SOURCE: Cook, Albert. “Leopardi: The Mastery of Diffusing Sorrow.” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 4, Nos. 1-2 (1980): 68-82.

[In the following essay, Cook details the mood, style, and thematic range of Leopardi's poetry.]

I.

In the isolation of his father's library Leopardi set himself to the mastery of classical antiquity; other equally cloistered but less inspired minds, after the Industrial Revolution were similarly shown toward what will be called a miximizing retrieval of data backed by a faith in the set significance of one hallowed past. Behind and around this faith, something, that would negate it by engulfing it, was gathering head; this was a process of speculation and its accompanying expression characterized by the splendid control of a diffusing sorrow. Meanwhile it was Wolf and Cardinal Mai—the addressee of one of his first long poems (1.7-9)¹—rather than Winckelmann, to whom Leopardi gave his intellectural attention. Soon he would move beyond Winckelmann from the painfully close concentration on detail of minor classical writers² to the integral incorporation of classical examples in his vast meditative effort which was to be unprecedented and was not to be matched and surpassed till the extensive Cahiers of Valéry. In the four thousand five hundred and twenty-six pages of the Zibaldone (“Miscellany”), written over a fifteen year period, Leopardi kept exalting by implication the very process of the mind at work by addressing himself again and again to the nature of perception, the philosophical implications of the literary use of language, the ontological status (as we would say) of art; topics which were to be also the major concern of Valéry.

Underplaying the sort of classificatory intelligence needed for exact philology, and also the intelligence of the philosopher, Leopardi placed the poems he had begun to write between these two activities. They were rhymed meditations at first anchored to a reverence not for the idea of antiquity but for antiquity as seen through the eyes of the philologist. He became less a philologist as soon as he began his poetic work. The prose meditations of the Zibaldone on the other hand took place as a kind of defining accompaniment, a private stock-taking, rather than a public justification of Renaissance poet-critics and their followers, as was the case in the England of Wordsworth and Coleridge or in the France of Victor Hugo.

Early in his career (2.110-111), Leopardi makes the distinction between “parole” accompanied by “immagine accessorie” and “voci scientifiche,” thus providing a framework where, under the latter category, both philology and philosophy might be lumped together³.

However, just as a modern philologist tries to avoid impressionism in his work, so Leopardi tried to achieve a poetic that would increase emotional expression through a deliberate scaling down of stylistical devices⁴, aiming for “l'antiretorica” at least by comparison with his predecessors if not with the twentieth century poet. He would seem to have pushed the “voci scientifiche” (in his sense) to produce an effect on the reader. While he elsewhere⁵ stresses the continuity between ancient and modern, it is along these lines that he distinguishes between them; this is how he describes the difference between Ovid and Dante:

Nella stessa maniera Ovidio, il cui modo di dipingere e l'enumerare (como i moderni descrittivi sentimentali ecc.) non lascia quasi niente quasi a fare al lettore, laddove Dante che con due parole desta una immagine lascia molto a fare alla fantasia.

(Zibaldone 57: 2.39)

In Leopardi's own practice the simplicity or “poverty” of his style was achieved through successive manuscript drafts, where characteristically he replaced forceful words with less emphatic ones⁶.

II.

This concentration of verbal effect left him free to connect and centralize high points of feeling; his “pessimism” by refusing to entertain illusion—or its rhetorical counterpart in diction—enabled him to bring together the two great romantic themes, nature and love. Wordsworth deepened the first only, so to speak, by nearly sacrificing the second (and Coleridge remarked interestingly that Wordsworth was incapable of love). “Lucy” for Wordsworth is a distant object not too different in what she evokes from the Highland Lass or the Old Leech Gatherer. Shelley, who did write about love and also about nature, presents nature only as a sort of backdrop for love, where Leopardi manages to bring both into the feeling of his diffusing sorrow. And where Shelley yearned for Italy and sketched on vast canvasses countries that lay ever further east, this Italian made what was close to home yield a full crop of sentiment—the hillside near his home in “L'Infinito,” the field outside his door in “La Ginestra.”

Leopardi undercuts the typical Romantic version of the distant “locus amoenus” by putting an Icelander at the Cape of Good Hope (“Dialogo della Natura e di un islandese,” 1.114-117), who expresses radical dissatisfaction with all the environments on earth.

The beloved is conceived powerfully enough to draw charged area after charged area into her orbit:

Torna dinanzi al mio pensier talora
Il tuo sembiante, Aspasia. O fuggitivo
Per abitati lochi a me lampeggia
In altri volti; o per deserti campi,
Al dí sereno, alle tacenti stelle,
Da soave armonia quasi ridesta,
Nell'alma a sgomentarsi ancor vicina
Quella superba vision risorge
.....Raggio divino al mio pensiero apparve,
Donna, la tua beltà. Simile effetto
Fan la bellezza e i musicali accordi,
Ch'alto mistero d'ignorati Elisi
Paion sovente rivelar.

(“Aspasia,” 1.35)

The beloved is here conceived naturally enough to make us feel the distance from the idealization of woman that occurs in Petrarch (whom Leopardi admired and edited) and in Cavalcanti or Dante. Her semblance in his mind simply evokes feeling and brings forth a yearning towards the beloved into accordance with any heightened object of attention.

III.

In “Il Risorgimento” (1.25), Leopardi makes explicit the doctrine that corresponds to and partially defines his energy of nostalgic recall. It is one akin to that which Wordsworth made a main source of his own creation; in it Leopardi states independently the central notion of the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”⁷. But he scales it down, he proverbializes it, investing it with doubt and melancholy:

Credei ch'al tutto fossero
In me, sul fior degli anni,
Mancati i dolci affanni
Della mia prima età

The notion is stated baldly, but the feeling behind it is no less powerful. It comes up again in the Discorsi, and in his sketch for an autobiography. Like everything else in Leopardi's poetry—like love and like his response to nature as yearning for the infinite—it partakes of a grave sense that man fulfills himself by being unfulfilled, and that consequently, as these short lines rhythmically intimate, there is no doctrine which can be singled out as the whole basis for other perceptions. Remembrance is a force in “A Silvia” and also in “Le Ricordanze,” and this force has the effect of intensifying the yearning of the imagined speaker rather than providing a comforting explanation for it.

It surfaces again in “Alla Luna,” (7.18):

                                                                      Oh come grato occorre
nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo
La speme e breve ha la memoria il corso,
Il rimembrar delle passate cose,
Ancor che triste, e che l'affanno duri:

Here the exaltation comes as a high moment in the process of thinking. In “A Silvia” the sense of nostalgia is heightened not only by the long lines that break the restraint of the short ones, but also by the rhetorical delay of essential information—we are not told that Sylvia is dead till the next-to-last stanza. The act of memory then is made to be recognized suddenly, after we have lingered at length on it. What seems to be the appeal of an old lover—“Silvia, rimembri ancora”—turns out to be the meditation of a mourner. There is and there can be, therefore, no vibrancy of response in the person so tenderly addressed; Silvia will not answer, and the rhetorical device at once places the pall of death over a vividness like that of love, investing the afterlife with a yearning towards possibility.⁸ “A Silvia” offers no “Liebestod”—effusions, but the vigorous evocation of a feeling so broad as to include love or death, depending on the immediate focus:

Porgea gli orecchi al suon della tua voce …
Lingua mortal non dice
Quel ch'io sentiva in seno.

(“A Silvia,” 1.26)

Once expressed, the sentiments have the air of commonplace. On the evidence, they are not so; others are like Musset or Schiller. In the “Dialogo d'Ercole e di Atlante,” Hercules lets the earth fall and nobody on it has noticed that he did so.

The sentiments may also seem casual. But that they are not so appears in the restraint of the poems, and also in Leopardi's fairly low estimate of Byron, who seems to him arbitrary and unsuccessful precisely in his delineation of feeling (Zibaldone 226; 2.100-101), which he strives to heighten in a self-defeating way: “il povero lord suda e si affatica perché ogni minima frase, ogni minimo aggiunto sia originale e nuovo.” Leopardi contrasts this procedure unfavorably with Goethe's in Werther (Zibalone 261; 2.111). More to the point in the significantly titled “Il Pensiero Dominate,” he writes:

E tu per certo, o mio pensier, tu solo
Vitale ai giorni miei
Cagion diletta d'infiniti affanni
Meco sarai per morte a un tempo spento.

(1.33)

Thus he equates sense of being with presence of thought which is the starting point and the sole cause of all feelings.

IV.

In the “Storia del Genere Umano” (1.79-85), men are created alike and bored with this condition; “Jupiter” then differentiates them, and they are delighted, but gradually they come to feel “tedio.” The poems of Leopardi follow this fable by coming to terms with tedium by recreating conditions in which it is at once realized and wakefully resisted. The agency for the realization is lyric poetry, which Leopardi declares to be the superlative kind of superlative human forms of speech, in a statement which anticipates Heidegger's deductions from Holderlin, “La lirica si può chiamare la cima il colmo la sommità della poesia, la quale è la sommità del discorso umano” (Zibaldone 245; 2.106).

His poems, as he reached his mature expression, lean more emphatically on the alternation of long and short lines than do the Rime of Petrarch. In his hands this alternation becomes an instrument that breaks and rises to fullness, breaks and again rises, the terminal line being always a full one. Even in poems of constant hendecasyllables, like “L'Infinito,” this same effect is gained by the resolution of caesurae before the final line, thus causing “dolce” to dominate over “naufragar”:

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,
E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
Dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
Spazi di la da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete
Io nel pensiero mi fingo; ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno
E Le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Cosi tra questa
Immensita s'annega il pensier mio;
E il naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare.

(1.17)

From the fourth line on, for nine lines, not only does every line contain enjambement until the colon at the end of the fourteenth; also every line except the ninth contains a caesura which is a more marked pause than the (enjambed) line-ending. The process follows the recapitulations of the “pensier” which is the only important noun repeated in the poem, except for “silenzio.” There are near-synonyms and related words for each, “mirando,” “odo,” “comparando” comprising moments in “pensier,” while “quiete,” repeating “silenzio,” is given the longest word in the poem as a qualifier, “profondissima.” This word, in turn, as a superlative, belongs to the large cluster of “absolutes” in the poem, “sempre,” “tanta,” “ultimo,” “Interminati,” “sovrumani,” “infinito,” “l'eterno,” “immensità.”

Cumulatively they mime the inundation that the unbroken last line rhythmically expands to name. “Dolce” seems more important than “naufragar,” not only because of its central position in the line but also because the reader is finally accorded the satisfaction of resolution after so many short, breathless, suspensions—like a tired swimmer finally with relief going under. In one word, “naufragar,” Leopardi has compressed the elaborate Petrarchan allegory of the ship. However, the verb is present—“è,” is, and not “would be”—as though in some way that act of uttering the poem has already amounted to shipwrecking, a suggestion heightened by the immediacy of the last modifier, “questo mare,” this sea.

The poem follows Leopardi's general practise of gradual climax, as in “Ultimo Canto di Saffo”:

Placida notte, e verecondo raggio
Della cadente luna; e tu che spunti
Fra la tacita selva in su la rupe,
Nunzio del giorno; Oh, dilettose e care …

(1.14)

where the apostrophes, once under way, give room for swift aphorisms:

Incaute voci
Spande il tuo labbro: i destinati eventi
Move arcano consiglio. Arcano tutto
Fuor che il nostro dolor

(1.15)

So in “Le Ricordanze,” the series of apostrophes comprising general words presented in broken rhythms crests in the naming, and thereby the suggestion, of “arcana // Felicità”:

                                                                                E che pensieri immensi,
Che dolci sogni mi spiro la vista
Di quel lontano mar, quei monti azzurri,
Che di qua scopro, e che varcare un giorno
Io mi pensava, arcani mondi, arcana
Felicità fingendo al viver mio:

(1.27)

“Immensi,” “dolci,” “spiro,” “lontano mar,” “azzurri,” “scopro,” “giorno,” “pensava,” “mondo,” “arcana,” “felicità,” “fingendo,” “viver,” “mio,”—we are back in the word-florilegium of “L'Infinito.” The thought crests, and crests again, and crests again, unwearied in facing its own weariness.

There is a negative concession in the very opening of this poem, “Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa, io non credea // Tornare ancor per uso a contemplarvi”—but he is there returning to contemplate these stars as they twinkle over his father's garden. He moves between vagueness and precision, just as the first word of this poem does, since it can mean “vague,” “wandering,” “eager,” and “graceful.” And the precise sense, “wandering,” is itself applied somewhat imprecisely, since the constellation does not exactly wander but rather moves through fixed positions in the heavens. The word in Greek “planetos,” literally translated, means “wandering star,” as the professional classicist Leopardi certainly knew. And a “planet” is the opposite of the fixed stars in the constellation of the Great Bear.

“Vaghe,” then the first word of “Le Ricordanze,” opens it on a strong and yet evasive tonic note. The poet thus wanders through an exploration of what may be evoked through a scene of remembrance and the topic of memory generally. For Leopardi is willing to invest almost the whole poetic effect into a kind of vagueness, an indefiniteness of diction: “non solo l'eleganza, ma la nobilità la grandezza, tutte le qualità del linguaggio poetico, anzi il linguaggio poetico esso stesso consiste, se ben l'osservi, in un modo di parlare indefinito o non ben definito, o sempre meno definito del parlar prosaico o volgare” (Zibaldone, 1900-1901; 2.517).

Between the fixed and the wandering, the mind of the speaker takes account of a sentiment at once vague and precise, thinking back to his life as a boy and the end of his joys, “ove abitai fanciullo, // E delle gioie mie vidi la fine.” In its rhythm and its diction, as in the doctrine it espouses, the poem succeeds in diffusing its sorrow by staying triumphantly sub-Wordsworthian. “Le Ricordanze” are only what may be evoked in a comprehensive look at the evening landscape under the stars. And yet there is a concentration. In the drafts (“Abbozzi”) of “L'Infinito” there is a green laurel tree covering a large part of the horizon, which disappears in the final poem, along with the leaves of some plants (1.73).

V.

For Leopardi even “naufragar” is “dolce.” We are beyond the romantic agony. The sorrow is so diffuse in its confrontation with the infinite that it shades into joy. Joy, “allegrezza,” Leopardi declares to be a necessary component of poetry (Zibaldone, 205; 2.93). He stresses the hovering between sentiments in “La Ginestra”: “Non so se il riso o la pietà prevale” (1.44). It is the infinite in love which brings about pleasure to men (Zibaldone 1017-1018; 2.295-296). And melancholy is powerless without an aura, “l'immaginazione e anche la sensibilità malinconica non ha forza senza un'aura di prosperità, e senza un vigor d'animo che non può stare senza un crepuscolo un raggio un barlume di allegrezza” (Zibaldone 136; 2.69).

Poetry, through its strategy of sending the indefinite in pursuit of feelings aimed at the infinite, avoids the trap of thought-definitions already characterized in the early ode “Ad Angelo Mai”: “Ecco tutto è simile, e discoprendo, // solo il nulla s'accresce” (1.8).

The process of being disappointed by an image also manages to transcend the confusion of disappointment:

Che la illibata, la candida imago
Turbare egli temea pinta nel seno
Come all'aure si turba onda di lago.

(“Il Primo Amore,” 1.16)

Dante's “lago del cor” (Inferno, 1.20), as well as Dante's meter, has been taken over and made the locus of a never-ending dynamic process of perception. Poetry and art, Leopardi says, aim at truth, not beauty (“Non il Bello ma il Vero o sia l'imitazione della Natura qualunque, si è l'oggetto delle Belle arti.” Zibaldone 2; 2.3). It takes, in effect, its subject at the point where the true philosopher feels a discontent at the incompleteness of his reasonings: “Nessun maggior segno d'essere poco filosofo e poco savio che volere savia e filosofica tutta la vita” (Pensieri XXVII; 1.224). But all life is what the poet might try to express, just because the sentiment he feels in a natural setting (“una compagna”) inspires vague and indefinite ideas of the highest delight, as though chasing a butterfly without catching it⁹.

And yet on the other hand, as he says in “Amore e Morte”:

Quando novellamente
Nasce nel cor profondo
Un amoroso affetto
Languido e stanco insiem con esso in petto
Un desiderio di morir si sente.

(1.33)

The desire for a fullness of sentiment is powerful enough to shade almost instantly over from love to death, and without any morbidity. The terms themselves are comprehensive in their psychology, and they delineate a sequence, a precise, if comprehensive, effect.

There is a kind of hidden paradox here between goal and procedure, and in the use of understatement and indefiniteness in a poetry that aims at unvarnished truth-telling. Images and terms in the language here are not adornments but instruments towards bodying forth something like a complete description.

The act of moving towards silent apprehension itself enjoins silence, as in the “silenzi” and “quiete” of “L'Infinito.” Or as he says in “La Sera del Dí di Festa”: “Tutto è pace e silenzio e tutto posa // Il mondo, e più di lor non si ragiona” (l.17). These poems achieve an air of having totalized experience by going through the thought-process of coming up, in repeated attempts, to naming what such a totality might be:

Pure all'aspro desire onde i mortali
Già sempre infin dal dí che il mondo nacque
D'esser beati sospiraro indarno
Di medicina in loco apparecchiate
Nella vita infelice avea natura
Necessità diverse, a cui non senza
Opra e pensier si provvedesse, e pieno,
Poi che lieto non può, corresse il giorno
All'umana famiglia; onde agitato
E confuso il desio, men loco avesse
Al travagliarne il cor.

(“Al Conte Carlo Pepoli,” l.23)

Fullness (“pieno”) is a kind of compensation for the incapacity to be joyful (“lieto”). And the whole sequence of the action issuing in agitation and confusion of desire, operates to reduce rather than to increase the area of the heart's suffering. Yet this diminishment is a kind of expansion into capacity for an awareness of which the poem is at once an example and a definition.

Such a process stands behind “La Ginestra,” the proleptically or synecdochally significant broom-plant toughly and heedlessly growing outside the poet's door in a beautiful landscape right beside a volcano:

Qui su l'arida schiena
Del formidabil monte
Sterminator Vesevo,
La qual null'altro allegra arbor né fiore,
Tuoi cespi solitari intorno spargi
Odorata ginestra,
Contenta dei deserti. Anco ti vidi
De' tuoi steli abbellir l'erme contrade
Che cingon la cittade …

(l.42)

Taken with the epigraph from St. John which immediately precedes this opening (John 3:19), “Men loved darkness rather than light,” the broom-plant is first addressed as a contrast to human activity, an implicit counter-example rather than an analogy to the human condition. Plants seek the light rather than shun it, as this biblical passage says men do, and plants beautify the desert. However the analogy is also present. It can be said that man, too, is like a tough plant growing on the side of a volcano, since the line which follows emphasizes the briefness and the unexpected end of the city, “la qual fu donna de' mortali un tempo,” and the word “donna,” here denotes “rule” (whereas the humble broom-plant rules nothing, like the “uom di povero stato e membra inferme” later on). “Donna,” also, implicitly connotes all the associations around the word “donna” as a desirable woman from Dante on. The verb “abbellir,” applied to the broom-plant, is not to be divorced from the “contrade” and the “cittade”: it is that which the broom-plant beautifies. Thus the analogy, subtly, begins to work against the contrast, creating, again, the vagueness and indefiniteness that Leopardi has insisted is the proper means for poetry.

As the poem gathers force the analogy emerges into an emphasized predominance:

Dipinte in queste rive
Son dell'umana gente
Le magnifiche sorti e progressive

Here Leopardi makes use of the italics he scorns Byron for resorting to so frequently¹⁰. Irony establishes the analogy; man claims the italicized definition which could differentiate him from the broomplant, but is thrown back by catastrophe into that humble state. The immediate reference of the lines here however, is not to the broom-plant on these slopes, but to the ruined cities, Heraculaneum and Pompeii. The landscape here contains traces of history as well as analogies to men: the process has become more involved; it is irreducible either to a nature mystique or to a rhetorical meditation on transcience, allowing in its vagueness for both, and for an emotion that comprises both:

                                                                                          Or tutto intorno
Una ruina involve,
Dove tu siedi, or fior gentile, e quasi
I danni altrui commiserando, al cielo
Di dolcissimo odor mandi un profumo
Che il deserto consola

The pathetic fallacy is broached but only grazed; the broomplant is “quasi commiserando,” and it is for the observer that the plant sends a most sweet odor to the sky; it consoles the desert for him. Again the ideal landscape of classical tradition and such romantics as Shelley has been subverted by stubborn natural fact; no “locus amoenus” but a tough plant growing in a “deserto.” In one sense, then, Leopardi illustrates his own epigraph: he loves the darkness of his example more than an ideal light, and men do build on the side of Vesuvius where he is living. But then he transcends it: he finds light even there. And he manages to fuse all these possibilities into a single expressive sequence, “La Ginestra,” the act of diffusing sorrow accomodates sorrow to an indomitably energetic perception.

Notes

1. All quotations are from Walter Binni and Enrico Ghidetti, eds., Giacomo Leopardi, Tutte le opere (Florence: Sansoni, 1969).

2. S. Timpanaro (La filologia di Giacomo Leopardi, Florence: Le Monnier, 1955), assesses his professional philological career in detail. As a translator Leopardi was a scrupulous literalist, like Holderlin but unlike Shelley. As Gilberto Lonari says (Classicismo e utopia nella Lirica Leopardiana, Florence: Olschki, 1969, p. 4), “per il Leopardi ventenne, esiste anche un aspetto funzionale del greco: di lingua o piuttosto di geloso e ingenuo cifrario per una crittografia dei sentimenti.”

3. The distinction is stressed by Domenico Consoli (Cultura coscienza letterarua e poesia in Giacomo Leopardi, Florence: Le Monnier, 1967, 21-24), “La concezione leopardiana dello stile poetico e essenzialmente antiretorica.”

4. In this light, it would take some dialectical twist to justify Lonari's remark, quoted in Note 2 above.

5. “Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica,” l.914-948.

6. Iris Origo remarks on this practice (Leopardi, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953, pp. 89-92), citing a lecture series by Arnoldo Momigliano, La poesia di Leopardi.

7. Karl Kroeber (Artifice of Reality, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), develops at length the analogy between Wordsworth and Leopardi.

8. Cesare Galimberti makes much of Leopardi's use of negation as a rhetorical device (Linguaggio del vero in Leopardi, Florence: Olschki, 1959, pp. 68-130).

9. “Il sentimento che si prova alla vista di una campagna o di qualunque altra cosa v'ispiri idee e pensieri vaghi e indefiniti quantunque dilettosissimo, è pur come un diletto che non si può afferrare, e può paragonarsi a quello di chi corra dietro a una farfalla bella e dipinta senza poterla cogliere: e perciò lascia sempre nell'anima un gran desiderio: pur questo è il sommo de' nostri diletti, e tutto quello ch'è determinato e certo è molto più lungi dall'appagarci, di questo che per la sua incertezza non ci può mai appagare” (Zibaldone, 75; 2.47).

10. The line is however a quotation from Terenzi Mamiani's dedication of his own “Inni Sacri” (1832) where the word order is slightly different.