[In the following excerpt, Perella examines Leopardi's many references in his lyric poetry to light, which he equated with happiness.]

1

Taking both day and night settings, the number of references to light in Leopardi's not very large output of lyric poetry is strikingly high. We have seen that brightness and clarity have for him a significant affective value of a positive kind (chapter I). In this connection, an entry made in the Zibaldone on August 19, 1823, explicitly equates light with happiness, and darkness with melancholy. The affirmation is made by way of illustrating the idea that the “spirit” of man is affected by external physical causes independently of habit:

Così, per esempio, la luce è naturalmente cagione di allegria, siccome le tenebre di malinconia; quella eccita sovente l'immaginazione, ed ispira; queste la deprimono. Un luogo, un appartamento, un clima chiaro e sereno, o torbido e fosco, influiscono sulla immaginativa, sull'ingegno, sull'indole degli abitanti, sieno individui o popoli, indipendentemente dall'assuefazione. Così una stagione, una giornata, un'ora nuvolosa o serena; il trovarsi per più o men tempo in un luogo qualunque oscuro o luminoso, senza però abitarvi, tutte queste circostanze fisiche, indipendenti dall'assuefazione e dalle circostanze morali, affettano, quali momentaneamente quali durevolmente, lo spirito dell'uomo, e variamente lo dispongono.¹

We would also recall here Leopardi's observation that the sight of sunlight or moonlight in a vast open landscape with a deep clear sky causes in us a pleasurable idea-sensation.² Though it seems to shine on his world less frequently than does the moon, the sun is by no means absent from Leopardi's poetry. In his most famous poem—L'infinito—there is no specific reference to the sun, but it is certainly on a bright, serene day that there takes place the psychologico-sublime experience recorded by that poem. It will be remembered that the poet tells us that he can see a part of the far-off landscape. The hedge that keeps him from seeing the rest of it leaves him gazing into an immense and serene expanse of sky.

So too the bliss recalled in the beautiful canzone A Silvia is associated with that time when the boy Leopardi, moved by the singing of the girl, would look out from his window, upon a cloudless sky, the sun-gilded streets and orchards of the village, and, in the brightness of a vast expanse, see as far as the distant sea on the one side and as far as the distant mountains on the other:

Mirava il ciel sereno,
Le vie dorate e gli orti,
E quinci il mar da lungi, e quindi il monte.
Lingua mortal non dice
Quel ch'io sentiva in seno.

(23-27)

This same image and its accompanying emotion are evoked in Le ricordanze in a way that involves a curious feature in the poem's first stanza (lines 1-27). At the outset, the poet addresses the night sky with its lovely stars of the Bear. Hence the time is night (or evening) and the poet recollects specifically an earlier time of his life when he would pass the evenings (or early part of the night) seated (the typical attitude suggesting meditation) on the grass, looking up at a stellated sky that brought him enchanting fantasies.

Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa, io non credea
Tornare ancor per uso a contemplarvi
Sul paterno giardino scintillanti,
E ragionar con voi dalle finestre
Di questo albergo ove abitai fanciullo,
E delle gioie mie vidi la fine.
Quante immagini un tempo, e quante fole
Creommi nel pensier l'aspetto vostro
E delle luci a voi compagne! allora
Che, tacito, seduto in verde zolla,
Delle sere io solea passar gran parte
Mirando il cielo, ed ascoltando il canto
Della rana rimota alla campagna!

(1-13)

There follows a reference to the presence of fireflies in those earlier evenings, and the voices of members of the household heard from a distance:

E la lucciola errava appo le siepi
E in su l'aiuole, susurrando al vento
I viali odorati, ed i cipressi
Là nella selva; e sotto al patrio tetto
Sonavan voci alterne, e le tranquille
Opre de' servi.

(14-19)

But just here the poet introduces a reference to the vast (immense) thoughts and sweet dreams and hopes that once were inspired in him by the sight of the far-off sea and the mountains that appear azure in the distance, which sight the poet says he makes out from the very spot in which he now again finds himself.

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

(19-24)

This can only be a vast panorama seen in the clarity of a bright yet serene sunlit day, the same as that in lines 23-27 of A Silvia. The phrase “Che di qua scopro” (“which I discern from here”) cannot mean that the poet sees that view in the present tense time of the poem, during his evening meditation. Rather, into his “night thoughts” has come, quite naturally as it were, the memory of an affecting view which on a clear day can be seen from the spot he now occupies. The connection between this remembered view and the nocturnal images that are actually present is an affective one.³

In La quiete dopo la tempesta a bright sun breaks through patches of blue sky at the end of a rainstorm; its light “smiles” on hills, fields, and houses, and causes the river to appear clearly in the distant (once again) valley:

                                                                                                              Ecco il sereno
Rompe là da ponente, alla montagna;
Sgombrasi la campagna,
E chiaro nella valle il fiume appare.
Ecco il Sol che ritorna, ecco sorride
Per li poggi e le ville.

(4-7; 19-20)

In Il passero solitario, the sun is radiant in the springtime that the poet says “sparkles” in the air and “exults” in the fields so that in beholding it his heart melts:

Primavera d'intorno
Brilla nell'aria, e per li campi esulta,
Sì ch'a mirarla intenerisce il core.

(5-7)

And later in the same poem the poet stands gazing into the bright air (l'aria aprica) at the sun setting behind the distant (yet again) mountains at the end of a clear sunny day (giorno sereno), a sun that because it sets symbolizes the waning of the happy time of childhood or early youth:

                                                                                                    e intanto il guardo
Steso nell'aria aprica
Mi fere il Sol che tra lontani monti,
Dopo il giorno sereno,
Cadendo si dilegua, e par che dica
Che la beata gioventù vien meno.

(40-44)

That clear sunny day—“il giorno sereno”—appears also at the end of Il sabato del villaggio as a metaphor for the happy time of childhood that will pass all too soon:

Garzoncello scherzoso,
Cotesta età fiorita
è come un giorno d'allegrezza pieno,
Giorno chiaro, sereno.

(43-46)

In La vita solitaria much the same components of the moonlit scene of La sera del dì di festa (but they are components common to most of Leopardi's landscapes) are seen to “sparkle” (again) in the light of the sun; and such a moment, especially if the poet then chances to espy a pretty maiden, has the beneficial if temporary effect of stirring the poet's listless heart. In typical Leopardian fashion, this momentary benignancy is also experienced in the silence of a clear serene summer night:

Pur se talvolta per le piagge apriche,
Su la tacita aurora o quando al sole
Brillano i tetti e i poggi e le campagne,
Scontro di vaga donzelletta il viso;
O qualor nella placida quiete
D'estiva notte, il vagabondo passo
Di rincontro alle ville soffermando,
L'erma terra contemplo, e di fanciulla
Che all'opre di sua man la notte aggiunge
Odo sonar nelle romite stanze
L'arguto canto; a palpitar si move
Questo mio cor di sasso.

(56-67)

2

But it is the second stanza of La vita solitaria that presents us with the sun in the context of what is surely as remarkable a passage as one will find in Leopardi's poetry. The experience described therein takes place at midday under a sun that does not vivify but silently reflects itself in a motionless lake on the banks of which the poet sits. All around is absolute stillness; there is no sound and no motion in the grass and trees. The lake itself is without a ripple; no bird flutters, no butterfly sports, and not even the cicada is heard. Attuning himself to the setting, the poet feels himself absorbed into the surroundings until all trace of consciousness and sensation is drained from him, whereupon he becomes one with the uncanny stillness:

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 imago il Sol dipinge,
Ed erba o foglia non si crolla al vento,
E non onda incresparsi, e non cicala
Strider nè batter penna augello in ramo,
Nè farfalla ronzar, ne voce o moto
Da presso nè da lunge odi nè 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, nè spirto o senso
Più le commova, e lor quiete antica
Co' silenzi del loco si confonde.

(23-38)

How different then is this sun and this landscape from what we have met with in the previous quotations. Here it will be instructive to compare the midday hour of the poem with that described by Leopardi in chapter VII of his adolescent compilation Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (1815):

Tutto brilla nella natura all'istante del meriggio. L'agricoltore, che prende cibo e riposo; i buoi sdraiati e coperti d'insetti volanti, che, flagellandosi colle code per cacciarli, chinano di tratto in tratto il muso, sopra cui risplendono interrottamente spesse stille di sudore, e abboccano negligentemente e con pausa il cibo sparso innanzi ad essi; il gregge assetato, che col capo basso si affolla, e si rannicchia sotto l'ombra; la lucerta, che corre timida a rimbucarsi, strisciando rapidamente e per intervalli lungo una siepe; la cicala, che riempie l'aria di uno stridore continuo e monotono; la zanzara, che passa ronzando vicino all'orecchio; l'ape, che vola incerta, e si ferma su di un fiore, e parte, e torna al luogo donde è partita; tutto è bello, tutto è delicato e toccante.⁴

The most striking thing about the two descriptions lies in their contrasting moods and the different affective value they attribute to the midday hour. In the prose passage there is nothing of the dead stillness evoked in the verses. At the very outset is that significant Leopardian verb brillare suggesting a confident and even joyful value in nature; and, indeed, the paragraph closes with a reference to the “sentimental” (in a positive sense, of course) quality of the scene which is said, in those equally significant and “eighteenth-century” words, to be “tender and touching”—delicato e toccante.⁵ Rather than the absolute immobility of the midday of La vita solitaria, we find what might be referred to as a luxurious torpor or languor, the sense of which is conveyed by way of the signs of life that do exist at that hour.

The poem, on the other hand, develops its description of the midday hour by way of a series of negatives referring to the absence of life, even of those same reduced signs of life that might be expected to prevail at midday. The prose description, in short, is what the verses are not, an idyll, and as such is much more in keeping with the idyllic treatment of midday in the poetic tradition from classical antiquity. It is with cause that Leopardi follows his paragraph with a quotation from Virgil.

One of the first bibliographical references made by Leopardi in his Zibaldone is to a review of Ignazio Martignoni's study on the beautiful and the sublime. Among the sources of the sublime listed by the reviewer is light such as occurs at midday when the sun is felt as immense and oppressive.⁶ But this theme of the oppressiveness of the scorching heat of the sun, which is found so frequently in references to midday, has no place in the experience recounted in La vita solitaria. Its presence, in fact, would be at odds with and most likely make that experience impossible. And what Leopardi describes is perhaps not even the uncanny in the usual sense, but rather the sense of a vast deadness that pervades all things. It is as though the whole were bathed in the light of a sun that was without warmth.⁷ Symptomatically, the same vision of a lifeless world lying beneath an apparently cold sun is evoked in the Cantico del gallo silvestre:

Se sotto l'astro diurno [i.e., the sun], languendo per la terra in profondissima quiete tutti i viventi, non apparisse opera alcuna; non muggito di buoi per li prati, nè strepito di fiere per le foreste, nè canto di uccelli per l'aria, nè sussuro d'api o di farfalle scorresse per la campagna; non voce, non moto alcuno, se non delle acque, del vento e delle tempeste, sorgesse in alcuna banda; certo l'universo sarebbe inutile; ma forse che vi si troverebbe o copia minore di felicità, o più di miseria, che oggi non vi si trova?⁸

Thus Leopardi's midday sun is quite unlike the noonday sun that Shelley saw descend around him amidst the Euganean Hills. In Shelley's midday, although the plains below lie silent and the air is windless, the Alps around him, all living things, and with them his own spirit (cf. Leopardi's spirto)

Interpenetrated lie
By the glory of the sky.

And for Wordsworth, as we learn from his poem on Peter Bell, noon should be the hour when one feels “The witchery of the soft blue sky.” Least of all is there in Leopardi's midday sun the Panic invitation to immersion in a rich life, even a “divine” life of sensations such as that sung by D'Annunzio who could feel the heat of the sun course through his veins, and the sun itself lodged in his heart. In La vita solitaria, midday, the hour of Pan, is entirely without the hushed sense of that august god's presence.

The following stanza from D'Annunzio's poem L'Annunzio—and the announcement is that Pan is not dead—is remarkable for its quality of antithesis to Leopardi's stanza in the matter of the effect derived from the same spot of time. While in Leopardi the light and silence of the midday hour are associated with immobility and death, they cause D'Annunzio to throb with the expectancy of a superhuman, cosmic energy:

Tutto era silenzio, luce, forza, desio.
L'attesa del prodigio gonfiava questo mio
Cuore come il cuor del mondo.
Era questa carne mortale impaziente
Di risplendere, come se d'un sangue fulgente
L'astro ne rigasse il pondo.
La sostanza del Sole era la mia sostanza.
Erano in me i cieli infiniti, l'abondanza
Dei piani, il Mar profondo.

(44-52)

Given these verses—and many more like them—it will not surprise us to learn that in an interview granted to Filippo Surico in June 1921, D'Annunzio parried the question whether he liked Leopardi by saying: “è molto lontano dal mio temperamento: la mia arte è solare.”⁹ And in this respect, even more like and unlike Leopardi's midday experience is what we find in D'Annunzio's poem entitled precisely Meriggio. At the noon hour when all seems stagnant and stifling, the poet feels himself dissolving into the objects of nature that surround him until he is lost unto himself and without his former name (i.e., no longer a mortal human); but now his name is Midday itself, and he lives in all things, as silently as death, a life that is divine.¹⁰

In Leopardi's verses we have anything but panpsychism; as we have seen, there we are far removed from the thrilling sense of a union with a pulsating universe. We are witness to a release of the self from sentiency and a passing into the utter immobility of death.¹¹ There is no trace of the rhapsodic feeling associated with the sense of a “deeper meaning,” that nature mystics claim to experience “while gazing at the sky in the azure noon, and in the starlit evening.”¹² And yet Leopardi so often gazed at the sky and at vast expanses of landscapes, both in the azure noon and in the starlit and moonlit evening, that it is perhaps this picture of him that most readily comes to mind at the mention of his poetry. The quality of the emotion associated with that gesture is one of the things we are here concerned with. For this reason we may further ponder the verses from La vita solitaria.

Although it is not a Wordsworthian intimation of “a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused” [Tintern Abbey] that Leopardi recounts, yet there is something about Leopardi's description that is not without a suggestion of the sublime, precisely in the characterization of the “deep” and “ancient” silence that pervades the whole scene. It is in this feature, if in anything, that Leopardi creates (but unwittingly, if at all) the sense of something like the uncanny. As the Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi shows us, Leopardi knew full well that midday could be experienced as a sacred, awesome hour.

It is this concept, in fact, that his chapter on midday in the Saggio is meant to illustrate. The first paragraph with its “idyllic” midday scene is given as an anticipatory contrast to the rest of the discourse, which is introduced with the comment: “Chi crederebbe che quello del mezzogiorno fosse stato per gli antichi un tempo di terrore, se essi stessi non avessero avuto cura d'informarcene con precisione?”¹³ There follow several pages of references (from classical, biblical, and early Christian sources) to midday as the hour of Pan and of Panic terror, the midday demon, the apparition of gods and goddesses at noon, etc., in support of the thesis that “è dunque evidente che gli antichi aveano del tempo del meriggio una grande idea, e lo riguardavano come sacro e terribile.”¹⁴

But all this is discounted by the young Leopardi—still firm at that time in his faith in reason and in Christian revealed truths—as superstition which modern enlightened man can happily claim to have eradicated. Though the “later” Leopardi was to lament the passing of such “popular errors” and “superstitions,” the rationalist in him always remained too vigilant to allow him to write a poetry that might reactivate them in some mythical way. It is in perfect coherence with this rationalism that in his verse the only evocation of midday as a time when sylvan deities and the goddess Diana appear occurs in the poem Alla primavera which, as its subtitle (o delle favole antiche) suggests, is a nostalgic farewell to the happy age of fable:

Già di candide ninfe i rivi albergo,
Placido albergo e specchio
Furo i liquidi fonti. Arcane danze
D'immortal piede i ruinosi gioghi
Scossero e l'ardue selve (oggi romito
Nido de' venti): 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.

(23-38)

Characteristically, Leopardi himself annotated these verses with the observation that “anticamente correvano parecchie false immaginazioni appartenenti all'ora del mezzogiorno, e fra l'altre, che gli Dei, le ninfe, i silvani, i fauni e simili, aggiunto le anime de' morti, si lasciassero vedere o sentire particolarmente su quell'ora.” It is this inerasable rationalism and skepticism that make it impossible to talk of the weird or the eerie in connection with the midday experience of La vita solitaria. For the same reason, it is difficult to consider that experience as being characterized by the feeling of the numinous save in a primitive sense.¹⁵

3

By the same token, we have suggested that Leopardi's midday sun is not the occasion for an ecstasy. The profound quiet is even unlike that which we find at the end of La sera del dì di festa where it has the nature of an ominous dread (see above pp. 52-53). For there is no doubt that the experience spoken of in La vita solitaria (and the title fits the poem's second stanza to perfection) was one that the solitary poet sought out and welcomed.

This, of course, is also true of the experience described in L'infinito, and it is in this connection that both poems reveal a characteristic that distinguishes their respective experiences from that of the mystics. I refer to the conscious subjectivity of the experiences in Leopardi. His words allow us no possibility of assuming that he merged into or was united with a personal God or with a transcendental Reality of any sort. Even if we admit that mystical experiences need not be intrinsically or necessarily connected with these specifically religious concepts, and that a mystic experience is possible for atheists (e.g., the case of the Buddhistic Nirvana), we are obliged to exclude Leopardi from the category of the mystical. At least we must do so if we assume—and there is good reason for this assumption—that a significant feature of the mystic's belief or his psychology is that “it nearly always includes an unshakable conviction that his experience is not merely a subjective mental state, but that it is objective in the sense that it constitutes a revelation of some transcendental reality. He may call this reality God or Nirvana or the Absolute, but the point is that no mystic will ever admit that his experience is merely a subjective state of his own consciousness, and no more.”¹⁶

The experiences described by Leopardi, on the other hand, are knowingly self-induced and even explicitly declared to be a subjective state. The vast silent spaces beyond the horizon, and the immense sky-sea in which he sweetly drowns have nothing to do with the Christian unified sea of Being or any other notion of a transcendental reality; they are the creation of the poet's own imagination, building, to be sure, on certain natural phenomena: “Io nel pensier mi fingo.” The phrase, coming almost at the halfway mark of L'infinito, does not belittle Leopardi's experience; rather it signals the triumph of the poetic imagination over a limited reality.

“Un silence absolu porte à la tristesse. Il offre une image de la mort.” So wrote Rousseau in the famous fifth promenade of Les Réveries du promeneur solitaire.¹⁷ For Leopardi, however, there were moments when this image of death was terrifying (e.g., La sera del dì di festa), and other times when it was friendly and cultivated by him (e.g., La vita solitaria, L'infinito). All in all the second stanza of La vita solitaria bespeaks an experience that resembles not so much that of L'infinito as it does the condition said to be theirs by the chorus of the dead in the stupendous verses sung at the opening of Leopardi's prose composition Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie. Bliss as a state of active and perfect happiness is denied to man in life and in death alike. Yet these dead who are not “returned” to life as sentiency but to consciousness of a sort for a brief quarter hour, make it known that they are safe from that former pain that was life. They have, in death, attained to that condition in which all hope and all desire are stilled, as are all anxiety and fear. Here then is that hymn to death:

Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve
Ogni creata cosa,
In te, morte, si posa
Nostra ignuda natura;
Lieta no, ma sicura
Dall'antico dolor. Profonda notte
Nella confusa mente
Il pensier grave oscura;
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.
Vivemmo: e qual di paurosa larva,
E di sudato sogno,
A lattante fanciullo erra nell'alma
Confusa ricordanza;
Tal memoria n'avanza
Del viver nostro; ma da tema è lunge
Il rimembrar. Che fummo?
Che fu quel punto acerbo
Che di vita ebbe nome?
Cosa arcana e stupenda
Oggi è la vita al pensier nostro, e tale
Qual de' vivi al pensiero
L'ignota morte appar. Come da morte
Vivendo rifuggia, così rifugge
Dalla fiamma vitale
Nostra ignuda natura;
Lieta no ma sicura,
Però ch'esser beato
Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.

These verses bring to mind a lesser poem that has in common with them the voice of one who has died expressing relief that “the fever called ‘Living’ / Is conquered at last.” But there is nothing in Leopardi's verses of the lilting yet morbid sentimentality that characterizes Poe's For Annie. And since Poe has once again found his way into these pages, I should like to suggest a comparison between the “Midday” stanza of La vita solitaria and the American poet's early poem The Lake:

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less—
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.
But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then—ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.
Yet the terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define—
Nor Love—although the Love were thine.
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

Poe's attempt to create a sense of the eerie is a puerile one here; he was wont to abuse the word “mystic” which, in this case, applied to wind, is ineffectual if not gratuitous. But it is not my intention to comment on the poetic value of the poem which is certainly not one of Poe's best.

Let us simply note that both poems are possessed of a “solitary soul” and that in the two poets we find the same searching out of a lonely spot in which a lake is a fundamental element and where nature reflects an image of and inspires a desire for death. The particular moment in Poe's poem is night; in Leopardi's verses it is midday, that is, the moment when daylight is most intense. It is not the least remarkable thing about the Leopardi example that no less than the blackness of night, the brightness of day could be made to assume the face of death.

Notes

1. Zibaldone di Pensieri, 3206; ed. F. Flora (Milan, 1945), II, 321. Compare the following entry made in August 1822: “Le stelle, i pianeti ec. si chiamano più o meno belle secondo che sono più o meno lucide. Così il sole e la luna secondo che son chiari e nitidi. Questa così detta bellezza non appartiene alla speculazione del bello, e vuol dir solamente che il lucido, per natura, è dilettevole all'occhio nostro, e rallegra l'animo ec. ec. Zibaldone, 2592; ed. Flora, I, 1540.

2. Zibaldone, 1745; ed. Flora, I, 1123-1124.

3. That the poem continues as an evening meditation is made clear by lines 50-55 where the poet hears the village bell-tower sound the hour, whereupon he recalls that the sound used to comfort him as a child during his night fears.

4. Giacomo Leopardi. Le poesie e le prose, ed. Francesco Flora (Milan, Mondadori, 1953), II, 280-281.

5. See above, p. 86.

6. Annali di scienze e lettere (Milan, 1811), III, 359. See above, p, 85, n. 41.

7. Emilio Peruzzi acutely observed that the blinding glare and heavy sultriness of the midday sun are not present in Leopardi: “In Leopardi non si trova mai l'acceccante fulgore del sole meridiano, l'aria che fiammeggia senza respiro. … Leopardi non riesce a sentire l'immobile calura meridiana ed anche quando si prova ad esprimerla finisce per descrivere proprio l'opposto come nella Vita solitaria 28-32 (nè gli vale servirsi della negazione perchè questa, come tutti i morfemi, non ha valore poetico).” “Saggio di lettura leopardiana,” Vox Romanica, 15 (July-Dec. 1956), 148-149. I do not agree, however, with Peruzzi's judgment that Leopardi's utilization of negatives is ipso facto without poetic value.

8. The passage is immediately followed by questions of deep but calm despair, put not to the moon, as is the usual case in Leopardi (in the poetry), but to the sun.

9. F. Surico, Ora luminosa: Conversazioni letterari con Gabriele D'Annunzio (Rome, 1939), p. 50.

10. At the beginning of an essay on Giorgione, D'Annunzio makes reference to the idea that the immobility of the midday hour derives from a concentrated passion and a repressed violence: “Soprastava a Venezia una di quelle ore che si potrebbero chiamar paniche, in cui la vita sembra sospesa ma non è, chè anzi la sua immobilità risulta da passione concentrata e da violenza repressa.” Prose scelte (Milan, 1920), p. 17.

    A different and, I believe, consciously anti-D'Annunzian midday experience has been prominent in twentieth-century Italian poetry. The most famous and most significant poem of this later development in Eugenio Montale's Meriggiare pallido e assorto where the scorching and blinding noonday sun beats relentlessly on a world of drought.

11. We may compare the verses with the following words, dated Oct. 21, 1820. “Io bene spesso trovandomi in gravi travagli o corporali o morali, ho desiderato non solamente il riposo, ma la mia anima senza sforzo, e senza eroismo, si compiaceva naturalmente nell'idea di un'insensibilità illimitata e perpetua, di un riposo, di una continua inazione dell'anima e del corpo, la qual cosa desiderata in quei momenti dalla mia natura, mi era nominata dalla ragione col nome espresso di morte, nè mi spaventava punto.” Zibaldone, 291-292; ed. Flora I 272.

12. The words are those of Richard Jeffries, from The Story of my Heart (London, 1968), p. 140.

13. Poesie e prose, II, 281.

14. Poesie e prose, II, 290.

15. Adriano Tilgher first spoke of the feeling of the numinous in connection with Leopardi's Infinito. On the Vita solitaria he has the following remarks: “Nell'immobilità e nel silenzio profondi del poeta e del mondo si produce la preparata—dunque attesa e desiderata—esperienza spirituale. Il poeta oblia sè stesso e il mondo: cioè con maggior precisione, la barriera tra l'Io e il Non-Io cade, ed egli vive un'esperienza di unità, di naufragio mistico dell'io nel tutto (la stessa con cui si chiude l'Infinito). Ma in lui quest'esperienza ha un carattere speciale: egli sente le membra sue come sciolte e senza più spirto nè senso, cioè senza più vita individuale e senso dell'individualità, e confuse da tempo infinito (lor quiete antica) ai silenzi del loco, cioè della Natura. Egli si sente natura e sente la natura come immobilità assoluta. è l'esperienza della Morte.” La filosofia di Leopardi (Rome, 1940), pp. 156-157. My own view of the question of “mysticism” in Leopardi's experience follows in the text. See also my second essay above.

16. W. T. Stace, Man against Darkness (University of Pittsburgh, 1967), p. 33.

17. Ed. J. S. Spink (Paris, 1948), p. 102.