Poetry Bookclub 2

[stlukesguild]

I noticed this poem when I foist got the book.

Virgil... I know you are a New Yorker... but wouldn't "foist" actually be a Joisey accent (or so were my memories of my time in Jersey City. Sorry... I couldn't help myself. I'll go back to my corner now and bury my face in Montale again...

[Virgil]

I noticed this poem when I foist got the book.

Virgil... I know you are a New Yorker... but wouldn't "foist" actually be a Joisey accent (or so were my memories of my time in Jersey City. Sorry... I couldn't help myself. I'll go back to my corner now and bury my face in Montale again...

No I meant when I first got the book. These fingers can't type. But it does sound like a New Jersey accent.

[Bitterfly]

I am struck by a number of layers of "meaning" involved in this poem. Again... at the start the poet begins with his rhetorical devise of suggesting his own lack of merit... longing for the eloquence of another (pointed out earlier by Mortal Terror)... although not so directly. He but alludes to his own deficiencies... unlike the great poets who only spoke of plants with "learned names" (ligustrum, acanthus, box) what he likes are the simple back alley ways... the drying puddles, etc... but even with these simple pleasures, Montale paints them in such a "classically" beautiful manner... and then the lemon trees.

I have the impression that he's not pointing to his own deficiencies here but really trying to detach himself from tradition and his predecessors. The "laureled poets" can only speak of what is orderly and tidily classified by scientists, with names that come from a dead language and that ordinary people cannot understand (funnily enough, acanthus also represents "love of art" ). I also noted that lemon trees are ones that grow in winter (they can therefore represent sun and light in the midst of the most hostile months) and bear fruit, whereas the two plants that the learned poets use are decorative, and that laurels can be poisonous plants.

On the contrary, Montale seems to wish to sing of ordinary people and their drabness - boys from obviously poor families scrounging for food that is just as badly off as they are ("famished eels"), next to "drying puddles" (yuck) and "ditches" , later on "niggardly light" and "bitter" souls, and show that even in these surroundings one can discover moments of beauty (I agree that his description creates beauty) and epiphany. When you think about it, his final vision stems from not much: the glimpse caught of a few lemons in a courtyard (here he also seems to be in the position of a poor boy stealing glimpses of how the rich must live - "gold" and all that). But the poetry - the song - which comes out of it is beautiful.

I think the trajectory of the "paths" in the first stanza represents the difficulty of finding that beauty in such a hard environment (it first "struggles" then "dips" (falls), before finally arriving at a place of fruitfulness and fertility, the "orchards" and "lemon trees"). He really identifies himself with the poor, too ("we the poor"), which takes him even further from the laureled poets, whose path among the "shrubs" is anyway too easy.

I love the gradation from hearing to smell to sight in the second and third stanzas, and the final explosion which is rather synaesthetic. The last lines remind me of Revelations, because of the "trumpets of gold", and because of the visionary character of the lines. Maybe there are a few bibical overtones in the poem, with the word "miracle" and "even the poor share the riches of the world". The end resembles a little what one would expect Heaven to be like: lots of light, the angel's trumpets, and songs and warmth. After the winter of the soul.... it reminds me of Anderson's little matchstick girl, ha ha!!

As that conclusion seems a little surprising for a modernist poet, maybe it's not entirely to be taken at face value? After all, the first moment of vision or rather smell is debunked as an "illusion" (probably because it rested upon a stilling of time - and here maybe Montale is reflecting on the inexorable passage of time, which dispels such moments of beauty, pleasure?). Why shouldn't the second vision be just as transitory, since after all it it depends on a door left ajar - which will then be closed after a while?

[stlukesguild]

Bitterfly... I don't dispute your interpretation of Montale as attempting to detach himself from his predecessors and from a tired tradition. But I never find him that simple... or rather there is always something ambivalent about his rejection of tradition in that it seems that he at once rejects it and even parodies it... but he is also deeply enamored of it. He is clearly deeply enamored of Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi... and the rest of the tradition.

As for the moment of epiphany... the Wordsworthian... or Blake-like vision... I'm not certain he wishes to debunk such... even as a Modernist. I think he is suspicious... doubtful... but he also admits that the whole of his poetry is "waiting for the miracle". I sense this in any number of other poems... a visionary sense of something miraculous... transcendent... is the least of experiences.

[Bitterfly]

Yep, I agree with you on both points. The first since I really haven't read enough of him, and ambivalence makes sense - it must be easier to determine when you read the original Italian for possible intertextuality, echoes of previous poets, too, I suppose (wistful sigh...). The second because it's difficult to be sure. And epiphanies were certainly an aim for poets/writers of the period. And I didn't see any irony there (except in the choice of the plants, ha ha!)... I was just wondering.

The door ajar keeps ringing bells, by the way, but I don't know which ones!!!

[Virgil]

Yes, it's very resonant of the best stuff from the romantic period.

I think I've pointed that out in a few of his poems. I think we can safely say it is a conscious thread that runs through his work. I do think here (and here I mean this volume, which is his first work) I think Montale stands in the tradition of Romanticism. I think it's a base to his vision. However, there is more I think than just Romanticism. I'm not sure I can put my finger on it exactly or even if I can articulate it. But look at these lines from this poem:

Here, by some miracle, the war
of conflicted passions is stilled;
here even we the poor share the riches of the world-
the smell of the lemon trees...

We see there an acquienence of emotional feeling, a universal sharing. Now this is still rooted in Romanticism, and that third stanza is almost pure Romanticism. But look at the beginning of the final stanza:

But the illusion dies, time returns us
to noisy cities where the sky is only
patches of blue, high up, between the cornices.
Rain wearies the ground; over the buildings
winter's tedium thickens.
Light grows niggardly, the soul bitter.

This strikes me as the opposite of Keats' Grecian Urn. Time doesn't freeze but returns, and the emotions mellow and turn in what I think is an aging, a maturing. I can't recall such a maturing from the original Romantics. Keats' Ode to a Nightinggale perhaps, but there it seems like it's eternal youth in emotion or death. Here there is a realization that life ticks on to sadness, even bitterness, until once again,

And one day, through a gate ajar,
among the trees in the courtyard
we see the yellows of the lemon trees;
and the heart's ice thaws
and songs pelt
into the breast
and trumpets of gold pour forth
epiphanies of Light!

Yes, it's quite Romantic with a Montale twist perhaps.

[Virgil]

I think the trajectory of the "paths" in the first stanza represents the difficulty of finding that beauty in such a hard environment (it first "struggles" then "dips" (falls), before finally arriving at a place of fruitfulness and fertility, the "orchards" and "lemon trees"). He really identifies himself with the poor, too ("we the poor"), which takes him even further from the laureled poets, whose path among the "shrubs" is anyway too easy.

I love the gradation from hearing to smell to sight in the second and third stanzas, and the final explosion which is rather synaesthetic. The last lines remind me of Revelations, because of the "trumpets of gold", and because of the visionary character of the lines. Maybe there are a few bibical overtones in the poem, with the word "miracle" and "even the poor share the riches of the world". The end resembles a little what one would expect Heaven to be like: lots of light, the angel's trumpets, and songs and warmth. After the winter of the soul.... it reminds me of Anderson's little matchstick girl, ha ha!!

As that conclusion seems a little surprising for a modernist poet, maybe it's not entirely to be taken at face value? After all, the first moment of vision or rather smell is debunked as an "illusion" (probably because it rested upon a stilling of time - and here maybe Montale is reflecting on the inexorable passage of time, which dispels such moments of beauty, pleasure?). Why shouldn't the second vision be just as transitory, since after all it it depends on a door left ajar - which will then be closed after a while?

Hey good point about the religious allusion. I think it's there. Epiphany has a religious context and trumpet of gold and the garden of eden.

[JBI]

So are we saying it is modernist, in the sense that it builds itself on an Italian pastoral, and then undercuts it with the "chaotic" modern horror?

In a sense, I think the poem is very modernist. It seems to take romanticism, and put it on its head, with the removal of the possibility.

It reminds me almost of the dawn scene in The Wasteland, where the Dawn itself is deformed and decayed and obscured.

Also, I see a hint of Leopardi in the poem, with the contrast of the pastoral vision against the brutal realistic vision. I feel especially, a connection with his early Idyllic works, especially "La Sera del dì di Festa"

The night is sweet and clear, without a breeze,
and the moon rests in the gardens,
calm on the roofs, and reveals, clear,
far off, every mountain. O my lady,
the paths are still, and the night lights
shine here and there from the balconies:
you sleep, and sleep gently welcomed you
to your quiet room: nothing
troubles you: you still don’t know, or guess
with how deep a wound you’ve hurt my heart.
You sleep: I gaze at the sky
that seems so kind to my eyes:
gaze on ancient all-powerful Nature,
who created me for pain. She said:
‘I refuse you hope, even hope, and may
your eyes not shine, except with tears.’
Today was holy: now rest
from pleasure, remember in dream, perhaps,
how many you liked today, how many
liked you: not I, it’s not I that hope
to fill your thoughts. Instead I ask
what life has left me, throw myself
to earth, cry out, and tremble: oh,
terrible days of green youth! Ah, on the road
nearby, I hear the solitary song
of the worker returning to his poor
lodging, late, after the revels:
and it grips my heart fiercely
to think the whole world passes,
and scarcely leaves a trace. See: the holiday’s
over: some nondescript day follows:
time carries off all mortal things.
Where now’s the sound of all those
ancient peoples? Where are the cries
of our famous ancestors, Rome’s
vast empire, its weapons, the clash
of arms, crossing land and sea?
All’s peace and silence: the world
rests entirely, and we speak of them no more.
Now I remember, in my young days,
when the longed-for holiday was awaited,
how, once it had passed, I lay, in sadness,
pressed tight to my sheets: and, deep in the night,
a song I heard in the streets,
died, little by little, far off,
crushing my heart, as now.

Note this translation is weak, but taken because it is in the public domain.

If we throw this at it, and other Leopardi works, Montale seems to be lamenting the past, and the destructiveness of his time. The romantic link is there, but I think Montale builds on it, and manages to modernize it a bit, unlike Eliot or Pound did, though this one, I would think, relies more strongly on the romantic tradition than their work.

[quasimodo1]

Eugenio Montale and Jonathan Galassi



from READING MONTALE
[By translator/writer Jonathan Galassi]

"…….They also hear constant echoes of an entire tradition. Italian lyric poetry can be seen as constituting a remarkably concise and unified line, starting with the thirteenth-century "stilnovisti" and their exemplar, Dante, the defining presence in Italian literature and the first to move the language out of the shadows of the classical past which in some respects endure to this day. The major figures--Petrarch, Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi -- are relatively few, and all of them echo in Montale's work. The poetic novel that ends with La bufera, then, can be read as a resume', a summation, perhaps a farewell to the Italian lyric enterprise, that love story tinged with an aura of the religious which begins with Dante and his inspiration, Beatrice.

In Ossi di Seppia the Italian reader hears echoes, too, of Montale's immediate forebears, the "crepuscolari", the post-symbolist "twilight" poets of his native Liguria, and behind them the sweet, sentimental, inventive voice of their major precursor, Giovanni Pascoli. This domestic, naturalistic strain alternates with the overstuffed turn-of-the-century rhetorical grandeur, tilted toward grandiosity, of Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Victor Hugo of Italian letters, who did everything that could be done with the language of his time -- and via whom Montale makes his first approaches to the style and vocabulary of Dante. Ossi di Seppia has been seen as a rewriting of D'Annunzio's "Alcyone", an attempt at wringing the neck of its overweening eloquence -- though Montale cannot help but resort at times to the very excesses he is fighting to liberate himself from. The book is a series of experiments -- many of them French-influenced, post-symbolist, impressionistic, synesthetic -- in creating a voice, which he achieves, definitively, in the "ossi brevi", the brief lyrics at the heart of the book which express an unconsoled pessimism in terse, paradoxical formulations."

[pp 418, 419 of Collected Poems 1920-1954]

[Virgil]

I'd like to present a Montale poem. This may be the last one. And fittingly I pick the last poem of the collection.

Seacoasts

Seacoasts,
a spears of sawgrass
waving from a cliff
above the frenzy of the sea will do;
or two faded camellias
in deserted gardens,
and a golden eucalyptus plunging
amoung rustlings and birds crazily bursting
toward the light:
and instantly
unseen threads entwine me, butterfly
netted in a web
of quivering olives, sunflower eyes.

Sweet captivity, today, of these coasts
for the man who yields, briefly succumbing,
as though reliving an old
never to be forgotten game.
O seacoasts, what a tang was in that drink
you gave to one bewildered adolescent boy:
humpbacked hills fusing with sky
of bright blue mornings; in sand
along the beaches, the undertow ran strong
but no stronger than that shiver of being alive
in a world on fire; and everything seemed consumed
by its own inward blazing.

Days of tumbling and tossing
like cuttlefish bones in the breakers,
vanishing bit by bit;
becoming
gnarled tree or sea polished
pebble; melting away
in sunset colors, to dissolve as flesh
and flow back, a spring drunk on sunlight…
O seacoasts,
this was his prayer, that boy I used to be,
standing by a rusty balustrade,
who died slowly, smiling.

How much, O seas, these cold lights
speak to that tormented soul who fled you!
Broadswords of water disclosed through fissures
in swaying branches; brown rocks
in the spume; arrow-flash of roving
martins…
Ah, seacosts, if only someday
I could believe in you again,
funereal beauties, framing in gold
the agony of every being.
Today I come home to you
a stronger man (or do I deceive myself), although
my heart almost melts in memories, happy
but also bitter. Sad soul of my past,
and you, fresh purpose summoning me now,
perhaps the time has come to moor you
in some harbor, more calm, more wise.
And someday, once again, golden voices, bold
illusions will summon me forth
a soul no longer divided. Think:
change elegy to hymn; make yourself new;
lack no more—
If only,
like these branches
yesterday bare and sere, bursting now
with sap and quiverings,
I could feel—
even I, tomorrow, among fragrances and winds—
fresh-running dreams, a wild rush of voices
surging toward an outlet; and in the sunlight
that swathes you, seacoasts,
flower anew!

You'll have to look up the Italian. This was a lot of typing as is.

God, I love this "Days of tumbling and tossing/like cuttlefish bones in the breakers,/vanishing bit by bit".

[stlukesguild]

Quasi... a nice, concise overview of what Montale means within the tradition of Italian poetry. I read the same in the Gallassi book a few weeks back. Much of what he speaks of we must take on faith... at least as far as the influences of more recent Italian precursors goes. I've yet to come across them in English translation. I was waiting for Petrarch... and for Virgil to offer up a preferred poem... but both have admitted to being quite tied up when I last spoke with them. I just got back from a trip out of state... and am getting over strep... but I'd like to throw out a little gem that caught my fancy:

Poems for Camillo Sbarbaro

Café at Rapallo

Christmas in the gleaming
tepidarium, cosmetic
fumes coiling from cups, curtained
shimmer of lights from beyond closed
panes, women profiled
in soft light among blazing jewels
and shot silk...
They've arrived,
the new sirens, on your native
shores! And now we need you, here,
old friend, Camillo, chronicler
of thrills and desires.

From the street a wild racket.

Outside the café
an indescribable music paraded by-
a blare of tin bugles, a silvery
tinkle of children's baptismal saucers:
the music of innocence passed us by...

With it marched a goblin world
in a clatter of tiny donkeys and carts,
and a bleat of papier maché
rams, and a gleam
of sabers sheathed in foil.
The generals, cocked hats
of cardboard, brandishing nougat
lances, passed by;
and then the rank and file
with candles and lanterns
and little boxes
that rattled with the tinniest sounds...

(I listened and marveled)

The hoard passed with the roar...

It found shelter in that greening pasture
where you and I will never graze again.

excerpts from William Arrowsmith's tr. Eugenio Montale

[quasimodo1]

Stlukes: Your poem makes it clear to me that Arrowsmith is the superior translator of Montale; the scholarship of Galassi is just as impressive and I am taking on faith that passage from "Reading Montale". It was more than a posting...it was another learning experience re: Montale.

[quasimodo1]

Sweet captivity, today, of these coasts
for the man who yields, briefly succumbing,
as though reliving an old
never to be forgotten game.
O seacoasts, what a tang was in that drink
you gave to one bewildered adolescent boy:
humpbacked hills fusing with sky
of bright blue mornings; in sand
along the beaches, the undertow ran strong
but no stronger than that shiver of being alive
in a world on fire; and everything seemed consumed
by its own inward blazing.
.................Truly a beautiful passage...almost as though it wasn't translated at all. But that's the goal of a good translator...invisibility.

[stlukesguild]

The influences of which Gallassi speaks are clear: symbolism with the descriptive and sensory-laden images/words... and Impressionism. But Montale never seems to simply offer up but his own version of the past without some irony. Here I snese the great contrast between images of adult sophistication, modern worldliness, and even a sense-laden decadence... and suddenly this is interrupted by a vision (real? imagined?) of a cacophonous children's parade. Eventually the parade finds shelter in green pastures (the poet's past... memories of the past... lost innocence?) The notes make clear that there is a slight ironic self-mockery here... as part of the poet's lost pasts there were his earlier attempts at a sort of neoclassical pastoral poetry.

[stlukesguild]

Acck! Cross posting! I bow to Virgil... and will return to my poem later... if at all.