The Centrality of the twenty "Mottetti" to Montale's decisive second book, Le Occasioni (1939), has been noted by such critics as Ettore Bonora and Silvio Ramat [in La poesia di Montale (1965) and Montale (1965), respectively]. Despite their probings, however, much remains to be done towards an organic understanding of this remarkable series of poems. Since this part of Montale's work relates to much else he has written before and after, I shall not attempt to isolate it from the rest of the Occasioni book, but merely to keep my focus on what is after all a kind of book within the book. A tighter unity prevails among the "Motets" than among the other poems in the volume, both because the former all turn on the constant of love for Clizia in the variations of worldly vicissitudes, and because they match this thematic constancy by a relative constancy of form.

The author himself, in his awareness of their interdependence, rearranged their sequential order to fit a dialectic of the heart rather than a strict chronological succession. The first three "Motets" (I take these details from the latest Mondadori edition, the fifth, of 1962) are dated 1934, and the last one 1937, with a prevalence of intermingled 1937 and 1938 datings in between. "Motet" No. 5 is of 1939, and therefore should come at the very end, if compositional chronology were the dominant consideration; it is arguable that the author shifted this utterly despondent piece backwards to fifth position to avoid concluding the whole sequence on the hell-haunted keynote on which it had started, especially since he then chose for an epilogue the ironically resigned "…ma così sia" of 1937, which changes the entire perspective. Instead of a development coming around full circle to seal a history of despair, we now have a precariously open line of spiritual dynamics.

Inner time thus supersedes factual time in the final arrangement of artistic experience, as specifically shown by the reshuffling of past and present which, within the magic circle of "Motet" No. 3, results in a suspension of time. Timelessness, however, is never durably grasped, just fleetingly glimpsed; it is as if the experiencing persona swam underwater in the stream of time only to surface momentarily into the timeless sphere where he cannot finally breathe—and this metaphor actually materializes in a later, thematically related poem from La Bufera e altro ("L'ombra délia magnolia"), with the poet seeing himself as a fish jumping on dry land at the call of his beloved from "l'oltrecielo," the sky beyond the sky. Here is one source of epiphany, "the point of intersection of the timeless / with time," to say it with Eliot, and it helps us to understand why in the end time will be accepted.

The experience of time is primary, intense to the point of making a reference to Bergson's concept of felt duration almost inevitable. Temporality as a form of consciousness involves a keen sense of the uniqueness of each fully lived moment, and thereby places a special emphasis on contingency, as in the philosophy of Emile Boutroux, another thinker who is relevant to Montale's poetical world; the poet himself publicly acknowledged his strong interest in Boutroux's philosophie de la contingence during his formative years. Each contingent moment (in Montale's language, "occasion") being unrepeatable, the intimate story outlined by these poems unfolds as a progression from a state of haunted deprivation to a substantially different one, though within this open pattern there occur, analogically speaking, seasonal cycles of the soul, winter to spring and summer, bereavement to budding hope, and plenitude and bereavement once again. Even if the analogy is imperfect, as Walter Ong would warn us, it nevertheless operates; analogies are not identities, and this means that the spiritual movement embodied in the overall design of the "Motets" is neither linear nor circular, but spiral.

Montale concentrates on private history, since public history in his opinion has become the domain of falsity and injustice. The several poems count as heartbeats of the mind engaged in the quest for personal truth and happiness: a fulfilling illumination to exorcize the idola fori of the age. Hence the markedly "occasional" nature of the "Mottetti," in accordance with the programmatic title of the whole book, Occasioni: in a historically deranged world (it's the middle-to-late thirties and the sky is darkening over Europe), in a naturally unyielding cosmos, a possible order of higher truth may reveal itself only by fleeting chance, and obliquely. The "occasional" mode of epiphany determines the rhapsodically loose structure within whose range each "Motet" can best function as an individual climax of perception that mirrors the previous ones and leads up to the next.

The poet's openness to experience will not guarantee an abundance of reliable occasions, yet he will keep trying, for he knows that his only chance (both as man and as poet) is to hope against hope: "Sobre el bolcán la flor," his epigraph from Bécquer has it, and it reads like a summary of Leopardi's "La Ginestra," that sober celebration, as a foil to man's disastrous history, of the unconquerable flower which no eruption will finally evict from Vesuvius' inhospitable slopes. The first poem of the sequence voices the despair of an excruciating loss which leaves only "the certainty of hell":

Everything conspires to make this "Motet" one of the strongest poetical statements of the century, whether we take it by itself, or as a prologue to the whole allusive story, or as the epilogue of an antecedent development: its dramatic abruptness, its clipped syntax like a gasping breath, its sharp imagery and crackling syllables interwoven with hidden rhymes (tiro-spiro, lungo-unghia, strazia-grazia, segno-pegno). Word economy reaches a maximum without impinging on the naturalness of utterance; Genoa's harbor is rapidly etched, a merciless landscape (for this contingency) even in the midst of spring, since it can be the scene of unbearable farewells. Spiritual derangement wreaked on the persona by such a departure culminates in the forecast of "hell" at the end, but it has already come through in those poignant similes of the "accurate shot" and of the "prolonged whir like a nail grating on the panes." Nothing in Auden or Eliot, nothing in Benn surpasses this nervous incisiveness, this assurance of diction which stands out as one exemplary embodiment of modern sensibility at its harrowing best. One thinks of the "Preludes," of "Rhapsody on a Windy Night"; and yet somehow Montale's piece throbs with greater urgency.

Nothing is explained and everything counts; as so often with Leopardi (an undoubted ancestor), the energy of utterance arches into an I-Thou address which must bridge a gap of absence (whether temporary or final), and leaves room only for the essentials of inner existence. We do not see the addressed person, we are not told who she is, only her importance to the speaker. The following "Motets" will make clearer why she is so important, without really violating the initial reticence. One thing we know: she is very human and real, yet somehow superhuman, if she can give "pledges of grace." These are of course the hyperboles of love, but in the course of the sequence they will develop into metaphysical attributes. She is not a stable presence; she has come and gone and is going once again, forever—a detail concisely expressed by that verb (riperderti) which makes the whole difference between rhetoric and passion. She is the exceptional visitor from another world (and in more than one sense, as the sequel will show), and she changes everything for our poet, who is left seeking for the "sign" of redemptive power.

Cavalcanti's, Dante's, Petrarch's ladies likewise brought peace and torment to their worshipers; the link is not casual, for it does not take long to see how Montale's language is steeped in Dolce Stil Nuovo and (even more) mature Dantesque style. The counterpoint of salvation and damnation appears in the very rhymes of this poem: tiro (shot) evokes spiro (breath, breeze), strazia (tortures) elicits grazia (grace), aperto (open) is echoed by certo (the certitude of hell), while segno (sign) instead tends tonally and semantically to coalesce with pegno (pledge), thus giving a musical resolution to the dissonant chords. In other poems of the series, or of the book, the dissonance coagulates into an oxymoron, such as "la tua cara minaccia" (your cherished menace) in "Motet" No. 7, the war described in terms of "night games of Roman candles" and "a feast" in "Motet" No. 3, or (elsewhere in Le Occasioni) "è una tempesta anche la tua dolcezza" (your very sweetness is a storm) in "Dora Markus."…

Coming to our first "Motet" with Dante in mind will result in an enriching recognition of the poem's qualities per se as well as of its structural function in the series. The cutting sounds, the concrete, localized words, the cruel metaphors call to mind the percussive alliterations of Inferno with its concomitantly astringent similes: "come coltel di scardova le scaglie"; "si dileguò come da corda cocca"; "come d'un stizzo verde ch'arso sia"; "tal che se Tambernicchi / vi fosse su caduto, O Pietrapana, / non avrìa pur da l'orlo fatto cricchi." The harbor's "wood of masts and iron" might almost arouse overtones of the Dark Wood; indeed a subjective "hell" is "certain," while the persona appropriately keeps looking for the "lost sign," for "the pledge of grace" his troubling Beatrice had given him. Like the Inferno's prologue, this "Motet" consummates a catastrophe and ushers in the possibility of a renewal by way of a perilous quest which should lead the bewildered poet back to his Lady. By the same token, it is the questing attitude that makes poetry possible, it describes the nature of Montale's poetry, as "Motet" No. 9 (coincidentally starting on an intentional reference to Dante) may exemplify, on the most intellectual level, a relentless search for meaning in the wilderness of phenomena. Ever since "I Limoni" (the opening piece of Ossi di seppia, 1925) he had hoped to disentangle "the thread … / that may instal us in the quick of a truth."…

It is the personal intimacy of a specific love rapport that dominates the "Motets" sequence and is itself heaven and hell to the poet's persona. The "prologue," we saw, has set the scene for the development of love's vicissitudes, and the next poem, composed in the same year, begins to explore them backwards by venturing into the region of memory and thereby supplying some antecedents to the predicament previously expressed. We hear of a crucial year of suffering (disease, as the following poem will show) at a "foreign" (Swiss?) lake, whence his elusive lady came down to her poet with a heraldic token (the "sign" and "pledge" mentioned in Poem No. 1?):

Molti anni, e uno più duro sopra il lago
straniero su cui ardono i tramonti.
Poi scendesti dai monti a riportarmi
San Giorgio e il Drago…

Many years, and one, harder, on the foreign
lake where sunsets blaze.
Then you descended from the mountains to bring back
Saint George and the Dragon to me…

If it is true, as Bonora says [in La poesia di Montale], that the heraldry refers to Genoa's patron saint, to signify a love tryst which took place there, we can hardly miss the larger significance of the symbol. As the rest of the poems variously hint, and the whole of Le Occasioni makes unequivocally clear (especially in elegies like "Eastbourne" or "Nuove Stanze," thematically related to "Motets"), the world is out of joint around the two lovers, and the condition of hell is no idiosyncrasy of the poet's mind; his lady often appears as defiant prophetess or fighting angel against the forces of evil, and thus St. George killing the dragon (of political obscurantism) makes the perfect icon for her to "bring back" to her devotee. It does not matter that the icon is no material object but (given Montale's psychological use of verbs like riportare and ritornare) simply the enshrined memory of a private occurrence. On the trans-narrative level, the force of style itself makes it announce emblematically the desperate fight for reason and justice, which concerns both parties here along with the largely unaware world around them. The persona, then, has more than one good reason to wish he "could imprint" the significant image on the "banner" he feels flapping at the seawind "in the heart":

Imprimerli potessi sul palvese
che s'agita alla frusta del grecale
in cuore … Å per te scendere in un gorgo
di fedeltà, immortale.
Would I were able to imprint them on the flag
which flutters at the whip of the seawind
in my heart … And to descend for your sake into a whirlpool
of faithfulness, immortal.

Not victory, but fidelity to the point of sacrifice is the thing for our poet who would joust for his lady's emblem. While still keeping his guard up against any encroachment of pompousness, he has come a long way from "Arsenio'"s paralyzing dubitation; for her he would readily go down in a whirlpool of self-purified passion. The extreme concision makes for mythical focus, climaxing in the very Dantesque metonymy (cf. "San Giorgio e il Drago" with "Caino e le spine" in Inf. XX. 126, or "il gallo di Gallura" in Purg. VIII. 81) which gives this personal story a decisive turn for the legendary. There is enough precision to individualize the persons involved, and enough narrative vagueness to evoke the mysterious aura of a fairytale; a marked success, to be sure, of the tendency to retreat from the explicit into the resourceful realm of the implicit. The rhymes, as usual, reinforce a semantic point, and this is particularly true of "tramonti" (sunsets) and "monti" (mountains), where a sunlike halo accrues to the Transalpine visitor. "Drago" (dragon) shocks us into sharper awareness when we realize its consonance with "lago" (lake). We could even speak of semantic rhyme in the case of the twice used verb "scendere" (to descend), which in Stanza 2 echoes, on the part of the speaker, the ritual action performed by his lady in Stanza 1.

This leads us to see the responsorial symmetry of the two stanzas, the first of which centers on the lady's person and actions, the second on her poet's response; and the response endures, as the verb tenses show—indefinite present offsetting the definite past of Stanza 1: "scendesti" (you descended)…"potessi" (could I) … "scendere" (descend). Thus memory prolongs and develops the erstwhile occasion into epiphany. The "lake" of Stanza 1 makes room for a "whirlpool" (gorgo) in Stanza 2; our lady really came as an angel to stir the waters, since everything (St. 2) is now in commotion in the poet's own self; he views his commitment to her as a tempestuous, dangerous, if enlivening state: "gorgo di fedeltà" (whirlpool of fidelity), a unique, and uniquely motivated, paradox. If any "Motets" justify their musical title by verbal counterpoint and polyphonic structure, this one does.

"Motet" No. 1 generated "Motet" No. 2 by way of associative reminiscence, and the latter in turn provides a further invitation to memory, thereby giving rise to "Motet" No. 3. Genoa was the clue No. 1 afforded to subsequent piece, and hospital and war develop as a contrapuntal poetical situation in No. 3 from the apposite intimations of "Motet" No. 2. The mind keeps going back into a further past on the thread of restless memory. Brief mention of the lady's sick confinement now summons the vision of her monotonous life in the uncommunicative plight of an Alpine sanitarium. The vision arises as an indefinite present, for the noun-ridden style of Stanza 1 admits of no verbs. At the end (St. 4) this syntax will focus on a historical present expressing the continuity of memory once struck by the significant moment:

E' scorsa un'ala rude, t'ha sfiorato le mani,
ma invano: la tua carta non è questa.

A rough wind has brushed past, skimming your hands,
but in vain: this was not your card.

And remembrance once again transforms the occasion (solitary card games in the hospital) into epiphany (Death's wing brushing past, but to indicate the wrong card; our lady's allegiance is not to death, and her hour has not struck; hope nestles in the nest of pain). Meanwhile, this "exile" of hers in the foreign hospital has reminded the poet of his own exile: the predicament of war by now long weathered. Two manners of solitude, two ways of confronting death; the separately endured ordeals were eventually to bring the two lovers together.

So he endured, but to what purpose, asks the poet in the next "Motet" (No. 4). His purpose was and is to know her, to be with her; the time spent in ignorance of her now appears wasted, and war ("il logorio / di prima," the distress of the time before) "spared" him only to let him see what an irremediable loss this was. Nevertheless, as memory pushes into door after door of the temps perdu, he is able to say that physical absence did not prevent his being spiritually with her when another ordeal, her father's death, tried her. Everything comes back to him from long ago, and war especially, as he knew it in a given region of the Alps ("Cumerlotti o Anghébeni"). The particulars of chance, expressed by these odd names of Alpine villages, add a weird note of individually felt reality to the scene. War in a way has not ended for him since "the distress of the time before" knowing his woman has been followed by a presumable "distress of the time after" losing her—who could alone be his peace, who alone could make sense of his life. "Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after," as the conclusion of "Burnt Norton" has it. Also, war and love have been intertwining fugally through three of these four "Motets" like complementary themes which contrast each other but may tend to a resolving fusion; the fusion, indeed, that will take place in the final stanza of "Notizie dall' Amiata" at the end of Le Occasioni, where the key expression is "rissa cristiana," Christian strife, anticipating the even bolder synthesis of "L'ombra délia magnolia" in La Bufera e altro: "perché la guerra fosse in te e in chi adora / su te le stimme del tuo Sposo" (that war might be in you and in whosoever worships / in you the stigmata of your Bridegroom). Love may bring peace, but in a psychological and even more in a mystical sense it is also "war." The two descanting themes transform each other in the course of Montale's poetical career.

Here it was the verb of active memory ("mi riporta Cumerlotti," etc.) that released a kind of purgatorial revelation by matching different levels of past experience; but we are back in hell with "Motet" No. 5, which rephrases in an even starker way the situation of "Motet" No. 1: an ineluctable parting, this time by train, and a hopelessness investing the whole world. Metallic onomatopoeia (of the kind Carducci had already essayed in his "Alia stazione in una mattina d'autunno" ["At the Station in an Autumn Morning"]) concurs with coughing asyndeton to structure the infernal vision:

Addi, fischi nel buio, cenni, tosse
e sportelli abbassati. E' l'ora…

Goodbyes, whistles in the dark, nods, coughing,
and windows lowered in the train. It is time…

It is, indeed, the time of parting, of loss, of infernal epiphany:

… Forse
gli automi hanno ragione. Come appaiono
dai corridoi, murati!

…Perhaps
the automatons are right. How they appear
walled in, from the aisles!

"Walled-in automatons": a dehumanized mankind appears, dominated by mechanical power.

In the second stanza, this sinister music becomes a dance of death:

Presti anche tu alla fioca
litania del tuo rapido quest'orrida
e fedele cadenza di carioca?

Are you too lending to the dim
litany of your express train this horrid
and faithful cadence of a carioca dance?…

The first four "Motets" make a cycle which is sealed by the fifth. Then from the zero point another season of the soul begins; and we go through the odyssey of waiting and hope and loss, all the stations of the search. But since the departure has been physically final, our poet looks for his lady's symbolic presence; everything may become a token, an embodying sign of her. And in this way the process of erotic apotheosis starts, with the absent lady taking on more and more metaphysical attributes. First (as in "Motet" No. 6) she is what gives a meaning to our poet's life, then she becomes the source of all meaning and life, to culminate in the frankly deifying myths of "Eastbourne," "Nuove Stanze," "L'orto," and "Iride." The ecclesiastical connotation of the title "Motets" makes itself felt, the more so as we connect the "Mottetti" with those other (thematically related) lyrics.

"Motet" No. 6 still delves in memory, since only from the past can the poet's light come now that his woman is removed from contact:

La speranza di pure rivederti
m'abbandonava;

e mi chiesi se questo che mi chiude
ogni senso di te, schermo d'immagini,
ha i segni della morte o dal passato
è in esso, ma distorto e fatto labile,
un tuo barbaglio…

The very hope to see you again
was abandoning me;

and I wondered if this thing which blocks
any sense of you, this screen of images,
bears the signs of death or, from the past,
it has retained, though distorted and fleeting,
a glimmer of you…

In the barrier of blind phenomena ("schermo d'immagini," screen of images) which threaten death because they seem to shut him off from any "sense of (his lady), the poet wonders whether "a gleam" (barbaglio) of her can still be found, however "faint and distorted." He is once again in the purgatorial plight of looking for his salvation, as it were, against odds; and it is against odds that the invoked sign comes, in the unlikeliest form of epiphany. "Cerco il segno / smarrito…," he said in "Motet" No. 1; and at times the symbol is not certain, as in the present case, where Clizia is epiphanized by a liveried lackey pulling two jackals on a leash:

(a Modena, tra i portici,
un servo gallonato trascinava
due sciacalli al guinzaglio).

(at Modena, in the porticoes,
a liveried servant was dragging
two jackals on a leash).

Even the fact that this particular remembrance is set in parentheses makes it a problematical epiphany. The revelatory sign generally comes at the unexpected moment, in the chance place, in the unforeseen way; here (if it is the sign), the exotic animals from Africa and the Orient, connected with the sun, remind the poet of sunflower-like Clizia. They are as incongruous to the scene as was Clizia herself, the visitor from another world. Incongruity may signalize transcendence, as "Motet" No. 9 will show.

Animals abound and tend to be magic vehicles in Montale's world, and if right now this function has accrued to the exotic jackals, in the next "Motet" (No. 7) it will be the familiar swallows that evoke his faraway lady. They are familiar, but winged and migratory; remember the heroic stork of "Sotto la Pioggia," and the many birdlike incarnations of the transcendental lady in La Bufera e altro. The swallows' joyful shuttling between telegraph poles and the sea, however, is not enough to bring her bodily back. She does not cease to be a real woman, and here the persona cannot do with anything less than her physical presence. Such oscillations of the heart contribute to the drama of occasion and epiphany. After a rainstorm, the "truce" of the elements is "menaced" by the pervasive thought of her:

Già profuma il sambuco fitto su
lo sterrato; il piovasco si dilegua.
Se il chiarore è una tregua,
la tua cara minaccia la consuma.

Already the thick elderberry exhales its scent
on the dug up earth; the shower fades away.
If the light is a truce,
your cherished menace now consumes it.

In "Motet" No. 2 she had come to stir the waters; to have known her is to have lost one's peace, and no peace would be welcome or indeed possible without her.

With "Motet" No. 8 she appears symbolically, but (this time) unmistakably, in the tracing of a palm tree's shadow cast on a wall by the sunrise:

Ecco il segno: s'innerva
sul muro che s'indora:
un frastaglio di palma
bruciato dai barbagli dell'aurora.

Here is the sign: it innervates
the wall being gilded by the sun:
an arabesque of palm leaves
burned by the dazzle of the dawn.

The Orient sun and the palm tree have to do with Clizia's sunny nature and with her Palestinian ancestry (as indicated by other poems like "L'orto" and "Iride"). For once the epiphany coincides immediately with its occasion, and the poet knows a fulfillment; one might say that he has momentarily left hell and purgatory itself behind, though heaven here and now can only be a matter of privileged instants, a dimension tangential to the historically fallen human condition.

The sunny sighting conjures auditory and tactile phenomena to make the absent one a total inner presence:

II passo che proviene
dalla serra sì lieve,
non è felpato dalla neve, è ancora
tua vita, sangue tuo nelle mie vene.

The footstep approaching
from the hothouse so lightly
is not muffled by the snow, it is still
your life, your blood within my veins.

The hypostasis of love is here strongly physical, immanent, personal, climaxing in the erotic fusion. Snow and sun, Orient and North make a polarity of milieux to reinforce the rapture, as in Heine's love poem of the pine tree consumed by love for the remote palm tree in the East; but what sets off the modern poem from its Romantic counterpart is a sensual chord produced by the counterpoint of physiological density and airy fantasy. The body, the here and now, the realm of occasion are never abandoned forever, and such swayings confer on Montale's sequence its unique dynamics, to preserve it from anaemic rarefaction.

If this fine "Motet" is the first fulfilling response to the search announced by "Motet" No. 1 ("cerco il segno / smarrito"), in the next poem the situation is reversed. While "Motet" No. 9 is undoubtedly the most abstract and intellectual of the "Mottetti," passion is not excluded; the search for meaning has come to involve the speculative mind along with the heart. In a way, "Motet" No. 9 marks the beginning of still another cycle within the sequence, by picking up the doctrinal cue of "Motet" No. 6, for here we find the questing poet engaged in sifting the phenomena for an evidence of the highest value that only Clizia can impart. The first cycle had culminated in the hellish nightmare of "Motet" No. 5, the second has consummated itself in the momentarily attained heaven of "Motet" No. 8, and after the respective zero point and high point of moral experience we find the persona resuming his relentless search, swaying between utter alienation and fulfillment, the two experiential thresholds of the mind. "Lo sguardo fruga d'intorno, / la mente indaga accorda disunisce … / … Sono i silenzi in cui si vede / in ogni ombra umana che si allontana / qualche disturbata Divinità" (The eyes keep scanning all around, / the mind investigates, harmonizes, disjoins … / … These are the silences in which one sees / in each self-distancing human shadow / some disturbed Godhead). These lines from Montale's "I limoni," the opening lyric of Ossi di seppia (1925), could provide an epigraph for whole present sequence and for the specific "Motet" under consideration.

The heavenly epiphany of the previous poem bore the earmarks of immediacy, now the mind recoils into the mediating act of thought which negates the occasions supplied by sensory reality to rise to a glimpse of the ineffable. The "screen of images" that makes the world of phenomena might be pierced to attain the noumenal. The poet probes a set of privileged phenomena from various areas of sensory experience within the range of a Ligurian seascape for traces of the transcendent entity his lady seems to have become. But even though their shared quality of instantaneousness made them all candidates to revelatory power, they fail in the end when tested against the utterly "other" nature of the noumenal Thou she is. Whether visual or auditory, the phenomenon consummating itself in the moment is both in and out of time, it verges on the timeless, therefore could somehow manifest transcendency; but not so here, where each event remains closed in itself, an opaque monad (as Franco Fortini wrote [in Comunità, August 1954] when analyzing "Estate"):

II ramarro, se scocca
sotto la grande fersa
delle stoppie—

la vela, quando fiotta
e s'inabissa al salto
della rocca—

il cannone di mezzodì
più fioco del tuo cuore
e il cronometro se
scatta senza rumore—

…..

e poi? Luce di lampo
invano può mutarvi in alcunché
di ricco e strano. Altro era il tuo stampo.

The green lizard, should it dart
under the great whiplash
of sunburnt stubblefields—

the sail, when it flutters
and falls at the steep
cliff headland—

the noontide cannon shot
feebler than your heart
and the chronometer if
it noiselessly clicks—

…..

and then? A lightning glory
in vain could change you all into something
rich and strange. Thy kind was other.

The suddenly darting lizard (a Dantesque reference), the sail vanishing behind a rock, the noontime cannon shot, and finally the ticking of the chronometer: these events can only add up to a series, horizontally as it were, but since they are still circumscribed by time (and the series happens to end with the action of a mechanical timepiece), the question remains open: "what then?" The poet has weighted them one by one to find them wanting even if they are susceptible of esthetic transfiguration ("in vain a lightning glory could change you into something rich and strange"). At this point we realize that the quotation from Shakespeare's Tempest is made to carry a definition of the poetic process, and in a poem which questions the ultimate value of esthetic experience, one can go no further than to begin with Dante and conclude with Shakespeare, the highest authorities of poetry.

The religious hypostasis of love has gone to a dizzy height; if the Absent Lady is not even accessible to poetical revelation, because her essence "was wholly other," she is godlike, or partakes of godhead. The poem's procedure in reaching that level presents some (probably not fortuitous) similarity to the Negative Way of the mystics who strove to express the ineffability of God by successively discarding every created aspect of beauty or power that could seem to approach Him: God is not this, nor that, nor even that…Like Dante in Purgalorio here Montale is a poet exploring the limits of his own art and humbly declaring it (along with Nature) unable to capture the transcendent. For the transcendent would be a steady plenitude of light, and poetic epiphanies are intermittent gleams only. The act of sifting and discarding what nature and art have to offer is underscored by the gesture of pronouns: in the two concluding lines the persona first addresses all the pondered phenomena collectively ("mutarvi," change you all), then turns away from them to speak to his lady ("Altro era il tuo stampo," quite other was thy cast). Notice should also be taken of how the enumerative, suspended rhythm of this poem conveys a tone of progressive meditation, unlike the fast and melodious rhythm of the previous one which suited the immediacy of enjoyed epiphany.

The metaphysical failure of Nature and Art does not stop our poet from pursuing his quest of revelatory analogies in the surrounding cosmos; for, should he cling forever to any kind of Negative Way, he would have to renounce poetry altogether. In "Motet" No. 10 (which is also chronologically later then No. 9) we see him again waiting for the appearance of his lady. "Why are you delaying?" ("Perché tardi?") he asks her; the scene is set, a squirrel is knocking on the tree, the half-moon is vanishing in the triumphant sun, day has started. But she, now appropriately disembodied into pure light, is hidden in a cloud:

A un soffio il pigro fumo trasalisce,
si difende nel punto che ti chiude.
Nulla finisce, o tutto, se tu fòlgore
lasci la nube.

At a gust the sluggish smoke startles,
to defend itself at the point which encloses you.
Nothing will end, or everything, if you, lightning-like, leave the storm cloud.

Her appearance in the world of time-bound phenomena can only be lightning-like; essence manifests itself tangentially in our opaque reality. We do not know if the apocalyptic rendezvous will be kept, we are left to share the waiting. The lightning image harks back to the foregoing "Motet," though with reverse import; the "nothing will end, or everything" implies that the longed-for revelation will either save or consume the world….

Musical epiphany is indeed what we have in "Motet" No. 11, where the absent lady makes her presence felt as a disembodied voice which is the soul of the world:

La tua voce è quest'anima diffusa.
Su fili, su ali, al vento, a caso, col
favore della musa o d'un ordegno,
ritorna lieta o triste…

Your voice is this diffusive soul.
On wires, on wings, at the wind, at random, with
the help of the Muse or of an engine,
it returns, joyous or sad…

The poet's communion with her through the medium of music (no matter how produced) is rigorously private, and he defends it against intruding interlocutors:

And so the passion of faith has overcome the ascetic denials of the intellectual "Motet" No. 9. Reality does hold cues to the intangible, but, of course, both in this "Motet" No. 11 and in the next one, the intangible is subjective, a revelation the persona refuses to share. No. 12 sings the angelic transfiguration of his woman:

Ti libero la fronte dai ghiaccioli
che raccogliesti traversando l'alte
nebulose; hai le penne lacerate
dai cicloni, ti desti a soprassalti.

I rid your forehead of the icicles
you gathered winging through the lofty
nebulae; your feathers are torn
by cyclones, you awaken by fits and starts.

That incongruity which manifests transcendence is here stressed by opposing the richness of imaginative subjectivity to the imperiousness of external, social reality:

Mezzodì: allunga nel riquadro il nespolo
l'ombra nera, s'ostina in cielo un sole
freddoloso; e l'altre ombre che scantonano
nel vicolo non sanno che sei qui.

Noontime: in the window frame the medlar tree
lengthens its black shadow, a shivering sun
persists up there; and the other shadows turning
into the alley do not know you are here.

Epiphany here (as given in the previous stanza of "Motet" No. 12) precedes outer reality instead of springing from its cues, and the two moments neatly offset each other. In the process, though, and just because inner reality has been affirmed without qualification, external reality loses its firmness to dissolve (not only optically) into shadows ("l'ombra nera…; l'altre ombre"). It is noon (mezzodì), the hour of plenitude, but plenitude comes to the poet only subjectively, from another sphere than that of physical presences; which is perhaps another way of restating the inadequacy of nature to his glimpsed revelation. "Things as they are," Stevens would say, "are changed upon the blue guitar." Or can they be? Here, at least, things as they are prove irreducible to the substance of a poet's dream.

Thus the troubadour must repeatedly exile himself from the certitude of unshared vision, to be lost among men and things: "Motet" No. 13 features him in an ambiguous Venice à la Offenbach, where a vision of his lady once taken away from him by demoniacally laughing carnival masks confounds him. What is left but some intermittent spurts of life? In watching on the now deserted scene a fisherman with his writhing eel catch, he emotionally identifies with the man and ultimately with the doomed fish:

Visionary Venice of remembered love with incidents worthy of Tales of Hoffmann abruptly dissolves into a quotidian, dull, realistic Venice, and the two contradictory moments of experience, appropriately assigned each to one stanza of the poem (in keeping with the dominant pattern of "Motets"), bring forth two opposite epiphanies: the nightmare of loss at the peak of merriment, and the desolation of fading vitality, as if the persona were reentering the world of "Arsenio."

Yet Queen Mab is at work and will not let him rest. "Motet" No. 14 breaks the spell to grasp the analogic presence of the remote lady in the music of hailstorm, whose destructiveness competes with, and finally melts into, her sprightly song of days gone by. The polyphonic resolution of that contrast through ambivalence aptly crowns this poem marked by musical references to a solemn Debussy (The Submerged Cathedral) and the lighter "Aria of the Campanulas." As usual, private reference serves to pinpoint the individual nature of the emotional situation; for all the mythical developments or mystical hypostases that situation fosters, it is not just any two lovers who are involved, but these two. The lady used to impersonate, in her private singing, the light opera character of Lakmé.

The whimsical operation of memory here—from the hail-storm-battered campanulas of a garden to the "Campanulas Aria," from hailstorm patter to mechanical keyboard ("la pianola degli inferi") to the trilling of the now remote singer—fits the fanciful manifestation of womanhood, which oddly conquers (by transforming them) the forces of destruction. But "Motet" No. 11 had said how any given occasion could evoke her voice: "on wires, on wings, in the wind at random, with the help of the Muse or of an engine."

No. 15 returns to a grave note. The beginning of day and the beginning of night, the turning points of man's daily activity, can only receive a human meaning (in the mechanical dispersal of work) from the poet's lady, who keeps threading together the contrary moments of time:

This is not the most perspicuous or convincing of the "Motets," but for all that it lends itself to interpretation. We notice that (in Stanza 1) daybreak carries with it a noise of trains in a tunnel, while in Stanza 2 nightfall brings the woodworm's creaking in the writer's desk and an ominous "watchman's step"; in both cases, an oppressive image of somber closure ("chiusi uomini in corsa," cf. the "automatons" of No. 5). Since Stanza 2 gives us the poet's own study (rather menaced than protected by the approaching "watchman" in whose custody this prison like world apparently is), and Stanza 1 a slice of the humdrum outside world, an opposition arises between public and private reality, outside hustle-and-bustle and interior meditation. The writer is alienated from the surrounding world, and the only way to heal this wound in experience is for him to heed the constant inspirations of his Muse (who handles a thread in a very womanly yet very Fatelike fashion). The transcendental seamstress (unlike her other avatars) appears as a steady presence.

Since in this poetry trains seem generally to function as instruments of alienation or separation, it is not surprising to find a funicular railway, in the next poem, once more parting the two lovers. A forget-me-not brings up this further painful memory in what could have become an alltoo-obvious sentimental piece in hands less expert than Montale's; actually, the poem has a captivating simplicity and a freshness all its own. The following poem instead ("Motet" No. 17) requires some comment, though it is every bit as vivid and far more painterly. Taken by itself, it belongs to Montale's most characteristic achievement; a chastened, yet prehensile sensuousness enables the language to grasp the essentials of a rural scene: late summer fields in the imminence of a storm. Few, sober yet dense brushstrokes as if from the palette of Fattori or Tosi, and tingling pizzicato sounds in a sustained metrical-syntactic flow outline a world peopled only by minimal creatures, with an effect of increased atmospheric vastness. There is no stanza break (unlike the pattern of the other "Motets"), and one effect is to stress the suspense of weather; but the coming storm already makes itself felt in a gradual hush, and in no time at all it will burst upon the deceptive peace:

The "lean horses" about to break into the sky, scattering "sparks from their hoofs," are a demonic, and rurally fitting, metaphorization of the galloping thunderclouds.

Nothing more need be said if we take the poem by itself, as the self-contained piece it can certainly be. But, as part of the "Motet" series, it must possess a resonance far beyond the limited scope of an Impressionist vignette. Those threatening "lean horses" have to do with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The storm (it is 1938) is overshadowing human history and is not just a part of local Nature. The piece is apocalyptic, not impressionist, its contextual position coming to strengthen the intrinsic clue. We may also call to mind the symbolic value of storms in Montale's poetry, all the way down to La Bufera e altro. A striking trait in this "Motet" No. 17 (and one that tends to set it rather apart from the rest) is the absence of any allusion to Clizia; it is an "It," not a "Thou" poem as all the others are. Even at the risk of overly rationalizing what brooks little or no rationalization, I would connect that unique trait with the drama of light and darkness, good and evil, whose positive protagonist Clizia has come to be. Where she is absent, no angel will be left to fight the forces of destruction; and the world is here abandoned to the coming ravage (which may also have a purifying effect, since open war seems better than oppressive stagnation).

Although composed in 1937, a year before its predecessor in the series as we now have it, "Motet" No. 18 seems to form a corollary to the one we have just discussed. It is fall now, and the summer storms are past; another kind of desolation looms on the November landscape where the woodcutter's axe hits the acacia tree:

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

Un freddo cala … Duro il colpo svetta.
E l'acacia ferita da sé scrolla
il guscio di cicala
nella prima belletta di Novembre.

Do not cut off, scissors, that visage
now left alone in my unpeopled memory,
do not make of her great, listening face
my perennial fog.

Cold weather settles down … Hard swings the blow.
And the wounded acacia shakes off
the cicada shell
in the first mire of November.

By one of the unpredictable analogies on which poetry thrives, the axe's blade arouses in the poet's mind the echo of an inner blow; and we know what blow, for in the "Motet" sequence "quel volto" can be only one visage, Clizia's. He fears for her life (hence the prayer to an Atropos figure to stop its murderous scissors, or, more simply, to Time itself, which Dante personified as a ruthless gardener "going around with his shears," "lo tempo va dintorno con le force," Par. XVI.). But to pray for her life is to pray for his own, especially in the spiritual sense; no wonder, then, that he should implicitly recognize himself in the "wounded acacia" of Stanza 2. Poems emblematizing himself or the other humans as plants abound in all of his three books of verse, witness "Tramontane," "Scirocco," "Arsenio" in Ossi de Seppia, "Tempidi Bellosguardo" in Le Occasioni, "Personae Separatae" in La Butera e altro. The cicada shell, likewise emblematic (in Anceschi's sense of the term), adds its funereal note to the realistic aspect of the scene. As a more explicit motif, symbolizing the doomed singer, it will recur in "L'ombra della magnolia," a passionate lyric of La Bufera e altro:

We have come again to a threshold of negative experience, signalized by the fact that the speaker no longer addresses Clizia directly, but only speaks of her as an imperiled memory (as he does in the following "Motet"); in the last one, it is an open question whether the only possible mention of her there ("[il] tuo fazzoletto," your handkerchief) really refers to Clizia or to the persona talking to himself. Be that as it may, the two remaining poems of the sequence mark an emotional epilogue of renumciation. In No. 19, a remarkable accomplishment to be compared with the pictorial apocalypse of No. 17, we see a spring which is no spring because the inspiring lady has receded into unattainable distance to leave the poet dejectedly scanning the sky for a sign of her in the midst of a gloomy landscape. Time goes on, inexorably, to corrode existence; Clizia was the counteracting force capable of (momentarily at least) reversing that entropy:

In Stanza 1 the recent manifestations of inviting Nature reborn are considered only to be rejected afterwards ("oggi qui non mi tocca riconoscere," "today here I don't have to recognize": the strong prolepsis helps the dialectical inversion of theme, with the key verb "to recognize" acting as the syntactical and semantic hinge of the whole sweeping sentence). What the persona has to "recognize" here and now, in a sultry, cloudy landscape, is the negative sign coming from a chance event in the real scene: "due / fasci di luce in croce," "two crossed beams of light." These beams literally "cross her out," they appear "beyond her now remote pupils." As a cross, they also portend suffering, the suffering that goes with this irretrievable loss, and more.

In the twentieth "Motet," the concluding piece of the series, an ironic resignation prevails:

…ma così sia. Un suono di cornetta
dialoga con gli sciami del querceto.
Nella valva che il vespero riflette
un vulcano dipinto fuma lieto.

La moneta incassata nella lava
brilla anch'essa sul tavolo e trattiene
pochi fogli. La vita che sembrava
vasta è più breve del tuo fazzoletto.

…but so be it. A sound of cornet
converses with the swarms of the oakwood.

In the seashell that mirrors the twilight
a painted volcano gaily smokes.

The coin encased in lava
likewise shines on the desk and holds down
few sheets of paper. Life which seemed
vast is smaller than your handkerchief.

"Così sia," "so be it"; life blossoms around the poet, and even his paperweights on the desk—a seashell and an ancient coin encased in a lava chunk—shine serenely. The prayerlike words of the opening (they are the Italian Amen) reveal their irony when we come to the sharp end: "Life, which seemed so vast, is smaller than your handkerchief." Even if by that "you" the poet means distant Clizia, it is as if he were talking to himself; he accepts his deprivation and is aware (with a certain detachment) of the joyously reawakened life around him. A painted volcano on the seashell, a piece of hardened lava on the desk remind him that his own life no longer seethes with the ardors of youth (just as the fiery youth of the world seemed inexorably past in "Sul muro grafito," an early Ossi di seppia piece which appearts to foreshadow the present "Motet" in more than one respect). The painted volcano (no less than the coin) may also point to the resolution of art which immobilizes riotous life and makes it viable as pure image. Another probable implication of the two focal objects is the chance cooperation of human art and elemental nature: the destructive lava has preserved the precious coin, the shell so beautifully designed by other than human forces has become the receptacle of a diminutive painting. But the main point is the retreat from the infinity youth had promised under Clizia's inspiration into the frame of the finite; one thinks of the second stanza of "Notizie dall'Amiata," with its invocation to the north wind that "endears to us our chains." The epiphany afforded by this last "Motet" is of the phenomenal, of the limited reality—not of the noumenal, as was formerly the case.

Through the ups and downs of inner experience, the persona has known heaven and hell and purgatory; the threshold of hell was touched with "Motet" No. 5, heaven was felt in "Motet" No. 8, and the threshold of spiritual death was sighted in "Motet" No. 18; now only the stoic acceptance of slowly dwindling life is left, with whatever minor consolations it may offer: neither heaven nor hell, a purgatory perhaps, but with no goal to the purging except death. It would seem that the poet's persona has grown from passionate youth to the sad wisdom of age, through the cycles of experienced time. Goethe's concept of Entsagung comes to mind, a renunciation made harder by that poet's cult of das ewig Weibliche. Montale too, in his less ambitious compass, has shown a deep fascination with the myth of the Eternal Feminine, and a comparable ability to accept limits and renunciation. It might be added here that Montale pointedly refers to Goethe in one of the Occasioni poems, "Nel parco di Caserta," and that his choice of such a title for the whole book probably stems from Goethe's dictum that his own poetry in a way is all Gelegenheitsdichtung, poetry of occasion. That the Ger man humanist poet would not have concurred with Montale's elliptical style, or sympathized with his frequent disrrust of Nature's regenerative powers, is beside the point. Montale voices the modern temper, with all the hardships it is heir to.