of the Bedouin, like that of birds, is a kind of eternal return. Human individuals are not lost in time if they allow the mirage (beauty, or the flash of poetic insight) to beckon them to the depths of experience. The Bedouin poet’s courage is his recognition that thirst and the loss of the will to fly are circumstances, as death is a circumstance. Though he knows that these will overtake him, they do not diminish his passion for flight and song. The poet is always moving back, but with openness; the truth he finds can be held in an image, briefly, but it can never become fixed or permanent. Ungaretti’s spirit persists in its capacity to evoke the dream in the midst of the wasteland.

Ungaretti’s poetic vision shares a great deal with that of the French Symbolists, for whom the world is a kind of nullity until it is transformed by human subjectivity—hence Charles Baudelaire’s celebrated notion that man knows the world through “forests of symbols.” In Ungaretti’s poem “Eterno” (“Eternal”), there is a whole poetics in epigrammatic form: “Between one flower gathered and the other given/ the inexpressible null. . . .” If the gathering and giving of the flower stand for poetry, then every poem results from a struggle with the inexpressible, what Ungaretti calls the void, or blind existence. As in the Platonic idea of recollection, the soul perfects itself only through repeated struggles with forgetfulness until it gains real knowledge; so too, in Ungaretti, a movement through repeated loss and gain is implied. In his work, however, this movement is one of renewing, or re-creating, in such a way that the poet, thereby humankind, is brought in touch with his deepest nature.

In L’allegria, Ungaretti abandoned the rhetorical devices that had become rife in nineteenth century Italian poetry. He conceived the poet’s task to be an “excavation of the word” to release its latent power and music. In “Commiato” (“Leavetaking”), Ungaretti addresses his friend Ettore Serra, saying, “poetry/ is the world humanity/ one’s own life/ flowering from the word,” and concluding, “When I find/ in this my silence/ a word/ it is dug into my life/ like an abyss.” The abyss of which he speaks here is not the nullity between the gathered and the given word; it is, rather, the depth of memory that carries back beyond the individual into a mythic past. The abyss is present not in the expressive content of the words but in their power. “To find a parola [word],” Ungaretti declared in a note to the poems in L’allegria, “means to penetrate into the dark abyss of the self without disturbing it and without succeeding in learning its secret.”

The culmination of this vision in L’allegria is found in the poem “I fiumi” (“The Rivers”), which opens with a scene from the battlefront. It is evening, a world of moonlight; a crippled tree evokes the desolation of war. The poet recalls that in the morning, he had “stretched out/ in an urn of water/ and like a relic/ rested.” This is a ritual act, a baptism, for the poem goes on to recount something of a rebirth. Each epoch of the poet’s life is represented by a river—the Isonzo, the river of war; the Serchio, the river of his forefathers; the Nile, the river of his birth and unconsciousness; and the Seine, the river of awakening self-awareness: “These are the rivers/ counted in the Isonzo.” In the ancient image of the river, Ungaretti captures the subjective moment in which all the branches of his existence blossom together. Such a moment is a consolation and a confirmation of a path but is at the same time evanescent. There is the tantalizing sense that while the outward rivers are in a moment of vision, harmonious with the flow of one’s life, such moments do not last: “My torment/ is when/ I do not feel I am/ in harmony.” Nevertheless, Ungaretti suggests that there is a power working through his experience which is not identifiable with himself: “hands/ that knead me/ give me/ rare/ felicity.” In Giuseppe Ungaretti, Jones suggests that “hands” refers to the power of ancestors working through the poet and establishing a bond between him and his tradition. However one interprets this image, it is a statement of conviction that the poet has tapped the depths of his being. Unlike his friend Mohammed Sheab, who “. . . could not/ set free/ the song/ of his abandon,” Ungaretti found his voice. The poem concludes: “Now my life seems to me/ a corolla/ of shadows.”

Sentimento del tempo

The poems of Ungaretti’s second major collection, Sentimento del tempo, grew out of a confrontation with the spirit of Rome. Jones paraphrases Ungaretti’s reaction to the art of Rome: “. . . [he] tells us that the greatest shock he received after his transfer to Rome was precisely the sight of a totally Baroque architecture, one which on the surface at least appeared to lack all sense of cohesion and unity.” After that initial shock, he came to feel that in the Baroque style, things are “blown into the air,” and the resultant fragmentation opens the way for a new ordering of things.

For Ungaretti, the Baroque bespeaks the absence of God. In Baroque art, the sense of absence is covered by an elaboration of sensuous detail and by the use of trompe l’oeil. Although Ungaretti saw in this expression of God’s absence another manifestation of the emptiness of blind existence, the rhetorical responses of the Baroque did not appeal to him. Poetry was an exploration of the real; he would not abandon the concentrated forms of his first poems. Nevertheless, Baroque poetry gave him access to traditional meters and harmonies, and these he did employ. As he said in a note to Sentimento del tempo, he intially wanted to recover “the naturalness and depth and rhythm in the significance of each individual word,” but his new project was “to find an accord between our traditional metrics and the expressive needs of today.”

The traditional metrics of which he speaks were the hendecasyllable (as in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote”) and the seven-syllable line, or settinario. These metrics are not simply imposed on his poetry. They are filtered through his intuition, syncopated, and brought together with a poetic style which remains staccato. Moments of passion are drawn out by the music of the line, which Ungaretti understood to be the actual rhythm of man’s deepest self. The fragmented modern vision is sustained by underlying harmonies. A surface coherence of images achieved through rhetorical devices would be simply linear in its structure; musical harmonies in their polyvalence and rich suggestiveness make possible a multidimensional and deeper union of self and work.

French philosopher Henri Bergson, with whom Ungaretti had studied in Paris, provided the poet with one of the central distinctions of his poetics. Bergson distinguished between two forms of memory: voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary memory is analogous to the sense of space which focuses on space as an aggregate of discrete parts. Life, however, is primarily temporal, not spatial, and this analogy between memory and space conveys the essentially superficial character of voluntary memory. In voluntary memory, man stands in an extrinsic relationship to his past; forgetfulness is the essence of such a relationship. Ungaretti saw in this idea the psychological symbol for the void. What Bergson called involuntary memory, however, was as a unified flow. In involuntary memory, everything is retained. One gains access to involuntary memory through free action, action in which the past flows into and enriches the present. Ungaretti saw in involuntary memory the concept that would unify his poetics: Poetry was a mode of free action. Blending autobiographical elements with the appropriate imagery and language of the tradition, Ungaretti felt that he had returned to the living reality of poetry: a momentary making conscious of the collective unconscious.

Sentimento del tempo is written in several sections. “Fine di Crono” (“The End of Chronos”) is both the title of a poem and the name of an important section of the work. Ungaretti presupposes a knowledge of the underlying myth: the murder of Chronos by his son, Zeus, who in his action revolted against the dark world of the Titans and successfully established the world of justice, the Olympian world. For Ungaretti, this revolution reflects the discovery of the deeper, liberating flow of memory beneath the fragmented memory of blind existence. Ungaretti, however, radically alters the traditional association of the Olympians with light. He associates the deeper sense of memory with the inner, subjective world of man; hence, things must be drawn out of the daylight experience of life into the world of memory and imagination that he associates with night. As Jones points out, “the poet tends to employ an inversionary technique throughout Sentimento del tempo, upturning the respective values of life and death.” Ungaretti carries this inversion as far as he can, making death the realm of perfection and day the realm of imperfection—imagery recalling Plato’s dialogue Phaedo (fourth century b.c.e.) in which Socrates argues that philosophy is a preparation for death. True life is the life of the spirit, and what most people take as life, the life of enjoyment, is death. Such a view expresses an ultimate human desire to give even death, that unknown standing wholly outside experience, a meaning.

The central collection of Sentimento del tempo is “Inni” (“Hymns”), whose subject is a religious crisis. Here Ungaretti introduces the idea of pietà (compassion, pity, or piety), which fuses the ancient notion of respect for ancestors with the Christian notion of love for all humankind. In these poems, Ungaretti’s self-declared condition is that of alienation, and through pietà he seeks a sense of solidarity with his fellowman. This search adds a moral dimension to the ambitions of a poet whose earlier works might be taken as seeking purely aesthetic resolutions.

The poem in “Hymns” titled “La pietà” (“Pity”) is the most important single poem in Sentimento del tempo. It opens with an echo of Ungaretti’s earlier self-depiction as “a man of pain.” “I am a wounded man,” he declares dramatically, going on to describe himself as an exile. This sense of exile is the profoundest sense of being out of harmony with the depth of experience Ungaretti has yet expressed: “I have peopled the silence with names./ Have I torn heart and mind to shreds/ to fall into the slavery of words?/ I rule over phantoms.” Ungaretti conjures up his previous work and throws its value into doubt. The absence of God confronts the poet with the possibility that he has built on sand. In this, he is like Michelangelo, whom he regarded as the greatest Baroque artist (and after a group of whose works this poem is titled).

The second section of “Pity” develops the inversion of death and life met within all the sections of Sentimento del tempo. “They [the dead] are the seed that bursts within our dreams,” he says. If there is a road open to God, it must be by way of memorial reawakening and restoration of the past. This is the very path that has led Ungaretti to the possibility of despair, but just as the desert had the double significance of the void and the mirage, so also might Ungaretti’s religious despair be the other face of hope.

In “Pity,” Ungaretti achieved something akin to prayer, but there was no discovery of a way back to a poetry of the divine. The poem’s fourth section is, therefore, a portrayal of human life without God. “Man, monotonous universe,” it begins. Every human action, considered by itself, is a frustration: “Nothing issues endlessly but limits.” When man tries to turn toward God, “He has but blasphemies.” This final line echoes the earlier “. . . do those who implore you/ Only know you by name?” “Pity” ends, then, without resolution. Ungaretti has moved away from the atheism of his early years—in fact, he embraced Roman Catholicism—but, in his poetry, the stance of this Bedouin poet is that of an agnostic who seeks to believe. There is no room for dogma here.

In La Poesia di Ungaretti (1976), Glauco Cambon suggests that the metaphysical connection among memory, consciousness of the void, and “the dream of becoming” is paralleled in Ungaretti’s later work by a moral connection among innocence, sin, and conscience. What had been, in the earlier work, the condition of man lost in blind existence deepens in the later work, taking on the significance of the Fall. Indeed, the next section of Sentimento del tempo, titled “La morte meditata” (“Death Meditated”), takes place in the Garden of Eden, and Eve is its central figure. Ungaretti gives a particularly modern shading to Eve by introducing an element of sensuality; he does this in order to include the sensuous, poetry’s medium, in an image of restored innocence. As the symbol of restored innocence, Eve carries the double significance of death as a realm of perfection and as the realm of the terrible loss of innocence. If death is another face of blind existence, then Eve emerges against the void of death as the mirage emerges upon the desert. Ungaretti’s choice of a female symbol to express the restored innocence for which poetry strives is characteristically Italian, recalling Petrarch’s Laura, Dante’s Beatrice, and Leopardi’s Silvia.

Il dolore

The poems of Il dolore grew out of Ungaretti’s experience of profound loss. In a poem about his brother Constantino’s death, he writes: “I have lost all of childhood—/ Never again can I/ Forget myself in a cry.” This nihilistic chord underlies the “bitter accord” of the collection.

“Tu ti spezzisti” (“You Shattered”) is the greatest poem of the collection. It opens with the alien Brazilian landscape—a landscape unnerving and threatening: “That swarm of scattered, huge, gray stones/ Still quivering in secret slings/ Of stifled flames of origin. . . .” The references to nonhuman creation call to mind the poetic task of inwardly re-creating the world, but this landscape is presented with a force and a strangeness that make such a task overwhelming, if not impossible. Against this landscape, Antonietto, Ungaretti’s son who died, is likened to a small bird: on the one hand, the recalcitrantly primitive and foreboding; on the other hand, the fragile but keenly alive. Disaster is inevitable. “How could you not have shattered/ In a blindness so inflexible/ You, simple breath and crystal.” The oppressive powers that brought down this small life are focused by reference to the sun: “Too human dazzling for the ruthless,/ Savage, droning, tenacious/ Roar of naked sun.”

The rest of Il dolore grows out of a preoccupation with the possible destruction of Italy. A notable aspect of these poems is the emergence of the figure of Christ. Like Michelangelo, who desired faith but from whom God hid himself, Ungaretti might be seen as an odd sort of agnostic. The Christ of Ungaretti’s poems is modified by the poet’s humanism.

La terra promessa

La terra promessa contains poems written in the early 1930’s, although the volume was not published until 1950. If, as Ungaretti says, the dominant season of Sentimento del tempo is summer, then the dominant season of La terra promessa is autumn. In this season, as Jones comments, “detached as the aging mind becomes from the flesh, it begins to see the world as a sensational Pascalian abyss . . . , which neither the fancy nor the imagination can any longer bridge over.” Blaise Pascal, however, took joy in the promised liberation from the senses, something that Ungaretti cannot do. There would be no way to the restoration of “innocence with memory” without the sensuous imagination. For Ungaretti, the separation of sense and mind—the dying of sense—which threatens to undermine the poet’s immediate engagement with things can be overcome through memory. The poet returns to the memories of youth to restructure them out of the knowledge of a full life, breathing new life into them.

The “promised land” of which Ungaretti speaks is promised because it is the place of renewed innocence. This symbol repeats and transforms his attempt to resolve the problem which was central to his writing from the beginning: How, without absolutes, does one live a human life in time? The answer he gave should be seen against a guiding mythology. As he says in Vita d’un uomo: Tutto le poesie:

Once upon a time there was a pure universe, humanly speaking . . . an absurdity: an immaterial materiality. This purity became a material materiality as a result of some offence perpetrated against the Creator by who knows what event. But anyway, through some extraordinary happening of a cosmic order, this material became corrupt—thereby time originated, and history originated. This is my manner of feeling things, it is not the truth, but it is a way of feeling: I feel things in this way.

This note to the poems of La terra promessa makes clear Ungaretti’s mythological cast of mind. The Golden Age cannot be restored, but its power can be evoked by a process of memory akin to the ritual. Poems are such evocations, and in this collection, the rites of poetry are reconstitutions of memories through the informing insight of maturity. If old age is characterized by the decline, even death, of the senses, this does not imply that there is no bridge between the sensuous visions of youth and the understanding of old age. A purification of memory is possible, and such a purification leads back through the “tunnel of time” to innocence.

The key figure in this collection is Aeneas, though he never takes the stage, and the Aeneid (29-19 b.c.e.) of Vergil is a source of much of its symbolic material. One of the most important poems of the collection is titled “Cori descrittivi di stati d’animo di Didone” (“Choruses Descriptive of Dido’s States of Mind”). In this group of nineteen fragments, the passing of Dido’s beauty is mourned. This image has obvious resonance with the image of Eve as a figure of lost innocence, but only to contrast Dido with Eve. Dido is ultimately lost. She is here, as she was for Vergil, the contrast to Aeneas’s virtue. She has no inner spiritual world. If Dido negatively echoes Eve, Aeneas positively echoes the image of the Bedouin poet.

Ungaretti’s lifework was to open a way to cultural origins by means of his adventure in language. For Ungaretti, whatever measure of salvation can be found is to be found only through history. Man is alone, but through pietà he can move beyond his alienation toward solidarity with his fellows. The poet’s access to the cultural flow of memory is gained through language. The language of poetry, Ungaretti said, is always in crisis, but this is a condition of its renewal. Through the purification of language, the poet hands on the tradition intact and creatively reworked. In doing so, he holds open the possibility of perpetual renewal.