Montale and the Occasions of Poetry [Course Book ed.] 9781400855469

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MONTALE A N D THE

OCCASIONS

OF POETRY

MONTALE AND THE OCCASIONS OF POETRY Claire de C. L. Huffman

PRINCETON

UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON,

PRESS

NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1983 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 APS-5 Palatino Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free 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 C L I F F O R D without whom, not

CONTENTS

PREFACE ix CHAPTER

ONE

Montale, Eliot, and the Poetic Object 3 CHAPTER

TWO

Transitional Poetics and Transitional Poetry 40 CHAPTER

THREE

From Ossi di seppia to Le occasioni 73 CHAPTER

FOUR

The Development of a Dramatic Mode in Le occasioni 114 CHAPTER

FIVE

"Finisterre" 158 CHAPTER

SIX

"GIi orecchini": From "scomposizione" toward "ricomposizione" 194 NOTES 237 INDEX 285 VIl

PREFACE

3&r> THE STUDIES making up the present volume are a series of approaches to the poetry of the late Italian poet Eugenio Montale. His poetry has been a prime focus of literary criticism in Italy continuously since the appearance of his first volume, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), in 1925. Although a number of poems appeared in print in the following years, notably in La casa dei doganieri e altri versi (1932; The Customshouse and Other Verses), it was not until 1939 that his long-awaited second major volume, Le occasioni (The Occasions), was published. This period is most important for Montale studies because in it, especially during the late 1920s, Montale came to feel that he had reached a thematic, formal, and even philosophical impasse. Critics felt that Le occasioni was "different." Some saw it as an unexpected excursion, an experiment, the beginning of a new kind of poetry, Hermeticism, a poetry that borders on prose, an Italian version of foreign, modernist poetic influences, a poetry of aridity, and a poetry that continued elements they had perceived earlier in his work. As we shall see, in Le occasioni there is a deliberate attempt to "re-form" earlier poetry, an effort that coexists with continuity and development.

During World War II, Montale collected a few poems which he published in a small volume entitled Finisterre; these, which are of major importance in his poetic career, were included in the widely acclaimed third major volume of poetry that Montale published after the war, La bufera e altro (1956; The Storm and Other Things). In the years since then, Montale's work has become the subject of an increasing number of traditionalist literary, linguistic, and cultural studies in Italy; more recently, Italian Structuralist critics have studied individual poems as well as the entire corpus, including the very different poetry since Satura (1971). But IX

PREFACE prior to the 1975 award of the Nobel Prize, Montale's work was studied only infrequently outside of Italian and com­ parative literature journals; despite somewhat greater inter­ est in recent years, his work remains largely inaccessible to English and American readers. Montale's poetry is noto­ riously difficult. Italian scholars have assembled glossaries, lexicons, and statistical studies of his vocabulary, for he uses rare, obsolete, dialectical, and literary words that can be traced back to Dante and Petrarch, on the one hand, and, on the other, to later poets hardly known here, like Guido Gozzano—all in new ways. The difficulty is not only lexi­ cal, however. Montale's poetry is syntactically conservative, but does not have the usual concomitant of that quality in modern poetry, the type of literal symbolism we have come to associate with T. S. Eliot. The present book, then, has several overlapping but mutually supportive aims. It is intended to be a study of Montale's poetry, and to use primarily, but not exclusively, the volume Le occasion! as a lens through which to discern the undoubted distinction of individual poems and the larger poetic tendencies as they have manifested them­ selves over the years. Analyses of specific texts and of ideas expressed in Montale's various prose writings and corre­ spondence (which must themselves be read as sophisticated literary compositions) establish patterns of continuity between Ossi and Le occasioni. For example, the study of two of the particularly controversial "Mottetti" (Motets) will, it is hoped, not only help to clarify those poems but to intro­ duce the reader to some of the major issues in Italian critical approaches to Montale's work of this period. Montale is not a local or peninsular poet, for his breadth of reference is wide. He translated many English poets, among them Shakespeare, Blake, and T. S. Eliot, and wrote essays on a number of twentieth-century poets, including Eliot. He consistently sought to identify his work with a modern internationalist movement: " C e stata . . . una corrente di poesia . . . che . . . si puo dire metafisica. Io sono χ

PREFACE

nato in quel solco" (There has existed . . . a current of poetry . . . which . . . could be called "metaphysical." This is the furrow I was born in). The nature of this internation­ alist standing is accordingly also a subject of concern in sev­ eral of these essays. The background here offered in Italian literary criticism acts to modify—assuredly not to dismiss— the propensity of critics to see Montale as a sort of Italian T. S. Eliot and to discuss his work in terms of superficial parallels to the objective correlative. The issue of literary relations between Eliot and Montale does, nevertheless, provide an important means to make the Italian poet—and the Italian criticism surrounding him—intelligible and even helpful to English-speaking readers. Montale's repu­ tation in Italy, until 1956 or so, was in large part based not only on his poetry but on his essays on English and Amer­ ican authors (although he also wrote criticism of Italian authors; in the 1920s, for instance, he was foremost in asserting the importance of Italo Svevo and in bringing to his work the attention it deserved). It is possible to clarify the nature of the complex but mutually illuminating rela­ tionship between the poetry of the two writers by focusing on the very eclectic use Montale made of Eliot's poetry and criticism while establishing his own career in Italy. One of the following studies looks, for instance, with Montale's eyes at the Eliot to whom he responded—not the Eliot of The Waste Land but of the "Ariel Poems," and in particular of "Journey of the Magi" (1927)—and then at one of his own poems, the motet "Lontano, ero con t e " (Far-off, I was with you) from Le occasioni, which the author, in turn, dis­ cussed using Eliot's critical terminology. Montale himself regarded Eliot's poetic language as a mediator between English and Italian literary cultures, and referred to Eliot as an example when he sought to outline to English-speaking critics his own literary accomplish­ ments. But, as we shall see, it is not possible to assume, or even accept, a direct cause and effect relation between Montale's reading of other poets and his own poetry; he χ1

PREFACE

does not belong to any "school." Furthermore, his aesthet­ ics, which he articulated in prose essays, themselves stem from his own poetic compositions rather than vice versa. These essays are useful to the student of Montale, but their relation to the poems must be determined before that use­ fulness can be ascertained. Studies of the final poems of Le occasioni—in many ways the most fascinatingly experimental of Montale's work— and of some in La bufera demonstrate the later develop­ ment—the poetic transformations and continuities—of Montale's poetic concerns, many of which were present even in the earliest published poetry. The poems that came to be included in the "Finisterre" section of La bufera are centers of new complexity, and, to many, Montale's major achievement: in fact, one of the most important books on Montale—a very influential one—is D'Arco Silvio Avalle's "GZi orecchini" di Montale (1965), devoted entirely to a single sonnet in "Finisterre." The essay on "La bufera" and other poems in "Finisterre" focuses on their literary relations, chiefly with Le occasioni, and the often-repeated Italian critical view that pressures of World War II forced Montale to abandon the selfenclosed atmosphere of his earlier work in favor of histor­ ical awareness. In approaching this topic, the study tries to distinguish between paths that lead into the poetry and those that lead away from it. Montale wrote, for instance, that in these poems he relies on a poetic figure, "Clizia" (alternatively "Iride"), and casts her against the back­ ground of World War II, entrusting himself to her. We shall not inquire who Clizia is, or what she stands for, but, rather, what her function is in the poetry. Similarly, rather than ask what concrete contribution Montale made to the understanding of political events in Italy, we shall ask whether the extreme difficulty of the poetry is "justifiable." Since poems composed after La bufera have often been com­ pared to the "great" and "incandescent" Montale of that χι ι

PREFACE

volume, it is useful to inquire what the nature of that incandescence is. Critics have amply shown that in this period Montale returns to and reuses his earlier poetic language, especially in "GIi orecchini" (The Earrings), which has been the subject of detailed formalist "scomposizione." In the last study, which seeks to "put together," to recompose that poem, we shall ask whether, and how, Montale achieves new meanings and values. Montale's work has been surrounded by a number of myths: that he is a poet of "disillusionment," echoing that quality in his generation; that he writes without emotions traditionally regarded as appropriate for poetry, that this break with tradition is his chief contribution to modernism, and that finding an adequate language is his chief challenge in writing; that he is a Hermetic poet; that he was, through his poetry, an important, if only symbolic, political voice through the 1950s, that he is Italy's Mallarmean fabricator, that there are clear-cut stages in the development of his poetry, identifiable with the publication of each of the volumes; and that his themes and statements (often announced in Ossi) can be taken uncritically as though they were pronouncements, guides to the poems in which they appear and even to later poems. These nearly proverbial, occasionally self-contradictory, assumptions interfere with the study of Montale's poetry. The only assumption that is accepted in the following essays is the importance of the analysis of specific texts to a proper assessment of a poet. The major critics who have begun with specific analyses have implicitly tested these longstanding critical myths and found them inaccurate. They have shown that nonspecific studies—"overviews," digressions on themes, loosely related to "historical background," resumes, and so on—have been unproductive, and they have called for continued close analysis. But specific focus here will not accept the increasingly widespread assumption that Montale's poetry (like that of X H l

PREFACE

Mallarme, with whom he has frequently been associated) and poetry generally are totally without any reference to external reality. One may, after all, eliminate values, truths, and objective reality as the content of the poetry without eliminating forms, linguistic devices, and poetic modes that relate to them. There is no assumption in the following pages that there are "more" and "less" poetic areas in language itself, as in the earlier critical prejudice in favor of studying images and relating them to psychological "states." Instead, these studies examine image and language together, seeking to discern Montale's characteristic means of poetic expression in unusual, unexpected areas of language—in conjunctions, adverbs, and verbal tense itself, for instance—which he uses in ways that are new in the history of Italian literary language. As a matter of practice, then, the present studies focus on specific poems, and move back and forth among a number of different subjects: possible literary influences, possibly concrete areas of reference, literature Montale may have had in mind, his published glosses, explanations, and reconsiderations of his own poetry, his letters and the variant texts they sometimes contain, and his literary essays, which some critics take seriously and others discount totally—even Montale does this, incidentally, but with characteristic irony. One aim of this procedure is to show in what ways Montale's criticism can serve as a guide to his poetry and how his poetry—more than an illustration of his literary thinking—can be taken as its informing principle. Indeed, close reading of texts, including nonpoetic material and even personal letters, shows the extraordinary unity of the whole. It is hoped that the reader will, for his part, have the feeling of "presence" at the making and shaping of each work, and will come to possess the keys to texts both earlier and later in Montale's work not under discussion. Another aim is to show how Montale's move to international modernism transcends his own rationalized XlV

PREFACE descriptions of it, and also goes beyond his critical vocabulary, for instance of poetic "objectivity." The suspicion that Le occasion! was a brief excursion into new areas, later abandoned in favor of the supposedly historically conscious La bufera, must be discarded. Without any single model, Montale moved, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, into the modernism of irreducible poetry. In rereading recently F. O. Matthiessen's Achievement of T. S. Eliot and C. L. Barber's preface to the third edition (1959), I was struck by Barber's statement of an approach to a "discovered" author. According to him, Matthiessen had read Eliot's poetry "with excitement and pleasure for some years," had found himself "launched on a book . . . because his realization of the scope of Eliot's achievement kept growing as his criticism, his lectures, his conversation, and his poetry illuminated each other." Matthiessen was "locating" an achievement, "describing" it, sharing "the vitality of discovery." His method is "to illustrate general observations about features of Eliot's technique and sensibility" and "to keep always a sense of the whole quality of the poetry," to be "concerned with it both as an experience of beauty and as a human statement." These words, conveying both an article of faith and a responsibility, define a goal I have tried to keep before me throughout. is quoted with permission by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore from Tutte Ie poesie (Milan: Mondadori, 1977). As a matter of procedure, wherever possible bibliographical citations for Italian criticism are to the original appearance in print and, following, to more accessible reprints. Montale's poetry and important prose passages are cited in the original Italian. For the convenience of some readers, I am providing my own prose paraphrases, with full recognition of the inherent irreducibility of the original texts. These paraphrases are to be taken as guides to the critical discussion of the texts; it is the critical analysis that MONTALE'S POETRY

XV

PREFACE

seeks, ultimately, to "translate" Montale, that is, to give to the reader the context in which the syntactic, grammatical, and lexical choices Montale makes acquire their meaning and value in his thought and work. A useful list of published English translations of Montale's poetry appears on pp. 294-306 of Laura Barile's BMiografia montaliana (Milan: Mondadori, 1977). The research for this book was supported in part by summer grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided a Faculty Fellowship for a year of research and teaching at Harvard University. I am grateful to Professors Dante Delia Terza and Nicolae Iliescu for their support and encouragement of my work at Harvard that year. I am grateful too for access to the unmatched collections of Widener Library and for the opportunity to develop some of my ideas in graduate seminars and professional colloquia. I thank Professor Luciano Rebay of Columbia University for first introducing me to the poetry of Montale. I am grateful to the memory of Eugenio Montale for the benefit of conversation and correspondence over many years, for the willingness he showed in reading and commenting on chapters in manuscript and in following the growth of this work with apparent enthusiasm and interest. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for help with the relentless necessities of xeroxing and typing, and my husband Clifford for his constant intellectual and moral support. Not only did he read and comment on the manuscript at every stage, but he volunteered to be an ideal "uninitiated English-speaking reader of Montale." More important, he helped free me from many daily domestic chores so that I could have the uninterrupted time so necessary to think and write. Excerpts from "Journey of the Magi" from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright 1936, by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1963, 1964 by T. S. XVl

PREFACE

Eliot; and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot. Somewhat different versions of portions of chapters one and six appeared in Italian Quarterly and Modern Language Review. New York, New York 1982

XVIl

MONTALE A N D THE

OCCASIONS

OF POETRY

CHAPTER

ONE

MONTALE, ELIOT, AND THE POETIC OBJECT Ammesso che in arte esista una bilancia tra il di fuori e il di dentro, tra l'occasione e l'operaoggetto bisognava esprimere l'oggetto e tacere l'occasione-spinta. Un modo nuovo, non parnassiano, di immergere il lettore in medias res, un totale assorbimento delle intenzioni nei risultati oggettivi. Anche qui, fui mosso dall'istinto non da una teoria (quella eliotiana del "correlativo obiettivo" non credo esistesse ancora, nel '28, quando il mio "Arsenio" fu pubblicato nel Criterion). "Intenzioni: Intervista immaginaria"* LITERARY CRITICISM d e v o t e d to t h e poetry of Eugenio M o n t a l e has t e n d e d to stress similarities b e t w e e n his w o r k a n d that of T. S. Eliot. O n e of t h e most influential formulations of this v i e w is a 1948 essay by Mario Praz 1 asserting that affinities of " p o i n t s of v i e w " a n d of cultural i n h e r i t a n c e account, at least i n part, for t h e s p o n t a n e o u s g r o w t h of "like flowers"—The Waste Land (1922) a n d Ossi di seppia (1925)— "Working on the supposition that a balance can be struck in art between what is "outside" and what is "inside," between the occasion and the work-as-an-object, [it seemed to me that] one had to express the object and suppress the occasion-stimulus behind it. [This would be] a new, non-Parnassian way, to plunge the reader in medias res, [to achieve] a complete absorption of one's intentions in objective results. Here, too, I was working on instinct, not on a theory (I don't think Eliot's theory of the "objective correlative" existed yet, when, in 1928, my poem "Arsenio" was published in Criterion.). 3

CHAPTER ONE on "distant branches," and that such resemblances predate literary contact between the two poets, which Praz effected. Eliot is reported to have recognized that he shared a "kindred inspiration with Montale"; 2 certainly he published the Italian academic's translation of Montale's important poem "Arsenio" (1927) in Criterion in 1928, and Montale borrowed copies of Eliot's poems from Praz and translated two of them into Italian.3 Praz goes on to argue that Eliot influenced Montale's subsequent work: drawn by the power of Eliot's verse, Montale enriched his own, from the 1930s on, with such new techniques as allusions to personal experience that diffuse the poems with "an intimate, dreamlike atmosphere"; "the poetic transfusion of the lyric essence of experience"; "the weaving" of quotations into the poetic text and the use of notes; and, chiefly in La bufera (1956), the use of images to give the reader "the emotional equivalent of thought." These arguments lead Praz to the conclusion that the poetry of both writers is of high artistic value because it finds structures that universalize personal emotions. The view that Montale is "the Italian T. S. Eliot"4 has become something of an unchallenged literary commonplace since that time. Critics who have repeated it have used the elusive term "objective correlative" in yet more elusive ways to reaffirm the allegation of similarity, whether in general poetic qualities or in isolated poetic techniques from Le occasioni (1939) on. Montale apparently lent them support, for his own criticism of literature, including his own writing, frequently made use of Eliot's terminology. The entire issue of Eliot-Montale relations is neither incidental nor purely theoretical. The study of Montale's comments on Eliot, even when approving, shows that more often than not they are indices of important differences between the two. It leads not only to new appreciations of Montale's unique qualities as a literary thinker, but also to new assessments of the successes of his quite distinct 4

MONTALE, ELIOT, POETIC

OBJECT

poetry. His understanding of Eliot cannot be said to have developed linearly over the years. At times, he mentions Eliot merely as a name. In more formal contexts, he mentions aspects of Eliot's poetic practice as a preliminary step to discussions of his own favorite areas of theoretical concern. Often, in both informal and formal situations, he uses Eliot's terms only to redefine them. The term "objective correlative," for instance, is, at times, a means to discuss the ways in which poetry with certain qualities of style and an overall formal autonomy can achieve his own unique notion of "objectivity." This notion, together with related concerns that preoccupied him over the years, distinguishes Montale clearly from Eliot and leads us to crucial areas in his own thought and poetic achievement. It does not, however, lead us there directly, for Montale's poetics are often a posteriori to his poetry, and are shaped by his poetic discoveries as much as the reverse. 5 Hence it is exceedingly difficult to say whether Eliot's poetry and criticism, of undoubted interest to Montale from the late 1920s on, catalyzed some of the modernist changes in the poems of Le occasioni, or whether Montale recognized some of his own poetic intentions in Eliot's poetry and literary theories. The guides we have are Montale's use of Eliot's terminology, which he employs frequently to define not only some of his own poetic ideals, but also their forms. These two elements, of theory and of practice, are not always fully consistent, nor could they be, for Montale does not adhere rigidly to any a priori aesthetic. Yet at times there is a revealing degree of self-consistency. Both in theory and in practice, Montale succeeded in refashioning the idea of poetic "objectivity" to accommodate his own brand of idealism. In his poetic theory, he extended the term "objective correlative" to include notions of the very value of poetry, a topic that he stamps with the doubts and aspirations that characterize all his thinking and that shape his writing. In this way, Montale's criticism, while still providing some practical guides to his appreciation and understanding of 5

CHAPTER

ONE

Eliot's poetry, and to areas in which we might seek for incidental similarities, helps us to understand the animating principle of his own, quite distinct, writing. The present chapter focuses on one of the "Motets" because it is in this sequence that Montale's definitions of poetic "objectivity" achieve full poetic life. The motet entitled, after its first line, "La speranza di pure rivederti" (The hope of even seeing you again), gives strong relief to a poetic image, and, since it is through imagery that Montale and Eliot are so often linked, it thus provides an opportunity to reassess the view that Montale, regardless of a priori and a posteriori poetic "intentions," nonetheless has, at times, written "like Eliot." In Italian literary criticism, "La speranza" has been regarded as a controversial poem that makes use of imagery in a controversial manner. Alfredo Gargiulo wrote, for instance, that its summary image is impenetrable, and is typical of the poet's overly great reliance on personal allusion throughout the "Motet" sequence: he termed these poems "external figurations unanimated by emotion." Gianfranco Contini, who argues that "La speranza" is really quite clear, later defended Montale's poetic innovations against Gargiulo's strictures. In doing so, however, he pointed to a similarity between Montale's structures of images and Eliot's "objective correlatives," although he recognized the limitations of this comparison. 6 Fortunately, the brevity of "La speranza" permits detailed analysis both of its techniques of "objectivity," without which comparative statements do indeed seem unsatisfactory, and of its relation to Montale's critical use of the term "correlativo obiettivo," particularly his association of it with specific issues; these include a poetic manner opposed to the direct expression of the poet's "inner world" and the autonomy of the "poetic object" with relation to the poet's biographical experiences, and even to all empiric references. to link Montale and Eliot through the terminology of the objective correlative must begin by taking ANY ATTEMPT

6

MONTALE, ELIOT, POETIC

OBJECT

into account Montale's preferences among Eliot's poems and the precise ways he uses the term in discussing Eliot's work. Montale's 1950 introduction of the Anglo-American writer to Italian readers most fully articulates his views. Here, he heralds Eliot as the "theorist of a new classical order," and characterizes this new poetic order by its objectivity, that is, by the withdrawal from the poem of the poet's personal voice and the expression of his emotions by indirect means/ As in an earlier essay,8 Montale finds these characteristics demonstrated in the "Ariel Poems" (19271931) rather than in The Waste Land—a poem about which he always has strong reservations 9 —because he finds Eliot's emotions to be successfully "hidden" and indirect. Montale observes that Eliot does not express ideas or confess his feelings directly, but rather attempts, according to the ideal of the "correlativo obiettivo," to construct "oggetti che sprigionino il sentimento senza dichiararlo" (objects that release feeling without declaring it). He does not pay much attention to Eliot's uses of imagery, to the way Eliot structures his poems on literary and cultural references or refracts the poetic voice in order to "release feeling." Rather, Montale is intent on other ways feeling is expressed indirectly in Eliot's poetry: it is controlled, or diffused, or, at last, conveyed musically, through the cadences and intonations of a proper reading out loud, as Montale had heard Eliot read his poems.10 The emotional quality of Eliot's poetry makes Montale question the validity of the terms "classical" and "romantic," and leads him to dissociate the essential qualities of poetry from characteristics he feels are extrinsic to it, like the pronouns used to express—or hide—the poetic voice. It does not lead him to define that conception of poetry, so characteristic of Eliot, which, developing in part out of his Symbolist heritage, led him to seek to blend rational and emotional experience and to transcend distinctions between them through the absolute medium of poetic language. It does not lead him to examine Eliot's strain of idealism, to ask the ways in which a poem may be both auton7

CHAPTER

ONE

omous and charged with values. As we know, this vexing question lies behind Eliot's paradoxical formulation of the objective correlative, and his poetry at times seeks to achieve conflicting goals. He achieved his goals of "objectivity" by relying on "objective structures," using quotations and allusions to literary and general culture, and employing a carefully chosen variety of poetic voices. But he also used "objective structures" to convey personal meanings and beliefs. In part, Eliot managed these goals by appealing to the sensibility of an ideal reader and involving him in the "experience" of the poem itself, an important element in his practice and criticism which Montale completely neglects. Montale disapproves of Eliot's use of a "fabric" of quotations and images;" he does not consider it as an overall structure of poetic materials which provides the references to elements within the poem, and which, therefore, is also a means to the "objectivity" that allows Eliot to blend emotional, rational, and concrete experiences. Yet, Eliot's attempt to blend these often conflicting elements in human experience is inseparable from his attempt to use language that is shorn of concrete references, abstract ideas, and direct statement. Eliot's poetic goals may have been influenced by the philosophical ideas of F. H. Bradley, by a form of philosophical idealism that is, as we shall see, quite distinct from Montale's metaphysical thinking. Bradley had denied the validity of distinctions between subjective and objective experience, and described human experience as nonrelational, a psychical fusion of all that we "suffer, do and are."12 Out of this train of thought may stem Eliot's concept of the objective correlative together with his attempt to incorporate past literatures into one simultaneous and present "immediate experience." For Eliot, "felt thought" is an absolute, perhaps the only reality. The value of literature is in its stimulus to "felt thought"; and "correlatives" can be "objective," that is, absolute, because they may blend thought and emotion, past and present, into a new whole. 8

MONTALE, ELIOT, POETIC

OBJECT

A successful integration in any individual image, or in overall structure, would, he thought, not only be absolute, but would also, paradoxically, "terminate in sensory experience" on the part of both ideal writer and ideal reader.13 Of all the aspects of Eliot's thought that Montale passes over, these, with their conflicting elements of subjective idealism and notions of the psychologically cathartic value of literature, are perhaps the most significant by their absence. Montale's 1950 essay uses the terms "object" and "objectivity" in ways that clearly imply radically different views of both the ultimate and the empiric value of literature. In interpreting Eliot's definitions, Montale treats ideas as though their source were in emotion, and emotion as though its source were a complete mystery to which the "objective" poem is correlated in an ultimately indefinable way. Montale's own skeptical idealism in setting up such an indefinite correlation between the "oggetto poetico" (poetic object) and the ultimate "source" of all experience is quite distinct from the idealism that led Eliot to view poetic form as the perfect medium of that synthesis of thought and feeling that he termed experience, and poetry as ideal when it fully synthesizes these otherwise conflicting elements. Montale is largely interested in different components of experience and in different relations among them. His rejection of abstract ideas stems from his rejection of all ideology, and is based on his constant concern to defend the integrity of individual experience and on his overriding skepticism;14 these lead him, in turn, to doubt not only the philosophical validity of abstract ideas and poetic statements, but human knowledge itself, which can give only unsatisfactory answers to the dilemmas of man's whole experience. His thinking is charged with the desire to define man's experience, and with the irony that this frustrated aspiration provokes. Driven back into his "inner world," Montale finds other frustrations in his attempt to 9

CHAPTER ONE define its sources and to isolate their inner and animating principle. 15 In poetic practice, then, Montale may make direct statements related to his experience and ideas, and do so in his own voice. But such statements are not necessarily really direct, either because they have a felt inadequacy or because their deepest source is largely unknown or indefinable. Thus, in Ossi di seppia, controls of statement "occur." At times, declarative statements are resisted by the poetic voice; at times, they work heuristically, and produce images charged with nonrational meanings. At times, again, both statements and images exist in dialectical relationship, and are controlled by tone and mood. In the "objective" poems of Le occasioni, controls may be more deliberate and statements be characterized by poetic "sobriety." But other statements seem less controlled, as though they were released only tentatively; emotion, however, is everywhere "released," often by extreme indirection. Conflicting emotions that lie beneath both controlled and uncontrolled statements are often taken to consciousness by the poet, and are used to show that experience itself is radically defective. Montale's desire to transcend the world known by mere intellect and definable emotions—to go beyond the defective forms of reality available defectively to us through the intellect and senses—is akin to his aspiration to "release" the whole poem from whatever empiric or psychological "occasion" may have thrust it into being. This aspiration transcends Montale's mere dislike of autobiographical poetry. Montale's various statements on poetic objectivity, sometimes a synonym for kinds of poetic indirection, are quite creative, especially when he approaches the issue of the final "release" of the poem from empiric experience. He refashions Eliot's terminology with his own distinct brand of idealism along the lines of ideas of contingency he developed from the philosophy of Emile Boutroux. Montale had read Boutroux in the 1920s—the period in which 10

MONTALE, ELIOT, POETIC

OBJECT

he may first have drafted some of the "Motets" 16 and during which he first considered the ways in which poems may be "objective." More and more, as he addresses this question, from the late 1920s on, it challenges him to consider not only the question of the integrity of poetic form but the very issue of consciousness itself, that which distinguishes animate from inanimate matter. IN A NOTABLE FORMULATION on poetry in 1931, Montale writes that poetic form results from the poet's battle with poetic artifices, and is a "worked" transformation of verbal material which may leave an "echo," an "obsession":

L'architettura prestabilita, la rima e c c . . . . hanno avuto un significato piu profondo di quanto non credano i poeti liberisti. Esse sono sostanzialmente ostacoli e artifizi. Ma non si da poesia senza artifizio. Il poeta non deve soltanto effondere il proprio sentimento, ma deve altresi lavorare una sua materia, verbale, "fino a un certo segno," dare della propria intuizione quello che Eliot chiama un "correlativo obiettivo." Solo quando e giunta a questo stadio la poesia esiste, e lascia un'eco, un'ossessione di se.b 17 Montale is anxious to distinguish poetic form from its personal psychological content and to insist that the writing of poetry is analogous to constructing an artifact. So anxious is he to do this—early critics regarded the poetry of Ossi di seppia as occasionally lacking in feeling or, paradoxically, being overly effusive in expression,18 and he was moving toward new forms—that he argues that poetic form may be b

Fixed structure, rhyme etc.. . . have had a far greater significance than champions of "free" poetry believe. [Such conventions] are, in essence, obstacles and the devices of a craft. But you can't get poetry without some artifice. Poets must do more than merely pour forth feelings; rather, they must work verbal material up to a certain point, give what Eliot terms an "objective correlative" of intuition. Only when it has reached this stage does poetry exist, and leave an echo, an obsession of itself. 11

CHAPTER ONE separable from all experience: thus, although it may correspond in some limited way to "intuition," "inspiration," poetic form supersedes it and distinguishes itself from even this major component of experience by leaving only an "echo," an "obsession." And thus, poetry "exists." This verb is a strong one for Montale, who disbelieves at times in the reality of existence itself.19 The term "echo" would seem to suggest that poetry exists musically, but the term "obsession" suggests that the echo enters the subconscious, perhaps the deep underlying source that Montale elsewhere names as the origin of poetic emotion. Montale's thought circles around itself. He does not define the conscious elements that are components of poetry, which battle with unconscious elements, a battle that includes even immaterial experience and such material elements of the artifact as rhyme. We can guess from his terminology that the transforming act of poetry results in a blending of animate and inert elements in an animated form akin to Montale's very notion of consciousness itself. Were we to substitute "poetry" for "consciousness" in the following passage from Boutroux, we would see how close is Montale's view of this transforming act to the French philosopher's very conception of consciousness. According to Boutroux, La conscience n'est pas un phenomene, une propriete, une function meme: c'est un acte, une transformation de donnees internes, une sorte de moule vivant ou viennent successivement se metamorphoser les phenomenes, ou Ie monde entier peut trouver place, en perdant sa substance et sa forme propres pour revetir une forme ideale, a la fois dissemblable et analogue a sa nature reelle.20 Montale imprints his definitions of art with his aspirations to spiritual survival, for he views experience as a persistent battle between animating forces (largely unknowable) and inert matter.21 For Boutroux, consciousness encompasses 12

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both existence and duration; it has characteristics both of an act and of a process and strives to transform external "donnees" into internal ones. For Montale, however, external "donnees" can remain relentlessly external, and internal ones largely unknowable. Perhaps only art can transform "radically heterogeneous elements," for it alone seems to be "endowed with freedom,"22 and to produce unforeseen results. These results, in turn, help to show how an animate principle can emerge successfully from, and transcend, inanimate "matter." According to Boutroux, it is only by abstraction that we can isolate human consciousness from the spontaneity that brings it into being, reduce it to logical sequence, or deduce it from fixed laws. Montale implies the same of art, which, again like consciousness, and for the same reasons, is an irreducible whole which explanation can only obscure and analysis destroy. In Montale's published views on art, which are shot through with irony, skepticism, undoubted evasion, and what has seemed to some critics to be the inability to think in an integrated way about political and social matters, we in fact find, symbolically expressed, concepts of human consciousness, survival, and freedom. These large shapes of his aspiration are not immediately discernible, for Montale also expresses them in nuclei of unexpected syntactic and stylistic difficulty. But careful attention will descry their imprint, as, for instance, in the line "e lascia un'eco, un'ossessione di se," in the subtle modulation from "echo" to the much larger term "obsession," which refers literary experience to the sentient mind—to human experience. In another context, Montale allows us further insights into the unique way he conceives of poetic process and human experience, while adopting Eliot's terminology. He suggests, in the following comments of 1940, that the poet participates in the reconciling experience of art. The achieved literary form becomes, in this view, an embodiment or incarnation of the poet's intuition. But the realized 13

CHAPTER

ONE

poetic object exists as a thing—an irreducible entity— whose status supersedes its functions and, in some way, does fuse otherwise irreconcilable experiences: Lavora il proprio poema come un oggetto, accumulandovi d'istinto sensi e soprasensi, conciliandovi dentro gl'inconciliabili, fino a fame il piu fermo, il piu irripetibile, il piu definito correlativo della propria esperienza interiore.. .. Ma una resta, pur nelle infinite varianti, la tendenza, che e verso l'oggetto, verso l'arte investita, incarnata nel mezzo espressivo, verso la passione diventata cosa.c a This understanding of the relationship between literary form and the poet's personal experiences is idealistic in nature, and suggests that the poetic object is in part a fusion, a reconciliation of the experiences behind the poem with the very experience of writing it. Despite an apparent similarity with Eliot's thinking, the conception of the synthesizing powers of poetry, understood both as an act and as a transforming process, allows Montale to place greater stress on the poem both as an artifact and as a suprarational product. By contrast, Eliot's concern is to distinguish between all abstractions, all rationally stated ideas, and "immediate experience," and he develops the notion of "felt thought," which is the medium between the fashioned poem, the artifact, and the experiences "behind" it. Eliot senses similarities between the ways poets can relate disparate experiences and the very value of the poem; indeed, it is as though his concept of literary value itself 'He works his poem as he would work an object, instinctively gathering within it meanings and higher meanings, and reconciling within it what is otherwise irreconcilable, until he makes it into the most arrested, unrepeatable, denned correlative of his inner experience. . . . But no matter what forms it may take, the direction is always the same: toward the object, toward art which is invested, made incarnate in the form that expresses it, toward passion turned into a thing. 14

MONTALE, ELIOT, POETIC

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derives from the former, as typified by this famous statement on John Donne: Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. 24 We have seen that Montale's metaphors for the poetic "object" are unique, even when they are concerned with quite general aesthetic issues. A further distinction from Eliot is the tendency, as in the 1940 comments, to distinguish between "sensi" and "soprasensi"—"meanings" and "higher meanings," or literal and allegorical ones. Like Eliot, he would set literature apart from the world of mere appearances, but his notion of the ultimate value of literature stresses both its miraculous genesis and its suprasensible, allegorical meanings and values. Montale stresses the autonomous and unique nature of poetic form, suggesting that it gives shape to mere contingencies and embodies suprasensible meanings. Most important, Montale does not attempt to define the kind of experience literature is (much less to incorporate it into a "simultaneous order of experience"). His conception of art largely leaves the realms of empiric experience and sensibility and the passage between them uncharted. Whereas Montale suggests by the word "incarnata" that intuition is, for him, in some way embodied in form, he does not suggest, as Eliot does, that a poem may be a "holy" 15

CHAPTER ONE medium of experience that returns, in the form of shaped "immediate experience," to an idealized reader of sensibility who then reexperiences it in the eternal present of literature. 25 Indeed, some of the adjectives Montale uses to define the poetic object are virtually antonymous to those that might so qualify the literary work. For Montale, the completed poem, which is "arrested," "unrepeatable," and "defined," is an object not only in the sense of "entity," but, and more particularly, of "final goal." Interestingly, qualities like "irripetibile" that Montale attributes to the ideal poetic object are those that the poetic voice and self of the Ossi often aspire to: to be defined, clear-cut, and definite, yet at the same time also to be almost concrete, unique, and essential (as in "Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed essenziale," "Antico, sono ubriacato dalla voce," and "Portami il girasole"; [I would have wanted to feel rough and essentialAncient One, I am made drunk by the voice; and Bring me the sunflower]). These same attributes are present in his later poetry as implicit concepts; for instance, the "unrepeatability" of an individual's existence becomes an argument for, even almost a substitute for, immortality itself (as in "A mia madre," To My Mother, La bufera). Other distinctions remain to be drawn from other apparent similarities between Eliot and Montale. As we have seen, Montale, like Eliot, would redeem the world of appearances, but in unique ways. He reserves a high place for the artifice of poetry, for instance rhyme; but he attributes value to conventions (even though he sometimes chooses to override them) almost as though they were the only available token of reasoned purpose in life. This is a battle that is played out in all his poetry. Like Eliot, Montale aspires to transcend purely personal experience, and he assigns value to poetry for enabling the poet to do so; but his doubts about the reality of the physical world and his lack of faith in most abstractions and ideas do not induce him to construct an aesthetic based on impersonal and absolute "experience." Throughout his poetry, the desire to 16

M O N T A L E , ELIOT, POETIC OBJECT

escape from the self is frustrated a priori by the failure to find, or define, anything to escape to or for; and indeed, it is the conflict between desire and skepticism that enlivens Montale's poetry of "disharmony." 2 6 His doubts are reflected in the seeming conflicts of his literary criticism: in his insistence, for example, that the poet must transcend personal experience and the self and that, at the same time, artistic expression is always pro­ foundly individual. Moreover, Montale's conceptual para­ doxes—they are not psychological ambivalences, as some Structuralist critics contend—arise from the tendency to dissociate subjective and objective, private and public, past and present, literary and empiric experiences, yet, at the same time, to sense that they are all somehow linked in indeterminable ways. Thus, in the poem "Piccolo testamento" (1953; Little Testament), Montale suggests that lit­ erature may be, at one and the same time, both a significant and a (perhaps) futile juncture of mind—isolated yet dom­ inant—and matter—recalcitrant yet evanescent. The fol­ lowing lines of that extraordinary literary testament con­ vey not, as is often thought, a chiefly political message,27 but a poetic one, of the simultaneously negative and posi­ tive value of all creative and transforming "acts." Such "acts" would include even emotional experiences, like that of hope, symbolized by the "iride," or rainbow. This sym­ bol alludes to a woman-myth and the poetry that takes its inspiration from her and is, in turn, imprinted by her char­ acteristics and by emotions associated with her. Questo che a notte balugina nella calotta del mio pensiero, traccia madreperlacea di lumaca ο smeriglio di vetro calpestato, non e lume di chiesa ο d'officina che alimenti chierico rosso, ο nero. Solo quest'iride posso 17

CHAPTER ONE

lasciarti a testimonianza d'una fede che fu combattuta, d'una speranza che brucio piu lenta di un dure· ceppo nel focolare.d Like the figure of the woman Iride (or Clizia), Montale's poetry itself may be either an ideal product or an evanes­ cent byproduct, a grace or an accident of time, existence, and history; or it may be all these things. The ambiguity in the poem is less that of psychological conflict than of delib­ erate irony and almost self-protective skepticism. As we have seen, in assigning value to poetry Montale seeks to avoid definitions of reality and of experience. The under­ lying skepticism is based on a double-edged doubt: if expe­ rience is largely predetermined, poetry is an accident: if experience is an accident, poetry is a high accident, a mir­ acle or a grace. Thus, the seemingly clear statements in Montale's poetry must be carefully construed. We might thus construe the "ideas" of "Piccolo testamento": the thing that "glimmers" in the "vault," hellish "calotte" and "skull" of "my thought," is only a "mother-of-pearl trace," only the dimly luminescent "trace" of a "snail," only the fragmented glitter of broken and "trodden" glass. But this only thing is more than nothing and may be all and even enough. Montale thus admits, by his unique indirection, more than what the negative poetic lines seem to eliminate from consideration. Of course, in "Piccolo testamento," Montale is also polemicizing with extremist and self-serving parties and positions in the world of politics ("chierico rosso, ο nero"), but his real reservation is that any political party—or posi­ tion—may provide suprasubstantial nourishment. It is only d This that at night glimmers in the calotte of my thought, mother-ofpearl trace of snail, or emerald of crushed glass, is neither church nor factory light fed by red or black cleric. Only this iris can I leave you as testimony of a faith that was fought for, of a hope that burned more slowly than a hard stump of wood on the hearth.

18

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by passing through such directly skeptical lines that we divine his inner emotion or idea, which is simultaneously both a thought and a hope: that one's own glimmers and intimations, no matter how minimal and dim, may have value. Both Montale's theories of art and the vision of "Piccolo testamento" have existential overtones in their suggestion that the individual may at best leave only a positive-nega­ tive trace of his own existence. Such existentialism may account for Montale's definitions of poetry as a choice, for instance, as an act, a battle, carried out against poetic con­ ventions. If so, some of Montale's paradoxical pronounce­ ments become explicable: for instance, despite his aware­ ness of all the irrational elements that go into the making of poetry—he has called it a "cohabitation" of "reasoning and nonsense, dream and waking"—he has insisted on the rational shaping of a rigorous poetic form. 28 Montale's ironic skepticism, which extends to all ideolo­ gies, and even to most ideas, emerges in his literary theory in part as the repeated call for poetic indirection. We must understand this term in relation to Montale's own poetic history, however, and place it in the context of his own lit­ erary criticism: as we have seen, it does not stand in simple opposition to "direct statement." After the publication of Ossi di seppia, Montale had been accused of effusing feelings and ideas, and for many years afterward he actively criti­ cized this earlier characteristic of his poetry and sought, according to his own testimony, to achieve a kind of poetic objectivity. In the 1946 "Intervista immaginaria" he explains that, in the late twenties and early thirties, he was determined to write perfect poetic "fruits," or "workobjects" (what he terms "l'opera-oggetto"), by eliminating the impurities of Ossi. He symbolizes the new poetic ideal as a "fruit" that will contain its themes "senza rivelarli, ο meglio senza spiattellarli" (without revealing them, or even better, without blurting them out). He goes on to express the view that the preparatory experience that 19

CHAPTER ONE serves as a stimulus and thrust to art—and he uses the term "occasione-spinta" to convey this idea—is never the immediate content of art, for he says: "Ammesso che in arte esista una bilancia tra il di fuori e il di dentro, tra I'occasione e l'opera-oggetto bisognava esprimere l'oggetto e tacere l'occasione-spinta." In the late twenties, he first became drawn to Eliot's poetry and literary theories. In 1933, he singled out and praised the "Ariel Poems," associating them with the desirable technique of poetic "correlativity" and "objectivity." But at that time he defined the objective manner only by opposition to the whole "mondo interiore" (inner or interior world) of the poet, a distinction that is of great value in the study of Montale's own poetry of this period, especially if we keep in mind that for him interior experience includes not only the personal experience of the poet behind the poem, its empiric references, but also the whole "fondo," the mysterious, the deepest, and the ultimate "source" of that experience. Like Eliot, then, Montale claims to make no rationalistic distinctions among the objective and subjective experiences behind poetry, for as he writes in the 1946 "interview," "Tutto e interno e tutto e esterno per l'uomo d'oggi" (For man today, everything is internal, everything is external). Again, like Eliot, he suggests that poetic form reflects the nature of experience. For Montale, indeed, a changing view of experience led deliberately and directly to a conscious attempt to modify poetic form: "Il nuovo libro [Le occasioni]... tentava di abbattere quella barriera fra interno ed esterno che mi pareva insussistente anche dal punto di vista gnoseologico" (The new book [Le occasiont\... attempted to knock down that barrier between internal and external [realms] that seemed to me quite indefensible, even from the point of view of epistemology). 29 Montale was quite aware that his ideas about the relationship between poetic form and the poet's personal experience would suggest to readers Eliot's notion of an objective correlative, and he pointed out more than once that he 20

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had developed his ideas independently, even writing that he had not yet heard of Eliot's ideas, and had read only Eliot's Laforguian poems, when Eliot saw to the publication, in Criterion, of his "Arsenio." 30 We can, by now, understand Montale's diffidence at association with Eliot—an association he himself, to some extent, fostered—and the reasons for his insistence on his individuality. 31 The differences between the two men may be even more profound than Montale suspected. Such is the suggestion conveyed by the study of one of the central poems in the nucleus of Le occasioni, the motet entitled, after the first line, "La speranza di pure rivederti." IN THE "Motet" sequence of Le occasioni, Montale deliberately suppresses the "occasions" in his personal life that may have prompted the composition of the poems. He seeks to relate, in new ways, "internal" and "external" reality, to fashion poetic "objects," the perfect "work-objects" he subsequently wrote of, and to create poetry that will, while conveying its meanings indirectly, still leave an "echo," an "obsession" of itself. Each of these topics is of immediate relevance to "La speranza," which also, through its great stress on a single poetic image, impinges on an area of study in which literary criticism has generally found the traces of Eliot's objective correlatives. Finally, the poem provides an opportunity to relate Montale's practice to a mode of criticism different from the ones we have examined. In 1950, he published an essay entitled "Due sciacalli al guinzaglio" (Two Jackals on a Leash) in which he sets out, seemingly, to defend and explain elements in his poetic practice.32 Many of the comments in this essay are ambiguous and deliberately evasive. Following the poem by so many years, its poetics are modified by the poem as much as the reverse, and its paraphrases of poetic content must be taken with some degree of caution. Nevertheless, it can help us to understand a number of Montale's concepts of topics men21

CHAPTER ONE

tioned in the present study, including his notions of reality, the ways he seeks to relate disparate experiences and to interpret their value, and the manner in which he tends to organize his thoughts and feelings about experience. The poem reads as follows: 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: (a Modena, tra i portici, un servo gallonato trascinava due sciacalli al guinzaglio). e In "Due sciacalli," Montale writes that he intends his essay to respond to the "great stupor" of the critics who did not understand the poem and another of the "Motets," "Lontano, ero con te," and sought to identify the facts—the personal experiences—behind them. Montale parodies their questions and methods and asserts that poetic obscu­ rity is the inevitable result of the extreme concentration characteristic of modern poetry and of the poet's—his own?—perhaps excessive confidence in his subject matter. He vacillates, considering such obscurity both real and apparent, and then accounts for its presence by suggesting that all poetry may ultimately be mysterious. In any case, he writes that the line of demarcation is determined by the poet's instinct, and must be respected by the reader. Thus, T h e hope of even seeing you again was leaving me behind; and I asked myself whether this that closes off all sense of you in me, [this] screen of images, bears the signs of death, or whether there is in it, out of the past, even if distorted and by now labile, some dazzling gleam of you: (in Modena, among the arcades, a liveried servant came dragging two jackals on a leash).

22

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with some reluctance, he tells us that the poem is addressed to a woman, "Clizia," who likes "funny animals," and that he thought of her when, one day in Modena, he suddenly saw a man dragging along two leashed jackals. Montale goes on, in his wittily ironic manner, to reveal the ways in which he conceives of reality, chiefly through a form of idealism, for life's images are mere appearances, even if some may be diverting. He explains that life presents many "distractions" that seem to be "painted," or "reflected," on "a screen." In the poem, these "distractions," conveyed more generically as "images," would logically include the jackals. Montale also reveals the ways he tends to relate his experiences, chiefly through association: the jackals cause him to link disparate experiences, and to think of Clizia and her idiosyncrasies. Montale notes his later mental association of Modena, Clizia, and the jackals, the curious persistence of them all together in his mind. His words suggest different yet interrelated possible interpretations of the incident: Clizia may have sent the jackals, almost by "emanation"; they may have been "an emblem, an occult citation, a senhal"; they may have been hallucinatory; they may have signaled his "decline," and even death. He places these possibilities, which have different conventional connotations, in an unbroken sequence and blurs distinctions among them. From this way of structuring his thoughts about the jackals and, albeit indirectly, about life's "distractions" and all its appearances, it would seem that Montale is less immediately concerned with the distinction between reality and hallucination than with that between messages from Clizia and omens of death, that is, between the positive and negative meanings that the world of appearances may carry. Thus he shows the tendency to yield, in his quest to gain knowledge of the world, to a nonrational or intuitive and even allegorical conception of experience in which appearances are reduced to their sign value, and may be both unreal and allegorical at the same time. This is a tendency that, some critics feel, 23

CHAPTER ONE

prevails in La bufera, many of whose poems are contempor­ aneous with Montale's 1950 essay.33 Montale's discussion reads as follows: Un pomeriggio d'estate Mirco si trovava a Modena e passeggiava sotto i portici. Angosciato com'era e sempre assorto nel suo "pensiero dominante," stupiva che la vita gli presentasse come dipinte ο riflesse su uno schermo tante distrazioni. Era un giorno troppo gaio per un uomo non gaio. Ed ecco apparire a Mirco un vecchio in divisa gallonata che trascinava con una catenella due riluttanti cuccioli color sciampagna, due cagnuoli che a una prima occhiata non parevano ne lupetti ne bassotti ne volpini. Mirco si awicino al vec­ chio e gli chiese: "Che cani sono questi?" E il vecchio, secco e orgoglioso: " N o n sono cani, sono siacalli." (Cosi pronuncio da buon settentrionale incolto; e scantono poi con la sua pariglia.) Clizia amava gli animali buffi. Come si sarebbe divertita a vederli! penso Mirco. E da quel giorno non lesse il nome di Modena senza associare quella citta all'idea di Clizia e dei due sciacalli. Strana, persistente idea. Che Ie due bestiole fossero inviate da lei, quasi per emanazione? Che fossero un emblema, una citazione occulta, un senhal? O forse erano solo un'allucinazione, i segni premonitori della sua decadenza, della sua fine?' 34 O n e summer afternoon, Mirco happened to be in Modena, walking under its arcades. Distressed and ever absorbed in his "prevailing thought," he felt amazed that life offered so many distractions [which seemed] almost painted or reflected on a screen. It was a day far too gay for a man without gaiety. And suddenly there appeared to Mirco an old man in livery who was dragging on a small chain two reluctant cham­ pagne-colored pups, which, on first sight, didn't appear to be small wolves or basset hounds or little foxes. Mirco approached the old man and asked: "What kind of dog are these?" And the old man [responded] drily, haughtily: "They're not dogs, they're shackals." (He pronounced "jackals" like a good uncultivated northerner [softening the consonants]; and he disappeared round the corner with his pair [ of dogs].) Clizia had

24

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ELIOT,

POETIC

OBJECT

Montale leaves the jackals ambiguous in this essay, clearly implying that poetic form provides the only real resolution. He then leaves the issue, although not without some illuminating parting asides. We learn, for instance, that the incident was only one of a number of similar occurrences that seemed to be "the strange products" of life's "bofte a surprise," and that they had a soothing effect on his suffering. The "boile a surprise," which produces surprise distractions, is an image of those accidents and contingencies (in Boutroux's sense) which, occurring unpredictably in experience, disrupt its mechanistic laws and reveal that the material world may, in fact, be informed by an animating principle. Montale's words suggest that such surprises may have positive value in and of themselves, and, since they are "distractions," allow escape from complete, subjective isolation. Since the jackals are one of life's surprises, Montale associates them, at least initially, with Clizia, the positive element in his own life. But Montale's emotion seems to reach its full range of expression when he develops the possibility that such signs in experience may also have the negative association of death. In this case, life's "screen of images" would be not even a present and comforting figment, but a final hallucination, a screen concealing a meaningless void behind appearances. Montale does not ask whether the screen is a diaphragm between two opposing realities, whether it is a defensive wall, barely protecting him from a void, or whether there is no external reality behind, and cause for, his perceptions. Although each of these somewhat negative metaphysical possibilities rises naturally out of his words, a fondness for funny animals. How she would have loved seeing these two! thought Mirco. And from that day on, he never read the name "Modena" without associating that city with the idea of Clizia and the two jackals. Strange, persistent idea. Could it be that the two creatures were sent by her, almost by emanation? Could they be an emblem, an occult citation, a senhal? Or could they perhaps be only a hallucination, the warning signs of his decline, of his end?

25

CHAPTER ONE no other question is so immediately important to him as whether the jackals are in some way sign-messages from Clizia: if not, they are omens of death. The secondary oppositions, for instance between "real signs" of an animating principle in life and mere figments of the imagination, shaped only by desire and anxiety, remain present and unresolved, and permeate, at least by apposition, his apparently casual phrases. The image of the jackals is, Montale writes, an "example" and a "conclusion" to his poem; certainly its linkage to the body of the poem through the striking rhyme of "barbaglio"/"guinzaglio" (dazzling gleam/leash) argues that it is more than a casual appendage. The jackal image can live on its own, he asserts, and he wonders whether he may have already explained too much about it and the poem's other "antefacts." He implies strongly that the reader should respond to poetic images as to objects in a still life, an analogy he clarifies elsewhere by observing that the reader can at times "receive" the "mondo di fantasmi ideologici" (world of ideological phantasms) of poetry.35 The images of poetry are, like those of life, ambiguous. They may carry ideas, but, since they are products of the imagination, or "real" apparitions—"fantasmi" carries both suggestions— their meaning is uncertain. "La speranza" conveys emotion by direct statement in the first person singular, yet it is successful in being indirect, for there is an "inner world" deeper than that which lyric statement alone can convey. We have seen that Montale's concept of indirect expression is, in its technical implications, quite distinct from Eliot's ideal, which advocated the eschewal of direct lyric expression, of emotion and of a personal poetic voice. For Montale, indirection often implies, in its technical aspects, concision, the correct intonation, sobriety, and suppression of biographical references: the result is not mere excision of ideas but intoning, finding a voice, despite all that which cannot be expressed, and that has gathered in the sentient mind and 26

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spirit, from the first moment of awareness. Were the poet to attempt direct statement, he would perhaps find the wrong intonation, or produce a nearly infinite series of conflicting direct statements about his emotions. The poem's opening lines propel us syntactically inward, toward the conjunction "and," rather than outward, toward the biographical experiences behind the poem, yet it is not that the poem is hiding (or not hiding) some concrete thing. The opening lyric statement alludes to events, and even carries temporal reference, but does not develop the potential narrative dimension. The essence of its emotion, the feeling of loss of hope and of Clizia's absence, is conveyed by the extremely ambiguous first lines of the poem, with their free-floating modifier "pure": "even" of seeing, of "even" seeing, of seeing you "somehow." While lyrically based on the significance of Clizia, these lines do not define that significance or develop the poet's stated feelings. The feelings embodied in ideas develop abruptly in the main body of the poem out of what seems, at first glance, to be clear statement. In their broad syntactic structure, the central lines seem to present two distinct meanings that the "screen of images"—including, logically, the final image of the jackals—may bear: a negative one ("i segni della morte") and a positive one ("o . . . un tuo barbaglio"). Montale offers the alternatives as equally possible, even though they are mutually exclusive. The light, almost "cantabile" phrasing of "distorto e fatto labile" alters this balance and throws stress on hope, as does the italicization of "tuo." This stress suggests that the "tu" of the poem is unlike all other beings. By syntactic implication, the "tu" is a "sign of life," yet she is more: for she, flashing and gleaming discontinuously, is known by dazzling light. Thus the central lines of the poem suggest that life's "screen of images" does carry signs or messages. In this respect, the lines are less ambiguous than the prose gloss to the poem, which raises the additional complication that all may be mere hallucination. Both in the poem and in the gloss, the ambiguity is 27

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more conceptual and philosophical than verbalistic. However, it invades the poem in surprising ways and renders its statements both tentatively reflective and dramatically immediate. The poem's lines stress a distinction between omens and a gleam or dazzling flash that may be even more than a sign of life, if it is animated by Clizia. Montale does not have an emotion in mind for which he is seeking adequate "correlatives" or images; it is, instead, as though his generically philosophical a priori metaphysical doubt were given form by the images he finds. They—and especially the flash which is so notably absent from the gloss—do not expand or refine his emotions: they tighten and articulate them and are, in turn, as in the earlier Ossi, caught in and refined by what Contini has termed "meshes of a polemical antithesis." 36 The fear that all may be a hallucination, a mere byproduct of anxiety and desire for Clizia, is suggested, quite indirectly, by the connotations of fear, bewilderment, and hope that the word "barbaglio" carries, in addition to those of light and truth. But other possibilities arise from syntactic linkages. The phrase "e in esso, ma distorto" (italics mine) anticipates and modifies the phrase "un tuo barbaglio."37 The compound linkage of "distorto e fatto labile" suggests that the miracle will not be direct, as the poet had hoped. Yet even this possibility is positive: Montale's metaphysics depends on the merest possibility of miracle in life. The flash of Clizia may be twisted, as though in a distorted mirror image, or be "labile" and evanescent, as though projected on water or another moving "screen." Even "barbaglio," as we have seen, has multiple connotations. 38 Thus, by means of a syntactic structure given almost as a spontaneous whole, Montale expresses his ideas and emotions through a mesh of possibilities, out of which no single one can be isolated. In this way, the general questions of the substantiality of reality, which Montale will consider only somewhat more abstractly in the 1950 essay, and the "inner world" of the poem, its emotional "source"—anxiety and 28

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desire for a miracle, a certainty, and Clizia—find expressive form. The final image of the jackals is not, then, a symbol or a central device in any of the usual senses of those terms, nor is the situation of its appearance an objective correlative to a given emotion. Its placement, after a colon, indeed suggests that the jackals are "examples" (in Montale's word) of a number of unanswerable questions about experience. Had they been given first, we might have read their connotations of death—for jackals are mammals of prey—into the whole poem, and as expressions of the poet's emotion. Their late introduction suggests a temporal gap between the poet's musings and his sighting of the animals; but their still greater isolation, in parentheses, suggests their persistence in memory too. In the poem, the jackals are concrete jackals, part of perceived reality, the "occasionespinta" of the poetic "object," and also obsessive memories. They have qualities of intensely perceived phenomena— their realistic cast and liveliness lend a vivid quality to the poem—but they are, above all, signs that Montale manipulates in what is essentially metaphysical poetry. MONTALE carried out many of the innovations of Le occasion!, chiefly poetic concentration and concision, and specifically of the "Motets," in the name of a modernism that he consistently exemplified by Eliot's poetry. Whether or not this was the catalyst of his innovations, the results are strictly Montalian. His decision to seek new techniques exerts pressures on their constituent elements. These pressures occur, for instance, in the phrasing of "o dal passato / e in esso, ma distorto e fatto labile, / un tuo barbaglio." The phrase "dal passato," whose meanings might encompass both memory and associations, is syntactically displaced for greater concision of expression. This displacement internalizes the elements that follow: if the "barbaglio" is to be on life's "screen of images," it must surface from the poet's memory, and the "screen of images"

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thus comes to be located, at least in part, in the poet's mind. It is as though a memory were struggling to survive intact, no matter how "distorted," no matter how "labile." Presumably, part of the difficulty lies within the poet himself, within his memory and perhaps in a battle with other distractions that lead him away, in Petrarchan fashion, from that part of himself which is truest.39 There is nothing of Bergson, or of Proust, in Montale's notion of memory, for it is not synonymous with consciousness, it does not provide duration, it is not, of itself, creative. It is the retention of past certainties, or intuitions, no matter how distorted they have become on their voyage to the poet's present time. Its opposite is really "oblio," or "oblivion," in its etymological sense: without some form of certainty, no matter how dimly intuited, life becomes, for Montale, a mere "screen of images," vacuity, absurdity, and death.40 The ambiguities so often noted in Montale's poetry are not chiefly the result of an opposition between emotions or between intellect and emotion. They are, nonetheless, the result of conflict, here the metaphysical one, between a present that is uninformed by certainty, and therefore unanimated, and one animated by a certainty, the imprint of Clizia, which may neutralize anxiety and which gives the poet the will to persevere. Montale tries to find a place in his poetry for the language of prose by developing new forms. In the "Motets," he relies on such musical possibilities as varying the duration of an element and repeating and interweaving several threads. Syntactic displacement breaks up the poetic lines and allows them to be read in more than one way, almost polytextually, at the same time. For instance, among the possibilities, one may read "e mi chiesi se questo che mi chiude ogni senso di te" (and I asked myself whether this that closes off all sense of you in me) or "e mi chiesi se questo schermo d'immagini che mi chiude ogni senso di te" (and I asked myself whether this screen of images that closes off all sense of you in me), either, or both, of which 30

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may be completed by "ha i segni della morte." The term "schermo d'immagini" runs freely through the lines. The late placement of the jackals is another device that significantly affects form, so that the whole poem invites rereading and has a truly musical, "da capo" arrangement. This structure accords with Montale's view of the obsessive nature of experience, in either its pleasurable associations or its arduous circularity. Montale also develops a new music in sound, as in the striking rhyme "barbaglio"/"guinzaglio" (with perhaps an echo of "sciacalli") and the internal assonances of "morte," "distorto," and "portici." This, together with the whole poem's economy, allows Montale to cross successfully the jealously guarded boundary between Italian prose and poetry, and to create a poetic language charged with "accensione interiore" (inner combustion). 41 In creating this language, Montale economizes in the use of the prefix "ri" in "rivederti," to incorporate an unexplained and, as we have seen, essentially irrelevant temporal dimension. The idea is picked up by the phrase "dal passato," but the forward momentum of the poem, working through its mushrooming alternatives, and the ambiguity of the "passato," which is the realm that may transmit, by distorting or curving (not reflecting, perhaps, but deflecting) the "gleam," the fleeting and labile light, glimmer (in the sense of intuition), glare, or flash of Clizia, carries us swiftly away from any prose dimension. We have seen how the words "dal passato" and "barbaglio" work together to suggest a spatial realm in which Clizia glitters and dazzles and may appear, and how, if this realm is luminous, it is also subliminal, like the reaches of the subconscious or of memory. Significantly, "labile," applied to Clizia's flash, also suggests the poet's failing powers of memory, as in the phrase "memoria labile" or "enfeebled memory." The prose elements in the poem everywhere acquire subjective qualities; the verb "trascinava," literally "was dragging," for instance, is in symmetric placement with the subjective 31

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"abbandonava," literally "was abandoning me," of the first line. The term "schermo" denotes both a screen and, somewhat contradictorily, a shield of defense. Its syntactic displacement suggests that Clizia herself may be associated with the term, perhaps as a poetic "blind." 42 The term "immagini" has various connotations, including photographic and poetic ones, depending on the way we read the term "schermo." The "segni" may be forward, signs or omens of death, or backward, its trace or vestige. And, finally, "chiudere," or "to close," "to shut," "to end," "to enclose," and even "to render obscure," suggests that the poet may be "shut out" or "shut in" from Clizia, cut off from her in many ways, all of which are suggested by the word "senso"; from a "sense" of her, her meaning, which is indecipherable, as in trobar clus, or even the way to her. At this point, it is quite unclear what is "shut off," external reality or the poet's mind itself. Syntax lends itself to these ambiguities and indeed furthers them, for instance in the ambiguous placement of terms like "pure," "schermo," and "questo." Some words seem to work by almost crosswordpuzzle refraction. Critics fond of formalist patterns might even perceive a semantic linkage of "barbaglio" and "guinzaglio" (the latter suggests slavery and anxiety, imprisonment and suspense), or of "barbaglio" and "speranza"—a ray of hope—by means of one of its connotations, through the related "barlume," or "vague idea," "glimmer," "ray of hope." But Montale's highly formal poetry is not self-referent, for it carries metaphysical implications about reality and perception. 43 Nowhere does Montale suggest that the interpretation of reality depends entirely upon human perception and attitude; nowhere does he approach purely subjective idealism. As in his other poems, there is a gap between perception and reality, and between the images of experience and their meaning. Thus, Montale moves significantly away from the French Symbolists (and particularly from MaIlarme, with whom his name has been linked), from Eliot, and from Italian Hermeticism. 44 If one were to look, with 32

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Mallarme in mind, for absoluteness in imagery and language, or, with a Hermetic model, for lyrically suggestive language, one would be compelled to believe that Montale tries to force meanings upon resistant materials, or that he gives figurations devoid of emotion, as Gargiulo felt was the case. It is true that of all these possible models, the concreteness of the jackals resembles Eliot's "noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking"; and the reader might be tempted to understand them as poetic material selected from experience to fuse or give concreteness to thought and feelings. But the poem is objective and concrete in a Montalian, not an Eliotan, sense. Montale, like Eliot, eschews what is generic and abstract; and he is uninterested in the cheerfulness of some days, the reluctance of bizarre animals, and the feelings of gaiety and sadness. But it is only by contrast to what is generic and abstract that the jackals seem concrete, whereas they are in fact only less abstract, unknowable, or untouchable than something he may have in mind. Montale must entrust this area of his subjective meanings to his "concrete" jackals; and he must refer to their spatial and temporal dimension, which is, significantly, largely implicit, while anchoring it, and the jackals in it, with the paradoxically concrete and kinetic verb "trascinava." The jackals are presented after a colon, a line and stanza break, and in parentheses: they are set apart physically, and, implicitly, also temporally, a surprise message. The kinesthesia of "trascinava" suggests that the jackals relate not only to the memory of Clizia but also to her meaning—hope, the apparition sought for, salvation—by their unexpectedness, their instantaneousness (Clizia is often associated, in Montale's poetry, with a lightning swiftness), and by their simultaneous reluctance, but these meanings are so indirect as to bypass both traditional poetic analogy and symbolism. And, since the poet himself speculates on whether they allude to Clizia's presence, he prevents us from reading them as mere commentary on her. Montale's gloss was in part directed to those critics who, 33

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like Gargiulo, had written that such images as that of the jackals have no proper place in poetry.45 It will be recalled that he found the poem, and others like it, radically inexpressive, prosy rather than poetic, and that he doubted that narrative and descriptive elements, which are notable in Le occasioni, can ever be truly expressive. Yet it is clear that there is neither narrative nor descriptive intention in "La speranza." The poem seeks more to disturb the imagination than to arouse it, and it relies heavily on the effectiveness of holding its solution to the end.46 The jackals have no integral part in their setting; their very gratuitousness, or, conversely, their extreme purposefulness—if such it be— argues for only one literary possibility: an ideal narrative time, an allegorical view of experience. No concrete fiction could thrive on such an image as the jackals, and on such an ideal aspiration as Montale's. Gargiulo found no emotion to thrive in the alien territory of the "prose" of this poem, either. Once again, it is true that there is neither a probing intellect nor a deep emotion provoking a rapid passage from image to image, no uncovering and discovering of deeper emotions, ideological transmutations, and sharp perceptions. The meaning of these images is not to be found entirely by reference to feelings, nor is it intended to be: the poet suspends feelings until he discovers both a proper vehicle for them and a very particular meaning in some very precise images. He is doing exactly the opposite of those poets who assemble their details to reflect their feelings. Montale seems not to select his images, but rather to allow them to select him. Then he focuses on them: the focusing itself—the sharpening of details—becomes an index of what he is feeling and thinking. Montale is not deliberately "Hermetic"—a school of poetry with which he seems fatally to be associated47—for he does not pretend to stand between images and what they mean. On the other hand, with no amount of deliberation could he really help the reader: his true delibera34

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tion—his program—is to undo the arbitrariness of a poetry that builds on image equivalents to justify, represent, or comment on a priori emotions and ideas. Instead, his images stand ready to receive a meaning. Since this meaning is not the poet's to create, but only his "to receive," the details he gives of the concrete images act as indices of what one may term his interested preparedness. They disturb and disorient the reader because, given their integral nature, they suggest logical connectedness in a world that, for Montale, quite clearly is fragmented and disordered. One area for poetic development is that left between images of experience and their possible meaning, a philosophical issue that Montale had probed discursively and explicitly (for all the precision of language) in Ossi di seppia. That ambivalent area in Ossi becomes part of the very arrangement of "La speranza." The poet takes advantage of the reader's curiosity, he catches his attention with an accurately rendered detail: but the image will not dart "into a thing inward and subjective,"48 for Montale is no Pound either. He is using a logical detail as Mallarme might deliberately violate one, to disorient the reader. The image gives the kinesthetic effect of having ideas and feelings, not the ideas and feelings themselves. Montale's process is a most unusual one: it is not, as in traditional poetry, to select images, and thus to give the reader a notion of their value, but, instead, to move from the desire that some images have weight and meaning to the poetic images themselves. At the same time, Montale carefully eliminates human details, for instance acts that might be significant to the reader, and the poetic presence that could be a guide to reading the poem. The reader must not move from the "feel" of images to a general statement, but must recreate the desire and anxiety with which the images are "received": there is no longer an organic relationship between ideas and images, only the relationship that the poet may somehow envision. Thus, the poet alludes to a plot whose empiric "reality" is irrelevant, and 35

CHAPTER ONE seems to build to a climax that he cannot provide, a revelation that can only be carried by tone or symbolized by some modification of the poem's process. Montale may have intended to move toward the prose objectivism that some critics are now seeing as the major trend of all his work, but, as usual, his overall poetic intentions—his true poetics—go beyond any he may have ha

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Scrivo poco, con pochi ritocchi, quando mi pare di non poterne fare a meno. "Intenzioni"a that there is an unbroken line running through Montale's poetry, from the earliest printed work through at least La bufera (1956), has characterized most critical approaches to his writing. The nature of that line, however, has not been unanimously agreed upon, even by critics who have made extensive use of Montale's own remarks about poetry and his own writing. Some of these comments exist as declarations made within poems, and thematic critics have tended to base their interpretations on them. Others appear in his literary essays, but, because of their often polemical or occasional character, are not always helpful for understanding his poetic practice; occasionally, they are playful, and sometimes even deliberately misleading. 1 A third area of Montalian commentary, more intimately related to individual poems, consists of letters to editors and acquaintances in which the poet demonstrates his practical or effective poetics in the context of proposed textual changes to drafts of poems in the process of composition. These "working papers," which show Montale not as a public essayist but as a struggling craftsman of letters, when compared with the published versions of the poems THE ASSUMPTION

*I write very little, making few corrections, and only when they seem absolutely necessary.

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CHAPTER THREE and his later comments on them help us to chart Montale's poetic itinerary from volume to volume and to understand better the nature of his poetic development. MANY CRITICS have approached Montale's poetry by seeing in it the evolution, over the course of his writing career, of moral elements: the "skepticism" of Ossi, for instance, leads to the moral commitment of La bufera, and thence to the withdrawal from public history from Satura (1971) on.2 For these critics, changes in moral tone can be recognized by overt changes in thematic content, announced by the statements of theme that characterize Montale's earliest poetry, and particularly Ossi: the theme of skepticism ("Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, / cio che non siamo, cio che non vogliamo" [Today we can tell you only this, what we are not, what we do not want]); 3 the desire for escape and for essentiality ("Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed essenziale" [I would have wanted to feel rough and essential]);4 the expression of existentialism, monotony, aridity, and immobility ("com'e tutta Ia vita e il suo travaglio / in questo seguitare una muraglia" [how all of life and its travail is in pressing on along a barrier wall]).5 These themes, in turn, have been connected with explicitly stated poetic programs: thus, in "Non chiederci la parola" (1923; Don't ask us for the word), the theme of skepticism is simultaneous with a poetics of inexpressibility and the poet's feeling that his work has nothing to say or offer to the modern world. 6 For several reasons, moral-thematic approaches have been generally unsuccessful in analyzing the poems of Ossi and the later poetry. 7 First, thematic approaches have tended to raise pseudoquestions, for instance whether Montale's assertions are "public" or "personal," and what value they may have as assessments of a public, personal, political, or cultural "condition." Second, as recent sophisticated demonstrations by structuralist and formalist critics have confirmed, the real unifying structures of the poetry

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cut across the traditional but superficial divisions of statement and exemplification.8 Third, an emphasis on theme and illustration is inadequate to the analysis of a complex yet strict interdependence between explicit statement and the whole poem as a vehicle that incorporates those assertions, one that "carries" them but also modifies them, and is in turn modified by them. Let us take the poem "Non chiederci la parola," which has been understood by critics as the expression of a "condition" and the polemical announcement of a "program" for a new and different poetry that, although stated negatively in the poem, was, Montale is alleged to have believed, the only kind of poetry possible in the psychological and cultural conditions of early post-World War I Italy:9 Non chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato l'animo nostro informe, e a lettere di fuoco Io dichiari e risplenda come un croco perduto in mezzo a un polveroso prato. Ah 1'uomo che se ne va sicuro, agli altri ed a se stesso amico, e l'ombra sua non cura che la canicola stampa sopra uno scalcinato muro! Non domandarci la formula che mondi possa aprirti, si qualche storta sillaba e secca come un ramo. Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, cio che non siamo, cio che non vogliamo. b b Don't ask us for the word that blocks out from every angle our formless spirit and declares it in fiery letters and shines forth like a crocus lost in the midst of a dusty field. Ah, the man who goes by confidently, friendly to others and to himself, and takes no note of his shadow that summer's midday sun imprints on a crumbling wall! Don't ask us for the formula that can open you worlds, but for some twisted syllable, dry as a branch. Today we can tell you only this, what we are not, what we do not want.

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Interestingly, this is a poem formed of the negation in its opening and closing lines. An interpretation based on paraphrase would see the final lines as a simple modification of the first ones: the poet cannot only not give a word to define man,10 but can also only say what man is not, and what he does not want. Yet the poem does give a form to man, who is "formless," "amorphous" in character, and "indefinable," and even defines that form, no matter how negatively conceived: "the most intense heat of summer," "noonday burning," imprints man's shadow on the crumbling, decaying wall. These words, evocative almost despite their polemical framework, rise and emerge as though by resistance to an idea. They effectively deny the initial topos of inexpressibility: they alone provide the context in which the imperative can be released as a dramatic utterance. The concluding statement, the opening negative imperative, and the image are in no way clearly separable. The poem opens by appearing to be based on an interest in the possibilities of particular words, or in language generally—"la parola" (word, speech, doctrine, even poetic language). Thus, the syllable that must be dry as a branch would seem to illustrate the poet's announced theme, and represent a poetry that will resist easy musicality, even all music, will be dry in personal expression, in tone and sound, and bare as the bareness of some existential condition. But the image of the shadow imprinted on the "decaying" wall, while yet carrying an assertive quality—the wall is "exposed in bare patches," is no longer "plastered" with untruth—masks a perceptible kind of nostalgic regret for the transitory nature of human life. In the guise of asking how one is to write, Montale deals with the question of why one writes, to which there can be no rational answer. There is no resolution to the condition of a world in which the true printer is burning heat and the blank page is a crumbling wall; or to the fact that the wall, crumbling in time, suggests irreversible deterioration. The answers can only be poetic: the Romantic search for immortality or the 76

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modern expression of individual anxiety. Thus, the tone of the first and last lines, rather than their content, is the poetic correlative of the poet's dilemma and in a sense suggests an answer to it. Paraphrase is inadequate when faced with the poem's procedure. It commands one not to expect language to state man's predicament, and says that the poet cannot use certain kinds of words, but, rather, it concludes, only "dry" ones, in a minimal, reductive poetry, "dry as a branch"; but, ironically, it gives, even simultaneously in the opening lines, exclamatory and meditative phrases that transcend elements of polemic, and images that rise from the polemic. This particular poem (like others in Ossi) is usually taken to be a direct challenge to contemporary Italian literature and culture, and even to the rise of fascism in Italy." It is typical of Montale's poetry that such meanings are present, but also that they remain strictly minor, even tertiary. This poetry has overriding primary meanings that also, as though incidentally, carry secondary meanings which are activated unpredictably and are themselves more important and ambiguous than any possible ambiguous political reference. By bearing this relationship of ambiguities in mind, one can begin to construct a history of Montale's poetry and of his poetics. For instance, tone conditions Montale's prose comments on poetry as well. These have often come out of rethinking, years later, the experience of writing poetry, and they share its characteristics. For instance, anxiety shapes Montale's polemics, undercutting his considerations of whether poetry is possible culturally (a current of thinking from "Stile e tradizione," 1925, right down to the Nobel Lecture, 1975); Montale wonders whether poetry or indeed any human activity is viable.12 An undercurrent of irony flows through this poem, through both the "croco / perduto in mezzo a un polveroso prato" and the "storta sillaba e secca come un ramo." Ironic skepticism renders all elements of language amorphous, even its most conventional ones. In a poem in which state77

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ments are put forth, but without rhetorical intention, only to be denied, and images are put forth as though to deny themselves, there is no reality to which the conventional "tu" and "noi" can correspond. This characteristic is more significant than the conceptual premise "behind" the poem that there is no cultivated readership for poetry. Even Montale's explicit intention of making his ideas concrete subverts his rational statements. Grammatically, since the phrase "risplenda come un croco" (that might shine forth like a crocus) is in the subjunctive, "la parola" does not exist, and, if it existed, it would do so only by surviving in a dusty field. Yet Montale makes "la parola" exist by embodying it in the image, the crocus, and then abolishes the crocus, renders it absurd, by placing it in the ironic dusty field. The image is stronger than the abstract rational statement, but irony is stronger than the image, and takes it back at the moment it proffers it. The image of the shadow on the wall logically presents itself as a definition of man who is, the poem has already implied, indefinable by language. The image is presented positively (although conceived negatively), and the poem's conclusion, stated negatively, is inconclusive, because it carries a tone of resignation. The conclusion, which the poem can state only by negatives ("cio che non siamo, cio che non vogliamo") is true only as an answer to the initial assertion, but is polemical, and therefore inadequate to the poetic platform. The fact that one cannot find an exclusive structure of thought in the poem is signaled by the awkward transitions between the stanzas and even, within the last one, between its first and last two lines. The stanzas themselves are unstable: they proceed dialectically, not logically, and one must look instead to unexpected grammatical, syntactic, modal, and tonal elements for their possibilities of poetic resolution: for instance, the affirmative "si qualche storta sillaba" concedes the superiority of a kind of poetry, but it also suggests that even the superior kind is fatally "deformed" ("storta"). In "Non chiederci," state78

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ments exist only by interaction with others, especially with their tone and mood. Often, Montale's poems work heuristically: they change the direction of their elements—nonlyric ones, for instance—in unexpected ways and create unforeseen resolutions out of assertions proposed only to be resisted. These assertions are necessary to the successful poem, which, by a kind of "combustion," suddenly, unexpectedly, achieves a perfect agreement between what is expressed and the way it is expressed.13 Recognition of the unforeseen qualities of the poetry has a further use in warning the reader to beware Montale's literary essays. One must be as cautious about accepting uncritically the explicit statements they make about poetry as one is about taking such statements from the poetry itself. For instance, the much-noted essay "Stile e tradizione" appears, like "Non chiederci," to offer a poetic program about the contemporaneous poetry.14 Typically, it is formulated by negative reaction to a society marked by the exploitation of culture in every forum. Because Montale is certain that he does not want this, he typically makes use of its qualities to define what is minimally desirable: thus he carves out of the negative "usefulness" a positive "uselessness," and defines a "useless" program and implies that it is superior to any "useful" one: "la salute e forse nel lavoro inutile e inosservato" (health lies perhaps in useless work that goes unnoticed). Given Montale's way of writing, the word "forse" is tantamount to a logical "thus," and not an ambiguous "perhaps": this manner of putting his thoughts is one important way Montale has to state abstract ideas. He also works by refraction of his ideas: thus, the term "useless" applies by indirection or ironic refraction as much to contemporary culture as to the proposed literary program, which is to be "minimal." Montale is quite aware of the irony of the term "minimal," for he notes that this program will charge an entire generation with an immense task, and, in stating it, he employs an apocalyptic tone which he modifies instantly. The task is to conserve "i tre 79

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o quattro punti d'intesa" (the three or four points of agreement), the few common grounds, and these truths are already menaced by oblivion: "rischiano di essere scancellati e sconvolti" (they are in danger of being wiped out, totally undone). Montale is more certain about the essential poverty of "useful" cultural programs than he is of what fruitful usefulness may be; and he is more certain that the common grounds for culture are few—three or four—and that the ground beneath them is deteriorating, than he is of what those few truths are. And overall, he is uncertain that there is even the real possibility for truly healthy literary culture ("e forse nel lavoro inutile e inosservato," italics mine). His doubts on this matter go deeper than conventional skepticism. The essay does not discuss the nature of literary tradition, but asks instead whether that very idea can be defined: "il problema della tradizione e il problema di tutti noi, e porlo con chiarezza e gia impresa difficile; che tanto varrebbe averlo risolto, per meta" (the question of tradition is one we all face, and to define it with clarity is indeed a difficult task, so much so that were we in fact to define it, we'd be halfway there to resolving it). The answer Montale offers is unexpected and different in kind from the question: literary tradition lies in the work itself, and the writer who preserves it is "the man who can," and who at times is "least aware of it"—the optimism of this at best indirectly optimistic phrase lies in the notion of accident, and is not rational. "I limoni" (1922; The Lemon Trees) is a much-anthologized and widely known poem that has been taken at times as an introduction to Montale.15 It appears to be the expression of an explicit program for poetry, one that seems to advocate, even more clearly than "Non chiederci," the intention to overturn contemporary literary practice and taste: the "furori giacobini, superomismo, messianismo ed altre bacature" (Jacobin furies, the cult of the superman, messianism, and similar worm-eaten ideas) that dominated Italian literature when Montale set out to write, and which he explicitly and implicitly opposed in "Stile e tradizione." 80

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This poem seems initially to offer a poetics that will be based on exceptional objects—exceptional in that they are uncontaminated by overuse in literary tradition—deliber­ ately selected from a world of familiar objects because of their quotidian familiarity and their concomitant ability to release "real" sensations:16 Ascoltami, i poeti laureati si muovono soltanto fra Ie piante dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri ο acanti. Ιο, per me, amo Ie strade che riescono agli erbosi fossi.c Some critics have written that the poet sets himself apart from literary tradition and offers in its place his own hum­ ble reality; yet this expressed desire to overturn conven­ tional poetic language relies in part on highly literary lan­ guages, of Horace, for instance, and of D'Annunzio. Is this a poem about the release of sensations or about language itself, is it concerned with little-known names or littleknown plants, or both? Are the sensations a synesthetic rendering of the external world or the evocations of mem­ ory? Are the lemon trees to be considered exceptional because they release the mind from strictures of literary language or from concrete reality or, as it might seem from the final stanza, just because they release the poet from unreality, the monotony of overly familiar winter days, and simply revive and revitalize him? La pioggia stanca la terra, di poi; s'affolta il tedio dell'inverno sulle case, la luce si fa avara—amara l'anima. d Quando un giorno da un malchiuso portone. 'Listen to me, poets laureate move only among plants with littleknown names: boxwood, privet, acanthus. I, for my part, love the streets that open into grassy ditches. d Then rain fatigues the earth; winter tedium gathers over the houses, light turns mean, the soul bitter. When, one day, through a half-shut gate 81

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The final stanza shows how contradictory are the surfacelevel statements about the lemon trees. Here, they are not "selected" at all, but appear unpredictably; they are made strange by the projection of an intonation anticipating the trumpeting last lines, and express a problematic release of enigmatic sensations. These uncertainties are reflected in the poem's disjunctions, the most striking of which is the disruption of continuity introduced by "quando" (1. 43). The narrative element in the last lines corresponds less to a unit of narrative time, or to the introduction of a new time plane, than to a disruption of inner time, of silence. "Quando" signals the end of an inner pause. The moments in the poem are not sequential; they are different approaches to a central problem. The whole poem breaks down, then, into a series of tentative approaches to the exceptional objects, a series of almost entirely discrete variations: the walk of the first stanza and the movement of sensations and mind in the two long central stanzas, in which the poet attempts to quell his ultimately undefined emotions, to replace them by sensations, chiefly of smell, and to arrive at the essential meaning of the lemons by transcending these sensations, as, restlessly, "la mente indaga accorda disunisce / nel profumo che dilaga" (the mind investigates, reconciles, disunites, in the perfume that floods). Unexpectedly, the last stanza takes us from this ideal realm to winter days in the city. Each of the variations represents a typically Montalian entry into language, and only hence into a degree of reality. On the early walk, there is a long hiatus before the boxwood, privet, and acanthus of poets laureate are matched by a countering image. The poet slowly uncovers and discovers a world with which he is comfortable, poetically and linguistically: "erbosi / fossi" (grassy ditches), "pozzanghere I mezzo seccate" (half-dried muddy pools), "ragazzi . . . [che] agguantano" "qualche sparuta anguilla" (boys . . . [who] seize some thin eel), "Ie viuzze che seguono i ciglioni" (the thin paths that follow the banks). Only grad82

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ually do the lines reach the image of the lemon trees, and the force of the earlier Horatian "amo" envelops everything that leads up to it, so that one might at first deduce that the poetics Montale is offering is indeed one of "adherence" to the physical landscape of Liguria, achieved by the use of antieloquent, nonconventional language to render its physical details.17 But there is no pleasure in the things "adhered" to, and no pain, either. In fact, it would seem that there is no emotion, only description, given with clarity of detail. But the details are too clear, too vivid, to be referred to anything real, and the tone and even the sounds in the lines too crisp to be uttered by someone who is regarding or contemplating images of concrete reality. Montale, it seems, is not regarding anything, not even his images; it is as though he is bringing them forth, out of an interior or anterior zone; thus, the images in the first lines point only to their own boastful "uselessness" ("qualche sparuta anguilla"). Language used in this way bears a striking resemblance to Montale's prose of thirty years later, when he gives the precise details of the physical landscape of his youth as though both to remember and to discount them (as in "La busacca," The Busacca, of the 1956 Farfalla di Dinard, The Butterfly of Dinard). Is this a magical world, even if nothing has ever happened in it, or could happen (these are the same dimension for Montale), or is this a world more to be grappled, despite its poverty, precisely because nothing happened or could happen in it? In any event, Montale's contradictory mood is largely present in the attempt to focus on the images themselves. The central stanzas undercut such adherence by raising questions about the objective reality of the landscape: to what, then, can the poetic language or even the poet really adhere, since the thrust of the central stanzas is toward the "punto morto del mondo" (dead center of the earth)? Montale is not a poet who directly feels his emotions and thoughts, but here he does attempt to give a sensation that is closer than either, and to render it synesthetically, fusing 83

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sound and smell. He "listens" to the scent of the lemons and collapses syntax; in this synesthetic silence, piu chiaro si ascolta il susurro dei rami amici nell'aria che quasi non si muove, e i sensi di quest'odore." All things seem ready to yield their secret, and the perfume that "floods in" or "overflows" is the background against which the mind moves in its effort to pass through sensation to intuition—a defined emotion and definition of existence. As though distant, his glance almost physically "ransacks" the landscape as the mind seeks to "reconcile" and "disunite." These lines are intellectual: what appears to be a Romantic, descriptive rendering of nature in fact expresses the difficulties and ambiguities of perception. The lines barely enact intuition or even sensation; they articulate, instead, their difficulties and elusiveness, so that the reader's attention is displaced from the image, which is itself in a void of unmoving air, to its momentary and enigmatic impressions. The lines move uneasily between trying to define the essence of things and trying to find them. The poem vacillates, too, between rendering images and trying to pass beyond them. In this situation, more is left unsaid than is said, or can be said, and it seems to be language itself that is sought. The words seem inadequate to something the poet has in mind and the definitions themselves ("l'anello che non tiene, / il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta / nel mezzo di una verita"; the link that doesn't hold, the thread to disentangle that finally can put us in the midst of a truth) are not rational statements or even emotional ones, but frustrated accusations made against an indefinable condition. The last seven lines, in fact, embody this linguistic impasse and try to break it. Here, the lemon trees appear "Clearer, you listen to the whisper of the close branches in the air that scarcely stirs and the senses of this odor

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unpredictably, an accident conveyed by the unexpected temporal interruption of "quando," the adjective "malchiuso," suggesting a gate left half-shut through negligence, and the yellow cores, the lemons that "si mostrano" (appear, show themselves), independent of the poet's memory and imagination if not entirely of his sensations. We are led into the final stanza by the tenuous transition of "Ma l'illusione manca" (But the illusion gives way). Time is rendered in a narrative present ("ci riporta il tempo"; time carries us back), and the elements of description seem overly articulated and distracting ("citta rumorose [dove] l'azzurro si mostra / soltanto a pezzi, in alto, tra Ie cimase"; noisy cities where the clear sky comes out only in bits, up there, among the roof copings). Symptomatically, the poet leaves behind some of the ideas articulated earlier, for instance that the lemons "gently rain down upon the heart an unquiet sweetness" ("piove in petto una dolcezza inquieta") and evoke the desire for truth in any form. (Now the lemons will forcefully pour forth their self-contained truth.) It is as though Montale, unable to define, in conventional and Romantic ways, that truth, which was to be comprised of both new poetic language and new poetic matter, articulates the difficulty by the very act of extending a narrative time and allowing nothing to happen in that time, in any usual narrative sense. This is one way of very indirectly expressing the inexpressible thing the poet desires; another is to entrust his desire to the energy with which he invests his images and even their sounds ("scrosciano," pour forth). Rather than directly work on the images, or seem to make use of them, he displaces energy from its usual centers in poetry, and carves out the place and the conditions in which his images are themselves carved out and discovered. These conditions do not matter in any narrative sequence of "cause and effect." The conclusion of the poem, like the appearance of the lemon trees, is unpredictable: "il gelo del cuore si sfa" (the heart's ice unfreezing) replaces the unquiet sweetness, the sounds that "scroscia85

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no" replace the earlier synesthetic silence, and the highly efficacious and discordant image of the lemons, "Ie trombe d'oro della solarita" (the golden trumpets of solarity), blends sound, color, and an abstracted element—one hesitates to say memory—of summer days. "I limoni" is, finally, an "adventure" in language and not in life, as the first stanza suggests it will be: the lemons cause the release of sensations that are semantic as much as physical, and that are difficult to define because they are not, as the second stanza suggests, mere disquieting catalysts of the search for truth. 18 By the final line, the whole poem has become the itinerary and has replaced an earlier walk in a local landscape. Ironizing the reality that only reluctantly yields images—a "malchiuso portone"—Montale seeks to overcome it by forcing the lemons, that might be unexpected in reality, to be inevitable in the poem. He thereby creates, in the final line, a poetic quite different from the one he announces and develops in the first four lines.19 "I limoni" shares many features with other poems in Ossi. The lemons are concrete, but, like other images in the volume, they render an abstraction, the difficulties in thought itself and in its relations with feeling, language, and external reality. Only in the course of creation does Montale achieve his poetic solutions: they are not consciously held theories that generate the poetry, but they are created in, and can only be expressed by, the finished 20

poem. One might expect, then, that readers could go to Montale's own later summaries of his aims and achievements, to those a posteriori "intentions" he deliberately and accurately opposed to the a priori poetic platforms of Ossi. In "Intenzioni," Montale summarizes some of his achievements as of 1946, but does so at times only rather philosophically and generically.21 Other later explanations of earlier poems must also be taken with great caution, for, at times, they are themselves works of art, often epigrams and allegories, or lie midway between essays and short stories. 86

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They appear to be literary criticism rather than art, but, as we have seen, the glosses they provide are not primarily aimed at elucidating the poems they appear to be studying, although at times they do argue positions that develop from the earlier poetry.22 All in all, then, the soundest place to study Montale's true poetics is internal rather than external, in the poems he had already written. Among these, the most revelatory are the ones he revised or considered revising. We know that when Montale actually wrote, he generally did so with few corrections; but he only set words on paper after the poem had "incubated" for a long time.23 In the few cases in which he expressed to others his thoughts about modifying his texts, he made comments freer of intervening irony, ambiguity, or any attempt to be generic about poetry—all qualities of his "a posteriori intentions"—and approached the poems directly. One of the most valuable for discerning a Montalian poetics is the series of comments on possible changes to be made to the motet "Non recidere, forbice" (1937; Don't cut off, shears). of the proposed changes to be made in an early version of the motet beginning "Non recidere, forbice" appears in a short series of letters that Montale sent to Renzo Laurano in 1937.24 Here, Montale provides information that is valuable for assessing poetic issues he had in mind as he composed the "objective" poems of Le occasioni; his comments are also applicable to many of the poems in Ossi, which are already well on the way to achieving elements of poetic objectivity.25 The draft of the earlier version, then called the "Fifth Motet,"26 reads as follows: THE DISCUSSION

QUINTO MOTTETTO

Non recidere forbice, quel volto solo nella memoria che si sfolla, non far sul grande suo viso in ascolto la mia nebbia di sempre. 87

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Un freddo cala . . . Il guizzo par d'accetta. E l'acacia ferita da se scrolla il guscio di cicala nella prima belletta di Novembre/ The version finally published is: Non recidere, forbice, quel volto, solo nella memoria che si sfolla, non far del grande suo viso in ascolto la mia nebbia di sempre. Un freddo cala . . . Duro il colpo svetta. E l'acacia ferita da se scrolla il guscio di cicala nella prima belletta di Novembre. 8 The suggested changes, those Montale actually made, and his comments on questions that Laurano asked show the way the poet selected specific words and conceived of their function, the way he worked with metaphor and developed poetic ambiguities, and his views on the role of statement, or the "content" of his verses, on the nature of their structure and their often essentially musical organization. Montale proposes, in the second letter, to substitute for the earlier words "il guizzo par d'accetta" (quite literally: "the flash seems of an axe") the phrase "duro il colpo svetta" ("svetta" signifies "to prune," "to trim," "to cut"), because the earlier word "accetta," or "axe," had, Montale punningly observes, not been "accettabile," or "acceptable," to Laurano, who did not understand its relation to the 'Don't cut off, shears, that face alone in memory that clears, don't gather on its large listening countenance my constant mist. A coldness strikes . . . The flash seems axelike. And the wounded acacia itself shakes off the cicada-husk into the first November slime. 8 Don't cut off, shears, that face, alone in memory that clears, don't make of its large listening countenance my constant mist. A coldness strikes . . . Hard, the blow prunes. And the wounded acacia itself shakes off the cicada-husk into the first November slime.

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"forbice," or shears. Therefore, Montale proposes to make the change in order to avoid confusion. In the third letter, Montale discusses his use of the verb "svettare" and decides finally in favor of the new version of the poem. He explains why: Io voto per la 2a stesura. Il significato equivoco di svettare (tra l'altro vuol anche dire: recidere la vetta) per quanto intraducibile, m'e venuto spontaneo, non tirato per i capelli, ed e prezioso in quel luogo. E poi la prima stesura Le aveva fatto credere che il guizzo si riferisse al freddo che cala, mentre per me era il guizzo della forbice-accetta che assesta il colpo; dunque era piu equivoca la prima stesura. Pure diversa e l'interpretazione che io intendevo dare al terzo e al quarto verso della V strofa; ed e: non fare, ο forbice, con l'atto della recisione, nebbia di quel viso, cioe, " n o n distruggerlo." Ma quella strofa, per ora, resti cosi; solo La prego di mettere una virgola dopo il 1° verso, l a strofa. . . . quel volto, e sfop.h We can deduce that the early version was not intended to be chiefly descriptive or psychological, or to evoke feelings. The discarded words "il guizzo par d'accetta" are based on the metonymic stress on the result—darting, flashing, or flickering light ("guizzo")—rather than on the cause, the h

I opt for the second version. The equivocal meaning of "to p r u n e " (among other things it means "cut off the top"), however untranslatable, came to me spontaneously, not by forcing it, and it is precious as it is. Then, too, the first version had led you to believe that "flash" referred to the oncoming cold, whereas for me it was the flash of the shears-axe striking the blow; so the first version was more ambiguous. The inter­ pretation I meant to give the third and fourth lines of the first strophe was also different; it's this: "don't make, oh shears, by the act of cutting, mist of that face," that is, "don't destroy it." But let's let that strophe stay as it is for now. Do, please, put a comma after the first line, first strophe: . . . that face, and stop.

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CHAPTER THREE axe, which is blended with shears ("forbice-accetta"). The flash may be related to the flash of light off the blades of the shears or the speed with which the head of the axe falls. The verb "par[e]," or "seems," which appears to carry minimal imaginative force, helps to link the metaphor to the second part of the poem, for it merges the memory that is about to be felled with an action perceived in the present, the state of anticipation of the blow with the felling of the acacia. "Guizzo" also has connotations that lead outside the specific poem: it may be an ironic allusion to Clizia's quick vitality, to the full and steady light of the memory of the woman to whom all the "Motets" sequence is addressed and who is generally associated with light.27 The phrase "quel volto / solo" carries, one suspects, a deliberate Petrarchan pun on "sole," the only sun, Clizia. Laurano had objected, on logical grounds, to the confusion between the shears ("forbice") and the axe ("accetta"). The unexplained transition from the one to the other was, from his point of view, weak and external; yet for Montale, it was immediate, natural, and satisfactory, and he does not appear to understand Laurano's reservations. The transition is nonrational, yet is conveyed by a clear grammatical accuracy that articulates fully, and even overarticulates, the metaphor, by means of the transforming verb "par[e]." Montale's concentration on "guizzo" and his satisfaction with the transition in the early draft point to the important fact that his concern is with the light itself and not (as Laurano had thought) with its objective "source," the shearsaxe, which would indeed distract from the imaginative force of "guizzo." Montale's imprecision about the objective source ("par d'accetta") indicates a lack of direct interest in writing about that source, which is, for him, equally, shears or an axe, or the oncoming cold weather, or even the objective world generally, and shows a concern only with effects. Montale is reversing, in this early draft, a typical func90

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tion of metaphor: instead of causing two thoughts of different things to interact, linking and supporting them, we have here a single if ambiguous effect, the "guizzo" (flash or flickering), a single word that not only displaces similarities and distinctions among different things but also makes their objective reality itself irrelevant to the poem. Grammar should not mislead readers, as it had Laurano, into looking for an underlying logical order to unfolding thought: Montale's poem is working in the world of effects, and all its energy is concentrated in the effects, regardless of their cause. Yet the source is not an ideal one, in the MaIlarmean sense. Montale is not using the image of the flash to invoke sensations of the blow, nor, conversely, sensations of the blow to invoke an ideal image, action, or realm:28 his interest is centered on fate and on Clizia and on a problematical present over which something looms. An appropriate translation would make present both the flickering light and the axe, not present one at the expense of the other, and not draw attention to their objective sources: "flickering axe." The earlier version creates a number of tensions. One exists between the effects of reality and the curiously nonobjective status of that reality, which is real only in the sense that it looms threateningly. There are other tensions in the distinction between some of the effects, the flash and flickering of the axe that threatens Clizia, for instance, and the ideal of Clizia who should be superior and invulnerable, whose face, particularized by the demonstrative adjective "quel," or "that," should, it would seem, be free from the effects of time. Clizia, whether creature or memory, is contradictory: on the one hand, she is soothing, as the repetition of "o" and "\" sounds in the first three lines indicates, and the poet must grapple her memory, secure it to himself; on the other hand, her memory, falling like the wounded acacia, loses its ability to console. Wounded and falling, she is both superior and vulnerable; the poet, for his part, is both protective ("non recidere, forbice") and 91

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resigned ("da se scrolla"), without the strength necessary to save her or even to retain her memory pristine. She shakes herself free, as she falls, of the shell, the empty husk of the cicada. The poet's resignation may force a minor ironic association with that insect, as it does in the poem "Debole sistro al vento" (Weak sistrum in the wind) of Ossi, a cicada, a parasite shaken off, in this poem, into the "slime of November."29 Montale's comments to Laurano state that the ambiguous "guizzo" was not intended to represent the flash of cold weather, but they do not contest such a reading, or indeed any that arises naturally from the poetic use of words. It is on the basis of such latitude, or open-mindedness, that some critics have constructed their view of Montale's poetry and his way of writing. They see his tolerance for different readings as an ambivalence that spontaneously invades all areas of his poetry, particularly his choice of words and images, and they assume, somewhat contradictorily, that he consciously manipulates language, in an almost Mallarmean fashion, to produce ambiguous meanings.30 The fact that secondary meanings arise spontaneously and yet can at times remain secondary must be taken into consideration by critics who assume, a priori, that unity is the central fact of poetry, that poets work on constructive centers and on stratifications of strictly interdependent levels of meaning, from phonic to metric and eidetic ones, and that poets work all aspects of the poem equally, by means of a kind of superconscious ability. Montale's letters to Laurano, which are, as it were, the poet's working papers, refining material toward the realization of the finished poem, show that Montale, at least, does not always work this way. For instance, when he does make a change in one place in "Non recidere," he does not feel it necessary to make other changes to accord with the new ambiguities that have entered, for instance the new phrase "duro il colpo svetta." More important is that Montale believes that "all explanations" are possible; the only unac92

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ceptable one is that the shears be taken as real ones! Yet some critics have seen in this poem a real pruning in a real landscape, a real event that is the poem's "occasion."31 Some of Montale's critical statements on other poems seem almost to reinforce these views, but they do so only coincidentally. For instance, in his well-known statement on the poem "Il sogno del prigioniero" (The Dream of the Prisoner), Montale wrote, "il mio prigioniero puo essere un prigioniero politico; ma puo essere anche un prigioniero della condizione esistenziale" (my prisoner may be a political one, but he may also be a prisoner of the existential condition). 52 But we can see from the letter to Laurano that Montale is largely unconcerned with secondary meanings, or with any associations that a reader may make, so long as he registers the primary ones, which are the cohesive elements of the poem. Only his modesty, his reluctance to impose his views on others, and the respect he has for the inherent freedom of poetic language cause him to write "also" for "chiefly" in the comment on "Sogno." Both the toleration of secondary meanings and Montale's strong sense that there is a primary, cohesive element in his poetry account for such apparent contradictions as his comment that all explanations of his work are acceptable to him and the statement elsewhere that he does not recognize himself in the complicated exegeses of his poetry published by some critics.33 Those critics who look for literal meaning are searching for cohesion in Montale's poem by concentrating on apparently concrete images, but Montale's primary, binding meanings are neither literal nor concrete. As we have seen, the concrete elements are not supported by the sense that reality is concrete. The cohesion in this poem and in others lies, rather, in the anticipatory momentum of its poetic images. Whereas other poets may work backward and gather up earlier images into a structure of feeling and thought, Montale tends to work forward, and relies—some have claimed that he overrelies—on the intelligibility and, 93

CHAPTER THREE perhaps more important, on the dramatic effectiveness of this momentum. He relies, too, on his own personal poetic language. We must know from other poems in the "Motets" sequence that images of light and motion, in both idealized and ironically distorted versions, are signs of Clizia; only if we recognize this can we fully appreciate the irony of the flash off the shears-axe, intensified by the recognition that this implement of Fate is about to cut off her memory, and therefore cut him off from her. Montale is neither working directly with concrete experience nor deliberately occluding it: he is building effects in a selective manner. The substitution of the new phrase "duro il colpo svetta" for the earlier words "il guizzo par d'accetta" rids the poem of the confusion that had disturbed Laurano, the sudden transformation of the shears into an axe. Yet the new phrase brings its own difficulties, including new kinds of ambiguity. 34 Attention to the revised version of the poem clarifies the ways Montale works, and shows how necessary ambiguity is to him and what forms it takes. By eliminating "guizzo," Montale sought to eliminate the confusing secondary association of the "flash" with the oncoming cold weather, which, in Italian, can "descend," or "strike," as in the verb "calare" in Montale's letter. But secondary implications of one sort or another refuse to remain banished. New ones, not discussed by Laurano or Montale, arise in the new line, beyond Montale's direct concerns. He writes that "svettare" has a peculiar richness for him.35 It also has many of its own inherent ambiguities. The verb denotes the pruning of the tops of hedges or trees and the trimming of hair, and it connotes the action of whittling away at something (perhaps the poet?). In its intransitive sense, it may signify the agitation (movement) of the tops of trees or the visible manifestation of an object, its looming in the distance. Latent psychological associations of the word "guizzo," "flash" or "light," for instance the briefly illumined state of mind of the poet, are picked up, even if later nullified, by "duro il colpo svetta," which 94

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has evocative force, chiefly in the word "duro," of hardness, lasting hardship, and bitterness. The pitilessness of the "colpo" cuts away at the poet as well as at Clizia, because it cuts off her memory.36 Metonymies also recur: "colpo" stands for the unexpressed action of cutting or pruning (and is linked, as we have seen, with "forbice"), and the verb "svettare" stands for the axe into which the "forbice" are transformed. Indeed, by a conflation of these metonymies, Montale tries to achieve the smooth transition of "forbice" to "accetta," although the transition in the revised poem is no smoother than it is in the earlier version, in part because we cannot resolve contradictions between the poet as fabricator and the poetic self, that is, between the visionary presentiment expressed by the poem and the lack of will in the poetic voice. "Svettare," then, is rich in ambiguity. It suggests that the image or memory of the "grande suo viso in ascolto," which even in the earlier version was wounded and cut down, nevertheless looms more intensely, may shake itself and agitate ("da se scrolla") its top: the top of the acacia (the hair of Clizia?)37 shakes itself free of the cicada just as it falls, and the poet's will with it. The cicada fulfills the purpose of fate: that everything must die. Fate and objective time are thus the same thing and the only important objective reality, which is, as it were, imprinted by itself, by fate and the fixed destiny to pass away. The simultaneous presence of the transitive and intransitive meanings of "svettare," both "cutting" and "looming," is typical of Montale's writing: he can hardly look at a thing or emotion without defining or evoking its opposite. The elimination of the earlier phrase surrendered at least one implied construction by opposition, the "flickering" ("guizzo") of the blow against the "nebbia." The new phrase retains the chief contrast, between a passive Clizia who is wounded ("ferita") and an active one ("da se scrolla") who perhaps by implication casts aside the cicada or poet, and in any case is the vehicle of its—or his—fall. 95

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However, as we have said, banished elements reappear in new guises. There are new oppositions: for instance, "Non recidere" may be a playful game, the memory of a woman turning away, shaking her hair, or a desperate poem of abandonment, as the poet and memory are cast off into the slime of November. The poem, in any case, does not work with the kind of consistency that establishes a single attitude toward these oppositions. Irony flashes over the whole poem, directed always against hostile fate, at times against Clizia, and, even more strongly, against the self, also associated with the simultaneously hollow and pitiful integument of the parasitic cicada. Montale changes "il guizzo par d'accetta," yet, despite Laurano's natural but misleading association of "guizzo" with the oncoming cold weather, he chooses not to change the words "un freddo cala." These words, then, and the idea behind them, have an independent life in the poet's imagination, and show, again, that he does not work all parts of the poem equally by insisting that a change in one part requires changes in others. It is clear that for him some lines, at least, are important building blocks that cannot be sacrificed. "Un freddo cala" is such a building block and is also typical of a type of phrase in his poetry that lies between description and evocative statement. Apparently related to the oncoming cold weather, so that we might see time as the servant of fate, these words seem in part descriptive, 38 but, as we have seen, Montale does not create a reality concrete enough for them to be successfully descriptive; moreover, he does not generalize or mythicize the idea of cold, as modern literal symbolism permits. 39 Lying somewhere between description and evocation, the phrase shows that, at least by 1937, Montale had succeeded in breaking through the constraints of mimetic, descriptive poetry. Such phrases had caused him difficulty in Ossi, because, overly tainted with mimetic intent—he tended to articulate details with too great particularity and failed to sustain a balance between the outwardness of description 96

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and the internal poetic function they were to fulfill—they declined easily into description. In some of the more successful poems of Ossi, Montale was learning to build on series of quasi-symbolic phrases of this sort, which only appear to be descriptive. In Le occasioni, Montale is more successful in using lines that are equally and simultaneously "inner" and "outer," and he later came to see this tendency as one of the goals of Le occasioni. Other lines similarly cross traditional poetic boundaries. The lines "E l'acacia ferita da se scrolla / il guscio di cicala I nella prima belletta di Novembre" cross the boundaries between simile, literal symbolism, and summary. They suggest simile, and could read "come l'acacia ferita che da se scrolla" (like the wounded acacia that). Like the phrase "un freddo cala," they carry mimetic overtones, yet, as we have seen, they are close to literal symbolism. They carry a tone that suggests they summarize the poem, and we properly look within them for the tonal resolutions of the poem's diverse elements. The boundaries crossed also include those of rhythm and sound. One means to this end is linguistic control, to which Montale pays close attention. He made a point, in his letter to Laurano, of inserting a comma after "volto": Non recidere, forbice, quel volto, solo nella memoria che si sfolla. The pause after "volto" and before "solo" emphasizes only some of the functions of the adjective "solo," "alone," or "only": the image of the face remains alone in memory after others have been cleared away. The pause also has another selective effect: it stresses and isolates the word "volto," both "face" and, significantly, "appearance," and, by effectively lengthening the second "o" of "volto," it intensifies the assonance among "volto," "solo," "memoria," and "sfolla" that is later picked up by "viso" and "ascolto" and makes the relationships among these words almost ideogrammatic. The memory is made to work visu97

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ally, phonically, and psychologically, and by mysterious agreements among these and other constitutive elements. to discussing particular choices of words, Montale's letters to Renzo Laurano offer two interesting prose paraphrases of the third and fourth lines of the first section of the original version: "Don't make, oh shears, by the act of cutting, mist of that face," and "'Don't destroy it.'" Both prose paraphrases, by omitting the possessive "my," differ markedly from the poem's words, "non far del grande suo viso in ascolto / la mia nebbia di sempre," "my mist of always," or "my constant mist." The possessive internalizes the mist, lending to it the sense that the poet is lost, as in a mist, perhaps in his own ignorance, and the poem is clearly self-ironic: "nebbia" has the figurative meanings of "seeing as in a mist," unclearly, and, overall, of shadowiness. The self-irony corresponds to the contradictions in the poem. This is a poet aware of the limitations within which he exists; this is poetry that reflects those limitations. The interesting second gloss, though inadequate to the poem, focuses on the initial negative exhortation, an element that links the poem to those in Ossi, and highlights a consistent tendency in Montale's poetry. IN ADDITION

In that earlier volume, we have seen, Montale used exhortation as a means of beginning a poem; in "Non chiederci la parola," for instance, the negative initial exhortation and its echo in the third stanza seem to express Montale's opposition to a literary and cultural condition, but the mood, rather than the polemical argument, is made central to the poem. In Le occasioni, the negative mood becomes pervasive and internalized: in some of the poems of this later volume, and in the poem under discussion particularly, the protest is in part directed against the poet himself, perhaps against his own ignorance, against his failing powers of memory, his inability to retain the pristine imprint or message of the absent woman. The poet prays, yet not to retain the richness of memories, but for a grace, the acci98

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dental byproduct of fate; and not for something that can be generated from within the self. As we read "Non recidere, forbice," we see that although it is indeed constructed on defensive negation, the words "quel volto, / solo" throw, because of the pause created by the comma that Montale insisted on, the substantive "volto" into positive relief against the whole of negative reality. Clizia's is the only face, in contrast to other faces and other memories. Not only are these memories "other," but, it is suggested, they are inferior. These other faces are, the phrase "si sfolla" tells us clearly if indirectly, images of the common herd, the "folia," "crowd" or "mob," a depersonalized vulgus from which the poet, in Petrarchan fashion, must flee. However, the image that Montale uses to stress his distinction is unexpected, so striking as to seem incongruous: the mind, like an open piazza or street that is suddenly cleared of people, "empties itself" of inferior images and mere appearances. 40 The reflexive verb has selective stress: there is no emphasis on remembering, or on the process by which the mind clears. Rather, there is emphasis on the necessity of memory, of clearing away the distracting images to make space for those of a superior creature. Thus, memory has the force of a definition, and of truth itself. This stress, taken together with the decisiveness of the lyric tone and the visual quality of the "grande suo viso in ascolto," send the reader back to the phrase "quel volto, / solo." The poem highlights its emphases with care. The third line, also a negative imperative, throws the positive memory into visual relief through rhyme: the rhyme "volto"/"ascolto" stresses "volto" as a superior alternative to, and rest from, all other reality. In the working papers on the "Elegia di Pico Farnese" of Le occasioni, Montale expressed strong interest in the "restringimento di retina visiva" (narrowing of the visual retina) that the vowel " i " effects. Certainly, "viso," in its tonally central phrase, becomes almost an ideogram of Clizia.41 We have noted the possible pun on "solo"/"sole," and 99

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the negative and threatening "nebbia" certainly reinforces its likelihood, sending us back to the "sun" or "only one" Clizia, the fragment of experience which the poet grapples. Yet the mists are total and "constant" ("di sempre"). Thus, what the poet grasps is at best a temporary escape from his state of mind, no matter how, poetically, he sets the images off from the quotidian world. The poem is not directly about Clizia or about the memory of her, but about the difficulties of memory and of willpower. In the "Motets" and in Le occasioni generally, Montale expresses the hope for some sign of, or perhaps from, Clizia. The indirection with which she is consequently treated leads to the difficulty of this volume, an indirection that is at times so extreme as to render some of the poems virtually indecipherable: in the "Elegia di Pico Farnese," for instance, the poet's hope is sustained by the only images in a whole day's experience that might even conceivably be worthy of the absent woman: "un vano farnetico / che il ferraio picano quando batte l'incudine / curvo sul calor bianco da se scaccia" (a vain paroxysm which the Pican blacksmith, striking the anvil and bent over the white heat, drives away from himself), and "se appare inudibile / il tuo soccorso, nell'aria prilla il piattello" (if your help appears inaudible, the disk in the air whirls and flashes). Thus, the poet grasps memory as one might grasp an object. He has not the power to do this with the resources of sensation and imagination, however, for, in Montale, memory is problematical:42 it is absurd, quite beyond his own powers, not a refinement of his own sensations or the product of imagination. Devotion to it as a safeguard and, but only at times, willed retention of it replace belief. Montale, unlike Proust, has scarcely the will to activate memory; chiefly, he has only desire. This situation is the secular analogy to faith without belief, the kind of religious sensibility that characterizes Montale's poetry as early as Le occasioni and links him, once again, to Eliot. In "Non recidere, forbice," the shears introduce explo100

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sively the protest against fate, yet express it with poetic dryness and sobriety. All in all, the "forbice" is a successful image; although some critics have related it to the conventional emblem of the three Fates, the third of whom, Atropos, cuts the thread of life, we have seen that Montale's concern is not so much with the fate of the woman as with the fate of her memory—and therefore with his own "minimal" program for existence. Despite this concern with memory and its fate, however, Montale is uninterested in psychology and in exploring the contradiction within himself between the desire to retain a memory and his own inertia. The fact that Montale ignores the possessive "my" in his paraphrases addressed to Laurano is of significance, and indicates a generally and profoundly fatalistic cast of mind: Atropos, is, after all, the inflexible Fate. The poetic result keeps the nature of the threat to Clizia's memory external, dramatizing only its effects, as in the phrase "duro il colpo svetta." Montale has no interest in identifying who or what cuts and prunes: the external world, though unreal, embodies a clear, hostile, and real threat. The means by which Montale makes objective reality unreal are not intellectual; and it is as though words spontaneously release ideas to him, perhaps revealing himself to himself.43 This quality of language is a positive force in poems largely about negation, lack of imagination, problematic will, and the loss of memory. In the poems of Le occasioni, and throughout La bufera, such phrases, without a clear agent or verbal complement, become characteristic, as do even more radically disembodied ones, like the notoriously difficult phrases of "GIi orecchini." 44 We have seen that Montale's changes to "Non recidere, forbice" do not alter the general tone of hopelessness: no matter what words are substituted, the essential mood is unchanged, and banished formal and psychological elements reappear. If protest and resignation are not susceptible of modification, new "reconciliations" 45 among them 101

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surface spontaneously with new images, and with each change come new, unanswerable dilemmas held in dynamic suspension. Montale makes concrete what is intangible, unconsciously renders objective reality distant while he is plunged further into its effects. He uses these effects to suggest, at the same time, Clizia's significance; this is the Clizia whose presence he would defend against threat ("non recidere, forbice")/ whom he celebrates, loses ('Tacacia ferita"), and to some extent inculpates ("da se scrolla")/ in a poem that seems, ultimately, not to be about her directly, or even, chiefly, about her memory, but about the fate of her memory and therefore about an internal battle fought on in the ambiguous space of one's "self" and one's "life." A CAREFUL, more traditional reading of "Non recidere" would see the poem as divided into two sequential stanzas, the first conveying a presentiment of fate and the second the action of fate, which fulfills the presentiment. In both parts, not only time ("un freddo cala") but even victims ("l'acacia") are fate's handmaidens ("da se scrolla"). The final image, accordingly, resolves the two parts of the poem into a tone of resignation to fate's massive inexorability. The final image seems to be the most concrete one in the poem, the kind that critics have generally taken to be, on account of their apparent concreteness, the real-life "occasions" of Montale's poems.46 But, we might ask, how can the poet begin by predicting the existence of fate and his resignation to it? How can he thus resign himself almost a priori? And how is it that the poet does so resign himself? Why can he not use his memory of Clizia to oppose time and fate? One possible traditionalist answer to this last question is that memory becomes, in this poetry, something that must be held physically, and that we have to do not with active memory of someone or something that is enriched by its object, but memory in itself, conceived virtually as an 102

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object. In "Sotto la pioggia" (1933; Under the Rain) memory is not opposed to fate and linked, as it might seem, to objective time by the image of an "eddy," because it exists in a different realm. Memory is a byproduct, a remnant, a scrap, a brief consolation "left" by the "eddy"; it does not oppose fate but drives consciousness of it away, at least temporarily: "se ancora / di la dal mulinello della sorte / mi rimane il sobbalzo che riporta / al tuo sentiero" (if still beyond the eddy of fate I have left the jolt leading back to your path). Thus, the poet can predict fate and both pray to it and seek to oppose it by praying for, as it were, an "accident," a temporary grace. We might therefore understand the initial words of the poem to be the equivalent of the prayer "Grant this brief grace," addressed to fate and opposed to "nebbia," "darkness," or the consciousness of fate. Even according to such an analysis, the only grounds for hope are that the "clearing" and self-purifying mind may seek a truth. The mind's search receives definition from the words "[la] memoria che si sfolla," which, despite the present tense, do not represent a present action, but are, rather, a noun and relative clause that act chiefly adjectivally, without sacrificing the concrete power of the verb.47 However, this search is less powerful than the fate that cuts off Clizia (just as the consonant cluster with its voiceless "f" in "sfolla" is less powerful than the cluster with the voiced "v" in "svetta"). A traditionalist reading could leave other important questions unanswered. Critics have sought to define the function in the poem of descriptive elements; since the concluding image seems strikingly real, some have seen a real pruning in a real landscape, and certainly such precise details as "Novembre" and "acacia" seem to point to a deliberate descriptive purpose. Critics have seen Montale's poetry generally and the "Motets" in particular as prime examples of this effort. The word "par[e]" in the original phrase "il guizzo par d'accetta" would seem to be an awkward transition between lyric exclamation and a concrete 103

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image: one would expect not "the flash seems to be that of an axe," but some more imaginative phrase blending the emotion of lyric with images selected from objective reality. In fact, Laurano, Montale's correspondent, was working with just a such a view—a fatal critical approach to Montale—when he questioned the transformation of the shears into an axe. But it is not the transformation that is curious; rather, it is Montale's reliance on the verb "pare." On this issue, Montale's letters are of great help, for they show that he works on inchoate experience, not directly on images or on his emotions, and only to a degree, to give it a new order in the poem object. In this poetic process, we have seen, intuition is expressed in unexpected places, and this compensates for a lack of interest in others, where, for instance, transitions are difficult.48 Montale's stress, we have now ascertained, is so much on the inexorability of fate that no other element seems more important. At the same time, fate gathers up everything into itself. A study of this poem's musical and sound structure shows how this is conveyed in poetic form. The formal element in "Non recidere" that most links it to musical motets is its reliance on contrapuntal rhyme and assonance, and on stress to cast important lines in relief.49 In the following passage, the recurring accented vowel sounds in internal rhymes and assonances, chiefly " o " in the first stanza and "a" in the second, are underscored. Non recidere, forbice, quel volto, solo nella memoria che si sfolla, non far del grande suo viso in ascolto la mia nebbia di sempre. Un freddo cala . . . Duro il colpo svetta. E l'acacia ferita da se scrolla il guscio di cicala nella prima belletta di Novembre. Within this overall pattern, centers of major semantic and phonic connections spring into relief: forbice-memoria; volto104

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solo (picked up by sfolla and continuing through ascolto to colpo-scrolla, each of which becomes its own center— ascolto-volto, colpo-volto-solo, scrolla-sfolla, etc.); nebbia-freddo (picked up by svetta and continuing through belletta, which becomes its own center—belletta-svetta); sempre-Novembre; cala-acacia-cicala, with the minor richness of their "a" sounds. The poem shows an overwhelming tendency to fulfill its own predictions and "to seal its own fate." This movement coincides with that toward more seemingly concrete language which is, in fact, completely abstract because it is effectively shorn of all concrete reference. We have a fulfillment of what is predicted: to "volto," associated by sound with "viso in ascolto," we have "scrolla," and the net effect is that Clizia, like everything else, is cast off, despite every effort to retain her memory. We have seen that "svetta" is a strong element in the poem and dominates "sfolla," and therefore that "forbice," associated with "svetta," dominates "memoria." Emphasis is thrown on "da se scrolla," and the effect is to indicate the kind of minute occurrence that Montale introduces as his subject matter in "I limoni." But this event is an "antimiracle," for it kills hope. The net effect, too, is that the acacia casts off even the "guscio" of a mere cicada. (Does "guscio" pervert "guizzo"?) 50 Certainly we can say that sounds in the second stanza help to seal the fate of the poem and the images in the first stanza. In this extremely self-fulfilling form, what seems to be present time is, in fact, an eternal present. It is this day that is equal to eternal time: "Novembre" phonically absorbs the earlier adverb "sempre." The last line of the poem closes with this process and therefore draws attention to the concluding lines of each of the two stanzas. Because the concluding line of the first is a "settenario," or sevensyllable line, stress is thrown on "belletta" in the poem's final line, which carries the seventh syllable and thereby breaks the line most interestingly. "Belletta," of course, denotes "mud" or "slime," and it is significant that it com105

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pletes one of the few perfect rhymes in the poem, with the noun "svetta," which contains the noun "vetta," "peak" or "summit." The important role of sound patterns shows that Montale uses descriptive language with nondescriptive, and in fact quite abstract, results. The day in November is not an occasion in the sense of "cause," but an image that both embodies and fulfills an emotion. Montale desires reality to bespeak a higher truth, and fears that it bespeaks only an "imprinted" condition. Thus, only by superimposing traditionalist and formalist approaches, can we appreciate fully the degree to which inexorable fate and objective reality are subject to the same poetic processes and arouse similar impulses and attitudes in the poet: they are both inexorable and unknowable. An exception must be found, and in this poetry it is often fabricated, is present in the poems' graces, objectifications of memory, and in the search for a Truth, to which pronounced truths for the poems to convey are all strictly secondary. We must recognize further that Montale's poetry is not a cold construct and that its elements are not all present as the result of a deliberate intellectual system. In important ways, the poems rely on intuition. In "Non recidere," Clizia is not present, and there is no sign of her whatsoever, although the signs or "messages" of Clizia are often, in Le occasioni, central, and many of the poems in it function as vehicles for those signs.51 Again, Montale's letters provide insight into those signs. Writing to Bobi Bazlen on June 9, 1939, and discussing the poem "Elegia di Pico Farnese," Montale implies that in a day that seemed to offer nothing, he waited for a sign or message from Clizia. He describes the situation in these words: "Se appare: 'e qui benche il tuo soccorso appaia inudibile c'e tuttavia il piattello che prilla e che e comunque (se non proprio il tuo soccorso) una degna chiave del giorno, la sola degna di t e ' " (If [your help] appears: "and here, although your help may appear inaudible, there is, nonetheless, the disk that whirls, and is (if 106

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not exactly 'your' help), a worthy key to the day all the same, the only one worthy of you"). This description is interesting, for it bespeaks a lack of a deliberate intellectual system. Anything that is comforting is, almost, Clizia's presence and is therefore "like" her. For Montale, what must be faced and overcome are the radical adventitiousness of phenomena and gratuitousness of experience; and these are sometimes overcome in the poetry (as in "Pico") by style and dramatic devices not totally separable from such plots of language as the networks of connotation. It is important to recognize, however, that these connotations are not dependent on a private system. Montale is not a poet who progressively returns to a private language, to his own earlier poems, only in order to blend a poetic language system with his own personal, private system of understanding reality, and to relegate to a completely irrelevant position the conventional references of language. He is not, in short, either a Yeats, coming armed with a self-sufficient system,52 or a Mallarme, coming to his poem, whose drama is only syntactic, with symbols that stand only for something he has potentially in his mind. If we have no Clizia and no sign of her in "Non recidere," we also do not have a created "absent Clizia," or— this would be a Mallarmean possibility—symbolized Absence. Nor is her absence purely linguistic. We can construe, from Montale's words on "Elegia": "There is neither your direct help, nor anything I can interpret as your help, or can connect with you in any way. Therefore, everything falls, slides away, slips into slime." For Mallarme, an answer to absence is silence; for Montale, especially in the later verse, an answer is satirical and apocalyptic poetry. When Clizia is absent, there is nothing to believe in or hope for. As a result, everything in objective reality is both unreal and threatening; as he tells us in the first motet, "l'inferno e certo" (hell is certain). This treatment of Clizia shows that she cannot be under107

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stood only as the crowning image in a mythic system elaborated a priori to make poetry possible. Only in poems in which she is hoped for do we have a language of potentiality: the desire that phenomena can be linked to her in some way, and at times the sense that they cannot, so that the images are, as it were, doomed at the very time they are being used. There is, then, no total system, no totally systematic approach to the chief symbol, Clizia; yet there is a tendency toward system, manifesting itself, as we have seen, everywhere in such details as puns, in ambiguities, in the choice of positive and negative images, and in the choice of such a word as "svetta." the nuclear sequence of Le occasioni, exemplify Montale's development toward his own "objective" poetry. This is not an isolated foray into classicism, nor "external figurations devoid of feeling," nor Italian versions of foreign modernist influences.53 It is perhaps Montale's most experimental poetry and the poetry that declares its distinction from Italian Hermeticism 54 and Symbolist influences,55 and leads the way directly to some of the most successful poems of La bufera. An understanding of the effective poetics of "Non recidere, forbice" also helps us to understand the constructive elements in Montale's early poetry, in Ossi, and to gain a more fruitful notion of his poetic history, at least through 1956. It also shows that traditional modes of exegesis and modern formalist criticism can work together to "find" Montale, without the occasional exaggerations of either. Recognition of this effective poetics might seem to argue for a discontinuity between Ossi and Le occasioni, and certainly critical studies of some of the earlier volume's more popular poems, "I limoni," for instance, have discussed it in terms of descriptive poetry and its psychological content. However, other poems in Ossi show that the characteristics we have been noting in Le occasioni were present even in THE "MOTETS,"

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that volume. An understanding of Montale's effective poetics helps us to appreciate Montale's itinerary from the Ossi to the Occasions, perhaps the most interesting in all his poetry. Among critics who have studied Montale, Gianfranco Contini paid due attention to this itinerary, seeing it as a development toward "saving phantasms" and verbal fabrications of grace, and justifying both the "nonpoetry" of the Ossi and the seeming-prose elements of Le occasioni.56 This itinerary begins as early as the early 1920s and ends only in the poems of La bufera of 1956.57 Little in Montale's overt statements in "I limoni" fully prepares us for it. The "theme" in that poem suggests that Montale's poetic development will be based on a Romantic view of reality, that his interest will be directly in his subject matter, and that he will, anxiously, seek to select symbols from reality and attempt to define their significance for himself and to find Romantic truths in them. In "I limoni," there is a fatigued nostalgia for a poetic world in which the poet, by selecting his images, might escape quotidian and monotonous reality, because those images stimulate sensations, calm the restless mind, and are revelatory. However, we saw that many of the temporal and narrative phrases show that the poetic symbol is not subjective but itself controlled by mysterious external mechanisms. Montale was well on his way toward the concept of a world of accidents in which poetic images are unpredictable or casual, and come from an unwilling, stubborn outer realm. In Le occasion, external mechanism and inner difficulties meet, and do so in a nearly completely ambiguous space, in which, as Contini says, poetic images may carry meanings, but at times only potentially. 58 What may have been a largely philosophical difficulty in Ossi becomes a literary one too: that of finding poetic subject matter and of assigning value to its images. We can find the beginnings of this itinerary in such an early poem as "Ripenso il tuo sorriso" (written 1923), of the 109

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Ossi. It announces in its title that its subject is memory; the poet seems to celebrate the memory and the exceptional nature of a friend: Ripenso il tuo sorriso, ed e per me un'acqua limpida scorta per avventura tra Ie petraie d'un greto, esiguo specchio in cui guardi un'ellera, i suoi corimbi; e su tutto l'abbraccio d'un bianco cielo quieto. Codesto e il mio ricordo; non saprei dire, ο lontano, se dal tuo volto s'esprime libera un'anima ingenua, ο vero tu sei dei raminghi che il male del mondo estenua e recano il loro soffrire con se come un talismano. Ma questo posso dirti, che la tua pensata effigie sommerge i crucci estrosi in un'ondata di calma, e che il tuo aspetto s'insinua nella mia memoria grigia schietto come la cima d'una giovinetta palma.' 5 9 But if we look at this poem closely, we see that, as in " N o n recidere, forbice," Montale's interest is not directly in the purported subject of the poem, the memory of a particular smile. It becomes less important to the poem than other concerns, other images, and an uneasy state of mind. The lines "ed e per me un'acqua limpida / scorta per avventura tra Ie petraie d'un greto" seem to be a compli­ mentary metaphor in which attention falls on the quality of the friend's smile. In fact, the metaphor is so articulated, one might say overarticulated, that the reader's attention 1

I recall your smile, and for me it is limpid water made out, by chance, among the heaped stones of a riverbed, a scant mirror for some ivy to watch its corymbs, and over everything the embrace of a quiet white sky. This is my remembrance. I couldn't say, oh distant one, whether an ingenuous spirit freely shows forth in your countenance, or whether you are among the wanderers that the ills of this world wear thin and who carry their suffering about like a talisman. But I can tell you this much: your image, found in thought, submerges capricious sufferings in a wave of calm, and your look insinuates itself into my gray memory, straight as the tip of an early young palm. 110

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correctly falls elsewhere. First, the phrase "scorta per avventura" throws stress on the chance discovery of a positive element, a trickle of "limpid water" among the stones in the gravelly, dry "riverbed" or "bank." Were we to make the error of taking this metaphor as one chiefly concerned with a smile, we would be confronted with grotesque associations among a loved and smiling face and a dried-up "rockbed" and its aridity; the additional elements ("esiguo specchio," etc.) would seem overextended. In fact, the subject, the smile, gets lost in, or at best only typifies, the discovery of something positive in negative and reluctant vehicles, "heaped stones" in a dried-out "riverbed," which themselves may stand for anything—the passage of time, the poet's memory, other memories, life itself. Montale is thus largely unconcerned with the possibilities and functions of figurative language and imagination, in unities or fusions of thought and perception; rather, he is interested in the way life only very rarely offers itself to him by yielding a single, seemingly unrepeatable good that does not originate within himself. Montale does not prepare us for, or control, all his images; parts of them carry nonrational meanings which do not always live in the image itself, yet the images, though at times apparently overly articulated, are still highly energetic. There are many possible meanings: perhaps, most generally, the "greto" is life, but Montale does not develop any general idea. Quite typically of Ossi, and, as we have seen, of the later "Non recidere," isolated images cross boundaries between metaphor (or simile), symbol, summary, and objective "equivalency." The smile and the friend diminish in significance in relation to the poet's predisposition, which is filled with the idea that some people are graced—even in adversity—and others not, and that the poet is excluded from some particular and unnamed grace that guides others through life. All of life, apart from the disembodied memory, the smile that lives in some present time ("ed e per me," italics mine) and alone is capable of engendering the "quiet white sky," is 111

CHAPTER THREE negative. All is "i crucci estrosi," "capricious sufferings," and escape lies in submerging anxieties and finding an "ondata di calma," a rare "calm" for Montale. The animation does not depend upon the poet, however, and, as we have seen, not even on sensation or imagination. The lines "il tuo aspetto s'insinua nella mia memoria grigia / schietto come la cima d'una giovinetta palma" show that a memory lives only by insinuating itself into the "memory" of the poet, carving itself in the "gray"—"gloomy," "passive," and "sad"—mind in opposition to all other reality, so that, once again, difficulty is transferred to the mind and its ambiguous, rather passive, space. Thus, we have a striking forecast of the motet "Non recidere, forbice": the poet seeks to escape isolation by holding onto an exceptional image that must itself be active and subtly aggressive, to overcome his passivity. This active element is almost kinesthetic, reinforced by the consonants of "schietto" and by the visual sound conveyed by the repeated vowel " i " in the last lines. As in the later "Motets," Montale is making memory visual ("cima" . . . "giovinetta") 60 against the grayness of his own mind. Again, Montale works the poem unevenly. Some elements are, it would seem, spontaneous and explosive, as in the protest against the "petraie d'un greto," conveyed so well by the pattern of its consonants. He makes others, like the traditional classical "giovinetta palma," rich in new ways: the blending of classical and Symbolist images, the Mallarme-Valery palm, results in a "frank" ("schietto" also means "candid") and triumphant realization of the image of the palm that is strictly Montalian. If Montale does not work all images and sensations in this early poem equally, he nevertheless achieves a compensatory semantic and phonic consistency, as he does later in the "Motets." In those later poems, Montale will believe in 1946, he attempted to merge subjective and objective experiences. In fact, in neither period is there a synthesis of these realms. There is, however, real opposition between the insinuating 112

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tip of the young palm, and the "memoria grigia." The extremely spatialized elements in the central images of "Ripenso" show a nostalgia for descriptive poetry61 and a residual desire to find harmony between the self and the external world. This nostalgia will persist in Le occasioni, for instance in "Tempi di Bellosguardo" (Times at Bellosguardo). Though Montale longs for harmony, his best poetry is, as critics and he himself have often noted, the product of "disharmony." 62 Typically, the most harmonious image, "su tutto Tabbraccio d'un bianco cielo quieto," is the least forceful one; more forceful is the suggestion of chance discovery in the "petraie d'un gTeto." In Le occasioni, Montale will embody and verbalize Chance and its "saving phantasms" and dramatize their effects. On these effects, transmitted by objective reality and personally "received," Montale will attempt to build the mythic meanings of CIizia in La bufera e altro and to develop an ethos of perseverance.

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Negli Ossi di seppia tutto era attratto e assorbito dal mare fermentante, piu tardi vidi che il mare era dovunque, per me, e che persino Ie classiche architetture dei colli toscani erano anch'esse movimento e fuga. E anche nel nuovo libro [Le occasioni] ho continuato la mia lotta per scavare un'altra dimensione nel nostro pesante linguaggio polisillabico, che mi pareva rifiutarsi a un'esperienza come la m i a . . . . Forse mi ha assistito la mia forzata e sgradita attivita di tradutt o r e . . . . Il nuovo libro non era meno romanzesco del primo, tuttavia il senso di una poesia che si delinea . .. dava agli Ossi di seppia un sapore che qualcuno ha rimpianto. "Intenzioni"" CRITICS are g e n e r a l l y a g r e e d that those p o e m s of t h e final a n d major section of Le occasioni that w e r e w r i t t e n in t h e 4

In the Ossi di seppia, everything was drawn to and absorbed by the ferment of the sea; later I came to see that for me the sea was everywhere, and that even the classical architectural forms of the Tuscan hills were movement and flight. Even in the new book [Le occasioni] I carried on my struggle to extract by near-excavation a new dimension from our weighty, polysyllabic language, which seemed to me quite resistant to my sort of experience.... Perhaps the disagreeable work I did by necessity as a translator helped m e . . . . The new book was no less adventurous than the first; all the same, the sense of poetry delineating itself . .. had given Ossi a flavor that some would come to miss. 1 14

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late 1930s make use, for the first time in Montale's output, of historical events—in some way—and are important for a proper understanding of La bufera. For some, this change in poetic content is important; for others, any such change is ultimately unimportant, for the resultant poetry remains, overall, exquisitely formal.1 Of the two groups of critics, the second has made the greater contribution to understanding Montale, showing, for instance, the necessity of deep familiarity with all his work, for the images, words, and themes of the later poetry have a prior context in the earlier poems. They have shown, too, that Montale's complex art does not lend itself to any analysis that strays from the text, or that relies on extracontextual background to find keys to the text. They have also raised a number of questions important for understanding the functions of historical and political references in Montale's poetry from the 1930s on; a prerequisite, however, is to learn more about Montale's use of language, particularly with relation to objects, events, and even images in experience. This study of the important, final poems of Le occasion!— composed close in time to others that did not have their full impact until the publication of La bufera in 1956,2 and similar to the later poems in many ways—will raise a number of interrelated issues. Is it true that Montale disbelieves in reality? If so, why does he, for instance, draw poetic materials from the worldly materials of chronicle? Is it only that, as he reiterated over the years, he had little imagination to "invent" materials of his own? 3 Why, after Ossi, is there so much denotation, and so much apparently referential language? 4 Do Montale's descriptions and his other semantically organized modes and phrases 5 function chiefly as "desperate assertions," as one critic has claimed?6 If there exist, upon analysis, only "sprazzi locali di semanticita," 7 how do these assertions or "local semantic gleams" function and hold together? Such issues echo, in a modern critical vocabulary, discussions of an earlier generation of critics. They asked, for 115

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instance, whether such poems as "Elegia di Pico Farnese," termed "drawn out and descriptive," are responses to a tenuous hold on reality. 8 Some, who felt that Montale's difficulty was a lack of emotion on which true poetry must be constructed, suggested that the poems—particularly those in Le occasioni—were not truly poetic, and, further, that they were essentially inexpressive and unpoetic because largely descriptive and narrative in nature. Others, meanwhile, had argued that Montale's new poetic language overcame conventional distinctions between "internal" and "external" experience and traditional Italian literary distinctions between "poetry" and "prose." How did he achieve this new poetic language, whose spirit is that of "fantasmi salvatori," or "saving phantasms"? 9 The present chapter concentrates on two major poems of the concluding section of Le occasioni: the "Elegia di Pico Farnese" (1939) and "Notizie dall'Amiata" (1938; News from Amiata), poems of a larger group that seems to have political reference and is also, according to Contini, "at the very limit of descriptive cohesion," whose language may, at times, reflect contemporaneous events of history, but only in a very special way, and, perhaps, only because, in Italy in the 1930s, those events were too "threatening" to ignore. 10 In these poems Montale creates dramatic poetry in which this adjective is no longer a weak modifier of the genus poetry but an indication of a new poetic mode. Montale's written explanations of "Pico Farnese" to Bobi Bazlen in 1939 and, thirty years later, to Luciano Rebay, are self-consistent and show that this poem, at least, provides a link between Le occasion's poems of "fantasmi salvatori" and the Ossi di seppia," where Montale had first learned to overcome the separation between "preparatory" elements and "poetic" nuclei, between, on the one hand, descriptive and assertive elements and, on the other, lyric ones, by merging them imperceptibly into one another: "The revelation of these saving phantasms is the substance of the 116

D R A M A T I C M O D E I N LE O C C A S I O N I book entitled, significantly enough, Le occasioni... 'occa­ sions' of lightning contact with the bearer of arcane Truth, who, in the end, is the source of extended epiphanies." 1 2 In "Pico," the preparation for the "fantasma," the appar­ ition of the loved and awaited figure Clizia, the "portatrice dell'arcana Verita," is largely verbal: it is entrusted to the verb "scaccia," literally to "chase away" or "drive out." While consistent with descriptive and narrative elements in the poem, "scaccia" also symbolically "banishes" other images, and thereby clears a path for the elusive apparition of the phantasmal Clizia or Iride, 13 conveyed in the images and qualities that Montale associates with her, flashing, flight, force, reflection, and comforting presence: Perche attardarsi qui a questo amore di donne barbute, a un vano farnetico che il ferraio picano quando batte l'incudine curvo sul calor bianco da se scaccia? Ben altro e l'Amore e fra gli alberi balena col tuo cruccio e la tua frangia d'ali, messaggera accigliata! Se urgi fino al midollo i diaspori e nell'acque specchi il piumaggio della tua fronte senza errore ο distruggi Ie nere cantafavole e vegli al trapasso dei pochi tra orde d'uomini-capre, il tuo splendore e aperto. b When Clizia does appear—whether chiefly in language or as vision—the poetic language is indeed elusive: b

Why wait here amidst this love of bearded women, amidst a vain paroxysm which the Pican blacksmith, striking the anvil and bent over the white heat, drives away from himself? Love is something quite other, and among the trees it flashes with your vexation and your winglike fringe, oh glowering messenger! If you press the persimmons to their essence and in the water mirror the plumage of your faultless forehead, or destroy the dark improbable tales and watch over the passage of the few among the hordes of men-goats,... your splendor is clear. 117

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Ma piu discreto allora che dall'androne gelido, il teatro dell'infanzia da anni abbandonato, dalla soffitta tetra di vetri e di astrolabi, dopo una lunga attesa ai balconi dell'edera, un segno ci conduce alia radura brulla dove per noi qualcuno tenta una festa di spari. E qui, se appare inudibile il tuo soccorso, neH'aria prilla il piattello, si rompe ai nostri colpi! c For instance, the word "prilla"—"to whirl" and "to shine"—is linked to the connotations of flashing in the verb "balena," "to flash" and "to strike," like lightning. The reader must relate the denotation of "prilla" to the mundane "piattello," the "target," "disk," or "clay pigeon," while apprehending that its connotations of brilliance, in semantic isolation, suggest the precious Clizia. We are prepared for this way of signifying her presence by the notice that a "discrete" (not "discreet"!) sign had been given— ("ma piu discreto")—to lead the poet to the "radura brulla" where the shooting will begin." The reader arrives at this major verbal symbol "prilla" by stripping away the shots from the shooting, the target from the shots, the flash and whirl from the target, and, finally, by isolating its purity: the brilliance is no mere flashing and breaking of a clay target ("si rompe / ai nostri colpi!"), even if the poem's words also unfold in a narrative sense. Sound, but not light, could be perceived by the observers. It is as though the anticipation of Clizia led the poet, by an inversion of the order of perception, from the inside out, from a mental senc But then more discrete than from the icy passageway, the childhood theater for years abandoned, with its vault made gloomy by glass and astrolabe, after a long wait at the ivied balconies, a sign leads us forth to the bare patch where, for us, someone tries a round of shooting. And here, if your help appears inaudible, the disk in the air whirls and flashes and bursts at our shots!

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sation of what must occur to a verbal sign in which antici­ pation, mental, and nearly physical impression cannot be distinguished. We have seen how words help to put Clizia "on the page" 1 5 more than offer the ordered syntax of nar­ rative; they also correlate in some way to the process by which the poet moves through gross contingencies to her sign. "Prilla" is, as Montale writes to Bazlen (May 5, 1939), "assunto anche per brilla." Thus, it is meant to pick up the primary connotations of "brillare," "to shine" and "to dis­ tinguish itself," and to carry them, with all their, and its own, associations of whirling, sparkling, being on fire, even of librating and exploding. These are akin to a whole range of kinetic signs of Clizia that Montale develops in the "Motets" (see "brillare" in "Infuria sale ο grandine?"; Is it salt or hail that bursts out?, and in " . . . ma cosi sia. Un s u o n o " ; . . . So be it. A sound) and continues into La bufera (see "prillare" in "Verso Finistere"; Toward Finistere, and "trillare," to trill, to ring, in "NeI parco"). Montale intends, he explains to Rebay, to convey the "particolare violenza che accompagna spesso Ie sue apparizioni" (particular vio­ lence that often accompanies her apparitions), 16 and the poetic suggestions show that this is chiefly a mental 17 experience. "Prilla" shows, even at an initial probing, that for Mon­ tale emotion cannot find its way into poetry through rep­ resentational images, but only by incorporation into extremely verbal ones that peculiarly embody it. To a degree, these images are arbitrary, and in the absence of a fully developed mythic system, depend on narrative and descriptive syntax for their decipherability. The poetry moves from the abstract and passes through the literal, to which it entrusts meanings and by which it is, in turn, shaped. The poetry also moves from inchoate personal emotions to something "other" and less inchoate, some­ thing that neither mimes nor seeks to represent emotion, 119

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and, by being more concrete (if not more real) than emotions, can be, as Montale calls it, an objective equivalent to them.18 As we have seen, some critics have felt over the years that the seemingly narrative and descriptive nature of Montale's poetry is essentially prosaic; to some it may at times even reflect a fatigued lack of inspiration." But for the reader there is no monotony in this poetry of active seeking. And moreover, while it is true that in Ossi Montale sometimes seeks any sign to break his sense of futility, provided that it has some appropriate particularity, in Le occasion he seeks a sign that, still appropriately particular, is related to a particular truth he has in mind. He is no Baudelaire, the cause and effect of his poetic visions. Yet Montale's is also paradoxical poetry, for he both seeks the sign and extracts it, by the will to see, from narrative and descriptive elements; in effect, he both seeks and creates the sign, and then recognizes his created and discovered being. To his credit, he does not represent monotony by monotonous landscapes, nor does the sense of futility lead him to associative ramblings that imitate incoherence. By contrast to the poetry of disengagement announced in Ossi, often understood by critics to provide a poetic program for the future, Montale's objective poems are often quite animate in form. Escape from the self does not end where it begins: he is engaged by his dramatic structures. These structures are important for him because he does not regard the experience of having an emotion as creative activity, or creative activity (like writing) as autonomous, capable alone of generating emotion; for Montale, like Eliot, comes more and more to write as though he can no longer conceive of isolation as something that is not a separation from something in particular, nor conceive of time without bringing to it some belief that there is a sense in human history.20 This "something in particular" and this "sense" combine structurally to create the poem and blend all levels of language. 120

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The word "prilla," for instance, shows that a symbolic event, embedded in the language of concrete events and facts, is momentary, and that such events and facts may be transformed by providing the vehicle of the higher events. If this is epiphany, then, it is such in an unusual form opening out in two lively directions: on the one hand, Montale's emotions are intensified or mitigated in the course of writing, and, on the other, dramatic interest and texture are added to the poem by the attempt to extend the modification to concrete experience. 21 The modification takes an unusual form in Montale. The event, the apparition of Clizia, does not make the target— or even the day at Pico—seem more real. It does, however, give the day, its images and its events, a sense of purpose. Thus Clizia makes images in the day "real symbols" in a Christian-Platonic sense. Montale's answer to the unreality of the day at Pico is to render at least one of its phenomena, the target, purposeful and therefore at least itself "real." Montale is working at the limits of what can be said, to suggest how ineffable his experience of Clizia is. To some readers, a phrase like "prilla il piattello" may seem forced, for how can shattering clay "shine" and "dazzle"? To others, it may seem ideogrammatic, fundamental, structurally pivotal to the poem, and hence, in some way, significant, although its reference is most elusive. These readers are not inventing difficulty, for Montale is akin to those medieval poets who sought to understand the literal and allegorical implications of their language and to make these levels work together. Like theirs, Montale's difficulties are conceptual before they are verbal; but he does not have their undoubted advantage, a fully developed and universally understood mythic system. Thus, as Contini has noted, images and events usually destined for the world of narrative and chronicle "escape" to that of "visionary" poetry.22 Montale chooses a mode difficult for visionary poetry: one that blends narrative and descriptive elements. However, although there is imbal121

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ance in the relationship between the ineffable "sign" of Clizia and its effable extended vehicle, "Pico Farnese" generates another kind of animation in the poet, who seems to discover a symbol in his own language. When he names his symbols, like the whirling and flashing target, it is as though in recognition, in the etymological sense of the noun, of the significance they carry. In part, this effect is undoubtedly created, or supported, by the exclamatory tone of the phrase "prilla il piattello." But in the anticipatory rhythm of the whole composition, it is as though the desire to reach this recognition keeps Montale's emotions one step ahead of the mere words he must use (and, as we have seen, just one step ahead of the logic of phenomena and the laws of physical perception). Surely there is no greater proof of the coherence and vision of the poem than the rhythm that holds it together. Rhythm understood as this kind of cohesion cannot, as Matthiessen observes, be faked. Eliot wrote, "A style, a rhythm, to be significant, must also embody a significant mind, must be produced by the necessity of a new form for a new content," and these words are echoed and overridden by Montale, who finds that poetic form preshapes areas of content and brings it to significance.23 The image in the final line associated with the unidentified Anacleto might seem at first to be a precisely observed detail of description and narrative: Dietro di noi, calmo, ignaro del mutamento, da lemure ormai rifatto celeste, il fanciulletto Anacleto ricarica i fucili.d But position itself makes the poetic image here ambiguous. The reloading of the guns undercuts the decisiveness of narrative action and implies that the whole sequence will, perhaps, begin again, that there may be more shooting and ""Behind us, calm, ignorant of the transformation, once again celestial and no longer a ghost, the boy Anacleto reloads the guns. 122

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another flash; thus, a detail of narrative is made to convey a suggestion of hope, a device used in the "Motets," notably in "Lontano, ero con te." Montale thus finds new ways to express a subtle and complex lyric emotion. Occurrence and recurrence, for instance—a temporal distinction—are made to convey not narrative suspense but the atemporal ambivalence of emotion: it is a suspenseful allusion to hope and doubt that breaks narrative time. The use of characters furthers, in unusual ways, the dramatic nature of the poem. Montale does not pretend that experience is equal to the totality of his perceptions. Instead, he invents, as devices, figures that see more or less (Anacleto is one of the latter) than he does. At the end, the poet may feel resigned, but the poem quite deliberately avoids blurring, trailing off, and vague summaries of indefinite emotions. These lines are emphatic without being conclusive, for, as Montale writes in "Il sogno del prigioniero" (La bufera), "il mio sogno di te non e finito" (my dream of you has not ended). The image of the recharging of the guns, like the imageverb "prilla," and the phrase "prilla il piattello," does not yield its meaning either as descriptive detail or as metaphor—if probed with such conventional critical dichotomies as "inner" and "outer" realities, images and what they stand for or evoke, or a structure of images and a corresponding one of emotions. Montale's poem does not work by metaphor (for images are not even a mode of apprehension), nor does it use common devices of modern dramatic poems—the doublings of voice and the techniques of inner commentary by which one series of images is made to comment on another that Eliot developed, for instance. For Montale is not the conscious medium of his materials, and there is no intellectual deliberation in the ironic distinctions and contradictions among the poetic voice that has seen, the one that creates the poem, and the one that must "see again": there is no prescient Tiresias24 and no constructed persona, no interest in analyzing emotions and their components—here, fear and hope—and repulsion at 123

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the superstitious "bearded women," the pilgrims and their brute "love," and the longing for an ideal love: "Grotte dove scalfito luccica il Pesce, chi sa quale altro sogno si perde, perche non tutta la vita e in questo sepolcro verde" Oh la pigra illusione.' For all this, Montale is the medium, and there is a distinction between the voice that creates the poem and the poet who must "see" his vision. But what is the nature of this vision? Some critics have felt that Montale is so visionary that his loyalty is to Symbolist poetry. However, he has said, "Se per poesia pura si intende quella di estrazione mallarmeana io non appartengo a quella corrente.... me ne dichiaro estraneo" (If by "pure poetry" you mean poetry of Mallarmean extraction, I do not belong in that current. . . . I insist that I am quite distinct from it).25 Montale is not, like a true Symbolist poet, one with his language,26 and does not conceive language to be a metaphysical problem. The distinction between the poet and his vision is conveyed by purely Montalian means: by a forward rhythm in which narrative details are largely given only to be cleared away, a process that leads to the "sign" of Clizia, and by an imposed, radically different momentum that leads backward from the sign, by an a priori necessity to isolate an appropriate vehicle for the manifestation of the sign. We might, perhaps, say that Clizia is the equivalent of a poetic emotion or idea,27 just as, at its simplest level, the symbolic situation finds its dramatic equivalent in the language of description and narrative. Her signs, though not always clear to the reader and perhaps even to the poet, are clearer '"Grottoes where the Fish, scratched out, glimmers—Who knows what other dream is lost, for not all of life is in this green sepulcher." Oh the lazy illusion. 124

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and more inevitable than they could be in experience. In "real life," the "diaspori" caught Montale's eye because they were red;28 in the poem, however, the brilliant "color of fire" he remembered goes beyond their merely symbolic value: they are the focus of all Clizia's meanings. The distinction that arises is between the poet who fabricates his poem and the one who becomes subject to it, to his language, and to a limiting situation. Montale is a fabricator who controls, because he specifies and names the poem's "flash"; yet his limitations are significant. They are conveyed explicitly, for instance, by the concluding lines, uneasy in form and ambiguous in the hope and truth they express, which is wrenched from the narrative situation. If Montale is not completely one with his language, he maintains no ironic distance from it. The effect is as though he were transcribing an experience from a dream or from unreal life—not solely from language and states of mind; indeed, in "Intenzioni," in a note to the poem "Iride," he speaks of dreaming his poem, translating it from a nonexistent language, and of being its medium. The reader of "Pico," who, in Montale's dramatic mode, is led to desire what the poetic voice desires, cannot doubt Clizia's effective reality, since signs of her hold the poem together, in rhythm and structure. Far more happens in the narrative than could happen in any sequence of time. There is, in fact, no sequence, properly speaking, but rather a rhythm that mimes no objective time and by making minor events major, for instance, turns time into an internal psychological one that must find its own perfecting release. IN "Elegia di Pico Farnese" Montale seeks to override distinctions not only between objective elements and arbitrary ones that have purely subjective value for him but also between static description and narrative and dynamic lyric.29 This leads to a paradoxical time scheme in the poem, a distinction between the poet who has "seen" his vision and the one who must see and know it again. The sense of necessity, the need to see his vision, is what allows Montale 125

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to bring Clizia into the narrative world of time. There is no systematically used private symbolism, as will sometimes be the case in La bufera.30 The two "times" in the poem supersede, in importance, the tenses of its verbs. The poem opens with a passato prossimo (a present perfect tense) that logically relates last night's events to those of this morning: Le pellegrine in sosta che hanno durato tutta la notte la loro litania s'aggiustano gli zendadi sulla testa, spengono i fuochi, risalgono sui carri. Nell'alba triste s'affacciano dai loro sportelli tagliati negli usci i molli soriani e un cane lionato s'allunga nell'umido orto tra i frutti caduti all'ombra del melangolo. Ieri tutto pareva un macero ma stamane pietre di spugna ritornano alia vita e il cupo sonno si desta nella cucina, dal grande camino giungono lieti rumori. Torna la salmodia appena in volute piu lievi, vento e distanza ne rompono Ie voci, Ie ricompongono. "Isole del santuario, viaggi di vascelli sospesi, alza il sudario, numera i giorni e i mesi che restano per finire."' 'The pilgrim women stopping off who have prolonged their litany the whole night, settle sendals on their heads, put out the fires, climb up again onto the carts. In the gloomy dawn the soft tabby cats appear from their wickets cut out in doors and a tawny dog stretches out in the damp garden among the fallen fruits in the shade of the orange tree. Everything yesterday seemed macerated, but this morning spongelike stones come back to life and dark sleep awakes in the kitchen, cheerful sounds reach from the large hearth. The psalmody barely returns in lighter spirals. The wind and the distance break the voices, recompose them. "Islands of the sanctuary, voyages of suspended vessels, lift the sudarium, count the days and months left until the end." 126

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The imperfect tense "pareva" suggests narrative and descriptive time, the events of last night ("pareva un macero"). But the present tense or, more properly, the present tension of the poem, becomes dominant: this is a time in which the poet waits. Montale has not yet given shape to his waiting by asking, "Perche attardarsi qui / a questo amore di donne barbute?" The demonstrative "questo" points inward as well as outward. But, in this numbingly familiar yet strange scene,31 everything must lead to such "an overwhelming question." During this poetic time, the poetic self "hears" the chants of the departing religious celebrants in antiphonal lines: Strade e scale che salgono a piramide, fitte d'intagli, ragnateli di sasso dove s'aprono oscurita animate dagli occhi confidenti dei maiali, archivolti tinti di verderame, si svolge a stento il canto dalle ombrelle dei pini, e indugia affievolito nell'indaco che stilla su anfratti, tagli, spicchi di muraglie. "Grotte dove scalfito .. ."g But although there are passages of time, there is no sequence so much as a tension between what the poetic self in some way hears and its growing need to ascribe a meaning or cause to its experience, to find a true sequence: the present tense that dominates the poem and seems to point to objects is a compromise tense to blend experienced events already part of the past, others moving into the past, present "effects" that reinforce what is known and an invocational future. 8 Streets and steps which rise in pyramid form, densely cut with incisions, spiderwebs of rock where open up obscurities animated by the trusting eyes of the pigs, archivolts colored with verdigris; the song barely unfolds from the umbrellas of the pines and takes its time, weakened in the indigo that drips on gorges, edges, reliefs of walls. "Grottoes where . . ."

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The sanctimonious pilgrims who chant the antiphonal lines are "beguines" of a "primitive South in which it is difficult to distinguish Christianity from pagan fetishism." The symbolism developed in the lines beginning "'Grotte dove scalfito'" is integral to "Pico." The phrase "sepolcro verde" (the green sepulcher), which in a letter of June 9, 1939, Montale refers to as "la foresta verde" (the green forest), exists in contrast to the true and discrete symbols of Clizia. Both terms evoke Christian symbolism forcefully, but the phrase in the poem suggests Montale's skepticism about the paradoxical belief that life can rise from death or about the belief that matter and spirit can be reconciled.32 Montale seems to contrast to it more ideal and absolute dreams. The pilgrims' "dreams" are treated ironically, for theirs is not, it seems, his vision of the relationship between life and death. There exist higher dreams, which Montale characteristically terms merely "altro," "different" and "other": Ben altro e l'Amore e fra gli alberi balena col tuo cruccio e la tua frangia d'ali, messaggera accigliata! Montale suggests by the understatement of the adjective "other" that the pilgrims' vision is overly schematic and superstitious. The use of a common adjective like "altro" in a highly unusual way is characteristic of Montale, especially of La bufera e altro, where allusion to something "other" is both an ironic reference to what exists in everyday life and, more important, for the poet a dynamic provocation—neither "invocation" nor "evocation"—to dream of something higher and better. Perhaps Montale's irony is chiefly directed against the pilgrims' failure to embody the true possibilities of transcendent experience. The sanctimonious cultists, Montale observed in a letter to Bazlen (June 9, 1939), seem "to continue Christ" and his significance falsely. Thus, it may be that, as he says, Christ does not "need" this kind of frenzied religiosity. True symbols of transcendent experience, more "dis128

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crete" ones, come where they are least expected; not in immediate verbal juxtaposition to the "green sepulcher," with its ironic oxymoron, but out of the "radura brulla" whose dry, bare desolation is a preparation for the later opposing combustion of Clizia's apparition. The true symbols come from true desire, despite the "bareness everywhere": they come from the will to see despite what appearances give. sound as though they were written to someone at a distance, whose attention must be caught. It is caught, by the uncommon word "zendadi." The reader's curiosity is thus piqued, but not satisfied, and he hopes for a clarification. He senses that the chronicler of the "pilgrims" has followed their movements, is no longer so much directly concerned with them—not because they are narratively leaving, for they are an important presence as their chants linger—as with finding something to justify discounting their activities. Thus, in these lines, there is the material, and even some of the style, of prose, but not its intention which, mysterious, charges the lines with expectation: THE INTRODUCTORY LINES

La poesia e un mostro: e musica fatta con parole e persino con idee: nasce come nasce da un'intenzione iniziale che non si puo prevedere prima che nasca il primo verso. Molto all'ingrosso: la poesia e meno prevedibile della prosa; il prosatore puo forse immaginare in partenza "che cosa sara" la sua prosa, il poeta Io puo molto meno. h M It is at first only clear that the poet finds himself in an overridingly hostile place, more to be located in his attitude h Poetry is a monster: it is music made with words and even with ideas: it springs unpredictably out of an initial intention which is unforeseen before the first line of verse comes into being. Roughly speaking: poetry is less predictable than prose; the prose writer can perhaps imagine from the start what his writing "will be"; the poet can do so only to a much lesser extent.

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and language than in any defined space. If the phenomena of this place are to be taken as real, then he must dream; if he is truly awake, then this world is a dream. His situation is an inverted form of conventional dream allegory, where the poet falls asleep in a pleasant setting and dreams of people performing symbolic actions, or of personifications performing mysterious actions which only later, upon his awakening, may acquire meaning. But the poet is distant from the hostile sounds of the place in which he dreams, and he seems to dream with his eyes open; he cannot accept the actions of those around him as either real or significant. He is driven to his dream by an overriding necessity, and it is the possibility, rather than the substance, of the dream that is to be the end of the poem. The reader whose curiosity has been piqued by details like "zendadi," and who seeks further information or resolution, must look for them in language itself. As we have noted, Montale is at times accused of merely listing, rather than selecting, descriptive details. In fact, he is forcing or imposing selectivity on an enumerative scheme in order to go beyond enumeration, and he gives the reader enough selectivity so that he desires a symbolic and verbal resolution. Description, then, does not point to anything; words used as though descriptive in intent have an abstract function. If a noun is common ("cane," for instance), an unexpected adjective ("lionato," "tawny," "lion-colored") offsets the commonness. It is as though such language is necessary if the poet is to "see," that is, "use," the things around him. He is, thus, using concrete objects in a particular way, not offering images. Conversely, these are not entirely mental and subjective images. Montale need not disrupt the usual appearance of things: he need not show that things are mysterious, need not show their inner life or want to live in them. The accumulation of such images, which disorient and disturb, serves to generalize the situation in a typically Montalian procedure. Since the images are limited by the possibilities of a dra130

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matic situation in which the poet is imprisoned, he cannot, it would seem, help the reader to decipher them. By suggesting that they are given by the landscape, not selected arbitrarily from imagination or from circumscribing reality, Montale eliminates an important process that would give the reader a notion of their weight and value. But the reader is drawn in by the poetic tension: the movement is not from images to their meaning, but from the desire that images of experience—or at least some one image—have meaning, to the articulation and embodiment of that desire. It might seem that Montale is trying to give us the atmosphere of a place. Details in the early lines come out from ambiguous backdrops, stepping onto the scene as though from nowhere, or appearing against it, while figures and "looks" creep out of unspecified but defined recesses in the landscape. But, really, there are too many images to engage the senses of the reader. Instead, we have an atmosphere, ultimately unrelated to any specific object or place, in which, we feel, something must, poetically, happen. We do not have a set of concrete circumstances but, almost, of effects of a situation that is intolerable. Therefore, no effect can follow, narratively; only, as we have said, the discovery of their meaning, cause, or, at the least, of their purpose. The poet must find a deeper or higher set of causes, or abandon these effects altogether. The poetry thus takes life from its setting, and the setting becomes a challenge: Montale believes that nothing is inherently unpoetic—this is his gift to modern Italian poetry—and in part the challenge he faces is to use "nonpoetic" materials. He may, for instance, have intended, in some way, to "use" the theater at Pico Farnese which, he explains in his letter to Bazlen of May 10,1939, had been unused for years; at the same time, its gelid atmosphere must, in some way, be overcome by the fire associated with the "diaspori." But, as we have seen, Montale also works arduously from the abstract to the concrete. He must name his objects and at the same time contend with them. At the very least, he must give a name to 131

CHAPTER FOUR his anxiety and desire; at best, he makes his desire live in his images. The poem's time of waiting truly evidences itself in the atemporal infinitive "attardarsi"; 34 the question "Perche attardarsi qui" not only literally asks "Why wait [loiter] here?" but also effectively "Why go over an experience in one's mind again?" Thus, anxious questions, no longer outward and Romantic, arise dramatically in the poem; here (and, as we shall see, also in "Notizie dall'Amiata"), the poet is not the Romantic speaker. He is both outside the situation and to some extent imprisoned within it, unable to ask his question of anyone in particular. But Montale is never trapped—like Mallarme—only in his language; he is trapped in a symbolic situation; this was the case in the poetical epitome of Ossi, "Godi se il vento ch'entra nel pomario" (Rejoice if the wind entering the orchard). The answer to Montale's dramatic question "Why wait?" is that only if he does can he be ready to recognize Clizia's signs, as in fact he will: "il tuo splendore e aperto." But the victory is not total, as it might be in a purely verbalist poetry; it is not totally self-predicting. If he can recognize and name them, thereby both romantically intensifying the situation to the point at which he can apprehend a truth and, in a modernist mode, acting out his prediction, 35 he can do so because he has already known them and seen them in his desire. Montale's poem does not develop its suggestions purely verbally. For instance, in "Oh la pigra illusione," the reference of "lazy" primarily picks up the love of the "donne barbute," and only secondarily "attardarsi," which could refer, through "tardo" (slow, slow-witted), to the speaker's own slowness in grasping the significance of the situation; but, more important, "pigra" functions by reminding him of life that is both inert and illusory: in effect it activates his own, real anxiety and reminds him to move on in the poem, to anticipate Clizia. Some images are not developed at all within a purely connotative framework. The weather is indifferently "mite," or "mild": this is not an Eliotan constructed land132

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scape. Mallarme might have "justified" Clizia, proven his vision, by bringing her into a full linguistic unity with other symbols. But Montale's metaphysics, verbalistic as it may be, is distinct from such verbalism. Montale does not try to bring Clizia's signs into unity with all images in the poem; chiefly, he brings them into the overall dramatic structure by opposing to the pilgrims' beliefs his own way of seeking—by waiting and by willing a sign to be, and to come and redeem him. We have seen that if Montale recognizes his signs, it is because, in some way, he has already known them. Indeed, when Clizia comes, she turns the "wasteland," the "radura brulla," into what it is in dreamt time. In this dreamt time, the "lemure" is returned to its original, atemporal nature, "rifatto celeste." 36 Montale is transcribing events he relates to Clizia as though he were a scribe who must write down an ineffable history while being confined by merely earthly language. Within the limits Montale set for poetry after Ossi, he cannot, of course, expatiate on her, on what he has known empirically of her. But he is not merely alluding, either, to empiric antefacts or occluding a personal history. He gives, as it were, the pattern or the apprehension of an emotional truth, using the language of a world that can at best reflect Clizia. She is somewhere in space and time, in some exceptional way: this world, largely infernal, can, at times, flicker and whirl with deeper and intense light that, more than a mere symbolic equivalent of her, corresponds 37 to the very thought of her. The image of the "diaspori" and its relation to Clizia illustrate Montale's way of working. In the 1939 letters to Bazlen and again in the 1969 article by Rebay, Montale gave the following explanations of this particularly complex image: Elegia. Se urgi (o se gonfi) ecc. i frutti del kaki ecc. ο distruggi Ie cantafavole (nel senso di balle) ecc. il tuo splendore e palese. L'androne gelido che e stato teatro (nei due sensi possibili, in tedesco ci vorra u n senso 133

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unico) e c c . . . . Se appare: "e qui benche il tuo soccorso appaia inudibile c'e tuttavia il piattello che prilla e che e comunque (se non proprio il tuo soccorso) una degna chiave del giorno, la sola degna di te." 1 Sono i frutti volgarmente chiamati kaki, e l'intero passo vuol dire: Se tu gonfi i kaki fino al midollo, cioe se Ii spingi—"urgi"—fino a maturazione in virtu di questa forza panica deH'Amore che tu rappresenti e sai suscitare, ο se ti rifletti nell'acqua, ο se distruggi con la purezza della tua presenza Ie cantafavole delle donne barbute e proteggi il tuo poeta—uno dei "pochi" sul cui "trapasso," cioe sulla cui vita, Clizia vegli—il tuo splendore e palese.' These comments suggest a number of psychological and linguistic possibilities. One is that the red "diaspori"—or, more properly, the "diaspori" once red—are "like" some force in Clizia, or Clizia herself. A second possibility is that the fruit is brought to maturation by Clizia, a force: she is potentially "like," not the "diaspori," but their maturation. Third, the redness of the "diaspori" may be a symbol of Cli­ zia. Last, stress on the transformation of the fruit is also cast into the kind of temporal and momentary epiphany typical of the Ossi. Montale finds an image that incorporates all of 1 On "Elegy": if you urge (or if you swell) etc. the persimmons etc., or if you destroy the improbable tales (in the sense of "pure nonsense," "lies") etc., your splendor is "manifest." The icy passageway "which was a theater" (in the two possible meanings, but German will call for a sin­ gle one) etc. . . . "If [your help] appears": and here, "although" your help may appear inaudible, there is, nonetheless, the disk that whirls, and is (if not exactly " y o u r " help), a worthy key to the day all the same, the only one worthy of you. 'They are the fruits popularly known as kaki [persimmons], and the whole passage means: if you swell the kaki to their very marrow [essence, core, skin], that is, if you press—"urge"—them to ripeness, by virtue of this panic force of Love which you represent and know how to awaken, or if you mirror yourself in the water, or if you destroy with the purity of your presence the improbable tales of the bearded women and protect your poet—one of the "few" over whose "passage," that is, over whose life Clizia watches—your splendor is manifest.

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these possibilities, but is not limited to any one of them: Se urgi fino al midollo i diaspori e nell'acque specchi il piumaggio della tua fronte senza errore ο distruggi Ie nere cantafavole e vegli al trapasso dei pochi tra orde d'uomini-capre, il tuo splendore e aperto. The "diaspori" carry associations: fire, the color red, the force of love, vitality, and the love Clizia inspires, and relate them to further associations of the poem, to her purity, splendor, comfort, and protection. 38 All of these associations, which could not be carried by a rationalistic simile, depend on the conjunction "se," which suggests the poetic "just as" and the hypothetical potentiality of "if." In English, we may construe the phrase as: "If you press the 'diaspori' to their very marrow (in the figurative sense) etc., your splendor is clear (in the sense of "manifest"), you are distinctly present, you appear." We may also construe an element of overall potentiality: "If you were to bring the 'diaspori' to maturation, your splendor would be manifest (you would be present)," and even the converse. We may also construe an invocational future, akin to the exclama­ tory tone of the passage: "If it will mature, then your splen­ dor will become manifest," and even the converse. We have the language of neither pure fact nor pure condition, but that of desire, or, even better, a language given to desire, to blend it with fact. Thus, too, if "the 'diaspori' are mature, your splendor is manifest"—effectively, "You are here." Montale typically works in the sphere of effects, and even of things already acted on: embodied effects, visible proof of unknown and at times hostile causes. Thus the atmo­ sphere can enlarge to gather in any cause. Thus, too, it often seems that his poetry predicts its very content. The lines seek not only to state an ineffable presence, but also to blend the notion of the potential inherent in phenomena with the agency of Clizia. The "diaspori" can become more than themselves by a force that brings out something essen135

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tial and inherent in them, here the color red, as Rebay has shown, the color of love and its associations. This use of the conjunction "se" is highly developed in the "Motets," for instance in "Il ramarro, se scocca" (The green lizard, if it darts out) and in "Al primo chiaro, quando" (At the first dawn, when), where it shapes them as poems of imperative invocation and hypothesis. But, for the full significance of "se," one must recognize the nature of the situation that will exist if its potential does not come into being. "Al primo chiaro, quando" has an impediment to Clizia's arrival, and a nightmare: al primo buio, quando il bulino che tarla la scrivania rafforza il suo fervore e il passo del guardiano s'accosta: al chiaro e al buio, soste ancora umane se tu a intrecciarle col tuo refe insisti.k For Montale, the syntactic link "if" is forced to render what is for him almost a logical necessity. This necessity is not only of Clizia's "insisting" and "persisting," but also of her arriving, her "setting her foot down," as "insisti" suggests in a rare meaning. In "Pico," it is the agency of Clizia that is necessary. If there is untruth, then there must be a truth; if truth exists, then untruth must be driven away. In "Pico," Clizia must appear and simultaneously disperse and drive away the falsity of the "cantafavole." The inverse situation, which begins in full nightmare, pervades poems of La bufera, notably "GIi orecchini," where untruth is so pervasive that Clizia must have been driven away into exile, and must be invoked by any means, no matter how fragile, to reverse the situation. k

at the first twilight when the graving tool that worm-eats the desk steps up its fervor and the footstep [passage, stride] of the watchman draws near: at light and at dusk, pauses that are still human if you, weaving them with your thread, insist. 136

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As Montale transcribes his vision, this world becomes even more unreal and its events even more things only to be endured. The objects, gestures, and events are poetically functional, but have no concrete reference. They become abstract images, are weightless and pointless in contrast, for instance, to the inner time they mark and the events they point to. The pilgrims have "prolonged," or "lengthened the night," but the past participle "durato" functions as a metaphor. The line end separates the predicate from its adverbial modifier and stresses time, regardless of grammatical tense, in its psychological aspect. "Durato" suggests both that something is to be endured and that something is inherently difficult. When the poem shifts into the psychological realm of "attardarsi," it moves into the language of allegory and lyric, appropriate enough for Clizia, who is present yet ineffable. Montale's technique here is to create poetic language by means of making other more conventional associations just present enough that the reader is aware that the poet is not making use of them. It may be, for instance, that knowledge of Montale's lifelong insomnia adds, for some readers, a dimension to the problem of enduring the long night in the lines quoted above, but other images—the "dark sleep" that "awakens" and "rises" in the kitchen, for instance— cooperate with the lines to create an impersonal scene and to dispel the notion that this is merely a language of biographical allusion. The first lines are structured by oppositions: the poetic self is chiefly made present by what it has endured and heard, the litany of the pilgrims is subordinated to its effects—expressed and yet made irrelevant by the night that has been lengthened—and the kitchen to what awakens in it ("il cupo sonno"). This "dark sleep," ominously, reaches the poetic self, wherever he is. In fact, the poet is both everywhere, citing details he could not see from a single perspective ("i frutti caduti," etc.) and nowhere, as though lost in his urgency to achieve a waking vision. The 137

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poetic self is thus that of the poete voyant and, we have seen, this is extremely verbal poetry; yet, we have also seen, Montale does not, either as a writer or as a poetic self, think entirely through the machinations of language. The image of the "diaspori" associates Clizia with fire, warmth, and love. Yet, were Montale truly to be thinking only through his language, he would, with greater verbal consistency, prepare us for her by using a Symbolist genitive in referring to the theater in which he waits for the target shooting. He might, for instance, refer to a "teatro di gelo," a "theater of ice," to create an opposition to fire; but this theater is "un androne gelido," "an icy passageway," a "corridor," architecturally predictable, and the poet goes on to give it descriptive appurtenances—"soffitta tetra / di vetri e di astrolabi"—and seemingly secondary details, that it is "il teatro dell'infanzia / da anni abbandonato." Thus, whereas we may gather that the word "theater" has the potential of a symbol, language also forces us to consider, at least briefly, the world of discrete objects and of time in which the theater has existed.39 Montale discusses the theater in his letter of May 10, 1939, to Bazlen: "Il teatro dell'infanzia" e certamente equivoco, ha tutt'e due i sensi che hai scoperto. Ma solo chi e stato a Pico puo essere certo che il teatro e un vero teatro dove si recita; chi non c'e stato avra egualmente il sospetto, il dubbio, il suggerimento del vero teatro; perche teatro nel senso di milieu (il teatro del delitto) sarebbe molto banale e difficilmente attribuibile a Eusebius.1 '"The theater of childhood" ["childhood theater"] is certainly equivocal. It has both meanings you discovered. But only someone who has been to Pico can know for sure that the theater is a real theater where people perform; someone who has not been there will have, all the same, a suspicion, a hint, a suggestion of the real theater. For "theater," in the [purely figurative] sense of "environment" [scene] (the scene of the crime) would be quite banal and not easily attributable to Eusebius [a playful name for Eugenio]. 138

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Despite the descriptive and figurative language, the poem shows how we can think of the theater as an abstraction: it is a typically Montalian occasion, an emotion and a condition given as a detail of narrative from which no plot can be extrapolated, a "theater of waiting." The theater is only real because of something that has not happened—but must happen—in it.40 Yet the purpose and significance of the theater—as of "Pico" itself—are not entirely controlled by the poet, for he is subject both to his battle with language and to the limitations he intuits of what one can ever learn and know. If Montale's art is no longer mimetic by design, it imitates the limitations of experience and the limited, yet vital, knowledge that can be gained through experience. This knowledge does not transform the poet, but gives him the means to accept another day and, toward that end, to retain the memory of this day. The emotional equivalent of the last line is a resigned "at least there is this." The dramatic equivalent is the deeper articulation of the poet's desire, consistent with the mode of the post-Romantic, modernist lyric.41 The poet, surrounded by phenomena—objects and events perceived or experienced—whose meaning escapes him and whose causes and results cannot be identified by reason, is too filled with doubts to turn the crisis into one only of language, or his poetry into one of fearful selfconsciousness. Montale's success in finding a dramatic occasion saves him from the "idolatrous dissolution of language from the grammar of a possible world, which results from the belief that language itself can be reality, or by incantation can create a reality."42 Semantic importance in unexpected areas can hardly be overestimated and may be a guide to interpreting the difficult language that Montale develops in Le occasioni and continues to use in La bufera. For instance, "E tu seguissi," the second section of "Notizie dall'Amiata" (1938), Le occasion's concluding poem, and often considered its major one, begins in this way: 139

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E tu seguissi Ie fragili architetture annerite dal tempo e dal carbone, i cortili quadrati che hanno nel mezzo il pozzo profondissimo; tu seguissi.. .m ** In the verb "seguissi," Montale typically blends what is contrary to fact with what is concrete and seemingly descriptive. We might construe the ideas "Would it were you here," and "If you, Clizia, were here, you would see something significant in what lies around me." We are not invited to imagine the architecture, but to complete an implied idea by adding such a thought as, "Then I should see something in what lies around me other than mere futility." Again typically, Montale puts this implied idea of futility, and also the corresponding emotion, concretely in a phrase that works by accumulation of details, "questo cadere di archi, di ombre e di pieghe" (this falling of arches, shadows, and folds). Details are given, then, as in "Pico Farnese," not to complete the scene, but, again, to be "driven away." They must be driven away within an implied span of time, by late at night. The first section reads as follows: Il fuoco d'artifizio del maltempo sara murmure d'arnie a tarda sera. La stanza ha travature tarlate ed un sentore di meloni penetra dall'assito. Le fumate morbide che risalgono una valle d'elfi e di funghi fino al cono diafano della cima m'intorbidano i vetri, e ti scrivo di qui, da questo tavolo remoto, dalla cellula di miele di una sfera lanciata nello spazio— "Were you to follow the fragile structures blackened by time and coal, the squared courtyards which have at their center the deepest well, were you to follow .. . 140

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e Ie gabbie coperte, il focolare dove i marroni esplodono, Ie vene di salnitro e di muffa sono il quadro dove tra poco romperai. La vita che t'affabula e ancora troppo breve se ti contiene! Schiude la tua icona il fondo luminoso. Fuori piove." ** The place, condition, and occasion of the poem, which have reminded some of Dante,45 are all the dark room in Amiata, in which the poet feels remote from Clizia and from which he considers sending news of himself to her. In the guise of wondering what, in the course of the evening, he can say about himself to her, in the third section Montale raises questions about the ways in which individual life can be expressed in the language of history: Questa rissa cristiana che non ha se non parole d'ombra e di lamento che ti porta di me?° How can the language of individual experience be conveyed through the "Christian conflict" or "fracas" whose words are those "of shadow and lamentation"? Critics have argued that Montale's concern is the conflict, the "fracas" of the Second World War then impending, 46 but the poet "The fireworks of bad weather will be a murmur of beehives late this evening. The room has worm-eaten beams and an odor of melons penetrates from the partition. The soft puffs of smoke that ascend a valley of elves and mushrooms up to the diaphanous cone of the mountaintop cloud over the glass. And I write you from here, from this remote table, from this honey cell of a sphere launched into space—and the draped cages, the hearth where chestnuts explode, the veins of saltpeter and mold are the picture where soon you'll break through. Life that enfables you is still too brief if it contains you! The luminous background opens up your icon. [Your icon opens up the luminous background.] Outside, it rains. "This Christian fracas which has nothing if not words of shadow and lamentation, what does it bring you of me? 141

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himself has been cited to show that the lines have no political concern: they express a "conflict between man and God."47 The poem's stress falls rather on an abstract issue: the near inexpressibility of an individual life, whether because the languages of life are contaminated or because life itself gives no useful or purposeful outlet to the individual. The use of the demonstrative adjective "questa" at the beginning of the third section ("Questa rissa") serves to make the question general and abstract, and suggests recognition and close familiarity with a perennial condition. By eliminating the particular source of the disembodied "Christian fracas"—monastery or politics—Montale does not throw stress on what he hears—what he would hear, for instance, in narrative—and to some extent he even refuses to listen to the "Christian fracas." The line, with its assonantal repetition of "o," throws stress on his doubt that there is any language left for the expression of true experience. The demonstrative adjective is applied to a reality to make it unreal. 48 The entire phrase has a general emotion, then, behind it, one gathered out of the whole expression which is a unity. We might grasp it whole as a Christian "fracas of words," "wordy fracas," and "fracas of mere words." The Christian world, like all reality, seems suspect and guilty by association with overall futility. These lines lead to an anxious question: "Che ti porta di me?" In part, the implied answer is that words cannot say anything to her of him. Montale tries, nevertheless, to find a different answer to this dramatic question: Meno di quanto t'ha rapito la gora che s'interra dolce nella sua chiusa di cemento. p p

Less than the marsh wrested from you, which softly silts up in its cement barrier. 142

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We must, in order to seize the essence of this answer, first study its structuring elements, like the image of the "gora"—"millpond," "trench," "stream" (e.g., of blood or sweat), "stagnant water," "marsh," even perhaps the Stygian marsh of Inferno viii.31—which, the verb "s'irrterra" tells us, both "silts u p " and "digs its way" into the earth. It is a self-interring and apocalyptic "gora," closing in on itself. The reflexivity of the action is reinforced by the noun "chiusa"—"barrier," "dam," "enclosure," "dyke," "conclusion," "prison"—itself in turn suggesting the finality and irreversibility of the action. "Dolce"—"softly," "gently," "quietly," "imperceptibly"—suggests that the action meets no resistance, as though the "gora" were doing the only thing it could do: it is both filling itself and fulfilling its end. Whatever the "gora" may stand for politically in the world of 1938 is less important than the noun's role as the embodiment of Time, Fate, and apocalyptic fatality. The images are concrete only by contrast to the abstractions they convey, reversing a process often found in Ossi, notably in "Meriggiare pallido e assorto" (To lie in the shade at noon, pale and absorbed), where there is some imbalance between logical-grammatical appurtenances and emotional content. The "enclosure," of "cemento"—"cement," with a possible pun on "cimento," "test" or "trial"—may perhaps bring to the lines, in a secondary way, the trials and hardships of Italy in 1938, but only as an example of oppressive Fate, which is opposed by a search for the very little positive that life allows, its accidental byproduct. The image of the "gora che s'interra / dolce" is reminiscent of "il treno lentissimo s'imbuca" (the train ever so slowly slips into a narrow trench) of the interesting "Bassa marea" (1932; Low Tide), a poem usually discounted by critics as a mere academic exercise.49 There, Montale refers to a loss from which he must seek some consolation, and uses the image of a distant tunnel that recedes, with the train, into both the distance and the past: 143

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e nella sera, negro vilucchio, solo il tuo ricordo s'attorce e si difende. S'alza sulle spallette, sul tunnel piu lunge dove il treno lentissimo s'imbuca. q "S'imbuca" may refer to the train hiding and moving into the tunnel, and this reflexive form carries rarer and more important suggestions: the train seems to dig itself a hole and to slip into a pit, trench, and perhaps even grave. The train digs itself into the tunnel, cooperating with both itself and Fate; it moves very slowly and softly, as if to sug­ gest not only that it cannot resist inexorable Fate, but that, in fact, it bespeaks and embodies it. But the memory "writhes" and "twists" ("s'attorce") and "defends itself" ("si difende"). 5 0 In "Notizie," the process is similar. In this poem, how­ ever, Montale does not say that he is able to seize some­ thing from the self-interring and grasping "gora" of Fate. Still, something was wrested from it: Si disfa un cumulo di strame: e tardi usciti a unire la mia veglia al tuo profondo sonno che Ii riceve, i porcospini, 51 s'abbeverano a u n filo di pieta/ Gradually, in the later Occasioni and ever more so in La bufera, Montale writes as though events are of interest only to the extent that they already embody abstract and ines­ capable truths. Ethical value is given not to action but only 'And in the evening, black twining stem of the bindweed, only your memory twists and defends itself. It rises on the embankment, over the tunnel farther off where the train ever so slowly slips into a narrow trench. Ά coil of straw is suddenly undone: and coming out late to unite my vigil to your profound sleep which receives them, the porcupines are watered at a thread of pity. 144

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to aspiration; progressively, Montale states his visions and, conversely, suggests that their realization is made impossible by life that, at best, distracts and, at worst, suffocates and threatens to engulf everything valid.52 He no longer wonders out loud, as he did in Ossi, whether such feelings are worthwhile, whether they are really feelings at all, and whether his experiences are real or fit for poetry. He has come to see, as in "Notizie," that a little can be "something" and expresses this way of thinking by dynamic dialectical imagery. The tendency culminates in "Piccolo testamento," where Montale, with no positive declaration, shows that his hope is more than the phosphorescence of a struck match, a view of faith as sensibility and the desire to have faith, of thought as the desire to find meaning, and of moral action as resistance. This alien cast of mind has fascinated Italian critics, who have found it to be Nordic, AngloSaxon, and even Calvinist! This "something" is equivalent to a private ethos and is presented with the force of an assertion, so that it seems to be a truth gathered in the very writing of poetry. AT THE END of "Notizie," Clizia is sleeping, but, in a poem in which nothing is truly alive, sleep is positive by being at least receptive ("riceve"). The letter to her remains unfinished. Only the poem now exists, and it offers a concluding image that Clizia "receives": this is Montale's poetic homage to her, and represents his desire to be united with her. The image, offered "late"—late in the evening, and perhaps late in life too—is that of the porcupines that "s'abbeverano a un filo di pieta." Coming at the end, it replaces the unwritten letter and is all the poet manages to extract from his long vigil. The poem mimes that extraction, a process we have already seen in the earlier "I limoni." The poet extracts his symbol on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the symbol extracts itself from the dissolving "coil of straw" or "hay," the "cumulo di strame" which itself almost dissolves in sending forth the porcupine messengers. The 145

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image suggests a "tangle" of memories giving way to a single dominant one that renders all the others purposeful; this is a process we have seen in the "Motets," and it informs many poems of the Occasioni, including "La casa dei doganieri" (1930). We have seen that the poet earlier attempted to bring Clizia into the temporal dimension of the poem by borrowing her eyes to see things differently. Now, he returns to this task, and achieves it by prolonging his waking vision until he can see the minimal, but unambiguously positive, symbol (later affectionately satirized in "A pianterreno" [1969; On the ground floor], of Satura): the porcupines that drink the rainwater left indifferently by the storm—there is no sentimentality here—that find comfort in it, but only as Clizia might see the "fascia d'ogni tormento" (covering of every torment) reflected, impossibly, in a deep and distant "borro" (gully). Clizia's insight may be akin to political foresight, but is stronger, the only way by which the elements in the poem find a proper pattern. One holds the worst of the political storm in abeyance by seeing it for what it is. The poet produces a symbol and therefore can act out his thin hope; and the poem has acted out this thin hope in order to produce a symbol. The porcupines do not merely represent the desire of the poet to see or foresee. Like Montale's famous jackals of Modena, they are a sign unraveled from the indiscrete tangle of events, the "cumulo di strame." of the first lines of "Notizie daH'Amiata" have seemed to some critics to allude to the political events about to explode in the Italy of 1938;53 the rare use of the singular, "fuoco d'artifizio," would suggest what precedes a full pyrotechnical display. But the fireworks exist in the poem to shape a dramatic situation and mark out the internal time in which the poem occurs: THE FIREWORKS

Il fuoco d'artifizio del maltempo sara murmure d'arnie a tarda sera. 146

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An assertion cast into the future tense also contains the hope that the force of the fireworks will be diminished with time, be transformed into a "murmur"—we might say, a "mere murmur"—of bees. By implication, time exists only to be endured. Montale is using a storm (which may symbolize any general crisis) to wish away a purely private situation. In the following lines, the poet enlarges the poetic setting, but to make it cosmic rather than political:54 e ti scrivo di qui, da questo tavolo remoto, dalla cellula di miele di una sfera lanciata nello spazio— e Ie gabbie coperte, il focolare dove i marroni esplodono, Ie vene di salnitro e di muffa sono il quadro dove tra poco romperai. The earth, we are told, is a "cellula di miele" of a "sfera lanciata nello spazio." The implication is that the earth is a mere hive in an unfathomable universe and that life is essentially futile. Thus, we come to see why the poet's "vetri"—the "windowpanes," "lenses," "glasses," "mirrors," but effectively, through connotations of the verb "intorbidarsi," his sight and even insight—are, he tells us, "clouding over," "dimming," "being troubled," not because of a political, or even literal storm, but because life is, a priori, phenomenal, a "screen of images." From the "screen," Montale is separated by the darkening "vetri." The window is not Mallarmean, and there is no separation between where we are and where we would be; nor does Montale see himself in the window, or use it to symbolize something. It is not that one can break through a wordsymbol, but that something must break through it. Night is not identified with poetry, as is often the case in a Symbolist treatment; here, it is worse than day, unless one can dream, for at least the day distracts. This darkness of the window forces vision inward. 147

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The poet is using the language of effable images to create an atmosphere in which he is symbolically trapped yet must organize whatever images he can to the end of creating a vision. Details that seem to appeal to the reader's senses, like the "sentore di meloni" and the "fumate morbide" in effect function to further the gap between the poet and the images outside, for he could not sense so many. They confront and assail him, and are dark and pernicious effects that emanate from no specific source. The poet cannot hope to modify reality, but can use the images it provides in different ways. For instance, he can use them to see them with heightened recognition of what they are and have always been. At the same time, he can use them in a dialectical process: the outer darkness is hellish, but can be displaced by the eruption of Clizia's "icon" which uncovers its own "luminous background," although the syntax also suggests that the "background" also opens up and reveals the "icon." The poet does not gather resources, for they are of no help; instead, he prepares himself by willingness to recognize light or truth when it breaks through images. Thus, the literal symbolism that is the mode of the poem—images have temporal sequence, but seem to exist in no specific time—implies not a cooperative poetic universe constructed by the poet, but a symbolic construct, made up of unalterable facts and conditions that dramatically limit and enclose him. Because the situation in this poem, like that in "Pico Farnese," is dramatic, images do not seem arbitrarily selected to represent a purely subjective state of mind. They present an atmosphere of obstacles and possibilities. Montale's sense that life is phenomenal has not led him to give images suggestive of his personal disharmony. In fact, his poetic process, to some extent, is the reverse: despite what may be personal inertia, he energizes the images, making them quite alive, while wishing them away. He suggests, however, that the decay, darkness, and rustling noises of autumn and its storm are relentless and that he can only hope for a reprieve, in part by cutting 148

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off sensations. The images are a reminder, therefore, not of the Romantic topos of the passage of time, but of a process inherent in things themselves. Montale cannot mitigate this condition by imagination, sensation, or physical escape—or even by meditating on such possibilities as he once did in Ossi. But he can seek symbolically to drive the condition away from consciousness, or to find a comforting presence. Better yet, he can organize everything to this end. That all sensations—auditory, olfactory, and visual—must be neutralized is a sign of the poet's subjection to his symbolic structure, a common enough situation in poetry, but extreme in this instance. The hope Montale expresses is really that there is an intact essence or presence that goes beyond mere outward perception and reason. There is no invitation to spring or incitement to sensation, but the desire to be released from sensation of the merely "material world"—be it the "real world" or hell. Montale makes no real distinction between them. Every detail of the phenomena inside the room—the smell of the melons, the holes of the worm-eaten beams—yields an essence, not of sensation or emotion, but of fact, the relentless self-consumption of existence.55 The rottenness of this prison-room may have a political reference to 1938, but the presented effects are subsumed into time which, by using them, reveals itself to be the only important factor. Given such a notion of time, it is not surprising that Montale conceives of history apocalyptically, and develops this view in Lo bufera. The details do not invite the reader to go back and reconstruct the room; they are effects for which a deeper cause must be sought, or to which an inner cause must be opposed. By attempting to suspend all sensations, the poet strives to drive out everything that is not inner. In this suspension, more wished for than shown, Clizia's icon, breaking free from its background (or rising from its depth) "erupts" ("il quadro / dove tra poco romperai"). The process by which the poet seeks to drive away or to occlude circumscribing reality, and thereby to try, symbol149

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ically, to alter his situation, is subtle. We find this essential process where we least expect it, as in the conjunction "and." In the phrase "e ti scrivo," " e " has the force of "and still," "despite this," and "and yet." Characteristically for Montale, a minor syntactic connective is made to carry major implications, in this case of both endurance and persistence. These prepare us to receive Clizia, who will break through the images. Montale uses another means to prepare us for Clizia, one similar to the phrase "prilla il piattello" in "Pico Farnese." Just as connotations of the verb "prilla" transcend the link to the targets, here the explosions are severed from their logical connection to the chestnuts on the hearth by their use in anticipating the explosive arrival. In the section's last lines, it is life itself that creates Clizia. It makes her myth, as in the following phrase, subject to varying, and conflicting, critical interpretations: La vita che t'affabula e ancora troppo breve se ti contiene! Clizia is, by implication, a logical necessity, created by life, that is, by disharmony. It is typical of Montale's poetic procedure to state such an idea in an absolutely clear, yet elusive phrase, and consign important ideas to subordinate clauses. We can construe part of the fundamental thought as: "If life . . . contains you, then it is too brief." We must interpret and construe further, for the idea must be, as it were, excavated out of what is unstated: "If life (which keeps you a fable, of the status of an illusion, for me, that is, which has made you only a memory by taking you away and which yet keeps you alive; your life intensifies my need for you) contains you (that is, if you are real), then life is too brief; this is, however, the only condition that makes life too brief." Both the poetic procedure and the thought in this passage are typical of Montale's blend of idealism and skepticism. From the Ossi on, he is willing to surrender the idea that life's passing is not to be lamented to the possibility that it is, but he subjects the second, less negative 150

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view to a condition that does not depend upon him, and he states it by means of the conjunction "if": thus, "If you are contained in life," and perhaps "If you are still real." Clizia's presence is an icon revealed against and revealing its own luminous sky: a moving, erupting, and live icon in contrast to which everything else is frozen and unchangeable. The luminosity of the icon's background implies that it is—somehow—ceasing to storm. Montale's returns to the objective scene—if such we can call it—are not returns to objective time; the replacement of the luminous background for the fireworks suggests that the "maltempo" continues, abated, and that the storm itself is a generic condition. The only discernible force behind the poem's events and images is that of time, futility, or history shaped by both. Montale does not try to heal the paradoxes in these ideas by a mythic system; he does not, for instance, suggest that Clizia compensates for the passage of time, only that she redeems the pain of waiting and enduring by appearing in his thoughts when she is invoked. We have seen that Montale uses the contrary-to-fact subjunctive and rhetorical accumulation in the second section of "Notizie" to express the idea that what he sees, and even that he sees, is futile: his is a problem of perception, not of politics. The "archi .. . ombre e . . . pieghe" are an allusion to Western Christian culture that is "falling" everywhere. But allusions are secondary to a primary emotion: the poet is lost, as though in a waking dream, estranged from his physical self and from "the step" of "a man who walks alone": "il passo che risuona a lungo nell'oscuro / e di chi va solitario" (the step that resounds for a long time in the darkness is of a man walking alone). Montale is suggesting that his may be a failure in insight. Only Clizia can repair this failure by lending him her eyes: she is, we discover in this second section, the person who is able to extract a comfort from the most negative elements, and to live in peace with them by foreseeing their end, that is, their purpose and necessity. She can, thus, paradoxically, make particular events real, 151

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for instance "il volo infagottato degli uccelli / notturni e in fondo al borro l'allucciolio / della Galassia" (the bundledup flight of the nocturnal birds and at the end of the gully the flickering light of the Galaxy) by discounting them in order to see a higher pattern. The hope for her insight and foresight—Montale progressively treats them as the same thing—is therefore not to change events and their course, or to understand them directly; rather, it is the hope of being able to accept them, and to justify seeing them at all, by seeing them as part of a truer pattern. But the poet doubts the possibility of even this very modified hope by noting that the "stars' weavings are too subtle": Le stelle hanno trapunti troppo sottili, l'occhio del campanile e fermo sulle due ore, i rampicanti anch'essi sono un'ascesa di tenebre." Montale is suggesting that the failure to understand experience may lie in him as much as in what he sees—or doesn't see: "trapunti . .. sottili" suggests that the stars are weaving patterns for the future, ones already established in the past and too "subtle" to be explicated; they are too thin ("sottili"), too, to offer a symbol of hope. Time, now stopped, is ominous; even the "climbing vines" are an "ascent of shadows." Montale reverses Romantic topoi by urging the north wind not to do what it will inevitably do, disseminate the autumn seeds, in effect not to serve time by spreading the "spore del possibile": Ritorna domani piu freddo, vento del nord, spezza Ie antiche mani dell'arenaria, sconvolgi i libri d'ore nei solai, e tutto sia lente tranquilla, dominio, prigione del senso che non dispera! Ritorna piu forte T h e stars have far too subtle weavings, the bell tower's eye is fixed at two o'clock, the climbing vines themselves are an ascent of shadows. 152

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vento di settentrione che rendi care Ie catene e suggelli Ie spore del possibile!' The poet turns away from the inevitable: "the ancient hands of the sandstone" suggest "the age-old grip of a standstill" (as in "arenarsi," "to come to a standstill") whose hold must be, yet could hardly be, broken. His turning away from the inevitable and the possible, which he treats interchangeably, is tantamount to the desire not to desire. But there is no hope even for the hope that the poet can be exempted from expectation, as we see in the following images: Son troppo strette Ie strade, gli asini neri che zoccolano in fila danno scintille, dal picco nascosto rispondono vampate di magnesio." Montale's hope for release from emotion—and only incidentally from Fascist menace ("gli asini neri")—is of the nature of a fatigued prayer: and this fatigue carries over into the concluding invocations, which convey contrary associations: Oh il gocciolio che scende a rilento dalle casipole buie, il tempo fatto acqua, il lungo colloquio coi poveri morti, la cenere, il vento, il vento che tarda, la morte, la morte che vive!v The "colloquy" is "long"; the "dead" are "poor"; they—or death itself—are "ash"; the "wind" may drive off the "ash" 'Come back colder tomorrow, north wind; break the ancient hands of the sandstone; disarrange the books of hours in the attics and let everything be a calm lens, dominion, confinement of sense which does not despair! Come back stronger, northern wind, [you] who make chains dear and seal off the spores of what is possible. "The streets are too narrow, the black donkeys clicking their hoofs in file raise sparks, from the hidden summit answer fiery outbursts of magnesium. "Oh, the slow dripping cautiously descending from dark huts, time turned to water, the long talk with the poor dead, ash, wind, delaying wind, death, living death! 153

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(or perhaps it should do so); it is late; only "death" "lives" (or, perhaps like the "wind," should come). The only conclusion is to wait, a waiting made up of both remembering and hoping. INCREASINGLY, Montale attempts to relate events in history and politics in Italy in some way to the truth of Clizia, and to blend lyrical and allegorical language. In "Pico Farnese," he uses her to judge experience as untrue and unworthy; and in "Notizie," to show that the too-oppressive, too-real war makes her true. In both cases, he can only show that she is a personal necessity for him. Lyric language in "Pico Farnese" passes at times imperceptibly into allegorical language, as in "attardarsi," which conveys a range of associations from Romantic waiting through the tardiness of love to life as a passage to death. This process is successful because the poems have a live, poetic time. Montale must displace ideas—for he invents no clear conceptual order for them—as in the major introductory poem to LA bufera, the title poem of the volume, which is paraphrased and discussed at length in the next chapter. Its images conceive of the storm of war and of life—the two are hardly distinguished—as a Spanish "fandango." But all its images come to suggest that the dance, even though threatening to engulf the lives of the poet and Clizia (or, more properly, the thought of her) and therefore more real than they, is less important, is only a simile—

Come quando ti rivolgesti e con la mano, sgombra la fronte dalla nube dei capelli, mi salutasti—per entrar nel buio. —for her leaving him, consigning him thereby to the darkness. The thoughts in La bufera are dynamic, not susceptible of reduction to statement—political or otherwise. The worlds of history and of dream are at times in dialectical 154

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relation, and the former may invade the latter, turning it into a nightmare. Many of the poems in La bufera consist of, or conclude with, symbolic actions—waiting, testifying, witnessing— that derive their validity from the poetry itself. They show that life, for Montale, is not a problem of art, and that his art has existential reference. As a writer of poetry that is simultaneously idealistic, skeptical, and existential, what he knows best is his own art and his battles with it. The truths he expresses are not intended to be political ones, although the poetry itself, as a symbolic action, has positive ethical value. In "Pico Farnese," there is a language of recognition, of returning to and knowing something again and better, of presenting more intensely a lyric truth or ideal, the love of Clizia. Montale does not clarify this love or state whether it is love of her, or is her love of something higher. This clarification will come in La bufera. The poet's task is to return to the events at Pico Farnese and to show that they are still untrue and, furthermore, that there is only a single truth, Clizia. At the same time, however, Montale's language also shows that these experiences, essentially untrue and unreal, are so in several sometimes conflicting ways. Sometimes the events alluded to in the poem are too present or grotesque, and in both cases can easily pass into nightmare. Shapes creep out of unspecified yet defined recesses in the landscape. The "molli soriani" that present themselves in their "sportelli tagliati negli usci" and the "occhi confidenti / dei maiali" that animate obscure recesses which themselves open into spiderwebs of rock show that every effort to make reality familiar, or to render it at all, only hides it behind nearly impenetrable recesses of language and throws it into question. Insofar as it is present at all, reality has metonymic existence in the poem; it is, as it were, only the premise of the poetry, a situation that becomes a characteristic of La bufera. We have seen that critics have much discussed the func155

CHAPTER FOUR tion of descriptive language in Montale. Commenting on the opening lines of "Pico Farnese," for instance, Marco Forti writes that the first half of the poem is overly detailed and resembles prose.56 But, much of the language used in a seemingly descriptive way again serves to create a time scheme that is purely internal and psychological. The dog "stretches itself out" in a "damp garden," but the verb "s'allunga" serves to stretch out time. Other sounds "develop" it ("si svolge") or merely "delay" ("indugia") or gather the poet, not himself under a serene sky, into a time that "drips" ("stilla") like wax. Reality can only "reach" the poet's ear. Are they not dream sounds emanating like the "dark sleep" in the kitchen? Other images cannot be visualized—they are merely named, comprehensible only because they are perhaps remembered from the previous night, as the "fruits" that have "fallen" "in the shade of the orange tree." Still others work by the kind of accumulation we have seen in "Notizie": "anfratti, tagli, spicchi di muraglie." But this accumulation functions to intensify the sense—if not the feeling—of futility with which everything is imbued. In "Pico," there is no single logical perspective. It is as though the poet were everywhere—and nowhere. The absence of a specified perspective lends a dreamlike quality to what is seen. The images, unreal as they are, are the necessary "screen of images" of a Platonic and Christian sense of reality. While life, conceived as something to be endured, returns in the poem, Montale doubts that this can be all that is. Perhaps the "cupo sonno," the "dark sleep," may be more than sleep or dream. Life may be dream, but may also be more; perhaps, however, this life is death. But perhaps it will produce life of a different kind. The allegory is not systematized. Montale does not, for instance, place the "dark . . . tales" of the women in some order of myth. They are defined, as Rebay has shown, by opposition to the whiteness associated with Clizia, but the opposition is not developed. Their "vano farnetico" is to be 156

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driven away. The brutish "men-goats" 57 are also "vain," not true pilgrims of love. They are the valgus with respect to the ideal of love, and represent love without a higher end. But the view of reality as a "screen of images" impinges on the Romantic language of truth and of love. The pilgrims are "vain" in another sense: perhaps they do not exist; perhaps they can be made not to exist, at least within the poem. Whether or not such untruth is worthy of consideration, whether or not it even exists, it provides Montale's poetic materials. The only dignity that the "men-goats" can achieve lies in the fact that they help to prepare us for CIizia's arrival, or, more properly, for the arrival of her dream apparition. The unresolved combination of the effects of reality whose worthiness he doubts, and whose existence is "vain," yet which he must use poetically, leads Montale to a conceptual impasse that the reader must bear in mind in approaching La bufera, where the poet attempts to bring CIizia into history and time.

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"FINISTERRE" Ho completato il mio lavoro con Ie poesie di Finisterre, che rappresentano la mia esperienza, diciamo cosi, petrarchesca. Ho proiettato la SeIvaggia ο la Mandetta ο la Delia (la chiami come vuole) dei "Mottetti" sullo sfondo di una guerra cosmica e terrestre, senza scopo e senza ragione, e mi sono affidato a lei, donna ο nube, angelo ο procellaria.... Si tratta di poche poesie, nate nell'incubo degli anni '40-'42, forse Ie piu libere che io abbia mai scritte, e pensavo che il loro rapporto col motivo centrale delle Occasioni fosse evidente. "Intenzioni"' THE FIFTEEN POEMS c o m p r i s i n g t h e " F i n i s t e r r e " section of La bufera e altro first a p p e a r e d t o g e t h e r i n t h e small v o l u m e Finisterre (Lugano: Collana di L u g a n o , 1943), b u t it was n o t u n t i l t h e y w e r e collected i n M o n t a l e ' s long-awaited t h i r d major v o l u m e of p o e t r y in 1956 t h a t t h e y received m u c h critical a t t e n t i o n . W h e n t h e y did, o n e of t h e d o m i n a n t crit­ ical t r e n d s w a s to observe t h a t t h e pressures of t h e w a r years h a d acted as a catalyst i n M o n t a l e ' s poetic d e v e l o p ­ m e n t , p r e c i p i t a t i n g a n e w political poetry t h a t judges expe*I completed my work with the poems of Finisterre, which represent my Petrarchan experience, so to speak. I projected the Selvaggia, Mandetta, or Delia figure (call her what you will) of the "Motets" against the back­ drop of a war both cosmic and terrestrial and without purpose or reason, and I entrusted myself to her, lady or cloud, angel or petrel. .. . These are a few poems, born in the incubus of '40-'42, and are perhaps the freest I have ever written; I felt that their relationship to the central theme of the Occasioni was evident. 158

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rience; another focused on a consistently nonpolitical poetry that completed longstanding, internalized, formalist tendencies. Gianfranco Contini had already isolated the latter elements in an influential article of 1938, where he observes that Montale's new poetry has a rigorous coherence, almost goes beyond its own limitations, and, by dint of "inner work," manages to seize "grace," or, more properly, to "fabricate" it.1 Writing in "Intenzioni" (1946), Montale observes of the earlier poems later collected in La bufera that they were closely related to, and completed themes developed in, Le occasioni. He writes, for instance, that they represent a kind of "Petrarchan experience," that they were written with greater "freedom" than the earlier poems, that he relied on a poetic figure (Clizia) and cast her against the "backdrop" of a "cosmic and terrestrial" war, "entrusting" himself to her. 2 The comment that the war is a "backdrop" ("sfondo") provides a troubled and not uninteresting access to the "Finisterre" poems. What are the relations between the Occasioni and "Finisterre," which critics have often used as a touchstone of La bufera's excellence? 3 What does Montale mean by "freedom," particularly since critics have insisted on the volume's extraordinary complexity and difficulty? What is the "Petrarchan" experience in the volume, and what does Montale mean when he says he "entrusted" himself to Clizia? If it is true that there is a desire to judge experience, what exactly is judged, and how? Can Contini's earlier comments be applied profitably to the later poems of "Finisterre"? To these questions we may add others. Are "Finisterre"'s repeated references to a storm and other images of adversity primarily political? Is the generally acknowledged self-consistency of language in this poetry a guarantee of consistent poetic success, as critics of formalist orientation have argued? It is useful to distinguish between approaches that lead into the poetry and those that might lead away from it. For instance, to inquire who Clizia is or what she stands for4 is 159

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less direct than to ask what her function may be in the poetry. Since poems written after La bufera have often been compared with the "incandescent" Montale of that volume, and especially of the "Finisterre" section, an attempt to formulate the nature of that "incandescence" would be useful.5 Last, it has been amply shown that in this period Montale returns to and reuses his earlier poetic language; hence one might ask whether this self-consistency is also an expansion that permits Montale to grow conceptually and poetically. "Notizie dall'Amiata" and "Elegia di Pico Farnese" demonstrate a long-term consistency in Montale's poetry which the poet's remarks to Bobi Bazlen (May 1, 1939) in turn help to clarify: for instance, with a rare intensity of concern, he states that he wishes to retain preferred words in his poems at any cost. This verbal self-consistency can also be seen in Montale's comments on "Pico," both in his letters of the period and later, in comments made orally fully thirty years after the composition of the poem. In the letter to Bazlen, he gives an interesting gloss to lines which later became "e l'Amore... messaggera accigliata": STUDIES OF

nel distico "e l'Amore . . . messaggera imperiosa" (che per me sarebbe il centro della poesia, la massima elevazione di tono) ci sono elementi che per me, soggettivamente, erano vitalissimi e non suscettibili di interpretazione neo classica: la frangia che tu hai gia visto nella fotografia di [ . . . ], qui frangia d'ali, ma insomma anticipazione dell'incredibile "piumaggio" attribuito alia fronte senza errore, cioe la vera frangetta. "Imperiosa" mi pare insostituibile, "messaggera" idemb.6 b in the distich "Love is . . . imperious messenger" (which I would judge to be the center of the poem, the maximum elevation of tone) there are elements which, subjectively speaking, were for me absolutely vital and not susceptible of neoclassical interpretation: the fringe [bangs] that you have already seen in 's photograph, here a fringe of wings, but, in fact, anticipation of the incredible "plumage" attributed to the forehead without error—that is, the true little fringe. "Imperious" seems to me irreplaceable, and the same is true of "messenger."

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We can see in this letter an interesting sequence that moves from the word in its literal form, "la frangia," and an allusion to its empiric antecedent, "Che tu hai gia visto nella fotografia d i [ . . . ]." Montale uses the past tense almost as though to place past empiric reality in the very brackets he uses for Clizia's name. Then, he gives the words he uses in the poem, "frangia d'ali." Although "ali" is less concrete than earlier Montalian nouns in similar syntactic positions, it is not intended to convey only an abstract quality, as the absence of its article might suggest. The phrase is a compromise among "fringe of wings," "winglike fringe," and "winged fringe." In the poem, the "ali," or "wings," are anchored by the word that follows, "messaggera" or "messenger." The forward reference completes the process by which the whole phrase passes through its literal meaning—which it retains—to its symbolic one. The semantics in the gloss, like their counterparts in the poem, are difficult, and Montale continues in still other directions in his explanation. He seeks to sum up the meaning of "frangia" ("insomma anticipazione") and does so by passing through a noun of expectancy ("anticipazione") before he names the "incredibile 'piumaggio.'" His "incredible" lyric truth fulfills his expectancy by taking a more perfect verbal form, and it also leads him to linguistic preciosity, which he recognizes and indicates in the selfconscious quotation marks around the word "piumaggio." But the language, the syntax shows, is attributable to and attributed to an absolute truth, the "fronte senza errore," that is, the self-evident and true "fringe," "la vera frangetta." Then, Montale attributes a spiritual quality to Clizia that leads him to isolate with affection (the diminutive "frangetta"), and make his own, both her truth and her reality. The phrase "insomma anticipazione" is more than a signal for summing up the themes of "Pico Farnese." In its connotations of expectancy and waiting, complemented by its use of forward textual reference, it reflects the poem's structure and also looks ahead to the use of language in La 161

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bufera. Structurally, it reflects the hope for and anticipation of Clizia herself that are so evident in the poem. In "Pico," we have seen, Montale moves consistently to discard both empiric antefacts and present appearances, and to find what is both true and real. The poem is held together by a dynamic time scheme in which what is discounted as untrue and recognized as true work together to convey the poet's desire to see the truth he associates with Clizia. There is also a precursor of time patterns occasionally used in La bufera, in the movement toward resolution in apotheosis through a series of linguistic refinements. In the gloss, emotion is only potentially that of traditional lyric. It finds release in the exaltation of language itself, and justification in an unidentified spiritual quality in Clizia. It gathers on the page, intensifies in a series of appositions that discard empiric references—the mere physical existence of the woman—passes through exaltation, and creates its own ideal time in which truth can be asserted. These qualities foreshadow characteristics of La bufera that are questionable, among them an arbitrariness of language, the displacement of the poet's meanings and their replacement by occasional verbalism, the tendency to use the language of exaltation and to assert truths nowhere shown, while arbitrarily discarding empiric references.7 In La bufera, and especially in the "Finisterre" section, there are poems created by dynamic tension—for example, the title poem "La bufera"—and others in which refinements of language associated with Clizia dominate. In the latter type, Clizia reveals herself to the poet in her true and essential meaning for him, but this means of self-revelation can create difficulties for the reader when it is not supported by poetic form. Such poems demonstrate that verbal consistency with the language of the earlier poetry is not always an inherent guarantee of successful poetry. The poem "La frangia dei capelli" (1941) raises this issue: La frangia dei capelli che ti vela la fronte puerile, tu distrarla 162

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con la mano non devi. Anch'essa parla di te, sulla mia strada e tutto il cielo, la sola luce con Ie giade ch'ai accerchiate sul polso, nel tumulto del sonno la cortina che gl'indulti tuoi distendono, l'ala onde tu vai, trasmigratrice Artemide ed illesa, tra Ie guerre dei nati-morti; e s'ora d'aeree lanugini s'infiora quel fondo, a marezzarlo sei tu, scesa d'un balzo, e irrequieta la tua fronte si confonde con l'alba, la nasconde. 0 Montale judges the world around him to be grossly deficient by alluding to its "nati-morti" who are carrying on wars for which he finds no purpose; the reference seems to be to the Second World War. The negative judgment of humanity as "nati-morti" has a clear historical source, then, but these grotesque creatures are less successful poetically than the equally grotesque "uomini-capre" of "Pico," for their nature is not demonstrated by the poem, to which they are not subject and by which they are not given form. This lacuna is closely related to the absence of a time element in "La frangia." There are allusions to time but no time sequence: "sulla mia strada," "nel tumulto del sonno," "e s'ora," and "l'alba." By implication, this is a "dawn" that must and will be hidden ("nasconde"); by further implication, it has not been bearable. By yet a further implication, the "cielo" referred to earlier in the poem must also be transformed by the dawn if the poem is to be resolved. But T h e fringe of hair that veils your childlike forehead, you mustn't distract it [push it aside] with your hand. It too speaks of you, on my path is the whole sky, the only light, together with the jades which you have encircled about your wrist, in the tumult of sleep the curtain which your dispensations stretch out [spread], the wing by which you go, transmigratory unharmed Artemis, among the wars of the stillborn. And if now that background is strewn with blooms of airy down, you are there to water it, having descended at once—and restless your forehead blends with the dawn, hides it. 163

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little is shown to render the dawn horrible or to show how the sky can be more than a mere sky. The tension between what is by implication merely what it is and what is more than it may be in ordinary human experience is often used successfully by Montale, but here the contrast is not truly created. It is simply stated or entrusted to virtually automatic verbal oppositions as a way more to show the need for Clizia8 than to make her present, more to discount history than to discard it dramatically. Conversely, the unworthiness of the "nati-morti" and their wars is used to assert the state of half-death in which the poet himself lives when not dreaming of Clizia. The procedure is essentially tautological; there are oppositions without tensions and overreliance on the assertion of a personal truth. The poem, in short, lacks an occasion that truly incites the poet to poetic engagement and does not provide images, so that the poet may discard them in his search for what is real and true. The occasion of the "guerre," if anything, distracts from that section of the poem which, on its own, would work as successfully as a motet, that is, the section that reads e s'ora d'aeree lanugini s'infiora quel fondo, a marezzarlo sei tu, scesa d'un balzo, e irrequieta la tua fronte si confonde con l'alba, la nasconde. It also lacks the kind of "fight" present in the earlier poetry, in which Montale extracts his images for Clizia from elements that do not want to yield them; there is, however, incandescence in the poem, largely created by style. A difficulty in the poem is that the fringe, which can be compared only to itself, has no appropriately dramatic vehicle. The "Motets" often have no occasions either, but in their absence Montale uses language successfully to create the time and space in which Clizia's importance can be conveyed, by stretching out words, images, and associations even to the breaking point: 164

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Ecco il segno: s'innerva sul muro che s'indora: un frastaglio di palma bruciato dai barbagli dell'aurora. d Montale verbalizes a time and space sequence as a vehicle for Clizia's arrival, but in "La frangia" there is some language more solid than anything shown, in part because Montale is using themes of his earlier poetry as occasions for new poetry, as in the image of the "cortina," obliquely a reference to Clizia's bangs: la cortina che gl'indulti tuoi distendono, l'ala onde tu vai, trasmigratrice Artemide ed illesa,... It is true that there is much that is stylistically interesting in the poem—etymological puns on "distrarla," with the two possible meanings "distract" and "push aside," the use of unusual verbs like "s'infiora," the play on meanings of "confonde" (in the Baudelairean sense) and "nasconde"— the senses of the poet must be confused and dazzled to see the dawn that is revealed behind the one that is hidden away. Similarly, interesting patterns of thought emerge from the structure and word plays of the poem. If Montale can see things as anything more than what they are, for instance if the "sky" is anything more than a sky, hope can exist and serve to transform the "background"—the war?— into a backdrop for Clizia. That transformation is used as proof of her presence; in a sense, then, out of his hope she has descended and merged with dawn. 9 The "tumult of sleep" is somewhere between a reflection of earthly tumult and its effect, and within this sleep there are only dreams in which the poet must distinguish between lower and higher aspirations and seek protection in the higher dream. d Here's the sign: it is innervated on the wall tinging with gold: a palm fretwork burned by the dazzling of dawn.

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The least thing can speak of Clizia, but the "frangia," "cortina," and "ala," which remain discrete, single-replacement metaphors, and as such always run the danger of relying on purely private meaning, do not have the explosive force and potential of such an image as the "diaspori." Although we have seen that much of the thought is subtle, there is a reliance on a rather skeletal opposition of terms— sky, earth—and much working—but with less subtlety— by the kind of apposition we isolated in the letter on "Pico" ("frangia," "cielo," "luce," "cortina," and "ala"). It is almost as though this listing of nouns were a substitution, with its modulations, for the explosive force of the concrete images of more successful poems in the Occasioni and "Finisterre." We miss a dramatic place for the distant Clizia (to which distance "ala" refers), for there is no elimination of false signs or nonsigns that can be so efficacious in the poetry. The historical element merely alluded to does not give a poetic time, either. The difficulties in "La frangia" result in part from the invention of a poetic language that precedes the supposed occasions of the volume; moreover, the apparent anxiety is not so strong as the anxious element in earlier, completely apolitical work. Montale continues to find all of life defective, but he casts it aside too automatically, and is perhaps too ready to assert the superiority of Clizia. The people of the earth are "stillborn," perhaps because they do not see Clizia and what she stands for, or they may be victims, not only perpetrators, of the war; but unlike Anacleto and the "uomini-capre" of "Pico," they are not shown in any relation, whether temporal or spatial, to Clizia. Montale had learned to blend temporal and spatial elements either by verbal ambiguity, as in the motet "Perche tardi? NeI pino Io scoiattolo," with its phrase "nel punto [where and when] che ti chiude," or by suggesting the atmosphere of empiric places, as in the "teatro" of "Pico." But he follows neither procedure in "La frangia."10 The phrase beginning with the conjunction "se" lacks 166

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the elements of potentiality we have seen characteristically present in the earlier poetry. Here, there is not even an element that is contrary to fact, or could be. Clizia's "fronte," "forehead," is embedded only in words—and not in time— to convey a clearing for truth. The explicit assertion that Clizia is "trasmigratrice," "illesa," and "irrequieta" is disconcerting: we do not understand why Montale implicitly asks for "indulti," "pardon," "indulgences," or "dispensations," or why he, or anyone, is subject to the "dipensations" of this providential, God-like Clizia. She seems to watch over the poet, but, more, she seems to mirror only herself,11 for we can know little of her except in the things that "speak" of her, and these named objects do not have the force of images and lack poetic particularity, like her "giade." As she watches over the poet, he seems to be moving toward death,12 the "strada" that is also, but only secondarily, a place of waiting for relief from historical contingencies. A NUMBER of the "Finisterre" poems, then, continue themes, conceits, and images of Le occasioni. To some critics, this consistency of language is itself interesting and virtually a guarantee of the success of the later poems; however, we have seen that this quality does not, any more than political engagement, guarantee poetic success. Each poem must be considered on its own merits. For instance, "Su una lettera non scritta" (1940; On an Unwritten Letter) is highly consistent in language and theme with earlier poetry (especially the "Motets" "Notizie daH'Amiata," and "Elegia di Pico Farnese"), has political reference, and yet derives its success not from these but from new ways of using earlier materials. "Su una lettera" picks up the theme of news from "Notizie," which it now presents as the conceit of an unwritten newsletter; it fuses this theme of "Notizie" with the forms developed in the "Motets"—which included successful treatments of nonevents (the nonarrivals of Clizia)—and 167

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blends them with a revived Petrarchan language, a new dramatic language, and even with some of the descriptive elements of the earlier poetry. The poem reads as follows: Per un formicolio d'albe, per pochi fili su cui s'impigli il fiocco della vita e s'incollani in ore e in anni, oggi i delfini a coppie capriolano coi figli? Oh ch'io non oda nulla di te, ch'io fugga dal bagliore dei tuoi cigli. Ben altro e sulla terra. Sparir non so ne riaffacciarmi; tarda la fucina vermiglia della notte, la sera si fa lunga, la preghiera e supplizio e non ancora tra Ie rocce che sorgono t'e giunta la bottiglia dal mare. L'onda, vuota, si rompe sulla punta, a Finisterre. e The poem is one of hope for news of Clizia and fear of hearing from her. The poet asserts that he should (in Petrarchan fashion) flee from the fatal presence of Clizia in his life, from her "profilo fatale extra umano" (superhuman fatal profile)13 and from the images of her ("bagliore" and "cigli") to something more real or more pressing, to what he calls the "altro" in life. The present time of the poem is similar to times that we have isolated in earlier poetry and is made up of a number of tensions: between monotony T o r a swarming of dawns, for a few threads on which life's yarn may be snarled, and may string itself out into hours and years—is this why the dolphins in pairs are doing somersaults today with their young? Oh, let me hear nothing of you, let me flee from the glare and flash of your eyelashes! There is much more [to it] in this world. I cannot disappear or present myself again. Night's bright red smithy holds back, the evening lengthens; prayer is torment and among the rising rocks the bottle from the sea has not yet reached you. The wave, empty, breaks upon the promontory, at Finisterre. 168

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and punishment (which takes us back to Ossi), anticipation and memory, conventional Petrarchan fear and doubt—not necessarily a successful tension in the poem—and between searching for and (perhaps) finding images that he can associate with Clizia—a highly successful tension in the poem. Montale manages to blend these and find their equivalent, particularly in the image of the dolphins. The poem opens with a highly ambiguous "per" (for, because of, and by the grace of). Are the dolphins that cavort in an ambiguous place doing so as a sign of Clizia's presence, or in order that the poet may be reminded of her? In either case, this is the Clizia of "La speranza," and, as in that poem, the questions are put objectively. Are they playing that there may be "a swarming of dawns," "a few threads on which life's yarn may be snarled [entangled]" and form a necklace of "hours and years"? This swarming, this tangle, given perhaps as a grace,14 is, then, an "intermittence," a skip in the pulse of associative memory. 15 The reader's attention is caught by "per'"s unusual position. The poem is obscure in meaning and moves inward; the reader is outside and can only be brought in, at least initially, by giving himself up not to the meanings of the words but to the sound patternings of the lines, especially the repetition of the vowel " i " ("formicolio" / "pochi" / "fili" / "s'impigli" / "s'incollani" / "anni" / "delfini" / "capriolano" / "figli" / "cigli").16 These lines, which, at first reading, yield sensation rather than meaning, and which are syntactically inward, reflect stylistic traits of the "Motets," where Montale uses the thickening of phrasing and sound to get poems going, as in "Il saliscendi bianco e nero dei" (White and black ups and downs of the), a use beginning as early as "Carnevale di Gerti" (1928; Gerti's Carnival).17 As is often the case in Montale, his concern with the finality and purpose of life's images is a catalyst for great poetic invention. The "per" probably means that the image of the dolphins comes both by Clizia's grace and with its 169

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own purposefulness. There is, as always, a tension between his desire to order the images of experience and his doubt that they have any cohesion, but now Montale adds a new element: "Oh ch'io non oda / nulla di te." Is Clizia trying to hold him? She is certainly distant, yet she is everywhere, the "bagliore" from which he must flee: "ch'io fugga dal bagliore / dei tuoi cigli." The exclamation, with its Petrarchan language and the opposition it raises between desire and flight, reflects Montale's growing interest in Petrarchism. Clizia is both "trivial," for "there is much more [ to it]," "there are other things on earth" ("ben altro e sulla terra"), and, we can guess, the only important thing, for we know that the "altro" for Montale is also ironic. Clizia is the center from which the poet cannot "flee," and before whom he dares not "reappear": "sparir non so ne riaffacciarmi." The centricity of Clizia is not imposed on the poem, but lives in its images. The early morning hours in which he seems to dream of her and feel her lively physical presence "blend," "swarm," "tingle," "disturb," and therefore create a time of their own. "Formicolio," a noun that conveys all these activities, is isolated and therefore made important by position and sound pattern. It is the first substantive in the poem, which begins so unconventionally with a preposition, and its accented " i " strikes the musical key of the poem's first section, in clear contrast to the empty and desolate sounds of the last line and a half of the poem, which stress the vowels " o " and "u." "Altro" in "Su una lettera" may refer to the war, but it seems chiefly to stand for mere reality and untruth, for the poet is not so convinced of his own interest in it as of the power and fatality of Clizia. Similarly vague is the message that should come to the poet: it is only the waiting for the message, and fear that it will not come,18 that matter, and even these are secondary to the notion that time must be stopped, be entangled and snarled, so that it can be woven and thus reveal its purpose through the image of the dol170

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phins. The language of fear and hope used for Clizia is also secondary in its Petrarchan implication that Clizia poses some threat to the poet, for this aspect of her fatality is merely declared by his desire to flee from her "bagliore." However, when the opposition of fleeing and hoping blends with the issue of time—whose purpose is centered on Clizia—as in the linkage of "figli" and "cigli"—we have a lively poetic invention. The poem develops themes of inertia and monotony, waiting and punishment, that first appear in Ossi; it does not imitate inertia, but is active in creating an equivalent of desire. In the "Motets," Montale created poems of desire by activating inactive images, by stretching language and almost creating a time of potential out of monotony. Similarly, we saw that thought in Le occasioni tends to become dynamic. In La bufera, the desire to flee from hope is not entirely separable from the idea of desiring not to hope and even desiring not to desire. The anxiety is enlivened by the degree to which the poet, while subject to finding images of Clizia, creates them out of his desire. The sound patterns of the dolphins are more lively than any realistic depiction of dolphins could be. In the image of the dolphins, the poet does not stress perception, but rather the sensation of joy in the ambiguity of their cause and purpose, a sensation that is tantamount to the intuition that everything can hold together. The liveliness of this language is also an equivalent of the unrepeatability, the pleasing particularity, of the dolphins. Without such images, Montale is never sure he is receiving special sensations to take him away from a pointless present lying between "memoria" and "oblio" (oblivion) such as that which opened the "Motets" in "Lo sai: debbo riperderti e non posso" (You know it: I must lose you again and I can't). Paradoxically, things must be connected without connectedness, and only the poet can connect them. It is he, then, who sets up the plot in the poem in which there are contradictory hypotheses, and in which the only certainty is 171

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the strange appeal of the special image. Waiting for and fearing the arrival of the night, the poet is left unable to flee. He is caught between the desire to flee from her and from news of her and the desire to hear from her, but she has not received the message ("L'onda, vuota, / si rompe sulla punta a Finisterre"), as the "bright red smithy" delays. 19 The "wave" is "empty," and the "prayer" is unan­ swered; not to hear news of her, and not to be able to send her news of himself, are hellish. "Su UNA LETTERA" shows that the fixed points of Montale's poetry are not formal inventions but concerns with such metaphysical questions as the finality of experience. The formal patterns of the poem can be discerned in the highly successful motet "L'anima che dispensa" (1938). Here, we have a blending of images of place and time, and ambigu­ ities that arise from this fusion. As in "Su una lettera," so here it is not clear whether the poet's memory and mind are arranging images or whether they arrange themselves in such a way as to confound him or, strangely, to free him from poetic silence. The word "dispensare," "to dispense" (in the sense already studied in "La frangia," and perhaps also in the sense of "exemption from service or work") is picked up by "ordegno," "contrivance" or "useful tool" (and, interestingly, even "war gadgetry" and "trap") and its implications: L'anima che dispensa furlana e rigodone ad ogni nuova stagione della strada, s'alimenta della chiusa passione, la ritrova a ogni angolo piu intensa. 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. Parlo d'altro. 172

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ad altri che t'ignora e il suo disegno e la che insiste do re la sol sol ...' It seems that a woman, her "spirit," or a "memory" of her ("L'anima") arranges her own folk dances at each "season" of life, at each "corner" of the street, and, we may construe, even in the mind of the poet, for she "feeds herself," " is fed," and then grows even in unlikely places, especially in his reluctant desire for her. This desire is "closed," "shut off," "hidden," "contained," and perhaps "secret," in direct contrast to her lively dances. The memory and the woman are inseparable; she is free, "everywhere" ("diffusa"), and her "design" ("disegno," which also could mean "scheme," picking up the secondary implications of "dispensa" and "ordegno"), in all its configurations, positive and negative ("lieta ο triste") invades his thinking and his language insistently ("col / favore della musa ο d'un ordegno"). She can also arrange a dance in his memory at will (or sing, thereby "feeding" those who listen, perhaps with the tunes of a dance). Clizia is willful if she can battle so aggressively with his desire for inertia and poetic silence. The more " h i d d e n " his emotion, the more "closed off" he is, the more she manifests herself and the more her memory grows. CIizia's special quality is her ability to grow and "feed" on something, someone whose existence she may not be aware of, and to be everywhere, at any season, given any set of contingencies: "su fili, su ali, al vento, a caso." 20 The mul­ tiplicity of plots in which Clizia exists is compelling because it may give to the poet at least one in which to place himself. It may be shaped by a negative "ordegno" or

'The soul that dispenses a furlana and rigadoon at every new season of the way feeds on closed passion, finds it more intense at every corner. Your voice is this diffuse spirit. On lines, on wings, in the wind, by chance, abetted by the muse, or a contrivance, it comes back happy or sad. I talk of other things, to others who do not know you, and its design is there, insistent: do re la sol sol... 173

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by a positive "musa," the "muse" of poetry. The poet may be "speaking," or, figuratively, "writing," of other things, when her voice returns with its "design," which is "insistent." Memory brings her back, yet seems negative, perhaps in reminding him of her distance from him. Not memory, but poetry, can approximate in a verbal pattern her ambiguous and insistent hold on him.21 "L'anima che dispensa" is one of the most complicated of the "Motets," and it holds the key to many of them. Its use of "chiudere," for example, shows that the poet is a priori closed off from the images that are his materials22 and distant, in some way, from the woman who can musically arrange them. The poem is also an anticipation of La bufera because it shows that the poet cannot claim absolute freedom; he is subject to the way in which experiences form themselves, under the ambiguous gaze of Clizia, into a purposeful pattern. The lessons Montale learned in the formal enterprises of this and other poems in the "Motets" sequence are important for shaping the poetry of the "Finisterre" period. In this group, "Lungomare" (By the Sea) combines elements of these formal lessons with some learned in "Pico Farnese," whose physically central section it closely resembles. Although written in the nightmare years of World War II, it does not have the degree and kind of disharmony we might expect: Il soffio cresce, il buio e rotto a squarci, e l'ombra che tu mandi sulla fragile palizzata s'arriccia. Troppo tardi se vuoi esser te stessa! Dalla palma tonfa il sorcio, il baleno e sulla miccia, sui lunghissimi cigli del tuo sguardo. 8 g

The puff grows, the dark is broken by gashes and the shadow you cast on the fragile palisade curls. Too late, if you want to be yourself. From the palm the mouse dives, the lightning charge sits in the ignited fuse, and on the exceedingly long eyelashes of your look. 174

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The "breath" of wind or water, or the heart's "murmur" (both possible in "soffio"), "grows." "Darkness" (symbolizing the mind, night, inactive memory, or poetic inactivity) is "broken by gashes" ("rotto a squarci"), possibly the light of dawn or even poetry (for "squarci" can signify passages of poetry) breaking in on the poet, with unmanageable and unpredictable experiences. The "shadow" or "specter" ("l'ombra") that she "casts" or "sends" on the "fragile palisade" ("fragile / palizzata") "curls" (logically, but only logically, perhaps because of the movement of wind or light in trees). The verb "arricciarsi" is used in unusual conjunction with the noun "ombra" and suggests the self-sufficiency of phenomena associated with Clizia, her physical appearance and impression, and even her glowering ("arricciare la fronte" can mean to frown) profile, her superiority. Thus it is "too late" if Clizia wants to be herself ("troppo tardi / se vuoi esser te stessa!"), that is, if she wants to be only herself rather than an illusion or the phantasm of the poetry she engenders. We may even construe the passage to mean "it is too late, for you are already mine." Other images follow, the "palm tree" from which the "mouse dives," the "lightning" about to flash, as though a "fuse" ("miccia") had been set or a "match" ("miccia") struck, on the "lunghissimi cigli" of Clizia's "look" ("sguardo"). Her look is the force behind the explosive images rendered in part by equally explosive sound patterns. The similarities to the language of "Pico Farnese" are evident, but perhaps there is too much stylistic freedom here; the verbal effects of Clizia are not gathered from a situation that has become their dramatic vehicle. For all of the active force of the verbs, there is none that has the dramatic efficacy of "prilla" of "Pico Farnese" or of "fugge" and "capriolano" of "Su una lettera." The allusions to time form no clear temporal plane. The "buio," the darkness that pervades the entire volume, does not here lead to inner seek175

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ing. The poet tells us it is "too late," but we have no pres­ sure from a temporal antecedent. The poem resembles the "Motets" in that at its center is the potential for thinking of Clizia and dreaming about her. There is stylistic playful­ ness, a new Baroque element in Montale, for the language may refer to the moment in which she is about to turn her eyes to him. She may be with him, walking on the palisade, or may only be a chimera. The wind is growing, as though to break up a stormy darkness, and it seems as though everything is ready to be seen anew, broken apart into a new pattern of light and dark. This unmistakable language of light and dark shows us that our task is not to identify the myth of Clizia, but what in that myth is used success­ fully in the poetry. Similar language develops in the poem "Il ventaglio" (The Fan). In "Lungomare," as in so much of the language of the "Motets," if Clizia is present, there is light, and if there is light, she is present. In "Il ventaglio," so reminis­ cent of Mallarme in its title, Montale writes: ma Ie tue piume sulle guance sbiancano e il giorno e forse salvo. O colpi fitti, quando ti schiudi, ο crudi lampi, ο scrosci sull'orde! (Muore chi ti riconosce?) h We may construe the following from these lines: if Clizia's hair ("Ie tue piume") "turns white" ("sbiancano"), and is therefore associated with truth, if she "reveals" herself, "the day is perhaps saved" and can be faced. The poet has awakened from a dream in which he has imagined men and machines moving into the distance, but the dawn breaks up this nightmare of war. 23 He tries to "fix" ("figgerli") everything, wonders how he can, and wonders how poetry can be "like a painting" ("ut pictura"). How can one h but the feathery down on your cheeks whitens, and the day is perhaps saved. Oh thick blows when you reveal yourself, oh rough flashes, oh downpour upon the hordes! (Does the man who recognizes you die?)

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paint a look, a sign, a day that is gone? How can one immobilize these things, and is it desirable to do so?24 Can one do so, if the real nightmare threatens to displace them in one's mind? There is still light, but it is about to be extinguished, for in the "vertiginous cove" ("la calanca / vertiginosa"), everything is "devoured" ("inghiottire"). This devouring cove is rendered as an atmosphere and condition in the title poem "La bufera," and thus it is a more effective vehicle for Clizia. in the poem "La bufera" is generally understood to be World War II, but an analysis of the opening lines and echoing lines of the third section will show that for Montale the "bufera" both simply exists and also must in some way be resisted: it is an abstract threatening presence and, whatever it may stand for, serves a purely poetic end.25 With almost the effect of a newspaper headline, the opening lines of the first section, like those of the third, consist of a noun and relative clause that disjoins the noun from a main verb withheld permanently in the poem: THE STORM

La bufera che sgronda sulle foglie dure della magnolia i lunghi tuoni marzolini e la grandine, ( ) il lampo che candisce alberi e muri e Ii sorprende in quella eternita d'istante— . . . ' The resulting suspense—the poem never returns to its primary clause—is reinforced by the fact that the lines that intervene between the two sets of echoing constructions— the second section of the poem—are in parentheses. Despite the suspense, the parallelism of the first and third 'The storm that drips on the hard leaves of the magnolia the long March thunders and the hail . . . the lightning that whitens trees and walls and catches them in that instant's eternity 177

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sections suggests that they should be read simultaneously, as in a musical composition. The "bufera che sgronda"— the "storm" that continuously "drips" and "grates"—is effectively an adjectival construction—the "dripping storm"—and conveys this meaning more forcefully than an adjective would, because it borrows an active element from a verb without pointing to a particular activity that could be imagined. 26 The verb suggests the indefinite present time, so characteristic of Montale's poetry from Le occasioni on. Further, the relative clause serves to disembody the storm, to isolate it, but Montale, unlike many modern poets with whom he is often compared—Eliot and Valery, for instance—does not linger over and play with his words to get ambiguity. Nor is the effect of the storm conveyed so much by the words' denotations as by their sounds. The storm drips incessantly, but the sounds, for instance, the consonant cluster "sgr" of "sgronda," are pseudo-onomatopoeic, imitating not the sound of rain so much as the feeling of being assailed.27 In some way, this unyielding storm has already worn at the poet. The sounds of the storm are clearer and more distinct than they could be in nature. They make grating, dripping noises—as the repetition of the "r" sound shows, in "bufera," "sgronda," "dure," "marzolini," and "grandine"—on the "hard leaves of the magnolia," and there are "long March thunders." Such phrases, like similar ones in the "Motets," in "Elegia di Pico Farnese," and in "Notizie dall'Amiata," express by sound what is simultaneously a state of mind and a condition in time. The sound pattern in the opening lines conveys a set of meanings quite as distinct as the syntactic structure. Together, they issue in an overall effect, of an event and the intuition of its meaning that have preceded the act of composition. 28 The event, which, in its effects if not its reality, is too oppressive to be ignored, 29 involves an unnamed "adversary" who, in "NeI sonno" (In Sleep) of "Finisterre," "shuts his helmet" and cannot be identified: 178

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Punge il suono d'una giga crudele, l'avversario chiude la celata sul viso.' This event, the "bufera" of the title poem, has always been hostile and threatening, is becoming more so, and is without apparent cause: e poi Io schianto rude, i sistri, il fremere dei tamburelli sulla fossa fuia, Io scalpicciare del fandango, e sopra qualche gesto che annaspa. k The words "sulla fossa fuia" echo the earlier phrase "sulle foglie / dure," but are embedded in a phrase that suggests that the storm is gathering speed and intensity by means of the temporal suggestion of "poi," which has no temporal reference, the accumulation of nouns, and the combination of consonants and consonant clusters: "scManto," "rude," "sisfri" and "fremere." The storm—conveyed by dense, suspenseful, yet, despite the constructions, disconnected and uncaused effects—is conveyed differently in section two, which introduces Clizia: (i suoni di cristallo nel tuo nido notturno ti sorprendono, dell'oro che s'e spento sui mogani, sul taglio dei libri rilegati, brucia ancora una grana di zucchero nel guscio delle tue palpebre) 1 'The sound of a cruel jig pricks, the adversary pulls down a visor over his face. k and then the rude rending, the rattling sistrums, the rumbling of tambourines on the dark ditch, the trampling of the fandango, and overhead some gesture that gropes '(the sounds of crystal in your nocturnal nest surprise you; out of the gold extinguished on mahogany and on the outline of the bound books, there still burns a grain of sugar in the shell of your eyelids) 179

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This care with words, their sounds, and the syntactic constructions rivets the attention of the reader,30 who therefore should not look for descriptive or political reference, which is undeveloped, and can at best be entirely secondary. It is made, and kept, irrelevant. Thus, "marzolini" may suggest "marziali," and this may be a "martial" March; but, if it is, that idea is kept secondary to the primary meaning the poet keeps before the reader but has not yet, at this point in the poem, disclosed. The reader, constantly frustrated, looks for something—a central idea, a symbol—to spring from the poem's form rather than from its words, and must ask where, on what, is the mind of the poet? THE STORM is, we have said, energetic and in the poem will be creative; it will thereby be robbed of its menace. It seeks out the poetic self, finds it, and presses against its world. But it is impossible to say precisely where the poetic self "is": somewhere inside a room, listening to a storm outside, or looking from somewhere to a point further inside a room, perhaps at the image of a sleeping woman. Montale is, like Baudelaire, with whom he associated himself at this period in his writing, largely a disembodied voice both everywhere and nowhere. As in "NeI sonno," he is closed off and suffocated somewhere in a zone of consciousness; this is a more dramatic limbo than that created in the "Motets." Here he is somewhere between waking and dreaming, day and night. "Error" presses in on all sides, forcing him to "gird" himself and see things he can hardly see, hear things he cannot hear through a screen of alien sounds, as in these lines from "NeI sonno," in the same section of La bufera:

Il canto delle strigi, quando un'iride con intermessi palpiti si stinge, i gemiti e i sospiri di gioventu, l'errore che recinge Ie tempie e il vago orror dei cedri smossi 180

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dall'urto della notte—tutto questo puo ritornarmi, traboccar dai fossi, rompere dai condotti, farmi desto alia tua voce.™3I We no longer have that expectancy of the senses that characterizes the "Motets," "Elegia," and "Notizie," to render the necessity of an imminent arrival that will truly "waken" the poetic self, "farmi desto / alia tua voce." If there are no Romantic adventures of the mind, no appetite whatsoever for experience, there is nonetheless a sharpening of sensibility. As we have seen, the poetic self both protests against something outside and at the same time gathers energy, to the point where he can poetically resist it. The storm of "La bufera" is already an abstraction, a disembodiment to some extent, and a sign of disharmony. Metaphor has already been at work prior to the poem, things already conceived metaphorically must then be used to some end to produce an opposition or modification, as we saw in "Notizie." The reader is not invited to imagine a monstrous enemy; it is already on the page. He may wonder instead what is the cause of the storm, and what one can do to resist it, and whether one can imagine or dream: he is thus brought into the themes of the volume by means quite different from the Romantic elements of Ossi. One has the impression, in the absence of a visual image, that the poet, unlike Eliot, who wished to "dream with his eyes open," is looking inward; he does not truly "hear" a natural storm and certainly he does not "see" it, but in, as it were, a sixth sense, he both "sees" and "hears" it as though he were about to resist or capitulate or, better, sharpen his resistance. This sixth sense has an equivalent in form: MonT h e hooting of the screech owls when an iris with intermittent beatings fades, the moans and sighs of youth, error which girds one's temples and the vague horror of the cedars shifted by the impact of the night— all this can come back to me, overrun the ditches, break forth from the ducts, awaken me to your voice. 181

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tale gives us the sounds of the storm as heard by Clizia before he presents her: (i suoni di cristallo nel tuo nido notturno ti sorprendono...) He gives a prepositional phrase that locates her, before the active verb on which it depends. In fact, he uses such devices of syntactic anticipation throughout this second section of "La bufera": "nel tuo nido," "dell'oro," and "sul taglio." Thus Clizia is simultaneously discovered by the poet and "surprised" or "uncovered" and "caught" by the storm. It is as though the storm were there as a way to Clizia and to establish the relationship between the poetic self and the Baudelairean "strana sorella" or Valery's "dormeuse," no matter how far away Clizia may be. Far indeed, it is suggested, since what are demonic sounds to the poet are crystalline to Clizia in her "nocturnal nest." Clizia is at the center of the poem, more within the mind of the poet than the storm. The poet has moved from the storm to Clizia and now moves from the storm's sounds (metonymically, the sounds on the tree's leaves) to the equally metonymic "nido notturno" which, by its arbitrary relation to "cristallo," suggests she is precious, protected, and remote. The image of the nest may allude to Clizia's flight and her peregrinations from the 1930s on.32 Nothing is done with the political possibilities here, nor is the image developed. Rather, and characteristically, the poet rushes to a nuclear verb, "ti sorprendono." Clizia fulfills an important function in the evolution of Montale's poetry. The fact that she was exiled and driven away allows him to extract her qualities—vulnerability and uniqueness—from her history and to use them poetically. Montale rushes to Clizia, located, as the poetic language shows, somewhere in his mind more than in some external, geographical place. Simultaneously—and this is perhaps more important—he is, as it were, following the effects of 182

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light created by the storm, trying to locate Clizia within that light and, finally, to locate a source of higher light. In part, then, Clizia exists in an illuminated space in the poet's mind. The day has ended: dell'oro che s'e spento sui mogani, sul taglio dei libri rilegati. The "gold" has "died," both outside and in, on the trees and on the furnishings. Some critics have found "La bufera" to be rather Baroque, but this is not an entirely artificial patterning of light and dark effects; it is the clearing for a true inner light. Since Clizia, when discovered, is startled, we may guess that she wakes and opens her eyes, perhaps turns to look at the storm, or simply to fix it with her gaze. The overall effect is that her glance is as a ray of light turned toward the darkness, sustained by her resistance and persistence: "brucia ancora" (italics mine). 33 Montale works this way: if he can imagine Clizia, then he can see her in the light of his mind and he can say that she exists, but he can only see her by believing. He creates this time in a variety of ways: the adverb "ancora," for instance, in the phrase just quoted, suggests not only "still" but also "despite all this," or "still in my mind or memory." But he can only see her by choosing to believe that the better part of his mind and spirit can hold out against the storm just as the "extinguished gold" is made to "burn." In fact, Montale is not following out a train of thought, but carving out the viability of spirit itself, and spirit is symbolized by Clizia. Clizia exists perfectly within this illuminated space. She is surprised and not destroyed, perhaps because she has both insight and foresight, but what she knows is less important to Montale's poem than that she knows something. 34 IN THE FINAL SECTION of "La bufera," Montale creates the

effect of holding, by an almost visual and aural relief, onto a truth, one of the "marvels" referred to in the poem's epi183

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graph, "Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grand's merveilles, / Leurs mains ne servent plus qu'a nous persecuter": Come quando ti rivolgesti e con la mano, sgombra la fronte dalla nube dei capelli, mi salutasti—per entrar nel buio." The sounds of the word "sgombra" contrast in pattern to "sgronda" and represent, typically, almost kinesthetically, a "clearing" of light and a "clearing" for truth, for the "fronte" of Clizia—Clizia's "fronte senza errore"—which is cleared of the "nube," Montale's recurrent image for doubt, error, and despair.35 This process of clearing is also a typical way to create a space in which to hold a memory of Clizia, who is not evoked but, rather, brought into the present time of the poem. Memory is not used in a sensual and evocative way, perhaps because for Montale time, past or future, has little positive potential. At best, one can salvage only a few particular things out of the past. In "A mia madre," the final poem of the "Finisterre" section, Montale reveals some of what is "behind the scenes" of the contemporaneous incandescent poetry of this part of the volume: the desire to possess the past, not to relive it. Here, this challenge is set into motion by the adverb "ora che" (now that), no longer the Romantic "ormai," sign of melancholy, of Ossi, but a provocative adverb which the poem answers by producing a gesture that can exist more perfectly than anything subject to time or relived in a Bergsonian flow of sensations and impressions. 36 In the fourth section of "La bufera," the poet remains both inside and outside the storm, retaining his images, tantamount to the effort of resistance itself. The words "Just as when you turned and with your hand, your forehead clear of the cloud of hair, you saluted me—only to enter into the darkness. 184

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"come quando" suggest an anterior dimension, but the effect is that created by a vortex within an accelerating condition. The long phrase, beginning with the words "come quando," is a secondary clause made to carry principal meanings in which, moreover, and also in typically Montalian fashion, some striking elements are pushed into the background so that primary ones can come into relief: CIizia's gesture and the darkness in which the poet is plunged. 37 But this is no Symbolist abyss. For Montale, the world is closing in on itself and on him. His growing claustrophobia suggests that completion will only come together with some cataclysmic change, but, we know, this is a poet who refuses to concede while he waits. World War II frees Montale from having to invent a mythic apocalypse and a purely private, closed mythic system. But, in a sense, he needs the war as he needs Clizia, to complete preexisting tendencies in his own writing. 38 There is a danger in some of the other poems of La bufera of suggesting more about Clizia's gesture than he can show; here, she seems to be a Christ figure, for she carries within her own perfection her "condemnation": "ch'entro te scolpita / porti per tua condanna" (which within you, sculpted, you carry as your condemnation). Her "condemnation" is "sculpted" within her and ties her to the poet, perhaps not because he feels condemned but, rather, because he feels, lyrically, protective ("e che ti lega / piu che l'amore a me, strana sorella"; and which binds you to me more than love itself, strange sister). Throughout La bufera, Montale develops a theme of suffering as redemption and makes explicit references to Clizia's bearing a Christian truth. Critics have tended to read her as an allegorical figure and the poems of the entire volume allegorically, but there is not enough system to make allegory; and images reveal not truths, but only themselves, which is truth. In "La bufera," the "lightning flash" makes the trees and walls "white hot" ("candisce"). But there is a pun here on "candid": the lightning flash reveals itself and 185

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tells the truth about itself. This way of working represents, to some extent, a conceptual impasse, but leads to a new kind of writing both in the prose and in the poetry of the period. As an answer to the storm, Montale seeks a gesture, or pinpoint of light, in a characteristic glance of Clizia.39 She carries within her "an instant's eternity," "sculpted" and imprinted, for it cannot be understood by intuition. Critics have much discussed the meaning of the phrase "qualche gesto" in the poem, and of similar indefinite phrases in the "Finisterre" poems, especially in "GIi orecchini," often attributing to them a reference to victims of fascism and war. The ambiguity of "gesto" is wider than these possibilities. The gesture may be a threatening one of a hand held over the head in the wild "fandango," but it may be a gesture summoning help or simply one made by Clizia, visualized against the storm-dance, to give the dance a pattern. The question is not, then, whether the gesture has political meaning. Is it active? Is it still living? Can it be retained, if it is positive, and, if it is negative, can Clizia's final gesture be more comforting? The gesture no longer has the narrative implications of "Pico Farnese" ("un segno ci conduce") nor the freedom from time and place developed in the ambiguous "Motets," where Clizia can be anywhere in time and space. Clizia is now brought into time and space and the result is, as we have seen, actually an increase in poetic tension. Montale is opposing mental images to a war whose danger is that it assaults mind and spirit. For him, the world of spirit is, ultimately, primary, and he intuits it and then moves to concrete language that can somehow embody his intuition, or works with concrete language that is so only by contrast to the spiritual one it mimes. In describing and summing up his poetry—and, therefore, himself—he speaks of a poet who "knocks on the doors" and "beats on the wall" to see what is behind them: 186

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Io sono un poeta che ha scritto un'autobiografia poetica senza cessare di battere alle porte dell'impossibile. Non oserei parlare di mito nella mia poesia, ma c'e il desiderio d'interrogare la vita. AgIi inizi ero scettico, influenzato da Schopenhauer. Ma nei miei versi della maturita, ho tentato di sperare, di battere al muro, di vedere cio che poteva esserci dall'altra parte della parete, convinto che la vita ha un significato che ci sfugge. Ho bussato disperatamente come uno che attenda una risposta." ^ Hoping and seeing are treated as the symbolic actions of beating and knocking so reminiscent of the English Metaphysical poets. From the Ossi on, Montale had treated actions and emotions as equivalents, often conveying the latter in quite energetic verbs, even when they were negative and static. Sometimes the process was entirely reversed. For this reason alone, it is virtually impossible to discuss the poetry by making arbitrary distinctions between literal and symbolic levels of meaning, even when symbolism seems shaped by allegorical intention. In La bufera, there is such allegory, but it is at best a tendency, one that does not visualize, personify, or formulate any consistent attitude toward experience. In the poems of this volume, Montale is uncertain whether experience is insubstantial and transitory or whether, if it is both, it also conveys substance, permanence, and Christian meaning. 41 As a result, it is difficult to define the nature of the darkness in which the poet is left; to some extent, it is the darkness "I am a poet who has written a poetic autobiography without ceasing to knock on the doors of the impossible. I wouldn't go so far as to speak of myth in my poetry, but there is the desire to question life closely. At the beginning I was a skeptic, influenced by Schopenhauer. But in my later poetry I have tried to hope, to beat on the wall, to see what might be there on the other side of the screen, convinced as I am that life has a meaning that escapes us. I have knocked desperately, like one who is expecting an answer. 187

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of the "fossa fuia," a Dantesque "ditch of thieves," and thus may reflect contemporaneous Italian politics.42 More significant, this is a "ditch" of "lost souls," in the sense of Inferno xii. 90, "anima fuia." It is also, however, a conventional lyric complaint conveyed by a traditional Stilnovesque pun on "salutasti": Clizia "graced" his life, "greeted," "saluted" him—and "left" him. Since the war is both real and unreal, and it is not clear whether it is not itself merely a symptom of a higher inimical force, we have too much ambiguity to speak of allegory, and it is not possible to draw a neat opposition between the imperfect earth and the realm of Clizia; this is shown by relations of darkness and light, grace and earthly perdition, for the poem, as we have seen, works not only by dichotomies but by a more inclusive, synthetic dynamic momentum. "La bufera" builds on suspense: Clizia's earlier gesture and the events of past time are brought into the poetic present and absorb it. The "buio" is not the storm; the storm lies within a larger darkness in which the poet is left. This larger darkness includes the storm and Italian politics. The synthesis and absorption are reinforced by rhyme: the last word in the poem, "buio," completes a rhyme—a deliberately imperfect one—with "fuia." Cohesion is provided by opposition, especially by Clizia and the storm, but they are interdependent. The storm increases the need for Clizia. Montale builds toward an effect he has in mind, which he achieves by radical images, especially those for light: spent gold, grains of sugar, and the flicker of light through Clizia's lashes. These are visual images of things that can neither be visualized nor even discerned in the darkness, and suggest, therefore, that inner light is needed. The oxymoron "spent light" is not a lifeless abstraction but a lively one: out of extinction Montale produces burning. Hope needs doubt and proceeds from it. Clizia has left the poet in the dark; his eyes are turned inward toward light. The unstated resolution is that he must stand firm and hold onto that light. The light in 188

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the interior has died and is spent, having lasted until the end on the bound books of the mysterious inner room. The very little light that remains is equal to "un grano di zucchero." If only this remains, Montale suggests that it can yet be a whole world. THE WAR provided Montale with a solution to formal problems he had been attempting to resolve for the major part of his literary career: to find an appropriate poetic form for emotion and sensation and a poetic justification for assertive images and for ideas, a poetic cause of and name for his sufferings, a poetic time frame for the potential and realization of poetic events. In Ossi, Montale wrote poetry in which his desires cannot be satisfied, in which he projects himself living alone with private sensations that he cannot attribute to a cause. This is a poetry of some fatigue, in which desires wax and wane, of half-proferred ideas, of monotony, and of emotion that has no appropriate vehicle through which to express itself. The poet, already aware of the dilemma, often develops a language that is self-ironic, that tends to negate its own subject—this is one of the interesting aspects of the volume—and that will rely on the possibility of particular "occasions" to spring to new life in Le occasioni. These "occasions" will provide him with a time scheme in which to demonstrate themes sometimes asserted in Ossi and summed up in its introductory poem, "Godi se il vento ch'entra nel pomario": that life is a "reliquary," a "reliquiario," and that all actions are "erased by the game of future time," "scancellati pel giuoco del futuro." Clearly, Montale has moved from the tendency in the earlier poetry to treat the future ironically to his "later predisposition" to focus on the self-fulfilled and irrevocable past. The restlessness in Ossi led the poet to want something, anything, to occur: often, he waited in a landscape that was purely mental, in which naturalistic touches might disturb the reader's response, distract him from the poem's content, but, in the 189

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successful ones, would excite his imagination by leading, unexpectedly, into new complexities of thought. 43 In the Ossi, the landscape was, it seems, a poetic pretext. Not surprisingly, it disappears in the Occasioni, where Montale no longer wants a "something"—without definition— to occur. Instead, he writes highly verbalist poems that express the simultaneous potential for and impossibility of feared and desired incursions of Clizia into his mental life. Sometimes in the "Motets," the poet wants to be freed from wanting such occurrences, as in "Lo sai: debbo riperderti e non posso"; at other times, he uses the image of Clizia to guarantee the reality and the tolerability of his experiences, as in "Al primo chiaro, quando." In both cases, Clizia provides a form; but, whatever she may provide as a purely poetic remedy, the cause of his suffering and the end of existence remain unclear. In "Barche sulla Marna" (Boats on the Marne), whose dates of composition, 1933-1937, encircle and almost enclose the "Motet" sequence, the poet asserts that he still has no name for suffering: ma dov'e la lenta processione di stagioni che fu un'alba infinita e senza strade, dov'e la lunga attesa e qual e il nome del vuoto che ci invade. p Nowhere is the difficulty—the absence of a "name" and of a cause—clearer than in the treatment of time, which has neither the largely verbalist remedies of the "Motets" nor the dramatic epiphany of "Pico Farnese." Time still gluttonously feeds on itself, while it moves into a past that cannot be recaptured, as in the line "il fiume ingordo s'insabbiava" (the voracious river silted up) in "Verso Capua" (1938; Toward Capua). Now, in "La bufera," there is no p but where is the slow parade of seasons which was once an infinite dawn without paths; where is the long expectant wait and what is the name of the emptiness that invades us?

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doubt that something—the storm, or, historically, the war—is occurring in time, but because history is inimical, time can now be used poetically to provide a sequence for the realities the poet has made his necessities. In La bufera, fatigue has a cause, sensations have a purpose, and there is a reason desire cannot be satisfied and reality cannot be transformed. The war, by giving Montale a poetic time frame, thus also gives him a language, a plot, and a structure for his thought. Montale associated himself with Yeats and Eliot at this time. He shares with them spiritual unrest, striving for and denial of significance, metaphysical skepticism, and the desire to write objectivist poetry of insight. However, although he develops some purely private poetic myths, he does not get them by deliberation or by seeking stimulating ways of thinking about human history. Montale is not interested in the multiplicity of life's images, although earlier in his poetry he occasionally attempted to lose himself in them, especially in the rare and curious ones, a fact that has led some critics to stress his enumeration of descriptive details.44 He is a poet who always needed a focus for his energies in a life frustratingly lacking in drama, not itself a fitting vehicle for his emotions and sensations. The war, thus, spares him by allowing him to participate in a battle between good and evil:45 he need not find an example of evil ("Spesso il male di vivere," Often the evil of living, Ossi di seppia), he need not invent evil; in fact, he need not find a subject matter, only a focus for his protective energies which will preserve "marvels" from the enemy that threatens. Interestingly, this displaces the earlier Romantic concern in Ossi about whether there is a focus, a marvel, a worthy enemy, and even whether the poet exists. While raising such questions, Montale was skeptical of Romantic language and consequently at times used a language that negated its own content. Moreover, he wished to convey his states of mind without abstractions and without words used apart from their conventional syntactic order. Now, Montale manages 191

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to keep a relatively conservative poetic language—while working linguistic miracles—in part because the war allows him to give his meanings through facts, to "rendere corporeo anche rimmateriale." 46 For instance, instead of using such a conventional simile as "the war is like a storm that incessantly drips" only to distort it, he instinctively turns the materials of the simile into the language of a dramatic plot in which the storm becomes both the atmosphere and the aggressor. As we have seen, he avoids language that is exclamatory, fragmented, and unfinished, and yet writes as though in "un fulmineo tempo psicologico" (an instantaneous psychological time).47 Without building his poems on words that have purely arbitrary meaning— words are not often his building blocks, as they are in MaIlarme—he can achieve extraordinary coherence. While the storm or war completes many ideas that began in Ossi, it does not do so in a deliberate way: Montale's is a self-completing poetic world, not a frozen one. In Ossi, he had asked questions that were already metaphysical in nature: in "I morti" (The Dead) and "Delta," for instance, he asked what form unlived life can take and where, and in what shape, memories exist. Now, these questions are made into metaphor as many ideas have changed form and produce new and unexpected poetic resolutions. One of the metaphysical questions is the nature and end of human life, most usually represented by memory. We have said that memory is not used in a sensual and evocative way and that time, past or future, has little positive potential: at best, one can salvage, that is, retain, almost as physical objects, a few particular images from the past. The ability to retain these memories becomes in turn a metaphor for the survival of spirit. Montale does not understand more because of Clizia's departing gesture; he responds to a threat to the survival of gestures.48 It is almost as though he fears for the survival of consciousness. Thus, the war is made the more real by the invocation, however ambiguous, 192

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of what it imperils, and the remembrance of what is imper­ iled is heightened by the war. The war is important to Montale's poetry in that it gives him an occasion. As a poet, he no longer needs to create dark in order to create light, as was the case in the "Motets," and the storm is no longer the artificial and musi­ cal one of "Infuria sale ο grandine" (1938). His language no longer seems to create effects of no known cause. He need no longer wonder whether suffering is sterile, need no longer create mysterious environments in which atmo­ sphere teases but does not satisfy the imagination, as in the much discussed "Buffalo" (1929) of Le occasioni. More posi­ tively, the war gives Montale a name for suffering that assails, a place for darkness that is everywhere outside of the mind's own light. It also gives an instance, now pro­ tracted and undeniable, of life as a waiting place for liber­ ation, passed by events that have no purpose.

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" G L I O R E C C H I N I " : FROM ' S C O M P O S I Z I O N E " TOWARD "RICOMPOSIZIONE" Il libriccino, con quell'epigrafe di D'Aubigne, che flagella i principi sanguinarii, era impubblicabile in Italia, nel '43. Lo stampai percio in Svizzera e usci poco prima del 25 luglio. Nella recente ristampa contiene alcune poesie "divaganti." In chiave, terribilmente in chiave, tra quelle aggiunte, c'e "Iride," nella quale la sfinge delle "Nuove stanze," che aveva lasciato l'oriente per illuminare i ghiacci e Ie brume del nord, torna a noi come continuatrice e simbolo dell'eterno sacrificio cristiano. Paga lei per tutti, sconta per tutti. E chi la riconosce e il Nestoriano, l'uomo che meglio conosce Ie affinita che legano Dio alle creature incarnate, non gia Io sciocco spiritualista ο il rigido e astratto monofisita. Ho sognato due volte e ritrascritto questa poesia: come potevo farla piu chiara correggendola e interpretandola arbitrariamente io stesso? Essa mi sembra la sola che meriti gli appunti di obscurisme mossimi di recente da Sinisgalli; ma anche cosi non mi pare da buttarsi via. "Intenzioni" a

"The tiny book, with the epigraph taken from D'Aubigne, which scourges the bloodthirsty princes, was unpublishable in the Italy of '43. So I had it printed in Switzerland and it came out just before July 25. In the recent reprint it contains a few "wandering" poems. Among the addi­ tions, there is "Iride," its key—terribly so—[a poem] in which the sphinx 194

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the appearance of Satura in 19711—poems collected in this volume appeared in print over the course of the 1960s—literary critics, inspired by the appealing triad formed by Montale's poetic publications and by the sheer span of time involved, had tended to see an overall tripartite configuration. To some, the poetry seemed to form a simple and deliberate counterpoint to historical events in this century; others tried to define three stages of thematic or stylistic development, and still others stressed a development in content, for example Montale's transcendence of his early skepticism and isolation by a move toward moral vision, historical consciousness, or personal stoicism before the events of history. 2 All such coherence left when Satura appeared, for it upset the notion of three—and even more—distinct stylistic "moments." Its apparent stylistic innovations are traceable to Montale's earlier poetry and even his prose, and the most seemingly new casualness yields characteristically Montalian complexities. 3 In it merge many aspects of Montale: he is polemical, prosaic, confessional, and lyrical, or, as the poet said to one critic, free, casual, realistic, episodic, and diaristic.4 As for the vision of a coherent, evolving, and growing poetry, Satura, a volume of humor, parody, cynicism, and withdrawal, was said "to represent the progressive corrosion" of the "conclusive qualities" of the earlier poetry. 5 The Diario del 72 e del '72 (1973) and Quaderno di quattro anni (1977; Notebook of Four Years), which followed BEFORE

of the "Nuove stanze," who had left the East to illuminate the ice and mists of the North returns to us as the lady who continues and symbolizes eternal Christian sacrifice. She pays for everyone, she makes atonement for everyone. The man who recognizes her is a Nestorian, a man who best knows the affinities that tie God to incarnate creatures—certainly not a foolish spiritualist or a rigid, abstract Monophysite. Twice I dreamed and retranscribed this poem: how could I make it clearer by making corrections and arbitrarily interpreting it myself? It seems to me to be the only poem to merit Sinisgalli's recent reproach of obscurantism. All the same, I don't think I should discard it. 195

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on the heels of Satura, seem to continue in its vein, merging styles and inverting stylistic norms. Stylistic, thematic, and ideological overviews, perhaps intended only to be critical conveniences, became critical impediments to the understanding of Montale's poetry. But since the 1960s there has been in Italy an energetic and coherent corrective critical effort. Italian Structuralist literary critics are not dismayed by the absence of "fourth," "fifth," or subsequent Montales, or of a conclusive or expansive poetic testament. They reject on principle all literary-critical approaches which, in attempting to extrapolate the overall "shape" or "meaning" of poetry, distinguish between poetic form and content and abstract aspects of style or content as the subject of literary discussion. They are also undismayed by the apparently corrosive, negative, and isolated persona that first appeared in Satura. In their view, no poet, when writing, is directly engaged in an external reality; indeed, for them, the very question of engagement does not legitimately concern the literary critic, since it involves him in the discussion of the "mental facts" of history and culture which they see as irrelevant to the description of poetry. 6 For the Structuralist, Montale's poetry is a formal fabrication, a Mallarmean chessboard, whose meaning ultimately coincides with his attempt to wrest significance out of even such nonsemantic areas of the poem as its metrical or rhyme patterns. Of the critics whose approach exemplifies aspects of Structuralist literary criticism and who have turned their attention to Montale's poetry, D'Arco Silvio Avalle is perhaps the best known for his monograph "GH orecchini" di Montale. Moving back and forth between the structure of this single sonnet of the "Finisterre" section of La bufera and "the system" of Montale's poetic works, Avalle concludes that Montale's poem is the product of "materiali di reimpiego," "reemployed and reinvested materials," 7 and generalizes to argue that a given poem of Montale acquires meaning only insofar as it is related to this larger "system." For Avalle, each work is only "a detail 196

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of a larger design" through which the poet achieves transcendence. 8 Although Avalle takes note of the clear, denotative quality of the language of "GIi orecchini," he proceeds to interpret it only through its connotative levels of meaning. He justifies his exclusiveness by stating that the structural cohesion or unity of Montale's poem is achieved by the interactions of its suggestive and connotative levels of meaning, that when the poem is interpreted through this net of interrelated meanings, individual words are most fully functional and hence meaningful in the total poetic structure. 9 But underlying this method of analysis is the premise that structural cohesion or poetic unity and the system of interactions on which it is based are the aspects of poetry that most truly characterize it. Indeed, Avalle has claimed that they are the only ones that should interest the literary critic. Avalle's treatment of total poetic system and individual structure as a constellation of thematic threads rather than of phonic and rhythmic symmetries makes of him an original practitioner of the Structuralist method. 10 Moreover, he does not attempt a systematic description of Montale's "larger design," in part because, in his view, the moves on "the chessboard" of Montale's poetic work spring unpredictably from the creative impulse of the poet. Guided by an intuition of poetic consistency which is, then, in part unconscious and yet superhuman, Avalle assigns meanings to the images of a single poem by relating them to their other appearances in the poet's works and to the unified system of interactions of meaning within the poem. Finally, having demonstrated that, when thus interpreted, the poem's images build a structure based on the principle of bipolarity, he finds its referent in the psychological ambivalence of the poet, and concludes that the central theme or meaning of the poem is "love which is also destruction." 11 Thus Avalle has used an empirical approach as a springboard to levels of meaning not ultimately subject to objective analysis. On the basis of his reading of "GIi 197

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orecchini," Avalle argues that Montale's is a highly modernistic, ambiguous, existential "either-or" approach to life. Avalle's important essay approaches the question of psychological reference directly, whereas Structuralists on the whole have tended to touch upon it only indirectly in their overriding interest in the description of formal structure. 12 Avalle's conclusions are reminiscent of idealistic elements of British and American New Criticism.13 When applied more fully, together with some Structuralist perceptions, they form a profitable approach to Montale's most complex poetry, for instance, "GIi orecchini" and other poems of "Finisterre." Interestingly enough, Montale's own expressed views of poetic ambiguity, which Avalle cites in support of his approach, tend to suggest that if his poetic language is by nature ambiguous, it is somewhat less than absolute. Although Montale elsewhere argues that modern poetry seeks to reach an absolute condition which is beyond history and that the reader must approach "the instantaneous psychological time" of the poem with an atemporal mind,14 he also suggests that his own poetry has areas of reference that are temporal and concrete: I miei motivi sono semplici e sono: il paesaggio (qualche volta allucinato, ma spesso naturalistico: il nostro paesaggio ligure, che e universalissimo); l'amore, sotto forma di fantasmi che frequentano Ie varie poesie e provocano Ie solite "intermittenze del cuore," (gergo proustiano che io non uso) e l'evasione, la fuga dalla catena ferrea della necessita, il miracolo, diciamo cosi, laico.b 15 b

The themes of my poetry are simple. They are: the landscape (sometimes hallucinated but often naturalistic: our Ligurian landscape which is most universal); love, in the shape of phantasms which haunt the various poems and provoke the usual "intermittences of the heart" (Proustian jargon that I don't use); and escape, the flight from the iron chain of necessity, the secular miracle, so to speak. 198

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Montale's discussion of the "simple" themes of his poetry is replete with suggestions of its psychological and verbal ambiguity. There is the theme of a landscape which is only occasionally susceptible of transformation; there is the allusion to emotions which respond intermittently to the specter of love; there is the complex view that life may be at the same time predetermined and miraculous; and there is the use and simultaneous ironic rejection of language to define his state of mind. But Montale's discussion suggests other areas of ambiguity. For if the landscape is "hallucinated," it is also "naturalistic"; if love "visits" and "haunts" the poems, it also "haunts" the poet; if there is "escape" from "the iron chain of necessity," this "escape" has a secular as well as a transcendent dimension. Thus, Montale suggests that his poetry has both intensive and extensive areas of meaning: images that may carry both concrete and symbolic references; emotions that spring from the poem and those that inform it; ideas that can be rationalized and those that cannot be. And at times his themes may be expressed in language that is simultaneously direct and ironic. Thus, formal "events" and poetic resolutions do not cancel out the world of experience lying outside of the poem. Such is, in fact, the case of "GIi orecchini." In studying this poem, Avalle refuses to consider all meanings that are not self-referential, to regard the poem as in part concrete, metaphysical, and secular, and to show those areas of the poem that appeal to our imagination, memory, and knowledge of things in extension.16 He has not considered the nonverbal aspects of the poem,17 the extent to which it is composed of images and symbols that are universalized, and the extent to which its "system of signs" carries us outside of the subconscious and the internal form of man. As he examines the connotations of each word in the poem, Avalle keeps before him a highly publicized statement of Montale's on the prisoner of the "storm" poems.18 199

C H A P T E R SIX But Montale's writing often offers an idea he has in mind, but does not want to impose, and offers as a secondary idea one that may be of primary importance. As we have seen, Montale uses subtle irony at the expense of literary critics. For instance, he wrote of the "Finisterre" poems: "These are a few poems, born in the incubus of '40-'42, and are per­ haps the freest I have ever written." But he wrote of the same poems' stylistic control: "My poetry of that period could only become more closed, more concentrated." 1 9 The two statements, taken together, seem intended to imply that the obvious obscurity of the poems was not, after all, the result of lack of political freedom. Montale's poetry does not direct the reader what to think nor does it meditate on its own ideas. If one were com­ pelled to use polarity in describing this poetic world, one would say that the poet usually moves from a sphere that can be described as "only what it is" to one in which things are "more than they appear to be." Sometimes this process leads to a Christian logical necessity, as in "L'arca" (The Ark or The Tomb) of "Finisterre," which invokes a storm far from "questa terra folgorata": La tempesta certo Ii riunira sotto quel tetto di prima, ma lontano, piu lontano di questa terra folgorata dove bollono calce e sangue nell'impronta del piede umano. Fuma il ramaiolo in cucina, un suo tondo di riflessi accentra i volti ossuti, i musi aguzzi e Ii protegge in fondo la magnolia se un soffio ve la getta. La tempesta primaverile scuote d'un latrato di fedelta la mia area, ο perduti. c The storm certainly will bring them together beneath that roof of old, but far off, farther off than this earth struck by lightning where lime and blood boil in the imprint of man's foot. The ladle steams in the kitchen, 200

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The only thing that survives in the generically conceived stormy world is memory, which in turn assails the poet. Memory is not opposed to inertia, the "oblio" of the "Motets," but to a state of "oblivion." What rises out of the earthly storm is an invocation of a higher, other—but not any other—storm. This higher storm is more invoked than evoked, for it is not conceived by imagination but only by a sense of urgency. By necessity, this higher storm must be different from "questa terra folgorata dove / bollono cake e sangue nell'impronta / del piede umano." Montale does not subject everything to the same scrutiny. His memories are made to be intact chiefly because they are threatened, and because wherever man has set his foot is a place unquestionably unfit for reunion with the earlier "morti," his "dead ones." He sees their "volti ossuti, i musi aguzzi"—images "reflected" mysteriously and "centered" in some present place—in the "ramaiolo / in cucina," in a microcosm, a "ladle." We will isolate a similar process in "GIi orecchini," where the poet will centralize his reflected memories, given both in the usual sense of images from the past and as reflections, made more vivid by a screen of unacceptable facts. We have seen amply, notably in the motets "Lo sai, debbo riperderti e non posso" and "Non recidere, forbice," and in the poems "Elegia di Pico Farnese" and "Su una lettera non scritta," that Montale's poetry is both ambivalent and polivalent. The poet is not certain of reality's existence, yet everything must have a meaning. These attitudes are not opposed, but related to each other dynamically in a poetry characterized by effects of causes not shown, hyperbolically expressed situations, apotheosis, and vision. Such poetry cannot be studied profitably only in terms of ambigone of its reflection-filled spheres centralizes the bony faces, the sharp muzzles, and—if a breath casts it there—the magnolia at the end protects them. The spring storm shakes with its howling of fidelity my ark, oh lost ones. 201

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uous bipolarity, opposed emotions, especially because, as we have seen, the language of opposition may be at times a superimposed Petrarchan convention. The relation of these attitudes, then, is Platonic and dynamic: Montale creates a poetry of searching. Moreover, this is a poetry in time without being timely, written by a poet who said, on the one hand, that he would have written the same poetry in any age or environment, that there are no ideas in art essential to its understanding, 20 that the physical world may not exist, and that the material of his poetry is his sense of disharmony; and, on the other hand, that art cannot be placed outside of history because cultural factors affect the poet (and these are always historically determined), that the theme of all poetry is ultimately the human condition, that every poetic liberation leads to comprehension of the world, that the very nonexistence of the world is meaningful, that the artist responds to general needs even when he works in isolation, and that poetic language is "incurably semantic" and "historicized." 21 Montale never sought to create a reality out of language, and for this reason is sharply different from the Mallarme with whom Structuralists so often compare him. Instead, he always sought to discover a truth, yet had to use poetic materials corresponding to experiences in life that often reveal only their own futility. Thus Montale's poetry confronts a fundamental issue of language itself. After Ossi di seppia, he chose to use the poetic materials available as though they were concrete building blocks of the poetry rather than to meditate poetically on or argue about the impossibility of writing. At least the pact that he struck with language and with his materials allowed him to find an outlet for a kind of obstinate lyricism in his writing. In many lyric passages, feelings, especially those about Clizia, are unambiguously positive and the language is quite free. There are "open areas," modern equivalents of Romantic poetry's topoi that life is adverse, that the poet needs protection, that he is isolated and in despair. What happens in 202

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this poetry, which eschews conventional metaphors, is that the poet's often unambiguous attitudes tend to shape the poem, and secondary attitudes, often ambiguous, opposing, or tense, surface in the language. One danger of overly formalist criticism, in scrutinizing isolated words and networks of connotation, is the neglect of the tone and dramatic nature of the poetry, for instance its often hyperbolic quality. Montale is often willing to sus­ pend the pleasure he gets in the curious particular images life offers, especially flora and fauna—bright birds, ingra­ tiating pets—to make things worse, to set himself poetic challenges, and to argue for the necessity of Clizia's immi­ nent arrival. "GIi orecchini," for example, begins with a hyperbolic situation: in its first two words, " N o n serba," nothing at all remains, is kept, not even a shred of hope. In part, that sonnet is devised to find within its conventional sonnet form an answer to its own challenge. Montale's comments on his poetry touch on the ambig­ uous relations among literal, symbolic, mythic, and allegor­ ical language in his poetry, and between his language, at whatever of these levels, and the psychological value car­ ried by the words themselves. The important poem "Giorno e notte" is typical of La bufera in its mixture of lin­ guistic levels and in its use of seemingly concrete details whose value is unclear to the reader and troubling to critics: Anche una piuma che vola puo disegnare la tua figura, ο il raggio che gioca a rimpiattino tra i mobili, il rimando dello specchio di un bambino, dai tetti. SuI giro delle mura strascichi di vapore prolungano Ie guglie dei pioppi e giu sul trespolo s'arruffa il pappagallo dell'arrotino. Poi la notte afosa sulla piazzola, e i passi, e sempre questa dura fatica di affondare per risorgere eguali da secoli, ο da istanti, d'incubi che non possono ritrovare la luce dei tuoi occhi nell'antro 203

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incandescente—e ancora Ie stesse grida e i lunghi pianti sulla veranda se rimbomba improvviso il colpo che t'arrossa la gola e schianta l'ali, ο perigliosa annunziatrice dell'alba, e si destano i chiostri e gli ospedali a un lacerio di trombe. d The poem is difficult in part because reliance on any single linguistic level does not build to a coherent reading. Are the details, like "e si destano i chiostri e gli ospedali / a un lacerio di trombe," allusions to a war, and if so, what is its function in the poem? Is the "piuma che vola" a concrete object, to be taken, in its lightness, as a sign of Clizia, or is it, by metonymy, a foreshadowing of an allegorical dawn— and if it is, what is the relationship of the "perigliosa / annunziatrice" to the earlier allusion to a bird, and why is the later bird mortally wounded? In an explanatory letter to Glauco Cambon, Montale states that whatever passages take place from the literal to the symbolic meaning of words are unplanned and instinctive: Se poi si puo vedere in lei un usignolo—e perche non un robin, che ha la gola rossa e che canta all'alba?— io non ci trovo difficolta; l'importante e che il traslato dal vero al simbolico ο viceversa in me avviene sempre inconsapevolmente. Io parto sempre dal vero, non so d

Even a flying feather can design your shape, or the ray that plays hideand-seek among the furnishings, the reply of a child's mirror from the roofs. Over the ring of city walls trailing dregs of steam lengthen the poplars' spires, and down there on the trestle the knife grinder's parrot ruffles. Then the suffocating night on the platform and the steps and always this hard weariness of sinking only to rise again, always the same—nightmares, for centuries or instants—that cannot again find the light of your eyes in the incandescent cave—and still the same cries and the long lamentations on the veranda, if suddenly the blow resounds which reddens your throat and tears your wings, oh perilous lady-mes­ senger of the dawn, and the cloisters and hospitals waken to a rending cry of trumpets.

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inventare nulla; ma quando mi metto a scrivere (rapidamente e con poche correzioni) il nucleo poetico ha avuto in me una lunga incubazione: lunga e oscura. Apris coup, a cose fatte, conosco Ie mie intenzioni. Il dato realistico, pero, e sempre presente, sempre vero. NeI caso di "Giorno e notte" caserme, ospedali e suoni di trombe (la sveglia, il rancio, la libera uscita ecc.) appartengono al quadra di una citta militarizzata. Nulla vieta di vedere in questo il profilo del perenne inferno terrestre. e H Montale's comments raise questions for readers accus­ tomed to responding to the psychological value of images, which is, in some kinds of poetry, a living part of them: such readers expect transformation inherent in metaphor to be emotional or intellectual, and expect images to convey moments of intuition and knowledge. In "Giorno e notte," however, these expectations mislead, as does the assump­ tion that the poem's words "stand for" something, and function with equal weight in a prearranged system. Instead, we have a dramatic poetry in which words diso­ rient the reader, and should cause him to ask whether this "awakening" ("si destano") is truly an awakening, and whether awakening to life has any worthwhile purpose. The final "lacerating trumpets" convey an effect of hor­ ror—not of a sound—but one that in the poem has no "If she is then seen as a nightingale—and why not even a robin, which has a red breast and sings at dawn?—that's fine with me; the important thing is that the transfer from real to symbolic and vice versa is for me always unconscious. I always start with what is real; I don't know how to invent anything; but once I'm writing (which I do rapidly, and with few corrections) the poetic nucleus has had within me a long incubation, long and obscure. Only αρτέβ coup, when all is done, do I know my intentions. The realistic datum, however, is always present, always real. In the case of "Giorno e notte" barracks, hospitals, and the sounds of trumpets (rev­ eille, rations, the off-duty signal, etc.) are part of the picture of a militar­ ized city. Nothing prevents [the reader] from seeing the outline of an eternal hell on earth. 205

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cause. To ask what the trumpets signify is to move outside the poem, for, unlike Robert Lowell's lines in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" ("The guns of the steeled fleet / Recoil and then repeat / The hoarse salute"), Montale's images do not comment on a situation such as Lowell's "Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea." The first images, "una piuma che vola," "il raggio che gioca a rimpiattino," and "il rimando dello specchio," suggest that they can sfi/Z—the "anche" carries a new note of perseverance—and in surprising ways and places, evoke Clizia. They can give her configuration, a mental design, and even almost designate qualities: flight, light, playfulness, and unexpectedness. The images that follow, however, seem to prolong an evening devoid of these qualities. He must make Clizia live by dreaming of her, yet he is not able to find her light in the "antro / incandescente" of nightmare. This failure is underlined by the ominous images that return with the dawn—their function is, then, chiefly to convey the idea that ominousness still pervades the atmosphere. In "Giorno e notte," images have a new apocalyptic resonance, for they seem to embody evil as they impede her arrival. For all the horror they suggest, particularly "Ie stesse grida," "i lunghi / pianti," "il colpo che t'arrossa / la gola," down to the final "un lacerio di trombe," they are curiously without appeal to any particular source or example of horror. Much earlier in his poetry, Montale had named his examples, notably in "Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato." There, the use of discrete examples showed that the poet had no definition of life's "ill" and "evil," only a conviction of its existence and of its effects. The second stanza, usually taken to be in dialectical opposition to the first (good to evil), really only proceeds by rising amorphously out of it: this is a world in which good is only a skeptical hope that derives from the conviction of the tenacious omnipresence of evil, and images for good can only be given by the most extremely indirect allusion. Montale does not return to this procedure, and the focus of "Giorno 206

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e notte" is, instead, only on the effect of outside evil, on the poet's inability to dream, and on his invocation of Clizia. When she comes, she arrives injured, but the reason for her mortal wounds is not made clear. Perhaps because her voyage to him is a mental one, he must resee her in relation to the concrete details of her life and a difficult past. This process, in turn, contaminates his higher dream, to be free, or, at least, to see her free of this world: Il suo compito di inconsapevole Cristofora non Ie consente altro trionfo che non sia l'insuccesso di quaggiu: lontananza, dolore, vaghe fantomatiche riapparizioni (vedi "Iride" pubblicata nel '43 e inclusa nella seconda edizione di Finisterre, pubblicata dal Barbera), quel tanto di presenza che sia per chi Io riceve un memento, un'ammonizione. La sua fisionomia e sempre corrucciata, altera, la sua stanchezza e mortale, indomabile il suo coraggio: se angelo e, mantiene tutti gli attributi terrestri, non e ancora riuscita a disincarnarsi (cfr. con "Voce giunta con Ie folaghe," scritta qualche anno dopo). Tuttavia e gia /won, mentre noi siamo dentro. Era dentro anche lei (cfr. "Nuove stanze," nelle Occasioni), ma poi e partita (cfr. "La primavera hitleriana") per compiere la sua missioned M The poem "Serenata indiana" (Indian Serenade) shows that timelessness—the condition of freedom from contingencies—can be conceived in varying ways. Here, it is a moment of dissolution of time's binding elements, an 'Her mission as unwitting bearer of Christ allows her as her only form of victory the failed events of this world: distance, sorrow, vague phantasmal reappearances (see "Iride" published in '43 and included in the second edition of Finisterre, published by Barbera), only so much presence as to constitute a memento, a warning for the man who accepts it. Her appearance is always troubled and proud; her fatigue is mortal but her courage untamable; if she is truly an angel, she still preserves all her earthly attributes; she has not yet managed to divest herself of her body (cf. "Voice Which Arrived with the Coots," written a few years afterward). All the same, she is already outside, whereas we are inside. Once she too had been inside (cf. "Nuove stanze," in Occasioni), but then she left to fulfill her mission (cf. "La primavera hitleriana").

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"undoing of evenings" ("il disfarsi delle sere")—perhaps an approach to sleep—which may prompt the agreeable conceit that the woman only "pretends to believe that she is with him" ("se tu fingi / di crederti con me"). Truly, she seems to believe that she is sufficient to herself, and yet he can show how she belongs at least to "the octopus which insinuates inky tentacles among the rocky cliffs" ("il polipo che insinua / tentacoli d'inchiostro tra gli scogli"), an image that suggests the tenacity both of memory and of the dream in which he may have to draw her to him. The language is reminiscent of the conceitful designs of the "Motets." This poem also concentrates on the ambiguous question of Clizia's presence, on her power over him, and on his efforts to name, to design, or to designate it. The presence of such conceits confirms the fruitlessness of "levels of language" or the dichotomy of language and reality as a point of concentration in analyzing the poetry. Montale sought to overcome this dualism in the late 1920s, at which time he did not recognize, however, that in Ossi he had effectively gone beyond conventional simile and metaphor. When he used similes there, he did so with such a high poetic energy that their logical grammatical links and their intelligibility became irrelevant; for instance, as early as 1916, the date of "Meriggiare pallido e assorto," perhaps the best known and most anthologized poem of Montale's, he had used prepositions, linking devices in descriptive passages, to introduce new areas of feeling and thought: 24 E andando nel sole che abbaglia sentire con triste meraviglia com'e tutta la vita e il suo travaglio in questo seguitare una muraglia che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia. g (Italics mine) g And moving in the blinding sun, to feel with sad wonder how all of life and its travail is in pressing on along a barrier wall with sharp shards of bottles on its crest (italics mine).

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In this poem, which avoids statements about life as well as summations built on details, Montale first isolates images that could, however momentarily, fuse the poet as perceiver with the concrete phenomena he perceives. The results are areas of animation that fuse details of image with poetic will: Osservare tra frondi il palpitare lontano di scaglie di mare mentre si levano tretnuli scricchi di cicale dai calvi picchi. h (Italics mine) In Ossi, one cannot talk of imaginative prehension and content, or fusions of thought and emotion. Perhaps responding to this situation, earlier critics argued that there is no feeling in the poetry, which is, consequently, only marginally poetic in nature. But from "Meriggiare" on, in fact, Montale used images that are minimal in relation to one content and maximal in relation to another, unstated, one. In this poetry, Montale offers to the reader a new poet, one who is not in charge and who is limited by his materials and by what they can offer. He can discover meanings in a landscape that is already (but only to a limited extent) an expression of himself or assert them by giving details of a landscape; he can scrutinize signs in the landscape or see them take their own wilful shape. He is, variously, hypnotized, surprised, and confused, foreshadowings of the dramatic activities in later poems. In the late 1920s, Montale deliberately confronted the difficulties of finding a poetic language; in a different poet, the recognition of such difficulties might have led to using grammar with deliberation, for purely experimental purposes. But Montale's interest was never in language as an abstract problem in writing. In Le occasion!, Montale solved many of the questions of language by finding a form that h

To observe through the foliage the distant pulsing of sea-scales while tremulous cicada screaking rises from bald peaks (italics mine). 209

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permitted him to organize his poetic effects and to eliminate—for instance, by the focus on Clizia—poetically indifferent materials. These materials also included description that serves no purpose and questions for which no answers can be found. In this volume, Montale discovers that the poet should not invoke feelings, that minor feelings can be major, and that many are uncovered in the very act of writing poetry. The poems become challenges to find, by the unexpected pairing of amorphous longing with poetic form, the connectedness of things. Sometimes Montale finds connectedness by inventing a purpose for the images that surround him: symptomatically, he no longer asks for 'Tanello che non tiene" ("I limoni"). The internal time that results replaces the sometimes Romantically conceived time of Ossi di seppia. He abandons the polemical openings that characterize many of the poems of this earlier volume, in favor of a constructed framework. At times, this framework may be multiple, with one leading into another, as in "Carnevale di Gerti," where none provides a final organization. Montale also abandons the explicit concern with finding a proper subject matter for poetry, and discovers that any subject matter may yield infinite treatment, especially as the many characters of that volume transform events into their own language as though they were writing their own history, for instance in "Dora Markus." The earlier concern with the transitory nature of life, which found expression in the evocation of the past, now yields to anxiety about memory itself which is superimposed on, or seems to rise out of, the effort to hold onto memories as onto physical objects. These memories are not interrogated, any more than the poetic self; indeed, there seems to be, for all the self-reference of the poetry, no interest in the self, except a desire to escape from it. At times, the sense of unreality leads the poet, from "Il balcone" to "Tempi di Bellosguardo," to the invention of contingent insight: what he sees depends on what others see, and thus he can simultaneously describe and negate his 210

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descriptions. At times, the sense of unreality that leads to inventions by which the poet connects images proceeds from a feeling that things are too connected, too inevitable. In the latter instance, there is no need to invent poetic materials, for these are given and must be used, even be selected rigorously. Montale overcomes earlier crises—lack of traditional poetic emotion, a sense that life does not hold together and that imagination is dead—by using them, making them a priori elements of construction in the poem. The poet keeps just one step ahead of poetic impasse. He mythicizes just enough to get a syntax and takes materials wherever they are offered, no matter how seemingly unpoetic they are. In Le occasioni, lack of knowledge is the necessary premise for understanding. In Ossi, time was a cause of pain: in Le occasioni, it still is, but each poem confronts it with new inventions of time sequence. Were we to analyze time in these poems, we could extrapolate a limited series of statements: nothing begins again, the poet is destined to lose, and the future will only confirm these truths. But Clizia provides the poet with something that, having passed into memory, is worth lamenting. This focus is important for a poet who is not certain of reality, but is certain of its significance. Some critics have made much of what they take to be the return to conventional lyric themes in La bufera, but this emphasis does the poetry a disservice by obfuscating what is new in it. In "A mia madre," the poet appears to be imbued with something akin to classical pietas, and invokes the beloved dead. But the remembrance of his mother provokes him to ask implicitly what memory itself is made of; to borrow from Montale's conceit in "Su una lettera non scritta," memory seems to be a necklace of discrete beads— images or lives—each of which is only itself, unrepeatable, and which, unlike Clizia, yields upon scrutiny no higher essence, but confirms only the fact of its own, now past, existence. This is essence too, but only that of unrepeatability, and its comfort can be meager. The procedure is typ211

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ical of La bufera, where ideas coexist dialectically: everything must have a meaning to redeem the unrepeatable existence of each man, but, if nothing has any meaning, then memory (not a Bergsonian flux of psychic states, but the poet-as-survivor) must preserve it.25 However, since nothing, after all, may be real, lives may be only an imprint in the life of the beholder. Montale is not a rhetorical poet: he does not say more than he feels, or claim to understand more than he can show. He is too desirous of answers to such metaphysical dilemmas to substitute lifeless verbal totems for them, and too filled with skepticism to turn his ontological crises into linguistic ones. The key to the distinction between the skepticism that tells him that reality may not exist and the pragmatism that rejects such skepticism in order to live and to write is implicit in these words from Montale's interview with Ferdinando Camon:26 Quando dico che probabilmente il mondo non esiste mi guardo bene dal pretendere che questa inesistenza sia priva di un significato positivo: ha certo un significato il fatto che il mondo, per noi, esista. Non si puo vedere contemporaneamente il recto e il verso della medaglia.1 Montale's language is irreducible, but there is a reality behind it which words point to and a truth toward which those words are used. It is interesting that in Montale's comments on his poetry he does not refer to the appositeness of images to ideas and feelings he had in mind (and to which, therefore, words should be adequate), but rather to the truths that he sought, and that also rise out of language. La bufera, generally considered to be the most complex and even, mistakenly, the most Hermetic of his poetry, does not 'When I say that probably the world doesn't exist I do not mean to suggest in any way that its nonexistence is without some positive meaning: certainly the fact that the world may exist for us has meaning. You can't see the recto and verso of a medal at the same time. 212

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exemplify a tendency to occult ideas but, in fact, a tendency to condense ideas that have accumulated and become internalized. This accumulation may explain why there are so few poetic asides, phrases that expand incidental concerns, so few changes in direction that might develop unexpected reflections and new states of mind. At times Montale uses objects semantically, at times he uses materials that may or may not be real in order to get at truths that do not always have an appropriate vehicle. Hence, if necessary, he will use words in their common, disconcertingly concrete sense, appropriate forms proper to narration and description, leave some poetic elements to chance, accept indeliberate obscurities, rely on sensation—rather than intuition—if it is all that can be gotten out of a particular set of images. The reader's attention cannot long be diverted from the truths the poet seeks to language as a medium: "Siamo lontani da un atteggiamento che richiami la fede decadente nella parola assoluta, nella funzione taumaturgica della pronuncia poetica; questa infatti presupponeva un'abolizione della realta, la sua riduzione all' 'inganno della rappresentazione/ l'incontro con la Beatrice mallermeana ('La Destruction fut ma Beatrice')" (We are far from any position that calls up the decadent faith in the "absolute word," in the thaumaturgical function of poetic utterance: for in fact it presupposed abolishing reality, reducing reality to a "representational trick," an encounter with the Mallarmean Beatrice ["La Destruction fut ma Beatrice"]).27 Thus, he differs sharply from Mallarme, who transmutes his crises into a crisis of language, for even if life is a dream played out exclusively in the mind, Montale chooses to write as though it were not. He will go to great lengths to provide a setting even for things not said and not done ("Personae separatae"), to dream his "correlatives" in the presence of reason, or against a concrete backdrop, no matter how it shifts into and out of his view, into and out of literal status, as he focuses on his central idea, or on what may come into being in the "antro incandescente." 213

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"Il giglio rosso" (The Red Lily) demonstrates how fragile the poetic form is when the focusing is not fixed and secure and there is not enough arrangement of events to allow him to pass through his different levels of language. The "lily," a recurrent symbol of Clizia, serves many functions without successfully blending them. It is a symbol for a quality she had in her "twenty-year-old heart" ("nel tuo cuor di vent'anni"); it is a conceit to attribute the unselfconscious brilliance of a "new sun" ("nuovo sole") to her; it is a symbol of a "sacrifice" ("sacrificato") that finds no concomitant form in the poem; it exists to yield to an image—the "mistletoe" or "traps" ("vischi")—which does no more than allude to Clizia's perilous passage to a northern land and to the relentless cold that swirls about her— both present metonymically in her hands and scarf. Finally, it is the flower that has no purpose but syntactically to introduce the "ditch" or "furrow" (it is a "ditch flower," "fiore di fosso") that must lead Clizia outside of—and therefore make her victorious over—time. For all the language, Clizia's meaning finds none: the notion of her sacrifice disturbs, as is often the case in La bufera, as does the urgent wish to see her untouched by earthly contingencies, for these are not shown to be her captors. "Finestra fiesolana" (Window in Fiesole) strikes a more successful balance between statement and metaphor. The language is more condensed than the emotions and ideas it seeks to convey, and there are also radiating spaces in it. The antagonist here is familiar, time itself, whose symptoms are the "insidious cricket" ("il grillo insidioso") that "eats holes" ("buca") in life ("i vestiti di seta vegetale," the dresses of vegetable, botany silk, italics mine), and cuts the poet off from Clizia. The inability to reverse this double process of passage and separation is also conveyed by the "smell of camphor" ("l'odor della canfora") that fails to "put the moths to flight" ("non fuga Ie tarme," with "tarme" signifying both moths and, ironically, their damage), that is, to use by an unusual verbal transition, their 214

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own weapon—flight—against them. Everything continues its insidious work as everything—including the moths themselves—decays (they "pulverize in the books," "sfarinano nei libri"). But Clizia permits the poet to argue with time—for why is she not there, if "the baby bird climbs in a spiral"? ("l'uccellino s'arrampica a spirale")—and she thus fills a vacancy in the poem which, without her, would be lifeless, for all its activity. The poem, which concludes with an image of light insufficiently illuminated, may suggest Symbolist topoi, but there is the will to fight vacancy and to battle against time by suggesting that in taking everything away it takes away at least one precious thing. Whereas in Le occasion! Montale at times peoples vacant landscapes as though he were filling up a terrible vacuum, in La bufera he takes the language of vacancy and imprisons, suffocates himself within it, as though he had to experience the feeling of suffocation in order to simulate release and give it a name. The hyperbolic situation of the evening in Fiesole evokes, by inversion, that world of impossibilities long since cast aside by the poet—since the time of Ossi—where things may live uncorrupted, capable of "vegetable" growth, and where sunlight, never absent, emblazons the world. "NeI sonno," a poem that we have studied in another context, begins in late evening, a limbo reminiscent of the "Motets." This limbo is created by the hooting of owls which does not announce the night, but, by a paratactic relation of clauses, the extinction of hope, "Il canto delle strigi, quando un'iride / con intermessi palpiti si stinge." The reader is made to hear things one could never hear— the "intermessi palpiti," the "gemiti e i sospiri / di gioventu"—and to feel a pressure that drives the poet further into himself to find something truly living and awake ("desto I alia tua voce"). Other sounds that are pricking ("d'una I giga crudele") and an unidentifiable adversary ("l'avversario chiude / la celata sul viso") compel him not to open but to close his eyes and to find a growing light, a 215

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clearing space identifiable with Clizia. It is almost impossible to get any literal meaning out of language used in this way: it is as though the poet were moving through symbols of nonlife that in some way implicate his own past ("i sospiri I di gioventu, l'errore che recinge / Ie tempie"). The poet seems to have a prescience of a higher pattern of life beyond death, but it is also as though he must follow this pattern by escorting it through these aggressively active symbols ("ritornarmi, traboccar . . . rompere"). He does not concentrate on any single one of them, but rather seeks to use them and to organize them. He attempts to resolve this sonnet, but paradoxically cannot do so without eliminating the negative symbols. As he enters sleep, the last sound that he carries with him is the cruel jig associated with the unnamed adversary that is inhuman, yet is as close to anything human as the poet can find. Montale names what Mallarme would evoke, "vago orror," but he discovers it too, and feels it more intensely in the course of writing the poem. This vague horror is attributed to things themselves, the horror of a situation. The events and sounds that he hears in his limbo, nearly deprived of verbal complements, are signs that send no signals, error that has no clear source and that presses in upon the poet. We may guess that the horror is intensified, for the trees are shifted by a blow, by an impact that itself comes from nowhere ("il vago orror dei cedri smossi / dall'urto della notte"). Because of the elimination of the agency of the "urto," this phrase must be taken as a whole: it creates the effect that the poet is lying somewhere between metaphor and situation. The horror may be inner, outer, past, or present, and is as though it were only recreated by the night sounds. The form is a tight one, an equivalent of the poet's desire to hold things together and to hold on. Typically, the poet desires to believe, to be transported further and "beyond death" ("oltre la morte"). Despite the tightness of form, elements within it are, we have said, free floating, and there are interstices, areas for 216

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broad interpretation: as in "Giorno e notte," the time that the poet endures may be measurable in centuries or in sec­ onds ("da secoli, ο da istanti"). Nightmares may rise again from the past or they may be nightmarish dreams—night­ marish only because the poet does not dream of Clizia. Montale leaves several areas unworked; there are unan­ swered questions, for the poet does not know all things. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his refusal, or inabil­ ity, to identify the source of pain in life or to find a symbol of it as central as that of Clizia-Iride. Some of the freedom in poems like "NeI sonno" derives from the fact that each begins as though the poet had an idea in mind, although in the ensuing pitched battle, there is little predetermined. When the battle leads to victory, to the "proof" of Clizia, there is no ecstatic sense of victory. Phrases do not work as symbols, but as embodied forces, conditioned by their source in experience. Montale's refusal to invent purely formal constructs is evidenced by the fact that his success­ ful poems show not so much what Clizia is but what her effect is, and by the fact that the poet is clearly seeking an effable way of expressing what he does not entirely know. This is Montale's answer to a dilemma that other writers, from Rimbaud to Bonnefoy, have answered by trying to possess words as though they were themselves the essence of things, or by creating themselves out of words. In Le occasioni, especially in the "Motets," the barriers between language and reality, inner and outer experience, had fallen. Rhyme was no longer semantic by that time (as in "L'anima che dispensa," with its rhyme of "col," with the, and "sol," the musical note G), it had become difficult to distinguish between nouns and verbs, things and actions ("Il saliscendi bianco e nero dei," italics mine), and phrases seemed to work best when understood to be disembodied symbols ("La canna che dispiuma," The reed that plucks, with its varying yet echoing construction in "la redola nel fosso," the narrow path in the channel, and "il cane trafe28 lato che rincasa," the panting dog that heads home). Such 217

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phrases, despite their immediate descriptive ("trafelato") appeal, mark the end of rationally ordered experience, for they seem to point only to themselves and to have no other reason for being. The effect is that of poetic texture,29 of fragments, unexpected traces of curiosity and unrest. In La bufera, and chiefly in "Finisterre," Montale composes poetic sequences in which phrases like these find a place. In "NeI sonno," for instance, the disembodied "canto delle strigi" has a new element, an incised subordinate adverbial clause beginning with "quando," unrelated to a verb. The result is to suggest a growing condition, an accelerating vortex in time. Notably absent in the new time scheme of La bufera are the abrupt dislocations in "Brina sui vetri; uniti" (Frost on the windows; united), especially in the lines "Ripenso / anche al mio" (I think back to mine too), the broken syntax in "Addii, fischi nel buio, cenni, tosse" (Farewells, whistles in the dark, gestures, coughing), the deliberate ellipses that play with time in "Il saliscendi bianco e nero dei," especially the line "ne ti riporta dove piu non sei" (nor does it carry you back where you no longer are), the anacolutha that, in the "Motets," revealed a smudging of time sequence in "Lontano, ero con te"— interestingly enough, typical of the later prose pieces of Farfalla di Dinard—and the forcing of language that creates a pseudotime, an overconnectedness in "La rana, prima a ritentar la corda" (The frog, first to sound its note again). The passage from Le occasioni to La bufera is thus not from descriptive or literal to mythic language, but rather from a language that begins by combining the properties of all these through the use of literal symbolism to an ever more complex one. It is difficult to convey this change to readers accustomed to modern literal symbolism in English and American poetry. In the poem "Lo sai, debbo riperderti e non posso" of Le occasioni, the phrase "paese di ferrame" blends the effects in English both of the substantive ("land of iron") and the qualitative and indefinite ("iron land"). 218

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There is a further blending of definiteness and indefiniteness, as in the English phrase "the iron land," that uses a definite article to point to nothing seen.30 In La bufera, the effect of familiarity with images that have no specific reference is intensified. For all the experimentation with language, however, there is little deliberate effort to bring the reader into a flow of language and adjust his perceptions. One might compare the paradoxical conceit "sangue tuo nelle mie vene" of "Ecco il segno" with Eliot's "trilling wire in the blood" of "Burnt Norton." In Eliot's phrase, the noun "wire," used in conjunction with "trilling," is so unexpected as to give rise to a disorientation which makes the reader consider all possibilities of the sensibility that is expressing itself in language and readjust his own accordingly. Montale's remarkably reminiscent language in the "Motets" uniquely combines his own sense of mystery (that he can live only with another's blood flowing in his veins), his own unrest, his highly reluctant feelings about Clizia, and his surprising intuition that she is not quite real. Her step is not "plushed," "made soft" by the snow: Il passo che proviene dalla serra si lieve, non e felpato dalla neve, e ancora tua vita, sangue tuo nelle mie vene.' She is not really present, but lyrically she should be. She is away; however, she is, because of his physical start, still ("ancora"—an insistent pseudotemporal element unique to Montale) more real than anything he can point to. Montale, who is an obsessive poet, and yet a free one, does not let his mind wander over possibilities, and as many analogies 'The step that proceeds so lightly from the greenhouse is not plushed by snow; it is still your life, your blood in my veins. 219

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are eliminated as are created in his language. He wrote, in "Il ramarro, se scocca," Luce di lampo invano puo mutarvi in alcunche di ricco e strano. Altro era il tuo stampo. k The phrase "luce di lampo" suggests both "lightning" and a "flashbulb": but no photograph will make her present or make him realize her distance. Her sign is ineradicable and not subject to the malicious tricks of everyday occurrences, whether they be of lightning storms or of photography. Coexisting with a concrete language for what can scarcely be expressed is the surprisingly open language of a phrase like "la tua carta non e questa" (this is not your fate) in "Brina sui vetri; uniti," and even the tendency to bare the bones of analogy, in "La gondola che scivola in un forte" (The gondola that slides in a strong): S'agita laggiu uno smorto groviglio che m'avviva a stratti e mi fa eguale a quell'assorto pescatore d'anguille dalla riva.1 (Italics mine) In moments like these, it is as though the poet briefly emerged from his limbo. It is first in the "Motets" that we have the consistent exploration of the vague boundaries between sleep and dreaming. Here, Montale seeks to use images, for instance the squirrel, merely to mark zones of passage: Perche tardi? NeI pino Io scoiattolo batte la coda a torcia sulla scorza. k Light of a flash in vain can change you into something rich and strange. Yours was another imprint. 'Down there a half-dead tangle agitates and startles me back into life and makes me like that fisher of eels, intent, by the banks (italics mine).

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"GLI ORECCHINI" La mezzaluna scende col suo picco nel sole che la smorza. E giorno fatto.m This squirrel cannot be seen, nor can the "coda a torcia" be heard, but there are appeals to both sight and hearing. A similar appeal is made by the image of the half-moon that the sun "extinguishes" ("smorza"). Thus, immediate experience is lost, or, better, used. The images are already metaphors, as they will be throughout the "Finisterre" poems. of La bufera uses language to create plot, a background against which the poet creates a symbolic action of purely personal import: conserving, preserving, holding out, resisting. Usually, in dramatic poetry, the poet is active: there is will to change or to have one's life changed. When this quality of active will is absent in Montale's poetry, the poems often end with or hinge on the arrival of something external, normally the thought of the woman or a verbalization of her arrival that calls on the poet's expressive skills, so that, in a sense, he matches those skills to her qualities. The poetry is thus a blending of dramatic and lyric modes. Because the poet is otherwise passive, many of the poems rely on the presence of an antagonist that impedes Clizia's arrival or prevents him from hoping for a reunion with her. The antagonist in this volume is the war, a fact that prevents the poetry from being abstract and coldly intellectual. Were the antagonist an intellectual construct, the poet would know how to plan escape from the difficulties he at times faces in his writing. In "Il tuo volo" (Your flight), for instance, where Montale does not use the war as an antagonist—indeed, there is no integral antagonist at all—the poem suffers for this absence. The poem opens with an invocation to Clizia, who appears immediately: THE DRAMATIC POETRY

"Why do you delay? In the pine, the squirrel beats its torch of a tail on the bark. The half-moon descends by its tip into the sun that extinguishes it. It is broad day. 221

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Se appari al fuoco (pendono sul tuo ciuffo e ti stellano gli amuleti) due luci ti contendono al borro ch'entra sotto la volta degli spini." She is injured (as she is in the motet "Ti libero la fronte dai ghiaccioli"), "her dress is in shreds" ("la veste e in brani"), the shrubs she has trampled in arriving "spark" ("rifavillano") and seem to catch fire. Time seems to have a direction but no purpose—perhaps because Clizia arrives too soon in the poem! The "furrows of the night" ("solchi della notte") open up, and human history is swollen with grotesque creatures, but these are ultimately miscellaneous backgrounds and antagonists (the "tadpoles," "girini," remind us of the "nati-morti" of "La frangia dei capelli"). The atmosphere and the antagonistic elements within the poem do not blend, and the concern of the poet, that he be found, located, and identified among the dead, is expressed in a phrase that does not rise to the verbal challenges in the poem: Se rompi il fuoco (biondo cinerei i capelli sulla ruga che tenera ha abbandonato il cielo) come potra la mano delle sete e delle gemme ritrovar tra i morti il suo fedele?" The image of the lost poet waiting to be summoned by a gesture from Clizia will be transformed impressively in "GIi orecchini." "If you appear at the fire (amulets hang from your forelock and adorn you with stars) two lights contest you at the gully which enters under the vault of thorn trees. "If you break through the fire (your hair is ash blond over the wrinkle which the sky left still tender) how will the hand of silks and precious stones again be able to find her faithful one among the dead?

222

"GLI ORECCHINI" The first words of "GIi orecchini," "Non serba" (literally, "does not hold"), tell us something is not preserved—it is unambiguously lost and gone: Non serba ombra di voli il nerofumo della spera. (E del tuo non e piu traccia.) This negativity is reinforced by the next phrase, "ombra di voli" (literally "shadow of flights"), with its dark sound. "Voli" carries an allusion to hope, through flight, while "ombra di voli" plays, in part by inversion, on colloquial expressions of hope, for instance "raggio di speranza," "ray of hope." Through hope, "voli" also alludes to Clizia, the winged messenger of La bufera. But hope is gone and impossibly darkened ("ombra" is completely deprived of its colloquial meaning of "a touch of"). There are, then, suggestions of hope and of a trace of hope, and a symbol of hope lost, and there are allusions to Clizia, to her being lost and in empiric exile. All of these elements have a latent presence in the poem, yet the reader will appropriately respond only to those the poet uses to bind the poem and develop it, as he turns his feelings—not a series and not a blend—into an atmosphere, and places himself in it. The poem is in fact so bound and the phrases so hyperextended as to suggest that the poet is avoiding everything subjective or fragmentary and yet is writing out of an accumulation of personal experiences. Montale picks up "Non serba" and hyperbolically extends it in the phrases that follow "(E del tuo non e piu traccia)," and the subsequent "barlumi / indifesi," "glimmers" of hope that have not been and cannot be preserved, are "undefended," and have gone into exile. The exile is another allusion to Clizia, one that conveys her frailty—something frail has been erased—and introduces ideas taken up later in the poem. "GIi orecchini" fulfills Montale's Romantic-ironic intimation in Ossi that everything will be erased by time. The poem makes this intimation concrete by casting it into past time and finding a content, no matter how amorphous, for the early "gli atti / scancellati pel giuoco del futuro" ("Godi se il vento"). 223

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Non serba ombra di voli il nerofumo della spera. (E del tuo non e piu traccia.) E passata la spugna che i barlumi indifesi dal cerchio d'oro scaccia. Le tue pietre, i coralli, il forte imperio che ti rapisce vi cercavo; fuggo l'iddia che non s'incarna, i desideri porto fin che al tuo lampo non si struggono. Ronzano elitre fuori, ronza il folle mortorio e sa che due vite non contano. Nella cornice tornano Ie molli meduse della sera. La tua impronta verra di giu: dove ai tuoi lobi squallide mani, travolte, fermano i coralli.p The word "serbare" ("to hold" in the sense of "hold onto," "retain") suggests that we are somewhere in time, and, as in "La bufera," time is conceived as an aggressive presence. The poem, like many others in La bufera, begins not in a neutral zone that we associate with a Mallarmean inner emptiness, but rather in an area of combative engagement, no matter how "dark" the sonnet. However, since from the first word the general processes at work and the "painful consequences" are identical, victory against the aggressor—the poetic resolution—cannot be achieved by argument. 31 There is an opposition of shadow and flights, but this is not coldly devised; it provokes the poet to produce the symbol of "barlumi," "glimmers," as though he senses what T h e lampblack of the sphere holds no shadow of flights. (And it no longer has any trace of yours.) The sponge that disperses the undefended glimmers from the golden circle has passed over it. There, I was seeking your stones, the corals, the strong empire that carries you off. I flee the goddess who takes on no flesh. I bear my desires for as long as they are unmelted in your flashing light. Wing-covers drone outside, the mad funeral service drones and knows two lives don't count. In the frame, the flaccid jellyfish of the evening return. Your imprint will come from below, where at your earlobes wretched defeated hands hold the corals. 224

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should be, and both stresses and recognizes his desperate situation. At the same time, the recognition that the "glimmers" are frail, "dispersed," and "exiled" ("scaccia"), that both hope and Clizia are absent, provokes him to find the ways in which he can bring back something positive, a compensation. "Ombra di voli" is not, then, a visual image; this is dynamic language shaped by an idea and corresponding to thought. If it is Clizia who has flown away, something has sent her on her flight and does not allow her to return. The reader may understand the agency of war, but this is secondary, for the language invites us to conceive an abstract idea and even to feel the poet's ideal, but the sensitive reader, understanding that with Montale the task is not to perceive objects in a new way or to discard them entirely, will feel the force of different and stranger invitations: to see how the poet can extricate himself from his desperate situation, given in doubly hyperbolic language, and how he can answer the challenge of the first two words by holding onto, preserving something that cannot, seemingly, be preserved. Again, this is a dramatic poetry, for, as the unblended verbal tenses clearly show, the poet's attitude and highly symbolic language are not fused, and he is subject to the situation that he casts into language and draws out in the poem. As he draws it out, we see enormous grammatical coherence which condenses ideas rather than masking their presence or absence. The second line of the poem identifies the place in which the poet had sought for traces of Clizia, the "spera," 32 which, in conjunction with the later key verb "cercavo," shows that the search, cast into the past, continues into the present. The "spera" is possibly a "mirror" or "sphere," a "globe," the "sky," or even, as we shall see, the "stones" contained in the spherical shape of her earrings, on which she has built her "dominion" and "empire": Le tue pietre, i coralli, il forte imperio che ti rapisce vi cercavo. 225

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However, Clizia, dispersed with everything else, has already been "wiped out" as though sent into exile: "e passata la spugna." The "sponge" that "disperses," "chases away" ("scaccia") all traces of hope and of Clizia, chases them just as the poet looks for them, in the present time of the poem. The phrase "e passata la spugna" is a reproachful invective that shows that some areas of experience have been prejudged. The reader, though not compelled to reconstruct events outside the poem, must keep in mind the attitude of invective as he follows the poem to its attempt at resolution: fuggo l'iddia che non s'incarna, i desideri porto fin che al tuo lampo non si struggono. In the poem's present time, the poet asserts his desire, which, significantly, he still carries within him. Montale is both seeking a resolution and, like all poets, manipulating language; he uses only what is necessary to convey the force that aggressively challenges his feelings or, more properly, his ability to preserve them until they find their proper vehicle. The aggressor is, by metonymy, insects or any flying machine: "elytra" is related to "coleoptera" ("coleottero") and may pun on "helicopter" ("elicottero"), but one must remember Montale's caustic rejection of overly ingenious readings of "Pico Farnese." Conveyed in the phrases that follow, Ronzano elitre fuori, ronza il folle mortorio e sa che due vite non contano, the aggressor is to be related to the earlier images of the poem. It is sensed in the poem's present tense and in the "droning" or "buzzing" of ambiguous yet aggressive "elitre," but it is part of the past dimension of the poem, the time that has rendered an experience irretrievable. The "elitre" may carry an allusion to war, but only so much as is necessary to shape the poem.33 226

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"Scacciare," reminding the reader of the key verb of "EIegia di Pico Farnese," here does not displace light but banishes it and makes a message impossible; Clizia does not have her usual vitality. In this poem, "scacciare" suggests that if the poet is to find a resolution, he will have to find something stronger than the action the verb conveys: he will, for instance, have to exile himself and join Clizia, or bring her out of exile, or he will have to undo a past that he has shown to be irreversible. Certainly the idea of time's irreversibility has dominated. Even the highly connotative "nerofumo" ("lampblack," "soot," "dark smoke," and even the basic element in printer's ink) raises the issue of time and process, the change from carbon through smoke to soot.34 The verbal phrase "Non serba" establishes a relationship to past time, and the phrase "non e piu traccia" reinforces temporal distance from the absent one, in whom are concentrated feelings of loss, anxiety, and desire.35 These feelings are projected not only backward in time, but also forward, as we shall see ("verra di giu"), and suggest that the search takes place in a psychological continuum, related to "real" time. The suggestion is supported by phrases like "e passata la spugna" and "sa che due vite non contano," set off even rhythmically from the body of the poem. The resultant isolation of the phrases, effected by this and other devices, marks them as a response to some event that is hostile to internal dreams and desires and which cannot be circumvented. The language moves from abstraction to something only relatively more concrete that the poet wishes to hold onto as a counter to his desire. At the same time, the poet is giving only so much of a "real" situation as is necessary to create the atmosphere in which he searches for what he can retain. Perhaps he intends us to accept the suggestion of a place, much as in "Pico Farnese," where we construed a theater that was both a place and a condition of waiting. The language can convey a place and time, but also a condition, for it is built on single replacement metaphors 227

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which permit great syntactic cohesion: this language can make use of a precise or a general reference and simultaneously deny its immediate relevance. These metaphors, typical of Symbolist writing, are used by Montale to stage ideas rather than to occult them; outside of poetry, they would find their proper form in modulated propositions like "there is no hope; but perhaps at least there is this." The reader must steer through difficult language, through metaphors, allusions, and myth; but no one level will suffice to give him the structure of the poem, though each is an important element that supports it. The reader senses that the situation is intensifying: the first person singular pronoun is assailed by forces cast into the third person singular, and the mirror that does not initially mirror anything is also hyperbolically darkening further with the onset of evening. He is also with the poet, somewhere between what is lost and what must somehow be found—which may be the same thing or different things. Since there is the phrase "Non serba," perhaps there will be a "serba." That something that is lost and must be found is the earrings; the reader's task is therefore to search for the answer to questions: how can they be found and where can they come from in such a world? The importance of search is brought out by studying some of the poem's problematical procedures of analogy. These in turn suggest the nature of the answers—if not the answers themselves—to these questions; the difficulty stems from Montale's doubt that there can exist a vehicle appropriate to her arrival and, simultaneously, his absence of doubt that her arrival is a necessity. The earrings, linked by apposition to the "imperio," "dominion," which "carries off" the absent lady ("ti rapisce"), are also a sign of her rule over him (as we know, Clizia is imperious). Because she rules over him, he must return to her if she cannot return to him. The earringsempire cluster picks up the multiple meanings of "spera" through the implication of shape—the earth, like the ear228

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rings, is spherical—and denotation of place. This is the "spera" which is blackened by the "nerofumo" and is, as "fumo" suggests, getting still darker, for in Montale this word carries incidental reference to the passage of time and, of course, intensification of condition. "Spera," in the sense of "mirror," is a Symbolist icon of hope and consciousness nearly extinguished. It also suggests that the physical earthly globe is undefended from attack and is the place of dispersal, desperate fleeing, and the threat of extinction: like the lives of any individual summoned up in the poem, life itself may be "wiped out" by the "spugna." 36 Taken together with the tone of the phrase "sa che due vite non contano" and the threatening sound of the "elitre," the poem suggests that a concrete force, or at least an earthly one—they are not the same for Montale—has led to physical separation of the absent one from the poet. This cluster leads the reader back to a world of contingencies and suggests how the earrings have become, given the poet's inability to combat these contingencies, a globe within the earthly globe, threatened with total darkness. Thus the ironic "elitre" and the "folle mortorio," "mad funeral service" or "procession," do not oblige us to give it one precise historical reference: it is sufficient that the reader imagine the aggressive persecutors of the earthly globe. There is no Symbolist linguistic coherence among the aggressors, or among their agents. "Elitre" and "mortorio," aggressive sounds and incoherent marchings of death, planes or marching politicians, are all aggressors of the two lives that would count themselves as one. The procedures of analogy do not resolve the supposed absence and presence of the lady. They do, however, confirm that the question will not be what the earrings "stand for" or "mean" but how the search will discover them in this place. The element of search and discovery began in Ossi. However, in that earlier poetry, Montale did not begin in a place that was both a language and a condition; there had been less metaphoric activity prior to the poem. Con229

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sequently, only in isolated phrases could he achieve a blending of figurative, often assertive language and of description, as in "Non rifugiarti nellOmbra": Non rifugiarti nellOmbra di quel folto di verzura come il falchetto che strapiomba fulmineo nella caldura. E ora di lasciare il canneto stento che pare s'addorma e di guardare Ie forme della vita che si sgretola.q (Italics mine) Such lines allowed Montale to avoid sentiment, but in turn seemed incisive phrases of purely local texture. Montale had guessed that poetry based on images could not give dimension to an intuited world and could not render his feelings: he had chosen if necessary to write deliberately marginal poetry. This was poetry that discovered its meaning, in turn, in marginal areas, and the poet no longer seeks to control his meanings or to interpret them. They gather and spread outward in unforeseen places: Ci muoviamo in un pulviscolo madreperlaceo che vibra, in un barbaglio che invischia gli occhi e un poco ci sfibra/ (Italics mine) He was at a distance from his language and therefore could not build meanings by metaphors, but only proffer images q Don't take refuge in the shade of that thicket of greenery like a small falcon that veers, a flash of lightning in the noon sultriness. It's time to leave the scrubby canebrake which seems to fall off into sleep and to watch the shapes of disintegrating life (italics mine). TVe move in a fine vibrating mother-of-pearl dust, in a dazzle that snares the eyes and all but enervates us (italics mine).

230

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to the disoriented reader. It seemed that he could only protest, or will to feel, to want, and to see. The poet could not read signs, but only cast himself as inadequate to their reading, and in turn they do not give what they promise (for instance, "Quasi una fantasia"; Almost a Fantasy). Pushed further into the ironic networks of language, the poet invites the reader to find what he can, perhaps not here, but somewhere "out there" ("Gloria del disteso mezzogiorno"; Glory of an extended noon). In this poem, the poet must stay behind, committed by the dualism of description/expression and often only able to find meanings by deliberately disrupting descriptive language or in the materiality of words themselves, as though he were laying down color on an already expressionistic landscape: L'arsura, in giro; un martin pescatore volteggia s'tina reliquia di vita. La buona pioggia e di la dallo squallore, ma in attendere e gioia piu compita.8 (Italics mine) Rarely did Montale go to his landscapes "new." As in "Antico, sono ubriacato dalla voce," poems are returns to something already felt to be digested and to offer no new language. The result is at times mimicry of the Romantic sequences of discovery and truth, yet Montale is destined to be a visionary poet and to go beyond sensations that are more semantic than emotional. In order to do this, he must develop a form of search within the poem, so that he may release language in which metaphor has already been at work and recognize the ends to which he organizes language. This he does in Le occasioni, in which he uses occasions that neither present nor 'Dryness everywhere, a kingfisher hovers over one of life's remains. A good rainfall is beyond the bleakness, but waiting is a more perfect pleasure (italics mine). 231

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represent, to act out his battle. The introduction of mythic language in La bufera reinforces the dramatic nature of the search. If we apply Northrop Frye's system to "GIi orecchini," we may say that the poet finds himself in an existential hell, for the "molli / meduse" (the common noun means jellyfish; capitalized, it means the classical Medusa) are part of a demonic world of imagery suggesting a "fierce, destructive passion." 37 As an object of love, the lady is associated with light and flight and hope, and is contrasted to the flight of the "elitre," to darkness, and to the demonic sphere. She is thus part of what Frye terms "an angelic world midway between the human and the divine spheres." 38 Her absence implies the absence of the possibility of salvation and accounts for the anxiety with which the poet searches the mirror for a sign or trace of her. But the mirror neither indicates salvation nor provides a passage to it: it only reflects the present. The message for the future has not yet come; time is stopped—temporarily—and the poet substitutes imaginative enlargement of experience for the temporal continuum. The imaginative experience works partially through antiallegorical or ironic images. Frye has shown that by definition, these tend to suggest a strained union between object and idea, actions and their meaning. 39 The use of "nerofumo" for darkness and "elitre" for any aggressive flight are examples of the poem's tendency to use images that are understated and ironic in relation to their potential import, which indicate that the full meaning of events is not understood, that they are still under scrutiny, and that they may be only particulars of a generalized crisis40 for which the poet can provide no system. The fact that the lady is absorbed into a structure of unambiguous images of salvation, like light and flight, while contingent reality is represented by ambiguous and ironic images like lampblack, insect wings, and sponges, is a sign that the poet's attitude toward contingent reality is itself ambiguous. 41 Thus the resolution of the poem cannot come from resolv232

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ing feelings: Montale is not opposing two feelings, or two equal ideas or psychological realities: this is no Baudelairean horror and ecstasy. The forces are unequal and he must invert their relationship; he must make Clizia triumph. Within the atmosphere so heavily and darkly weighted against him, he is the symbolic protagonist who, throughout, casts his emotions and ideas as actions. This occurs in the notoriously difficult phrase, "fuggo / I'iddia che non s'incarna." We have seen that opposed forces in Montale's dualistic poetry—light and dark, good and evil—are not equal: one set is always conveyed so forcefully or ironically as to intensify the urgency of the other. Here, the smoke of the hellish sphere is so black that even the shadow of Clizia cannot be reflected: the "mirror" ("spera") has no glint and the "sky" ("spera") has no sign. Any object (and "spera" suggests all such objects and, by a pun, also "hope") that has the potential to illuminate does not do so, but should. Despite the Petrarchan language of flight from and return toward an object ("fuggo" and "porto"), 42 the goddesses related to these verbs are not the same, as a purely formalist reading, unconcerned with the imaginative procedures of this dramatic poetry, might find. It is true that the goddess from whom the poet flees and "who does not become incarnate" ("fuggo / I'iddia che non s'incarna") suggests Clizia. These words, which work by the paradoxical pairing of a verbal reflexive and the notion of miraculous incarnation, are reminiscent of the "Motets" and of their goddess, "who does not become flesh" but who, precisely because she is a phantasm, is a menace to the poet's acceptance of things. The words join the idea of flight away from something and another negative, this one grammatical ("non s'incarna"), and suggest that Clizia, strong and wilful as she is, is present yet refuses to reveal herself and to return. They remind us of phrases like "la finestra che non s'illumina" (the window that does not brighten, or is not illuminated) 233

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of "Il balcone," which in the "Motets" suggested that something that does not happen should do so. Even there, the negatives and paradoxes were used not to tease Clizia into purely grammatical existence but to indicate problematic feelings for her and to convey desire. Any emotion is painful and must be avoided. The existential hell Montale creates from the "Motets" on, implies, unlike Eliot's hells, which have no physical reference, that the poet must get away from physical existence to something higher and other.43 Quite early in his poetry, Montale had brought images from external reality into sharp relief or animated them by emotion not always shown. He had often used them to express ironic wishes for things that could not be: Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed essenziale siccome i ciottoli che tu volvi, mangiati dalla salsedine; scheggia fuori del tempo, testimone di una volonta fredda che non passa.' Later, in Le occasioni, he had found a name for will and a reason to be "essential" and "outside of time." He had also urged Clizia to enter time and make herself real so that he could name his now lyric enemy, the woman. In "Finisterre" she is more "inside" the poems than ever before, and "GIi orecchini" might seem to crown a process of formal fabrication. But there have been other developments. In Ossi, evil was "in" the "moth-eaten" or "gnawed" universe. "Tarlare" (normally a reflexive verb) in the next lines suggests "to eat" (like a moth), "to gnaw" (like a woodworm), and "to consume with anxiety"; the normal reflexive "tarlarsi" conveys "to be consumed with anxiety": 1 would have wanted to feel rough and essential like pebbles you turn over, eaten away by the sea salt; a splinter outside of time, witness to a cold unyielding will.

234

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che tarla il mondo, la piccola stortura d'una leva che arresta l'ordegno universale." In La bufera, Montale learns to intensify antagonistic forces—perhaps because the real war intensified his unease—and to keep them unequal. Now, evil "eats at" the world and threatens to devour the poet; it justifies what he would have liked to have been, but could never be. At the same time, Clizia, fed in "L'anima che dispensa" on "closed passion" ("chiusa passione"), emerges more frail but more alive. The intensity with which he feels this unequal balance between the self and the outside world, which in La bufera leads to poems of refusal to surrender and of survival, suggests that the words "fuggo / l'iddia che non s'incarna" refer not to Clizia but to a false goddess, a strong antagonist of the poet and of Clizia. Probably this other goddess who never comes (and who does not take a form by which the poet can name her) is another example of amorphous evil. Perhaps she is the liberation that all await and have awaited in vain, the false idol of a nation unable to liberate itself. But, more probably, taken together with the next phrase ("i desideri / porto fin che al tuo lampo non si struggono"), she is any goddess who is an illusion, is not true, because she never was in the world's "body." She is not Clizia herself, who, instead, was once "embodied" and who therefore "bears" the possibilities inherent in incarnation, to whom desires must be carried and in whom alone they can be melted and appeased. The poem is both dramatic and lyric: its resolution is in part "I will bear my desires, but only in order that they be, and only up to the point at which they are (as the indicative mood would suggest), conveyed to their proper object—you—and are consumed." Because this is all he can do—continue to bear his unsatisfied desires— "I determined to seek out the evil that eats at the world, a lever's tiny deformity shutting down the universal contraption; 235

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he ends by holding on: he returns to the earrings which, earlier, he had sought, had tried to conjure up in his mind or in dream, and he holds on to them because they are magical survivors of the hostile darkness. No matter how cryptic the movements of the hands are, no matter whose hands are moving ("ai tuoi lobi squallide / mani, travolte, fermano i coralli"), the earrings are unambiguously close to Clizia, are the globe within the earthly one. In the last lines, further challenges have been set: "two lives don't count," and the sky in which nothing was reflected has become a "frame" in which something must at least be pictured, but the "molli / meduse," other false and "flaccid" goddesses, return from somewhere "outside." Therefore, the poet must make at least one life count, and attach his to hers, must counter false goddesses by insisting on the truth of his own, must find the image within, must hold onto his image despite the ambiguous arrivals and departures around him, and must hold secure.44 Thus, Clizia is not an idea that sees itself illuminated in its own perfection, rising out of internal mirage. Some critics take Clizia to be only a name for internal absence, but this reading is the result of imposing Mallarme's techniques on Montale; "GIi orecchini" is not a poem of Mallarmean absence for which Clizia is a mythic counterpart. The night in which she is found and invoked for the future ("verra" is the only future tense in the poem) is a night somewhere in human time. She rises not from mirage but from the pressure of emotion, and emerges triumphant over forces that the reader, like the poet, desires to see defeated. In performing her function—which is the same as the poet's— Clizia does not destroy subject matter, but finds its place and therefore gives it meaning.

236

NOTES

CHAPTER

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1. "T. S. Eliot e Eugenio Montale," Cronache letterarie anglosassoni (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1950), 1,191. This essay originally appeared in Le fiera letteraria (November 14, 1948). Praz first mentioned parallels between Montale and Eliot in the introduction to his translation of The Waste Land, which appeared in Circoli, 2, no. 4 (1932). See also Gianfranco Contini's important essay, "Montale e La bufera" (1956), rpt. Una lunga fedelta: Scritti su Eugenio Montale (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 79-94. Contini gives the background and publication history of the various essays in the book's foreword. 2. Giulio Nascimbeni, Montale (Milan: Longanesi, 1975), p. 125. 3. Montale translated two "Ariel Poems": "A Song for Simeon" in Solaria, 4, no. 12 (December 1929), 11-12, and "Animula," in L'immagine, 1, no. 5 (November-December 1947), 296-98. "La Figlia che Piange" (1911) was included among the first editions of "Ariel Poems" that Praz lent Montale. Montale published his translation of it, together with a reprint of his translation of "A Song for Simeon," in an article in Circoli, 3, no. 6 (1933), 50-57. 4. Renato Poggioli mentions this view in "The Italian Success Story" (1953-1954), collected in The Spirit of the Letter: Essays in European Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 214. 5. "Intenzioni: Intervista immaginaria," La rassegna d'ltalia, 1, no. 1 (1946), 86; for the reader's convenience, whenever possible I also cite page references in the collection of Montale's criticism entitled Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), in which the present citation appears on p. 565. 6. Alfredo Gargiulo, "A proposito di Eugenio Montale" (1940), reprinted as "Le occasioni," in Letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1958), pp. 634, 639; Contini, "Di Gargiulo su Montale," Corrente (April 30, 1940), rpt. Una lunga fe237

C H A P T E R O N E · NOTES delta, pp. 49-57; Contini, "Montale e La bufera," ibid., p. 87. Critics have continued to raise Eliot-Montale questions, and to use Eliot's terminology in discussing Montale: see, for instance, Luciano Anceschi and Sergio Antonielli, Lirica del Novecento (Florence: Vallecchi, 1963), p. lxxv; Angelo Jacomuzzi, Sulla poesia di Montale (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1968), especially pp. 66-69; and Gilberto Lonardi, "Cecchi e la prima poetica di Montale," Lettere italiane, 26 (July-September 1974), 322-24. Laura Caretti, Γ. S. Eliot in Italia (Ban: Adriatica, 1968), contains a long essay on the Eliot-Montale issue ("Un caso di affinita: Eugenio Montale," pp. 49-80) together with a full bibliography of scholarship. 7. "Invito a T. S. Eliot," Lo smeraldo, 4, no. 3 (May 30, 1950), 1923, rpt. T. S. Eliot: Tradotto da Eugenio Montale, 2d ed. (Milan: All'Insegna del Pesce d'Oro, 1963), pp. 9-22 and Sulla poesia, pp. 457-65. Compare his discussion in "Ricordo di T. S. Eliot," Corriere della sera (January 6, 1965); Sulla poesia, pp. 516-20. 8. See Montale's note in T. S. Eliot, pp. 40-41, a reprint of "Omaggio a T. S. Eliot," Circoli, 3, no. 6 (1933), 50-51. Two early expressions of Montale's interest in Eliot are "Giornate di lettura: Charles Du Bos," Il convegno, 7, no. 9 (September 25, 1927), 517, and a book review of Odor di terra by C. Pavolini which appeared in Pegaso, 1, no. 6 (1929), 764-66. 9. In 1950 (see note 7, this chapter) Montale notes that Eliot uses the "objective correlative" to "release feeling," but he disre­ gards some of the ways Eliot does this in The Waste Land, for instance, his use of literal symbolism, of language that is simultaneously emotional and concrete, and of irrational lan­ guage, especially in the poem's last lines. Montale rejects its "fabric" of quotations as "overly rational." In 1951, he says that the whole poem lacks inner cohesion: that it is "sewn together," and that much of Eliot's poetry has "the smell of chloroform": "Il cammino della nuova poesia," Corriere della sera (January 24, 1951); Sulla poesia, p. 470. 10. T. S. Eliot, p. 13; Sulla poesia, pp. 459-60. Montale says of Eliot's poetry reading: "Nessuno capiva, tutti capivano" (No one understood, but everyone understood too). 11. See note 9, this chapter. 12. See Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959), pp. 49, 51-52. 238

CHAPTER ONE · NOTES 13. "Hamlet and His Problems," Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950), pp. 121-26. Quotations from Eliot's essays are from this edition. Montale paraphrases Eliot's theory in "Il poeta T. S. Eliot premio Nobel 1948," Cornere della sera (November 5, 1948). 14. See, for instance, Montale's comment on ambiguity: "Non ci sono sette tipi di ambiguita come crede William Empson: il loro numero e incalcolabile" (There are not seven types of ambiguity, as William Empson believes; their number is incalculable), "Autointervista," Corriere della sera (February 7,1971); Sulla poesia, p. 600. 15. For Montale's use of the term "mondo interiore," see the first essay cited in note 8, this chapter. 16. In a letter to the present writer (April 21,1978), Montale stated that most of the "Motets" were drafted in the 1920s. 17. "Della poesia d'oggi," La gazzetta del popolo (November 4, 1931); Sulla poesia, p. 558. Between 1931 and 1976, Montale changed the language of the quoted excerpt in one most interesting way, from "dare alia" (to give [an objective correlative] to) to "dare della" (to give [an objective correlative] of). 18. References to the primary documents in this critical discussion, and quotations from a number of them, are provided by the appendix to Silvio Ramat, ed., Omaggio a Montale (Milan: Mondadori, 1966) and Rosanna Pettinelli and Amedeo Maria, eds., "Bibliografia Montaliana (1925-1966)," La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 70 (May-December 1966), 377-78. 19. See the interview with Montale entitled "Discorrendo della fine del mondo," La fiera letteraria (December 12, 1968), 16. 20. De la contingence des lois de la nature (1874; Paris: Alcan, 1913), p. 102. For Montale's reading of Boutroux, see "Intenzioni," p. 86; Sulla poesia, p. 565. 21. D'Arco Silvio Avalle puts the matter negatively by observing, "Moreover, all of his poetic activity is only a form of life, in fact the only life permitted those who, like Montale, 'don't really live' ("Intenzioni")." Avalle calls Montale's a "worldly faith which takes up and goes beyond ethical and religious thought, by taking it down to the level of a poetic theme," in "Cosmografia montaliana," Strumenti critici, 1 (1966), 63-72, rpt. Tre saggi su Montale (1970; Turin: Einaudi, 1972), p. 112. 22. De la contingence, pp. 102-3. 239

CHAPTER ONE · NOTES 23. "Parliamo dell'ermetismo," Primato, 1, no. 7 (June 1, 1940), 78; Sulla poesia, p. 560. 24. Selected Essays, p. 247. 25. For a discussion of the critical issues involved, see, by the present writer, "T. S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, and the Vagaries of Influence," Comparative Literature, 27 (1975), 193-207. 26. See, for instance, "La solitudine dell'artista" (1952), rpt. Auto da fi (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966), pp. 54-57. On his poetry of "disharmony," Montale writes: "Avendo sentito fin dalla nascita una totale disarmonia con la realta che mi circondava, la materia della mia ispirazione non poteva essere che quella disarmonia" (Since I felt from my very birth a total disharmony with the reality that surrounded me, my material, my ideas could only be that very disharmony), "Confessioni di scrittori (Interviste con se stessi)", Quaderni della radio, 11 (1951), 67; Sulla poesia, p. 570. In 1975, Montale echoes this statement: "il mio argomento e stato il disagio della vita e anche il vano tentativo di smontarlo per vedere com'e fatta" (My subject has been the "dis-ease" of life and also the futile attempt to dismantle it in order to see how it's put together). The later comment appears in "Eugenio Montale: Questions, Answers and Contexts," by the present writer, Yearbook of Italian Studies (1973/75) (Florence-Fiesole: Casalini Libri, 1976), 228. 27. Franco Croce discusses this view in "L'ultimo Montale: I: Le conclusioni provvisorie," La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 77 (May-August 1973), 286-310. 28. Cf. "Storia dell'araba fenice," Corriere della sera (March 29, 1951), Sulla poesia, pp. 171-75, and "Confessioni di scrittori," Sulla poesia, pp. 569-74. 29. "Intenzioni," Sulla poesia, pp. 566-67. 30. Ibid., p. 567. 31. Huffman, "Eugenio Montale: Questions," p. 228. 32. Corriere della sera (February 16, 1950); Sulla poesia, pp. 84-87. 33. Gianfranco Contini, "Introduzione a Eugenio Montale," Rivista Rosminiana (January-March 1933), reprinted as "Introduzione a Ossi di seppia" in Una lunga fedelta, p. 12; Angelo Jacomuzzi discusses the tendency to allegorize in Sulla poesia di Montale. 34. Montale's comments are often used to explain the poem he 240

C H A P T E R O N E · NOTES discusses. See, for instance, Franco Croce, "Le occasioni," La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 70 (May-December 1966), 285-87. 35. "Selva," Corriere della sera (January 9, 1952); Sulla poesia, pp. 471-74. 36. Contini, "Eugenio Montale," Letteratura, 8 (1938), reprinted as "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni" in Una lunga fedeltd, p. 33. 37. An earlier version of this motet was considerably less ambig­ uous. Notable are the changes imposed subsequently in lines 5 and 6, and the italicization of the last three lines. The type­ script reads: La speranza di pure rivederti m'abbandonava; e mi chiesi se questo che mi chiude ogni senso di te, schermo d'immagini, e il segno [is the sign] della morte ο dal passato e ancor esso [it is yet], distorto e fatto labile, un tuo barbaglio: (fl Modena, tra i portici, un servo gallonato trascinava due sciacalli al guinzaglio). The typescript is reproduced in Omaggio a Montale, illus. 14, following p. 256. 38. "Autointervista"; Sulla poesia, p. 600. For a Petrarchan conno­ tation of "barbaglio" (related to "abbaglio" or "dazzle," "error"), see Canzoniere 363, "Morte ha spento quel sol ch'abagliar suolmi." The flash may long since have become only at best labile (as "fatto" suggests in a rare usage) or may be just now at least evanescent. 39. In "Due sciacalli," Montale writes, "Basta identificare la tipica situazione di quel poeta, e direi quasi d'ogni poeta lirico che viva assediato dall'assenza-presenza di una donna lontana" (It is sufficient to identify the typical situation of that poet and, I might add, almost of any lyric poet who lives besieged by the simultaneous absence and presence of a distant woman); Sulla poesia, p. 84. 40. "Io mi considero un uomo che vive dentro un mistero ineffabile che continuamente Io tenta ma non si lascia penetrare. E la mia poesia e il diario intimo di questo uomo la cui esistenza 241

CHAPTER ONE · NOTES

41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

oscilla tra memoria ed oblio" (I think of myself as a man living within an ineffable mystery that draws him closer and does not let him in. And my poetry is the intimate diary of this man whose existence hovers between memory and oblivion), Montale, interview in Gioia (March 2, 1971). Montale, "Invito," Sulla poesia, p. 463. Montale's music achieves similar effects to one he recognized in Eliot's: "una musica .. . che fa vibrare dal sottosuolo del lessico piu comune tutte Ie possibili armoniche" (From the subsoil of the most common words, [Eliot's] music makes all possible overtones vibrate), "Eliot e noi," Sulla poesia, p. 443. See Montale's comments on Dante's "donne-schermo" or "screen-ladies" and the "spiritello della mistificazione" or "spirit of mystification" of his poetry, in "Dante ieri e oggi," Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi Danteschi 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1966); Sulla poesia, p. 22. See, by the present writer, "Structuralist Criticism and the Interpretation of Montale," Modern Language Review, 72 (1977), 322-34. Montale has commented on his distance from Mallarme and Hermeticism in "Dialogo con Montale sulla poesia," Quaderni milanesi, 1 (1960); Sulla poesia, p. 581. For a further discussion of Montale and Hermeticism, see Aldo Rossi, "Il punto su Montale dopo il quarto libro, Satura," L'approdo letterario, 17, no. 53 (March 1971), 7. Contini, "Introduzione a Ossi di seppia," Una lunga fedelta, p. 11, presents another interesting defense. My debt to Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1938) will be clear in some of the terminology that follows. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), s.v. "Hermeticism." Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska (London: John Lane, 1916), p. 103. See the interview with Ferdinando Camon in Il mestiere di poeta (Milan: Lerici, 1965), p. 83. "Intenzioni," Sulla poesia, p. 567. "Dagli Ossi alle Occasiom," Una lunga fedelta, pp. 19-45. Montale, "Lettere a Bobi Bazlen," Sulla poesia, pp. 94, 96; the dates of these letters are May 1,1939, and May 10, 1939. These 242

C H A P T E R TWO · N O T E S

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

letters were first published and discussed by Luciano Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," ltalica, 46 (1969), 33-53. "Io parto sempre dal vero, non so inventare nulla; ma quando mi metto a scrivere (rapidamente e con poche correzioni) il nucleo poetico ha avuto in me una lunga incubazione: lunga e oscura. Apr&s coup, a cose fatte, conosco Ie mie intenzioni" (I always start with what is real; I don't know how to invent anything; but once I'm writing [which I do rapidly, and with few corrections] the poetic nucleus has had within me a long incubation, long and obscure. Only apres coup, when all is done, do I know my intentions). This letter, dated October 16, 1961, and addressed to Glauco Cambon, is included in "Su 'Giorno e notte': Una lettera di Eugenio Montale e una nota di Glauco Cambon," Aut-Aut, 67 (1962), 44-45, and is reprinted in Sulla poesia, pp. 91-92. The term is John Crowe Ransom's in The World's Body (New York: Scribner, 1938), p. 139. Letter to Bobi Bazlen, May 1, 1939, Sulla poesia, p. 93. Letter to Bobi Bazlen, May 5, 1939, ibid., p. 95. See note 53, this chapter. Huffman, "Eugenio Montale: Questions," p. 226.

CHAPTER

TWO

1. Gianfranco Contini discusses the "nonpoetic" elements of Montale's early work in "Introduzione a Eugenio Montale," Rivista Rosminiana (January-March 1933), reprinted as "Introduzione a Ossi di seppia" in Una lunga fedelta: Scrttti su Eugenio Montale (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 3-16. 2. While still stressing that his poetic goals were often instinctive or susceptible of clarification only "a posteriori" to his poetry, Montale later indicated some of his earlier goals in "Intenzioni: Intervista immaginaria," La rassegna d'ltalia, 1, no. 1 (1946), 84-89; Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 561-69. 3. In "Intenzioni," Montale says that when he first formulated a notion of poetic objectivity in 1928, Eliot's theory of the objective correlative "did not exist." But in 1929 and the years following, he often used Eliot's term as a critical standard: for 243

C H A P T E R TWO · N O T E S instance, he used it to judge a volume of poetry he was review­ ing in Pegaso, 1, no. 6 (1929), 764-66: "quella precisa definizione che tende a far di ogni lirica moderna un Oggetto' di poesia (il 'correlativo obbiettivo' del dato interno, secondo la nota teoria di T. S. Eliot)" (that precise definition which tends to turn modern poems into poetic "objects" ["objective correl­ atives" of inner experience, according to the well-known the­ ory of T. S. Eliot]). For a brief discussion of Emilio Cecchi's possible influence on Montale's understanding of poetic objectivity, see Gilberto Lonardi, "Cecchi e la prima poetica di Montale," Lettere italiane, 26 (July-September 1974), 321. 4. See Montale's note in "Omaggio a T. S. Eliot," Circoli, 3, no. 6 (1933), 50-51, rpt. T. S. Eliot: Tradotto da Eugenio Montale, 2d ed. (Milan: All'Insegna del Pesce d'Oro, 1963), pp. 40-41. See also "Invito a T. S. Eliot," Lo smeraldo, 4, no. 3 (May 30, 1950), 19, rpt. T. S. Eliot, pp. 9-22 and Sulla poesia, pp. 457-65. 5. An influential formulation of this view is that by Mario Praz, "T. S. Eliot e Eugenio Montale," La fiera letteraria (November 14,1948), rpt. Cronache letterarie anglosassoni (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1950), 1,189-92. 6. " C e stata pero, a partire da Baudelaire e da u n certo Browning, e talora dalla loro confluenza, una corrente di poesia non realistica, non romantica e nemmeno strettamente decadente, che molto all'ingrosso si puo dire metafisica. Io sono nato in quel solco" (From Baudelaire and a certain Browning, and some­ times from their confluence, there has developed a current of poetry that is not realistic, not romantic, not strictly decadent, and which, in a very broad sense, could be called "metaphys­ ical." This is the furrow I was born in), "Dialogo con Montale sulla poesia," Quaderni milanesi, 1 (1960), 13; Sulla poesia, p. 581. 7. "Il cammino della nuova poesia," Corriere della sera (January 24,1951); Sulla poesia, pp. 465-71. For ease of reading, I at times cite the earlier, shorter form of the titles of some of the "Motets." 8. See "Gozzano, dopo trent'anni," Lo smeraldo, 5, no. 5 (Septem­ ber 30,1951), 3-8; Sulla poesia, pp. 54-62. For the term "semenzaio," see "Intenzioni," p. 86; Sulla poesia, p. 564. 9. See my essay "Structuralist Criticism and the Interpretation of Montale," Modern Language Review, 72 (1977), 322-34. 10. Montale, "Omaggio a T. S. Eliot," Γ. S. Eliot, p. 41; "Invito," p. 16; Sulla poesia, p. 461. 244

C H A P T E R TWO · N O T E S 11. Montale, "Eliot e noi," L'immagine, 1, no. 5 (NovemberDecember 1947), 261-64; Sulla poesia, pp. 441-46. This essay is available in English in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, ed. Tambimuttu and Richard March (New York: Tambimuttu and Mass, 1965), pp. 190-95. In this essay, which first appeared in the same issue of L'immagine as his translation of Eliot's "Animula," Montale contrasts real poetic vision to mere "ideological prestidigitation," of which he is constantly critical. 12. See Montale's foreword to the Swedish edition of his Poesie, transl. Gosta Andersson (Stockholm-Rome: Italica, 1960); Sulla poesia, p. 89. 13. "'Ariel Poems' was the title of a series of poems which included many other poets as well as myself; they were all new poems which were published during four or five successive years as a kind of Christmas card. Nobody else seemed to want the title afterward, so I kept it for myself simply to designate four of my poems which appeared in this way. 'Journey of the Magi' is obviously a subject suitable for the Christmas season." Eliot made these observations in an NBC radio discussion that appeared in print as "Poetry by T. S. Eliot," University of Chicago Roundtable, 659 (November 12, 1950), 8-9. 14. T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 99. All quotations from Eliot are from this edition. 15. Christine Brooke-Rose discusses this kind of literal symbolism in A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958), pp. 29, 35. 16. "Intenzioni," p. 88; Suiie poesia, p. 567. 17. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (1957; rpt. New York: Norton, 1963), p. 94, distinguishes between "the recognition of what must be believed in" and the incapacity of the "speaker" to believe fully. 18. Andrewes is quoted from Lancelot Andrewes: Sermons, ed. G. M. Story (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). The passage from the fifth Nativity sermon (1610) appears on p. 34, where Andrewes associates joy with salvation: "but sure there is no joy in the world to the joy of a man saved." In "Lancelot Andrewes," Eliot quotes the Anglican bishop, and conflates this passage with sections of the fifteenth Nativity sermon: Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950), pp. 306-7. The essay first appeared in the Times Literary 245

C H A P T E R T W O · NOTES

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

Supplement (September 23,1926), 621-22, almost a year before "Journey of the Magi" was published (August 25, 1927); the poem is no. 8 in the Faber and Gwyer series "Ariel Poems." Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England: From Cranmer to Hooker (1534-1603) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 67-68, writes that at that time Nativity sermons were designed to appeal to emotions of amazement, wonder, and gratitude. Eliot cites the original in "Lancelot Andrewes," Selected Essays, p. 307: "It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, 'the very dead of winter.'" It is significant that in the poem Eliot changes Andrewes's "they" to "we." It is interesting with relation to The Waste Land that, a lew lines before the lines Eliot cites, Andrewes had written, "This was nothing pleasant; for, through deserts: all the way wast and desolate . .. Nor . . . easy neither: For, over the Rocks and craggs of both Arabies (specially Petraea) their journey lay." The quoted terms are from "Lancelot Andrewes," Selected Essays. Some are Eliot's and some derive from F. E. Brightman's introduction to the 1903 edition of Andrewes's Preces Privatae; Eliot cites and adapts these in the essay for the purposes of his discussion of Andrewes's prose, which he finds truly poetic. "Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a watermill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer," The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), p. 148. Andrewes, p. 113. Eliot uses the quoted phrases (Selected Essays, pp. 308-9) to describe the relationship between Andrewes's emotion and its "object." 246

C H A P T E R T W O · NOTES 24. T. S. Eliot: Tradotto da Eugenio Montale, p. 13; Sulla poesia, pp. 459-60. Montale heard Eliot read "Journey" in the late 1940s, was struck by the efficacy of his intonation, called the reading "a miracle," "una lettura interiore fatta ad alta voce" (an inner reading delivered out loud), and noted that the same intonation characterized Eliot's recorded reading of the "Four Quartets." 25. Unlike Eliot's conception of poetic voices as masks, Montale's is musical and involves proper tonal "placement": see "Intenzioni," p. 85; Sulla poesia, p. 562. Montale had aspired to a career as an opera singer. 26. Corriere della sera (February 16, 1950); Sulla poesia, pp. 84-87. Montale uses the term "occasione" in the sense of "psychological situation" in "Intenzioni": "Non bisogna scrivere una serie di poesie la dove una sola esaurisce una situazione psicologica determinata, un'occasione" (One shouldn't write a series of poems when a single poem exhausts a given psychological situation, an occasion). But, as we have seen, he says in the same interview that experience is never exclusively "internal" or "external"; Sulla poesia, p. 567. 27. On Clizia, named after the mythic nymph, see Montale, "Tornare nella strada," Corriere della sera (May 28, 1949), rpt. Auto da fe (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966), p. 136; Luciano Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," ltalica, 46 (1969), 33-53; and Montale's letter to Glauco Cambon in Aut-Aut, 67 (1962), 44-45; Sulla poesia, pp. 91-92. 28. Sulla poesia, p. 85. 29. The epigraph that Montale chose for the motet sequence is one version of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer's short poem beginning "icomo vive esa rosa," concluding, in the version Montale uses, "sobre el bolcan la flor." It may be a deliberate hidden reference that the adjacent poem in most editions of Becquer's Ritnas begins "iQue es poesia?" and concludes "Poesia .. . eres tu." 30. Montale, letter to Cambon (see note 27, this chapter). Montale's various comments on the identity and nature of Clizia seem to be carried on in the spirit he attributes to Dante's prose: "il problema e di sapere fino a che punto Io spiritello della mistificazione s'insinui nella trama" (the difficulty is grasping to what extent the spirit of mystification is woven 247

C H A P T E R TWO · N O T E S

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

into the fabric and plot [of the poetry]), "Dante ieri e oggi," Atti del Congresso lnternazionale di Studi Danteschi 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1966); Sulla poesia, p. 22. Cf. Dante, " T mi son un, che quando / Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / ch'e' ditta dentro vo significando,'" Purgatorto xxiv. 52-54. See "Storia dell'araba fenice," Corriere della sera (March 29, 1951); Sulla poesia, pp. 171-75. See also the interview with Ferdinando Camon in Il mestiere di poeta (Milan: Lerici, 1965), p. 81: "La poesia viene da un sottofondo che gli uomini non conoscono" (Poetry comes from a deep, underlying source that we have no knowledge of). See also my "Eugenio Montale: Questions, Answers and Contexts," Yearbook of Italian Studies (1973/75) (Florence-Fiesole: Casalini Libri, 1976), 227: "Forse certe poesie di Satura possono essere 'spontanee/ ma e poi cosi spontaneo il fondo da cui emergono?" (Perhaps certain poems of Satura are "spontaneous." But can we still speak of spontaneity when we take into account the depths from which poetry surfaces?). The Sacred Wood (1920; rpt. London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 16768. The bulk of this essay had first appeared in the Athenaeum (April 2, 1920), 441-42. Selected Essays, pp. 200, 229. "Invito," p. 16; Sulla poesia, p. 462. "Eliot e noi," p. 262; Sulla poesia, p. 443. In the same essay, with Eliot's attempt in mind, Montale discusses suspension of critical judgment and its philosophical relation to autonomy in art. He contrasts the Anglo-Saxon approach to the question of artistic autonomy with more severe, idealistic ones. See Sulla poesia, p. 30. It is interesting to note that Montale modifies his earlier view of the irrelevance of Beatrice to the understanding of Dante by stressing her "carattere miracoloso," or "miraculous nature" (p. 34). Finally, one might compare Eliot's notion of "the objective 'poetic emotion'" of the Divine Comedy (Selected Essays, p. 200) with Montale's notion of the "concretezza delle immagini," or the "concrete nature of its images," and of Dante's ability to render "corporeo anche l'immateriale," to render "corporeal even what is incorporeal" (p. 27). See, by the present writer, "T. S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, and 248

C H A P T E R TWO · N O T E S

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

the Vagaries of Influence," Comparative Literature, 27 (1975), 193-207. The three studies I both refer to and work from in this and the next paragraph are discussed not in themselves but, rather, as examples of general critical trends; therefore, it seems inappropriate to give the conventional documentation for them. Montale says only, in a note to the poem, that Cumerlotti and Anghebeni are small towns in Vallarsa. This area was one of the theaters oi World War I and he was stationed in it; on Montale's war experiences, see Giulio Nascimbeni, Montale (Milan: Longanesi, 1975), chapter four. Glauco Cambon, "Tematica e struttura dei 'Mottetti'," Sigma, 28 [29/30] (1971), 97-98. Silvio Ramat writes that guilt and neglect are the themes of this poem, and implies that Montale is playing with a pun on colpa I colpo: see Montale (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965), p. 105. In Petrarch's Canzoniere, "colpo" and "colpi" appear eighteen times, occasionally clearly punning on "colpa." These are the schematic poles employed by Avalle in his influential and revealing "GU orecchini" di Montale (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1965). Contini, "Introduzione a Ossi di seppia," Una lunga fedelta, p. 11. Montale has said that "il grande semenzaio d'ogni trovata poetica e nel campo della prosa" (The great seedbed of every poetic discovery is the field of prose), "Intenzioni," p. 86; Sulla poesia, p. 564. Contini allegorizes the poetry as a "victory over prose" in "Eugenio Montale," Letteratura, 8 (1938), reprinted as "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni" in Una lunga fedelta, p. 43. Montale uses the term in medias res in "Intenzioni," p. 88 (Sulla poesia, p. 567), and "antefatto" in "Due sciacalli" (Sulla poesia, p. 86). In the latter essay, Montale calls the news of Clizia that he received at different times over the years "spunti," which means not only "starting points" but also "(theatrical) cues." Montale may be echoing Contini's use of "antefatto" in "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni": here, the critic speaks of antefacts that escape from the world of prose chronicle, Una lunga fedelta, p. 22. The conflicting elements are Petrarchan; see note 39, Chapter One. "A proposito di Eugenio Montale" (1940), reprinted as "Le 249

C H A P T E R TWO · N O T E S

48. 49. 50. 51.

occasioni," in Letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1958), p. 634. Contini answered a number of Gargiulo's strictures in "Di Gargiulo su Montale," Corrente (April 30, 1940), rpt. Una lunga fedelta, pp. 49-57. The Gargiulo-Contini debate is fundamental to the understanding of many aspects of modern Italian literary history. "Discorrendo della fine del mondo," La fiera letteraria (Decem­ ber 12, 1968), 16. See Huffman, "Eugenio Montale: Questions," p. 226. Ideas are "il combustibile della poesia" (the fuel of poetry): see the interview with Camon, Il mestiere di poeta, p. 83. "Inflettersi" conveys the action of memory, too. In his gloss, Montale says that he found the poem's final images by "rum­ maging" in his past. In their linkage by the conjunction "and," the images, which are simultaneously aural and visual, acquire clarity and precision. The effect of visual sound is one that Montale deliberately sought: see Montale's letter to Bobi Bazlen (May 10, 1939), in "I diaspori di Montale," p. 40; Sulla poesia, p. 95. The images and sounds enact passive or associa­ tive memory. Indeed, the "scoppi di spolette" symbolize this mental activity. On the other hand, Eliot spoke of memories that, "charged with emotional significance," gain intensity "at the expense of clarity"; cited, from an unpublished lecture of 1933, by F. O. Matthiessen, in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935; 3rd ed. rev., New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 56.

52. The ending of the poem leaves images suspended; this tech­ nique also conveys his perception of his war experiences. In response to a question about why he never wrote directly about his role in World War I, Montale replied: "Conosce La Certosa di Parma, di Stendhal? Io ero un po' come Fabrizio, che si trova in mezzo a rumori, confusioni, fumo, gente che viene uccisa ο fugge, e solo dopo si rende conto che ha partecipato alia battaglia di Waterloo.. .. Ho visto cosi un po' da sonnambulo che esistevano delle cose strane intorno a m e " (Are you familiar with Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme? I was a little bit like Fabrice, who finds himself in the midst of noises, confu­ sion, smoke, men being killed or fleeing, and only afterward realizes that he was in the battle of Waterloo.... Thus I saw, 250

C H A P T E R TWO · N O T E S

53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60.

a little like a sleepwalker, that strange things were going on around me). See the interview in La fiera letteraria (April 20, 1975), 7. Cf. "il tenue bagliore strohnato / laggiu non era quello di un fiammifero" (the tenuous gleam struck down there was not the spark of a match), "Piccolo testamento," La bufera. The condition may be related to the "arduo nulla" (with its possible pun on "ardere," or "to burn," and its irony, for "arduo" can mean "sublime") of "Il balcone," that introductory poem to all the Occasioni and, significantly, the allegorical variation on some of the "Motets." Images of light and burning, and ironic, reductive versions of them, are later developed fully in the mythic "visions" of La bufera. The "da capo" poetic structure has a negative aspect which may convey the darker notion of the "disco di gia inciso" or "already 'cut' record" ("L'orto," The Garden, La bufera). Montale, in E. F. Accrocca, ed., Ritratti su misura di scrittori Haliani (Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960), p. 183; Sulla poesia, p. 577. "Delia poesia d'oggi," La gazzetta del popolo (November 4, 1931); Sulla poesia, p. 558. See Praz, "T. S. Eliot e Eugenio Montale," 189-92. Contini notes the presence in Le occasioni of "ambiguity," of "expressions that may perhaps be symbolic," although the poet has, and therefore gives, no guarantee of it; he finds these "objects" similar to Eliot's objective correlatives, which he understands as "equivalents" of states of mind. Contini goes on to say that the terminology is not entirely satisfactory, "Montale e La bufera" (1956), rpt. Una lunga fedelta, pp. 87-88. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959), pp. 243-45. "Dante," p. 213. Not surprisingly, these allusions seem quite dantesque. Cf. Eliot's "the night-fires going out," with Inferno iv. 68-69, and the final line of "Journey," with 1. 42 of the same Canto of the virtuous heathen. "Eliot e noi," p. 262; Sulla poesia, p. 443. In "Problematica esistenza dei poeti A1 B1 C , " Corriere delta sera (February 6,1951), Montale points to "Journey" as virtually untranslatable, and 251

CHAPTERTHREE · NOTES

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

implicitly compares it to the music of Stravinsky. In "Ricordo di T. S. Eliot," Montale associates the music of Eliot's verse with its quasi-prose elements. The network of rhymes and assonances was meant to imitate the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins. See Montale's foreword to the Swedish edition of Poesie; Sulla poesia, p. 89. On Bradley's influence on Eliot, see Kenner, The Invisible Poet, pp. 49, 51-52, and passim. Eliot effectively inverts Dante, whose virtuous heathen live, according to Vergil/'sanza speme . . . in disio" (Inferno iv. 42). The Use of Poetry, p. 133. See, for instance, Camon, Il mestiere di poeta, p. 83. Montale's "intentions" are, like many of his prose writings, related thematically to the poems "a posteriori": see "Intenzioni," p. 87, Sulla poesia, p. 565 and Cesare Segre, "Invito alia Farfalla di Dinard," in Silvio Ramat, ed., Omaggio a Montale (Milan: Mondadori, 1966), 291-307, rpt. 7 segni e la crttica (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), pp. 135-51.

CHAPTER

THREE

1. See Montale's comment in the introductory poem "Il tu" (The You) of Satura: "I critici ripetono, / da me depistati, / che il mio tu e un istituto" (Critics, thrown off the track by me, repeat that my you is an institution), Tutte Ie poesie (Milan: Mondadori, 1977), p. 325. AU references are to this edition. 2. See Chapter Six, pp. 195-96. 3. Tutte Ie poesie, p. 47. 4. Ibid., p. 83. 5. Ibid., p. 48. 6. "This feeling [of moral and metaphysical perplexity] is further clinched . . . by the explicit formulation of the last couplet, which sums up his [Montale's] own predicament as well as that of his contemporaries in the perplexing age of the early 1920s that saw the rise of fascism in Italy.... The sense of a limited or negative communication as the only alternative to words, syllables, or formulas pervades the whole poem and determines its structural . . . complexity," G. Singh, Eugenio Montale: A Critical Study of His Poetry, Prose, and Criticism (New 252

CHAPTER THREE · NOTES

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 31, 32. See, for an interesting discussion of the poem's "treble game," Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry, Eugenio Montale: The Private Lan­ guage of Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977), pp. 27-30. Gianfranco Contini noted that of all traditional poets, Montale least lends himself to thematic interpretation: see "Di Gargiulo su Montale," Corrente (April 30, 1940), rpt. Una lunga fedelta: Scritti su Eugenio Montale (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p. 50. For a useful bibliography of these studies, see the appendix in Contini, Una lunga fedelta, pp. 114-15. Silvio Ramat claims that the last two lines came to be the sym­ bol of the anxiety of an entire generation in Italy: Montale (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965), p. 36. Marco Forti claims that the poem renders the experience of the generation in Italy that underwent the ordeal of fascism, and notes that young writers working in the late 1930s in Italy turned it into a literary man­ ifesto that served notice on the Fascist regime: Eugenio Montale: La poesia, la prosa di fantasia e d'invenzione (Milan: Mursia, 19731974), pp. 71-72. According to Montale, "squadrare" is to be read "tagliare a grandi blocchi, ο definirsi esattamente" (to cut out in large blocks, or be precisely defined). See Montale's note to " N o n chiederci" in G. Singh, ed., Montale: Selected Poems (Manches­ ter: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 126. See Montale's comments on such readings, in his foreword to his Poesie, trans. G6sta Andersson (Stockholm-Rome: Italica, 1960); Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 87-91. This skepticism undercuts Montale's avowed identification with the constructive, humanistic, and creative elements in poets like Eliot. See, by the present writer, "T. S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, and the Vagaries of Influence," Comparative Litera­ ture, 27 (1975), 193-207. "Stile e tradizione" first appeared in 7/ Baretti, 2, no. 1 (January 1925), 15. Under the title "E ancora possibile la poesia?," Montale's Nobel Lecture, first published by Casa Editrice Italica (Stockholm-Rome, 1975), is reprinted in Sulla poesia, pp. 5-14. See Gianfranco Contini, who discusses the conflicting ele­ ments in Ossi, in "Introduzione a Ossi di seppia," originally 253

CHAPTER THREE · NOTES

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

published under the title "Introduzione a Eugenio Montale," in Rivista Rosminiana (January-March 1933), rpt. Una lunga fedelta, pp. 5-16. Montale uses the image of "fuel" (combustion) in Ferdinando Camon, Il mestiere di poet a (Milan: Lerici, 1965), p. 83: "Ie idee . . . attraverso Ie forme . . . subiscono una decantazione: quando escono non sono piu idee, sono il combustibile della poesia" (ideas .. . are decanted . .. in passing through forms: when they are poured out, they aren't ideas anymore, they are the combustible material [the fuel] of poetry). See Forti's discussion, in Eugemo Montale, pp. 13-14. According to Forti, who cites Montale's call for "simplicity" in "Stile," we can derive directly from Montale's words his idea of poetry at the time of Ossi. Ramat, in Montale, p. 68, speaks instead of Montale's skepticism, the "instinctive habit of mind" which colors "Stile." See, for example, Forti, Eugenio Montale, p. 60. Montale, in the preface to Andersson's translation (see note 11, this chapter), considers "I limoni" something of a special case in Ossi; Sulla poesia, p. 89. Singh, Selected Poems, p. 124: "While describing a typical Ligurian landscape, this poem serves as a poetical manifesto, illustrating the kind of prosaic and familiar language, imagery and rhythms that Montale was to use in his poetry, unlike the classical or the 'crepuscular' poets who aim at achieving the effect of the sublime. The poet here describes the joy that the sight and smell . . . of lemons bring. The quiet peace of the countryside in summer induces contemplation and a feeling of being near to the solution of life's mysteries." Montale speaks of "adherence" in "Intenzioni": "Dov'essi [Ceccardo and Boine] meglio aderivano alle fibre del nostro suolo rappresentarono senza dubbio un insegnamento per me" (Where they [Ceccardo and Boine] were more adherent to the fibers of our soil, they were without doubt my teachers), La rassegna d' Italia, 1, no. 1 (1946), 85; Sulla poesia, p. 563. The language is that of Montale: "Forse donna Pietra e realmente esistita; ma in quanto avventura stilistica non potra mai coincidere con una donna reale" (Perhaps Donna Pietra really existed, but as a stylistic adventure she will never in any way coincide with a real woman), "Dante ieri e oggi," Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi Danteschi 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 254

C H A P T E R T H R E E · NOTES

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

1966); Sulla poesia, p. 21. With reference to synesthesia in Montale's poetry, see the important study by Luigi Rosiello, "Le sinestesie nell'opera poetica di Montale," Rendiconti, no. 7 (May 1963), 1-19. According to Montale in "Intenzioni," p. 87, some of his poems went beyond his "intentions," others represented premature "syntheses," and still others underwent "disintegration"; Sulla poesia, p. 566. A possible source of the style of the last section of the poem is Guido Gozzano, "Delia cavolaia," "come l'apparire, / dell'inviata Candida degli orti / tra il rombo turbinoso cittadino." Another source for these last lines is D'Annunzio; for a study of Montale's use of D'Annunzio, see Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, "Da D'Annunzio a Montale" (1966), Eugenio Montale, ed. Antonio Barbuto and Donatella Fiaccarini Marchi (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1972), pp. 22947. This accords with Montale's definition of metaphysical poetry, in which "tradition" he places himself: "I metafisici non sono poeti filosofi in senso stretto.... I poeti del Dolce Stil Nuovo, Petrarca, Shakespeare nei sonetti, i grandi poeti metafisici (o religiosi) spagnoli, inglesi e tedeschi, e ieri Hopkins, Valery, Yeats, Benn ed altri hanno espresso idee che sono accettabili solo in 'quella' forma" (Metaphysical poets are not poet-philosophers, strictly speaking.... The poets of the Dolce Stil Nuovo, Petrarch, Shakespeare of the sonnets, the great metaphysical (or religious) poets of Spain, England, and Germany, and, more recently, Hopkins, Valery, Yeats, Benn, and others have all expressed ideas that are acceptable as such in "that particular" form), "Dialogo con Montale sulla poesia," Quaderni milanesi, 1 (1960), 13-14; Sulla poesia; pp. 582-83. In his preface to Andersson, Poesie; Sulla poesia, p. 88, Montale notes the philosophical cast of "Intenzioni." See his statement in E. F. Accrocca, ed., Ritrath su misura di serif tori italiani (Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960), p. 181; Sulla poesia, p. 574: "Un mio vecchio scritto . . . portava questo titolo: 'Intenzioni'; ma ho dovuto poi convincermi di non essere affatto un poeta intenzionale, un poeta che parte da una 'posizione estetica'" (An old writing of mine . . . bore the title "Intentions," but I came to be convinced that I'm not at all an intentional poet, one who works from an "aesthetic position"). Montale, in Accrocca, Ritratti, p. 183; Sulla poesia, p. 577. 255

CHAPTER THREE · NOTES 24. "Tre lettere a Renzo Laurano," Almanacco letterario Bompiani (Milan: Bompiani, 1940), p. 88; Sulla poesia, pp. 79-80. Montale reviewed Laurano's poetry in Pan, 3, no. 2 (February 1, 1935), 297. Until the appearance of Eugenio Montale: L'opera in versi, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), the Montale-Laurano letters provided very rare and valuable opportunities to study the poetry in the light of textual variants. Montale stated, in "Queste Ie ragioni del mio lungo silenzio: Dialogo con E. M.," Settimo giorno (June 5,1962); Sulla poesia, p. 595: "non ho mai fatto molte correzioni. Anzi c'e un mio amico che sta preparando la riedizione dei miei libri e vuol mettere anche Ie v a r i a n t i . . . ma tutto si esaurira in cinque, sei pagine. Perche si vede che cominciavo a scrivere ad un punto gia avanzato di maturazione" (I've never made many corrections. Indeed, a friend of mine is preparing the new edition of my works and wants to add variants.... Five or six pages will be all there are . .. evidently I'd begin writing when the work had already ripened considerably). However, the Bettarini-Contini edition shows amply that there are extant, in fact, a great many variants, as well as scattered commentaries in personal letters, and Montalian "explanations." As I hope this chapter indicates, even the most seemingly straightforward commentary, even the most seemingly minor textual variant will require careful study. 25. For Montale's use of the term "objective," which he applies to the poems of Le occasioni, see "Intenzioni," p. 88; Sulla poesia, p. 567. In "Dante ieri e oggi," p. 332, Sulla poesia, p. 33, Montale gives a more illuminating definition of "objectivism" and alludes to the dilemma confronting the modern poetic practitioner of poetic "objectivity": "esempio massimo di oggettivismo e razionalismo poetico egli [Dante] resta estraneo ai nostri tempi, a una civilta soggettivistica e fondamentalmente irrazionale perche pone i suoi signifkati nei fatti e non nelle idee. Ed e proprio la ragione dei fatti che oggi ci sfugge" (the greatest example of objectivism and poetic rationalism, he [Dante] is still foreign to our times, to our subjectivist and fundamentally irrational civilization, because he puts his meanings in facts, not in ideas. And what eludes us today is precisely the ability to account for facts). 26. The motet is now the eighteenth of twenty motets in Le occa256

CHAPTERTHREE · NOTES

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

sioni. It was published originally in Olimpo (Thessaloniki), nos. 1-2 (January-February 1938), and appears on p. 186 of Tutte Ie poesie. Montale does not discuss one interesting change in the published version, from "non far sul [on its] grande suo viso in ascolto" to "non far del" (italics mine). See Montale on Clizia, in "Due sciacalli," Corriere della sera (February 16,1950); Sulla poesia, pp. 84-87. In this article, Montale attempts to defend the "obscurity," or "apparent obscurity" of (his?) modern art, "quella che nasce da una estrema concentrazione e da una confidenza forse eccessiva nella materia trattata" (that born of extreme concentration and of perhaps excessive confidence in its material), Sulla poesia, p. 87. My language is based, of course, on Mallarme's famous statement: "Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l'oubli ou ma voix relegue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicalement se leve, idee meme et suave, l'absente de tous bouquets": "Avant-dire au Traite du verbe" (l886),Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 857-58. For an interesting contrast to Mallarme, see Montale's remarks about his "difetti obiettivi" (objective defects) in his letter of May 1, 1939, to Bobi Bazlen, in Luciano Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," Italica, 46 (1969), 33-53; Sulla poesia, p. 93. See D'Arco Silvio Avalle, "Cosmografia montaliana," Strumenti critici, 1 (1966), 63-72, rpt. Tre saggi su Montale (1970; Turin: Einaudi, 1972), pp. 101-14, who discusses images of slime and incrustation in Montale's poetry and the view that, in the later work, they are used again as a way o( responding to a world he has failed to know. It would seem, however, that, in the history of Montale's poetry, his language expands to gather in new contents and also grows qualitatively. The "guscio di cicala" cannot but "remind" us of the later "traccia . . . di lumaca" of "Piccolo testamento," in La bufera. See, by the present writer, "Structuralist Criticism and the Interpretation of Montale," Modern Language Review, 72 (1977), 322-34. See Pietro Pancrazi, "Le occasioni di Montale" (1939), in Scrittori d'oggi, 4 (Bari: Laterza, 1946), p. 214. "Dialogo con Montale sulla poesia," p. 11; Sulla poesia, pp. 57980. This comment, together with its influence on Montale criticism, is discussed in Chapter Six. 257

CHAPTER THREE · NOTES 33. See "Quelli che restano" (August 20, 1951), Auto da f£ (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966), pp. 91-92, and the preface to the selection of his poems in Antologia popolare di poeti del Novecento, ed. V. Masselli and G. A. Cibotto (Florence: Vallecchi, 1955), p. 237. Yet, see Rebay's complete article in Italica cited in note 28, this chapter, in which Montale makes quite a strong statement on the meaning of "diaspori," rejecting as nonsense the punning possibilities of "diaspri" and "diaspore" and allusions to victims of the diaspora, all meanings that critics have put forth. 34. "Colpo" appears elsewhere in the "Motets," notably in "Lontano, ero con te," where it carries the Petrarchan pun on guilt. Thus, "colpo" may provide an outlet for the puns lost to the poem by the line change. The essay "Due sciacalli" makes clear that the major theme of the "Motets" is Petrarchan: see Sulla poesia, p. 84. 35. In his May 10, 1939, letter on the"Elegia di Pico Farnese," Montale writes of "ambiguity" that is a "richness," that is "spontaneous" and not always "deliberate" in the motet "Perche tardi? NeI pino Io scoiattolo" (Why do you delay? In the pine, the squirrel). The "Pico Farnese" letters are available in Rebay, "I diaspori"; Sulla poesia, pp. 93-97. 36. Some critics associate the "colpo" that cuts the acacia with the previous summer, and the "guscio di cicala" with memory. To others, the "colpo" cuts away Clizia and therefore leaves only the "husk" of experience; still others associate Clizia, not the poet, with the "guscio di cicala." 37. The suggestion may seem bizarre, especially in view of the image that follows (the shaken parasite) but Montale, as we have seen, builds his poems not as a totality of images, but in a selective manner, highlighting effects. This way of working leads naturally to some of the mannered qualities of La bufera, as well as to its undoubted strengths. Clizia's hair is a major image in all the Clizia poems of Le occasioni and La bufera, where it undergoes mythic dilation and becomes a constant symbol of message and salvation. See Rebay, "I diaspori," p. 38, Sulla poesia, p. 93, which print the May 1, 1939, letter to Bobi Bazlen. See the motet "Ti libero la fronte dai ghiaccioli" (I free your forehead of the icicles, Le occasioni) and "La frangia dei capelli" (The fringe of hair, La bufera) in which images of the hair (and, by contiguity, the forehead), heaven (or sky), 258

CHAPTER THREE · NOTES

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

light, wings, and dawn are fused, and are opposed to the extremely generic "guerre dei nati-morti" (wars of the stillborn). See also the concluding lines of the title poem of La bufera, discussed in Chapter Five. The "demon of description" is seen as a strong presence in Le occasioni. See Forti's discussion of "Buffalo," in Eugenio Montale, p. 139. In Montale's view, as we have seen, Le occasioni tried to abolish the distinctions between subjective and objective experience; see, for example, "Intenzioni," p. 88; Sulla poesia, p. 567. Christine Brooke-Rose discusses similar techniques in A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958). "Sfollare" and "sfollarsi" are used in the earlier "Carnevale di Gerti" (1928) in two different concrete, nonmetaphorical ways, "emptying streets" and "clearing barracks"; in the present poem, the reflexive is suggestive of evacuation, as in war, but goes beyond any such allusion, and may even be related to the Petrarchan theme of love as war, developed in all of the "Motets," and particularly in "Lontano, ero con te." The Petrarchan theme was continued, according to Montale, in the "Finisterre" poems of La bufera: "Intenzioni," p. 88; Sulla poesia, p. 568. For a study of "viso" and its relationship to ideogrammatic structure, see the discussion of "NeI parco" (In the Park, La bufera) by Stefano Agosti, "I messaggi formali della poesia," Strumenti critici, 5 (1971), 1-38. Agosti attempts to demonstrate that phonic structure and conceptual development are virtually fused. But Montale shows, in his letters on the "Elegia di Pico Farnese," that the pivot of his poems is also tonal. See his letter of May 1, 1939, in Rebay, "I diaspori," p. 38; Sulla poesia, p. 93. It is problematical in that it is not creative, and does not arise from sensations and associations so much as it arises unpredictably and provokes them. Thus, the frequent association of Montale with Bergson seems doubtful, especially because Montale's response to the inexorable passage of time is a frustrated attachment, often by means of nearly talismanic objects, to the present time, or an attempt to fill the temporal vacuum with those objects (or memory objects) rather than the abandonment of the self to "psychical states." The term is that of 259

C H A P T E R T H R E E · NOTES

43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

Bergson, Matiere et memoire (1896; Paris: Alcan, 1928), p. 149 and passim. See Montale's statement: "A cose fatte leggo i critici e scopro Ie mie intenzioni. Talora mi accade di non poter riconoscerle per nulla; altre volte imparo a rawisare qualcosa di me che non sospettavo affatto" (When all is done, I read the critics and discover my intentions. Sometimes it happens that I can't recognize them at all; at other times I come to see something of myself that I had not been aware of at all), Accrocca, Ritratti, p. 183; Sulla poesia, p. 577. See also Montale's comment: "E proprio per conoscersi che il lirico scrive" (Poets write precisely for this reason: to know themselves), "Storia dell'araba fenice," Corriere della sera (March 29, 1951); Sulla poesia, p. 171. "Ombra di voli"; "E passata la spugna"; "i barlumi / indifesi"; "l'iddia che non s'incarna"; "Ronzano elitre fuori"; "ronza il folle I mortorio"; "Ie molli / meduse della sera"; "squallide / mani, travolte" (see Chapter Six for the translation of these words). In La bufera, such phrases at times carry mythic overtones and, secondarily, political ones, but it is futile to try to understand their effective content only in these terms, for, as we shall see, they are not based on a coherent mythic or political system. See "Parliamo deU'ermetismo," Primato, 1, no. 7 (June 1,1940), 78; Sulla poesia, p. 560. In this, they have been following the kind of lead provided by Montale in the already cited letter to Glauco Cambon, AutAut, 67 (1962), 44-45; Sulla poesia, pp. 91-92. In this letter Montale concludes: "Il dato realisrico, pero, e sempre presente, sempre vero" (The realistic datum is always present, always true). An important study of this kind of syntactic structure in Montale is Angelo Jacomuzzi, "Nota sul linguaggio di Montale: l'elencazione ellittica" (1963), Sulla poesia di Montale (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1968), pp. 13-25. Letter to Bobi Bazlen, May 10, 1939, Sulla poesia, p. 96. The etymology of the term motet is uncertain, but it is thought perhaps to derive from the Latin "mottum" (Italian "motto") or "sound"; "motto" is any poetic text set to music and, like its French equivalent "mot," connotes a verbal form. "Motet" may also derive from the Latin "motetus" (Italian "motetto," 260

CHAPTER THREE · NOTES

50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

the diminutive of "motto") or even from the Latin "motulus," akin to "modulus," which suggests melody. For Montale, " i " is a magical sound that creates a visual image: see note 41, this chapter. Gianfranco Contini, "Eugenio Montale," Letteratura, 8 (1938), reprinted as "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni" in Una lunga fedelta, pp. 19-45. Montale distinguishes his procedure from Yeats's fabrication of myths, in an interview printed in the Gazette de Lausanne, 42 (February 20-21,1965). The phrase, we have seen, is that of Alfredo Gargiulo, "A proposito di Eugenio Montale" (1940), reprinted as "Le occasioni," in Letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1958), p. 634. Renato Poggioli uses the phrase "the Italian T. S. Eliot," in "The Italian Success Story" (1953-1954), collected in The Spirit of the Letter. Essays in European Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 214. Francesco Flora was among the first to link Montale to those he termed the "Hermetic" poets, in La poesia ermetica (Bari: Laterza, 1936), and in "Eugenio Montale," Scrittori italiani contemporanei (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1952), p. 149 (originally published in Letterature moderne, no. 2 [1950]). The term "Hermeticism" and the association of Montale with it are largely rejected by scholars, but persist nonetheless. See the discussion of Hermeticism in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 345. Montale speaks of vague Symbolist influences in "Intenzioni," p. 87; Sulla poesia, p. 565. Piero Bigongiari is an early proponent of the view that Montale must be understood through French Symbolism, particularly for his "purity." See Bigongiari, "Altri dati per la storia di Montale," II senso della lirica italiana e altri studi (Florence: Sansoni, 1952), p. 120. Contini, "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni," Una lunga fedelta, pp. 1945, and "Di Gargiulo su Montale," ibid., pp. 49-57. See note 40, this chapter. "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni," Una lunga fedelta, p. 36. Among the more widely available studies of Montale containing discussions of this poem are: Silvio Ramat, Montale, p. 41, according to whom "ellera" and "corimbi" give a classical and 261

CHAPTER FOUR · NOTES idyllic tone to the poem (but see "Rosso su rosso," Red on Red, in Diario del 71), which is also characterized by the theme of suffering as an emblem of moral salvation; Alvaro Valentini, Lettura di Montale: Ossi di seppia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1971), p. 82, n. 3, cites parallel passages from the Odyssey; Oreste Macri, "Esegesi del terzo libro di Montale," in Silvio Ramat, ed., Omaggio a Montale (Milan: Mondadori, 1966), p. 248, n. 39, reports that Ramat has identified the "K" to whom the poem is addressed as a male dancer and finds Montale's attitude in the poem to be that of indifference. 60. Montale, in the May 10, 1939, letter to Bobi Bazlen: "assorbito; mi pare funzionale, forse per quell'i e i successivi; mi da un preciso senso di restringimento di retina visiva in un momento in cui il suono e, appunto, visivo." (On the word "assorbito": it seems to me functional, perhaps because of its "i" and the ones that follow. It gives me a very definite sense of narrowing of the visual retina at a moment when sound is just that—visual), Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 40; Sulla poesia, p. 95. Contini, "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni," Una lunga fedelta, p. 33, calls the image primitive and pure, free of polemics, but not of the doubts so frequently expressed in Ossi. 61. Contini discusses this general question in "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni." 62. See Montale's comments in "Confessioni di scrittori (Interviste con se stessi)," Quaderm delta radio, 11 (1951), 67-68;Sulla poesia, pp. 569-70.

CHAPTER

FOUR

1. For a discussion of these two groups, see Chapter Six, pp. 19596. 2. In 1943, a volume entitled Finisterre was published in Lugano in a limited edition. It includes "La bufera," which had first appeared in 1941, and "GIi orecchini," which had first appeared in 1940. On the other hand, "La primavera hitleriana" (Hitler's Spring) (which is not in Finisterre), nuclear in La bufera, bears the date 1939-1946. In La fiera letteraria (July 12,1953), 3, a note appeared to accompany a reprint of a Montale poem, drawing attention to the growing interest in Mon262

CHAPTER FOUR · NOTES

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

tale's "third period," which the editors hoped would soon take concrete form in a third volume of poetry, since Finisterre was then absolutely unavailable. On Montale's publications generally, see the extremely useful BMiografia montaliana, ed. Laura Barile (Milan: Mondadori, 1977). Contini speaks of Montale's absolute lack of interest in reality in "Eugenio Montale," Letteratura, 8 (1938), reprinted as "Dagli Ossi alle Occasion?' in Una lunga fedelta: Scritti su Eugenio Montale (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p.19 and develops the idea in "Montale e La bufera" (1956), rpt. Una lunga fedelta, pp. 79-80. With regard to Montale's powers of imagination, see his remark, "Dalla pura invenzione non mi riesce, purtroppo, di ricavar nulla" (Unfortunately, I really don't manage to get anything at all by pure invention), Corrente (February 28, 1939), 3. Montale has called poetic language "inguaribilmente semantica" (incurably semantic), "Il giudizio estetico," Corriere della sera, November 22, 1958; rpt. Auto da fe (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966), p. 143. For the nature of semantic organization, see Angelo Jacomuzzi, Sulla poesia di Montale (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1968), p. 142. Benvenuto Terracini, "Stilistica al bivio? Storicismo versus strutturalismo," Strumenti critici, 2 (1968), 13-14. Stefano Agosti, "I messaggi formali della poesia," Strumenti critici, 5 (1971), 3. Rosario Assunto discusses language that is irreducible, in a Symbolist tradition, and yet signifies a reality that is behind it: see "Per una teoria della poesia di Montale," in Silvio Ramat, ed., Omaggio a Montale (Milan: Mondadori, 1966), pp. 20-36. Pietro Pancrazi, "Le occasion! di Eugenio Montale," Scrittori d'oggi, 4 (Bari: Laterza, 1946), p. 214. Montale speaks of "fantasmi" who "haunt" his poems in a passage cited by Piero Gadda Conti, "Montale nelle Cinque Terre (1926-1928)," Omaggio a Montale, p. 416. The term "fantasmi salvatori" is used by Contini, Letteratura dell'ltalia unita 18611968 (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), p. 814. The Crocean distinction between poetry and nonpoetry raises issues taken up by, among others, Sergio Solmi, "Le occasion! di Montale" (1940), rpt. Scrittori negli anni (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963), pp. 200-201, 263

C H A P T E R FOUR · NOTES

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

and Alfredo Gargiulo, "A proposito di Eugenio Montale" (1940), reprinted as "Le occasioni," in Letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1958), p. 634. Contini answered a number of Gargiulo's strictures in "Di Gargiulo su Montale," Corrente (April 30, 1940), rpt. Una lunga fedelta, pp. 49-57. The quoted observations are Contini's, "Montale e La bufera" (1956), rpt. Una lunga fedelta, pp. 88, 80-81. Even today, critics have different views about whether description is appropriately poetic; see, for instance, Alvaro Valentini, Lettura di Montale: "Le occasioni" (Rome: Bulzoni, 1975), p. 206. "I diaspori di Montale," ltalica, 46 (1969), 33-53; Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 93-97. In this article, which contains all the letters of Montale to Bazlen quoted in this chapter, Rebay summarizes "Pico Farnese," explains its references, and clarifies many of its obscure passages. See also G. Zazzaretta, "Satura," "Le occasioni," "La bufera e altro" di Eugenio Montale (Pollenza: La Nuova Foglio, 1973), 2:85-94. Contini, Letteratura italiana, p. 814; the terminology is developed in Contini's "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni," Una lunga fedelta, pp. 17-45. Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 33, identifies Clizia/Iride as "the messenger of God and of the Old Testament, the Jewish Beatrice . . . the supreme inspiration of the Occasioni and the Bufera," On this figure, see Montale's note to "Silvae" in La bufera, his essay "Due sciacalli," Corriere delta sera (February 16, 1950), Sulla poesia, pp. 84-87 and "Intenzioni: Intervista immaginaria," La rassegna d'ltalia, 1, no. 1 (1946), Sulla poesia, p. 568. For the function of the word "segno," see Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 48, n. 11: "'Segno,' Montale insisted in our talks, 'doesn't mean the signal that the shooting match is about to begin. It is an undefined [not particularized] sign, metaphysical and transcendent, not concrete and real.'" But "segno" also functions narratively to suggest that the shooting is about to begin. The "radura brulla" is probably Shakespearean, rather than Eliotan, in origin: see the epigraph to section 4 of the Occasioni, quoting Shakespeare, Sonnet 5: "Sap check'd with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone, / Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where." 264

CHAPTER FOUR · NOTES 15. Agosti, "I messaggi formali della poesia," p. 28. 16. Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 49, n. 27. 17. The sound pattern contributes importantly to the conveyance of the mental experience. In his letter to Bazlen of May 10, 1939, Montale discusses the way the vowel " i " can create "visual" sound. In the lines now under study, such an effect is created by the aural opposition of "brulla" and "prilla." 18. See Montale's lecture on Dante (April 24,1965) in AtH del Congresso Internazionale di Studi Danteschi 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1966); Sulla poesia, p. 33 and note 25, Chapter Three. 19. Marco Forti, Eugenio Montale: La poesia, la prosa di fantasia e d'invenzione (Milan: Mursia, 1973-1974), p. 139, who coins the term "demon of description" (see note 38, Chapter Three) in speaking of the earlier poems of Le occasioni, notes that the first half of "Pico Farnese" verges on art-prose; Edoardo Sanguineti, Ira Liberty e Crepuscolarismo (Milan: Mursia, 1970), p. 39, claims that Montale is a prose writer working in poetry. Contini, in Letteratura italiana del Novecento, p. 813, notes that the "vastly descriptive" language first used in Ossi continues into Le occasioni and has its place in poetry. 20. See T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), pp. 132-33. 21. On this use of the term "dramatic" see Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (1957; rpt. New York: Norton, 1963). 22. Contini, "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni," Una lunga fedelta, p. 22. 23. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935; 3rd ed. rev., New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 110. Eliot's words are quoted in ibid., p. 82, and Montale is quoted from "Eugenio Montale: Questions, Answers and Contexts," Yearbook of Italian Studies (1973/75) (Florence-Fiesole: Casalini Libri, 1976), p. 226, by the present author. 24. In the 1920s Montale, perhaps ironically, used to sign his letters "Tiresia": see Mario Praz, "Incontro con Montale," Omaggio a Montale, p. 442. 25. Piero Bigongiari, "Altri dati per la storia di Montale," Il senso della lirica italiana e altri studi (Florence: Sansoni, 1952), p. 121, states that Montale must be understood in the tradition of French Symbolism; see also Lucio Lugnani, "Ossi di seppia," La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 70 (May-December 1966), p. 263. This argument is picked up by such a Structuralist critic 265

CHAPTER FOUR · NOTES

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

as Agosti (see note 7, this chapter). Montale's remarks are quoted from "Dialogo con Montale sulla poesia," Quaderni milanesi, 1 (1960); Sulla poesia, p. 581. Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 71. This may be an answer to the Structuralist question of "where" the mind of the poet is. Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 43. As Rebay establishes, Montale used "diasporo" incorrectly for "diospiro." In his letters, Montale occasionally discusses factors involved in choosing among various poetic elements; for instance, see the letters of May 1 and 5, 1939; in the earlier letter Montale also writes that even the opening twelves lines of an earlier draft of "Pico" are "only apparently descriptive," yet in the later one he notes that he has sought to move the poem from "un inizio statico descrittivo a un moto narrativo e lirico" (a static descriptive opening to a movement that is both lyric and narrative). The relation between the objective and subjective meanings of the theater in "Pico" is discussed in the letter of May 10,1939. Montale dissociates himself from Yeats's fabrication of myths; see the interview printed in the Gazette de Lausanne, 42 (February 20-21, 1965). Montale's task is not, therefore, that of lifting the film of familiarity to see things fresh (the Romantic-dramatic mode in part derived from Coleridge that Langbaum discusses, see note 21, this chapter) but, rather, that of justifying attention to things at all on the grounds of their role in preparing the way for Clizia's appearance. Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 37. In his letter to Bazlen of June 9, 1939, Montale writes as follows of these antiphonal lines: Quanto alle strofette mi e impossibile darle in prosa. Esse sono estremamente generiche, non pero oscure. Dovrei riscrivere Ie stesse parole disponendole in prosa. Alza (tu) il sudario, numera (tu pellegrino) (oppure tu che guardi) il sudario (non so che sia, forse il velo di Maja). I vascelli sono ex voto, Ie isole luoghi nelle navate. Nella terza ci sono i dolciumi venduti sui sagrati dei santuarii,

266

CHAPTER FOUR · NOTES un accenno al monte spaccato a vulva presso Gaeta, accenni a candele ecc. Nelle grotte (delle isole di cui sopra) c'e il segno del Pesce che credo uno dei piu antichi segni cristiani; comunque si esprime il dubbio che la simbologia cristiana (la foresta verde) dimezzi la vita e che Cristo abbia bisogno di essere continuato forse malgre lui. As far as the interstitial lines go, it is impossible for me to render them in prose. They are exceedingly generic, but not necessarily obscure. I would have to rewrite the same words, arranging them in prose sequence: Lift . .. the sudarium, count (you, the pilgrim) (or, maybe, you who watch) the sudarium (I don't know what it is, maybe Maia's veil). The vessels are ex voto, the islands are places in the naves. In the third [group of interstitial lines] there are the sweets they sell on the sanctuary squares, [there is] an allusion to the vulvar-cleft mountain near Gaeta, and allusions to candles, etc. In the grottoes (whose islands I mention above) there is the sign of the Fish, which, I think, is one of the oldest Christian symbols. In any case, here there is a doubtful point of Christian symbology (the green forest) cutting life in two halves, and of Christ needing to be continued perhaps despite himself. "Dialogo con Montale sulla poesia," Sulla poesia, p. 584. Marco Forti, Eugenio Montale, p. 338, cites an interesting example which shows that the process we are discerning in the poetry at times makes the prose poetic. "Attardarsi" has other possibilities; it may be a reference to the writing of the poem itself. It may also contain a hidden allusion to the theme of the "tardo motivo" expressed in "Il balcone" that refers to the tardiness with which he turned to CIizia and saw her significance for himself only after he had lost her—in empiric experience. Obviously, "motivo" carries here too an allusion to poetry; for it means "theme" as well as "motivation." Of course, the theme of Montale's immobility is first developed in the Ossi. For a study of related words like "tardi" and "tardare," see Jacomuzzi, Sulla poesia di Montale, pp. 137-38.

267

CHAPTER FOUR · NOTES 35. Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience, pp. 41,199. 36. The adverb "ormai" (by now), used in Ossi in a Romantic vein (notably in the Leopardian "Mia vita"), is no longer used in association with Romantic melancholy without an objective equivalent; in "Pico" the equivalent is the dreamt time whose presence Clizia makes possible. 37. Montale has associated himself with Blake and Hopkins on the basis of a common mythic and hymnal quality in their poetry. His godlike being, Clizia, breathes and moves, but Montale cannot proclaim, like Hopkins, for and with the world, "There lives the dearest freshness / deep down things," or like Blake, "Turn / Thine angel eyes upon our western isle, / Which in full choir hails thy approach"; at best, he must work within an "Integralist" style: see his essay "Il cammino della nuova poesia," Corriere della sera (January 24, 1951); Sulla poesia, pp. 465-71. 38. This is an aspect of the "moto . . . lirico" to which the poem moves. See note 29, this chapter. 39. On the issue ol denotation in Montale's poetic language, see note 4, this chapter. 40. One thinks of Eliot's comments on the function of description in Henry James's The Aspern Papers, where the method, despite richness of description, is "to make a place real not descriptively but by something happening there"; quoted by Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, p. 69. Cf. Eliot's comments in "In Memory of Henry James," Egoist, 5 (1918), 1-2. Similarly, in Montale's lines "Perche attardarsi qui / a questo amore di donne barbute," the meaning is abstract and can be rendered, as we have seen, "Why wait here?" and, we can now add, "Why wait at all?" 41. Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience, pp. 38-74. 42. Allen Tate, "The Angelic Imagination: Poe as God," The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays (Chicago: Regnery, 1953), p. 61. 43. Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry, Eugenio Montale: The Private Language of Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977), p. 95, call "Notizie" a "grouping of texts," "three shorter poems," "three separate moments in the scriptorial present tense of Le occasioni." They also raise interesting ques268

CHAPTER FOUR · NOTES

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

tions about the use of the superlative "pozzo profondissimo" (pp. 96-97). In a letter to the present writer (October 20, 1978), Montale writes that in this period he was reading Browning; cf. section 8 of Browning's "Up at a Villa / Down in the City" (11. 35-37): "Late August or early September, the stunning cicala is shrill. I And the bees keep their tiresome whine round the resinous firs on the hill. / Enough of the seasons,—I spare you the months of the fever and chill." See Arshi Pipa, Montale and Dante (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), p. 59. See, for example, Forti, Eugenio Montale, p. 200 and Valentini, Letiura di Montale, p. 222, n. 2. Cited by G. Singh, ed., Montale: Selected Poems (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 151, n. 47. Montale's unusual use of a demonstrative adjective has an effect similar to the English use of the definite article: see Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958), pp. 29, 35. The thinking process isolated by the analysis of these lines provides the organization for Montale's many essays of the late 1940s on political and cultural conditions in Italy. Ramat terms this poem "accademica" (Omaggio a Montale, p. 122). For another interpretation of these lines, see Andrea Zanzotto, "L'inno nel fango," in the useful issue of La fiera letteraria (July 12,1953); Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry believe that "gora" helps make an anagram for "guerra" (Eugenio Montale, p. 100). Cf. "A un soffio il pigro fumo trasalisce, / si difende nel punto che ti chiude" (At a breath the lazy smoke leaps, resists just at the point that closes you in) in the motet "Perche tardi?" The relationship in rhyme as well as meaning of "disfa" / "pieta" precisely reflects the "sfa" / "solarita" of "I limoni." On this theme in Montale's later poetry, see D'Arco Silvio Avalle, "Cosmografia montaliana," Strumenti critici 1 (1966), 63-72, rpt. Tre saggi su Montale (1970; Turin: Einaudi, 1972), pp. 101-14. See, for example, Ramat, Omaggio a Montale, p. 138; Montale derides the notion of his poetry as vatic or prophetic in "Intenzioni," Sulla poesia, p. 568. 269

C H A P T E R FIVE · N O T E S 54. See note 3, this chapter. 55. Cf. Baudelaire, "Le Temps mange la vie," poem 10 ("L'ennemi") of "Spleen et Ideal," Les Fleurs du MaI. 56. Eugenio Montale, p. 189. 57. In addition to Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," see Valentini, Lettura di Montale, p. 204, who gathers together relevant information on the term "uomini-capre."

CHAPTER

FIVE

1. Gianfranco Contini, "Eugenio Montale," Letteratura, 8 (1938), reprinted as "Dagli Ossi alle Occasion?' in Una lunga fedelta: Scritti su Eugenio Montale (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p. 20. For an analysis of political and formalist approaches to Montale, see, by the present writer, "Structuralist Criticism and the Interpretation of Montale," Modern Language Review, 72 (1977), 32234. See Montale's famous statement on the political noncontent of La bufera: "In definitive, fascismo e guerra dettero al mio isolamento quell'alibi di cui esso aveva forse bisogno" (After all, fascism and war gave my isolation the very alibi it perhaps needed), "Confessioni di scrittori (Interviste con se stessi)," Quaderni delta radio, 11 (1951); Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), p. 571. 2. "Intenzioni: Intervista immaginaria," La rassegna d'ltalia, 1, no. 1 (1946); Sulla poesia, pp. 567-68. We now know that in 1945 Montale conceived the idea of adding the poems of Finisterre, with a few additions, to the sixth edition of Le occasioni, or of making a single volume of Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, and Finisterre: see Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini, eds., Eugenio Montale: L'opera in versi (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 2:937. 3. Characteristic of this common tendency in Italian criticism is Marco Forti's chapter on La bufera in Eugenio Montale: La poesia, la prosa di fantasia e d'invenzione (Milan: Mursia, 1973-1974); see especially p. 254. 4. The preponderance of such questions in the criticism of Montale is documented and analyzed by Glauco Cambon, "Montale nella critica recente," Il veltro, 10 (1966), 401-8, especially p. 403. 270

C H A P T E R FIVE · N O T E S 5. For the critical use of the term "incandescence," see Huffman, "Structuralist Criticism," p. 327. 6. Luciano Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," Italica, 46 (1969), 3353, contains all the letters of Montale to Bazlen cited in this chapter. See also Sulla poesia, pp. 93-97. 7. This language also foreshadows later ironic language. In La bufera, there are false wings, flights not flown, prosaic airplanes, and birds; the characteristic is especially clear in the '"Flashes'" of La bufera, which reflect the prose of Farfalla di Dinard. In some of the poems of Satura, often mistakenly regarded as a somewhat realistic diary of Montale's later years, snatched fragments of reality become "real" only when they remind the poet of his ironic situation. 8. The identification of the poem's "tu" with Clizia is justified by Montale's note to the poem "Iride," which explains that the woman Iride, interchangeable with Clizia, is the central figure of all the "Finisterre" poems, and that she can also be identified with the figure of the "Motets" and the "Nuove stanze" (1939). 9. This poetic logic finds its roots in Ossi di seppia, for instance in "Crisalide" (Chrysalis): "Per me che vi contemplo da quest'ombra, / altro cespo riverdica, e voi siete" (For me gazing at you from this shadow another bush greens again and you are here [you exist]). 10. In the May 10, 1939, letter to Bazlen, Montale discusses the first type of ambiguity, and explains that the phrase "nel punto" can have two meanings: "nel momento che e nel luogo che, tutti e 2 legittimi" (at the moment in which and in the place where, both legitimate"), Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 40; Sulla poesia, pp. 95-96.In the same letter, he discusses the ambiguity of the phrase "il teatro dell'infanzia" created by "il sospetto, il dubbio, il suggerimento del vero teatro." 11. The adjectives that convey Clizia's qualities are weak forms of the verbs "urgi," "specchi," and "distruggi" of "Pico Farnese," which break down particular qualities into even more particular effects. Here Clizia is closer to Montale's ambiguous view—he uses a question mark—of Beatrice as a "scala specchiata" (mirrored ladder), expressed in "Dante ieri e oggi," Atti del Congresso Intemazionale di Studi Danteschi 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1966), pp. 315-33; Sulla poesia, p. 31. 271

C H A P T E R FIVE · N O T E S 12. The notion of life as a passage to death over which Clizia watches is, interestingly, the only addition to Montale's earlier comments on "Pico" and occurs in his conversation with Rebay: see Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 43. 13. Letter to Bazlen, May 1, 1939, ibid., p. 39; Sulla poesia, p. 95. 14. "Formicolio" also carries the physical sensation of "tingling": it is typical of Montale to use words whose primary meanings, in conjunction with other nouns and active verbs, raise metaphysical questions (here, of the nature of time) and whose tertiary meanings (here, of physical sensation) are still relevant to the poem. It is also typical of Montale to bind the poems syntactically through a minor denotation whose concrete effect cannot be entirely dismissed and where kinetic clues to the poems' genesis are embedded. For the meanings of "per" as "by your grace" and "because of your presence," see Giorgio Orelli, "L' 'upupa' e altro," Strumenti critici, 5 (1971), 258. 15. The term "intermittence," used in "Intenzioni," is applied to Montale by Contini: see Letteratuta dell'ltalia unit a 1861-1968 (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), p. 814. 16. Montale often uses the vowel " i " for its visual relief and as a sign of Clizia: see his letter of May 10, 1939, to Bazlen in Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," p. 40; Sulla poesia, p. 95. 17. Montale is especially aware that an initial thickening of phrasing helps to offset the apparent descriptive reference of words and that such reference is disturbing to some critics: see Montale's letter to Bazlen (May 1,1939), Rebay, "I diaspori di Montale," pp. 38-39; Sulla poesia, p. 94. Here, Montale combines this unusual technique in opening the poem with a dramatic question that is not directed outside the poem, and he thereby also responds to negative criticism of Ossi (see, e.g., Sergio Solmi, "Le occasioni di Montale" [1940], rpt. Scrittori negli anni [Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963], pp. 200-201). 18. For a comic version of the Petrarchan language and of the paradoxical awaiting and fearing a message, see "Le rose gialle" (1947; The Yellow Roses), rpt. Farfalla di Dinard (Milan: Mondadori, 1960), pp. 14-19. 19. The language and the image of the smithy, here diabolical, are reminiscent of techniques used in "Pico Farnese." 20. This sequence of nouns marks an early instance of the linguistic freedoms Montale will take from now on when writing 272

C H A P T E R FIVE · NOTES

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

of Clizia. The prepositional and adverbial phrases imply a large number of nouns, any one of which is a potential sign of Clizia. Thus, "fili" suggests clotheslines, the strings of necklaces, blades of grass, and, by metonymy, birds, gems, and fauna. For similar associations presented in inverted form, see the motet "Il saliscendi bianco e nero dei." For the negative and positive associations of "insistere," see the motet "Al primo chiaro," where Clizia weaves experience into a bearable design. "Chiudere," used in this double-edged sense, as "closed in upon itself" and "closed off from," appears in "La speranza di pure rivederti" and "Perche tardi? NeI pino Io scoiattolo." See Montale's interesting gloss on the "dawn" ("alba") of "Giorno e notte" (Day and Night) in "Finisterre": "E perche la visitatrice annunzia l'alba? Quale alba? Forse l'alba di un possibile riscatto, che puo essere tanto la pace quanto una liberazione metafisica" (And why does the visiting lady announce the dawn? [And] which dawn? Perhaps the dawn of some possible redemption, which could be equally peace or metaphysical liberation), in Glauco Cambon, '"Giorno e notte,'" AutAut, 67 (1962), 44-45; Sulla poesia, p. 91. For a prose parallel, see "La casa delle due palme" (1948; The House of the Two Palm Trees), rpt. Farfalla di Dinard, pp. 4 1 46. Important recent studies have shown that critics should avoid beginning with allegorical interpretation in the analysis of Montale's poetry: see the review article by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo in Strumenti critici, 3 (1969), 415-20. On the importance Montale attributes to the opening lines of his poems, see his remarks in "Dialogo con Montale sulla poesia," Quaderni milanesi, 1 (1960); Sulla poesia, p. 584. See Contini's interesting comment, in his analysis of Ossi di seppia, ' T h e more heavily reality is weighted with attributes, the more weightless it becomes," "Introduzione a Eugenio Montale," Rivista Rosminiana (January-March 1933), reprinted as "Introduzione a Ossi di seppia" in Una lunga fedeltd, p. 12. The use of onomatopoeia develops in the early, so-called naturalistic Montale, but it is only in the later Montale that the experiment with sound becomes poetically justified—and this occurs, paradoxically, only when it loses its relation to natu273

C H A P T E R FIVE · N O T E S ralistic phenomena. For the term "pseudo-onomatopoeia" used in such a sense, see Frederic O. Musser, Strange Clamor: A Guide to the Critical Reading of French Poetry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), p. 43. 28. The rough sounds of the opening lines contrast to the gracious ones associated with Clizia, as in "i suoni di cristallo" and "nel tuo nido I notturno," and with the sounds of relief in the final section, as in "sgombra / la fronte." It is largely in the "Motets" that Montale learned to use sound oppositions to convey abstract meanings and also developed a system of infernal sounds: a notable example is the opening motet, "Lo sai, debbo riperderti e non posso" (1933), which contains in embryo many of the techniques of "Finisterre," including the metonymic treatment of an unidentified, assailing "outside" world. Here, the grating lines "Un ronzio lungo viene dall'aperto, / strazia com'unghia ai vetri" (a long buzzing comes from the open, and grates like a fingernail at the windows) are in strong contrast with the idea of "grazia" (grace); both in sound and in meaning, "strazia" may pervert "grazia"—an opposition enforced by the fact that "strazia" is the first word in a line and "grazia" the last in the next. This effect is one of the missing elements of Montale's prose, the other being an occurrence that might render the background elements purposeful. Cf. "L'aria era piena di muggiti e di nitriti, accanto ai primi tori spuntarono i primi cavalli, anzi Ie cavalle, guidate da un grande Stallone bianco. Poi si levo un vento ostinato, il cielo accese di colpo Ie sue luci sanguigne, Io stagno di Vaccares si punteggio di guizzi, gli alberi sconvolti iniziarono la loro danza e un'immensa sinfonia di grida, di belati e di bramiti soffoco Ie nostre voci. Il torellino traballante era gia lontano, correva verso i tori e Ie vacche" (The air was filled with bellowing and neighing; next to the first bulls suddenly appeared the lead horses, or rather, the mares, led by a large white stallion. Then a stubborn wind rose; the sky suddenly lit its blood-colored lights; the Vaccares's stagnant stretch became dotted with flashes; the trees, thrown into disorder, began their dance and an immense symphony of shouts, of bleating sounds, and of roaring drowned out our voices. The little tottering calf was already far off, running toward the bulls and cows), quoted from Montale's Fuori di casa (Away

274

C H A P T E R FIVE · NOTES

29.

30.

31.

32.

from Home) (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1969), pp. 205-6. Forti, Eugenio Montale, p. 338, cites this prose sample in a different context. Contini has also defined this reality as "the amorphous unknown" in "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni," Una lunga fedelta, p. 41. That Montale is battling against an amorphous yet alien reality, which he typically presents as an irreversible effect, is indicated by his remark, when asked by G. Singh to comment on the image "la banderuola affumicata" (the banner blackened with smoke) in the famous "La casa dei doganieri" (1930): "the changing of everything in general." See G. Singh, ed., Eugenio Montale: Selected Poems (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 148. In part, the syntactic constructions rivet the attention of the reader because, at least within the overall phrasing, they are intelligible, and Montale seems not to place emphasis on the gap between words and their meaning. The syntactic clarity, for instance, in the prepositional phrase "sulle foglie dure della magnolia," reflects the avoidance of evocative poetic language, especially of adjectives that blend impressions and sensations. There is no emphasis in this phrase on any sense impression of the magnolia; in fact, Montale's language is moving from intuition to a language that is, only by contrast, less abstract. Montale is reversing the conventional Petrarchan flight to the "peaceful grave," the "tranquilla fossa" of Canzoniere 126. He is also modifying the image in Inferno iii.31; Dante uses the verb "cingere" in the sense oi "to girt," whereas Montale uses "recingere" in the sense of "to enclose," "to fence in." Montale must also "brace," "gird" himself because hope, "un' iride," or "iris," "rainbow," is fading. Unlike Laura, Clizia (Iride) is free of association with "error," conventionally expressed in Italian poetry by images of "shadow": cf. "tanta tenebre d'errore" (Familiares x.3) and, more interestingly, "ingombrata" (encumbered, Canzoniere 366) (in contrast to Montale's "sgombra"; clear, unencumbered). Montale does not treat error as a shadowy mirage or a "blind labyrinth," "cieco labirinto" (Canzoniere 224); instead, he finds Clizia in these labyrinths. "Intenzioni," Sulla poesia, p. 568. 275

C H A P T E R FIVE · N O T E S 33. In contrast to the day that has ended and that seems to carry none of the potential of the active image verbs of the "Motets," we have only the purely internal reference of "ancora." On Clizia's eyes, see the "occhi d'acciaio" (eyes of steel) in "Nuove stanze." 34. Cf. Montale, Corriere della sera (February 28, 1962) on Giorgio Bassani's Micol, as a "donna che sa" (woman who knows) and his typical refusal to expatiate. 35. The process of "clearing" raises a major distinction between Montale and Mallarme, with whom he is often compared. The language and sinuous sentences of "La bufera" are not present to "deregler" the reader, to force him back to inspect the grammar for hidden meanings, but rather to force him for­ ward to find an area of relief in the poetry. 36. For the concept of "possessing" the past, see Contini, "Introduzione a Ossi," Una lunga fedelta, p. 11. The dreadfulness of the past is also treated in "La casa delle due palme" (1948), Farfalla di Dinard, p. 43. 37. The gesture that Clizia makes with her hand picks up the ambiguous earlier "qualche gesto," but it is free of whatever negative connotations the earlier phrase may carry. It is typi­ cal of Montale to work by such refraction of ideas and to con­ sign his unambiguous meanings to seemingly secondary areas in the poetry. 38. For a treatment of Montale's use of claustrophobia, see Avalle, "Cosmografia montaliana," Strumenti critici, 1 (1966), rpt. Tre saggi su Montale (1970; Turin: Einaudi, 1972), pp. 103-14. The apolitical aspect of Montale has irritated politically oriented critics, for instance Carlo Salinari, in his discussion of Mon­ tale, "Montale dopo La bufera," in La questione del realismo (Flor­ ence: Parenti, 1960), pp. 131-40. 39. In the prose of Farfalla di Dinard and in many poems of La bu­ fera, Montale similarly opposes characteristic gestures and loved objects to everything else, to what is futile. For this rea­ son, the prose seems plotless: one cannot make a plot out of gestures and objects. 40. "Conversation avec Montale," interview with M. Graff-Santschi, Gazette de Lausanne, 42 (February 20-21, 1965). 41. "L'argomento della mia poesia (e credo di ogni possibile poesia) e la condizione umana in se considerata: non questo ο quello avvenimento storico. CiO non significa estraniarsi da 276

C H A P T E R FIVE · N O T E S quanto a w i e n e nel mondo; significa solo coscienza, e volonta, di non scambiare l'essenziale col transitorio" (The theme of my poetry [and, I think, of all possible poetry] is the human condition, contemplated in and of itself; not this or that his­ torical occurrence. I don't mean that the poet distances himself from what is happening in the world. I mean only that the poet must be aware, must will not to confuse what is essential with what is transitory), in E. F. Accrocca, ed., Ritratti su misura di scnttori italiani (Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960), p. 282. 42. See Arshi Pipa, Montale and Dante (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), p. 90. 43. Although, as we have seen, Montale does not reason through his poetic images, they serve to condense thought and pro­ voke new thought. 44. For this tendency, which is especially clear in Montale's prose, see Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, "Montale 'fuori di casa/" Strumenti critici, 4 (1970), 172-88. 45. For a typical comment by Montale on his virtually Manichean view of intellectual and moral life and its relation to art, see his "Augurio," Corriere della sera (September 19-20, 1944), rpt. Auto da fe (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966), pp. 65-67. 46. Montale, "Dante ieri e oggi," Sulla poesia, p. 27. 47. For Montale on this term, see "Variazioni VII," Corriere della sera (April 20, 1946), rpt. Auto da fe, p. 183. Contini comments that the war seems "invented to give duration to the instan­ taneous, discontinuous, and indirect world of Montale's hope, that is to say, his poetry," "Montale e La bufera" (1956), rpt. Una lunga fedelta, p. 80. For an example of Montale's harsh view of poetic incoherence, see "Tornare nella strada," Corriere della sera (May 28, 1949), rpt. Auto da fi, p. 135: "Troverete Iiriche in cui ogni verso cammina per conto suo, ha un senso in s e . . . . La sintassi non c'e ο e respinta su un piano non pure extra-logico, ma anche extra-intuitivo. E sostenuta . . . da una meccanica associazione di idee. Chi legge deve fabbricarsi la poesia" (You will find poems in which every line exists on its own, is self-contained.... Either there is no syntax or it fails at a level that is not only beyond logic but even beyond intu­ ition. It is sustained . . . by a mechanical association of ideas, so that the reader must invent the poetry for himself as he goes along). 48. Thus, in Montale's poetic usage, gesture shares with memory 277

C H A P T E R SIX · N O T E S its insubstantiality (cf. "Sotto la pioggia," 1933, of Le occasioni), with objects (by metonymy) their concreteness (cf. the waved scarf of "Verso Capua," 1938, and the salvaged cage of "A Liuba che parte," 1938 (For Liuba, who is leaving), both of Le occasioni), and with life its elusiveness and lack of definition (cf. "Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed essenziale," 1924, of Ossi di seppia).

CHAPTER

SIX

1. (Milan: Mondadori, 1971); Satura was followed by Diario del '71 (1971), Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973), and Quaderno di quattro anni (1977) all published by Mondadori in Milan. 2. Piero Bigongiari, "I tre tempi della lirica montaliana," Paragone, 7 (1956), 23-30; Riccardo Scrivano, "La bufera," La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 70 (May-December 1966), 306-36. 3. Maria Corti, "Un nuovo messaggio di Montale: Satura," Strumenti critici, 5 (1971), 217-36. 4. See the transcript of the discussion of Satura printed as "Satura di Eugenio Montale," L'approdo letterario, 17 (1971), 107-16. 5. Ibid., p. 109. 6. D'Arco Silvio Avalle, "La critica delle strutture formali in Italia," Strumenti critici, 7 (1968), 324-25. 7. (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1965), p. 113; rpt. Tre saggi su Montale (1970; Turin: Einaudi, 1972), p. 87. References to the "Orecchini" paper are to this more accessible reprint. 8. Tre saggi, pp. 89-90, n. 3. 9. Ibid., pp. 117-19. 10. Cesare Segre, review of "GZi orecchini" di Montale by D'Arco Silvio Avalle, in Paragone, YJ (1966), 133-34. 11. Tre saggi, p. 89. 12. Cesare Segre has indicated, however, that one of the chief questions confronting the movement is precisely that of determining the cognitive reference of poetry. See "Strutturalismo e semiologia nella critica letteraria," Yearbook of Italian Studies, 1 (1971), 305 and 7 segni e la critica: fra strutturalismo e semiologia, 2d ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), p. 23. 13. Benvenuto Terracini, "Stilistica al bivio? Storicismo versus strutturalismo," Strumenti critici, 2 (1968), 18; in "GIi orecchini," 278

C H A P T E R SIX · N O T E S

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

Avalle refers especially to William Empson's influential Seven Types of Ambiguity. "Variazioni VII," in Auto da fe (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966), p. 183. Cited from a letter to Piero Gadda Conti in his "Montale nelle Cinque Terre (1926-1928)," in Silvio Ramat, ed., Omaggio a Montale (Milan: Mondadori, 1966), p. 416. For such an attempt, see Oreste Macri, "Esegesi del terzo libro di Montale," Omaggio a Montale, pp. 197-255. The importance of such aspects is convincingly argued by Rene Wellek, "Stylistics, Poetics, and Criticism," in Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. Seymour Chatman (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 69. "Il mio prigioniero puo essere un prigioniero politico; ma puo essere anche un prigioniero della condizione esistenziale," "Dialogo con Montale sulla poesia," Quademi milanesi, 1 (1960), 11; Sulla poesia, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 579-80. "Intenzioni: Intervista immaginaria," La rassegna d'ltalia, 1, no. 1 (1946), Sulla poesia, p. 568; "Confessioni di scrittori (Interviste con se stessi)," Quademi della radio, 11 (1951), Sulla poesia, p. 571. See E. F. Accrocca, ed., Ritratti su misura di scrittori italiani (Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960), p. 282, and the interview with Ferdinando Camon in Il mestiere di poet a (Milan: Lerici, 1965), p. 83. These views are to be found in Auto da fi, pp. 274, 137, 143; Accrocca, Ritratti, p. 282; Camon, Il mestiere di poeta, p. 83; Montale, "Le api di Aristeo," in Corriere della sera (February 4,1955), Sulla Poesia, pp. 122-26, and Montale, "Intenzioni," Sulla poesia, p. 564. The letter is printed in Aut-Aut, 67 (1962), 44-45; it is reprinted in Sulla poesia, where the quoted passage appears on p. 92. Ibid. On the extremely rare use of prepositions to introduce single replacement metaphors, see Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958), p. 253; Brooke-Rose isolates this rare use in the poetry of John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins is one of the poets Montale most associated himself with over the years. 279

C H A P T E R SIX · N O T E S 25. Memory conceived and used in this way is the central theme of the collection Farfalla di Dinard, and is especially important in "La casa delle due palme" and "La piuma di struzzo" (The Ostrich Feather). 26. Camon, Il mestiere di poeta, p. 83. 27. In Italian literary criticism, the issue of Montale's possible relation to French Symbolism (chiefly to Mallarme) is much debated. Some of the important contributions to this controversy are: Rosario Assunto, "Per una teoria della poesia di Montale," Omaggio a Montale, pp. 20-36, especially pp. 30-31; Angelo Jacomuzzi, "Appunti per uno studio sulla religiosita nella poesia della Bufera e altro" (1966) and "Per un 'omaggio' di Montale a 'Rimbaud,'" collected as chapters 3 and 5 in Sulla poesia di Montale (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1968), pp. 5380 and 125-66; see also pp. 84-85, from which the passage quoted in the text is taken; Luigi Rosiello, "Le sinestesie nell'opera poetica di Montale," Rendiconti, 7 (1963), 3-21. 28. Jacomuzzi, "Nota sul linguaggio di Montale: I'elencazione ellitica" (1963), rpt. Sulla poesia di Montale, pp. 18-19. 29. I borrow the New Critical term "texture" from John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1941). "Tessitura" (in part, "structure") exists, but Ransom's meaning has no correlative in Italian literary criticism. 30. Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor, studies the effect of the definite article "the" in modern literal symbolism, especially its ability simultaneously to point to objects, mental images, and values, and to symbols recognized for themselves, the latter especially developed in Symbolist procedures. Especially interesting is her isolation of constructions in the French Symbolists, Blake, Browning, Yeats, and Eliot, which are self-referential yet rely on stimulating the reader by provoking him. Montale's procedures would place him among such poets. The overall effect of his literal symbolism is, "If I name it, it exists, but I must use it, battle with it, recognize something in it." 31. For an interesting study of the radically different organization of universal processes and "painful consequences" in Shakespeare's sonnets, see Murray Krieger, "The Innocent Insinuations of Wit: The Strategy of Language in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. J. Calderwood and 280

C H A P T E R SIX · N O T E S H. E. Tolliver (Englewood Cliffs, N.T.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 101-17. 32. "Spera" is a poetic term for "sfera" and adds to the poem yet another allusion to hope gone. It is related in sound to the etymologically unrelated "sperare," "to hope," and suggests phrases like "spera di sole," or "ray of light." Thus, although "spera" is undoubtedly precious, its chief function is to suggest the ironic notion that hope and light are not where, of all places, they should be. For a different interpretation of "ombra di voli," see Giorgio Orelli, "L' 'upupa' e altro," Strumenti critici, 5 (1971), 244, who writes that this phrase is a compact syntagma, akin to the phrase "ossi di seppia." Orelli bases his reading on the assumption that in these constructions an ultimately unanalyzable image is the result of a radical blending of two nouns with "di" and without an article. But, it should be noted that inverse forms of these images, for instance "voli senz'ali" (flights without wings, from "Vento e bandiere," Wind and Banners) condense ideas, an effect as important as any blending of abstract qualities: the woman can, on her "wingless flights," also fly "without wings": unlike the poet, she can dream and imagine, and is not rooted to the same place. 33. Cf. the motet "La rana, prima a ritentar la corda," which reads in part: tardo ai fiori ronzio di coleotteri che suggono ancora linfe, ultimi suoni, avara vita della campagna. (a buzzing slowly moving on the flowers, of beetles which suck more sap and lymph, last sounds, avaricious life in the countryside.) In this earlier motet, Montale had to invent coherence, to connect discontinuous elements, and to conjure an artificial apocalypse. In a land lidded by a "heatless sun" ("sole senza caldo"), there will be an eruption of "fleshless horses" ("scarni cavalli") whose "hoofs" can, despite their disembodied state, "spark" ("scintille degli zoccoli"). A similar form recurs in La 281

C H A P T E R SIX · N O T E S bufera and especially underlies "L'orto" and "Iride." For other earlier treatments, see, in "Lo sai: debbo riperderti e non posso," the lines "Un ronzio lungo viene dall'aperto, / strazia com'unghia ai vetri," but there the contrast was between active search and inactive will; and the hell the poet names as his destiny is not truly created, for all the allusions to it. Earlier, in "Vento e bandiere" (Ossi di seppia), Montale introduced the idea of "messaggeri del vespero," "messengers of the evening"; now, he has a content for their "vaganti incubi," "wandering nightmares." The word "ronzano" is an ironic form of the flights associated with Clizia. It is interesting that the war is used both as a background of unidentifiable activities and noises ("ronzano") and as a cause ("scaccia") whose effects began in the past and continue into the present. This ambiguity of treatment of history continues throughout La bufera. More important, one can trace back to Ossi the attitude that regards both the reason behind existing things and their purpose as identical. 34. The controversial phrase "nerofumo della spera" and its many possible meanings are discussed in great detail by Avalle, Ire saggi, pp. 21-33, who says that it is only a "stylistic variant" of earlier phrases (p. 25) and stands for nothingness (p. 33). However, the mirror does not "stand for" emotion or an abstraction but is used to convey the extent to which and the manner in which the poet sees or does not see things: for instance, the indirection of his stymied understanding, in the "specchio ovale ch'ora adombrano" (oval mirror now shaded by, italics mine) of "Di un natale metropolitano" (Christmas in the City) of La bufera. 35. The poetic opposite of the pseudotemporal negative "non piu" is not itself necessarily temporal; it can be spatial and is found in the opening word "anche" of "Giorno e notte," where it indicates the availability of Clizia's signs. 36. The earrings-empire image cluster is extraordinarily complex, and resembles the word-auras Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor, calls attention to in her discussion of Shakespeare; it is interesting to note that Montale began publishing his translations of some of Shakespeare's sonnets in 1944. 37. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 149. Such mythic images, foreshadowed in the 282

C H A P T E R SIX · N O T E S "Motets" (for instance, in "Infuria sale ο grandine?" with its subacqueous zones), are demythicized in the section of poems entitled "'Flashes' e dediche" ("Flashes" and Dedications), especially "Argyll Tour," where there is no epiphany because there are no inventions of time, and images are used as though to say to the woman, "This is why you were not there earlier and could not be there." The "molli" of the phrase "molli / meduse" suggests something that is soft and yielding, without backbone, and may be a satirical aside directed at contempor­ aneous political figures, but such a reference is at best tertiary since the poem opposes to it the hard and unyielding "orecchini." In Montale's poetry, when evil is amorphous, good often has the opposite quality of solidity; when it is solid and resistant, good is often fluid, as in "L'anguilla" (The Eel). 38. Ibid., p. 145. 39. Ibid., pp. 91, 117. 40. Contini, "Montale e La bufera" (1956), rpt. Una lunga fedelta; Scritti su Eugenio Montale (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 79-94. 41. This conclusion supports the view that the poem closes in upon itself and breaks all ties to reality, but it shows that "GIi orecchini" does so in ways very different from those he assumes. First, the images are part of a system which is not completely personalized and which suggests a generalized psychological experience. Second, these images vary in qual­ ity and cannot be treated with one method of analysis. Third, one of these types of image, the ironic one, suggests that the tension of the poem lies between mental and physical events, not just between opposing psychological attitudes. Fourth, the motifs, themes, images, symbols, and the structural devices by which these are introduced involve, like the processes of asso­ ciation and analogy, mental processes that are important to the consideration of the poem but which have a nonverbal dimension. 42. Although this language can be traced ultimately to Petrarch, for instance Canzoniere 18 ("Fuggo; ma non si ratto che'l desio / meco non venga"), it can be traced more immediately, and perhaps effectively, to Montale's lifelong and passionate love for opera. Not only did he train to become an opera singer, but he was also a music critic for Corriere delta sera from the late 1940s on. There have been no studies of possible parallels 283

C H A P T E R SIX · N O T E S between Montale's language and the linguistic-thematic registers of operas like A ida (with its insistent "sfuggire" and "struggere"), Nabucco (with its "lutto e squallore"), and IZ trovatore (with its "vittima," "traggo," "delirio," "orrida," "fugge," "solo divampa," and "strugge," among others). 43. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935; 3rd ed. rev., New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 117. 44. There is critical controversy over the ambiguous gestures of the "Finisterre" sequence and even over the term "gesto," as in "La bufera." Oreste Macrt, "Esegesi del terzo libro di Montale," tries to establish a historical reference, but the prose poem "Visita a Fadin" (Visit to Fadin) and many poems, for instance "A mia madre," show a tendency in Montale to regard gestures, especially of loved and admired figures, as carrying their perfection within themselves. Silvio Ramat discusses the significance of the theme of gesture in a number of French and Italian Hermetic poets of the 1930s in L'Ermetismo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973), pp. 257-66 of which focus on Montale.

284

INDEX

3&r> "A Liuba che parte," 278 "A mia madre," 15, 184, 211, 284 "A pianterreno," 146 absolutism, 7, 8, 9, 33, 56, 60, 198 Achievement of T. S. Eliot, xv aesthetics (Montale's), xi-xii, 5, 15, 16, 36, 57, 255 Agosti, Stefano, 259, 266 allegory: in Montale, 15, 24, 34, 121,187, 240, 273; use of, 42, 130, 137, 154, 156, 185, 188, 204, 232, 251; Eliot on, 55; Montale on, 86-87, 203 allusion: in Montale, 6, 35, 41, 161, 228; in Eliot, 8, 45, 50, 251; use of, 17, 27-33, 49, 54, 58, 90, 133, 137, 146, 151, 163, 166, 175, 204, 206, 223^ 226, 258, 259, 267, 281, 282 Almansi, Guido, 253, 268, 269 "Al primo chiaro," 136, 273 ambiguity, 18, 21, 25, 27, 30, 32, 45, 52, 54, 65-66, 69, 77, 87, 9 1 92, 94-95, 102,108, 109, 112, 122, 124, 131, 166, 169,171, 172, 178, 186,188,192, 201-202, 208, 226, 232, 236, 271, 276, 282; Montale on, 26, 57, 88, 89n, 92, 198, 199, 203, 239, 258, 271; critics on, 198, 251,284 ambivalence, 17, 35, 92, 123, 197, 201 Anacleto, 122-23, 166 anacolutha, 218 anagram, 269 analogy, 26, 33, 58-59, 61, 71, 219-20, 228-29

Anceschi, Luciano, 238 Andrewes, Lancelot, 46-48, 52, 57, 65, 66, 245, 246 Anghebeni, 51, 52, 60, 249 "Animula," 245 antefacts, 26, 36, 52, 60-61, 62, 133, 161, 249 "Antico, sono ubriacato dalla voce," 231 Antonielli, Sergio, 238 Apollo, 54 apposition, 228 "Argyll Tour," 283 "Ariel Poems," xi, 7, 20, 41, 43, 237, 245 "Arsenio," 3, 4, 21 assonance, 31, 97, 104, 142, 252 Assunto, Rosario, 263, 280 "Augurio," 277 autobiography, 6, 10, 26, 27, 38, 41, 61, 137, 138, 187n autonomy, 5, 41, 43, 55, 66, 67, 120, 248 Avalle, D'Arco Silvio, xii, 196-99, 239, 249, 257, 276, 279, 282 "Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed essenziale," 234, 278 Barber, C. L., xv "Barche sulla Mama," 190 Barile, Laura, xvi Baroque, 183 "Bassa marea," 143-44 Bassani, Giorgio, 276 Baudelaire, Charles, 120, 165, 180, 182, 233, 244

285

INDEX Bazlen, Bobi [Montale's 1939 correspondence with], 106-107, 116, 119, 128, 131, 133-35, 138, 160-61, 250, 257, 258, 262, 264, 265, 266, 271, 272 Beatrice, 56, 213, 248, 271 Becquer, Gustave Adolfo, 247 Benn, Gottfried, 255 Bergson, Henri, 30, 63, 184, 212, 259 Bettarini, Rosanna, 256 Bibliografia montaliana, xvi Bigongiari, Piero, 261, 265 Blake, William, x, 5, 268, 280 Bonnefoy, Yves, 217 Boutroux, Emile, 10-11, 12-13, 25, 239 Bradley, F. H., 8, 69, 252 Brightman, F. E., 246 "Brina sui vetri; uniti," 218, 220 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 245, 259, 269, 279, 280, 282 Brooks, Cleanth, 242 Browning, Robert, 15, 40, 244, 269, 280 "Buffalo," 193, 259 "Burnt Norton," 219 Cambon, Glauco, 204, 243, 260, 270 Camon, Ferdinando, 212, 248, 250, 254 Caretti, Laura, 238 "Carnevale di Gerti," 169, 210, 259 Cecchi, Emilio, 244 classicism, 7, 108, 112, 160n, 211, 232, 254, 261-62 Clizia, xii-xiii, 17-18, 23-26, 2728, 30, 31-32, 33, 36-37, 52-55, 56-60, 61-62, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 99-100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 113, 117-18, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126,128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135,

136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150,151-52, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159-60, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167-69, 170-71, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179, 182-88, 190, 192, 194, 202, 203, 211, 214-15, 216, 217, 219-20, 221-24, 22527, 228, 233-36, 247, 249, 257, 258, 264, 266, 267, 268, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 282 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 266 conceits, 61, 62-63, 65-66, 167, 208,211,214,219 connotation, 23, 28-29, 32, 38, 59, 90, 94, 107, 118, 119, 132, 147, 150, 161, 227, 241, 276; critics on, 197, 199, 203 Conti, Piero Gadda, 263 contingency, 10, 15, 25, 119, 167, 173, 207, 210, 214, 229, 232 Contini, Gianfranco, 6, 28, 37, 60, 109, 116, 121, 159, 237, 243, 249, 250, 251, 253, 256, 262, 263-64, 265, 272, 273, 275, 276, 277 crepuscular poets, 254 "Crisalide," 271 Criterion, 3, 4, 21 critical approaches: to Montale, ix-x, xi, xiii-xiv, 36, 74-75, 120, 155-56, 191, 195-96, 236, 261, 264, 270, 281; to Montale and Eliot, 3, 4, 41, 238; to Ossi, 19, 108, 209; Montale on, 22, 33-34, 41, 252, 260, 272; to La bufera, 24, 42, 158, 167, 185, 211, 284; to Le occasiom, 114-16. See also specific titles and critics. Croce, Franco, 240, 241, 263 Cumerlotti, 51, 52, 60, 249 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 81, 255 Dante, x, 53, 55-56, 61, 67, 141, 188, 242, 247, 248, 251, 252, 256, 265, 275

286

INDEX "Dante," 55 "Dante ieri e oggi," 55, 242, 254, 256, 271 "Debole sistro al vento," 92 "Delta," 192 denotation, 42, 94, 105-106, 115, 118, 178, 197,229,272 description, 37, 38, 47, 83, 84, 85, 89, 96-97, 103, 106, 108, 113, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127, 130, 138, 139, 140, 168, 180, 191, 208, 210, 211, 212, 218, 230, 231; critics on, 34,120, 259, 265, 268: Montale on, 266, 272 Diario del '71 e del '72, 195-96, 262 "Di un natale metropolitano," 282 Divine Comedy, 55, 248. See also Inferno Dolce Stil Nuovo. See Stilnovo. Donne, John, 15, 279 "Dora Markus," 210 dualism, 41n, 70 "Due sciacalli al guinzaglio," 2 1 23, 51, 55, 56-57, 241, 249, 257, 258 "E ancora possibile la poesia" (Nobel Lecture), 77 "Ecco il segno," 164, 219 "Elegia di Pico Farnese," 37, 99, 100, 106-107, Chapter 4 passim (114-57), 160-61, 163, 166-67, 174, 175, 178, 181, 186, 190, 201, 226, 227, 258, 259, 264, 265, 266, 268, 271, 272 empiric experience, Montale on, 9, 10, 15, 17, 20, 52, 54, 55, 56; use of, 6, 35, 36, 38, 44, 61, 161, 162, 166: Clizia and, 71, 133, 223, 267 Empson, William, 239, 279 English metaphysical poets, 64, 187 epiphany, 117, 121, 134, 190, 283

Farfalla di Dinard, 83, 218, 271, 276, 280 fascism, 77, 252, 253, 270 "Finestra fiesolana," 214-15 Finisterre, ix, 207, 262-63, 270 "Finisterre," xii, Chapter 5 passim (158-93), 196, 198, 200, 218, 221, 234, 259, 271, 273, 274, 284 "'Flashes' e dediche," 60, 271, 283 Flora, Francesco, 261 formalist criticism, xiii, 32, 74, 106, 108, 159, 233, 270 Forti, Marco, 156, 253, 254, 259, 265, 267, 270 "Four Quartets," 50, 247 Frye, Northrop, 232 Fuori di casa, 274-75 Gargiulo, Alfredo, 6, 33, 34, 61, 250, 261, 264 "Giorno e notte," 203-207, 217, 273, 282 "GIi orecchini," xiii, 101, 136, 186, Chapter 6 passim (194-236), 262, 283 "GU orecchini" di Montale, xii, 196 "Gloria del disteso mezzogiorno," 231 glosses, Montale's, xiv, 27-28, 33, 36, 51, 53, 54, 57-58, 87, 98,160, 162, 250, 273 "Godi se il vento ch'entra nel pomario," 189, 223 Gozzano, Guido, x, 255 Graff-Santschi, M., 276 grammar, Montale's use of, xvi, 58, 78, 90-91, 143 Hermeticism, ix, xiii, 33, 34, 108, 212, 242, 261, 284 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, xv, 252, 255, 268, 279 Horace, 81, 83

287

INDEX idealism: in Montale, 5, 9, 10, 14, 23, 32, 150, 155; in Eliot, 7, 8, 9, 46; in criticism, 57,198 ideogram, 97,99,121, 259 ideology, 9, 19, 34, 55 "I limoni," 80-86, 105, 109, 145, 210, 254, 269 "I morti," 192 "Il balcone," 70, 210, 233-34, 251, 267 "Il giglio rosso," 214 "Il ramarro, se scocca," 136, 220 "Il saliscendi bianco e nero dei," 218, 273 "Il sogno del prigioniero," 93, 123 "Il tu," 252 " I l t u o volo," 221-22 "Il ventaglio," 176 images: critics on, 4, 6, 199, 254, 257, 281; Montale on, 7, 8-9, 26, 230, 248, 261; Eliot on, 8-9, 51, 246; use of, in Montale, 10, 21, 23, 25, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 38, 60, 64, 65, 66, 76, 78, 83, 84, 85, 86, 92, 93, 102, 103, 109, 110, 111, 112,113, 115, 117, 119, 121,123, 130-34, 137, 143, 145, 146, 148, 154,156,164,165,166, 167, 169-70,170-72, 175, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188,189, 206, 208, 209, 210-11, 214, 215, 219, 220, 221, 226, 230-31, 232, 251, 254, 258, 262, 272, 275, 276, 277, 281, 282-83; use of, in Eliot, 44, 46, 47, 49, 67 Inferno, 143, 188, 251, 275 influences on Montale, x, 4, 261 "Infuria sale ο grandine," 119, 193 "integralist style," 268 intentions, Montale's, 3n, 5, 6, 35, 39, 86-87, 129n, 205n, 243, 252, 255, 260 "Intenzioni: Intervista immagnaria," 3,19, 40, 73, 86,

114, 125, 158, 159, 194, 243, 249, 252, 254, 255, 261, 272 invective, 226 Iride. See Clizia. "Iride," 125 irony, Montale's, xiv, 9, 13, 18, 19, 23, 48-49, 52, 59, 63, 69-70, 7778, 79, 86, 87, 92, 94, 96, 98, 123, 125,128,129,170, 189,199, 200, 223, 231, 232, 234, 251, 265, 271, 281, 282, 283 Jacomuzzi, Angelo, 238, 240, 260, 263, 267, 280 James, Henry, 268 "Journey of the Magi," xi, 42-50, 52, 57, 66-67, 68, 245, 246, 247, 251 kinesthesia, 33, 35, 112, 119, 272 Krieger, Murray, 280 "Lancelot Andrewes," 245, 246 Langbaum, Robert, 245, 265, 266 Laurano, Renzo, 87, 88, 90-94, 9698, 101, 104, 256 "L'anguilla," 283 "L'anima che dispensa," 172-74, 217, 235 "L'arca," 200-201 "L'orto," 251, 282 "La bufera," xii, 162, 177-88, 190, 224, 262, 276, 284 La bufera e altro, ix, xii, Chapter 5 passim (158-93), Chapter 6 passim (194-236), 262; critics on, xii, 4, 24, 42, 74, 109; and history, xv, 149, 270, 281-82; characteristics of, 15, 60, 63, 101,119,126,128, 139,154-55, 251, 259, 260, 271, 276; and Eliot, 41, 43, 69; and Clizia, 54, 71, 113, 136, 157, 264; in relation to Le occasioni, 108, 115,144

288

INDEX "La busacca," 83 "La casa dei doganieri," 146, 275 La casa dei doganieri e altri versi, ix "La casa delle due palme," 273, 276, 280 La fiera letteraria, 262 "La frangia dei capelli," 162-66, 172, 222, 258 "La gondola che scivola in un forte," 220 "La piuma di struzzo," 280 "La primavera hitleriana," 262 "La rana, prima a ritentar la corda," 218, 281 "La speranza di pure rivederti," 6, 21-23, 26, 34-35, 37-39, 51, 241, 273 La vita miova, 55 Le occasioni, xii, 251, 256-57; importance of, ix, x, xii, 114-15; and poetic objectivity, xv, 10, 108, 256; and Eliot, 4-5, 21, 3738, 41-43, 66; Montale on, 20, 87,97,114,116-17; characteristics of, 29, 38, 41, 68, 98,100, 101, 113,120, 139, 144, 146, 158, 171, 178, 259, 265, 268; critics on, 34, 60-61, 109, 251; and Clizia, 36, 99, 106, 207, 234, 258, 264; and Ossi di seppta, 108, 189-90, 209-11; and La bufera e altro, 159,167, 215, 217-19, 23132, 270 "Le rose gialle," 272 Leopardi, Giacomo, 268 Liguria, 83 Lonardi, Gilberto, 238, 244 "Lontano, ero con te," xi, 22, Chapter 2 passim (40-72), 123, 218, 258, 259 "Lo sai, debbo riperderti e non posso," 171, 201, 218-19, 274,282 Lowell, Robert, 206 "Lungomare," 174-76

Macri, Oreste, 262, 284 MaIIarme, Stephane, and Montale, xiii, 32, 35, 71, 91, 92, 107,112, 124,132, 133, 147, 176,192,196, 202, 213, 216, 224, 236, 242, 257, 276, 280 Manichean, 277 Matthiessen, F. O., xv, 122, 250 Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 255, 273, 277 "Meriggiare pallido e assorto," 143, 208-209 Merry, Bruce, 253, 268, 269 metaphor, Montale's use of, 37, 38, 39, 88, 90, 91, 110-11, 123, 137, 166,181, 192, 203, 205, 208, 214, 216, 221, 228, 229, 230, 231, 279 metaphysical elements in Montale, 8, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 36, 64, 68, 172,191, 192, 199, 212, 264, 272, 273 metaphysical poetry, xi, 244, 255 metonymy, 89, 95, 155, 182, 204, 214, 226, 273, 278 modernism, ix, x, xii, xiv-xv, 29, 38-39, 41, 50, 68, 108, 132, 139 "Motets," Chapter 1 passim (3-39), Chapter 2 passim (40-72), 16768, 169, 171, 174, 178, 180, 181, 193, 208, 215, 219, 258, 259; and Clizia, 90, 94,100, 119, 164, 176, 186, 190, 271; characteristics of, 103, 108, 112, 123, 136,146,174, 190, 201,217-18, 220,233-34, 251, 274, 276, 282; Montale on, 158 "Mottetti," χ musical dimension of poetry, in Montale, 31, 36-37, 38, 50, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 68, 104, 178; in Eliot, 67, 68; Montale on, 67, 88, 242, 252 Musser, Frederick O., 274

289

INDEX myth, of Clizia, 17, 108, 113, 150, 176, 236, 258; use of in Montale, 37,53,96, 119, 121, 151, 156, 185,191, 211, 218, 228-29, 232, 251, 260, 282; use of in Eliot, 47; Montale on, 187n, 203, 261, 266, 268 narrative, 27, 34, 38, 42, 44, 46, 59, 61-62, 69, 82, 85, 109, 117, 118119, 120, 122-23, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 139, 142, 186, 212; critics on, 34, 116, 120, 121; Montale on, 266 Nascimbeni, Giulio, 249 "NeI parco," 119, 259 "NeI sonno," 178-79, 180, 215-17, 218 New Criticism, 198, 280 "Non chiederci Ia parola," 74, 7579, 80, 98, 253 "Non recidere, forbice," 87-99, 100-106, 107-108, 111, 112, 201; and "Ripenso il tuo sorriso," 110 "Non rifugiarti nell'ombra," 230 "Notizie dall'Amiata," 116, 132, 139-54, 156, 160, 167, 178, 181, 268 "Nuove stanze," 207, 271, 276 objective correlative, xi, Chapter 1 passim (3-39), 213, 238, 239, 243, 239, 243, 251 objectivity, poetic, xv, Chapter 1 passim (3-39), Chapter 2 passim (40-72), 87, 108, 120, 191, 243, 251, 256 occasions, poetic, 3n, 10, 21, 38, 93, 102, 106, 117, 139, 164, 165, 166, 189, 193, 231-32, 247 onomatopoeia, 273 Orelli, Giorgio, 272, 281

Ossi di seppta, ix; and Le occasiom, x, 38, 41, 64, 92, 115-16, 120, 132, 133, 134, 143, 145, 149, 150, 189-90, 267, 419; characteristics of, xii, 15, 19, 35, 74, 86-87, 9698, 108, 187, 202, 208, 209-11; critics on, 3, 10, 11, 28, 77, 253, 254, 262, 265, 273; Montale on, 40, 114, 272; and La bufera, 169, 171,181, 184, 191-92, 215, 223, 229, 234, 270, 271, 282 oxymoron, 129, 188 paradox: in Eliot, 8, 9; in Montale, 17, 19, 33, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 120, 125, 128, 151, 171, 219, 233, 234, 272 parataxis, 215 parody, 22 "Perche tardi? NeI pino Io scoiattolo," 166, 220-21, 258, 269, 273 persona, 123 Petrarch, influence on Montale, x, 30, 63-64, 90, 99, 158, 159, 168, 170, 171, 202, 233, 241, 249, 255, 258, 259, 272, 275, 283 "Piccolo testamento," 17, 18-19, 145, 251, 257 Plato, 202 poetic form: critics on, 9, 41, 196; Montale on, 11-12, 13, 14-15, 19, 20, 39, 43, 51, 52, 66, 122, 253, 255; in Montale, 25, 30-31, 37, 41, 59, 63, 67,162, 167,172, 180, 188, 209-10, 214, 216, 231, 281-82 poetic language: Montale on, xi, 93, 198, 203, 263; in Montale, xiii, xiv, 31, 42, 60, 81, 83, 85, 94, 107, 117-18, 124, 125, 130, 132, 135, 137, 138, 155, 160, 161, 162,165, 166, 167, 171,175,176, 182, 189, 190, 191, 192, 202, 204,

290

INDEX 208, 209, 212, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 224, 225, 226, 227-28, 229, 230, 231, 257, 275, 283-84; in Eliot, 8, 46, 219; in Montale, critics on, 116 poetic statement, xiii, 8, 9, 10, 19, 27-28, 44, 49, 74-75, 76, 77-78, 79, 82, 88, 109, 209, 214 poetic texture, 121, 218, 230, 280 poetic tone, 10, 36, 38, 74, 77, 7879, 83, 97, 99, 101, 122, 135, 16On, 203, 229, 259 poetic voice, 7, 10, 15, 26, 41, 44, 46, 50, 60, 65, 95, 123, 124, 125, 180, 247 poetics, Montale's, 5, 21, 36, 52, 73, 77, 81, 83, 87, 108 Poggioli, Renato, 237, 261 Pound, Ezra, 35 Praz, Mario, 3-4, 237, 244, 265 Preces Privatae, 246 prose: uses of in Montale's poetry, critics on, ix, 34, 249-50, 254, 265, 267; Montale's, x, xii, 83, 98, 267, 271, 273, 274, 276, 277, 284; uses of in Montale's poetry, 30-31, 36, 39, 42, 48, 49, 60, 66, 68, 109, 129, 185, 252; uses of in poetry, Montale on, 67, 129n, 249, 252 Proust, Marcel, 30, 100, 198 pseudo-onomatopoeia, 178, 273 pun, 63, 88, 90, 99, 108, 165, 188, 226, 251, 258 Quaderno di quattro anni, 195 "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," 206 "Quasi una fantasia," 231 Ramat, Silvio, 249, 253, 254, 261, 269, 284 Ransom, John Crowe, 280

realism, 29, 60, 171, 195, 205n, 244, 260, 271 reality, as poetic reference, xiv, 32, 56, 81, 86, 90-91, 93, 96, 104-105, 131, 148, 196, 205n, 208, 212, 217, 260; Eliot on, 8, 46; in Montale, 10, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 37, 51, 56, 64, 83, 95, 101-102, 106, 107, 113, 115, 116, 148, 149, 155-57, 170, 201, 202, 211, 232, 275, 283; Montale on, 240, 259; in Montale, critics on, 263, 273 Rebay, Luciano, 258, 264; discussions with Montale on "Elegia di Pico Farnese," 116, 119, 133-34, 258, 264; on "Elegia di Pico Farnese," 136, 156, 264, 266 reference: in Montale, xiv, 13, 37, 42, 54, 57, 65, 71, 115, 121, 132, 137,155, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 180, 186, 219, 228, 247, 267, 283; empiric, in Montale, 6, 161, 162; in Eliot, 7, 8, 34, 50, 67, 234; temporal, in Montale, 27, 179, 229; cultural, in Montale, 41, 49; Montale on, 52, 197, 198, 199, 272; political, in Montale, 115, 116, 149, 180, 229, 284; in Montale, critics on, 198, 264, 278 reference, self, in Montale, 32, 36, 210, 276, 280 relative clauses, 103, 177-78 rhyme, H n , 12, 15, 31, 61, 99, 103-106, 188, 196, 217, 252, 269 Rimbaud, Arthur, 217 "Ripenso il tuo sorriso," 109-13 romanticism, Montale's, 37, 76-77, 84, 85, 109, 132, 149, 152, 154, 157,181, 184, 191, 202, 210, 223, 231, 266, 268 Rosiello, Luigi, 255, 280

291

INDEX Rossi, Aldo, 242 "Rosso su rosso," 262 Salinari, Carlo, 276 Sanguineti, Edoardo, 265 Satura, ix, 74, 146, 195-96, 248, 271 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 187 Segre, Cesare, 252, 278 "Serenata indiana," 207 Shakespeare, William, x, 255, 264, 280, 282 simile, 97, 111, 135, 154, 192, 208 Singh, G., 252, 254, 275 skepticism, 9, 13, 17, 18-19, 48, 49, 55, 74, 77, 80, 128, 150,155, 187n, 191, 195, 206, 212, 253, 254 Solmi, Sergio, 263, 272 "Sotto la pioggia," 103, 278 "Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato," 191, 206 Spinoza, Benedict de, 15 Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), 250 "Stile e tradizione," 77, 79-80, 253, 254 Stilnovo, 54, 55, 188, 255 Stravinsky, Igor, 252 structuralism, ix-x, 195-98, 202, 265-66 structuralist critics, ix-x, 17, 74 structure, poetic: in Montale, critics on, 4, 6, 74, 196-97, 198, 260; in Eliot, 8, 46, 67; Eliot on, 9, 55; Montale on, Hn, 55, 88; in Montale, 59, 61, 63, 64, 120, 121,125, 133,149, 161-62,165, 191, 228, 232, 251, 259 "Su una lettera non scritta," 16772,175,201,211 Svevo, Italo, xi symbolism, literal, 50, 96-97, 148, 218, 238, 245, 280 Symbolist(s), French, 7, 32, 108, 112,124, 138, 147, 185, 215, 228, 229, 261, 263, 265, 280

symbols: use of in Montale, 17, 29, 33, 44-45, 60, 97, 107, 108, 109, 111, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138, 146, 147, 148, 149-50,155, 161, 183, 187, 214, 216, 217, 221, 223, 224, 225, 233, 250, 253, 258, 267, 283; Montale on, 199, 203, 204, 205n; critics on, 199, 246, 251 synesthesia, 81, 83-84, 86, 255 syntagma, 281 syntax, 44, 107, 277; in Montale, x, xvi, 13, 27-28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 42, 59-60, 62, 65, 68, 78, 84, 119, 136,148, 150, 161, 169, 178, 180, 182, 191, 211, 214, 228, 260, 272, 275 system, 196-97 "Tempi di Bellosguardo," 113, 210 temporal dimension, 27, 29, 31, 33, 58-60, 63, 71, 103,109, 123, 125, 126, 127, 133, 137,146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 156, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166,168-70, 170-71, 175, 178, 179,183, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 210, 211, 218, 223, 226, 227, 232, 282; in Eliot, 45, 48, 69; pseudo, 218, 219, 282 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 33 themes: use of in Montale, ix, xii, 41n, 68, 76, 84, 109, 115, 161, 165, 167, 171, 185, 189, 211, 252, 258, 259, 262, 267, 280, 283; Montale on, 19, 158n, 159, 198n, 199, 202, 276; critics on, 74-75, 195,197, 249, 253, 269, 284 "Ti libero la fronte dai ghiaccioli," 222, 258 Tiresia(s), 123, 265 topos, 76, 152, 203, 215

292

INDEX tradition, xiii, 33, 35, 80, 81, 97, 116,162,253 traditionalism, Montale's, 58, 102103, 106, 108 translations by Montale, x, xvi, 4, 237, 245, 282 Tutte Ie poesie, xv Valentini, Alvaro, 262, 264 Valery, Paul, 112, 178,182, 255 variants, textual, 12, Chapter 3 passim (73-113), 241, 256, 257, 266, 282 "Vento e bandiere," 281, 282 verbalism, Montale's, H n , 60, 117, 118-19,121, 130, 132, 133,138, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 174, 175, 190, 214-15, 221, 222

verbs, 99, 101, 103, 126,127, 137, 147,162,177,178, 182, 214-15, 216, 217, 218, 225, 227, 233, 234, 236, 268 Vergil, 252 "Verso Capua," 190, 278 "Verso Finistere," 119 "Visita a Fadin," 284 Warren, Robert Penn, 242 Waste Land, xi, 3, 7, 41, 42, 66, 238, 246 Wellek, Rene, 279 word-aura, 282 Yeats, William Butler, 107, 191, 255, 261, 280 Zanzotto, Andrea, 269

293

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Huffman, Claire de C. L., Montale and the occasions of poetry.

Includes index. 1. Montale, Eugenio, 1896-1981.—Criticism and interpretation—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title. PQ4829.565Z68 1983 851'.912 82-21522 ISBN 0-691-06562-4