SOURCE: "The Particular Poetic World of Eugenio Montale," in Italian Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 10, Summer, 1959, pp. 42-55.

To talk about Montale's poetics is above all to talk about his Ossi di seppia (1925). His later collections of poems—Occasioni (1939), Bufera (1956)—do not modify the position assumed and lived by Montale from his very early poetic experiences: "Meriggiare pallido…" (Ossi di seppia), dated 1916. In the collections following the Ossi the poet merely continues to investigate his problem more profoundly and to develop his particular poetic language further. It is in his particular poetic language rather than in his subjects that Montale attempts modification. He adopts a more extensive and more narrative style, which remains open to exterior happenings. But in speaking of such a modification, one must proceed with caution, for even in the Ossi, created during a moment in which Italian poetry in its search for the purely essential shunned any type of narrative expedient, Montale's narrative taste is already evident; not so much in the poems themselves as in the concious construction of the collection. It is not unusual for the "opera prima" of a poet to represent a fixed point in the spiritual life of the poet. Moreover, in most cases the "opera prima" is something more than an attempt: it is the presentation and clarification of the particular poetic world of the writer. Once formulated and expressed through various sounds and images, this poetic world unconsciously restricts the poet and often prevents an interior development by fixing him once and for all in the position which he himself has created.

This, in a way, has happened to Montale. After the Ossi Montale's poetry always found itself faced with a hopeless ontological limit established by the poems themselves. He had two choices: either to negate his earlier works, or in some way to repeat in continuous prismatizations the same inevitable ideas. He has chosen the latter path. And perhaps it is for this reason that the name Montale immediately brings to mind the Ossi di seppia, just as the name Leopardi immediately brings to mind the Idilli. Only on second thought does one recall the Occasioni (and certain poems of this collection such as "Dora Markus" or "La casa dei doganieri") and the recent Bufera. Montale's "stuttering language" ("balbo parlare"), so rich and carefully thought out, is already to be found in Ossi as is his equilibrium, "uneven and essential" at the same time; his poetic world as well is expressed (and always in such a way as to remain in accord with his basic premises). In the Ossi, too, Montale's particular "philosophy" first present ed itself, already inevitably closed to any development whatsoever.

That Montale's poetry originates from a negative position, from a belief in non-existence or from a non-gnosis, has been known for some time now. But to write poetry is always a gnosis or way of becoming conscious; a way of learning about oneself and the world which surrounds one, one's own drama in relation to the self as well as in relation to external realities. To arrive at such a consciousness Montale looks inside himself with a searching and pitiless glance until he feels or even sees a terrible anguish from which there is no hope of escape: he sees the evil of life itself. For him, all of nature suffers. And each thing suffers in accordance with its capacity to suffer, in its own particular way:

it was the strangled stream that gurgles,
it was the crumbling of the leaf
dried-out, it was the horse fallen battered.
(Ossi di seppia)

In man this suffering becomes intellectual, metaphysical. His doom consists of aspiring for a happiness which is pure illusion; in aspiring for it and at the same time being fully aware that it is an illusion; in searching for a truth which continually escapes him, a truth which is always beyond his grasp. The human condition is symbolized as the useless strain of searching for a "broken thread in the net which encloses us" ("In limine"); "the link which does not hold, / the thread to disentangle, which finally places us / in the middle of a truth" ("I limoni"); "the apparition that saves you." During certain vague moments of lucidity ("and in the breast a sweetness rains") it seems that man almost understands this elusive mystery: but it is an illusion which immediately dissolves and the "blue" once again "shows itself only in pieces," "the light becomes meager—mean the soul" ("I limoni"). It is the illusion of a moment which betrays and disheartens but nevertheless encourages man to take up the search once again, because it leaves behind the desire for a lost promise, for the solarity of the golden horns.

This is subject matter quite close to that of Leopardi. It lacks, however, the vague, "il pellegrino," the melancholy of Leopardi; it has become pure dialectic which lives and thrives on the intelligence, almost eliminating all sentiment "a priori." The affective life is as if darkened; the very words have become meager, pale, fit for the posing of the same agitating, unsolved and unsolvable problem: the cognitive or ontological problem. If Leopardi sought for the "why" of the universe and the life of man, to conclude that "perhaps in whatever form, in whatever / condition he may exist, in cot or cradle / it is a gloomy birthday for the one just born" ("Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia"); Montale does not even bother to search, because he assumes the answer to be true from the start. What Montale asks is rather, Of what does this "suffering" consist? that is, he asks the "why" of this suffering, only to conclude that it is a suffering without reason and without purpose; it is an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, a painful desire or longing for something that can never be attained and which resolves itself only in nothing:

And walking in the dazzling sun
to feel with sad bewilderment
what all of life is and its struggle
in this following along a wall
which has on top sharp broken bits of bottle.
(Ossi di seppia)

It is superfluous to point out how much that is "romantic" is to be found in the content of Montale's poetry. But expressions, the poetic images dissolve into a suffocating weariness of despairing monotony. Things seem always alike but unrelated: they are pure apparitions lacking any deep meaning. Montale's universe is a chaos of monotony which offers no relief. The poetry of the Ossi is fixed in the blinding atmosphere of a sultry midday: an atmosphere which renders barren every source of sentiment. It is a midday "tense and burned" of which the early Leopardi already had captured the surprising static quality and in which things appear isolated, detached, desiccated. Their moment is mere apparition, their variation is pure contingency, which returns to present the same vexing problem of staticity.

It is at this point that Montale introduces the most concrete and fascinating of his symbols: the sea. In its continuous flowing movement the sea combines the absolute staticity or motionlessness of man and his appearance of being in continuous movement. The clarification of this symbol comes in that group of nine poems which in the Ossi give life to an extensive colloquy with the sea. "Mediterraneo" is almost a "poemetto" in which the sea has a concealed symbolic value. But it is not an abstract or intellectually forced symbol, rather it is a symbol which is born spontaneously from the very nature of the sea and from Montale's special reaction to it. The sea is life; it is the essence of humanity, dynamic and static at the same time; and the voice of the sea is the very voice of humanity "vast and manifold and at the same time confined" ("Antico, sono ubriacato della tua voce"). In continuous movement, in letting oneself be seized by life, like a pebble or sunflower there is the hope of finding the essential, freedom, "the dreamed-of homeland," "the uncorrupted country." Montale fully understands the problem, but he refuses to accept it. It is his intelligence that does not permit him to abandon himself to life. To the poet the right "to observe" alone is conceded, to view powerlessly the miracle of life without being part of it: he is the "desolate plant," "the dried-out earth," which opens up to allow the blossoming of a pale flower: his poetry, which is powerless to capture the truth and which functions only as a means for relieving his "rancor."

An emotion from which there is no escape, which every Montale poem reveals and almost puts on a level with pleasure, is the joy of self-destruction: "because in confidence, my dear friend, I believe that you are happy and that everyone else is happy; but as far as I am concerned, with your permission and that of the century, I am very unhappy; and I believe myself to be so; and all the newspapers of two worlds will not convince me to the contrary." (G. Leopardi, Operette morali, "Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico"). The Leopardian position is adapted to the new drama. Life is for the others; it is for those like Esterina, who find in the sea "the force which tempers" her, and says "in the water you discover yourself and you renew yourself," but it is not for one who "of a race of those who remain earth-bound" is capable only of "watching." Montale knows that he is incapable of solving the cognitive problem, yet he never gives up trying. It is a titanic battle between his desire to know, which is his intellectual pride, and the limit of knowledge imposed upon every man. Yet "Falsetto" is the most and at the same time the least Leopardian of Montale's poems. That is to say, it is the poem which best reflects Leopardi's imagery and at the same time best reveals Montale's difference from it. Esterina is, in some ways, daughter to Silvia: both are fixed in eternal youth. Esterina, whose twenty years of age threaten her in the form of a rosy-grey cloud which little by little encloses her; Silvia, who is fixed in the memory "when beauty splendored in your laughing, agile eyes" and "happy and thoughtful you ascended the threshold of youth." But Silvia already lives in a myth, in the absolute immobility of bland thought, of dreams, of vague expectations. Silvia is an integral part of the poet who created her. Esterina, even though idolized, remains outside the poet: she is of that part of the world which is in opposition to the Montalian "I." Montale can pray for her as he can for the others, but he cannot reassure her in her ignorance of life:

Tomorrow's doubt does not frighten you.
Happily you stretch out
on a reef glistening of salt
and in the sun you burn your body.
You bring to mind the lizard
paused on the barren rock;
for you youth lies in wait
for him the little boy's lasso of grass.
("Falsetto," Ossi)

The instinctive knowledge that things possess is the very essence of Esterina: it is a particular way of knowing or understanding that really belongs exclusively to childhood, when

Every moment burned
in the succeeding moments without trace
to live was a venture too new
hour by hour, and it made the heart pound.
("La fine dell'infanzia," Ossi)

Death is not a threat to Silvia but rather a redemption or solution. But Esterina does not die, rather she lives in an inconceivable nightmare, not forthcoming but present. And Montale captures all of the suffering in this. "Go, for you I have prayed"; those most appropriate words from "In limine," are recapitulated at the end of the first stanza of "Falsetto": "I pray it be / for you an ineffable concert / of tiny bells." The intense cleavage between the poet and his image is still more evident in the closing:

We watch you, we of a race
of those who remain earth-bound.

Esterina does not represent a happiness completely lost, a dream which could have been realized but was not, like Leopardi's Silvia. Rather, she represents a happiness which is denied to whoever desires to know it. To want to know or understand life, the essence of things, is already in itself a denial of our ability to know. To abandon oneself to life and with a "shrug of the shoulders" destroy the fortresses of an obscure tomorrow signifies a capturing of the essence of life without knowing or understanding it; and this is the only way to be able to live beyond the negation.

More than once Montale has attempted the theme of childhood, the age of illusion. Above all, he has attempted to capture the moment of fracture, the breaking point, the painful passage from the naiveté or unawareness of childhood to the unarmed, defeated consciousness of adulthood, from "Falsetto" to "La farandola dei fanciulli," from "Arremba sulla strinata proda" to "La fine dell'infanzia," the same theme is dealt with: perhaps salvation consists in the ability to fix one's very self in eternal childhood, in a long sleep in which "the evil spirits that sail in fleets" can never catch up with one. An impossible means of salvation!

Life presses down on us: the break from the fallible "certitudes" of childhood "arrives," sometimes slowly and mysteriously, other times suddenly and violently, but to escape the break is an impossibility.

The fracture comes: perhaps without a fracas.
Who has constructed feels his condemnation.
("Arremba sulla strinata proda," Ossi)

In "La fine dell'infanzia" the break is lived as personal memory, and is no longer feared or suffered through another. This poem is among the best constructed and most rich in thought of Montale's first collection. In it the themes which Montale has been unravelling throughout the Ossi are recapitulated and clarified in the loose and sad narrative tone of the central part of the poem. The image of the sea in a tempest, which opens and closes the poem, gives it a circular construction. But this image has an analogical value which surpasses its constructive value. The tempest signifies the breaking point in which "the deception was evident," and it is the indication of a painful existence which lasts beyond the breaking point in a world which no longer has "a center." Uncertainty, uneasiness, cognitive impotency accompany "the hour of searching." Everything becomes extraneous, unconceivable, mysterious, closed in upon itself like a raincloud.

Heavy clouds upon a troubled sea
which boiled in our face, soon appeared.

And childhood died in a ring-around-the rosy:

Remote also the place
of childhood which explores
a blocked-in yard as a world.

The Leopardian theme of the illusion, the delightful deception, which accompanies childhood, becomes in Montale the theme of the imaginative consciousness of astonished childhood, when

Things dressed themselves with names,
our world had a center.

Life, after the passage from childhood to adulthood, is nothing more than a fatiguing and useless searching for this "center;" a spasmodic waiting for the miracle of insight, the sudden ripping away of the veil behind which the truth of all things is hidden. This is a return, therefore, to the central point of Montale's poetry.

A particular moment is expressed in the poems entitled "Sarcofaghi." Here Montale groups together four poems of a particular tone which deal with one poetic motif: the eternal, happy, stable life of art as opposed to the everchanging, unhappy, uncertain life of man. The relationship with Pirandello is more than evident. Human existence in its continuous and fatal flowing, in its participation in form without ever becoming form is a slow and daily death. Montale lingers:

man who passes by . .
Then goes on: in this valley
there is no exchange of dark and light.
Along this way your life has led you,
there is no refuge for you, you are too dead.
("Sarcofaghi," Ossi)

The creatures of art glory in an immutable existence. Perceived during a sudden illumination, "in a bland minute"—when nature functions mysteriously through the fantasy of the poet—these creatures remain fixed eternally in their happiness. They are the work of nature and therefore they are life, but a life which is form and for this reason stable and eternal.

… in a bland
minute illuminating nature
molds her happy
creatures, mother not step-mother,
in levity of form.
World that sleeps or world that glories
in immutable existence: who can say?

The same conception of art guides both Montale and Pirandello. "Nature serves as the instrument of the human fantasy in order to continue or carry higher her work of creation," explains Pirandello through the Father in Six Characters in Search of an Author. But that which in Pirandello is reasoning and dialectics in Montale dissolves into lyrical afterthoughts and images. The very question: "who can say?" shadows the concept with a halo of doubt. Pirandello affirms; Montale doubts. And from this doubt is born that sad and lyrical tone which Pirandello rejects.

But this is not the only point of contact between the two authors. By contact I do not mean a direct Pirandellian influence on the formation of Montale's thought, but rather an independent working-out of the same problem, the conception of which depends on the particular historicalphilosophical atmosphere of each author while the affinity of the solutions depends on a certain spiritual affinity between the two. Pirandello and Montale are certainly the Italian writers most representative of an epoch and of a crisis of moral values. But knowledge or cognizance is at the base of ethics: a gnostic solution is also always a solution which implies a human norm of existence, and therefore the solution is a moral one.

The problem or theme of the "truth" is at the center of both Pirandello's art and Montale's poetry. It arises from the search for a plausible reason for the "fear of living." Pirandello, in his last essay on Verga written five years before his death, makes a nearly open confession of the problem: "Almost all the Sicilians," he writes, "have an instinctive fear of life which causes them to close themselves within themselves, lonely, contented by little, so long as it gives them a sense of security" (Saggi, Mondadori). This fear of life is the hidden poetical core of Pirandello's work, and he feels and suffers this fear in all of its destructive force while he insistently searches for the "why." In Montale the "fear of living" becomes the "evil of living" ("male di vivere"): but his reason for searching for the "why" is analogous to Pirandello's. Pirandello in his inquiry gathers the roots of the drama through the conflict between "life which continuing moves onward and changes, and form which fixes life making it immutable." But the drama remains beyond the philosophical solution, and it is the drama of man who aspires to life and at the same time fears it. These premises lead to Pirandello's relativism concerning truth. If man could only arrive at a truth, stable, certain, unchangeable, a true, undoubtable truth, he could conquer his "fear of living." The norm of his actions would be based on this unchangeable truth finally realized. But the only truth which man is capable of arriving at is a subjective, individual, changeable truth. "The reality of today will be the illusion of tomorrow; and the reality of tomorrow will become even a more fleeting illusion at some future time," Pirandello had written in Il fu Mattia Pascal, anticipating the words of the Father in Six Characters. Every man, therefore, has his own truth, but it is a truth which naturally and instinctively cannot satisfy him: man desires not a truth but rather the truth. Human existence is nothing more than a fatiguing and useless search for an unattainable mystery which perhaps exists within but which presents itself to man behind a thick, impenetrable black veil just as Signora Ponza is presented to the public in the last act of Così è (se vi pare). In Montale relativism disappears, and in its place appears the "contingent" as a moment which passes and is to be grasped; not truth certainly, but rather the complete renunciation of possibility of possessing truth. In Montale, Pirandello's gnosic pessimism is sharpened beyond the point of relativism. There remains only a lyrical opening of disillusioned hope for a miracle. Everyone who lives—by the very fact that he is alive—tends toward movement: towards a movement which gives the sense of life although it is mere appearance or a "glimmer of life." The Occasioni, Montale's second collection of poems, are born from this state of mind. In this collection Montale attempts to capture in pure poetry this fleeting moment, the "occasion," the contingent. And his style becomes always more narrative; he makes the momentary impression the only thing that counts and that has an absolute value. Like Arsenio, the most dramatic and autobiographical character in the Ossi,, Montale now attempts to let himself be taken by the sea, by life; he attempts to leave the "race of those who remain earthbound." But "all becomes strange and difficult"; "everything is impossible" ("Carnevale di Gerti"). For a man who thinks or even for a man who has once attempted this road to the mystery, the contingent life is an empty passing of images that have neither sense nor reason. And perhaps this is really the profound reason: one lives thanks to a "tailsman," like Dora Markus, like every man. In accepting the cognitive limit a sporadic and absurd hope gave temporary light. Now this too gives way, and "hell is certain."

One cannot talk about Montale without at least mentioning the value of recollection or memory in the poems of this poet. Memory is the very life of Montale's present poetics: a life which is a "screen of images," which has in itself "the signs of death and of the past." The Montalian memory gathers both past and future, resolving both in pure detached images. If in the Ossi Montale had captured the universal chaos of things: each thing independently static, without order and without a goal; in the Occasioni he captures the interior chaos of human existence: a collection of separate, unattached images, lacking in both order and aim. Man in his deepest soul mirrors the useless universal life. This is the new and more disconcerting position of Montale, who is so capable of translating into poetry a crisis of faith in oneself and a "transcendency" which may be cause, order, and harmony of things.

In the Bufera, Montale's most recent collection, the two motifs are interwoven, and they mirror each other without finding a solution of "glimmer of light." Montale, like his poetry, develops in an apparition of continual movement, which, in reality, remains in the fixed staticity of everything. Perhaps because of this, the poetical discovery of the sea, which appears in the Ossi as pure symbol and pure transfiguration of reality, is so right for Montale. It is a sea outside of us; it is a sea deep within us: all sound and all movement, all changing colors and tones, yet it is always the same. And nothing makes sense; neither the staticity nor the movement. One cancels the other without ever satisfying or being satisfied.