Poetry Reading Group Redux- Nominations

[Paulclem]

Just a very quick post before bed...

Yes when Quark mentioned Shelley and “Mount Blanc” I thought of the sublime, but I think it operates differently here for it is not about being in awe of nature or questioning existence but simply using nature as a means of peace.



I still read it as the latter. He loves the hill, not for the hill’s sake, but because the infinity of the scope of nature blocks out his internal woe.

The hill is definitely a source of shelter, a place he can hide from the larger ie threatening aspects of life, symbolised by the horizon. The horizon is a terminus, a point beyond which we cannot see. It stretches out in either direction forever, like the uncertain state we experience before life and after death.

I was just thinking about this - isn't there the idea that directly perceiving "God" would result in death? I can't remember where i read it, but Moses talking to the burning bush is an example.

So the hill would allow an inner view, but not a direct view of the far horizon, and is protective of him behind the hedge.

[Quark]

So with this in mind to some degree, when I am reading like in the poem above of the narrator's thoughts, I am thinking in terms of things like these. This is why I ultimately see the poem as dark because nature or the infinite can only provide a temporary break from such thoughts.

Given what we know about Leopardi, you're probably right that the poem expresses some unwillingness or inability to deal with harsh reality. No doubt Leopardi harbored some pretty bleak ideas. One could interpret the poet's meditations in "Infinitive" or "Infinite" as a defense mechanism--a big diversion from ugly thoughts. After all, when we say we're going to go "drown" our thoughts, it's usually not a terribly happy time in our lives.

Of course, I don't think we should write off the poem as just a distraction for the poet, though. There is something genuinely important to the poet's meditation here. It isn't just a negation of Leopardi's dark thoughts. On the hill, the poet becomes aware of the difference and similarities between past and present, intellectual and material, infinite and finite. These are important ideas to a Romantic poet. I think Leopardi is trying to show that there's something actually fruitful about comparing these opposing ideas. It's not just a mental diversion. Although, it might be that, too.

Infinity seems light compared to the ones about death.

Well it sounds like many posters have a pretty dark take on "Infinity." I'm with you, though. The poem rings a little happier for me than many of his other ones.

Here's how I would segment the poem:
Part 1:
I've always loved this lonesome hill
And this hedge that hides
The entire horizon, almost, from sight.

Part 2:
But sitting here in daydream, I picture
The boundless spaces away out there, silences,
Deeper than human silence, an unfathomable hush
In which my heart is hardly a beat
From fear. And hearing the wind
Rush rustling through these bushes,
I pit its speech against infinite silence--

Part 3
And a notion of eternity floats to my mind,
And the dead seasons, and the season
Beating here and now, and the sound of it. So,
In this immensity my thoughts all drown;

Part 4
And it's easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.

The next thing is to identify the kernal of though in each part.
Part 1: A description of a place, and how it gives him pleasure.
Part 2: "But" signifies contrast, and so the daydream exercise is in contrast to the pleasurable little hill. So what's the contrast? Pleasure versus fear, finite spot and moment versus boundless space.
Part 3: The boundless space is developed to an abstract thought, "eternity" and his relationship with it - death, overwhelming powerlessness to it.
Part 4: Closure, the death and powerlessness actually alleviates the fear.

Those are helpful divisions. I might move "And hearing the wind/ Rush rustling through these bushes,/ I pit its speech against infinite silence" into the third part, though, since it's part of the comparison between nature and the infinite. It's not really part of the daydream of the infinite. Those lines kick off the juxtaposition that happens in part three.

Edit:
I'm laughing now because I see that there's ten new posts already posted in the time it took me to respond to just three posts. I'm never going to catch up.

[Paulclem]

I must say that this is what I'm after from a poetry thread.
And so to bed.

[Quark]

The wind rustling through the bushes is obviously his poetry, just as the beat of the season represents the pulse of his heart.

Yes, with words like "wind," "speech," and "sound" there's clearly a reference to poetry itself. This isn't just a mental exercise. It's a verbal one, as well, and Leopardi is commenting on inspiration, composition, and reception. To say that the wind through the bushes is plaintive or reminds him of death, is to say that the poetry is, too. To say that the wind comes from an infinite realm beyond the natural and material, is to say that his inspiration is also. And, to say that's "easeful" or "sweet" to be shipwrecked on these meditations, is to say that reading this poem is "sweet" and "easeful." There's a lot going on this poem. It's not just daydreaming about infinity, nor is just trying to distract oneself from unpleasant thoughts. It's also a commentary on poetry and art.

He pits sound versus silence, life versus death, a season juxtaposed against eternity. Thus, that which is living makes a temporary sound. Making poetry an expression of his life, however brief. It's interesting that art is the opposite of immortality in this poem. Leopardi's work, his expressions, are temperal like the passing seasons. He does not seek to live through them.

I think there's some concern that poetry is made of ephemeral stuff. But, at the same time, I think Leopardi is arguing that there's also something of the infinite and permanent, as well. Remember, the wind is omnipresent: it exists in the infinite range beyond as well as the hill. It only makes noise on the hill because there's something of substance for it to create a sound. This is similar to the Aeolian Harp analogy that many Romantic poets use. The harp represents the material and temporal world, and, yes, it is the thing that creates poetry. But, in order to operate it, you need wind--which represents the infinite. I think Leopardi is espousing something like that. That is, a poetry that is a collaboration of finite and infinite.

The hill is definitely a source of shelter, a place he can hide from the larger ie threatening aspects of life, symbolised by the horizon.

Neely has been pitching this idea all day and part of yesterday, and, while there's definitely something to it, I don't think it completely gets what's going on the poem. We can think of the hill, hedge, and horizon in psychological terms. It would look something like this if we did:

The hill: consciousness, the ego, thought
The hedge: a defense mechanism to keep out unpleasant realities that might threaten our life on the hill
The horizon: unfiltered reality, what we know

I agree with this reading up to a point. Yes, Leopardi had a dark worldview at times, and the hill seems like an escape from it (Paulem already pointed out how the poem is lighter than Leopardi's others). But, at the same time, we have acknowledge that there's something of value going on in the meditation itself. I think we can interpret the hill, hedge, and horizon in another way which saves the meditation. These relate to more than just psychological states. They also relate to platonic conceptions of consciousness. The hedge is there not just to block unpleasant thoughts. It's there because the material world conceal the ideal world. The horizon is like a platonic sun and the hill is a place where the poet can see both the shadows on the wall and the sun itself. I think that this platonic reading of the poem is present alongside the psychological reading.

I wonder if he had read Edmund Burke's "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful".

If Leopardi did, he certainly problematizes it in this poem. He slips "easeful" into an "immensity" here--something I don't think Burke would have considered possible.

I notice the words "lonesome" and "hides" in the first two lines. He goes to the hill alone, retreating from society. Could the vast seas represent people, the turmoil they cause his soul, and his desire to be alone in his deformity?

Yeah, we haven't talked about the social aspect of this poem. I'm not going to start in on yet, though, until things calm down a little on the thread. Introducing a new topic doesn't seem like a smart thing to do right now.

Could the hill and the hedge represent another state of mind? One where he is neither thinking about the future nor the past? "It's easeful to be wrecked in seas like these." Is he saying that he would rather contemplate the big vital topics, that he enjoys the "fear" and excitement that come from contemplating his own demise more than tranquility and lack of thought?

The end is a little ambiguous. We don't know whether he's thinking about both future and past or neither. I tend to think that neither is exclusively taking up his attention, but rather that he's going back and forth between the two. That interplay between opposing ideas creates the immensity that he wants drown his thoughts into.

I don't know if the season is juxtaposed against eternity mortal. The season I think corresponds with the infinite, as the wind flows through bringing about the cyclical change - it is all contrasted against his limited life, and own decay.

When it says the "season/ beating here and now" that sounds like something juxtaposed with eternity, as does "dead seasons." The seasons seem to be able to decay just like the speaker.

The image of the hill could mean anything, but I like to think of it as the place of vision, rather than of comfort, in that he looks out at all that is eternal bellow him, and contrasts its cyclical infinity with his limitation.

While I can see the hill as a shelter, I have to agree with JBI that it probably more of a place of vision. It's lonely, yes, but it's also a high place that for vision. If it were a hole, or something like that, it might be easier to think of this as just a shelter. One doesn't seek shelter on peaks, though.

[mortalterror]

I don't know if the season is juxtaposed against eternity mortal. The season I think corresponds with the infinite, as the wind flows through bringing about the cyclical change - it is all contrasted against his limited life, and own decay. The image of the hill could mean anything, but I like to think of it as the place of vision, rather than of comfort, in that he looks out at all that is eternal bellow him, and contrasts its cyclical infinity with his limitation.

But you aren't considering what a fine classical scholar he was, and the education he received. A season, in this poem, is the space of a human life. Past seasons are the lives of his ancestors or past poets.

And the dead seasons, and the season
Beating here and now, and the sound of it.

I don't see the wind as being a part of the infinite. When I see those lines about the wind, I think of the old testament; where God is a breath of wind, a spoken word, and the breathe is life. It stirs the leaves and bushes. It makes a sound. Death has no motion in this poem, it's all stillness and silence. Noise, and speech are affirmations of life. That's why I think the wind represents his poetry. Writing isn't about longevity but existence itself, like breathing. At the same time, he knows that his writing is useless, when weighed in the balance, just as he knows he's going to die.

He's not looking out because there is nothing to look out at. His view is blocked by the hedge. This is a poem about an internal journey and a man surrendering his ego to the void.

[mortalterror]

I think there's some concern that poetry is made of ephemeral stuff. But, at the same time, I think Leopardi is arguing that there's also something of the infinite and permanent, as well. Remember, the wind is omnipresent: it exists in the infinite range beyond as well as the hill. It only makes noise on the hill because there's something of substance for it to create a sound. This is similar to the Aeolian Harp analogy that many Romantic poets use. The harp represents the material and temporal world, and, yes, it is the thing that creates poetry. But, in order to operate it, you need wind--which represents the infinite. I think Leopardi is espousing something like that. That is, a poetry that is a collaboration of finite and infinite.

I can get behind that thought. But what's really bothering me is that if we are agreed that the wind is his poetry, then what are the leaves and bushes it's shaking? For that matter, what is the hedge?

You make a good point about the hill being exposed.

[Quark]

But what's really bothering me is that if we are agreed that the wind is his poetry, then what are the leaves and bushes it's shaking? For that matter, what is the hedge?

It's language. It's the material of the book. It's everything that limits us from understanding directly one-mind-to-another what Leopardi is thinking and feeling. Since the Romantic conception of poetry is "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," the ideal art would be telepathic one. But, since humans are dumb to what others are feeling, we need material and linguistic expressions. Immaterial wind coming through a material object (like a hedge or harp) is a common Romantic trope for this process. I think Leopardi is working off this playbook.

[JBI]

It's language. It's the material of the book. It's everything that limits us from understanding directly one-mind-to-another what Leopardi is thinking and feeling. Since the Romantic conception of poetry is "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," the ideal art would be telepathic one. But, since humans are dumb to what others are feeling, we need material and linguistic expressions. Immaterial wind coming through a material object (like a hedge or harp) is a common Romantic trope for this process. I think Leopardi is working off this playbook.

Strange to note though that at this point in his career he was heavily rooted in Classicism over Romanticism that was popping up, and only really got associated with Romanticism a little later after he turned much, much darker.

[quasimodo1]

Outstanding find, that youtube recitation Virgil... in case anyone ever doubted the superior musicality of Italian over English. (Leopardi might even have approved the soundtrack?) Barnes, in the introduction, makes a clear statement about "Infinitive"... {But it is with "Infinitive" that Leopardi fully discovers

his own voice, setting aside public themes and focusing on objects and landscapes which take on far-reaching

emotional resonances. "Infinitive" is the fiirst of a group of five poems composed between 1819 and 1821

(the first five in this selection), which Leopardi called "idylls." Here evocation and memory come to the

fore, while grief at the dashing of cherished hopes and the inexorable passing of time is sublimated in calm

contemplation of an immense, all-embracing nature. It was only later that Leopardi came to identify nature

itself as the prime cause of human unhappiness, a view that underlies his "great idylls" of 1829-30 (from

"The Solitary Thrush" to "Night Song of a Nomadic Shepard in Asia"). these poems evince a sense of universal

pain and a compassion that extends to all living people.}

[Virgil]

One thing I thought about his relationship to the Romantics was the meditative element, such as you find in Wordsworth. It is clearly an inner appreciation of the infinite, as the hedgerow obscures the horizon:

To me this lonely hill was always precious
And this hedgerow also , where so wide a stretch
Of the extreme horizon's out of sight.

It's lonely and enclosed alowing his mind to perceive the infinite beyond, which seems counter intuitive, as you would think the infinite more appreciable with a good view of a distant horizon.

I think he answers this with his:

"more than human silences"

Yes, Paul. That is the starting point, but the "But" on the very next line delineates a strong contrast, and that contrast is what is developed for the rest of the poem, except perhpas for that last line. Does that last line bring him back to the emotions on the hill? If one sees that last line in that way, then one could make an argument of Romanticism for the poem. If one looks at that last line as concluding the emotions of the immensity and drowning,as I think I do, then then it strikes me as different from Romanticism. Like I said before, there is no nourishment or spirituality in nature, and whatever easeful or delight he's getting seems to be some morbid attraction to death.

which suggests a higher prescence - God? - of which there is fear:

...almost
My heart fills up with fear.

He seems to set up paradoxes in order to perceive this infinite with the solitary enclosed hill to view infinity, infinite silence and the wind rustling, the eternal and the dead seasons.

Do the paradoxes cause his thoughts to drown, and is this why this kind of drowning is tinged with fear, but also a delight?

Could be. I guess it's too short a poem to really conclude much on the God question. I had read it as a sort of atheism ("infinite silence"), but I think you've got a good argument there on the possiblity of God. Here's where an intertextual check with his other works might persuade us one way or the other.

That's superb. My daughter wants to learn Italian for her GCSE options 14-16 year studies. I wonder if she'll be interested - possibly, though she treats me with a practiced scorn.

Oh that's great. I hope she enjoys it. But she sounds like a typical teenager.

hill, hedge, horizon, daydream, spaces, silence, heart, wind, bushes, speech, eternity, seasons, sound, immensity, seas

The wind rustling through the bushes is obviously his poetry, just as the beat of the season represents the pulse of his heart.

I don't know if that's obvious, but it is within the realm of possibility. I don't read those words as symbolic or metaphoric. It just seems like he's describing the wind. But I grant you, we could possibly stretch it to suggest that.

He pits sound versus silence, life versus death, a season juxtaposed against eternity. Thus, that which is living makes a temporary sound. Making poetry an expression of his life, however brief. It's interesting that art is the opposite of immortality in this poem. Leopardi's work, his expressions, are temperal like the passing seasons. He does not seek to live through them.

I think those are really good observations. I pretty much agree with you.

The hill is definitely a source of shelter, a place he can hide from the larger ie threatening aspects of life, symbolised by the horizon. The horizon is a terminus, a point beyond which we cannot see. It stretches out in either direction forever, like the uncertain state we experience before life and after death. Nature is not a solace to Leopardi, as the seas and large spaces are what he's hiding from by the small secluded hedge. But the hill with it's containing hedge is positive.

The horizon is threatening but I think you're stretching the symbolism too far. There's no suggestion that the nartrator is threatened by "aspects of life." I do agree that nature is no solace.

I notice the words "lonesome" and "hides" in the first two lines. He goes to the hill alone, retreating from society. Could the vast seas represent people, the turmoil they cause his soul, and his desire to be alone in his deformity? But he cannot hide from himself. There are two distinct spaces in the poem. The setting starts externally on the hill and moves into his mind on the fourth line. "But sitting here in a daydream... in this immensity my thoughts all drown." All the external stimulae are peaceful. What's internal is where all of Leopardi's problems lie. He mentions that he loves the hill, but does he love it because it keeps him safe, or because it allows him to daydream?

I pretty much agree with everything there except the vast seas representing people thought. Again, I think you're stretching the symbolism beyond what is there. I like the way you distiguish the internal and the external.

Could the hill and the hedge represent another state of mind? One where he is neither thinking about the future nor the past? "It's easeful to be wrecked in seas like these." Is he saying that he would rather contemplate the big vital topics, that he enjoys the "fear" and excitement that come from contemplating his own demise more than tranquility and lack of thought?

Hmm, that's a possibility. I could go along with that reading, though I'm reading the poem more literally than you are. I think he feels insiginficant set against the infinity of the horizon and the sea.

[Virgil]

I can get behind that thought. But what's really bothering me is that if we are agreed that the wind is his poetry, then what are the leaves and bushes it's shaking? For that matter, what is the hedge?

While the wind is certainl tied to the earthly elements in the poem, including the the poet's voice, I still think it's a stretch to say the wind represents his poetry. Such a symbolic, almost allegorical, reading of the poem, leads you into the specious, like trying to find symbols for everything.

It's language. It's the material of the book. It's everything that limits us from understanding directly one-mind-to-another what Leopardi is thinking and feeling. Since the Romantic conception of poetry is "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," the ideal art would be telepathic one. But, since humans are dumb to what others are feeling, we need material and linguistic expressions. Immaterial wind coming through a material object (like a hedge or harp) is a common Romantic trope for this process. I think Leopardi is working off this playbook.

You're not convincing. The deep silence of the infinity overwhelms his personal feelings. There is a difference here from the Romantics.

Strange to note though that at this point in his career he was heavily rooted in Classicism over Romanticism that was popping up, and only really got associated with Romanticism a little later after he turned much, much darker.

I don't know much about his life and ideas, but I sense that's true.

Outstanding find, that youtube recitation Virgil... in case anyone ever doubted the superior musicality of Italian over English. (Leopardi might even have approved the soundtrack?)

Absolutely.

Barnes, in the introduction, makes a clear statement about "Infinitive"... {But it is with "Infinitive" that Leopardi fully discovers

his own voice, setting aside public themes and focusing on objects and landscapes which take on far-reaching

emotional resonances.

I see how "Infinitive" as a grammatical word could suggest his poetic voice, but still the title eludes me. There has to be more to it. Could it be an ironic stance? His voice is miniscule to the infinity, even though he chooses a word that puns infinity. Perhaps that's the significance.

"Infinitive" is the fiirst of a group of five poems composed between 1819 and 1821

(the first five in this selection), which Leopardi called "idylls." Here evocation and memory come to the

fore, while grief at the dashing of cherished hopes and the inexorable passing of tiime is sublimated in calm

contemplation of an immense, all-embracing nature. It was only later that Leopardii came to identify nature

itself as the prime cause of human unhappiness, a view that underlies his "great idylls" of 1829-30 (from

"The Solitary Thrush" to "Night Song of a Nomadic Shepard in Asia"). these poems evince a sense of universal

pain and a compassion that extends to all living people.}

Good find Quasi. I think that does help in setting the poem within his work's context.

[quasimodo1]

This is probably a leap, but the choice of "infinitive" I take as an ironic choice over the use of "infinite", as if Leopardi wants to be subjunctive instead of declarative in tone. / An excerpt from a letter to Pietro Giordani (1917) -- "Poetry requires infinite study and application, and its art is so profound, that the more you advance in proficiency, so much the further does perfection seem to recede... To be a good prose writer first, and a poet later, seems to me to be contrary to nature, which first creates the poet, and then by the cooling operation of age concedes the maturity and tranquility necessary for prose." {30th April 1817.}

[Quark]

Strange to note though that at this point in his career he was heavily rooted in Classicism over Romanticism

It would interesting to see how classicism makes its way into the text. The form of the poem, its genre, and subject matter seem to be very Romantic. I pointed out--in a post probably fifty posts back now--how the central act of this poem (meditating on the infinite and finite) has many similarities with key Romantic poems. Shelley's "Mount Blanc" and Coleridge's "Aeolian Harp" are two, but you can find examples all over the place. Another Romantic element is its genre: reflective lyric. The poet is meditating alone, and we're supposed to be "overhearing" (see Mill's definition of poetry which is frequently considered Romantic) the poet's self-address. This isn't a performance with lots of classical rhetoric (something we would see in a classicism mode). The poem is about the thoughts of a lone speaker. The poem makes clear that the poet is imagining the infinite. In a classicist poem, you would expect that the infinite or ideal or immense would be something real that the poet would understand--rather than something they would imagine. These are all basic building blocks of Romantic poetry. That doesn't mean that there isn't anything classical, though. Often critics set Romanticism and Classicism up as mutually exclusive since it makes explaining them easier, but frequently there's overlap.

You're not convincing.

I'm not trying to convince you, Virgil. I'm just explaining my interpretation of the poem and how I came to that interpretation.

I am curious, though, why you now disagree with Aeolian Harp reference when you up until recently you seemed to agree that it was there:

Yes the wind through the bushes is similar to the Aeolian Harp metaphor

That was six hours ago. You did go on to qualify your agreement:

but with Leopardi, nothing the wind is limited in comparison the the scope of what it's set against, the infinte space. In fact he creates a direct compariosn: "pit its [the wind] speech against infinite silence." I think the key to this is evaluating the silence. There is a dichotomy.

I think you'll agree that this kind of misses the point, though. In the poem it's not the wind that is limited but the sound it makes in the bushes:

And hearing the wind
Rush rustling through these bushes,
I pit its speech against infinite silence

It's not the wind that is limited, but it's "speech." As I explained before, the speech of the wind is the physical, linguistic embodiment of poetry in the Aeolian Harp metaphor. Thus, this is entirely within the usual Aeolian Harp metaphor.

What I was explaining in the post you quoted above was the Aeolian Harp. And I wasn't giving a far-fetched description. This isn't Quark spinning one of his wild theories. It's pretty much right down main street, "Intro to Lit" kind of stuff. As for this:

The deep silence of the infinity overwhelms his personal feelings.

One might argue the entire poem is his personal feeling. But you don't even need to do that. The infinity is an imagined one. Imagination is only one of the biggest words in the Romantic vocabulary. And, again, this fits exactly with the Aeolian Harp metaphor. Imagination is the wind in that stirs the Aeolian Harp, just as imagination is the inspiration for the Romantic poet. The harp represents the material and limited world which inspiration has to pass through to becomes poetry. It creates audible sound or written poetry that others can experience. Similarly, the bush makes sound.

That's all I'm saying. You can interpret it any way you want.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Good postings everyone, a lot to go on, good You Tube find Virgil.

I just thought I’d quickly share the note in the Nichols edition on this poem which comes from the Zibaldone once again, as it might be of interest:

...at times the spirit...desires a view which is in certain ways restricted and confined... The reason is...the desire for the infinite, because in those circumstances the imagination goes to work instead of the eyesight, and fantasy takes the place of what is real. The spirit imagines for itself what it cannot see, what that tree, that hedge, that tower hides from it, and goes wandering in an imaginary space, and pictures things it would not be able to if its sight extended everywhere, because the real would exclude the imaginary. Hence the pleasure which I always used to experience as a child, and do even now, in seeking the sky etc. Though a window, a doorway...

I think that there is a lot to take from this extract to support many peoples’ thoughts on the poem. For one it certainly shows his importance the imaginary has on Leopardi and the obvious connection that has with Romanticism. It clearly shows the favour of imagination over realism in this sense. From this piece it also paints a less bleak image perhaps as to the need for the infinite in order to tackle thoughts of a darker nature, there is some pleasure for pleasures sake. Of course the poem is the primary concern but I just thought I'd share it anyway.

[Virgil]

I'm not trying to convince you, Virgil. I'm just explaining my interpretation of the poem and how I came to that interpretation.

I am curious, though, why you now disagree with Aeolian Harp reference when you up until recently you seemed to agree that it was there:



That was six hours ago. You did go on to qualify your agreement:

I didn't realize you were going for a law degree and you were practicing your cross examination skills on me. Yes I acknowledged that the wind goes through the bushes like the Aeolian Harp, but I did not acknowledge I thought that's what Leopardi was referring to. The rest of my response was not a qualification to an agreement, but a refutation of the Aeolian Harp metaphor as analogous. I began that refutation with "But" which indicates I wasn't agreeing.

Look I think this is such a short poem, it's possible to read this through the prism of Romanticism and through the prism of something other than Ramonticism, say Neo-Classicism. Or it's possible he's intentionally or unintentionally blending elements of both. A poet doesn't sit down and say i'm going to write a romanitc poem today, at least not a good poet.