SOURCE: "The Poetry of Eugenio Montale," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXV, No. 3, Summer, 1977, pp. 411-29.

My subject is Montale's poetry and the peculiar configuration that it makes.

Poems like Wallace Stevens's "The Ordinary Women" baffle exegesis, but when you say them over and over, they describe a configuration or form: "The lacquered loges hunddled there / Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay." Other poems such as "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" present difficulty which is all at the exegetical level. Only read what Pound has read or let the commentators do that for you; this superficial labor accomplished, the rest is easy going. Montale's poetry lives in its own place—call it a midden—between these different kinds. It smells of ebbtide and detritus like the early poetry of T. S. Eliot, which means it is bookish poetry and smells of the lamp:

The happiness of cork abandoned to the current
that melts around tumbledown bridges.
("Boats on the Marne")

Or it smells of the ditch whence private memory springs, the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart:

Montale is not a discursive poet, so the clarity you expect in the poetry of linear progression is wanting, the Comedian as the Letter C making his soul, where C is the peregrine hero and the cursus that he negotiates. In this poetry of innuendo motion belies itself or goes downward to darkness. Falling leaves describe a helix, spiraling like arrows in their descent. Revolving doors appear to communicate as they pass on their metaled ways. The look of communication is an optical illusion. The swallow, faithful to instinct, builds its nest, wanting life to endure. The squirrel, presenting life, still flames in the pine tree.

But over the dikes, at night, the dead water
wears down the stones.
("Lindau")

"Botta e Riposta": the title to which Montale twice returns in his poetry of the 1960s elucidates the strategy—it is perhaps a psychological imperative—of these earlier pieces. "Blow and Counterblow":

Now the minutes are equal and fixed
like the turns of a pump wheel.
("House by the Sea")

Thesis and antithesis confront one another. From the confrontation no synthesis ever emerges.

Desolate the leaves
of the living who lose themselves
in the prism of the minute,
the fevered limbs devoted
to the motion that repeats itself
in a brief circle.
("Times at Bellosguardo")

We need the Italian for the beating of the metronome, then the subsidence:

atti minuti spechiati,
sempre gli stessi—

"acts minutes mirrored, always the same." Nothing happens. This poetry cries for apocalypse.

Time, passing, is static, and it moulders ("funghisce su sè") as it dotes on the past. But Montale in the same context suggests that "memory is not a sin so long as it avails." To turn from the past—old fathers, grandfathers—is to abjure reality, always understood as refreshment, hence to insure the sterility of the present. Montale disinters the past, not as he is morbid or molelike ("di talpe, abiezione"), but as he is heuristic. Like the eel in the great poem of that title he learns by fronting death and still-luminous decay to thread the slime and granite of life.

The learning in which he instructs us—"la mia lezione"—is not intellectual but is felt in the blood. This is certainly a kind of heuristics but is expressible only as it makes a figure. You cannot express the yield, as in a cento of available truths. Memory, dazzling in sleep, irradiates the waking day. The pulsing of the sea, remembered, evokes consternation. These are powerful words—"abbagliante" "sbigottimento"—but peculiar to the event which is their occasion. The sun is an event, also an adventure ("evvenimento"), and it riddles us with light. This riddling sums but does not explicate our being: "bruciare, / questo, non altro, è il mio significato." The voice that pours from the green bells of the sea, whelming the heart, throbs with ardor, then is stilled: "il bollore / della vita fugace." The eel against the river, narrowing down and down, presents a torch, a lash, Love's arrow on earth, a rainbow that vanishes in the moment of its apparition. Always the apparition is violent and necessarily itself, "su sè." Montale is a parochial poet, and he is loath to debase the linguistic currency in which he trades.

Having said this much, let me go against the drift of the argument. Montale's poems make a composition analogous to music. His motets of the 1930s, antiphonal in structure, this voice against that one and both voices recurring, suggest a generic title for the whole. In the poetry conceived as "mottetti," recurring figures do duty for plot. As they recur they constitute this writer's poetics; so they give us liberty to say what he attempts. The substantive "solco," a thing plowed and prospectively bearing, signals to the reader who has met it before the accession at least the potentiality of knowledge. "Nel solco dell'emergenza": in the furrow of emergency we encounter, unexpectedly, our own tormented being, coming out of darkness into light.

Poetics is not the same as philosophy. Montale, working his furrow or little patch of ground and so getting to know it, does not pretend to generalize from what he knows. I suppose that we who read him are more ambitious. If our ambition is not wholly out of the way, that is because what is most parochial is most likely to ramify or breed.

In this obdurately analytic or personal poetry, the buried life is everywhere, rooted way down in quick recollection, so that often you want a gloss, though knowing you are not going to get one. "Arsenio" enacts the plight of the dislocated man ("sperso"), whose alienation is qualified as he drags his roots with him. Viscid and tentacular, they eddy beneath turbid water—like the seaweed that Montale remembers persistently from his boyhood on the Ligurian coast—menaced by the water but still trembling with life as they cling to the source which guarantees their being:

I take it that Arsenio, an obscure monastic of the early Christian centuries, is lifted from the hagiography and meant to emblematize, in humility and mock humility, this poet of holes and corners. It is more pertinent to say, as particulars ramify, that he is emblematic of ourselves.

I cannot name the woman tenacious memory exhumes, save as Montale names her. She is Clizia the heliotrope, transformed by Apollo, or Diana Artemis, the embodiment of purity to which the fierceness of the hunter is allied, or she is Diotima who discourses to the wise man on the nature of love, or the devotee Veronica who tenders Christ her veil. Maybe, like Petrarch's Laura, this woman is begotten by the poet on his muse. The commentators think otherwise and are willing to come to specific matters. What they have to tell us in this particular doesn't signify. Montale, reflecting on Cavafy's poetry, suggests why this is so. "Cavafy's erudition was that of an artist who takes what he needs wherever he finds it and who could not really care less for historical exactitude." Better to go or stay with the reticent poet and see him as manipulating personae. I think of Shakespeare at sonnets and what we don't know about the life that goes into the poetry or from which the poetry appeals. Montale is less favored than Shakespeare; he is, however, more favored than most modern makers—Yeats, for example—in that the essential biography is dim. He thinks—meeting Brancusi, whose vociferous ego is everywhere in the room: "This is precisely the problem of our time: art 'with anecdote' (that is, with something that recalls the life of the man)." Joyce says that Shakespeare's poetry is written by another man who bears the same name. It is a just rejoinder to the biographical critics—and as valid for Montale as for Shakespeare. The effect in either case is ardent and impersonal, the artist like the Creator, impassioned but discreet, hiding himself in his elliptical handiwork. The impersonality authorizes the passion.

The function of the poet as he descends on the world is, by convention, pentecostal. Like the messengers of Tobias in "The Hitler Spring" he touches with fire and so resuscitates the living dead. Or he is the diviner who with rod or wand locates the life-giving spring beneath our stony soil: "per i sempreverdi / bruciati e le cavane avide d'aqua." In Montale's poetry the divining is potential, rarely accomplished. The gullies still clamor for rain, the evergreens wither. The dominant landscape ("greti arsi del sud") is Eliotic:

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock.

Further back is Dante, the common property of both poets (they use him with a difference), discerning no shade, no sign, only the bank and the bare road and the livid color of the stone (Purgatorio 13). Dante's progress is, however, ineluctably upward. Purgatory wants its transcendent conclusion. Montale cannot see so far. He prays for the dead that they may pray for him—he is pious and selfregarding—and for the living

The living are only hypothetically alive. The past absolute ("ebbero") renders their present existence. It says that the present is moribund already. No celestial kingdom is in prospect.

Mostly the life of which the poetry is made declares its humdrum condition. It is not a clamant storm, Dante's "bufera infernal, che mai non resta," but is offhandedly La Bufera e Altro ("and other things"). The last sounds ("ultimi suoni") that assault us might portend Armageddon; they are only a buzzing, as of bluebottle flies. "We are all already dead without knowing it" (quoting from Satura), and this buzzing is our requiem. Life is only scribbling on a blackboard. Or it is a letter not written or a bottle in the sea that never finds its destination. Like Matthew Arnold's protagonists we are sundered from each other, "in the sea of life enisled." Arnold, however, is proffering answers. Never mind that the answers are bleak. Montale is prodigal of questions, he is a niggard of answers, but I think that the answers are implicit in his country of the mind. The characteristic mise-en-scène is a garden burned with salt, or a funicular in which the travelers sit passive and alone, or a forest of iron masts in the dusty evening. The reminiscence is of Dante's "selva oscura," and it emphasizes the distance between these two poets. In the hell through which Montale ventures to lead us—he assumes the role of Virgil to our modern Dante-pilgrim, but unlike Virgil he does not bring us out on the heights of theology—there is no contrapasso or apportioning of just desserts. His protagonists are aloof from good and evil, like the cripples and old folks and little children of "Eastbourne," who inhabit a gaudy pavilion erected on piles above the eroding and victorious sea. Or they are denatured, no longer human beings but red ants

The psychological tenor is superficially the same as Valéry's in his fragments from "The Youngest of the Fates" (La Jeune Parque). Valéry, like Montale, tastes ashes in his mouth, so enjoins on himself his own annihilation: "Formetoi cette absence … Abandonne-toi vive aux serpents." But in the end denaturing, "malgré moi-même," is impossible to this poet of affirmations: "It is necessary, O Sun, / That I adore my heart wherein you are confirmed." Valéry is countervailing—or in any case he is counterpointing—the injunction to descend and to sleep. Montale in comparison seems perversely uninventive, harping continually on the one string.

Rising and falling, the sound of a cruel gigue stings us to the quick. The analogy is to "the long wave of my life," the up and down of it, a pattern and divested of meaning. So the crashing noises come to crescendo, then close without interval in muteness. "I fragori si distendono, / si chiudono in sordino" ("Eastbourne"). Syntax is mimetic; it authenticates the dreary round. Conjunctions are omitted, as betokening sequence. There is no sequence, no heightening or depressing, so resort is to the paratactic style. The vocabulary works to present deliquescence. "Chiudere" (to close) is the apposite verb; elsewhere—since the emotional weather seems not to change—are similar words and phrases on its semantic or connotative periphery.

Veiled trembling of lights beyond the closed windows,
silhouetting the profiles of women at dusk.
("Café at Rapallo")

The windows are always closed. Passion is a shut-in ("chiusa passione"), rarely loosed or unfolded. The redressing of the negative words—"sciolta" or "schiude"—is not often conceded. Its occasion is not often perceived. Silence, like a cloud, immures us, or lazy smoke, or we are carried on a train ("chiusi uomini") through a dark tunnel, anticipating the ultimate immuring or interring: "chiusa di cimento." Barricades seal off our salvation. What the deity has in store for us, nobody can say. His fuliginous operations—"di fuliggine," suggesting a divinity of hell—are hidden from view; and when we put the portentous question he shuts up his face like an ambush.

The hardness of Montale—"come un ramo," like the limbs of a tree whose fibers are inextricably twisted—verges on opacity, not simply on the surface but all the way through, so mingling gnomic Stevens and recondite Pound. Only rarely is the sense or saying in the music, in "the beauty of inflections." Form and content bristle with mutual antipathy. Or say that the form, which asserts meaning exactly as it is formal, and the content, in which meaning is often to seek, are immiscibles that fuse to create a third thing which has not existed yet in the standard taxonomies.

In poetry where the corrosive idea does not translate, as when the word becomes flesh, this forcible joining of opposites-by-convention is surprising, but like an affront. The poet is jejune: Hart Crane comparing love to a burnt match skating in a urinal, Pound in his hysterical fourteenth canto scoring off the Georgians who thought poetry was beautiful:

Oxymoron when it works effects a chemical change, the poet exploiting latent energies, as of fire and powder, but to an end which is not combustion but annealing. Surprise attends the recognition of what you had not noticed before, the integrity of the compound that the poet makes or discovers. To read Montale successfully you need a new set of terms. That is one measure of his greatness.

All poetry is bringing order to experience, but this is more or less true, and it depends on whose poems are to hand. Montale is not so much rationalizing his uncomely material as enunciating and honoring the figure that it makes. In his best poems—"The Lemons," "The Sunflower," "To My Mother," "The Hawks" (to name only a few of them)—he so countenances actuality—this time, these trivia—as to confer reality upon it. The conferring is like a sacrament, but it works from within. The phenomenal world is made abruptly incarnate, not declared to be noumenal or real. That is why paraphrase fails. "The perception of the intellect is given in the words" (Pound is introducing the poems of Cavalcanti), "that of the emotions in the cadence." Something like that.

In Montale's poetry there is a felt oxymoron between the congealing form and the content that threatens to unfix it. Often the poetry wears the favor of consecutive argument. The pattern "since … then" is syllogistic. Since the road taken, should I turn back, is longer than the road ahead; since the palliatives that present themselves along the way do not palliate: then let us push on to the bound of the waste. This is the expectation the syntax engenders, as the poet apostrophizes his dead father ("Voice Arriving with the Coots"). But logical structure functions as a blind, and the corollary tells us, in the teeth of expectation, that there is no golden underground where spirits gat them home. "Eccoti": Here you are, father, not there. The end of the journey that we think we are pursuing is independent of the end. But go to the poem and see how the conclusion is augured and mandated by the indulgent particulars of which the dependent clauses are made. Since they are indulgent, they are logically off the point. At the same time they are indispensable to the life of the whole, where life is not a paradigm but the pressing on form of the indigenous thing.

Philosophy and politics are prone to general statement, science also, and poetry of the second rank. Montale's poetry, like that of his master Dante, is innervated (to translate his verb "sinnerva"), gives nerves to ideas, so making them things. Revivification is an idea, but it is presented metaphorically. The returning year fords the heavens, pillaging the heart ("Autumn Cellars"). That is tenable of springtime in the year 19_, and in the little town of___, and only as the poet perceives it. You cannot elevate metaphor to preceptorial status.

If we agree that disembodied ideas do not signify, let us also agree that the imitation of life is a gudgeon not worth taking. Montale in his craft is not looking to render our ephemeral business; in any case the rendering is not where we come out. Naturalism is all-in-all sufficient only for the art of trompe l'oeil. It is a minor art. The stuff in which Montale deals is ugly only in the first place, as nature yields it up to his inspection. His flaccid or seamy data, since they are naturalistic, are nothing. "Dark things strain towards brightness"—to quote from "The Sunflower"—and in their straining are perdurably changed. The poet is the instrument of this unlikely metamorphosis. He is Proteus the shifty god, neither fish nor flesh; but what he is changing, or melding rather, as one thing merges with another thing, is not himself but his materials: bodies in their drossy solidity diffused, exhausting themselves in a flowing of colors, thence in a flowing of music: "si esauriscono i corpi in un fluire / di tinte: queste in musiche." This is not Ovid, the conjuring poet, turning Daphne as by magic to the laurel tree. I see Montale, more augustly, as presenting Apollo, but not now ambitious or balked of his own ends. The loving magic that he works on the heliotrope is disinterested, thus magnanimous. He is not displacing what he touches but making it greater. He burns with auroral light the nondescript particular ("bruciato dai barbagli dell'aurora") and creates in the process not another thing but the thing itself, as it might be. "Ecco il segno." In the bread and wine, the body and blood are already there. Only you have to enlarge them. This is the poetry of transubstantiation, where the mystery, in the accepted sense, is still dark to the priestcraft that performs it.

In the title poem of La Bufera, the running together of "marmo [marble] manna e distruzione" articulates a unity of disparate things. The poetry is saying that the bane and the yield (or manna) are the same. Against the harmony of the amaranth moon, redolent of romance, recalling the flower that never fades, is set the tumult in the blood, which discomposes all that famous harmony ("In Sleep"). Prosody emphasizes the connection or disjunction. Prosodically the poem is like a Shakespearian sonnet and is written in verse that is basically hendecasyllabic, the standard linear form of Italian poetry to the present. It begets expectations, even as the sonnet form begets and belies them. (See "Leda and the Swan.") There is no prosodic reticule more aggressively formal, and here we feel it brimming with inchoate substance, the shrieking of nightbirds, error that strangles, hideous apparitions thrusting upward from dream. Assonance, alliteration, medical and interior rhyme—the staple techniques of conventionally mellifluous poetry—as they are levied on in this poetry, work against the conventional grain. They are the music or the threads on which the tassel of the verse is caught, or they are the tassel of experience itself, strung or reveled out into hours and years.

Convention yokes together similar sounds to make the lines cohere: pity thrilling in the air, for the greedy roots, for the tumid bark: "per l'avide / radici, per le tumide cortecce." Montale prefers the refracting of convention. Like and like come together but to mock the resemblance—or like and unlike to find out their identity. You can make a facile rhyme of "frastaglio" and "abbaglio," the slashed or broken thing and the quality of wonder ("Autumn Cellars"). But the yoking together is more than homophonic, or rather in this case the sonantal correspondence argues that splendor is discovered in prosaic materials and corruption is its warrant and even its condition. "For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent." The flock or palpable aggregate is also the mist in which it dissolves: "greggia" and "nebbia" are heard and felt to associate, as clouds associate with carob trees, solidity with its obverse ("e nubi … dei carrubi"), and the serene and transpicuous ether with the entombing darkness below: "nell'aria ancora serena … / nel ventre della balena."

In "The Shorewatchers' House" the pleonastic particle ("Ne," meaning, gratuitously, "of it") is twice repeated, and it signals affirmation. Then follows a perfect homonym, complementary in sound, antithetic in sense, and turning the prior sequence out of doors.

Ne tengo ancora un capo….
Ne tengo un capo; ma tu resti sola
nè qui respiri nell' oscurità.

Memory is a thread:

I still hold an end of it….
I hold an end of it; but you remain alone
nor do you breathe here in the dark.

Substantially the poem is saying: after all you are not here, and memory fails. Under the skin the sequence of meaning goes: Yes … yes; but: no. So meaning is discountenanced as the form asserts it.

Meaning in this poetry is occulted on the premise that not much is open to rationalization. Perception is a screen of images—"schermo d'immagini"—where the screen is like that in the movies; it is also a moat defending against the sensory world. The adverbial phrase which locates us is "nel crepuscolo." We move in a twilight or crepuscular kingdom. Thought or memory assails us, but like a "swarm" or "fog." Reality is "muffled"; it only grazes or touches us lightly, like a puff of air or diaphanous cloud. More figures recur here: "sfiora," "un soffio." The words bespeak ephemerality and compose a gravid presence, tolling us back to our soul's self, the clog to which we are fettered. So perception, communion also, is partial.

The mirror breaks that signalizes apprehension. Blind shears, like Milton's shears but with no Christian succor behind, reduce our experience to fragments. Between you and me a subaqueous brightness, occluding and deforming, insinuates itself. "I do not know if I know you." Its uncanny power—"sortilegio"—consigns us to solipsism—this, on the one hand, on the other to a horrid autonomy which entails not freedom but a shivering of the whole into parts. The man alone surrenders; dwelling in this country he has no option:

To the sorcery of not recognizing
Anything of myself outside of myself.
("Two in the Twilight")

What we recognize is like the lightning in the collied night, a gesture without provenance against a background that is always running away. The indicated words are "sfuggevole," "reciso."

Dubiety is where we live, so wan hope is native to us.

The hope of ever seeing you again
was fleeing from me.
("Motet VI")

Here seeing means partly metaphysical seeing, grasping the quiddity or quick. Memory tuning out, the sovereign presence of distortion, is the business of the poem. But who is the protagonist, an equivocal creature and possibly inimical, and how is it that memory grows tenuous? Here are two answers. The first is from Yeats, who saw a monkey on a chain but never said a thing.

So I have picked a better trade
And night and morning sing:
Tall dames go walking in grass-green Avalon.

And here is Montale, turning it around in the concluding stanza of his motet:

At Modena, among the porticoes,
a servant in livery was dragging
two jackals on a leash.

The connection between the stanzas is suppressed, so the mind labors to enforce it. Perhaps the connection is inconsequent, syntactical merely? I suppose that we divine it as we take the force of the antecedent details. From one point of view, divining is not so good as declarative statement.

"I don't know." The declarative phrase rejects the possibility of declaring or affirming, and in the poem called "The Garden" it recurs like witless music when the needle is stuck in the groove. The repetitions simultaneously assert and gainsay. Structure and substance are at a mortal war. The anaphoric mode, repeating the same grammatical sequence, makes an order. The direction is centripetal. Concurrently it says the poem, whose purport is subversive of order. The metaphysical direction is centrifugal. The object of the verb, which is the subject or point, is withheld, but not costively. Maybe there is no point. Deific design, the fingering that we hear or think we hear on the heavenly keyboard, is perhaps an imposition, man creating God after his own proclivities. At any rate, "Io non so." The path that bears us is fashioned of air, or too narrow to prosecute, perhaps no path at all. Or if it exists it carries us to hell where we shall melt like wax against the fire.

Evidently Montale is not an optimistic poet. He does not beat the big drum like D'Annunzio, who wants us to march with him into the future. But neither does he indulge the pessimism-by-rote of his predecessor Carducci to whom, in an amusing poem, he hears himself compared. In his poetry revealed truth is unavailing. But skepticism avails. For once that dismal Pyrrho is approved. "Every doubt takes you by the hand like a friendly little girl" ("Portovenere"). Customary formulations and responses—"per assumere un volto": preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet—are put away. This poet must purge himself, like the cleansing sea, of "lordura," "macerie"—in tellectual shibboleths. He is the maimed man who is aggrandized as he witnesses to his affliction. The poetry presents him or his different guises, the wounded acacia that shakes loose its outworn husks in the time of storms, the eel that inhabits fruitfully where everything is burned. The blow he takes is hard, but what it lops away ("svetta") is excrescent. The path he pursues is harder—"la via più dura"—but as he transacts it he withers into the truth, "leaping into dryness under the new moon." He creates, lock, stock, and barrel from his incessant probing and his resinous heart, a personal order, however tentative, and free from religious or political persuasion, "chierico rosso, o nero," the red shirt or the clerical habit.

As a gloss on Montale, the metonymic poet who puts the parts for the whole, see Montale the translator, who discerns a kindred spirit in Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Here, from one of Dickinson's poems, is an apparent connection: "The missing All prevented me / From missing minor things." If you fail to apprehend or believe in the total congeries—what Montale caricatures as the intolerable sleight of hand of the stars, and Dickinson sees as manifest only "inscrutably"—you are driven back on the minute particular. Hopkins at a guess commends himself to Montale as the questions he raises are answerable only in terms of the phenomenal world. Hopkins the eschatological poet is the invention of Professor X, altogether a less mettlesome person. Rightly read, his appeal, Montale's also, is to the discordant-seeming matrix from which we take our being.

Life comes, unbidden, to the dark corner where the eremite—it is Arsenio—cultivates his garden ("Chrysalis"). His only light ("la sola luce") is personal and veiled but indemnifies his isolation and declares it gracious. He is a man of silences but not deprived as he is silent. Quench the clamant birdsongs and you begin to hear. The yield of this hearing and seeing, as passion's war is intermitted, is the replenishing of our poverty with riches, "l'odore dei limoni." What the tacit observer discovers—more precisely and soberly: what, one day, he might discover—is the dead point of the world ("il punto morto del mondo"). It is the chink in the armor or the half-closed gate which allows us to glimpse and savor, for an ecstatic instant, the divinity that inheres in common things.

He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make.

So after all he is like Crispin, the Comedian as the Letter C, and his poetry also is a vale of soul-making. That is not as he aspires to the role of the magus, looking into the heart of the mystery, rather as he trusts (gingerly, for want of a better) to his senses:

Gladly I will read the black
signs of the branches on the white snow
like an essential alphabet.
("Almost a Fantasy")

The essential alphabet or the essential prose is cryptic and not readily construed—this, as we are human, so purblind. We see piecemeal, "illuminato a tagli," where the pieces make a unity that is only supposititious. On this sour cross the poetry leaves us.

But not quite. To the quiescent man, a cantle of the truth is conceded, or the cantle which is the truth, as he declines to put himself forward. He stretches out, so makes a lengthened shadow, as he disburdens himself of himself: "mi allungo disfatto di me" ("In the Park"). Like the Snow Man in Stevens's poem, he is

The listener, who listens…
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

To listen, to watch, to lie in shadow ("Meriggiare pallido e assorte"): the infinitives on which this early poem is strung are like a rosary that the poet tells, keeping time to his salvation. He attains to salvation, the "delirium of immobility" by which Arsenio is recognized, as he contemplates the rock that covers the world, or the swallow's black flight,

This is the furrow that bears.

And I have no other rosary
to finger, nor pillar of fire
if not this, of resin and berries.
("Iris")

Common things, acknowledged—a rosary of cautious drops sparkling on the hayfork—confer the gift of grace. The obscure idea of God descends on the saving remnant ("sui pochi viventi"), who are alive as they want prepossession.

Where are the bread and wine of this poetry, "la nostra parte di richezza"? Bread is the velvet bud, and wine the profound breathing of the sea. The redemptive rite in which they participate is the achieving of peculiarity in this temporal place, the tenacious gangue or veinstone that associates the living and the dead ("Eastbourne").

Peculiarity, the irrefrangible thing, must suffice us. That is the burden of Montale's music and denotes its acrid color, the inflection of it, the figure it makes. To encapsulate this figure I am drawing on intimations from Satura and Diario, the last of Montale's five volumes. They reveal a poet who is fiercely self-occupied yet insistently remote, hiding himself in underground places. He refuses with horror the glosses of the scholiast. By and large he is resolutely antipoetic, not gay or wise or celestial. He entertains ugliness with something more than equability: poetry and the sewer are two problems that he is unwilling to disjoin. Sweet and sour, beauty and terror constitute for him an inextricable harmony ("una sola musica"). He is wanting in "philosophy." Brothers, he says, don't look to me for tears or succor. So far as he knows, man is the unlikely product of a game of chance ("lotteria"), so there isn't much profit in agitating metaphysical questions. Children don't inquire if another life exists, and as they are incurious, they are right. This reticent poet is, however, not phlegmatic or impervious to divinity; only he finds it in a droplet or crumb. He is the man whose eyes have opened for a moment, "e tanto basta." It is enough.

The triumphant conclusion of Montale's poem "To My Mother" gives the sense and the strength-in-weakness of this provisional poet. The "disencumbered highway," the path the eschatologist is pursuing,

is not a path, only two hands, a face,
those hands, that face, the gesture of one life
that is not any other but itself,
only this puts you into elysium,
thick with the souls and voices in which you live.

The gesture the spirit makes as the poem sinks to silence is ambiguous. But it remains. "E il gesto rimane":

Perhaps, like a picklock, it forces open the closed place or secret point of the world. Montale, venturing the question doesn't venture an answer. No answer is likely, unless an irreducible surd.