Montale’s Cliff

To talk about a poet on the front page of a newspaper is a risky business: you have to make a ‘public’ discourse, stressing his vision of the world and of history, and the moral lessons implicit in his poetry. Everything you say may be true, but then you realise that it could apply equally to a different poet, that your discussion has failed to capture the unmistakable note of this poet’s verse. Let me try, therefore, to remain as close as possible to the essence of Montale’s poetry when I try to explain how today the funeral of this poet, who was so averse to any ceremonials and so remote from the image of ‘the national bard’, is an event with which the whole country can identify. (This fact is also the more peculiar in that the great openly declared ‘religions’ in the Italy of his lifetime never could count him amongst their followers, on the contrary he never spared the sarcasm he directed against every ‘cleric, red or black’.)

I would like to say this first of all: Montale’s poetry is unmistakable for the precision and uniqueness of its verbal expression, its rhythm and the imagery it conjures up: ‘il lampo che candisce / alberi e muri e li sorprende in quella / eternità d’istante’ (the flash that whitens / trees and walls and surprises them in that / eternity of an instant). I am not going to speak about the richness and versatility of his lexis, a gift which other Italian poets also possessed to a high degree, and which is often linked to a copious, even redundant quality, in other words to something that is at the opposite extreme from Montale. Montale never wastes his shots, he goes for the unique expression at the right moment and isolates it in all its irreplaceability: ‘… Turbati / discendevamo tra i vepri. / Nei miei paesi a quell’ora / cominciano a fischiare i lepri’ (Disturbed, we came down through the thornbushes. / In my region the hares begin to whistle at that time).

I will come straight to the point. In an age of generic and abstract words, words that are used for everything, words that are used not to think and not to say, a linguistic plague which is spreading from the public sphere to the private, Montale was the poet of exactness, of justified lexical choices, of sureness in terminology, which he used to capture the uniqueness of the experience described: ‘S’accese su pomi cotogni, / un punto, una cocciniglia, / si udí inalberarsi alla striglia / il poney, e poi vinse il sogno’ (a tiny point, a ladybird lit up on quinces, a pony was heard rearing at the curry-comb, then I fell into a dream).

But this precision is used to tell us what? Montale talks to us of a world like a vortex, spun by a wind of destruction, with no solid ground for our feet to stand on, the only aid being the individual’s morality which teeters over the edge of an abyss. This is the world of the First and Second World Wars, maybe even of the Third. Or perhaps the First is still a little bit outside the frame (in the cinemathèque of my historical memory it is the subtitles of Ungaretti’s spare lines that run under those already rather faded photograms); and it is the precariousness of that world as it appeared to the young men of just after the First World War that forms the backdrop to Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones). Similarly it would be the anticipation of another catastrophe that would make up the atmosphere of Le occasioni (The Occasions), while the catastrophe itself and its ashes would be the central theme of La bufera (The Storm). La bufera is the finest book to have emerged from the Second World War, and even when it is talking about something else it is really talking about the War. Everything is implicit in it, even our postwar anxieties, right down to today’s fears: the atomic catastrophe (‘e un ombroso Lucifero scenderà su una proda / del Tamigi, del Hudson, della Senna / scuotendo l’ali di bitume semi-mozze dalla fatica, a dirti: è l’ora’ (and a shadowy Satan will disembark on the bank of the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine, shaking his bitumen wings half-worn by the effort, to tell you: the time has come)), and the horror of the concentration camps of the past and the future (‘Il sogno del prigioniero’ (‘The Prisoner’s Dream’)).

But it is not Montale’s direct representations and clearly-stated allegories that I want to emphasise: the historical situation in which we live is seen as a cosmic one; even the tiniest presences of nature become reshaped, under the poet’s daily observation, into a vortex. Instead I would stress the rhythm of the verse, its metre, its syntax, all of which contain this movement in themselves, from the beginning to the end of his three great collections. ‘I turbini sollevano la polvere / sui tetti, a mulinelli, e sugli spiazzi / deserti, ove i cavalli incappucciati / annusano la terra, fermi innanzi / ai vetri luccicanti degli alberghi’ (The whirlwinds raise the dust up on to the roofs, in little sandstorms, and the empty piazzas, where the hooded horses sniff the ground, stationary before the sparkling hotel windows).

I mentioned the individual morality that withstands the historical or cosmic apocalypse that could at any moment cancel the fragile trace of human kind: but it must be said that in Montale, though he is far removed from any communion with others or outburst of solidarity, the interdependence of each person with other people’s lives is always present. ‘Occorrono troppe vite per farne una’ (Too many lives are needed to make one) is the memorable conclusion to a poem from Le occasioni, where the shadow of the hawk in flight gives a sense of the destruction and renaissance that pervades every biological or historical continuum. But the help which can come from nature or man is always an illusion except when it is a tiny rivulet which surfaces ‘dove solo / morde l’arsura e la desolazione’ (where only heat and desolation bite); it is only by going up the rivers until they become as slender as hair that the eel finds the safe place for procreation; it is only ‘a un filo di pietà’ (at a thin stream of pity) that the porcupines of Monte Amiata can slake their thirst.

This difficult heroism carved out of the inner aridity and precariousness of existence, this antiheroic heroism was Montale’s reply to the problem of poetry in his generation: how to write poetry after (and against) D’Annunzio (and after Carducci, and Pascoli, or at least a certain side of Pascoli), the problem which Ungaretti solved with the inspiration of the single word in all its purity, and Saba with the recovery of an inner sincerity which embraced also pathos, affection, sensuality: those were hallmarks of humanity that Montale the man rejected, or considered could not be articulated.

There is no message of consolation or encouragement in Montale unless one accepts the consciousness of a hostile, greedy universe. It is on this arduous road that his discourse continues that of Leopardi, even though their voices sound so different. Just as, when compared with Leopardi’s atheism, Montale’s strain of atheism is more problematic, fraught as it is with constant supernatural temptations that are however immediately undermined by his basic scepticism. If Leopardi dismisses the consolations of Enlightenment philosophy, the proposals of consolation for Montale come from contemporary irrationalisms which he weighs up one by one and then drops with a shrug of his shoulders, constantly reducing the surface of the rock on which his feet rest, the cliff to which Montale the shipwreck obstinately clings.

One of his themes which becomes more and more insistent with the passing of time, is the way in which the dead are present in us, the uniqueness of each person that we refuse to allow to perish: ‘il gesto d’una / vita che non è un’altra ma se stessa’ (the gesture of a life, which is not another’s life but itself). These lines are from a poem in memory of his mother, where the birds come back, the dead, against a sloping landscape: these are part of the repertoire of positive images in his poetry. Today I could find no better frame for his memory than these same lines: ‘Ora che il coro delle coturnici / ti blandisce nel sonno eterno, rotta / felice schiera in fuga verso i clivi / vendemmiati del Mesco …’ (Now that the chorus of rock partridges soothes you in eternal sleep, a broken but happy crowd fleeing towards the freshly vintaged slopes of Cape Mesco).

As well as continuing to read ‘inside’ his books. This will certainly guarantee his survival: because however much they are read and reread, his poems capture the reader at the start of the page but are never fully exhausted.

[1981]