On the surface they suggest a policy or poetics of evasion; but I submit to you that the statements may be taken as a premise to something deeper and richer to be found in these three poets and others of their time, in Keats and Coleridge, for example. By and large the Romantics were more acutely aware than were writers of previous ages that the relationship between desire and the creative impulse is fundamentally predicated upon an awareness of the perennial, indeed the necessary failure of desire, and on the paradoxical survival of desire amidst its own ruins. The greatest of the Romantics were determined to turn precisely this awareness into something creative. It is the failure or negativity of desire that leads to the dynamics of the imagination and to what we may call creative pessimism, or creative skepticism. The truest Romantic poetry is a highly self-conscious and self-reflexive poetry, and at its best it is grounded in the reality principle.

The reason that desire is doomed to failure and negativity is that its ultimate object is eternity/infinity. Like others before him—Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, and any number of mystics and theologians—Leopardi knew that because our desire is infinite, nothing finite can satisfy it, fill it, put an end to it. Moreover, there is a profound ambiguity or paradox about desire to which we will return: desire is both a desire to attain the plenitude in which it will annihilate itself, and a desire to perpetuate itself.

I would have liked, in this lecture, to touch on some highlights in the history of desire as it came down to Leopardi. If there were time, and foregoing all mention of Plato, I would begin by reminding you at least of how Saint Augustine gave poignant utterance to that desiderium which is the core of his religion but which is also the underlying psychological and spiritual principle of affective mysticism in general; of how the great Saint conceived of this desiderium as a part of God's working in man whereby the soul is prepared and made capacious enough to receive its fulfillment; I would quote such words of his as: “The entire life of a good Christian consists of a holy yearning. Now what you yearn for, you do not see … By withholding himself, God extends our yearning; through yearning he extends our soul … So then brethren let us yearn, since we are to be filled … This is our life, that we be exercised by yearning.” For Augustine, that is, the Christian life is envisioned as a schooling in desire; but it is clear that for him desire has a fixed goal, a terminus ad quem. I would speak of how, in Gregory of Nyssa, this psychology of love as yearning informs an even more specifically mystical context; of how, in commenting on Moses' request to see God after their face-to-face meeting, as though the patriarch had not seen him at all, Gregory pictures Moses as a passionate lover longing for a fuller vision of the supernal archetype of beauty. But God would not have revealed himself at all if the vision were meant to bring an end to Moses' longing. Given the transcendance and infinity of the Deity, the lover's, that is, the soul's, desire must be endless, and any apparent vision or taste of God is no resting place, but rather a springboard for another leap by desire to him. Here is the real significance of “seeing” God [but every sighting of God is but a “glimpse”]—never to have desire appeased. Because God is infinite, Moses' desire and quest can have no end. This dynamism of unsatisfied desire acquires a highly erotic coloring in Gregory's commentary on the Song of Songs, and even more so in the commentaries on the Song by the medieval mystical theologians. Gregory's commentary comes close to proclaiming this endless desire even in an eschatological key. Be that as it may, in all the Christian exegetes of the Song we find as clear a statement as one can expect to have of a love psychology that places the true joy of the lover in the anxiety of the quest, that is, in desire itself. Of course, we must remember that the frustration of incomplete possession (the failure of desire) is balanced or compensated by the hope of and the faith in a fuller possession. Indeed, the truly religious and mystical aspect of this dynamism of love (which has all the earmarks of a Charity that has been invaded by Eros) is that to desire does not mean to be completely without what one desires. So that Saint Bernard's fellow Cistercian, William of Saint-Thierry, could say that in divine love, satiety, rather than diminishing the soul's desire, increases it, but that anxiety is removed. And therein lies the fundamental difference between all this and Leopardi. Christian desire is eminently teleological, and what makes it so is hope. Hope is desire specified, well focused. It is this specificity, by which desire is directed to the future, that can be said to make for the distinction between desire and hope. For all the infinite and transcendental nature of God, not even Gregory of Nyssa diffuses hope into inchoate or objectless desire.

As for Leopardi, his speculation on desire and hope is inextricably connected with his sensationist, indeed his materialistically grounded theory of pleasure and the imagination. While it was to acquire significant accretions over a period of a decade or so, the theory was formulated clearly enough as early as July 1820 in the Zibaldone, and may be summarized thus: Man, who does not have innate ideas, does have an innate desire of a boundless or infinite pleasure or happiness. We may say that this is tantamount to a desire for the infinite, and add that the desire for infinity is really the expression of the infinity of desire. For Leopardi, desire can never be fulfilled because there is no object adequate to it, for the world, let alone individual or specified objects, is finite. And yet, man does possess in the imagination the means to conceive of (or feign) things that do not exist. The infinite pleasure that the world does not afford can be supplied as a fiction by the imagination which is the sole fount of our illusions and our hopes. But the knowledge of truth severely balks desire and imperils the imagination; and hope, which was given by nature as an uncontaminated and inestimable gift to the ancients (and which remains so to children and the ignorant, i.e. unknowing man), is almost totally atrophied and nullified in modern enlightened man who posessess more truth than is good for him.

From the Zibaldone's densely packed early pages on the question of the relationship between desire and pleasure one of the most cogent must suffice here; it is all the more pertinent to my theme because, along with desire, it makes specific reference to hope:

Quando l'anima desider una cosa piacevole, desidera la soddisfazione di un suo desiderio infinito, desidera veramente il piacere, e non un tal piacere; ora nel fatto trovando un piacere particolare, e non astratto, e che comprenda tutta l'estensione del piacere, ne segue che il suo desiderio non essendo soddisfatto di gran lunga, il piacere appena è piacere, perché non si tratta di una piccola ma di una somma inferiorità al desiderio e oltracciò alla speranza. E perciò tutti i piaceri debbono esser misti di dispiacere, come proviamo, perché l'anima nell'ottenerli cerca avidamente quello che non può trovare, cioè una infinità di piacere, ossia la soddisfazione di un desiderio illimitato.

(Zib. 166-67: luglio 1820)

The knowledge that no object is commensurate with desire does not bring about a diminution or softening of desire; on the contrary, it increases and exacerbates desire. Desire, then, has no limits because it is a faculty “ingènita o congènita [innate, inherent] coll'esistenza,” and so can end only with the definitive termination of life. The same is true of hope: “La speranza è infinita come il desiderio del piacere, ed ha di più la forza, se non di soddisfar l'uomo, almeno di riempirlo di consolazione, e di mantenerlo in piena vita.” (Zib. 170: luglio 1820)

Leopardi repeatedly declares that to desire is to desire in vain, so that man is always in a state of pain. And again he says much the same thing of hope. For the moment, three things interest me: first, the fact that Leopardi early declared that no less than desire, hope is infinite; secondly, he recognized hope to be a counter-emotion to the negativity and anxiety of desire. Now, the way in which all this is said suggests that hope is not the twin of desire but rather its offspring by way of the imagination, that it is a fantasm (though it is not personified as such in the 1824 Storia del Genere Umano, that great fable of insatiable and perenially thwarted desire which is the first and, one may say, introductory, composition of the Operette morali); a fantasm or illusion that serves as a partial antidote to the pain of desire or, what comes to the same thing, to the pain of living. But in no way is it possible to speak of desire, or better, the awareness of desire, as an illusion or a fantasm, for desire is a basic, perhaps the basic existential condition. Moreover, the passage I have quoted above concludes with the following sentence: “La speranza propria dell'uomo, degli antichi, fanciulli, ignoranti, è quasi annullata per il moderno sapiente.” Not so desire. It is true that Leopardi says “quasi annullata,” and there is more than one passage in the Zibaldone that speaks of hope as indestructible; it may give way to despair, just as other illusions suffer disenchantment; and like them, it may receive death blows only to revive over and over in a cyclical fashion. But the force that revives hope is desire. If I may say it in words borrowed from one of the better poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“Love's Apparition and Evanishment,” 1833); Desire—Coleridge says Love—kisses lifeless Hope and thereby wakes “just enough of life in death / To make Hope die anew.”

The third thing to be said of the quoted passage is that in it desire and hope, if not actually twins, have almost an equivalence of value. They could almost be synonymous. And this is just what we find in most of Leopardi's pronouncements on the one or the other, where they are frequently joined so as to make of the two terms a binomial, as when he writes that “Nella speranza o in qualunque altra disposizione dell'animo nostro, il bene lontano è sempre maggiore del presente” (Zibaldone 105-26, marzo 1820)—a passage to keep in mind because of its pertinence to Leopardi's developing poetics of the enchantment and the pathos of distance, and which we will find expressed in the poems themselves. In this same vein is the assertion that “Il desiderio e la speranza del vero amante è più confusa, vaga, indefinita che quella di chi è animato da qualunque altra passione: ed è carattere (già da molti notato) dell'amore il presentare all'uomo un'idea infinita … e ch'egli può concepire meno di qualunque altra idea” (Zibaldone, 1017-18: 6 maggio 1821). Here again then, is a connection with the poetics and poetry of the indefinite and the sublime and with what we may call the pathos of evanescence. Or yet again when he speaks of the pleasure that exists in the very heart of despair: “Il piacere della disperazione è ben conosciuto, e quando si rinunzi alla speranza e al desiderio di tutti gli altri [piaceri], non si lascia mai di sperare e desiderare questo” (Zibaldone, 1545-46: 22 agosto 1821).

But the clearest attestation to the equivalence or synonimity of desire and hope occurs in a passage in which Leopardi declares that the two are inseparable, even as he recognizes that in terms of logic they can in fact be distinguished:

Noi speriamo sempre e in ciascum momento della nostra vita. Ogni momento è un pensiero, e così ogni momento è in certo modo un atto di desiderio, e altresì un atto di speranza, atto che benché si possa sempre distinguere logicamente, nondimeno in pratica è ordinariamente un tuttuno, quasi, coll'atto di desiderio, e la speranza una quasi stessa, o certo inseparabil, cosa col desiderio

(Zibaldone, 4146: Bologna, 18 ottobre 1825).

What is particularly intriguing and important here is the fact that the equivalence is established on psychological or, better, on experiential grounds (“in pratica,” as Leopardi says). Intriguing because when we turn to the poems and the creative or poetic prose of the Operette Morali, we find that they belie the presumed equivalency and what occasionally comes close to being the primacy of hope over desire that is sometimes suggested by the Zibaldone; and they give the lie to it precisely on experiential grounds, as in the Dialogo di Timandro e di Eleandro (1824) of the Operette morali when Eleandro says: “In ultimo mi resta a dire, che io desidero quanto voi, e quanto qualunque altro il bene della mia specie in universale; ma non lo spero in nessun modo.” And in the Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo Genio familiare (1824), hope is apparently already excluded in the discussion on pleasure (and happiness) and the possibility of experiencing it. Nobody can claim to know pleasure at first hand, says the Genio, because pleasure is an abstraction, not a reality, a desire, not a tangible fact: “il piacere è un subbietto speculativo, e non reale; un desiderio, non un fatto.” The Genio's fuller exposition will recall something of the mechanism or psychology of desire as enunciated by Gregory of Nyssa. The supposed “enjoyment” one experiences in any given moment is never such as to satisfy one, and one is forever expecting (a hint of hope?), that is, in painful desire of a greater and truer enjoyment. In so far as it can be said to “exist,” pleasure is the blind hope (“speranza cieca”) to enjoy more truly at another time.¹

It is not that hope and desire never go happily hand in hand in the poetry. In “La vita solitaria” we read: “amore, amore … // Era quel dolce / E irrevocabil tempo … // [quando] Al garzoncello il core / Di vergine speranza e di desio / Balza nel petto” (39-50). But note that the reference is to the adolescent or the youth. And yet, as a youth—at eighteen years—and referring to himself, Leopardi had written the following:

I' piango adesso, e mai non piansi pria:
Sperai ben quel che gioventude spera,
Quel desiai che gioventù desia.
Non vidi come speme cada e pera,
E 'l desio resti e mai non venga pieno,
Così che lasso cor giunga la sera
[i.e., la morte].

The verses are from Appressamento della morte, Canto V, 22-27. While this early poem (1816) was not published by Leopardi (except for the 1st canto, somewhat modified), Mario Fubini rightly noted that the reader of Leopardi cannot neglect this fifth canto, “in cui è il grido dell'anima del giovane poeta e che è tra le più notevoli testimonianze della sua vita interiore.”² And incidentally, the primacy of desire enunciated in the verses is further declared a few lines later when the poet tells us that before the final fall of his hope, it was nourished by desire: “Ardea come fiammella chiara e lieta, / Mia speme in cor pasciuta dal desio / Quando di mio sentier vidi la meta” (31-33).

Some twenty years later, approaching the end of his short life, Leopardi in the Spring of 1836 wrote his last, or second to last poem—“Il tramonto della luna”—in which the dominance of desire and its painful consequences are seen reaching into old age as a gratuitous act of cruelty, worse than death, inflicted by the gods on man: “D'intelletti immortali / Degno trovato, estremo / Di tutti i mali, ritrovar gli eterni / La vecchiezza, ove fosse / Incolume il desio, la speme estinta.” (44-50). Thus though the survival of desire when hope is dead in “old” age is the cruelest evil of all, it is nonetheless true that it is the cruelest of ills in any age.

An interesting question arises here. Can one choose not to desire? For Kierkegaard the burning question was how to save man from despair. For Leopardi the question was not really so different, though a proper phrasing of it would have to be put it in Hamlet-like terms: To desire or not to desire? The question may seem absurd because it amounts to saying: to despair or not to despair? (Does one really have a choice in the matter?) What is Despair if not that other child of Desire, Hope's true twin? Hope and Despair are the twins generated simultaneously by the parent Desire, just as Love and Death, in Leopardi's poem by that title (“Amore e Morte”) are twins generated simultaneously by Fate: “Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte / Ingenerò la sorte.” (1-2). Both sets of twins are at one and the same time antithetical and complementary; but in a Leopardian context, of the two sets only Love and Death are benign and identical twins. If Hope and Despair are for Leopardi the same “twin torturers” they are for Shelley, it is because they are the twin children of Desire. But they are not identical twins and of the two it is Despair that bears the truer resemblance to their common parent Desire.

One of the great 20th century poets of desire, Wallace Stevens, wrote in the last section of a poem whose title, significantly enough, is Esthétìque du Mal:

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.

(Section XV)

Stevens' word “poverty” is pregnant and almost surely means lack or difficulty, and, even more so, despair or anguish.³ We are familiar enough with the difficulty and despair Leopardi felt in trying to live in this “physical” and social world. We may think, for example, of the letter he wrote to Pietro Vieusseux, declining the invitation to collaborate in Vieusseux's periodical with a regular column to be called, quite pointedly, L'Hérmite des Apennins:

Perché questo buon Romito potesse flagellare i nostri costumi e le nostre istituzioni, converrebbe che prima di ritirarsi nel suo romitorio, fosse vissuto nel mondo, e avesse avuto parte non piccola e non accidentale nelle cose della società. Ora questo non è il caso mio. La mia vita … è stata sempre, ed è, e sarà perpetuamente solitaria, anche in mezzo alla conversazione, nella quale, per dirlo all'inglese, io sono più absent di quel che sarebbe un cieco e sordo. Questo vizio dell'absence è in me incorreggibile e disperato.

(Bologna, 4 marzo 1826)

And how can we not think of the poem “Il passero solitario,” where Leopardi's state of mind is mirrored in that strange bird who, while singing, remains apart from all the other birds who fly about in the happy air of Spring, apparently indifferent to the joy associated with that season of desire's awakening; and yet, a state of mind so different from the passero in that, unlike the bird, the poet foresees that in his old age he will look back at his absence disconsolately and with bitter regret—a clear betrayal of his acute awareness that his desire is too difficult to tell from his despair?

I wish to go into this matter of Spring and desire, so often treated in Leopardi's poetry. But first it may be well to look at, without hoping to resolve, the question of what seems to be the impossible choice of desiring not to desire, of attaining what Leopardi, in the Zibaldone, referred to as “il riposo dei desideri,” of stilling desire, of doing what Wallace Stevens in The Credences of Summer said must be done, that is: “Exile desire for what is not.” One way was that of the famous ataraxia (attarasia) of the Stoics that Leopardi writes of in several places: the liberation from all passions. In the prefatory remarks to his translation of the Manual of Epictetus (1826), Leopardi says that the indifference to external things taught by the Stoics amounts to attaining a state of indifference to being happy and not fleeing from being unhappy: “Il perdere quasi del tutto l'abito e la facoltà, siccome di sperare, così di desiderare … il rinunciare, per così dire, la felicità.” Is this not exiling desire for what is not? He claims he himself has sometimes achieved this state of renouncing desire and that he has been helped immensely by it. But Desire's exile was never of long duration. Nonetheless, there are moments in Leopardi's poetry that suggest he had in fact reached such a state, a condition that is beyond happiness and unhappiness.

Perpetual motion and perpetual stillness are the two poles between which desire oscillates, attracted now to the one, now to the other. In either case infinity and eternity are implied. By means of perpetual motion, man dreams of overcoming the threat of death by experiencing and devouring all things and thereby avoiding the reabsorption of himself into thinghood. By means of perpetual stillness, he dreams of a fulness which is perhaps the heart's secret desire for a death which is the return to the original source that is alone eternal.

In the second stanza of “La vita solitaria,” Leopardi describes an uncanny experience he has successfully and repeatedly sought out. I have elsewhere characterized this stanza as a variation on the theme of the beata solitudo.⁴ The experience takes place under a midday sun that neither vivifies nor blasts the earth, but silently reflects a still image of itself in the motionless waters of a lake on the banks of which the solitary poet sits without stirring. The poem obliterates all signs of nature's normal life by enumerating them in a series of negatives that creates an atmosphere of absolute stasis. Attuning himself to the setting, the poet feels himself gradually absorbed into a “moment” of timelessness and a “quiete antica” that is an inviolable primordial anesthesia:

Talor m'assido in solitaria parte,
Sovra un rialto, al margine d'un lago
Di taciturne piante incoronato.
Ivi, quando il meriggio in ciel si volve,
La sua tranquilla image il Sol dipinge,
Ed erba o foglia non si crolla al vento,
E non onda incresparsi, e non cicala
Strider, né batter penna augello in ramo,
Né farfalla ronzar, né voce o moto
Da presso né da lunge odi né vedi.
Tien quelle rive altissima quiete;
Ond'io quasi me stesso e il mondo obblio
Sedendo immoto; e già mi par che sciolte
Giaccian le membra mie, né spirto o senso
Più le commova, e lor quiete antica
Co' silenzi del loco si confida.

(23-28)

We may think of Leopardi's absorption into this “antica quiete” as belonging to a tradition of the benedictional mode of pastoral, but it is hardly Wordsworthian, and any true Arcadian would flee from this retreat in horror. For Leopardi has here created a radically personal locus amoenus, the beautiful place of desire, where, rather than finding a condition of pastoral peace and otium, he has entered a cataleptic state, a condition of emptiness or nothingness in which desire, in both a biological and metaphysical sense, has finally come to rest.

I cannot go into the question of how Leopardi, in the inexhaustible unrhymed fifteen hendecasyllables of “L'infinito,”—perhaps the most famous and best loved lyric of Italian poetry—arrives at the sweet drowning spoken of in the last two and a half lines: “… Così tra questa / Immensità s'annega il pensier mio: / E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.” I must be content here with suggesting that the poet is speaking of the sweet drowning of desire. To attain infinity and eternity (feigned or not) is to put an end to desire. It is to enter nothingness; and yet, paradoxically, in this poem it is also to feel desire infinitely and eternally—and voluptuously. Now it is nothing short of miraculous that Leopardi should so successfully convey the idea/sensation of “experiencing” infinity, for he in fact denied the possibility of infinity both of any entity and of the universe. There are enough statements in the early Leopardi that bespeak a materialistic view which included the idea that the universe is finite. One could cite, for example, the Zibaldone entry of May 9, 1821, or an even earlier entry, that of July 12/13, 1820, beginning: “L'infinità della inclinazione dell'uomo al piacere è una infinità materiale …” But it is the thought recorded on May 2, 1826 that serves us best here. Beginning with the observation that nothing in nature suggests the possibility of infinity and that infinity is a child of our imagination—nothing more than an idea, a dream, not a reality—Leopardi reaches the startling yet logical conclusion that only what does not exist may be limitless, and that infinity is only nothingness (or only nothingness is infinite): “Pare che solamente quello che non esiste, la negazione dell'essere, il niente, possa essere senza limiti, e che l'infinito venga in sostanza a esser lo stesso che il nulla” (Zibaldone, 4178). In the infinity-as-nothingness experienced in “L'infinito,” it is the face or child of Desire known as Despair that has found surcease, while the pleasure of desire survives. For unlike what occurs in “La vita solitaria” stanza, in “L'infinito” it is as though a pleasurable sentiency yet remains in sinking into a nothingness of duration.

The theme of a “riposo dei desideri,” of a “totale quiete delle passioni,” is the subject of the great hymn to death—sung by none other than the dead themselves—heard at the outset of the Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie. The hymn, however, is closer to the second stanza of “La vita solitaria” than it is to “L'infinito” because of the absence of any sense or sensation of luxurious engulfment; and the reason for this, I think, is that although the experience of the Vita solitaria stanza is given in the present tense as if it were happening even as we read the verses (much the same as in the case of “L'infinito”), unlike “L'infinito” but very much like the chorus of the dead it seems written, or uttered, in a posthumous voice. This gives to both poems their uncanny sense of peace that derives ultimately from the cessation of desire. There is no sentiency in these voices from beyond the grave, in these dead who have passed beyond that punto acerbo (line 21) which is the “point” of life that has briefly but so painfully interrupted the nothingness that preceded and followed it. No happiness for the dead or the living; but at least the dead, in the privileged fifteen minutes of insentient consciousness granted them in the great “mathematical” year (the first occurrence of it since the beginning of time), can speak without fear and trembling, in liturgically intoned verses, of the definitive stilling of hope and desire, indeed even of their liberation from that most horrendous experience of all—noia:

Alla speme, al desio, l'arido spirto
Lena mancar si sente:
Così d'affanno e di temenza è sciolto,
E l'età vote e lente
Senza tedio consuma.

(9-13)

A significant different between the Vita solitaria stanza and the hymn of the chorus of the dead is that in the latter we can detect a residue of the still-living author's bitterness at the failure of desire. Nonetheless, we can speak of both poems as illustrations of desire reduced to zero degree, a state, as Leopardi theorized in August 1821, that is pleasurable in and of itself (Zibaldone 1581). But somehow, if consciousness is present, such a state may be close to if not actually the very experience of noia. The unexpected kinship between desire and noia is touched on explicitly in a Zibaldone entry of Oct. 17, 1823:

Chi dice assenza di piacere e dispiacere, dice noia … La noia è come l'aria quaggiù, la quale riempie tutti gl'intervalli degli altri oggetti, e corre subito a stare là donde questi si partono, se altri oggetti non gli rimpiazzano … Or che vuol dire che il vivente, sempre che non gode né soffre, non può mai fare ch'e' non desideri la felicità, cioè il piacere e il godimento. Questo desiderio, quando e' non è né soddisfatto, né direttamente contrariato dall'opposto del godimento è noia. La noia è il desiderio della felicità, lasciato, per così dire, puro.

(Zibaldone, 3714-15)

Five months later, on March 8, 1824, Leopardi observed that “La noia è manifestamente un male”; not a specific ill, or evil, or pain in particular, “ma la semplice vita pienamente sentita, provata, conosciuta, pienamente presente all'individuo, ed occupantelo. Dunque la vita è semplicemente un male” (Zibaldone, 4043). Hence, both desire and noia are existential in character, and together they make up the theme of one of the greatest existentialist lyrics of modern literature—the “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell' Asia.”⁵

The image for desire in the poem are the wings—ale [ali]—that are evoked and invoked by Leopardi's philosophical shepherd at the end of his anguished plea to the unresponsive moon for an explanation of the meaning of existence and of man's experience of crushing noia. But the wings of desire are really present throughout the poem in the echoing sound of àle incorporated in the series of end words that create a rhyme, indeed a refrain that links the several stanzas: vàle; immortàle, tàle, mortàle, càle, fràle, màle, animàle, assàle, àle, quàle, nàtale. The same words, that is, the oft-sounded refrain, also evoke the word màle; and the effect of the repeated echo of the refrain, àle, is to create an acoustic image of a lament. Unending desire and unending despair are phonically fused into those two brief syllables.

The last stanza, much the shortest, is the only one of the poem's six stanzas of variable length to include the refrain at the end of its first line, where it appears for the only time in the purity of its two syllables—àle. The preceding stanza closed with the refrain at the end of the last two lines, so that, taken with the final stanza's opening line, we find the only occasion in which the refrain is clustered in three successive verses. In the last stanza, then, the echoing lament of the refrain is concretized into the visual image of wings of desire which are sent on an anxiety-ridden flight in search of ever-new objects to occupy or divert desire. But this shepherd is too disenchanted, too familiar with the failure of desire, to sustain the wings with hope, and he concludes his colloquy with the silent moon and his flock of silent sheep by pronouncing what may well be the most desolate verses of Leopardi's Canti:

Forse s'avess'io l'ale
Da volar su le nubi,
E noverar le stelle ad una ad una,
O come il tuono errar di giogo in giogo,
Più felice sarei, dolce mia greggia,
Più felice sarei candida luna.
O forse erra dal vero,
Mirando all'altrui sorte il mio pensiero:
Forse in qual forma, in quale
Stato che sia, dentro covile o cuna,
È funesto a chi nasce il dì natale.

(133-43)

I take my cue from this solitary philosopher/shepherd to look at the figure of another Leopardian shepherd and thereby get back to the theme of Spring and desire. Spring, not autumn, is the season most frequently evoked by Leopardi; and Spring, more than any other season, was when he wrote most of his poems. Spring has always supplied poets with subject matter, and with Spring, its indispensable poetic components: desire and memory and hope, and with them, it may be, grief and despair. This is the case with our poet, as it was to be with Thomas Stearns Eliot who begins the most famous poem of the twentieth century—The Waste Land—with the verses we all know:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and Desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

When desire, which is awareness of a lack, looks not to the future, where it can mean hope, but instead looks backward to what is absent or lost, it is known as nostalgia and even as regret, as lament, as complaint. Any good dictionary will include those words in its definition. Even in Latin, desiderium was often said of something that is no more, that can no longer be had. Because of Memory, which is yet another child of Desire, as are Hope, Despair, and Imagination, there is no absence in an absolute sense. Desire and Memory make possible a presence in absence, or a remembered presence. In Leopardi's poem “Alla primavera” which, as its subtitle “o delle favole antiche” almost ironically suggests, is a nostalgic farewell to the happy age of fable and to the illusions of youth, there is a moment when the poet, evoking images of pagan mythology or illusions, introduces the figure of a simple shepherd, using him as a protagonist contemporary to that Edenic age, from whose perspective the expectation of an epiphany of the goddess Diana is expressed:

… : e il pastorel ch'all'ombre
Meridiane incerte ed al fiorito
Margo adducea de' fiumi
Le sitibonde agnelle, arguto carme
Sonar d'agresti Pani
Udì lungo le ripe; e tremar l'onda
Vide, e stupì, che non palese al guardo
La faretrata Diva
Scendea ne' caldi flutti, e dall'immonda
Polve tergea della sanguigna caccia
Il niveo lato e le verginee braccia.

(23-33)

Now this is a stupendous example of the dynamics of desire, of desire and memory energizing the poetic imagination, of making present what is absent while yet lamenting its loss, a lost Eden and its irretrievability in the modern world. The shepherd has been the victim of a noontide nympholepsy that is permeated with a higher degree of erotic desire than one might expect in a poem by Leopardi. There is a tremulous eroticism of secret desire—of sacred voyeurism—in this shepherd who seems to have come to the midday retreat as much in the hope of obseving the ablutions of Diana as to bring his flock to shade and drink. Is there not a certain ambiguity in the verb stupì which perhaps suggests more disappointment than surprise in the shepherd because the goddess has not appeared or, though present, remains invisible to him? And is there not something like Romantic irony at work in these lines? At the center of the Edenic vision stands a protagonist who is denied the fulfillment of his secret desire no less than is the poet who has nostalgically and self-reflectively evoked and imaged the whole scene. This being so, the relationship between the shepherd and the poet—as in the “Canto notturno”—is one of identity. But though Leopardi here stands both inside and outside his creation, there is no wanton shattering of the vision itself, no shift in its mood of incantatory nostalgia either from within or from without the verses.

How much desire and how much despair in that supreme elegy “A Silvia,” where again there is remembered presence, presence in absence, in its evocation of the purity and innocence of Silvia and Spring, both of whom are emblematic of the poet's youthful hopes and illusions! The poem is so much an expression of desire without hope, that it is the spectral personification of the poet's hope, into whom the memory (the imago) of Silvia seems to have merged, that points to the desolate tomb that awaits the poet “… Ahi come, / Come passata si, / Cara compagna dell'età mia nova, / Mia lacrimata speme! / … All'apparir del vero / Tu, misera, cadesti: e con la mano / La fredda morte ed una tomba ignuda / Mostravi da lontano.” (52-55; 60-63).

And in “Le ricordanze,” how much desire still lives—eterno Sospiro mio—in the midst of the soul's all too wakeful anguish at the finality of the death of hope, emblematized in the springtime figure of Nerina and in her fate! It matters not that “A Silvia” was written in the month of April and “Le ricordanze” in the months of August and September. They are, like the poem “Alla primavera,” Leopardian poems of Spring cruelly mixing, that is, stirring, memory and desire. And memory, which Leopardi often says is sweet and pleasurable in and of itself, even when the memory is of something painful, itself becomes cruel: “… Ahi Nerina! In cor mi regna / L'antico amor … / Ahi tu passasti, eterno / Sospiro mio: passasti: e fia compagna / D'ogni mio vago immaginar, di tutti / I miei teneri sensi, i tristi e cari / Moti del cor, la rimembranza acerba.” (157-58; 169-73)⁶

How often and for how long can hope be revived? How long can desire live without hope? Leopardi's double, in the “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” is of course the poet Sappho herself. The ferocity of Sappho's implacable desire without hope was long—“lungo amore indarno, e lunga fede, e vano d'implacato desio furor”—and finally consumed her, bringing her to leap from the Leucadian promontory into the sea. “La sera del dì di festa” shows us Leopardi desiring without hope, or at least disclaiming any pretense of hope for a response, even an acknowledgement of his desire, from the object of desire: “Questo dì fu solenne: or da trastulli / Prendi riposo; e forse ti rimembra / In sogno a quanti oggi piacesti, e quanti / Piacquero a te: non io, non già, ch'io speri, / Al pensier ti ricorro” (17-2). Indeed, Fate's words to this poet of desire were, as he records them: “A te la speme / nego, mi disse, anche la speme” (14-15).

Yet we know that Leopardi in the Zibaldone repeatedly asserted that hope and illusions are never so dead that they may not rise again. It would seem to be so also in “Il risorgimento,” the poem, written in Pisa in April of 1828, that announces a reawakening and is a prelude to the great second period of Leopardi's poetic creativity. From Pisa, in January of that year 1828, Leopardi made an entry in the Zibaldone that to me is one of the most surprising, even perplexing entries of all. In it the poet considers his present state of mind with a view to what it had been in the past:

Memorie della mia vita. La privazione di ogni speranza, succeduta al mio primo ingresso nel mondo, appoco appoco fu causa di spegnere in me quasi ogni desiderio. Ora, per le circostanze mutate, risorta la speranza, io mi trovo nella strana situazione di aver molte più speranze che desiderii.

(Zibaldone, 4301)

To my mind, the passage describes a fascinating but perhaps impossible situation. Leopardi himself, we note, refers to it as a strana situazione. Without doubt, one must be wary of quarreling with great poets, the more so when they are also powerful minds and profound probers of their inner life. But is this really the poet talking? Can we justifiably call on this passage to explain what “Il risorgimento” is about and see in it a preannouncement of the poem, as so many critics have done? I think it is misleading to do so. What has reawakened in the poet? In the poem, after first describing what had been his inert, quasi-cataleptic state, and saying that he lived the April of his life as though it were the winter of life, come the lines: “Meco ritorna a vivere / La pioggia, il bosco, il monte; / Parla al mio core il fonte, / Meco favella il mar” (97-100). The world is renewed in the poet's heart, and the poet's heart responds to it. What had seemed dead are the palpiti that the poet speaks of in line 13 (“Mancar gli usati palpiti”), that is, his heart, which is to say, desire. Now if ever there was a poem and a situation in which one would expect hope to be proclaimed, it is this one. But almost paradoxically, and yet quite explicitly and categorically, Leopardi rules out the revival of hope. To the question the poet asks himself, that is, his heart, as to who or what it is that gives him back the ability to weep, and how it is that the world now seems renewed to him, Leopardi answers with something of a rhetorical question, melancholicly intoned despite the poem's lilting meter, and then answers the question with a negative reply:

Forse la speme, o povero
Mio cor, ti volse un riso?
Ahi della speme il viso
Io non vedrò mai più.

(105-08)

Making use of the Zibaldone passage cited above, Domenico De Robertis glosses these verses by saying: “Non ha [il Leopardi] motivo di sperare, pure non è morta in lui la facoltà di sperare e d'illudersi.”⁷ But the gloss and the Zibaldone quote used to support it fly in the face of what the verses say. What is revived are the palpiti, spoken of first in line 13 and picked up again precisely at this point of the poem, in line 109. The palpiti and even the illusions revive: “Proprii mi diede i palpiti, / Natura, e i dolci inganni. / Sopiro in me gli affanni / L'ingenita virtù; // Non l'annullar: non vinsela // Il fato e la sventura; / Non con la vista impura / L'infausta verità” (109-116).

The palpiti of line 109 becomes in line 112 the ingenita virtù, i.e., the innate faculty (of desire) which the poet says had been dulled but not annihilated by his sufferings (affanni). As we saw earlier, in the Zibaldone the same adjective ingenita was used to speak of the faculty of desire as being inherent/congenital to existence. The poet's colloquy in “Il risorgimento” is with his heart; and the poem's closure, where the poet thanks his heart, can leave no question as to what the poem says: “Mancano, il sento, all'anima / Alta, gentile e pura, / La sorte, la natura, / Il mondo e la beltà. // Ma se tu vivi, o misero, / Se non concedi al fato, / Non chiamerò spietato / Chi lo spirar mi dà” (153-60).

This heart is content to palpitate, to feel and to yearn even without hope. The poem is about the primacy of desire, and the desire to desire, perhaps even the pleasurable despair of Desire.

How long can desire survive without hope? What of that other, later colloquy between the poet and his heart, the short epitaphic “A se stesso” written in the Spring of 1835, in the aftermath of the disillusionment of the poet's ill-fated passion for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti? The poet will say: “… Ben sento, / In noi di cari inganni, / Non che la speme, il desiderio è spento” (3-5), a phrasing, incidentally, that tells us that vis-à-vis the relationship between hope and desire, the latter is primary. But even now, is desire really dead? Beyond that, can one “feel” (“Ben sento …”) the death of desire? In the condition of Leopardian noia as theorized in the Zibaldone, that seems sometimes to be the case. And we have seen that it would seem to be so in the second stanza of “La vita solitaria,” in the chorus of the dead from the Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie, and, in a different, more complex and paradoxical way, in “L'infinito.” But the rhythm, the cadence, the intonation of those poems (liturgically monotonic and tranquil in the first two, tranquilly undulating in the third, despite the splendid pauses, which are used not to fragmentize but rather to create a silently echoing space for the mediation) are unlike what we find in “A se stesso,” where the epitaph, as the critics refer to it, is chiseled out in the starkest verses Leopardi ever wrote. Yet, for all the infinite sense of desolation and bitterness conveyed by the poem, the epitaph may be premature. Ambiguity remains in the very heart of despair.

Leopardi would exile desire but the future tense—“Or poserai per sempre, / Stanco mio cor” (1-2)—and, even more, the repeated imperatives addressed to his heart—“Posa per sempre … T'acqueta ormai … Dispera l'ultima volta …”—suggest how difficult it is to quiet this heart and to still desire even in the absence of all hope. We should not be misled by the apparent past absolute in the phrase “Assai palpitasti,” because while it is grammatically a past absolute, its value is that of a present perfect (passato prossimo). The heart continues to beat in the poem's rhythm. Angelo Monteverdi long ago noted in the poem “un gran numero di proposizioni e [una] spezzatura dei versi”; and more recently Margaret Brose has given a cogent commentary on the word palpitasti in this poem: “Palpitasti is the seme which the poem disseminates phonically—in palpitation—in an agonistic gesture of defiance against the semantic message.”⁸ Indeed, the hammering heard in the poem's broken rhythm is the panting or the beating of the heart. The core of the message is in the words: “… Non val cosa nessuna / I moti tuoi, né di sospiri è degna / La terra. Amaro e noia / La vita, altro mai nulla: e fango è il mondo” (7-10). The poet may entreat his heart and protest that nothing is worth its palpitations (moti; cfr. “i tristi e cari moti del cor” of “Le ricordanze,” 172-73) and that the world is not worthy of its desires (sospiri: cfr. “eterno / Sospiro mio” of “Le ricordanze,” 169-70), that life is nought but bitterness and noia, and that the world is mud; but the poem's staccato rhythm (so staccato that almost all the words seem monosyllabic in effect if not in fact, including, I feel, those of the poem's strongly accented last line: “E l'infinita vanità del tutto”), its stark but anxiety-ridden moti or palpiti, mocks the poet's injunction that it is finally time to bury desire forever. I have no doubt that Leopardi knew that the poem expressed the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of separating his desire from despair.⁹

In the final analysis, hope cannot survive without faith. In Wordsworth's famous and grandly optimistic lines most of the key words are explicit. But they are sustained by the unspoken word faith:

Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

The Prelude, VI, 604-08

For many, such as St. Thomas Aquinas and, I suspect, the professional psychologists, there can be no desire without hope and faith of some sort. Moreover, in the relationship between desire and hope, they would in all likelihood give the primacy to the latter. But there is a long line of poets (who can be trusted as the better psychologists) who speak of loving without hope and who actually use the formula “to desire without hope” in one variant or another. To be sure, one could count on Ariosto to mock the concept in regard to Orlando: “Così cercava Orlando con gran pena / La donna sua, dove speranza il mena. // … / Amar senza speme è sogno e ciancia” (XX, 88: 7-8; XXV, 49:6).

But there is Petrarca, who knew the feeling well and expressed it in one way or another throughout the Canzoniere, and who on one occasion put it into one line of verse: “Il desir vive, e la speranza è morta” (257:4). But we can cut through all the many poets in whom Leopardi could have found authentication for his guiding principle of the dominance of desire; we can cut through all of them and turn to what we all know is the greatest poem of desire in Western literature. It is because in life hope does so often seem to spring eternal in the human breast that Dante finds inscribed over the portal to the eternal region of Hell the words Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate. The inscription is the overriding principle reigning in Dante's Inferno. And it is not long before its words are echoed in the poem, in Limbo to be precise; in Limbo which, whether we like it or not, is part of Dante's Hell. It is the place for all eternity to which Dante's revered guide Vergil is condemned; and I say “condemned” advisedly. Without waiting to be asked, Vergil explains to Dante that he (Vergil) and the other souls in Limbo were guilty of no sin during their mortal life, and that they are there because they were born before the coming of Christ. As to their condition as lost souls, while they are visited by no external (or “physical”) punishment, they are tormented by their condition of an eternal life of desire without hope: “Che sol di tanto offesi, / Che sanza speme vivemo in desio.” In so far as this is an existential condition, Dante's Vergil is existential man, and the few words in which he has defined his punishment are, it seems to me, the most pathos-laden words of The Divine Comedy. And they are words that sum up the essence of the dominance and the despair of desire that is the theme of the greatest existential voice of modern Italian literature.

In turn, I can think of no better gloss to Vergil's declaration than the following words, chosen among so many on the theme of desire to be found in Leopardi: “Il desiderio è pena, e il vivissimo e sommo desiderio, vivissima e somma [pena], e il desiderio perpetuo e non mai soddisfatto è pena perpetua.” (Zibaldone 3445; 16 settembre 1823).

That the foregoing aphorism, which occurs in a longer meditation on desire, was recorded in September 1823 is not without special significance to my own discussion. For the acme of Leopardi's great theme is the pivotal lyric “Alla sua donna,” written precisely in September 1823. It is the poem to which I really wanted to devote my talk today. To do so “adequately” within my allotted time would have meant saying even less of what I have said hitherto. And yet, because my previous remarks form, for me, something of a prolegomenon to this difficult but remarkable poem, I ask your indulgence if I allow myself a few words about it. It is a poem in which the pathos of absence, the pathos of distance, and the pathos of evanescence are at work from beginning to end. From the opening vocative—“Cara beltà”—the poet's donna, is an ever elusive, nympholeptic figure that the poet has despaired of seeing incarnate: “Viva mirarti ormai / Nulla speme m'avanza” (12-13). Even assuming what the poem subtly suggests is a manifest impossibility, that is, that on earth there might exist a creature who conformed to the poet's donna in all ways—in features, in comportment, in speech (concerning all of which the poet gives no specifics)—yet would that creature fall far short:

… Ma non è cosa in terra
Che ti somigli; e s'anco pari alcuna
Ti fosse al volto, agli atti, alla favella,
Saria, così conforme, assai men bella.

(19-22)

One thinks of certain lines in Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty where the English poet, in his ambiguous and, in this case, skeptical Platonism, confessing ignorance as to the origin of Beauty while yet acknowledging its “Presence,” sings its praise thus:

Man were immortal and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart

(II:39-41)¹⁰

It is as if the poet, be it Leopardi or Shelley, does not in fact desire to behold an incarnation of his donna; as if the satisfaction of desire is not desired so as to avoid the further disillusionment of the failure of desire. Or better yet, what is suggested is that what is desired is always something else, something that is Other, and other than fulfillment, other than the cessation of desire.¹¹ Hence the concluding stanza of Leopardi's poem enskies the donna in the remotest of regions, a region that is an illusory transcendence and a never-to-be-realized future that the poet evokes by means of imagery borrowed from an Aristotelean-Dantean universe of supernal spheres, the concept of the plurality of worlds (much discussed in the 18th and early 19th centuries), and the realm of pure Platonic ideas or forms:

Se dell'eterne idee
L'una sei tu, cui di sensibil forma
Sdegni l'eterno senno esser vestita,
E fra caduche spoglie
Provar gli affanni di funerea vita;
O s'altra terra ne' superni giri
Fra' mondi innumerabili t'accoglie,
E più vaga del Sol prossima stella
T'irraggia, e più benigno etere spiri;
Di qua dove son gli anni infausti e brevi
Questo d'ignoto amante inno ricevi.

(45-55)

As is almost always the case in Leopardi, the enchantment of distance is also the pathos of distance. The splendor of the imagination's vision has receded to an unattainable distance which, paradoxically, is also its guarantee of inviolability. The donna is the projection of an unreachable and perhaps undesired fulfillment of desire, the Paradise of our despair. That is why, though she is an image, an imago as the poet says in line 43, she is not really imaged at all in the poem. She can be imagined but not imaged, and indeed it is essential to Leopardi's strategy that she not be imaged. She is, if one likes, a pure mental image. In the Preface to the poem, cited in footnote 11, Leopardi concludes: “Infine è la donna che non si trova,” adding that “se questa Canzone si vorrà chiamare amorosa, sarà pur certo che questo tale amore non può né dare né patir gelosia, perché, fuor dell'autore, nessun amante terreno vorrà fare all'amore col telescopio.” Early in the poem she is addressed as “ombra diva” (4), where the noun ombra has a pathos and irony that the critics miss when the word is glossed merely as immagine. For ombra here, while it may mean image, surely is meant to signify also shadow or shade, that is, something that has no consistency. Nor is she a Platonic “shadow” of the kind referred to in Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. In short, Leopardi's donna, it seems to me, is above all the imago of pure desire, as is Eros in the great myth of Psyche and Eros, where, as we know, Eros must not be seen.¹²

The poem is a supreme example of radical idealism born of a radical but creative skepticism; in the full wakeness of his despair, the poet has created a non-existent object of desire—announced by the poem's opening words as an erotico-esthetic abstraction: “Cara beltà che amore / Lunge m'ispiri”—and realizes its futility, realizes the failure of desire and yet is faithful to desire. Thus he has presented himself as a devotee or “priest” offering to his donna, who resides in that region which is holy land, a hymn of devotion, which is his poem: “Questo d'ignoto amante inno ricevi,” as the last line says. The great irony and even greater pathos here is that the self-deprecating term ignoto belongs as much to the donna as to the poet, perhaps more so, except in so far as the poet “knows” her as desire. (Cf. Shelley's words “unknown and awful as thou art,” quoted above). The autograph of the poem shows that the title Leopardi first gave to it was “All'amor suo.” There would seem to be ambiguity enough in that word amor. Actually, I believe that Leopardi felt that such a title gave away too much about who or what the donna really is.

As an imago of pure desire, Leopardi's “non-existent” donna is also, of course, a symbol of the poet's emotional and creative state. So then, we may ask, is there any consolation in any of this, in the imagination's ability to create an ideal to counter reality, as the critics would have it, indeed, as the Romantic poets (including Leopardi) quoted at the outset of this paper would have it. I think the answer is yes and no. I cannot now go into all the reasons why I believe this to be so, although some of them are implicit in what has preceded. I can only suggest that if there is any consolation, it lies in the creative act itself, in the construct that is the poem, within which is embodied the wish that the imago/desire may be preserved by memory:

E per li poggi, ov'io rimembro e piagno
I perduti desiri, e la perduta
Speme de' giorni miei; di te pensando,
A palpitar mi sveglio. E potess'io,
Nel secol tetro e in questo aer nefando,
L'alta specie serbar; che dell'imago
Poi che del ver m'è tolto, assai m'appago.

(38-44)

These lines are a lyrical transcription of the thought expressed aphoristically much earlier in prose in the Zibaldone: “Se è tolto l'ottenere, non è tolto né possibile a togliere il desiderio,” and, in terms still closer to the poem, in lines 69-71 of the lyric Il sogno (1820-21): “e mi soccorra / La rimembranza or che il futuro è tolto.” It would be enough for the poet that his heart continue to palpitate, to feel, to desire (cfr. “Il risorgimento,” written more than four years later).

Obviously, there is much more that needs to be said, but it must suffice here to have shared with you my conviction that Leopardi lived with a combined lyrical and intellectual intensity perhaps unmatched by any other modern poet, the ever-revitalizing dynamics of the infinitely-desiring self facing with awesome lucidity the infinitely-recurring despair of desire, remaining constant all the while to his yearning thought, his pensiero dominante as he was to call it in the title of a later poem, his donna or cara beltà as he calls it in “Alla sua donna,” this poem that better than any other lyric I know of may serve to prove the truth of René Char's tantalizing aphorism: “Le poème est l'amour realisé du désir demeuré désir.”¹³

Notes

1. See the earlier articulation of the thought in the Zibaldone (523-35: 20 gennaio 1821), which argues that pleasure is never present or past, but always and only future (but an illusory future), because “non può esserci piacer vero per un esser vivente, se non è infinito: (e infinito in ciascun istante, cioè attualmente) e infinito non può mai essere, benché confusamente ciascuno creda che può essere, e sarà, o che anche non essendo infinito, sarà piacere: e questa credenza (naturalissima, essenziale ai viventi, e voluta dalla natura) è quello che si chiama piacer; è tutto il piacer possibile.”

2. G. Leopardi, Canti, con introduzione e commento di Mario Fubini. Edizione rifatta con la collaborazione di Emilio Bigi (Torino: Loescher, 1971), p. 280.

3. Helen Vendler has studied the important presence of the “ferocity of desire” in the American poet in her little volume Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). I would call attention to the fact that Leopardi was among the authors the young Stevens read and discussed within a circle of friends. Vendler's study on Stevens and Leo Bersani's book Baudelaire and Freud, quoted by me further on, are the best treatments known to me of desire as a dominant theme in major poets. For a fine discussion on the relationship between desire and Leopardi's theory of pleasure and amor proprio, see the second chapter (“Un desiderio illimitato”) of Antonio Prete's book Il pensiero poetante (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980), pp. 16-35. See also Piero Bigongiari's essay “Il pensiero dell'io: Riflessioni preliminari sull'ordinamento dei Canti,” in his volume Leopardi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976), pp. 3-50.

4. See my Midday in Italian Literature: Variations on an Archetypal Theme (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 81-84.

5. In the prose writings, Leopardi's extraordinary meditations on noia and its experiential tie to desire are given their most eloquent and poignant articulation in number LXVIII of the carefully wrought Pensieri. Here, in a secularly Pascalian vein, the existential experience of noia and infinite, unrequited desire are characterized as the most sublime of human sentiments and become the badge of man's nobility, his mark of superiority over “other” animals who were looked on with envy in the Canto notturno. To contemplate the immeasurable expanse of space, the plurality of worlds, to imagine an infinite number of worlds and the universe as infinite, and yet feel that our mind cannot be filled or rest content, that our desire would always be greater than such a universe, and therefore suffer the experience of a lack, of a void, of noia, what is this if not the surest sign of man's greatness and nobility! For a discussion of this and other Leopardian observations on the grandeur et misère de l'homme in connection with the poetics of the sublime, see my Night and the Sublime in Giacomo Leopardi (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), Chapter II “Nature and the Poetic of the Sublime.”

6. In his annotation to these closing verses of Le ricordanze, Domenico De Robertis quite rightly calls the reader's attention to the intimate relationship that obtains here between the imagination and remembrance. “Nota come, concludendo, [Leopardi] riaffermi per primo quel rapporto, essenziale, fra immaginazione e rimembranza, di questa ormai sostanziandosi quella e da questa prendendo il suo colore.” Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, a cura di Giuseppe e Domenico De Robertis (Milano: Mondadori, 1978), p. 309, n. 8. Indeed, I feel that, for all practical purposes, the two terms are essentially synonymous here and elsewhere in Leopardi's writings, and that they are closely connected with, even dependent upon desire. On this important question concerning Leopardi's poetics, see my book Night and the Sublime of Giacomo Leopardi, op. cit., pp. 111-16; and also the fine article by Franco Ferrucci, “Memoria come immaginazione in Leopardi,” in Lettere italiane, 39 (Oct.-Dec. 1987), 502-14. On p. 509, Ferrucci writes of an 1828 entry in the Zibaldone: “è nuovamente tracciata l'equivalenza fra memoria e immaginazione; la quale ormai ci appare come la più originale scoperta della poetica leopardiana, e trova qui il proprio apice.”

7. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, a cura di Giuseppe e Domenico De Robertis, op. cit., p. 266, n. 8.

8. Margaret Brose, “Posthumous Poetics: Leopardi's ‘A se stesso,’” in Stanford Italian Review, 7, 1-2 (1987), 182.

9. Samuel Beckett, who admired the poem A se stesso, was certainly wrong to use it as an example of a modern sage who had learned the secret of eliminating desire. In his 1931 essay on Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, he writes: “Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application. They are the flying buttresses of the temple raised to commemorate the wisdom of the architect that is also the wisdom of all the sages, from Brahma to Leopardi, the wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire: ‘In noi di cari inganni / Non che la speme, il desiderio è spento.’” In Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York, London, 1931 [first printing]), p. 7. Leopardi is mentioned elsewhere in Beckett's essay again by way of A se stesso and again in connection with the wisdom of suppressing desire (a theme that Beckett insists on in his interpretation of Proust): “And as before, wisdom consists in obliterating the faculty of suffering rather than in a vain attempt to reduce the stimuli that exasperate that faculty—‘Non che la speme, il desiderio …’” (p. 46). And, significantly enough, the epigraph on the title page of Beckett's little book consists of a lapidary phrase from the same poem. “E fango è il mondo.” Curiously, what Beckett says in the second of the passages cited in this note can be applied to the second stanza of La vita solitaria, except that, as I have tried to show, Leopardi there does achieve the obliteration of the faculty of suffering precisely by reducing to the zero point the stimuli that exasperate that faculty. In A se stesso, the “wisdom” of the command Leopardi gives to his heart is there, but the heart suffers doubly in its anxious beating. To desire or not to desire? Can the heart really choose? Can the mind command the heart?

10. The sentiment as such, of course, is not limited to the poets of the Romantic age. Leaving aside antiquity, and keeping to poets, it is found in Jaufré de Rudel's amor de lonh and in Renaissance poets. Worth quoting here in connection with verses 19-22 of Alla sua donna are four lines from a sonnet by the sixteenth century Italian poet G. Guidiccione: “Se ben scorge talhor lieto il pensiero / A caldi raggi del suo amato sole; / Et vede il volto, et lode le parole, / Quasi in un punto poi l'attrista il vero.” In Rime diverse di molti Eccellentissimi Autori nuovamente raccolte. Libro Primo (Venice: Giolito, 1545), p. 149.

11. In his study Baudelaire and Freud, Leo Bersani reminds us of Freud's description of desire thus: “Desire is movement in the sense of being a mental activity designed to reactivate a scene connected in the past with the experience of pleasure. It immediately moves away from the desired object in order to develop a desiring fantasy which already includes a certain satisfaction.” Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 60-61. This is readily applicable to Alla sua donna if we but note the truth of what Leopardi says in the 1825 preface to the poem he first published in Bologna in 1824: “La donna, cioè l'innamorata, dell'autore, è una di quelle immagini, uno di quei fantasmi di bellezza e virtù celeste e infallibile, che ci occorrono spesso alla fantasia, nel sonno e nella veglia, quando siamo poco più che fanciulli, e poi qualche rara volta nel sonno, o in una quasi alienazione di mente, quando siamo giovani,” and if we recall that in the Zibaldone he says that the pleasure of despair is well known. As to the revival of a “scene connected with the past,” the imago of the “cara belta” that the poet seeks desperately to keep alive is, in a very real sense, the memory of the childhood and adolescent fantasms or visions he speaks of in the preface and in the poem's first stanza: “Cara beltà che amore / Lunge m'inspiri o nascondendo il viso, / Fuor se nel sonno il core / Ombra diva mi scuoti, / O ne' campi ove splenda / Più vago il giorno e di natura il riso; / Forse tu l'innocente / Secol beasti che dall'oro ha nome, / Or leve intra la gente / Anima voli? o te la sorte avara / Ch'a noi t'asconde, agli avvenir prepara?” (1-11).

12. In a Zibaldone entry dated 10 February 1821, Leopardi interprets the myth as an allegory of the fall of man from a state of happiness to one of unhappiness because of the baleful wish to know truth. “Io non soglio credere alle allegorie, né cercarle nella mitologia, o nelle invenzioni dei poeti, o credenze del vulgo. Tuttavia la favola di Psiche, cioè dell'Anima, che era felicissima senza conoscere, e contentandosi di godere, e la cui infelicità provenne dal voler conoscere, mi pare un emblema così conveniente e preciso, e nel tempo stesso così profondo, della natura dell'uomo e delle cose, della nostra destinazione vera su questa terra, del danno del sapere, della felicità che ci conveniva, che unendo questa considerazione, al manifesto significato del nome di Psiche, appena possa discredere che quella favola non sia parto della più profonda sapienza, e cognizione della natura dell'uomo e di questo mondo.” Zibaldone, 637. Leopardi mentions the Psyche and Eros myth in the same key again in the Zibaldone (2939) on 11 July 1823, two months before writing Alla sua donna.

13. From Fureur et mystère, nouvelle édition (Paris: Gallimard), p. 76. It is symptomatic that Leopardi should characterize the paradisal bliss he says music naturally evokes as consisting in ethereal (but unspecified or indefinite) visions, to be sure, but even more in infinite desires: “Desiderii infiniti / E visioni altere / Crea nel vago pensiere, / Per natural virtù, dotto concento. / … Ma se un discorde accento / Fere l'orecchio, in nulla / Torna quel paradiso in un momento.” Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna scolpito nel monumento sepolcrale della medesima (39-42; 47-49).