perfection, the goal of infinite approximation through ultrasonic (or hyposonic) frequencies. Montale is consistent with his reiterated quest for the infinitely small, for the metaphysical vanishing point of reality that La Mosca is credited with having envisaged beyond the willfully ignored fact of death; he still insists "on seeking [the feminine/ divine essence] in emptiness, never in fullness," as "Ex Voto" puts it, for the "still point is an All/ nullified" (un tutto/ nientificato). If the ultimate is verbally inexpressible because the one who "spoke entirely" turned out to be "incomprehensible," we are reduced to babbling, to "a halfway speaking" (un mezzo parlare), and a poem like "La mia Musa" should be a telling instance. Even so, its relaxed utterance, its apparently casual style where only a thin -ita rhyme keeps insinuating its flutelike note as if to suggest the "music of straws," are the reward of care, not chance, and one can best appreciate this feat of sprezzatura by perusing the

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(holograph) manuscript, dated May 13,1971, in the collection of Montale autographs at Pavia University (Fasc. IV). The manuscript shows several corrections, at lines 2 and 3 and, more insistently, in the last stanza.9 Even more extensive and significant are the emendations on the original typescript of "II tuffatore" (The Diver, Pavia MSS Coll., Fasc. IV), the next piece in Diario del '71, which grapples with cognate metaphysical and epistemological issues. Satire has little to do with it; on the contrary, the occasional datum of experience—a diver observed in slow motion on a TV screen—triggers a chain of meditative paradoxes that, in the second and last stanza, attain religious earnest. The "spiderlike arabesque" traced by the diver as he has jumped from the springboard is "perhaps" "the cypher" of his entire life and, if so, whoever stands on the springboard "is still dead," and the same is true of whoever swims back to the pool's ladder after diving, or of whoever photographs him; and as for the sports writer celebrating the feat, he "wasn't even born." This bombardment of negations, unleashed by the realization that a man is truly alive only when he actualizes his finest powers, elicits in turn the skeptical question, Is "the space on which every moving thing lives" really alive? The unanswerable question, undermining even the one positive certainty at the start, precipitates a litany of disconsolate invocations: "Pieta per 9 Perhaps the most significant of these variants is the one related to line 3, stanza I, where the choice sanctioned by the published text ("Se pure una ne fu," If one actually did exist) has superseded the provisional alternative ("Se una ve η'έ," If one does exist). The shift to the past tense in the final textual option fits the self-deflating grotesqueness of stanza 3, where the scarecrowlike Muse is said to have been "filled" (as the theater costume she was) with the speaker persona, her devotee. The implications are intriguing; there has been a change in style from sumptuous to bare in M.'s poetry, and the poetry as such is a masquerade, not an essence, yet it has a life of its own and it becomes life giving. Also, using the past tense in the clause under examination makes it a sharper rejoinder to the scoffers who deny that M.'s Muse ever existed. Her reality, in the course of the poem, is affirmed by the grotesque imagery itself, rather than by a logical proof: and it is an imaginary kind of "reality."

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Ie pupille, per l'obiettivo,/ piet& per tutto che si manifesta,/ pieta ..." (Pity the pupils, the camera eye,/ pity whatever manifests itself,/ pity . . .). The prayerlike utterance is addressed to no one in particular, and it encompasses all of motion, all of the vital phenomena, and the very consciousness taking them in and trying to express their insoluble predicament: pieta per chi non sa che il nulla e il tutto sono due veli deU'Impronunciabile, pieta per chi Io sa, per chi Io dice, per chi Io ignora e brancola nel buio delle parole! pity who knows not that nothingness and the All are two veils of the Unutterable, pity who knows it, pity who says it, who is unaware of it and gropes in the dark of words! Beyond the negations that rob of any reliability everything we see, do, think, and say, there looms an inexpressible something, a Kantian noumenon forever inaccessible to our intellectual and verbal grasp. I have it from the poet that he has read Immanuel Kant with interest, also Heidegger (to add a philosopher who, in his different way, deals with nothingness), but the point here is an existential predicament that the poem dramatizes, not a transcription in verse of philosophical ideas. That predicament, that anguish is something all of conscious mankind is heir to, and the poet shares it with the thinker and the man of action. Like the Jamesian protagonist of "The Middle Years," he "gropes [works] in the dark," without renouncing the "madness of art." The poem, a meditation on the human condition, takes shape as an existential statement verging on the religious, and here it is appropriate to notice that the word "ignora" (is unaware) in the penultimate line has superseded

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an earlier "prega" (prays), presumably to avoid tilting the poem toward conventional piety. Montale refuses to reify God, as the reader of his last books can see for himself; the poet will obliquely refer to God as "1'Altro," the Other, in language curiously remi­ niscent of Protestant theologians like Rudolf Otto, Karl Barth, or Kierkegaard. In the poem we are discussing, an exten­ sive passage between stanza 1 and stanza 2 has been crossed out on the Pavia typescript; the deletion must have been prompted by reasons of formal coherence because the ex­ cised passage seems irrelevant to the poetical development of the initial imagery, which it interrupted with more than a touch of adventitious rhetoric: Peggio ancora chi pone 1'Energeia sugli altari tra fumi e bende sciorinate ai tanti zefiri di una primavera stanca di ripetersi a vuoto. E vivo dunque Worse still who places Energy on the altars among fumes and swathes unrolled at the many zephyrs of a Spring by now tired of repeating itself for nothing. Is then alive . . . The vitalist poet D'Annunzio had enthroned Energy (in the ostentatiously Hellenizing spelling, Energeia, which Montale pointedly reproduces as a source clue) in his pagan hymn to life, Laus Vitae, at the turn of the century, and Montale makes that spurious cult (it wasn't only poetical) his target; in his view, it amounts to a gross reification, a modernist fetishism for which he has no use. Although conceptually this passage was of a piece with the mystical paradoxes of stanza 2, poetically it was not; if anything, it disrupted the movement of thought and image, hence the excision, which throws light on the genesis of the poem. It is of course a risk to apply a loaded word like "mystical"

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to Montale's writing, even at its metalogical peaks where language seems to deny itself in the presence of the ineffable. For the tension powering these sallies beyond the merely rational is unabatingly intellectual, as is Dante's in Paradise, where analytical intellect will test its power by going repeatedly to the very limit of thought and expression before acknowledging defeat. The dazzling plenitude that thus dawned on the godstruck pilgrim of the medieval mind came to reward the asceticism of reason, a faculty selftranscended rather than unquestioningly discarded. The noumenal emptiness intermittently yawning behind the veil of discrete phenomena in the modern poef s fragmentary rhapsody comes to subvert whatever comfortable assurances our smug secularism may have proffered. The via negativa10 undertaken by the reader of Kant, Boutroux, and Heidegger leads him to unmask the pretentious inadequacy of many a logical construction that passes for an exhaustive solution of life's riddle; but he hardly enters the mystic's via unitiva, since the totality he seems to glimpse beyond the wreck of all logical certainties keeps eluding his grasp and leaves him forever groping in the dark or speculating in the half light of pure probability. The predicament strains his intellectual resources, but it is the only condition he accepts: Mi chiedi perche navigo nell'insicurezza e non tento un'altra rotta? Domandalo all'uccello che volta illeso perch£ il tiro era lungo e troppo larga la rosa della botta! You ask me why I steer my course through uncertainty and do not try another route? Ask that of the bird that turns around unhurt because the shot was long and too wide the pellets' spread! 10 Jacomuzzi,

in La poesia di Montale, concurs with this loaded terminology.

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The above is the first of two stanzas dated June 4,1971, in the manuscript and provisional typescript I have examined in the Pavia collection; the poem, published in Diario del '71 e del '72 and then in Tutte Ie poesie (The Complete Poems), carries the title "Tiro a volo" (Trap Shooting). The emenda­ tions have been several and quite pointed, documenting this piece's doctrinal as well as aesthetic importance to its author. To begin with, the original holograph manuscript had the verb "respiro" (I breathe) at the end of line1 instead of the eventual "navigo" (I navigate) that has given imaginative coherence to the overall metaphor of movement and quest. Concurrently, "un riparo sicuro" (a safe shelter) at the beginning of line 3 in the manuscript has become "un luogo sicuro" (a safe place) and finally "un'altra rotta" (another route), thereby intensifying the verb "tento" (try) of which it happens to form the direct object. As a result, the speaker's formerly passive, circumscribed stance gives way to a willful action in keeping with the metonymic image of the bird flying past a narrow miss; both subjects now range an unconfined if dangerous space. Image becomes complete argument without ceasing to be image; and the craftsman has sharpened its power by replacing an initial "vola" (flies) with a far more graphic "volta" (turns) to evoke the imperiled bird's response to sudden attack, while "botta" (shot) at the end of the stanza supersedes "pallini" (pellets) to clinch the whole metric unit with a stronger sound, one that rhymes with "rotta" in the midst of line 3. Concealed rhyme is among Montale's favorite devices. The second stanza, consisting likewise of six uneven if regular lines, exploits the iconic cue of the first for gnomic purposes. It too has evolved through some variants of note, the most significant occurring at lines 3 and 5 respectively. For us "wingless" (non alati) creatures also, the persona says, there are saving "rarefactions," not of gun lead "but of acts" (atti), and the latter word has replaced an earlier "afa" (mugginess) to tilt the semantic tenor from shapeless passivity to focused action—a choice obviously consonant with those that took place in the first three lines of stanza 1, as well as with the metaphoric pointers of the gunshot

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scene. Then, after a cancelled line, a characteristic couplet seals the lyric in the doubting Thomas style so dear to Montale, who can thus restore the uncertainty theme of the start: Se ci salva una perdita di peso e da vedersi. If we are saved by a loss of weight remains to be seen. The touch of irony in the expression "loss of weight" (which has happily superseded an earlier "la nostra incertezza," our uncertainty) leavens the gnomic conclusion to rescue it, and the whole poem, from didactic flatness. Loss of weight, of course, recalls in muffled tone Dante's purgatorial deliverance; What else would do for "wingless creatures" trying to match a bird's feat? It is possible to miss the poet's own feat of perfect tone, as exemplified by this composition, in an intentionally unlyrical and sometimes prosaically colorless or overly discursive book whose import so often seems self-deflating or just polemical. The achievement of the right tone in verse sustained chiefly by the resilience of dialectic with imagery pared to the bone marks quite a few of Montale's late poems, from Satura II (especially the series "Dopo una fuga," then "Ex voto" and "II primo gennaio," January 1st) to Diario, some of whose unpredictable successes I discussed above. But whatever aesthetic reservations one might conceivably harbor about several other poems from Diario and Quademo, the antilyrical drabness so well pinpointed by Maria Corti11 in her lexical analysis is part of an asceticism of style that in turn matches and mirrors the self-chastising thought I have advisedly likened to the theologians' via negativa. This ingrained trend comes to a head in "A questo punto" (At 11

See note 3.

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This Point), dated October 6, 1971, in the holograph manuscript at Pavia. Negation here involves everything; it actually singles out what is closest to the poet persona, what is most presumably himself. "A questo punto smetti/ dice l'ombra." At this point stop, says the shadow who further on in the poem declares herself to be an inner double of the persona's self (I keep the feminine pronoun that goes with the Italian gender of ombra to suggest its Jungian anima quality). The shadow has accompanied the persona (who for once is the silent addressee of the monologue, its unresponsive Thou and not its speaker) through thick and thin, war and peace, "and even the in-between," she has been to him "elation and taedium," she has infused in him virtues and vices that were not his. Her imperious urging to stop, three times repeated, is the more effective because it does not explain what should be stopped. It is an objectless, transcendental command that need not be explained to its addressee— and this is one further case of that typically Montalian situation (so pointedly analyzed by Almansi and Merry) of private understanding between a speaker and a listener who tantalize the eavesdropping reader. The magic circle of poetic significance is thereby outlined in the rhetorical ellipse of an (I-Thou)/-We structure of relation and frequently reinforced by semantic multivalence in certain words or expressions that the author himself, if personally questioned, refuses to specify or at least leaves suspended in ambivalence. The poem under examination, unlike so many others of the seventies that emphasize explicitness, seems to be a case in point; it draws the reader toward an elusive inner sanctum of meaning, it "sidetracks" (to quote the naughty expression Montale has used to define his attitude to overly zealous critics in the introductory piece of Saturn, "II tu"). Yet it is far from unfocused, semantically speaking, and anything but hazy; its tone of urgency preserves it from that. What happens is something like this: an inner voice makes itself suddenly heard, cryptically and peremptorily, as if in a prophetic dream; it's a kind of daemon, the "He"

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(Lui) of which Montale has told us in some interviews. The sibylline command cannot be ignored, and it compels both the listener in the poem and Montale's readers with him (or through him, since we are not privy to the background reference) to try a hazardous deciphering as we go along. In this way a definite verbal structure is translated each time into an open process, our experience of discovery. We now return to the structuring imperative, "A questo punto smetti," at this point stop, or desist. If at first it catches us by surprise, like the abrupt beginning it is, it will become contextually more meaningful with each repetition. "If now I detach myself from you," says the shadow after issuing her order the first time, "you will suffer no pain," and she goes on to add that her addressee will be lighter than leaves, mobile as the wind. She must now "lift the mask" (an earlier version in the Pavia manuscript had the more obvious expression "gettare la maschera," to throw the mask, corrected into "alzare," to lift); she is his thought, his "non-necessary part" (il tuo innecessario), his "useless husk." The addressee is urged to stop relying on her (It?), but it is she, the fictive entity projected by him in lifelong assiduousness, that takes the initiative in unveiling, unmasking herself. Self-demystification is the point, and it is presented as a hard thing to accomplish, partly spontaneous and gradual, even unconscious, and partly sudden and voluntary. The second time we hear the momentous injunction "smetti," immediately after the lines just discussed, it prolongs itself into heightening paraphrase: "wrest yourself loose from my breath," "go through the sky like a rocket." Radical negation transforms into unlimited affirmation, and it is here that the dark imperative reveals its positive side, quixotic though it may be. There is still some light ("lume," superseding an earlier and weaker "barlume," glimmer, in the manuscript) on the horizon, the shadow continues, and there is somebody to see it—"just a man," not "a madman." A man and nothing more is the very thing the addressee wanted not to be "out of love for a shadow." The reprimand

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becomes self-accusation when the shadow adds that she has "deceived" him, just before repeating her order ("A questo punto smetti") for the third time. Here she cryptically explains that his best and his worst "do not belong" to him and that for what he will have he "can do without a shadow." There follows, by way of conclusion, what would be the fourth reiteration of the negative order ("A questo punto . . .") if it did not, as it does, immediately replace the emphatic negation ("smetti," desist) with a totally new and positive one, "guarda" (look). The last line, a regular hendecasyllable clinching the restless whole on the note of metrical order, is: [A questo punto] guarda con i tuoi occhi e anche senz'occhi. [At this point] look with your own eyes and even without eyes. The metaphor of deliverance and flight has changed into one of vision—true vision as opposed to delusion—and the metaphoric change hinges on the intermediary image of sky ranging and sky scanning (there are "lights on the horizon"). If the conclusion reformulates the negative command on a positive level, it does so only by making it more baffling than ever; nor did we expect the oracular poem to make its point by "levelling out" whatever elements of meaning might resist a reductive, simplistic explanation. In fact, levelling out is the etymology of "explain," and it persists in our rationalistic usage, while in the case of poetic language the appropriate descriptive word would be "unfold." The poem unfolds in our perception to reveal its form and manifest its richness. The flower's corolla, in the present case, happens to be that climactic last line that gathers in itself the essential meaning and imagery of the entire developing composition; Shall we be able to descry its

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complexity, to realize its strange coherence, without destroying it? To see with one's own eyes and even without eyes: the first operation entails rejection of whatever cultural superstructure has fulfilled its function and gone stale, since cultural constructions in the long run can mystify instead of revealing, while the second, paradoxical operation aims at a second sight, a seeing beyond seeing, beyond, that is, mere appearances. A remarkable consonance with another poem captures our ear now and may help to deepen our understanding of the present one; in the second part of "Botta e risposta Π" (Saturn IT), Montale brings up the ancient NeopIatonic philosopher Porphyry's statement that wise people's souls can survive and that those few "think see love without eyes/ or body or form whatever." Even though in that context Montale appended a sarcastic rebuttal to the quotation in order to invert its "niggardly" metaphysics into the far less hopeful historical predicament of our benighted time that forebodes darkness if the last glimmer of wisdom should peter out, the precise echo of "see without eyes" (vedono . . . senz'occhi) in "A questo punto" can hardly be fortuitous, the more so as it occurs in climactic position and in a context involving lights to be sighted in the distance and personal deliverance from delusion. There is no avoiding the contradiction: on the one hand, Montale pointedly quotes his earlier quotation from Por­ phyry with clear ethical and epistemological assent, and on the other hand he had made short work of its meta­ physical underpinnings when first using it in Saturn II. Making allowances for the poet's right to contradict himself as mood changes from poem to poem will do scant justice to Montale's intellectual earnest. Neither should we try to constrain his imagination in a hard-and-fast logical con­ sistency that ignores each poem's liberty to probe truth from a different angle. A good way out of the impasse is to remember how doggedly Montale balks at any attempt to dogmatize. He reports in Fuori di casa (Abroad), after a visit to the Holy Land, that seeing Jerusalem is to realize

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how paramount the Christian revolution has been, but he scoffs at the Catholic Church's postwar attempts to exploit that truth in a petty political way12 (see also "Le processioni del '49," in La bufera). He respects Croce's philosophy and personal integrity,13 but he openly proclaims his distrust of systematic historicism—and that goes also for fashion­ able Marxism of the smug or fanatical sort. He has no use for Teilhard de Chardin's kind of theology, and he laughs at the naivete of progressive liberalism that believes in the inevitable triumph of secular verities, though on the other hand (in "Piccolo testamento," from La bufera) he describes his unrelenting allegiance to humanism as "a faith that was fought," "a hope that burned slower/ than a hard log on the hearth" in utter defiance of the contrasting mass ide­ ologies of "red" and "black" clerics. Behind the anti-ideological impishness of so many barbs in the poems from Satura, Diario, and Quaderno, there lurks precisely this re­ fusal of cozy or dictatorial formulas as a key to the workings of reality. With this in mind, it should be easier to under­ stand Montale's basic consistency in mocking Porphyry's selfish metaphysics and at the same time appropriating that philosopher's epistemological challenge. It is one thing to claim the monopoly of spiritual immortality for a privileged elite and quite another to propound ethical and cognitive self-transcendence as the ultimate task of enlightened man­ kind. For that is the theme of "A questo punto," just as it was the theme of "Tiro a volo"—granting the difference be­ tween the ironically relaxed tone of that poem and the 12 E. M., "Da Gerusalemme divisa" (From Divided Jerusalem) and "Noterelle di uno dei Milie" (Diary Entries of a Garibaldi Volunteer), in Fuori di casa (Milano-Napoli: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1968), pp. 317-328. 13 See the pages devoted to Croce in E. M., Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milano: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 128-143; also E. M.'s poem "A un grande filosofo" (To a Great Philosopher) in Diario del '71 e del '72 (Milano: Mondadori, 1973), p. 90, and the part of "Intenzioni (Intervista imaginaria)" that acknowledges Croce's impact on M.'s intellectual formation (see La Rassegna d'Ualia 1, no. 1 [January 1946]: 84-89; reprinted in Sulla poesia, pp. 564-565).

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oracular wisdom of the more recent one. To be spiritually alert is not to take truth for granted; and if in "Botta e risposta II" a touch of self-sufficiency seemed to creep into the conclusive part 3 (but watch the corrective quantum of self-irony), in "A questo punto" we cannot miss the ethical courage of the persona who, after a lifetime of dedication to culture, throws everything into question, facing the shocking realization that everything he lived and worked for, his humanist values, may have outlived its use—and discarding it for the sake of an unguaranteed spiritual ven­ ture means to shed whatever had long acted as protection and comfort, poetry included. We shall miss one of the strongest notes in this ascetic confession if we turn a deaf ear on the inner resonances of its imagery. The abrupt, reiterated command to "desist" carries intimations of death, and death is the presumable ordeal announced by the Doppelganger shadow who keeps harping on the timeliness of parting with her; this is no poem that could have been written by a young man. But the preparation for death, the enjoined adieu to what was dearest, the painful severance from what had become an enveloping husk (line 11), sounds like a new birth. We had expected something like the separation of body and soul, and we get the emergence of a liberated spirit from a driedup (metaphoric) placenta. The chrysalis of the Ossi di seppia poem by that title also comes surreptitiously into the pic­ ture as the shadow describes herself in the guise of a "use­ less husk" to be shed; but now the chrysalis will not be denied its chance to awaken into Dante's "angelic [Montale's "human"] butterfly." Potential development will no longer be repressed because potentiality is now a phase, not a prison. And all of this is made possible by the ordeal of ascetic negation—an ordeal that somehow calls to mind Ungaretti's "La pieta" and Dante's purgatorial penance, especially Canto XI. The fact that the holograph Pavia man­ uscript shows only sporadic and rather unimportant var­ iants corroborates the poem's confessional impact, the im­ mediacy of its formal birth on paper, "at this point" providing

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a counterpart of its inner integrity. Formal revelation is punctual. Negation can also appear in the form of irony aimed at the autobiographical persona in the very act of defending his record; and it is in "L'immane farsa umana" (The Huge Human Farce, Quaderno, June 16, 1976) that the speaker claims for himself the dubious privilege of having taken shelter in "the intermediate zone" of life14 to wash his hands of collective human folly even at the price of being dubbed lethargic or morose. All he did, he goes on, was repeatedly to try and bring to birth "saving angels," even if "provisional"; and if one of them failed, there was an­ other one ready to take over features and function of her predecessor so as to fit to perfection the exact mold "of somebody who seemed alive and was nobody." This is sheer self-debunking on the part of the author of poems like "Stanze" or "Iride" or "Se t'hanno assomigliato," as if a lifetime of poetic earnest sustained by personal dedi­ cation to "a faith that was fought, a hope that burned slower than a hard log on the hearth" and punctuated by real devotion to Muses in the flesh like Clizia and the Vixen were a trifling thing in retrospect. Self-disparagement be­ comes black humor while vindicating the subjective nature of the poetic myths that these and other ladies inspired. It sounds very much like a "nada, nada," without the pros­ pect of self-transcendence that "A questo punto" had opened; one is left with the final word "nessuno," nobody, capping the utterance in such a way as to denounce the insubstantiality of the whole show, personal as well as collective. But this is an intermittence of the Montalian heart, not a definitive stance, as we can verify by turning to "Mor14

See Chapter One, note 7. Another scrupulous exegete of M.'s opus is Claire Huffman, "The Poetic Language of Eugenio Montale," Italian (Quarterly 47-48 (1969): 105-128; "Structuralist Criticism and the Interpretation of Montale," The Modem Language Review 72, no. 2 (1977): 322-324; "Montale, Eliot and the Poetic Object," Italian Quarterly 21, no. 81 (Summer 1980): 63-82. 241

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gana" of January 17, 1977, the last piece of Quaderno and of Tutte Ie poesie. Whether dictated by chronology or com­ position, the placement has a strategic meaning that no reader of Ossi di seppia and the "Mottetti" can afford to ignore, for it is certainly far from casual, on Montale's part, to have given the last word, once again, to the voice of (re)affirmation. Morgan Le Fay, Fata Morgana, is a title that deftly points to the CTeative qua illusionary nature of poetic activity. The poet speaks to his quintessential Muse, or anima, the mythic yet utterly real precipitate of the women who by love moved him to write, the source of his power, the immanent Thou with whom alone discourse is possible. The self-disparaging posture of "L'immane farsa umana" yields to intellectual passion; the misunderstandings, the banality visited upon creator and creature by the aggressive worldliness of the hoi polloi have not prevailed, and a lyrical outburst one would hardly expect from the inten­ tionally prosaic and satirical author of Diario and Quaderno raises the tone of utterance to a by now unwonted height: Ahime figlia adorata, vera mia Regina della Notte, mia Cordelia, mia Brunilde, mia rondine alle prime luci, mia baby-sitter se il cervello vagoli, mia spada e scudo, ahime come si perdono Ie piste tracciate al nostro passo dai Mani che ci vegliarono, . . . Alas my adored daughter, my true Queen of the Night, my Cordelia, my Brunhild, my swallow at the first lights, my baby sitter if the mind should falter, alas how the tracks get lost that our watching Manes outlined for our steps, . . . Yet this lyrical peak springs from a quite discursive introductory part, whose relaxed lines, attuned as they are

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to elegant irony, make the transition the more remarkable. It is a feat of Montalian modulation through different registers, where polemic shades into self-directed humor to counterpoint the elegiac effusion and subside in turn into the initially witty and finally grave but Olympian wisdom of the ending: Hanno detto hanno scritto che ci manco la fede. Forse ne abbiamo avuto un surrogato. La fede έ un'altra. Cosi fu detto ma non έ detto che il detto sia sicuro. Forse sarebbe bastata quella della Catastrofe, ma non per te che uscivi per ritornarvi dal grembo degli Dei. They've said they've written that we lacked faith. Maybe we had a makeshift one. Faith is something else. This they said but who is to say if what they said is certain. Maybe faith in Catastrophe would have done, but not for you who were issuing—to return there— from the bosom of the Gods. The desolate earnest is unmistakable and it supersedes whatever oscillations may have intervened in the protracted writing of this penultimate book, so much so that one thinks of the tone and role that "Conclusioni prowisorie" had brought to La bufera over two decades earlier. In particular, one remembers "la fede che fu combattuta," the faith that was fought, in "Piccolo testamento," where the speaker's stance toward his silent feminine interlocutor matched the one he takes in the present poem. A further reason to point out how "Piccolo testamento" resonates in "Morgana" through the long interval is that in both cases the authorial persona treats the unspecified feminine entity as a personal presence. In the earlier poem she appears as an individualized woman, presumably younger than the speaker since she is supposed to inherit his intangible values in the dark times ahead, and as obliquely

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portrayed through her feminine appurtenances (face powder and pocket mirror) as Dora Markus had been through hers so long before. In the recent poem, she sways between a purely mental and a physically real status: at first the speaker wonders how her youth can have endured so long, then he lavishes on her the mythic attributes we saw, then he pinpoints her autonomous existence by emphasizing the hardship of their shared predicament under the surveillance of "the cruelest Manes who ever kept watch over two human beings" (lines 21-22). The concluding lines quoted above amount to an apotheosis that both confirms and discredits her reality as a person, for if only a real person can undergo apotheosis, only a bodiless idea can issue from "the bosom of the gods." Clearly this poem contradicts the previously discussed one, but such contradiction as may occur helps to propel it. Resilience is the result, and it does not abrogate the underlying constancy of a writing that mirrors in its occasionally mercurial variations the wide gamut of life's unpredictability in the very act of testing the countervailing stability of values. In the present instance, this is the inner dialectic: the reductively subjectivist poem ("L'immane farsa umana") culminated in the word "nessuno" (nobody), while the faith-reaffirming one ("Morgana") attains its climactic end in the word "Dei," Gods, to compound subjective denial and objective assertion of reality in a higher form of perception. Montale's poetry in its late phase reviews the stations of its long progress and in so doing often talks back to itself. Under the flippant mask, the dialectic is never shallow. "Under every no/ lay a passion for yes that had never broken"; the Stevens passage from "Esthetique du mal" again comes to mind as one leafs through the cumulative denials that make up so large a part of Satura, Diario, and Quademo. Time is denied in many a poem, from the lovely "La pendola a carillon" (The Carillon Pendulum Clock), where the old chime clock, at the moment of stopping forever, talks to the persona and urges him to live "nel 24 4

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fuordeltempo," in the dimension outside time that cannot be measured, to the elaborate "Miraggi" (Mirages), which begins by stating that our personal identity does not necessarily coincide with the time to be measured by the instruments at our disposal and ends on the intimation that "if anything did exist" there is "no distance" between millennium and minute, between who lived and who didn't. To complicate matters, still another poem, 'Tempo e tempi" (Time and Times, of 1968, from Satura II), Einstein-like maintains that there is no single time but several, while a much later one from Quaderno, "Fine di settembre" (End of September, July 1976), hypostatizes time into something "hard, metallic" like "an anvil" throwing its sparks at us poor souls in utter indifference. Existence is denied, at least in its physical outrageousness, as "II primo gennaio," one of the last pieces in Satura II, teasingly exemplifies in its opening paradox to the effect that "one can live/ without existing" and that conversely one can "exist/ without living,/ with roots torn asunder by every wind." A later poem, "Domande senza risposta" (Questions With No Answer, 1975, from Quaderno), talks of "divine nonexistence" as the perfect state of being, as if to restate the theme of "divine indifference" so well set forth half a century earlier in "II male di vivere" and the kindred yearning for a nirvanic disappearance in "II girasole" in Ossi di seppia. Yet late Quaderno poems like "Un errore" (A Mistake) qualify the negation significantly by opposing "true lives" (vite vere) to "dead lives" (vitemorte) regardless of time length, and "Una lettera che non fu spedita" (A Letter That Was Not Mailed) oracularly says that an "unknown Godhead" is the saving force for which it is worth living and dying; once our allotted time is over we'll see "who was the living one and who the dead." Living, in this concentrated sense, is authentic conscious­ ness, and by this standard the great majority of the phys­ ically alive are "dead." The realization of belonging to a tiny elite makes for uneasiness, if anything, and in a uniquely sharp poem like

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"Senza mia colpa" (Through No Fault of Mine) it leads to a waking nightmare, instantly dissipated by the ghostly, if vivid, intervention of "a white shadow," a waiter serving drinks to a "nondescript somebody" who is nevertheless "alive" (but in what sense? the rescuing certainty of phys­ ical presence does not dispose of the revelatory nightmare, after all). The nightmare will reassert itself in a poem of 1976, "Dormiveglia" (Half Awake), where the insomniac speaker waits for something to happen outside that will show him how "the world exists" and "the so-called living are not all dead." Disgust for the world as it is caps the poem with satirical deprecation, on the note of a deftly shuffled quotation from the arch pessimist Leopardi. The probing consciousness of his latter-day disciple knows no dogmatic assurance, whether of the positive or of the neg­ ative kind and can only persist in an epistemological sus­ pense as its proper element. How it came to be this way one learns from the concise intellectual autobiography that pointedly introduces Quaderno. It is a rich poem called "L'educazione intellettuale" (An Intellectual Education), dated 1973, and it summons up poignant remembrances of things past for the aged speaker who, lounging on the beach, sees the alert boy he once was confront once again the stormy sea and the per­ ennial questions. These were never answered by the catch­ all formulas of self-assured rationalist thinkers, especially Hegelian, who triumphantly identified Logos and Nature, Thought and Reality, and thus abstractly solved all prob­ lems in advance. The temporary turmoil of today's sea evokes a time when "all forms were liquescent" from "ex­ cess of youth." It was the youth of the world for "the boy with a forelock" who eagerly took in the chimeras of imag­ ination, the "voices of seers and madmen," the "faces of wise men," saints, and "the prince of lunatics," obviously Friedrich Nietzsche kissing a drayhorse in his first seizure to enter the abode of "a luminous darkness." Such effer­ vescence of sea and mind was the boy's initiation to poetry as an alternative to dogmatic philosophy (to any preten-

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tious ideology), but it is now remote, and the speaker is left with the view of a demythified, denatured, empty sea— the synecdoche of the present world into which he has survived. The disabused poet of the seventies remembers the fervid poet of "Mediterraneo" from the twenties; his personal heroic age of myth is a memory and a pang. En­ tropy, of history and perhaps nature itself, is now his myth— a negative myth that can still challenge the official ide­ ologies and the intellectual fads of our time. That braces him for whatever ordeal may be in store. An untitled poem in Diario del '71 begins on the quizzical note "I'm ready, I repeat, but ready for what?" Not for death, he goes on, for he does not believe in it, and not for the "teeming of robots" that they call life. There is no "other life" to mirror the absurdities of this one; there is a "life beyond" (oltrevita) that nevertheless is in time, not outside it, and time actually "feeds on it" to prolong its "deceit." To be ready, the poem concludes, is not a matter of choos­ ing between two evils or two goods or even between all and nothing. It is a matter of having put it to the test; of knowing that the "Veil" (of appearances) is deceitful yet cannot be rent asunder. More than the subtly agnostic stance, what seems of interest here is the idea of a transcendence demystified. The Montalian coinage, oltrevita, supersedes altravita (other life) to denote a beyond that is not the tra­ ditional reified "Beyond" of naive mythologies but a di­ mension intrinsic to life itself, the very act of going beyond appearances (and social stereotypes), the refusal to take reality for granted. If to deny is to transcend, it is no wonder that this and many another poem of the last decade should take shape as an efflorescence of denials. One such instance, quite germane to the one just discussed, is "Ci si rivede" (We'll See Each Other Again), from Quaderno, where the memory of a dying man who took his gallant leave with those words but is not remembered by the speaker otherwise causes the latter to meditate that "Up there/ down there" there will be no marks of identity, no exchange of words. "We

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shan't even find Nothingness [il Nulla] there"; "we shall have neither [paradisal] ether nor [infernal] fire." Negation pushed to the limit begins to negate itself, and this accounts for the negative prayer to a God ("Ai tuoi piedi," At Your Feet) who is acknowledged only as a pres­ ence (or absence) devoid of attributes, as other poems of this season confirm, while "Π trionfo della spazzatura" (The Triumph of Garbage) had earlier mentioned "the nameless god/ who dispenses Grace" and cannot do anything else; from Him one can learn that "just to be alive [in the height­ ened Montalian sense] is no paltry enterprise." That this unusually affirmative poem should have sprung from the unlikeliest occasion conceivable (a strike of garbage collec­ tors in Rome, where Senator Montale used to attend the official meetings of his prestigious legislative body) only verifies once more the irreducible elfishness of his art. How the negative way can lead a lay humanist to God (or "God") beyond all disenchantments; how this very per­ son (and persona) had earlier come upon a kindred rec­ ognition from a different departure after composing (en­ acting) two capital books that omitted (biblically?) the intractable name; and how the Bufera's theophany could eventually yield to Satura's and Diario's perilous swaying between an exalted and a degradingly demonized vision of godhead—there is nearly inexhaustible food for specu­ lation in such questions. But, to stay with the poetry, we can hardly fail to notice how the drive for a total grasp of reality, for an imaginative contact with reality's possible source, makes our poet blend the quest for "God" with the recurrent examination of his craft's powers. Those pow­ ers are verbal, and they are limits at the same time. A poem like "La lingua di Dio" (The Language of God) in Diario del '71 voices deep-seated concern about the prob­ lem. To begin with, the generating clause ("Se dio e il linguaggio," If god is language) links two incompatible sources in muffled antinomy: St. John's Gospel, which be­ gins with the well-known statement "In the beginning was the Word," and contemporary linguistics, which tends to

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replace ontology with a potentially metaphysical analysis of language. The conditional formulation, intrinsically un­ dermining any claim of absoluteness in the philosophical equation being considered, was already there in the two earlier drafts of the poem, which can be consulted in the Pavia University modern manuscripts fund. They are typed, with few corrections or alternatives weighed, on the back of one sheet of paper whose other side carries the typescript of another Diario poem, "II frullato" (Whipped Stuff). The tenor of the initial clause—"Se dio si esprime nelle nostre lingue" (If god expresses himself in our languages)—dif­ fered somewhat in these preliminary sketches, and the se­ quel deepens the divergence to the extent of making the three drafts look not so much like three phases of the same evolving poem as, rather, like three ramifications of one basic idea. In all three cases the ratiocinative scaffolding is alike, with an introductory hypothesis: god talks in our human tongues, drafts 1 and 2; god (always spelled in lower case) is language, draft 3—and notice the emphatic italicizing of the copula, which had first come up in the last line but one of draft 2. The hypothesis then leads to absurd consequences in the logical development that fol­ lows. But each of the three conclusions represents a different line of thought. Draft 1, after admitting that the arduous prospects of communicating with the godhead are "better than nothing," follows it up with the sarcastic remark that if so, anything is better than nothing, even the meaningless "dripping of a broken faucet" or the "wailing whir of ma­ chines." A subsequent sentence ponders the strangeness of "a nothingness uttering sounds" (but this expression is crossed out) and, in particular, the strangeness of our talk­ ing "a language not our own" that in turn should be not just god's tongue "but his very way of being"; at this point the meditation founders in the invocation of "absolute si­ lence," an impossible option for the living. Draft 2, a more discontinuous one, with more hesitations, introduces after line 1 a clinching specification that will supersede it in the

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final draft ("if god expresses himself in our tongues/ and is actually himself Language as/ . . . the wailing whir of machines") then proceeds to reflect how strange it is that he himself, "the uncreated one/ who confused all tongues" should not speak one of his own, should instead "express himself in babbling"; after all "he is language and nothing else," as the "latest discovery" (of aberrant linguistics) has it. Draft 3, the published one, strengthens by emphatic condensation the conditional beginning ("If god is lan­ guage, the One that created so many others/ to confound them later") and restores much of the remaining part of the sentence as given in draft 1 ("how shall we manage to consult him and how/ believe that he has spoken and will speak/ forever undecipherable and this is/ better than noth­ ing"). But the conclusion, inferentially articulated in three short sentences, has little or nothing to do with that of the two preliminary drafts: . . . Certo meglio che nulla siamo noi fermi alia balbuzie. E guai se un giorno Ie voci si sciogliessero. Il linguaggio, sia il nulla ο non Io sia, ha Ie sue astuzie. . . . Certainly better than nothing are we who are stuck in stuttering. And woe to us if one day the voices were to flow smoothly. Language, whether it's nothingness or not, has its own astuteness. The threefold repetition of the word "nulla" (nothing, nothingness) in the second half of the poem insinuates the idea that god, the All, and Nothingness may be inter­ changeable, or at least that if language is god, is All, then it may be nothing.

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The irony is metaphysical, not flippant; the quest for a total language, which alone would be capable of grasping the All, forms the theme of other gnomic poems, notably "Incespicare" of 1968, which I had a chance to discuss with the author, and "Le maschere" (The Masks) of 1975. Of course any totalitarian claim for language as the only and ultimate reality can only elicit sarcasm from a writer of Montale's antidogmatic kind, as "La forma del mondo" (The Shape of the World, dated June 6, 1971, according to the Pavia holograph manuscript) abundantly shows. But the earlier "Incespicare," an earnest speculative lyric that can sustain comparison with the best of Goethe's "orphic" verse, pointedly said that "once/ somebody spoke entirely/ and was incomprehensible," and since then "the world has been dumb," despite the profusion of written and spoken words from every quarter. Stammering, stumbling in our attempt to speak, is necessary to "awaken our tongue from its torpor"; yet even stammering won't do, and we have to be resigned to "a half speaking" (un mezzo parlare). Christ (but Christ as a type only) is the one who "spoke entirely," as Montale told me in 1977. He of course was the Word; we, even if we are poets, can only express ourselves obliquely and incompletely. Human language and divine, total language are incommensurable, and the allencompassing expression remains forever beyond our grasp. The poet of "Incespicare" and of "La lingua di dio" restates in metaphysical terms what he had more sensuously said in the twenties when humbly comparing his "stammering talk" (balbo parlare) with the unbroken music of the Mediterranean sea. And the myth of the Tower of Babel enters the picture now, to compound the precariousness of the human condition from the point of view of that essential human prerogative—the verbal act. Caught as it is between silence and noise, doomed to fragmentation and confusion, endlessly degraded by history, can the human word hope to achieve, or regain, an authentic quality? Authenticity is of the essence, and Montale eventually asks if "one day we shall throw [away] our

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masks," since everybody wears one without knowing it. Language of course can be the mask. Who knows, "among the millions" there may well be the man "in whom face and mask coincide," and he alone "could tell us the word/ we have been awaiting forever." The identity of existential appearance and reality would be (we can infer) a new revelation, a Second Coming. But "probably" the man of truth, if he exists, does not know his privilege. He who did "paid for his gift with stammering or worse" (Christ can be a Billy Budd). His name was always unpronounceable, "not just because of phonetics." Science is otherwise busy. "Chissa se un giorno butteremo Ie maschere" (Who Knows If We'll Throw Our Masks Away) ranks with "Incespicare" as one of Montale's best gnomic formulations, a truly "orphic" one in Goethe's sense of the word. It relates to the earlier poem symmetrically, by projecting into the future a unique event that "Inces­ picare" had adumbrated in past, sacred history. Since "parIare per intero" (entire, encompassing speech) and "mezzo parlare" (half speaking) or "balbuzie" (stammering) are a polarity not to be reconciled, since the Word negates the broken word of human history that it was supposed to fulfill, one would expect the negation to become absolute. But even this would be insufferably dogmatic and glib, so Montale lets us glimpse the bare possibility of a redeeming presence, along with the extreme unlikelihood of our ever recognizing it. Perfection, Being, completeness are tangen­ tial to our world. At this point, the frustrating perspective can undergo a reversal of sorts, and a metaphysical assurance will begin to dawn on the bare horizon. Poetry, the quintessential verbal act, having steadily rejected the temptation to glorify itself, having subsisted on sheer self-denial ever since the remote day when Montale wrote that "we can only tell you what we are not, what we do not want" to add that he would never give us "the world-disclosing" word of plen­ itude but just "some dry syllable, crooked like a branch"— poetry, that unlikeliest of endeavors, now declares itself to

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be something not so insubstantial after all. It does so, need­ less to say, on the spur of the moment, in the unpredictable context of a polemical rejoinder that affords the cue for statements whose real consequence might escape the can­ did reader. In "Asor" Montale takes gently to task the Marxist critic Asor Rosa for disliking any "private bias" (privatismo) in poetry, a dislike that would make sense only if history did produce something comparable. Poetry, he goes on to say in one of his rare assertive utterances, "is not made for anybody,/ not for others and not even for him who writes it." The barrage of negations is briefly interrupted by a consequent question, "Why is it born?" (Perche nasce?) There follows a new reiteration of denials that reject the very legitimacy of the question itself: . . . Non nasce affatto e dunque non e mai nata . . . . . . It is not born at all and therefore it never was born . . . Here, negation pushed to the limit shows itself to be just the other side of an affirmation whose boldness equals its oracular crypticalness: . . . Sta come una pietra ο un granello di sabbia . . . . . . It stands like a rock or a grain of sand . . . "La poesia non esiste," Poetry does not exist, is the title of a paradoxical short story that was eventually added to Farfalla di Dinard. The real meaning of that incredible denial, if one listens closely to the character uttering it (and it's not the authorial persona) in the most improbable cir­ cumstances that could be conceived for such a discussion,

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is that great poetry may exist in itself but remains or becomes inaccessible to us, through no fault of its own; history removes us from it. The present poem sounds very much like a vindication of such a metahistorical status—even though in the sequel to the lines quoted above we read a momentous qualification, "It will end/ with everything else," to remind us that if our purest cultural creations transcend historical contingency, in the end they are not exempt from historical entropy. Unsystematic Montale, no matter how committed to truth and to the intermittent sighting of truth that is granted to its devotees, will never give us a coherently integrated rationale of his vision, only sharp probings. Yet his recurrent jabs at whatever smug philosophy may claim monopoly of that truth that must be always earned anew do finally add up to a fairly consistent attitude; and the attitude is polemically anachronistic because it is at loggerheads with rationalist historicism in all its forms, as well as with the industrial Utopias of mass society (see his essays in Auto da fe). Accordingly he sees real culture entrusted to a quiet elite, whatever resentments the idea (and the word) may attract nowadays; the alternative, in his view, is noise, nonsense, and shapelessness, nor does he have much use for a collectivist society that is not composed of individuals.15 The otherness we have seen him confer on poetry is then an aspect of the staunch negation he flings in the face of a modern industrialized society that risks falsifying or obliterating the values of humanism; the old faith in the dignity of man is far from defunct. And this is why metaphysics, that most unfashionable pursuit, looms in his verse. "La verita" (Truth) is a case in point, with its wholesale denial of the modern idea of dynamism, motion, and change; the "idea that everything moves" is a scholiast's mockery, 15 This is the gist of M.'s thought, and an explicit formulation of this idea is put forth in the poem "L'obbrobrio" (The Infamy), which reads: "if the individual is little, the collective/ is just fragmentation/ and dust: nothing more." See Quaderno di quattro anni (Milano: Mondadori, 1977), p. 91, 11. 4-6.

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the idea that there is such a thing as a before and an after does not hold water. Truth is "a spiderweb" and it can last, provided we don't go at it "with a broom." At other moments the same vindication of a secret stability in the core of the real takes a different form, and then the otherness of unadulterated reality reminds us of poetry's otherness and of the several occurrences of "crystal," "jasper," "gem," and similar metaphors of undefeatable hardness in Montale's poetry from Le occasioni to Quaderno. A particularly incisive for­ mulation of this insight appears in "Fine di settembre," a poem of Quaderno dated July 3, 1976. An oriole's song in the sparse greenery near a crowded beach, unlyrically "ordinary" though it is, turns out to evoke an extraordinary revelation: time is not swift but hard, and under the apparent flux of things it is immobility ("la stasi") that asserts itself— an "infinity peopled,/ rich in itself, not in men, divine/ because the divine is never parcelled." Time, says the persona now, is hard, "metallic," actually an anvil flinging its sparks at us and "working on us with a horrid indifference," sometimes with mockery, quite like the oriole's song, the only song worth listening to "in days like these." Time, then, is not motion, it "stands" like poetry, it is actually one and the same with an irreducible, measureless reality that deserves the epithet "divine." For once, the noumenon attainable only through tireless negation shows itself in its awesome otherness, through a voice of nature, in the midst of human hustle-and-bustle. One can hardly help remembering a very consonant insight in Wallace Stevens' "The Motive for Metaphor" (from Transport to Summer of 1947), which culminates in the glimpsing of a "sharp flash," "steel against intimation," the truth beyond metaphor, the "arrrogant, fatal, dominant X." The convergence is not accidental because Stevens' poetical phenomenology, with its emphasis on seeing "the very thing and nothing else" to "burn it with the hottest fire of sight," and his attendant ontology of Nature as the inaccessibly intact "first idea" that antedates all our an-

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thropomorphic mythologies and logical fabrications, is germane to Montale's independent approach; they also share a basic distrust of totalitarian political ideologies. "To know is not to impose," says Stevens in his Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. With both, poetics is epistemology; and for both "perhaps truth depends upon a walk around the lake." The way of negation, as we have been tracing it through a meandering exploration of several poems from Montale's last phase, seemed at times bent on nihilism; but he refuses to absolutize negation itself, and accordingly the gesture of denial becomes a way of discovering the purity of being in its manifold manifestations as well as in its hidden roots. In the prayer called "Ai tuoi piedi" (At Your Feet), which is a ritual, or informal, preparation for death, the Montalian persona anticipates his going over the few things that were his life: rifaro il censimento di quel nulla che fu vivente perch£ fu tangibile I'll repeat the census count of that nothing which was living because it was tangible And in "Appunti" (Notebook Jottings), from the same period (May 1975), some nocturnal meditations on our forthcoming death and on the persistence of wholesale evil in the world make way for a final apergu of what is a "living," "tangible nothing": the blackbird happily swaying on a twig at dawn. "Felice," happy, is the conclusive word. The thread I have chosen to follow through Montale's work in its last phase necessarily bypasses some aspects to which only a much broader, comprehensive approach could begin to do justice. But it is my hope that an organizing perspective will thereby arise to rescue from misunder­ standing or underrating a body of verse that offers new departures while developing certain imminent cues that were there from the start. The lowered pitch, the deliberate informality of style are diversionary, and they may well

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sidetrack the hasty reader away from the formal accom­ plishment of many individual lyrics, epigrams, or potentially narrative pieces. The liberal admixture of humor also differentiates Satura, Diario, and Quaderno from their pre­ decessor in the canon, the hymnically pitched Bufera. The later books somehow criticize, demystify, and thereby recall the earlier ones. The "value of the individual," as Karl Joachim Weintraub has aptly entitled his study of Western autobiography from Augustine to Goethe,16 is the humanist value in question, and Montale's poetical autobiography (a "fragment of a great confession") comes to remind us how much harder it has become to reassert that value in our troubled era. If Montale's self-portrait sounds too often like the confession of a besieged consciousness vis-a-vis the freely expanding consciousness that emerged from Goethe's poetical and autobiographical pages, his fidelity to the dignity of man is indubitable. Is it anachronistic? The prophet is often someone who cries out the forgotten values. 16 Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Selfand Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978).

INDEX OF M O N T A L E TITLES AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS

"Accelerate" (Omnibus Train), 181 "Agave sullo scoglio" (Agave on the Cliff), 32 "Ai tuoi piedi" (At Your Feet), 248 "A Liuba che parte" (To Liuba Leaving), 29, 201 "A mia madre" (To My Mother), 97 "Angelo nero" (Black Angel), 203 "L'anguilla" (The Eel), 153, 156, 157, 159, 163, 171, 181, 209 "Anniversario" (Anniversary), 185, 188, 189 "Appunti" (Notebook Jottings), 256 "A questo punto" (At This Point), 239-241 "Arsenio" (Arsenio), 19, 32, 40, 47, 53, 85, 150, 206 "L'arte povera" (Destitute Art), 225-226 "A un grande filosofo" (To a Great Philosopher), 239n Auto da fi (Statements of Belief), 61n, 111, 120, 123, 131, 145, 189n "II balcone" (The Balcony), 54 "Ballata scritta in una clinica" (Ballad Written in a Hospital), 216 "Barche sulla Marna" (Boats on the Marne), 53, 54, 136, 192, 219 "II bello viene dopo" (The Real Thing Comes Later—short story), 154, 179 "Botta e risposta I" (Thrust and Riposte I), 210, 217, 218 "Botta e risposta II" (Thrust and Riposte II), 111, 189, 217, 238 "Botta e risposta III" (Thrust and Riposte III), 210 La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things), 6n, 7, 13, 34-35, 38, 83, 85, 92, 96, 98, 105, 111, 117, 119, 123, 131, 135, 140, 150-151, 153n, 155-157, 160, 166, 175, 187-190, 192, 196, 199, 203, 205, 207, 210211, 216-217, 239, 243, 248, 257 "Buffalo" (Buffalo), 193-195, 201

INDEX

"Carnevale di Gerti" (Gerti's Carnival), 35-53 "Casa dei doganieri" (The Shorewatchers' House), 37, 207 "Che mastice tiene insieme" (What Putty Holds Together), 204, 215 "Chiss^ se un giorno butteremo Ie maschere" (Who Knows If We'll Throw Our Masks Away), 252 "Ci si rivede" (We'll See Each Other Again), 247 "Clivo" (Knoll), 15 "Qizia a Foggia" (Clizia at Foggia—short story), 197, 199-200 "II condannato" (The Doomed One—short story), 94 "Corno inglese" (English Horn), 14 "Costa San Giorgio" (San Giorgio Hill Road), 207 "Crisalide" (Chrysalis), 32, 39, 40, 45, 130-131, 206, 240 "Un crollo di cenere" (A Downfall of Ash—short story), 200 "Da Gerusalemme divisa" (From Divided Jerusalem—chapter in book; see Fuori di casa), 239 "Dal treno" (From a Train), 165 "Da un Iago svizzero" (From a Swiss Lake), 181 "Delta" (Delta), 30, 31, 206 "Dialogo" (Dialogue), 219 Diario del '71 e del '72 (Diary of 1971 and 1972), 209, 211, 222, 229, 234, 239, 248-249 "Divinity in incognito" (Deities in Disguise), 222 "Domande senza risposta" (Questions With No Answers), 245 "Dominico" (Dominico—short story), 189 "Dopo una fuga" (After a Flight), 176, 234 "Dora Markus" (Dora Markus), 29, 38, 53, 54, 155, 156, 157 "Dormiveglia" (Half Awake), 246 "Eastbourne" (Eastbourne), 34, 37, 52, 63, 192, 195, 209 "L'educazione intellettuale" (An Intellectual Education), 246 "Elegia di Pico Farnese" (Elegy of Pico Farnese), 6, 29, 34, 53, 54, 117, 123 "Un errore" (A Mistake), 245 "L'estate" (Summer), 73, 207 "Ex voto" (Dedication), 164, 204, 228, 234 "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel" (title of spiritual), 119 "Falsetto" (Falsetto), 18, 219 "Fanfara" (Fanfare), 219 Farfalla di Dinard (Butterfly of Dinard), 94, 108, 154, 176, 179, 180, 189, 197, 253 "Feliciti raggiunta" (Happiness Attained), 16 "Figure" (Figures of Speech), 221 "Fine di settembre" (End of September), 248

INDEX "Finisterre" (Finisterre), 196 "La forma del mondo" (The Shape of the World), 251 "Forse un mattino" (Perhaps One Morning), 16 "La frangia dei capelli" (The Lock of Hair), 123 "II frullato" (Whipped Stuff), 249 Fuori di casa (Abroad), 238, 239n "II gallo cedrone" (The Black Cock), 155, 199 "II giglio rosso" (The Red Lily), 119 "II girasole" (The Sunflower), 5, 205, 245 "Gloria del disteso mezzogiorno" (Glory of the Outspread Noon), 16 "L'immane farsa umana" (The Huge Human Farce), 241, 242 "Incantesimo" (Spell), 163 "Incespicare" (Stumbling), 220, 251 "Incontro" (A Meeting), 45 "In limine" (On the Threshold), 8, 12 "Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria)" (Intentions, an Imaginary Inter­ view—essay), 4n, 29, 56, 90, 219, 239 "Intercettazione telefonica" (Telephone Interference), 219 "In un giardino italiano" (In an Italian Garden), 176 "Iride" (Iris), 38, 92, 103, 118, 120, 126, 131, 135-137, 139, 141, 143, 149, 156, 159, 163, 241 "Lampi e dediche" (Flashes and Dedications), 98, 160, 163, 165, 167, 186

"Lettera a Malvolio" (Letter to Malvolio), 219 "Una lettera che non fu spedita" (A Letter That Was Not Mailed), 245 "I limoni" (The Lemons), 8, 9 "La lingua di Dio" (The Language of God), 248, 251 "Madrigali privati" (Private Madrigals), 160, 167, 171, 182, 187 "II male di vivere" (The Pain of Living), 4, 205, 245 "Marezzo" (Choppy Sea), 30 "Le maschere" (The Masks), 251 "Mediterraneo" (Mediterranean), 12, 17, 20-21, 25-31, 224, 247 "Meriggiare pallido e assorto" (Nooning in Pale Absorption), 4, 45 "Meriggi e ombre" (Noons and Shadows), 15 "La mia Musa" (My Muse), 222, 225-226, 228 "II mio ottimismo" (My Optimism), 222 "Miraggi" (Mirages), 245 "Morgana" (Morgan Le Fay), 241-242, 244 "I morti" (The Dead), 32 "Mottetti" (Motets), 34, 54-88, 155, 196, 242

INDEX "Nel parco di Caserta" (In the Caserta Park), 89

"Noterelle di uno dei Mille" (Diary Entries of a Garibaldi Volunteer— chapter in book; see Fuori di Cosa), 239n "Notizie dall'Amiata" (News from Amiata), 34, 45, 67, 88, 116, 122, 175 "Nubi color magenta" (Clouds of a Magenta Hue), 176 "Nuove stanze" (New Stanzas), 34,123, 192 "L'obbrobrio" (The Infamy), 254n Le occasioni (The Occasions), 6, 7, 28, 32, 34, 35, 52, 54, 57, 60, 63, 67, 85, 122, 124, 136, 144, 181, 182, 195, 207 "L'ombra della magnolia" (The Magnolia's Shade), 56, 85, 92, 96, 119, 144, 146, 149, 153 "Gli orecchini" (The Earrings), 187n "L'orto" (The Garden), 13, 119 Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 17-18, 24, 29, 30, 32-34, 45, 88, 130, 155, 157, 164, 176, 179, 181, 183, 188, 205, 245 "Ossi di seppia" ("Cuttlefish Bones"), 7, 14-18 "Palio" (Siena Horse Race), 29, 53, 54, 123, 156, 192 "La pendola a carillon" (The Carillon Pendulum Clock), 244 "Per album" (For an Album), 175 "Personae separatae" (Separated Lovers), 85 "Per un omaggio a Rimbaud" (For an Homage to Rimbaud), 155 "Piccolo testamento" (Little Testament), 97 "La piuma de struzzo" (The Ostrich Feather—short story), 204 "La poesia" (Poetry), 222 "La poesia non esiste" (Poetry Does Not Exist—short story), 222 "Un poeta" (A Poet), 222 "Primavera hitleriana" (Hitlerian Spring), 5-6, 53, 117, 150, 188, 207, 209 "II primo gennaio" (January 1st), 234 "II principe della festa" (The Prince of the Feast), 221 "Le processioni del '49" (The Processions of 1949), 103, 239 "Proda di Versilia" (Versilia Shore), 93, 99, 100, 111 Quaderno di quattro anni (Notebook of Four Years), 98, 209, 211, 239,

241, 242, 245, 246 Quaderno di traduzioni (A Notebook of Translations), 141

"Quasi una fantasia" (Almost a Fantasy), 11 "Realismo non magico" (Nonmagical Realism), 220 "II regista" (The Movie Director—short story), 204 "Reliquie" (Relics—short story), 154 "Retrocedendo" (Going Backwards), 202 "Le rime" (Rhymes), 222

INDEX

"II ritorno" (The Return), 195, 197 "Riviere" (River Banks), 32, 206 Satura (Satirical Medley), 111, 202, 204, 210, 215, 217, 234, 235, 238-239,

244, 245, 248 "Scirocco" (Sirocco), 85 "Senza mia colpa" (Through No Fault of Mine), 246 "Serenata Indiana" (Indian Serenade), 196 "Se t'hanno assomigliato" (If They Have Likened You), 171, 177,181 "Siria" (Syria), 186 "Slow" (Slow—short story), 204 "II sogno del prigioniero" (The Prisoner's Dream), 188 "Sotto la pioggia" (Under the Rain), 22,155 "Stanze" (Stanzas), 34, 241 "La storia" (History), 220 "Sulla Greve" (On the Greve), 161 Sulla poesia (On Poetry), 4n, 191 "Sul limite" (On the Threshold—short story), 108,113, 204 "Sul Llobregat" (On the Llobregat), 160 "Sul muro grafito" (On the Carved Wall), 7, 45 "Tempi di Bellosguardo" (Bellosguardo Times), 85 'Tempo e tempi" (Time and Times), 245 "Tiro a volo" (Trap Shooting), 233 "Tramontane" (North Wind), 85, 91 "II trionfo della spazzatura" (The Triumph of Garbage), 248 "La trota nera" (The Black Trout), 160 "II tu" (The Thou), 118 "II tuffatore" (The Diver), 229 Tutte Ie poesie (The Complete Poems), 233 "Gli ultimi spari" (The Last Shots), 217 "Valmorbia" (Valmorbia), 32, 181, 182 "II ventaglio" (The Fan), 119 "La verit&" (Truth), 254 "Verso Capua" (Toward Capua), 194 "Verso Finist£re" (Toward Finistere), 186 "Verso Siena" (Toward Siena), 160 "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe" (Voice Coming With the Moorhens), 92, 99,113, 116 "Xenia" (Xenia—songs of hospitality), 35, 211-217

GENERAL INDEX

Adams, Hazard, 142 ttdynaton (logical impossibility), 228

Agosti, Stefano, 21In Alighieri, Dante: quoted on "the great sea of Being," 18; quoted on Love's dictation, 23, 35; as alternative model to Petrarch, 59-61; percussive sounds in the Inferno poetry of, 61-62; quoted, 84; importance of to M., 90-91; as underlying model for M.'s purgatorial poetry, 94-153; as poet of sublimated love, 158159; as example of the coexist­ ence of poet and critic, 192, 194, 223, 224, 240 alliteration, 4, 11, 62, 194 Almansi, Guido, 55n, 167n, 175, 182, 189n, 235 ambiguity: as expressive function, 13; syntactical, 31; symbolic and semantic, 156, 183n; out of the question in "Anniversario," 187n Amendola, Giovanni, 3n America, 122, 125, 127 amor de Ionh (love from afar), 113. See also Provengal poets; trouba­ dour Anadyomene, inner, 31

anagoge, through metaphor, 172. See also truth anamnesis, of Platonic and Wordsworthian type, 20, 25 Anceschi, Luciano, 61, 85 animal emblems, 153-185, 196. See also bird imagery; fish imagery animals, magical functions of, 70 Annetta, 30 annihilation, 5, 21, 34. See also Nirvana Antonielli, Sergio, 61n apocalyptic poetry, 77, 83, 85, 103, 119; linked to personal confession, 129; challenging the public conventions of its time, 136, 139; as utterance having its source in the transcendental "he" or self, 141 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 126, 182 apotheosis, 34; erotic, 69. See also deification Aquinas, St. Thomas, 113, 137138 Archimedes, 215 Ariel, 12 Aristotle, 110 Arnold, Matthew, 103 ascetic tendency, 7, 13, 78, 234 Atropos, 84 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 58

INDEX

authorial persona, 11, 13; quest­ ing, 18; musing, 22; attaining full consciousness, 27; self-criti­ cal, 28; identifying with stone, 29; attesting to a forgotten or­ der, 31; rationalizing, 46-47; love-tormented, 63, 84-87; awaiting apparitions, 93; cling­ ing to sheltering enclosures, 118,132,147; unable to go be­ yond purgatorial condition, 150; deified, 187; threatened by chaos, 194, 206, 215, 217, 225; as theater manikin, 228 availability, as rejection of clo­ sure, 13 Avalle, DiArco Silvio, 201n

Barile, Laura, 29n, 32n Baroque style, 60 Barth, Karl, 231 Baudelaire, Charles, 192 Beatrice, 35, 62, 90, 99, 107, 128, 132, 134, 143-144, 148, 149, 156, 159 Bicquer, Gustave Adolfo, 57 Bergson, Henri, 45, 56, 120n Bettarini, Rosanna, 28n bird imagery, 21-22, 70, 98; taking on symbolic meanings, 145; as allegory of Clizia the Christbearer, 145-146; polarized against fish imagery and partly overlapping with it in symbolic overtones, 153-155, 156-188. See also fish imagery Blake, William, 3, 20, 142 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 142 Boine, Giovanni, 3n Bonfiglioli, Pietro, 90n Bonora, Ettore, 54, 63 Borges, Jorge Luis, 111 Boutroux, Emile, 56, 138; as antimechanist philosopher, 191,

120n; leading M. to via negativa, 232. See also contingency, phi­ losophy of Breughel, Pieter, 94 Brodsky, Joseph, 90n Buddhist attitude, 4. See also Nir­ vana Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 226 Buzzati, Dino, 111 Cacciagmda (Dante's ancestor), 102 Calvino, Italo, 17n canzoniere, 62

Caretti, Laura, 61n Carpi, Umberto, 6n Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson), 203 Casella (Dante's friend), 95, 114 catalytic Thou, 21, 31; as inner in­ terlocutor of authorial persona, 140; closely linked to the tran­ scendental "he" or self, 140141; comparable as such to Yeats's "antiself," 141-142; and to St. John of the Cross's "Bridegroom of the soul" (i.e., Christ), 141-142; embodied by Leone Traverso in poem ad­ dressed to him, 223; functional, blending La Mosca with an­ other inspirer, 226. See also transcendental self catharism, 145 Cavalcanti, Guido, 59, 90, 142 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 104 Christianity: ancestral, 104; as concept of Love, 105; elements of, 105; orthodox, 105; without a Church, 139; esoteric, 145; dogmatic, 152; secularized, 180 chthonic regression, 116, 153 Cima, Annalisa, 9n, 17n, 34n, 154n Circe, 153

INDEX Circoli, 61η Claudel, Paul, 104 Clizia, 5, 6, 13, 30; apotheosis of, 34-35; sublimated eros and pro­ phetic voice of, 54-55, 70-73, 8387, 90, 106-108; Jewishness of, 122; as Christ-bearer, 122-124; as Iris and Christ-bearer, 126130, 140; sunlike, 130; as awakener and challenger, 131; Bea­ trice-like and Christ-bound, 132-133; as transcendent hypos­ tasis, 136; as dominant ad­ dressee of "Mottetti" and La bufera, 140; as one form and function of the "he-thou," 140; Christ-bound and sun-bound, 143; sunny Christ-bearer, 146; Beatrice-like, 148; birdlike and transfigured, 148; as iris-Irisrainbow, 156-158; as sunflower, 156-158; interacting in polariza­ tion or overlapping with the Vixen, 163-164; demonized into an octopus, 196; metamor­ phosed (in a dream) into a spi­ der, 197-200; committed to per­ sonal values, 208; against obscurantism, 209; as Muse in the flesh, 241. See also animal emblems; bird imagery cognitive poetry, 7, 9, 30, 31,191. See also epistemological tend­ ency Collodi, Carlo, 201 Colonna, Vittoria, 226 Comello, Toni, 90n Compositional chronology (differ­ ent from sequential arrange­ ment of poems), 32, 55 consciousness: tried, 3; as genera­ tor of poetry, 23; intent on problem of existence, 23; indi­ vidualized, attaining fullness, 26; mature, 27; dimming, 84;

burdened by sterile memory, 108; expansion of, 132-133; lim­ its of (with hell and paradise as negative and positive pole), 150; threatened by chaotic forces of id, 194, 196-197; be­ sieged, 257; expanding, 257 contingency, philosophy of, 56, 113, 138, 191. Seealso Boutroux, Emile Contini, Gianfranco, 27, 28n convulsive rhythm, 68 Corti, Maria, 8n, 32n, 210n, 234 cosmic harmony, 19, 25-26 cosmic mythopoeia, 17, 20, 25 cosmogony, 16, 45 Crane, Hart, 77 Crepuscular (or Crepuscolare) po­ etry, 8, 12, 28 Criterion, The, 32n Croce, Benedetto, 120n, 137, 145, 191, 239 ciyptical imagery, 119 Cummings, Edward Estlin, 199 da Gubbio, Oderisi, 225 d'Annunzio, Gabriele, 24, 187, 231 Dartte, see Alighieri, Dante da Pistoia, Cino, 90, 165 Debussy, Claude, 80 Decadent morbidity, rejected by M., 191 de Chardin, Teilhard, 239 deification, 160, 185-188 delle Vigne, Pier, 91 Dickinson, Emily, 141, 221 Dimensioni, 90n Dionysian attitude, 23, 27, 183; as fury, 192, 224 Diotima, 163 discovery of self, 26, 34 Dolce Stil Nuovo, 35, 90, 142, 158. See also poetics Donne, John, 196

INDEX Dora, Markus, see Markus, Dora Doubting Thomas, 6, 234. See also skeptic tendency

Fascism, 111, 147, 151, 210 Fattori, Giovanni, 82 Fellini, Federico, 35 Ferrata, Giansiro, 17n Eckermann, Johann Peter, 89n finiteness vs. infinitude, 24-26, ecstasy, 3, 4, 16, 24, 26, 34; erotic, 32, 88, 97 161; nirvanalike, 205 fish imagery, 98, 149, 151, 154; Eden, 32, 34, 43, 94-96, 108, 116, polarity of, to bird imagery 137, 154 with symbolic overtones, 154, Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 32n, 58, 155-156, 158-160, 164-165. See 61, 111, 129, 140, 151, 191 also bird imagery elliptical form, 14; as poetical de­ Folena, Gianfranco, 24n vice, 30; attuned to stark vision, Forti, Marco, 9n, 12n, 153n, 210n 54; as elliptical analogism in po­ Fortini, Franco, 73n etical tradition, 60; as trait of Freud, Sigmund, 98 modernist style, 89; characteris­ Friedrich, Hugo, 68, 135 tic of "Iride," 119 Frye, Northrop, 222 Empson, William, 156 Futurism, 110. See also Marinetti, entelechy, 110, 111 Filippo Tommaso; Munari, entropy (irreversible lowering of Bruno energy), 14, 34, 40, 41, 45, 52, 86, 96, 108, 148; existential or Galassi, Jonathan, 90n historical, 188 Genoa, 63 epiphany, 11, 38, 56-57; problem­ Gentile, Giovanni, 120n atical, 70; coincident with its oc­ Gerti, 30; as individualized casion, 72-73; musical, 77; pre­ woman, childlike sorceress, ceding outer reality's cues, 79; grace-bringing interlocutor, 34phenomenal, not noumenal, 88; 53 collective, 100; pointing to ob­ Giachery, Emerico, 12 jective being, 132; taking place gnosticism, 145 only in memory, 143; emerging Gobetti edition (of Ossi di seppia, from minimal elements, 164; 1925), 9 lightninglike, 178; not to be God, Christian, 5, 24, 35,105; planned, 181 and Aristotelian, 105; as alter­ epistemological tendency, 9, 256. native to emptiness, 137; as See also cognitive poetry; truth Love, 142, 150, 160; as "Other," eros: sublimated, 55, 153-159; ter­ unknown, 208; defined by ne­ restrial and liberated, 153-183; gations, 222, 248-249. See also susceptible to catharsis without Christianity denial of the flesh, 163, 178 godhead or god(s), non-Christian, essentiality, 16 18-21, 24, 35; referring to au­ Esterina, 18, 35 thorial persona, 187; referring Eunoe, 107, 108 to beings in human form, 187, existence as predicament, 4, 22222. See also Hoelderlin, Fried­ 25, 34-53, 85 rich

INDEX Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: and Eckermann, 88n; and the Eternal Feminine, 88; and hu­ manist optimism, 88; and po­ etry spurred by "occasion," 88 Goetterdaemmerung (twilight of the gods), 15 Goffis, Cesare Federico, 32n Goya, Francisco, 147 Gozzano, Guido, 12n Greece: ancient, 20, 21; modern, 210, 215 Grignani, Maria Antonietta, 8n, 32n, 211n Guglielminetti, Marziano, 216 Guinizzelli, Guido, 102, 142, 158159, 165 haecceitas ("thisness"), 165, 177 Hamlet, 12 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 137 Heidegger, Martin, 45, 113, 115, 116, 120n, 230, 232 heightening, transfiguration, and coalescence process, 157 Heine, Heinrich, 72 Heraclitus, 17, 25, 216, 221 historicism: post-Hegelian, 137; idealist, in Croce, 191. See also Croce, Benedetto Hitler, Adolf, 151 Hoelderlin, Friedrich, 20, 187 Homer, 20 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 165 Huffman, Gaire, 241n humanism: bourgeois, 96-97; cri­ sis of, 98; post-Enlightenment phase of, 103; besieged con­ sciousness of, 192; as vision of the good life, 193; as unvanquished faith, 239 humor: and apocalypse, 112, 201, 202; resulting in aleatory meta­ physics, 204

hypostasis, 31, 38, 72, 75, 80, 126; of feminine interlocutor, 141; of the iris-rainbow motif, 157 iconic development, 40 iconic recurrences and transfor­ mations, 46 Il Baretti, 61n imaginary antiworld, 39 innocence: lost or recovered, 3-4, 20; savage, 173 interlocutor he (she), 141-143; iden­ tified with Love, 141-143; with God, 141-143; as inner "dicta­ tor" of poetry, 141-143. See also catalytic Thou; transcendental self iride, see iris, rainbow iris, emblematic motif intertwin­ ing with rainbow icon, 156-158. See also rainbow irony: hallucinatory, 109, 111; as mask, 224; self-debunking; 226228, 234; aimed at the autobio­ graphical persona, 241. See also negation irrationalism, 135; as mass phe­ nomenon through history, 147; as literary or philosophical pos­ ture, 191 Isella, Dante, 89n Jacomuzzi, Angelo, 18, 210n, 232n Jahier, Piero, 3n James, Henry, 192, 211 Jung, Carl Gustav, 217 Kafka, Franz, 111, 192, 198, 199 Kant, Immanuel, 120, 138, 191, 230, 232 Karma, 37, 195. See also wheel Kierkegaard, Soren, 231 Lachelier, Jules, 138

INDEX Lakm6, 80 language: incommensurable to cosmic totality, 24-26; stammer­ ing or divine, 24-26; doomed to stammering and insignificance vis-4-vis God's wholeness, 248252 La Rassegna d'ltalia, 4n Latini, Brunetto, 102 Laura: beloved of Petrarch, 179; demonized by him, 196 La voce, 3n Leopardi, Giacomo, 4n, 51, 57, 59, 103, 246 Lethe, 107, 108, 113 Liguria (M.'s native region), 3, 4, 73, 101, 154, 205 Limbo, 32 Liuba, 35, 122n; and her cat and cricket, 201 Lollards, 145 Lothophagi, 113 Lowell, Robert, 104 lyrical compression, 16 Macri, Oreste, 122n, 152n magmatic state (of reality), 42, 45 Malibran, Maria, 197 Mandetta, 90 March, Richard, 61n Marcuse, Herbert, 145 Mariani, Gaetano, 3n Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 110. See also Futurism Markus, Dora, 35, 122n; and her ivory mouse, 48, 201, 201n, 244 MarteUi, Mario, 210n Martinetti, Piero, 145 Marxism, 6n, 145, 239, 253 mass society, industrialized and formless, 111, 123, 144-145 Mediterranean Sea, 3, 18; as fath­ erly, demonic-divine interlocu­ tor, 21-23; surrender to, 25; as universal matrix of life, 154

memory: sterile and parasitic, 108; new, different, and transcend­ ent, 109; as magic, 115, 134; of one poem by another, 182. See also entropy; metamorphosis Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 24n, 187n Merrill, James (author of Mirabell), 203 Merry, Bruce, 55n, 167n, 175, 182, 189n, 235 metamorphosis: Protean, 19; heightening or transfiguring, 107; cosmic, 181; in M. and in Kafka, 198-200. See also Proteus metempsychosis (or reincarna­ tion), zoomorphic, 197-199. See also Pythagoras meter: hendecasyllabic, 14; free, 21; suggesting the seaswell, 26; consisting of hypermetric hendecasyllables, 49; resilient, 98; deformalizing of, 130; formal observance of, 130; exceeding its norm without breaking its functional coherence, 168 metonymy, Dantesque, 64 Michelangelo, see Buonarroti, Mi­ chelangelo Mondadori editions (of Ossi di seppia), 9 Morandi, Giorgio, 29 Morgenstern, Christian, 176 Mosca, La ("the Fly," nickname of M.'s wife), 35, 201, 211; as household goddess, 212; as Jungian anima of M., 215-217; Pythian function of, 216 Mothers, descent to the, 116. See also Goethe Munari, Bruno, futurist, 203 Muse(s), 30, 81; rhetorically worn out, 141; as self-parody of the artist, 227-229; quintessential, 242

INDEX music as analogy or reference: polyphonic, 77, 80; of string quartet to poem's rhythmic shape, 149 mythic personification, 6, 18, 21, 31 Nature: as perennial matrix, 3-6, 9, 20, 24, 26, 32, 34; unequal to the challenge of transcendence, 75, 79, 86, 89. See also Mediter­ ranean Sea Nazism, 5, 111-112, 144, 151, 189. See also Hitler negation, 12, 31, 35, 39; as Nega­ tive Way, 76; as premise to an ultimate affirmation, 133; as unrelieved negativity and possi­ ble formlessness, 202; as the key to imaginative transforma­ tion, 203; uses of, in vital di­ alectic, 209; as denial of death, 213; as truly negative, entailing ethical indifference, 219; as an­ tidote to reification, 230; as in­ strument of self-transcendence, 234-235; negating itself at the limit, 248 Nestorian (heresy), 103, 123-124. See also nonconformist, lay Christian attitude Nietzsche, Friedrich, 246 nihilism, 115, 257 Nirvana, 3, 34; in the sunflower poem of Ossi di seppia, 157, 205. See also annihilation; Buddhist attitude; negation; nihilism nonconformist, lay Christian atti­ tude, 124, 238-239. See also Nestorian nothingness (as foundation of ex­ istence), 115. See also Heidegger noumenon, 73, 77, 115, 230, 255. See also nothingness Novaro, Mario, 3n

numinous presence or experience, 115, 178 objects, cryptically significant (emblematic objectivism), 29, 60, 85, 88 occasion (as factual cue to inner vision), 35-37, 55-57,129, 137, 200 Offenbach, Jacques Liivy, 79 Ong, Walter, 56 onomatopoeia, 67 openness vs. enclosure, 118 Orbicciani, Bonagiunta, 142 Orelli, Giorgio, 154n Orient, symbolism of, 71-72 Oriental exoticism, 124. See also Promised Land theme Other, Otherness, as definition of divine principle, 208, 214. See also God Otto, Rudolf, 178, 231 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 5, 117, 198 oxymoron, 28, 59, 172, 209 Pascal, Blaise, 16 Pascoli, Giovanni, 38; poet of bird life, 155 Pavia University, MSS collection at, 8,10, 32n Perella, Nicholas, 32n Petrarch (Petrarca, Francesco), 5961, 123, 178,180, 196. See also Laura phonosymbolic elements, 13, 15, 50, 58. See also alliteration, rhyme Piranesi, G. Battista, 202 Platonic archetype, 25,163 Poe, Edgar Allan, 169 poetical metaphysics, 45 poetics: as ars poetka, 8; cognitively oriented, 9; of negation, 12; of finitude, Parnassian, 18;

INDEX poetics (cont.) coinciding with mythopoeia and symbolic autobiography, 25; from nature-bound into ob­ jective and internalized kind, 29; elliptical and cognitive, 30; metaphysical, 31; of Dolce Stil Nuovo, 35, 90; Dantesque, of harsh rimes, 90; object-ori­ ented, 130; extreme and exem­ plary formulation of (in "Iride"), 135; of nondiscursive logic, 135 political commitment, 52; in the thirties, during World War II, and after, 189, 205 polyphonic structure, 65, 77. See also music as analogy or refer­ ence Porphyry (Neoplatonic philoso­ pher), 218, 238, 239 Pound, Ezra, 129, 152 Praz, Mario, 32n, 61n pre-Socratic philosophy, 17, 25, 31 Promised Land theme, 124, 127, 132. See also Oriental exoticism prophetic utterance: in Le occa­ sions, 55; in La bufera, 130 Proteus, 18-20 Provengal poets, 160 Puck, 12, 192 Pythagoras, 197-200. See also met­ empsychosis Queen Mab, 80 Ragioni critiche, 32n rainbow, 39; as developing icon in M.'s poetry, 156-159 Ramat, Silvio, 17, 54, 83n, 152n, 153n rationalism, 136; in Dante, con­ comitant with the miraculous, 191

reason, as form, allied to imagina­ tion, 202 reason vs. dream, in poetry, 191204 Rebay, Luciano, 6n Renaissance poetry, 103 Rendiconti, 60n rhyme: expressive or semantic function of, 11, 14, 26, 39, 5051, 58-59, 65, 162; concealed, 233. See also phonosymbolic ele­ ments Rilke, Rainer Maria, 143, 223 Rimbaud, Arthur, 135, 155 rime aspre (harsh rimes), 62, 91. See also alliteration ritorrmre (to return) and cognates: structural recurrence of in "Gerti's Carnival," 49-52; in "Iride," 133-134 Roccatagliata Ceccardi, Ceccardo, 3n Romantic myth, 11, 12, 20 Romantic poetry, 103 Rombi, Maggi, 60n Rosa, Asor, 253 Rosiello, Luigi, 60n Rudd, Margaret, 142 Rudel, Jaufri, 123 St. Augustine, 257 St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 102 St. George, as heraldic icon, 63 St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz), 141 St. John-Perse (Alexis Liger), 135 Salvemini, Gaetano, 3n Sapegno, Natalino, 217n Sappho, 197 Sartre, Jean Paul, 103 Sbarbaro, Camillo, 3n Schiller, Friederich, 20 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 4, 22, 205 Segre, Cesare, 9n, 17n, 34n, 154n Selvaggia, 90

INDEX

semantic contradiction and iconic consistency, 51 semantic focus, 13 semantic indeterminacy, 184 semantic inversion, 40 semantic rarefaction vs. conden­ sation, 176 semantic reactivation, 44 semantic resonance, 39 senhal (code name normally given by a Provengal poet to the lady he wooed), 160 Seroni, Adriano, 32n Serra, Ettore, 28n Sewanee Review, 90n Shakespeare, William, 75 Shchestov, Lev, 120n skeptic tendency, 10. See also Doubting Thomas Slataper, Scipio, 3n Socrates, 139 Solaria, 61n Solmi, Sergio, 28 sorcery, 35-52 sprezzatura, 116, 161, 224, 228 Statius, Publius Papinius, 114 Stevens, Wallace, 23, 79, 139, 207, 255, 256 Stoic philosophy, 17, 25 surrealism, 118; rejected by M., 191; inherent in oneiric writing of "Iride," 126; matched by M.'s visionary power, 203 symbolic autobiography, 25 syntax: expressive functions of, 14, 31, ώ-50; clipped, 58, 68; flowing and wavelike, 82, 98; firm and overarching, 119; hypotactically tightened, 130; rhythmical acceleration of, 149; as reiterative mimesis of eel's vital energy, 158; cooperating with meter to express joyous release, 168-169; exuberance of, rhythmically effective, 171; as

central cue to "Buffalo" through alternation of verb tenses, 193-194; mimetic rhythm of, nightmarish or ec­ static, 197 systole and diastole: metric and mythic, 18; semantic, 44 Tambimuttu, 61n Tate, Allen, 104 Tedesco, Natale, 12n, 52 temps retrouvi (Proust's "time re­ covered"), 51 Thales, 17, 25 time and timelessness, 34-53, 5456, 247, 255 tonal modulation, 8, 16, 28, 46, 49, 130 Tosi, Arturo, 82 transcendence, 73, 75, 78, 247 transcendental "he" (Lui), see transcendental self transcendental (vs. empirical) self, 138-139; as related to the cata­ lytic Thou, 140; source of apoc­ alyptic utterance, 141-148. See also catalytic Thou; interlocutor he (she); Kant, Immanuel Traverse, Leone, 222-225 troubadour, 35, 79, 123, 196. See also Provengal poets; senhal truth: quest for, 8, 12; fleetingly revealed, 57; inner, coming from beyond oneself, 143; higher, 150; nonmetaphoric, at­ tained through metaphor, 172. See also cognitive poetry; epistemological tendency Tuscan landscape, 101 unconscious as potential cosmos, 120 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 20, 28n, 60, 104, 110, 162, 178, 240

INDEX Valentini, Alvaro, 105n, 122n, 153n Valiry, Paul, 60n, 118,139,191192 Venus, or Cybele, 159 veronica: as icon, 122; hallucina­ tory, 125,133 via negativa (negative way of theo­ logians and mystics), 232. See also Negative Way via unttiva (unitive way of mys­ tics), 232 Vico, Giambattista, 21 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 102, 137, 145 visible speech (in Dante's Purgatorio), 135 Vixen, the, 35; as senhal, 160; em­ bodying the force of terrestrial eros, 161-188, 241

Weintraub, Karl Joachim, 257 West, Rebecca, 12, 172 wheel, as symbol, 37-38, 40, 51, 195 Whitman, Walt, 20-21, 24, 187 wireless imgination, 110. See also Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso; Ungaretti, Giuseppe Wordsworth, William, 20, 25, 26 World War 1, 13, 32, 66, 110, 182 World War Π, 92; horrors of, 96, 131, 151, 185, 189; M.'s disap­ pointment after, 190 Yeats, William Butler, 37, 96, 129, 141-142; translated by M., 227 Zampa, Giorgio, 4n, 56n, 142, 157n Zanzotto, Andrea, 210

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cambon, Glauco. Eugenio Montale's poetry. Includes indexes. 1. Montale, Eugenio, 1896—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ4829.0565Z573 1982 85Γ.912 82-47584 ISBN 0-691-06520-9 AACR2