[The wartime poems of L'Allegria modulate Ungaretti's] voice in its simplest form, as a naming of things which is at the same time an acknowledgment of existence, of its mystery and stark "givenness." They are generally statements of the human condition made in wonder and awe. (p. 97)

This is the dawning form of vocation or calling: the poet cast into exile and war calls created things and resigns himself to their protection, even to their indifference since it is a guaranty of reality, of indestructibility. Or we should say, rather, that he names them as a kind of reassurance. "The things exist, therefore I exist." The calling, a silent one, comes from the things themselves; and such a mood continues with notable deepening into the Sentimento del tempo collection, which marked, in the early thirties, Ungaretti's "hermetic" evolution. He contemplates things, or listens to them, in a posture of wonder…. Elemental stupor begets myth … and then we have a thing like Nascita d'aurora (Birth of Sunrise), where pure perception shapes an evanescent, inchoate goddess. But the intentness of contemplation and listening gradually shifts the focus from the presence of things to their absence; and then the mode of vocation becomes one of evocation. The poet is "illumined with immensity," and "listens to a dove of other deluges."… One is always struck in Ungaretti by the periodical return to elemental utterance on the threshold of the inarticulate. This movement is balanced, though, by the development of regular rhythms (the hendecasyllable of Italian tradition) and closed sentences in the Petrarch-Góngora style. But our poet does really borrow them: he evolves them out of his own experience of first beginnings. The voice recapitulates a history of the language.

The moment of evocation, turning inward, makes for greater self-consciousness, with some attendant complications. We have a "hermetic" closure, an attempt at selfsufficient magic…. In Alla Noia, in contrast, there is a posture of torment, for this is not enough; the sustaining certitude of elemental things has withdrawn, and the poet struggles with his own phantoms as a dissatisfied magician. The state of mind is far more complex, utterly unstable, and the verbal medium is correspondingly denser…. [The] relatively easy immediacy of L'Allegria yields to the striving for an immediate transcendental perception that … reminds one of Emily Dickinson…. (pp. 98-9)

The obscurity with which Alla Noia … confronts the reader is justified by depth of striven-for insight; it is, if anything, a uniquely lucid obscurity, a transparency of a new kind…. We have here a phenomenology of existence as an unknowable that endeavors to know itself.

To begin with, the very title (and subject) is a trap for the unwary. Noia, as a familiar feeling that ranges all the way from weariness to dissatisfaction and disgust, generally finds its English equivalent in "boredom" or "tedium" (p. 100)

The movement of the poem gives us the sharp waverings of the soul between [the poles of attainment and disappointment], coming to a head in the resolving contradiction of lines 21-22 (May I desire your lips again …/May I never know them any more!). So much happens actually between the lines that the blank space of a pause conceals the propulsive force of the poem…. (p. 101)

If we pass on from Alla Noia to La Pietà, the most sustained piece of Sentimento del tempo, we see Ungaretti taking stock of himself in a climax of religious anguish which marks or preludes the reversion to a more directly dramatic language…. La Pietà is a remarkable utterance of the extended type, with its unanswered appeal to an absent God. The poet disclaims the value of words and rejects the very suffering they cost him …, and recites a "mea culpa" in a language of naked confession, despair and prayer; obliquity is discarded. Elsewhere, as in Memoria d'Ofelia d'Alba (from the same book), he had apparently set great store by his aesthetics as an eternizing power: "And in you immortal / The things which among premature doubts / You followed burning at their changes, / Seek peace, / And shortly at the bottom of your silence / They will stop,/ Things consummated; / Eternal emblems, names, / Pure evocations …".

"Evocations" is the keyword, of course. But now he looks at the other side of the coin, and resents or fears the unreality of the fictive world he has created as an artist. He "reigns over phantoms", he is walled in in the solitude of mind and flesh; art is a spider web, like everything man does…. (pp. 101-02)

The poet brings his torment to an acme by positing the possibility that God is a mere fiction of the human imagination, a dream…. And he never introduces a positive reply on the part of the passionately addressed Divinity; the whole thing is a dramatic monologue, with self-questioning followed by self-answering and new self-questioning, and God's own answer, if any, is to be seen in the blank spaces between anguished address and statement. Pauses are always important in Ungaretti…. They are the objective correlative of God's silence as an answer to modern man…. The prison of self is not demolished; the breakthrough remains an aspiration. From the uncertain pleasures of evocation, culminating in elusive visions like Alla Noia, the poet has passed on to the agony of invocation. The former is a magically powerful voice, the latter a powerless and despairing one…. Ungaretti offers his own human defencelessness in a faith beyond faith: he has the prayer, not the assurance. And without any explicit ideological commitment, he does speak for man, not just for himself as an artist. Thus, an important breakthrough has been scored, in strictly poetical terms, yet such that no ivory tower can be said to obstruct human communion. Invocation is the logical response to vocation, or better, its final form. (pp. 103-05)