SOURCE: Brose, Margaret. “Moontime and Memory: Leopardi's ‘Alla luna’.” Stanford Italian Review 9, Nos. 1-2 (1990): 155-79.

Giacomo Leopardi's “Alla luna,” written most probably in July of 1819, is the second composition of the group of poems known as the primi or piccoli idilli: a group of five poems written between 1819 and 1821, which are united by their shared setting of the Recanati landscape, and suffused with a nostalgia for the loss of innocence. The term idillio comes from Leopardi's own description of those poems of 1819, which he further defines as “situazioni affezzioni avventure storiche del mio animo.”¹ As is well known, Leopardi's idyllic voice was born contemporaneously with another poetic register, that of his first political and mythological odi and canzoni. The most salient features of this latter group are, thematically, a heroic agon pitched against the tyranny of human destiny and the mechanistic laws of the universe, and, stylistically, a classical hypotaxis marked by long periods and hyperbatons. In contradistinction, the relatively shorter five primi idilli are marked by dense euphonic patterning and a parataxis regulated polysyndeton and asyndeton.

These idylls of 1819-1821 are designated primi or piccoli (by critics, not by the poet, we should note) because they are followed, after a brief hiatus of prose production (the ironic Operette morali of 1824-1828), by a second series of idylls, the grandi idilli of 1828-1830, which return to the thematic and stylistic characteristics of the first idyll group. “L'infinito,” written in the spring of 1819, is the archetype of the piccoli idilli, first not only in chronology but also in its magisterial melding of lyrical brilliance with theoretical self-consciousness.² It stands as an almost prefatory poem to the idyllic world of Leopardi's Canti, both signalling its affective content and providing a legend to its own compositional structure. The rhetorical patterns of the idilli first appear here and are consciously designated as such by the poet. In the following pages I shall discuss the third of the piccoli idilli, “Alla luna” (written second, but placed third in the ordering of the Canti by Leopardi himself) in terms of its adherence to and variance from the typical rhetorical patterns and temporality of the Leopardian idyll. Consequently, before we turn to our discussion of “Alla luna,” it would be well to highlight briefly one or two of the paradigmatic aspects of “L'infinito.”

I

“L'infinito” exemplifies above all Leopardi's theories about the creation of the poetic Sublime by means of contrasts and the poetic function of certain lexical categories. These poetic theories are inextricably tied to his more philosophical speculations concerning the impossibility of happiness residing in the present, and the role of memory in the creation of experiences of pleasure, the indefinite, and the infinite. Moreover, from this first idillio emerge the constituent elements of the typical idyllic Leopardian scene, beginning with an autobiographical event subsumed by a landscape which will then be progressively transcended (or blocked from view). Both autobiography and landscape are attenuated in the longer “heroic” poems.

“L'infinito” opens, then, with the poet's return to a solitary hill (Mt. Tabor, the hill of Leopardi's youthful musings), vision blocked by a hedge, and the sound of the wind rustling through the branches. This is an unpopulated locus amoenus, without the country fairs, artisans, or maidens busy at domestic work which inhabit several of the other idilli poems. The central presence is the poet, who sits and gazes outward into the infinite spaces beyond the visible; this outward gaze (“mirando,” v. 4) harkens an inward seeing of something far more sublime than horizon or hill. The poem thus begins to establish a contrastive process for the production of the experience of the Sublime.³ This process, which I have elsewhere termed a metaleptic reversal,⁴ depends upon a tightly controlled use of binary pairs: past/present; allora/ora; infinite/finite; tu/io (the tu invoked may be a woman, or a moon; what matters here is not the referent but the dialectical relationship engendered). Leopardi's idilli tend to revolve around the network of temporal-spatial deictics established by the poet's recurrent use of questo/quello. These binary systems permit Leopardi to constitute a dialectic of presence and absence; once constituted, this dialectic may be reversed. The dialectical relationship between past/present and presence/absence (or, plenitude/loss) structures numerous of the entries in the Zibaldone, Leopardi's notebooks, and also several of the Operette morali.

Throughout Leopardi's writings, the past is consistently described as a period of plenitude; the present is experienced as finitude and loss. Like Vico, Leopardi ascribes to childhood the free reign of the Imagination and the poetic faculty of metaphorization. The past remembered is commensurate with apperceptions of the infinite and the poetic sublime. “La rimembranza è essenziale e principale nel sentimento poetico, non per altro, se non perchè il presente, qual ch'egli sia, non può esser poetico: e il poetico, in uno o in altro modo, si trova sempre consistere nel lontano, nell'indefinito, nel vago” (Zibaldone 2.4426; 1237-38; December 14, 1828). But the signs of the present (objects such as hill, hedge, and moon; auditory sensations such as wind, song, and echo), which are marked by the deictics of the present (questo & ora) can be substituted by similar experiences of the past, which are marked by the deictics of the Other (quello & allora). The alternation between the visible and the invisible, the hic et nunc and the imaginary, the finite and the infinite, can be reversed by this same metaleptical exchange. In a lyric as tightly structured as “L'infinito,” this metaleptic movement takes the form of an economical chiastic substitution, elegantly contained within fifteen lines. The chiasmus is effected on the conceptual, imagistic, and phonic levels at the same time. In a longer lyric, such as “La sera del dì di festa” (46 verses), the metaleptic movement assumes the form of a spiralling helix of ever-widening circles.

The quintessential Leopardian poetic act is remembering: it is this act which the speaking subject of the idylls performs and it is this very act which we perform as readers. The unified idyllic lexicon and landscape allow for a restricted but intertextually expansive set of allusions. The speaking subject of the poems remembers his youth, when hope was infinite and illusions powerful enough to elicit the expectation of future happiness. This moment is then later remembered as a time of plenitude (memory dulls the awareness that happiness was, even then, hypothetical, composed of proleptic hope—as tenuous and as transparent as spider webs, Leopardi comments later in one of the Operette morali, “Il dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare,” Le poesie e le prose 1: 878). In the idillio, the lost moment is reinscribed into the present of the text by a metaleptic return of past images, made possible by the exchange of deictic shifters.

The mechanism for such metaleptic re-figuration is delineated in “L'infinito.” Leopardi clearly indicates the mental operation of contrast or comparison between two semantic fields as the mechanism which produces the experience of Sublimity: “… io quello / infinito silenzio a questa voce [il vento] vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno” (vv. 9-11; emphasis mine). The poem's brilliant closure turns upon the rhetorical sleight-of-hand which marks the sea of sublimity with the deictics of the present (“questa / immensità” [vv. 13-14]; “questo mare” [v. 15]; emphasis mine), thereby filling the textual space with the dizzying free-fall into the shipwreck of Infinity. The trope's effectiveness also depends upon the poet's manipulation of auditory data (rather than visual data), and upon the etymological provenance of the verb “to remember” (sovvenire) as a “coming from under,” or a de-repressing (de-sublimation) of early childhood fears and exhaltations. Auditory sensations (similar to gustatory ones such as Proust's madeleine) stand, in fact, in a privileged relationship to the Unconscious in both the poetic theory and practice of Leopardi.⁵

The above description of metaleptical exchange at the lexico-semantic level of “L'infinito” helps us to understand how, from the larger perspective of the Canti as a whole, metalepsis serves as the structuring trope of the relationships between Leopardi's various poetic phases. The entire poetic period of the piccoli idilli (1819-1821), for example, will, at a later date (1828-1830), be transfigured into the grandi idilli. What had earlier been the locus of a past plenitude (the poet's youth) becomes transfigured into the haunting image of a past poetic plenitude; youth's innocence is reinscribed as the innocent phase of the first idylls: thus the spiraling helix. And we as readers perform the same significant (i.e., sign-producing) act of remembrance. We remember “L'infinito” as we read the second of the piccoli idilli, “La sera del dì di festa,” and we continue to remember these previous two lyrics when we read “Alla luna,” the third poem of the sequence.

II

At first reading, then, “Alla luna” is easily assimilated into the idyllic ambience established by the first two lyrics of the piccoli idilli series. Its scenic (Mt. Tabor) and affective contours, as well as its brevity (sixteen lines) recall “L'infinito.” Its moonscape evokes immediately that of “La sera del dì di festa.” Both the lexical register and the syntactical structures of “Alla luna” appear to be fully consonant with the two preceding lyrics. Not only is “Alla luna” integrated into the memorial line established by the first two idilli, it also figures prominently in that tetralogy of moon-poems, “La sera del dì di festa” (1820), “Alla luna” (1819), “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia” (1830), and “Il tramonto della luna” (1836).⁶ And yet, according to some critics, “Alla luna” seems to be a less than fully realized example of the Leopardian idillio. Mario Fubini, to cite only one example, speaks of “Alla luna” as possessing “una letterarietà meno sensibile che negli altri idilli.”⁷ If such indeed be the case, how are we to account for this lesser achievement? Fubini suggests that the typical rhythmic structure of the idyll, the endecasillabo sciolto, is here more subdued (“più piana e sommessa”), and that the syntax of “Alla luna” is characterized “da movimenti sintattici dolci e pacati e da enjambements più teneramente discorsivi che indefiniti e drammatici.” Here as always Fubini is a perceptive reader. The lyric is in fact less paratactic and less dense than “L'infinito,” and is organized in more uniformly equal syntactic blocks. It is also less complexly structured on the phonic/acoustic level, exhibiting less of what Kenneth Burke has referred to as verbal “acrostics” in sound patterning.⁸ However, beyond these differences, I would like to suggest that what sets this lyric off from its piccoli idilli counterparts in the Canti is the introduction of an irresolvable temporal paradox. The typical past/present dialectic, established early in each of the first idylls and then usually metaleptically reversed by the poem's end, is here disrupted. This abrogates the expected closure of the idillio in which refigurations of the past (filled with infinite hope and illusion) come to inhabit the once-empty present of the poem. By examining the poetic and rhetorical devices of “Alla luna” in detail, we may better understand the nature of its temporal patterning and in so doing, come to appreciate more fully the rhetorical temporality of Leopardi's poetics in general.

III

“ALLA LUNA”

O graziosa luna, io mi rammento
che, or volge l'anno, sovra questo colle
io venia pien d'angoscia a rimirarti:
e tu pendevi allor su quella selva
siccome ora fai, che tutta la rischiari.
Ma nebuloso e tremulo dal pianto
che me sorgea sul ciglio, alle mie luci
it tuo volto apparia, che travagliosa
era mia vita: ed è, nè cangia stile,
o mia diletta luna. E pur mi giova
la ricordanza, e il noverar l'etate
del mio dolore. 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!

In the Neopolitan autograph (An) of this poem, the original title is at first double: both “Idillio/La luna” and “o la Ricordanza” are contiguous variants. Successive versions of this lyric have “La ricordanza” as the title until the 1831 edition (Nr) of Leopardi's poems, entitled now Canti, where the poem acquires its definitive title “Alla luna.” This brief genealogy of the title is not without significance. The poem is Leopardi's first lyrical meditation on memory,⁹ which one of the original titles, “La ricordanza,” clearly signals. In 1829, Leopardi composed “Le ricordanze” (his own Wordsworthian “Prelude”), which presents a more deeply sounded memorial-meditation, albeit from the mature perspective of the grandi idilli. The other original title, “Alla luna,” denotes, like “La sera del dì di festa,” the occasion for the projection back into memory, rather than the process itself. That this version eventually won out as the definitive title suggests that Leopardi chose to emphasize the “naive” rather than the “sentimental” aspects of that lyric. As we shall see, this tension between experience within the parameters of memory and meditation upon the processes of memory will inform the temporal ambiguities of the poem as well. The moon is the obvious tutelary presence of the poem, as the framing repetition of the vocative to the moon at the opening of the first section (v. 1) and the closing of the second section (v. 10) of the poem suggests. Like the caro colle of “L'infinito,” the graziosa luna is a concrete sign from the present which points to a past empowered to console the poet as the evidence of an affective durée.

Let us first delineate the four sections of “Alla luna,” noting that they correspond perfectly to the four major syntactical units of the poem, each section punctuated with a period: section 1. vv. 1-5; section 2. vv. 6-10 (to the period after “O mia diletta luna.”); section 3. v. 10 (“E pur …”) v. 12 (“del mio dolore.”); section 4. v. 12 (“Oh come grato occore …”) v. 16. The symmetries and correspondances between the various sections are especially marked. Each section opens with a vocative, a conjunction, or an exclamative which clearly delineates it from the preceding sentence: 1, “O”; 2, “Ma”; 3, “E pur”; 4, “Oh.” The pattern created by these four initial words constitutes something like a chiasmus. …

Noteworthy here is the phonic identity of the first and the fourth units, which reinforces the tonal and affective unity of the first and the fourth sections.

The entire poem is marked by an assonantal repetition of the vocalic “O”-making the poem a sustained vocative or moan to the moon. The visual insistence on the circular form “O” iconically reiterates those numerous other orbs floating through the textual space—the moon, the moon's face, the poet's eyes, the poet's mouth rounded into an imploring “O.” The assonance intensifies in verse 12. For Piero Bigongiari, this graphemic/phonemic repetition accords with his thesis that the first section of Leopardi's Canti represents “In vita dell'io”; the assonance is the instantiation of the io as it disseminates itself throughout the lyric.¹⁰ The repetition of the initial “O” phoneme in the first and last sections constitutes a framing device, just as the reiterated vocatives frame the first and the second sections: “O graziosa luna” [v. 1]; “O mia diletta luna” [v. 10]. The frame suggests containment and continuity. As we shall later see, however, it is precisely this expected consonance between sections 1 and 4 which stands at odds with the peculiar temporal dimension inserted in the fourth section.

Returning to our chiastic pattern, we see that these four initial lexemes constitute, in microcosm, the drama of the entire lyric. We move from an affective invocation to the moon (“O graziosa luna”), which asserts a metaphoric connection between the poet and the moon (io, tu), and between past and present; to an adversative conjunction (“ma”) which establishes metonymic distance and difference between past and present; to, finally, a resolution of sorts in the awareness of the metatemporal duration linking all moments. Here in verse 9, close to the poem's very center, is a syntactical icon in nuce of how the past (“era la mia vita”) and the present (“ed è”) are subsumed into the atemporality of memory (“nè cangia stile”). The fact that “cangia” is a present tense indicative suggests that there is a uniquely Leopardian present tense in the piccoli idilli which denotes not the present tense of the enunciation, but rather the presence of memory: a “memorial-durational-present” in which all times are coextensive. This is Leopardi's grammatical equivalent of the experience of memory itself. The experience of this rhetorically induced continuity elicits that particularly Leopardian bittersweet phenomenon of remembrance. “Rimembranza” is, then, the subjective analogue of a durée in which past and present meld.

And yet—the poem forcefully commands our attention with “E pur” (v. 10)—the poet emphatically reasserts a sense of synecdochic identification with the past. The recounting of the seasons of the past, the telling of his beads, mitigates whatever pain the past may have contained: thus, the “E pur” of section 3 neutralizes the adversative force of the “Ma” of section 2.

The fourth section, opening with “Oh come grato occorre” (v. 12), is phonically allied with the opening assonance of the vocative “O graziosa luna” (v. 1) and, of course, with the echo of that first vocative in its second instance, “O mia diletta luna” (v. 10). This fourth section, then, would be expected to achieve that Leopardian “memorial-durational-present” tense and to resolve the binary opposition between past and present. We expect this resolution because we, as readers, will have registered the memorial line established by the poet in the previous idylls. For Leopardi, to read is to remember. The fourth section almost achieves this apotheosis of memorial duration, and indeed, actually did achieve this in its original version. But verses 13 and 14—“nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo / la speme e breve ha la memoria il corso”—were inserted by hand by Leopardi on his copy of the 1835 Starita edition of the Canti, and therefore represent a later ironic intrusion inimical to that tenuous idyllic resolution. It is to this aphoristic emendation of 1835 that we shall return later, with the aim of demonstrating that the ironically demystifying tone of that intrusion undermines the metaphoric union of disparates possible only within the temporality of memory. Or, to put it somewhat differently, the lyric in its entirety is structured along the temporality of allegory; the emendation, in terms of the temporality of irony.

The temporal references within the first section (vv. 1-5) reveal a structural similarity to verse 9: the present/past and the io/tu dialectical opposition is established and then resolved. Some interesting patterns of voice and tense are made manifest.

v. 1—io—present indicative (“io mi rammento”)
v. 3—io—past (imperfect) (“io venia”)
v. 4—tu—past (imperfect) (“tu pendevi”)
v. 5—tu—present indicative (“fai … rischiari”)

There is clearly a substitutionary, if not formally chiastic, rhythm created by this disposition. What is its precise choreography? While the io voice moves from present to past, and that of the tu from past to present, the final present tense (“rischiari”) is held in a “durational-memorial” suspension. This is achieved by the play of two other pairs of binary deictics: or/allor (v. 2, v. 4, v. 5) and questo/quello (v. 2, v. 4). The complex interweaving of these shifters effaces the distinction between past and present, between the distant and the near, and elevates both to a union possible only within language. Synchronicity is achieved by the dissemination of phonemes as well. For example, variations of the morpheme la (v. 5) link the elements of the dual moonscape: “tu pendevi allor su quella selva / siccome or fai, che tutta la rischiari” (vv. 4-5). The la of that other woods (quella selva) descends literally into the present of the following verse. This “selva oscura” is the dark wood of the past, now illuminated by memory's light.

The moon, then, the analogue of memory, completes its cyclical course to re-illumine the night: “or volge l'anno” (v. 2). The rippling dissemination of the liquids (l/r), and of the fricative v will continue into the next section of “Alla luna.” Especially noteworthy in this first section, however, is the alliterative recurrence of the liquid r in perfectly balanced end-words: “rammento” (v. 1), “rimararti” (v. 3), “rischiari” (v. 5). The effect of this phonemic inundation is to bond the binary opposites into unions which work against their surface semantic connotations. The rhetorical and phonic reduplications prohibit the reader from maintaining clear-cut oppositional distinctions. The entire first section, then, forms a unitary temporal-spatial whole. In his book-length study of “Alla luna,” Lucio Lugnani refers to Leopardi's technique of melding all temporalities into the continuum of memory as the creation of a “presente gnomico (senza orologi nè calendari nè limiti biologici-psicologici).”¹¹ Lugnani's findings support my thesis that the diverse verbal tenses in the idillio are all subsumed into the continuum of memory: a present in tense, but a temporal otherness in content and affect.

This much is evident in the first two verses alone, in which the verbs reflect the Leopardian theory of happiness: that is, happiness may be experiences in some past or in some future moment, but never in the present. Here “mi rammento” and “volge” signal the temporal alterity of pleasure. Although the verbs are in a grammatical present tense, their semantic level points metaleptically to the past, reminding us that for Leopardi, temporal distance is a necessary condition for the apperception of happiness.

IV

Section 2 of “Alla luna” opens with the forceful adversative conjunction “Ma” (v. 6), which recalls its predecessor in “L'infinito”: “ma sedendo e mirando …” (v. 4). In both cases, the adversative is the grammatical obstacle which signals a swerve into an interiority. Just as the hedge obscured the poet's vision in “L'infinito,” in “Alla luna” it is the tears which rise in the poet's eyes that obfuscate the face of the moon.

In this second section, the poet's mood dominates the scene and nature is internalized. The moon is visually deformed by the aqueous invasion of an internal storm. The moonscape appears as an Impressionist painting, a Seurat, delicately Pointilist. As Piero Bigongiari notes, not without irony, the cosmic “mare” of “L'infinito” gives way to “un patetico mare interiore, quello della passione, e quasi che il ciglio precorra, miniaturizzato ma amplissimo, ‘queste piante’ della siepe dove stormirà il vento dell'infinito.”¹² Again, what is at first set up as diametrically opposed states—the illumination shed by the moon (v. 5) and the obfuscation of the moon by the poet's tears (vv. 6-8)—is resolved by the overarching statement of the perdurance of the poet's pain: “travagliosa / Era mia vita: ed è, nè cangia stile” (vv. 8-9). Obfuscation and clarity are merely climatological variants of a steady state, that of the anguish of the poet's life. Once again, difference is dissolved within the “memorial-durational” presence of memory. The verbs of the second section in the imperfect tense, “sorgea” (v. 7), “apparia” (v. 8), “era” (v. 9), signal a continuous, repetitive past. Of the five past tense verbs in these first two sections, all in the imperfect, three are in the “poetic” form rather than ending with the more regular, prosaic “-v-” desinenza. As such, they are examples of that category of lexemes which Leopardi called “parole”—words which are poetically evocative of the indefinite and the infinite, as opposed to “termini”—words that are referential and precise in their denotations (Zibaldone 1.110-11: 135-37; April 30, 1820).¹³

Section 3, “E pur … del mio dolore” (vv. 10-12) presents the affective resolution of the divergent perspectives presented in the first two sections. The affirmative semantic force of the opening syntagm of section 3 (“E pur”) proposes the successful antidote to the adversative conjunction “Ma”: that is, the coexistence of both past and present subsumed within the pharmakon of memory. Section 3, in fact, is cast entirely in the Leopardian “memorial-durational-present” tense, the opposition between past and present now synthesized. Whereas the first two sections display a heightened pronomial density—the io/tu alternation—Section 3 is inhabited only by the first person.¹⁴ The speaking subject's interlocutor, the moon's many faces and phases, is absorbed by the metaleptic process of “noverar l'etate” (vv. 11-12) into the hegemonic pleasure of memorial refiguration.

In fact, the sublation of the tu begins earlier. The opening line of the poem presents the io and the tu as syntactically separate but contiguous entities, the comma blocking any phonic slippage into synaleopha: “O graziosa luna, io mi rammento.” Verse 10 then echoes and sublates that first verse: “O mia diletta luna.” Embedded within this vocative is both the first person pronomial marker (“mia”) and an index of the affective change from the descriptive adjective “graziosa” to the inscriptive one, “diletta.” The lexeme “graziosa” points to a semantic field of the external, the visually perceivable Other. “Diletta,” on the other hand, belongs to that semantic field of affective semiosis so prevalent in the idilli.

We recall here (as readers we perform the Leopardian metaleptic memorial leap) the opening and closing verses of the “L'infinito”: “Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle”; “E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.” In all three cases, the affective adjective (“caro”; “dolce”; “diletta”) is accompanied by the first person pronomial marker (“mi”; “m'è”; “mia”). Difference dissolves; the Other is absorbed. In section 3 of “Alla luna,” then, the absence of the second person singular pronomial marker has already been prefigured by the closing vocative of section 2 (“O mia diletta luna”) which syntactically melds the first and second pronomial markers within the same syntagm. The painful distance between the speaking subject and his interlocutor, the moon, disappears as the Other is introjected into the subjectivity of the speaker. In so doing, the speaking subject takes on the attributes of the Other, made dear by distance and indefiniteness. So, too, the absence of the past tense from section 3 reveals the melding of past and present into a new synchrony. Viewed as figures of the elements of a dialectical syllogism, section 1 is thesis, section 2, antithesis, and section 3, synthesis.

Following this line of development, section 4 would be expected to provide a lyrical expansion of section 3, and would be consonant thematically with the use of the “memorial-durational-present” tense. And so it did—that is, before the insertion of verses 13-14. The absence of all pronomial markers in this last section suggests the generalizing impulse which follows organically and logically from section 3. This expansive universality of experience is typical of the last stage of the Leopardian idyll. This oceanic immersion in the suspended temporality of memory assuages the poet's individual grief. The remembrance of things past—“Il rimembrar delle passate cose” (v. 15)—is a universal balm. By means of memory, the lyrical io moves from pain to pleasure; by means of memory, past, present, and future are held in an oneiric continuum; by memory alone, the virgin moon goddess Diana, once distant and indifferent (but, to leap proleptically forward within the Canti, this moon is not as indifferent as its counterpart in “Canto notturno”) becomes internalized, introjected within the voice of the poet. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, irreconcilable opposites cohabit in harmony in memory, that supremely textual space which generously allows for catachresis and radical metaphor (as in giova/dolore, section 3; grato/triste, section 4). Section 4, then, expands the lesson learned by the lyrical io of the poem to a universal dimension.

A fundamental aporia is introduced into the fourth section by the addition of verses 13-14: “Nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo / La speme e breve ha la memoria il corso.” As Lucio Lugnani has noted, the present tenses of the first three sections constitute a univocal time frame (what I have called a “memorial-durational-present” tense) which is not coextensive with the actual present of the enunciation.¹⁵ Abruptly, it would seem, the appended verses 13 and 14 introduce a different present tense which is noncontemporaneous with the dominant memorial present. This new present serves to displace the present of the first three sections (the “ora” of verses 2 and 5) to an even more remote time. The “ora” of sections 1-3 is revealed now to be that “tempo giovanil” which is irrevocably lost. Until verse 13, the present of the act of remembering (“il noverar,” v. 11; “Il rimembrar,” v. 15) is identified with the very moment of the enunciation of the speaking subject. Indeed, we can now fully appreciate how the temporality of “Alla luna” was originally the same as that of “L'infinito” and “La sera del dì di festa”: the metaleptic return of past images, filled with the anticipatory pleasure of childhood illusion, into the de-temporalized fictional present—fictional precisely in the etymological sense of invented or crafted. In “Alla luna,” however, as a result of the 1835 emendation, regret rather than restoration fills the speaking subject of the poem.

V

Now, we may choose to regard this 1835 emendation of Leopardi's as “un atto di integrazione storica,” as does Piero Bigongiari.¹⁶ And surely it is that. But such an act of historical integration implies a spatio-temporal locus outside the lyric itself from which the author wields his pen. Where is that place? Whoever speaks verses 13 and 14 can no longer be identified with the lyrical io of sections 1-3. If it is assumed to be the same persona, we must acknowledge a radical temporal discontinuity. If we take the Canti as a whole as the necessary macro-context for this poem in its definitive form, then the correction would not be to a single lyric of 1819, but to the very temporality exhibited by that earlier lyric as seen from the distinctly different temporality of 1835. If we think of the Canti as an opus conceived of by Leopardi as an organic totality—a very problematic assumption, to be sure—then we must ask ourselves, from what temporal perspective can one perceive such a synchrony? Or, to return to Bigongiari's formulation (“un atto di integrazione storica”), what is the form of the storia into which the correction of “Alla luna” is to be integrated? I would like to suggest that the correction belongs to an ironic storia, one in which the speaking subject stands outside of the temporality of the poems of both idyll sequences (the piccoli idilli and the grandi idilli), and from which he deconstructs the illusions of temporal recuperation inherent in each phase. Both phases of the idilli are metaleptic. The piccoli idilli return to the earliest memories and images of childhood as that edemic anteriority of plenitude: memory projects these experiences, refigured, onto the screen of the present in the poem. The grandi idilli retrope the period of the piccoli idilli as the moment of lost plenitude. But Leopardi's last poems (from the ciclo d'Aspasia to the last Neopolitan odi and canzoni) contain only the present of the enunciation itself. There is only this present of the speaking subject, without past or future, without dialectical oscillation between now/then, here/there, finite/infinite. Memory and hope, the cathodic poles of the idyllic poetics, are exorcised from this Titanic “nuova poetica leopardiana,” to cite Walter Binni's characterization of this counter-idyllic poetic mode.¹⁷

I have preferred to characterize Leopardi's divergent poetics in terms of their temporal structures, along the lines of what Paul de Man has called the rhetoric of allegory and the rhetoric of irony.¹⁸ In this view, the piccoli idilli exhibit the temporality of allegory: a diachrony of successive stages of consciousness, “one belonging to the past and mystified, the other to the now of the poem.”¹⁹ The Leopardian idillio, whose turning point is a metaleptic substitution or reversal of spatio-temporal markers, problematizes temporality itself. Translating de Man into a Leopardian lexicon, the speaking subject of the lyric enunciates from a point in the trajectory of his life when youth and its illusions are forever gone. The idyll seeks to abrogate this diachrony by transferring the constituent elements (signs) of that past into the affectively empty present of the scene of inscription. The only recourse of the speaker is to refigure the memory of that earlier hope, a metaleptic leap back to a proleptic anticipation, a pattern which inscribes a spiralling helix. That you cannot go home again is what saves the idyllic moment from redundancy and noia; remembrance returns the prior image to a wholly different spatio-temporal axis. It is a resurrection into timelessness, from Chronos into Kairos. Thus it is that the Leopardian idyll is without a true (rather than merely formal grammatical) present tense—the present, as Leopardi notes over and over again in his Zibaldone, can never be poetic and can never provide man with the experience of happiness. And even the past, so idealized, was itself constituted by an imagined future. We have strayed into a semiotic maze, in which all signs point to other signs. “The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign,” notes Paul de Man, “can only consist in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term) of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority.”²⁰

The temporality of irony, on the other hand, is opposed to that of allegory. Irony is the mode of the present, notes de Man: “it knows neither memory nor prefigurative duration.”²¹ In the development internal to Leopardi's Canti, the diachronous temporal spread of the idillio eventually yields to the unitary present of the Titanic or heroic enunciation of the poet's later poems. All times are subsumed into the present of the enunciation, which erodes the fictionality of the poem. In these later poems, there is no longer a hypostasized anteriority, nor an instantiated io. Truth and error are no longer allegorized as successive, but are co-extensive with the speaking subject. The speaker acknowledges both origin and closure as illusory. Leopardi's last lyrics signal an ironic acceptance of the present as partial and aleatory, and of plenitude as always Other.

With these considerations of rhetorical temporality in mind, we can now better appreciate how the emendation of verses 13 and 14 transforms “Alla luna” into an ironic utterance. The dialectic of past and present collapses; there remains only the single moment of the final enunciation which devastates any illusion of memorial restoration. That lyrical io who takes pleasure in the remembrance of past seasons, albeit of pain, is revealed to be a former self. The emendation of 1835 functions somewhat like a litotes in that it affirms its central message by negation. The aphoristic “quando ancor lungo / La speme e breve ha la memoria il corso” can only be uttered from a chiastically reversed experiential place. For it is the very essence of youth not to be able to describe itself thus; not to be able, that is, to understand the hydraulic dialectic of speme/memoria. What demarcates hope from memory is that specific spatio-temporal locus called the present, from which the enunciation issues forth. The overt semantic message specifies that “long hope/short memory” applies only to youth. But to know this is to have left youth behind forever. It is to stand in a synchronic relationship to both the illusion of memory's recuperative power and to its demystification. This secondary revisionism, of which Freud speaks in relation to the dreamwork, is the hallmark of the ironic perspective.

Of course, verses 13 and 14 of “Alla luna” do not constitute the only occasion in the Canti where Leopardi comments on the state of youth and its prerogative of hope. When Leopardi does invoke youth in a poem, however, we need to examine whether that poem closes in a suspended “memorial-durational present” or, to the contrary, whether the poem ironically collapses all other temporalities into the univocal present of the enunciation. For however we might choose to describe the modulations of tone, mood, lexicon, or rhetoric of the piccoli idilli, they all share that memorial closure and synecdochic relationship to the past.

“La sera del dì di festa,” a piccolo idillio of 1820, offers some instructive comparisons with “Alla luna.” At the exact irradiating center of the poem we find “Oh giorni orrendi / In così verde etate!” (vv. 23-24). Here the speaking subject, immersed in the present of his adolescence, painfully confronts the incongruity between his anguish and the supposed “salad days” of youth. What follows, however, is not an ironic demystification of youth or of the act of remembering, but rather their apotheosis. Still in the evening of the holiday, the poet cries out: “Ahi, per la via / Odo non lunge il solitario canto / Dell'artigan …” (vv. 24-26). By means of a metaleptic return of the same auditory event, the poet's present (“E fieramente mi si stringe il core” [v. 28]) melds with the past, now both held in a timeless memorial suspension: “Un canto che s'udia per li sentieri / Lontanando morire a poco a poco, / Già similmente mi stringeva il core” (vv. 44-46).

Here in “La sera del dì di festa” metalepsis, the troping back to an earlier figural experience, counters both the delimiting nature of the present and the inevitable realization of the illusory basis of all childhood speranza. Diametrically opposed is the temporality of “Alla luna,” in which this metaleptic retroping (“il noverar”; “il rimembrar”) is the object of the demystification. In “La sera del dì di festa” illusion is negated by means of remembrance; in “Alla luna,” remembrance is revealed to be illusion. “La sera del dì di festa” incorporates two temporal dimensions, the present (of the speaker's youth and of the enunciation), and the past (childhood). The present, infused with retroped images from the past, becomes meta-temporal; all moments are subsumed within the “memorial-durational” continuum. In “Alla luna,” this same temporal configuration is outlined, then radically disrupted by verses 13 and 14, which constitute an ironic commentary on the temporality of the first twelve verses, and perhaps a larger commentary on the powers of memory itself. Like any version of Romantic Irony, the author's intrusion dispells the fictionality/figurality of the preceding verses, and stands in an adversative relationship to the text and in an admonitory relationship to the reader.

VI

Does this ironic stance affect the lexical register of “Alla luna?” At first glance, verses 13 and 14 appear to be consonant with the rather uniform lexical register of the piccoli idilli. Two lexemes, however, indicate this new, ironic, counter-idyllic perspective: “memoria” and “corso” (v. 14). Corso is a typical Leopardian lexeme, indicative of both his concern with time's passage and also of his Petrarchan heritage. Corso appears nine times in the Conti, including one variant. What is of paramount importance is that this lexeme is found nowhere in the piccoli idilli except in this instance in “Alla luna.” It occurs only once in the grandi idilli, in “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia,” in a similarly symmetrically balanced oppositional equation, this time not between the paths of hope and memory, but between those of the moon and the shepherd. The shepherd naively asks of his silent interlocutor, the moon: “dimmi: ove tende / questo vagar mio breve, / Il tuo corso immortale?” (vv. 18-20). Here it is not merely the quantitative difference between the lengths of the paths which is in question, as in “Alla luna,” but primarily the qualitative difference between the movements themselves: the shepherd's path is aimless and of brief term; the moon's course is directional and immortal. The opposition is twofold: breve vs. immortale; vagar vs. corso. It is significant that this opposition is posed in a rhetorical question, whose answer is thus apodictically clear, and that the speaker—the fictive pastore—represents the voice of an anonymous child or of an ironized childhood itself. The entire semantic field constituted by Leopardi's various uses of corso in the Canti is univocal: corso, more a termine than a parola, signals a precisely delineated path, necessary rather than contingent, which is juxtaposed to the indefinite, the vague, and the vast which characterize Leopardi's sense of the poetic Sublime. Indeed, corso is a most terminal termine, and one which is perceptable only after the demystification of childhood's illusions. This conjunction of the term corso with the apparition of il vero (the demystifying Truth) is well illustrated by the ironic single usage of corso in “Il tramonto della luna,” explicitly linked to the “giovanile stato”:

Troppo felice e lieta
nostra misera sorte
parve lassù, se il giovanile stato,
dove ogni ben di mille pene è frutto
durasse tutto della vita il corso.

(vv. 34-38)

The term corso appears once also in “La ginestra” in an oppositional relationship similar to that of “Canto notturno.” In “La ginestra,” it is the terrified “villanello intento” (v. 240) who seeks to protect his “ostel villereccio” (v. 250) from the volcanic flood of Vesuvius:

… esplora il corso
dal temuto bollor, che si riversa
dall'inesausto grembo

(vv. 252-55)

Reminiscent of the opposition between the pastore and the moon, here the humble peasant, with his ephemeral life and possessions, is pitted against the inexorable force of the inhuman and inhumane volcano. Corso is again a precisely delineated passage of Nature (Nature as evil stepmother, rather than as benign mother), and is antithetical not only to hope and happiness, but to survival as well. It is a counter-idyllic term. Again, we must conclude that the use of the term corso in “Alla luna” signals an abrupt discontinuity with the temporality of the first twelve verses of the poem, and confirms our hypothesis that the verbal present tense of that later emendation of verses 13-14 is not contemporaneous with the rest of the poem.

Lucio Lugnani's detailed study of “Alla luna” corroborates our hypothesis that corso is a lexeme extraneous to the piccoli idilli. What is more, Lugnani suggests that the lexeme memoria, also in verses 13-14, constitutes a virtual “semantic hapax” within the lexical variations of the early idilli.²² Other than in “Alla luna,” the lexeme memoria does not appear in any of the piccoli or the grandi idilli. Oddly enough, its few appearances are restricted to the early odi and canzoni of 1820-1822. But if the idyll poems are pre-eminently lyrics of remembrance, should we quibble about the single appearance of one term among many of a similar semantic field (that of Memory writ large)? Lugnani aptly quotes Gianfranco Contini here, who pointed out in his seminal essay, “Implicazioni Leopardiane,” that the numerous Leopardian terms of memory constituted a large zone of synonymy (“I termini della rimembranza facevano parte, per Leopardi, di una larga zona sinonimica”).²³ Contini is correct, and here the exception proves the rule. Of all the terms for remembrance in the Canti, only memoria is used to designate the specific object of remembrance or to refer to a specific intellective faculty; it is not used to describe the psychological act of remembering or its poetic affect. As thus conceived, Leopardi's memoria has a terminal content rather than the poetic operation of figuration as its referent. Memoria is a faculty of the intellect, thus functionally linked to Reason; as such, its operations undercut the indefiniteness of poetic remembrance, and stand in opposition to the figural plenitude of speranza and rimembranza. It turns out, ironically in this case, that the term memoria as used in “Alla luna” is semantically opposed to the other terms of remembrance in that poem (“mi rammento” [v. 1]; “la ricordanza” [v. 11]; “il rimembrar” [v. 15]), as well as to terms such as “speme” (v. 14), which signify an operation diametrically opposed to that of memoria. Here speme signifies not only hope, but also illusion, and even dimenticanza as used by Leopardi in the Zibaldone (1.216: 223; August 18-20, 1820). In fact, Leopardi's Zibaldone entries of 1821-1822 dilate on memoria as an intellective faculty of assuefazione: “La memoria non è altro che una facultà che l'intelletto ha di assuefarsi alle concezioni …” (Zibaldone 1.1453-55: 965-66; August 4, 1821). It would appear, then, that memoria is actually antinomous to that large zone of synonymous terms of remembrance of which Contini speaks, and that its appearance in verse 14 of “Alla luna” is another indication of how this late emendation radically alters the efficacy of remembrance which comprises the dominant theme of verses 1-12.

VII

“Alla luna” is a memorial poem, metaleptically echoing back through Leopardi's life and his other lyrics. Not only does the very first predicate of the poem signal this (“mi rammento” [v. 1]), but the subject of the remembrance is in fact, a revisioning, as it were, of an idyllic landscape (“rimirarti” [v. 3]). This backward rippling is allied to the phonic rippling of the liquid phoneme “r” in the first three sections of the poem. Remembrance is always revisionary—indeed, that is its value—and like its prototype the echo, it is infinitely reduplicative. “Alla luna” is an anniversary poem, and like anniversaries allows us the illusion of the abrogation of time. There is a primitive magic implicit in the very notion of the anniversary that did not go unnoticed by Leopardi. It is a beautiful illusion, Leopardi notes in the Zibaldone (1.60: 90; April 30, 1820), that even though we recognize that the day of an anniversary has nothing to do with the past, and that the past is irrevocably lost, nonetheless the things of the past “rivivano e siano presenti come in ombra, cosa che ci consola infinitamente allontanandoci l'idea della distruzione e annullamento che tanto ci ripugna, e illudendoci sulla presenza di quelle cose che vorremmo presenti effettivamente.” Memory creates for us the greatest illusion of all, immortality itself. In Leopardi's view, anniversaries are just as important as festivals and ritual institutions: as temporal springboards, they all project us back into the past, back into the poetically diffused anteriority of “una carissma passione.” As ritualized remembrance, the anniversary resurrects the dead, and allows for attendance in more than one temporal moment at the same time: ritual cyclicity overcomes linearity, the paradigmatic vanquishes the syntagmatic.²⁴

In “La storia del genere umano,” the first of the ironic prose pieces of the Operette morali, Leopardi narrates the creation of the echo. Millenia ago, man's unhappiness, born from his sense of finitude, had reached monstrous proportions. Jove decided to improve the human condition by creating a simulacrum of the state of childhood, to which men ardently sought to return, one characteristic of which is the illusion of infinity.

E risolutosi di moltiplicare le apparenze di quell'infinito che gli uomini sommamente desideravano (dappoi che egli non li poteva compiacere della sostanza), e volendo favorire e pascere le coloro immaginazioni, della virtù delle quali principalmente comprendeva essere proceduta quella tanta beatitudine della loro fanciullezza.

(Le poesie e le prose 1: 813)

As simulacra of the infinite, Jove adopted many expedients such as the sea, dreams, and the echo. Such expedients deluded men, creating for them vague and confused images (“immagini perplesse e indeterminate”), and figurations of the infinite. In this narration, we witness an apprehension of absence giving rise to a presence, not unlike the genesis of “la ginestra” on the dessicated volcanic slopes of Mt. Vesuvius. Leopardi's narrative of the creation of the echo is a representative anecdote which also explains the creation of the poetic sublime by means of the trope of metalepsis.

Metalepsis, or transumption, is “a kind of meta-trope, or figure of linkage between figures,” states John Hollander.²⁵ Hollander's book, The Figure of Echo, is an essay on the phenomenon of echo as a mode of literary, mythic, and acoustical allusiveness. Hollander summarizes and then expands upon past rhetoricians' use of the term, from Quintilian through Kenneth Burke to, most recently, Harold Bloom and Hollander himself. What becomes apparent from this investigation of the history of the term is that metalepsis is a trope apart, a figure signifying transition rather than a specific content or content-forming relationship between, say, any tenor and vehicle. It is a trope whose message is the medium; it signifies transition back to another past figuration. As such, metalepsis (and of course its dopplegänger, prolepsis) is necessarily a diachronic trope. According to Hollander, even for Quintilian “there is a suppressed or implied diachrony.”²⁶ And even when the trope takes the form of a pun or paranomasia, “we may observe that metalepsis fetches signification from afar in time as well as in semantic space.”²⁷ It would appear, therefore, that Leopardi's predilection for parole over termini in the idyll sequences was due in large measure to the metaleptic structure of the former. The parola is a metaleptic lexeme, inherently diachronic, which reaches back to distant and indefinite semantic possibilities for signification. The termine is inherently synchronic.

The profoundly transumptive nature of the trope of metalepsis resides in its power not merely to bring back the past but to transcend it by means of a stronger revisioning. This is why Harold Bloom fondly calls it “the trope of a trope” and sees it as the dominant form of all poetic revision, or battling with one's poetic fathers. Hence my allusion to the spiralling helix rather than to the closed circle: the return is an expansion and elaboration of a former figure. For Leopardi, metalepsis permits a return to the prelapsarian imaginative capacity—that of childhood—which could figure forth experiences of the sublime (unbounded happiness, symbiotic relationship to Nature, intimations of the infinite) which Reason at a later date would inevitably demystify.

Yet time's progress is ineluctable, linearity is inexorable, and even in childhood we are besieged with a suppressed temporal anxiety. Childhood's exquisite pleasures are only proleptic in nature. While this awareness must be repressed, it also no doubt gives rise to the bittersweet frisson of Memory itself. It follows, then, that even Origins are impure. For Leopardi, the “first time” necessarily occurs within the sequentiality of time; the revision, the echo, is a return to a semiotic space in which the laws of spatio-temporal seriality are suspended. The echo is inviolate, and this because it is the pure, unfettered creation of our figural capacities. So, too, the dreamwork permits combinations and resolutions of our experiences which transcend those of the waking realm. In metaleptic echoing, states Hollander, the interpretive or revisionary power “raises the echo even louder than the original voice.”²⁸

Leopardi understood this well, and it is this revisionary power of the figure of metalepsis that underlies his famous passage in the Zibaldone about seeing double:

All'uomo sensibile e immaginoso, che viva, come io sono vissuto gran tempo, sentendo di continuo ed immaginando, il mondo e gli oggetti sono in certo modo doppi.

(Zibaldone 2.4418: 1230-31; November 30, 1828)

The first vision is produced by the physical senses themselves, and therefore constrained by the actual limitations of the sense organs. The revision is of the imagination and superior to the first: “in questo secondo genere di obbietti sta tutto il bello e il piacevole delle cose.” Leopardi concludes this passage by pitying those peoples whose lives are restricted to experiencing the world merely with their physical senses, and who are deprived of the transumptive pleasure of imaginative revisioning.

The act of remembering, both the content and the form of “Alla luna,” is a metaleptic revision of a prior figuration. The return is a resurrection out of time and space. The typical Leopardian idillio traces a trajectory from an affectively empty present to the refiguration of a former experience of plenitude. The sub-stratum of “Alla luna” reveals just such a configuration of temporal development, into which the 1835 emendation of verses 13 and 14 radically intrudes. This rupture thrusts the entire lyric into the synchronic moment of the new, ironic present of 1835. All time is demystified, subsumed under the only time admissible to irony, a now in which the speaking subject is beyond illusion and recuperation. This is exactly the temporality of Leopardi's last lyrics, the ciclo d'Aspasia and especially “Il tramonto della luna” and “La ginestra.” Most importantly, it is the only vantage point from which the Canti as a whole could be demystified. Only after the ineluctable progress of time and the anamorphosis of tropological perspectives could Leopardi have relinquished remembrance. Irony is won only after living out the forms of illusion which it serves to demystify. Irony is a form of exorcism of the ego.

Viewing Leopardi's poetic development in terms of a passage from an allegorical to an ironic temporality accords with Piero Bigongiari's perceptive thesis that the structure of the Canti inscribes a chiasmus, and that the first two sections are composed of “In vita dell'io” and the last two, of “In morte dell'io.” The act of remembering (allegorizing) is necessarily ego-centric (here, again, Petrarch is Leopardi's true poetic father), whereas the ironic perspective achieved in Leopardi's last phase moves beyond the subjectivity of the poet. It is in the light of this aspect of irony that we can best appreciate those critics of Leopardi's work who view his later poems as heroic or progressive or Titanic. Indeed, without recourse to any aesthetic or moral valorizing, we can locate the rhetorical stance of Leopardi's last phase as one outside of any narrativized (hence allegorical) subjectivity. In some sense, “A se stesso” (1835) enacts the death of that lyrical self, and the birth of a new poetic persona. This poem, so reminiscent of “L'infinito” in its brevity and paratactical form, and yet so utterly opposed in rhetorical temporality and lexical register, tolls the death knell for the poet's own heart after the disillusionment of the last and most powerful of the Leopardian illusions, Love. It should not go unnoticed that both “A se stesso” and the emendation of verses 13 and 14 of “Alla luna” bear the same date of composition, 1835.

The re-examination of Leopardi's last poetic phases initiated by Walter Binni as a positive valorization of a “nuova poetica leopardiana” has moved us far beyond the Crocian opposition of poesia versus non-poesia.²⁹ I have sought in this essay not to judge the poetic voice or temporal modality of any of the Leopardian phases, but rather to indicate that there is a specific temporality that reflects the thematic and stylistic imperatives of the diverse poetic periods. The diachronic temporality of remembrance that characterizes the piccoli idilli was no longer possible for the poetic voice of 1835. “Alla luna,” is then, with its emendation of 1835, an intimation of that ironic temporality and voice of “cosmic pessimism” which was yet to be born in 1819.

Notes

1. Giacomo Leopardi, Le poesie e le prose 1: 705, in Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi a cura di Francesco Flora, 7th ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 1967). This edition, which comprises five volumes (Le poesie et le prose, vols. 1 and 2; Zibaldone, vols. 1 and 2; Le lettere), is the source of all quotations from Leopardi unless otherwise noted; volume and page number will follow quote. Parenthetical references to the Zibaldone are to volume, section, and page number(s), followed by date.

2. Franco Ferrucci, in his insightful essay “Lo specchio dell'infinito” in Addio al Parnaso (Milan: Bompiani, 1971) describes “L'infinito” as “la meno ‘tipica’ delle poesie di Leopardi” (141). Ferrucci indicates as atypical the meter of the poem (endecasillabo sciolto) and the paucity of temporal and spatial descriptive indices. However, I would argue that the Leopardian idillio typically effaces initial spatial-temporal description so as to project back to the space and time of memory. Ferrucci goes on to suggest that the Infinite is born as Imagination and then becomes the instrument which enables the Imagination to come to life. Ferrucci describes here a process similar to defamiliarization, which permits the doubling of the subject as Other (“l'estraneazione de se stesso, l'abbandono alle cose” [146]).

3. Leopardi himself described the contrastive process in “L'infinito” as “un contrasto efficacissimo e sublimissimo tra il finito e l'indefinito” (Zibaldone 1.1431: 953; August 1, 1821).

4. See my essays “Leopardi's ‘L'infinito’ and the Language of the Romantic Sublime,” in Poetics Today 4.1 (1983) 47-71, and “Posthumous Poetics: Leopardi's ‘A se stesso,’” in Stanford Italian Review 7.1-2 (1987) 161-89.

5. Leopardi appears to ascribe to sound-signs, or to the auditory, the operative force behind Memory itself. We can remember only that which we have heard. He narrates the tale of his very first memory, that of a few pears, which he both saw and heard named at the self-same moment (Zibaldone 1.1103: 741; May 28, 1821).

6. These four poems comprise a moon-tropics, in that each represents a different tropological stance with regard to the moon, to the operations of memory and the Imagination, and to the act of poesis itself.

7. Mario Fubini cited in Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, ed. Fernando Bandini (Milan: Garzanti, 1975) 127.

8. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage, 1957) 298. This entire chapter, “On Musicality in Verse,” is a masterful discussion of the semantic force of sound patterning in poetry.

9. Piero Bigongiari, in Leopardi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976) 299, also notes the meta-meditational nature of this poem.

10. Bigongiari 292. The affinity between Petrarch and Leopardi runs deeper than even Bigongiari's insight suggests; they are the quintessential poets of memory in the Italian lyric tradition. Bigongiari sees the entire Canti as delineating a chiasmus in theme and structure; I would argue that this is also true of Petrarch's Canzoniere.

11. Lucio Lugnani, Il tramonto di “Alla luna” (Padua: Liviana, 1976) 20. This book-length monograph on “Alla luna” examines the textual variants of the poem as well as the patterns of verb tense and pronomality. With differing terminology, Lugnani's analysis is fully consonant with my comments in this essay.

12. Bigongiari 301.

13. See also Leopardi's comments on synonyms and on the multiplicatory power of metaphor (Zibaldone 1.1477-83: 978-81; August 10-13, 1821).

14. See also Lugnani 17.

15. Lugnani 42.

16. Bigongiari 303.

17. Walter Binni, La nuova poetica leopardiana (1947, rpt. Florence: Sansoni, 1971). This important study, along with his later La protesta di Leopardi (Florence: Sansoni, 1973), represents one of the first efforts to valorize the counter-idyllic mode of the Leopardian oeuvre against the long tradition of Crocean inspired disdain for the more philosophical or heroic aspects of Leopardi's work. See also Salvatore Timpanaro, Classicismo e Illuminismo nell'800 (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1969), and Aspetti e figure della cultura ottocentesca (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1980); Cesare Luporini, Leopardi progressivo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980); Bruno Biral, La posizione storica di Giacomo Leopardi (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). These latter three critics locate Leopardi's materialism within a politically progressive context. For studies which discuss (and, in the case of Prete, transcend) the opposition between Leopardi's poetic and philosophic natures, see Umberto Bosco, Titanismo e pietà in Giacomo Leopardi (Rome: Bonacci, 1980) and Antonio Prete, Il pensiero poetante (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984).

18. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” in Charles S. Singleton, ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969) 173-209. This essay is reprinted in de Man, Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 187-228.

19. de Man 206-07.

20. de Man 190.

21. de Man 207.

22. Lugnani 76.

23. Gianfranco Contini, “Implicazione leopardiane,” in Varianti e altra linguistica (Turin: Einaudi, 1970) 46; quoted in Lugnani 76.

24. Leopardi's views on this subject echo not only Vico, but also anticipate those contemporary cultural anthropologists and historians of religion such as Mircea Eliade, who, in The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), discusses archaic ontology in terms of the abolition of profane time and the recurrence of cyclical, paradigmatic time. Eliade's views were, in turn, influential in the work of Cesare Pavese.

25. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 114.

26. Hollander 136.

27. Hollander 143.

28. Hollander 114.

29. Benedetto Croce, Poesia e non-poesia (Bari: Laterza, 1946). See Francesco Figurelli, Giacomo Leopardi, poeta dell'idillio (Bari: Laterza, 1941) for a classic, although somewhat outmoded, Crocean study which valorizes the idyllic aspects of the Leopardian corpus.