Part Three: Leopardi as a Poet of the Risorgimento

The Poetry and Rhetoric of Liberal Patriotism

Leopardi was deeply committed to the struggle for a free, united Italy. Yet his outlook on the possibility of fundamental political change grew increasingly pessimistic as the years passed. Hints of this pessimism can be gleaned from letters he wrote in the early 1830s to Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti and princess Charlotte Bonaparte. Writing to Targioni-Tozzetti on December 5, 1831, he said that he was sure she did not expect any exciting political news from him. “You know,” he reminded her, “that I abominate politics, because I believe, or rather I see, that because of a fault of nature, that has destined men to unhappiness, there is no form of government that does not make individuals unhappy; as for the masses, that makes me laugh, because my little brain cannot conceive of a happy mass composed of individuals who are not happy.”[1] In a letter along the same lines to princess Charlotte Bonaparte, which he wrote in French on May 17, 1833, he told her that “the progressive state of society does not concern me at all. My own, if it is not retrograde, is eminently stationary.”[2]

What gave rise to such negativism was, in my view, partly a certain world weariness that protected him from undue enthusiasms, and partly the expression of Leopardi’s reluctance to assume personal responsibilities for any of the efforts being made in the 1830s to advance the cause of Italian independence. The letter to Charlotte Bonaparte in particular was the expression of one side of Leopardi’s temperament, not of the whole person. The truth is that he not only did not desist from believing in the Italian national cause, he made it the subject of a mock heroic poem he wrote in Naples that revolves, comically and sarcastically, around the failed attempts of Italians to stand and fight for their independence. Behind his sarcasm lay the disappointed soul of a patriot. He had not repudiated the ideas that inspired his earlier patriotic poems, but reinterpreted them in the light of European and Italian politics during the years 1825 to 1835. Nor had he forgotten his belief that the eventual successful outcome of Italy’s struggle for freedom was crucial to the resurrection and resurgence of Italian literature, which he regarded as virtually moribund and in need of an infusion of fresh thought and energy.

Leopardi did not think that Italy was merely a “geographical expression,” as supposedly remarked by the Prussian chancellor Clement von Metternich, or a land “whose soil is aged where men are born old,” living only on an irretrievable past greatness amidst irredeemable present corruption, as the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine thought.[3] But he was troubled by uncertainties concerning the character of “the Italian people.” He wondered about how the lives of ordinary Italians were connected to the dreams and hopes of the country’s writers and intellectuals. This was not an abstract question for Leopardi and his liberal friends. One possible answer to it was given by Alessandro Manzoni in his historical novel of 1827, The Betrothed, in which two young people of the working class, Renzo and Lucia, are given the role of protagonists in a story involving all of the contending political forces in seventeenth-century Italy under Spanish domination. It’s unlikely, however, that Leopardi read the novel in this manner, or that he applied its historical “lessons” to the early decades of the nineteenth century. One facet of Leopardi’s own point of view on this and related questions can be found in his Discourse on the Present State of the Customs of the Italians, which I discussed in chapter two. This work sheds some light on his thinking about the Italian national question as it affected and was affected by ordinary Italians in the 1820s.

Several of Leopardi’s dedications to his poems published between 1818 and 1824 show that the creative impulse in him in his youth was inseparable from his feelings of affiliation with the Italian national cause. His dedication of his first published work of Italian verse in 1818 to Vincenzo Monti was a reminder to his readers that Italy was still the country whose fate had been lamented by Petrarch, Machiavelli, and other writers: that of winning glory only in the fields of art and letters. “Today,” he said to Monti, “anyone who deplores or exhorts our fatherland cannot help but think of you and a few others who support our last glory, that derives from literature and the fine arts, because of which we can say that Italy is not dead.”[4] In the 1824 Bolognese edition of his ten canzoni he was more explicit about the need in Italy to “revive” the country’s sense of national honor. The dedication on this occasion was “to readers” rather than to an individual: “With these canzoni,” Leopardi wrote, “the author does his best from his corner of the world to revive in Italians the kind of love for one’s fatherland from which derive, not disobedience, but probity and nobility of thought and of works.”[5] Sentiments such as these were part of what made many Italians of the time think of Leopardi as an inspirational figure.

At this moment in our discussion, we can gain some insight into the question under consideration from a series of notes in the Zibaldone of March 1821, and from a letter that Leopardi wrote to his brother Carlo from Rome on February 20, 1823. These are both essentially private reflections, yet precisely because of this they show how sensitive Leopardi was to public issues such as the relations between literature and social class in the Italy of the early nineteenth century, and how these relations impinged on the qualities and deficiencies of contemporary Italian literature.

In his Zibaldone Leopardi asked himself “why our literature had no popularity” and why “the best books are in the hands of a single class, and are destined for it alone, even when their subject has nothing to do with this class.” In reflecting on this question, he observed that all of Italy’s other classes were entirely indifferent to literary studies, which he attributed to “the lack in Italy of life, of national spirit, of activity, and also of freedom,” whose absence accounted for “the lack of originality of [our] writers.” All of this, he thought, was responsible for “the complete division that exists between the lettered class and the others, between literature and the Italian nation.”[6] In another note, written only a day or so after the one just cited, Leopardi touched on the way in which Italians looked on their own literary heritage. “I praise the attempt to reawaken in the people that national spirit without which there has never been national greatness in this world, nor even individual greatness.” But in order to initiate a real process of renewal, he added, it was of no avail to shower praises on the current qualities of Italian writers; what was needed, instead, was “not arrogance nor esteem for our current things, but shame. And this must spur us on to change our whole direction and to renew everything. Without that we will never do anything.”[7]

Leopardi was encouraged to take up the theme of renewal by his reading of Vittorio Alfieri’s autobiography, published in London in 1804, that inspired him to think about the need for a thoroughgoing self-appraisal on the part of Italy’s literary community. As we’ll see shortly, in his ode “To Angelo Mai” Leopardi saw Alfieri as the poet and thinker whom Italians could look to as an example of probity and virtue. But there were others as well who moved him in the same direction, notably Silvio Pellico, whose article in the liberal anti-Austrian review Il Conciliatore on September 6, 1818, spoke of Alfieri as a beacon of enlightened patriotism to writers interested in connecting their work to the living body of Italian nationalism.[8] Pellico was arrested by the Austrian government in 1820 for his activities in the secret society known as the carboneria, for which he served ten years in prison. Leopardi was aware of this society of nationalist conspirators,[9] but remained aloof from it because of his inability to accept the methods it used to foment a revolutionary movement.

Leopardi’s letter of February 20, 1823, to his brother Carlo reveals his sense of keen disappointment at the superficiality of Rome’s intelligentsia. His first stay in the eternal city, from November 1822 to April 1823, during which he roomed in the home of his uncle Carlo, deepened his understanding of the difference between engaged literary studies motivated by real concern for literature as a criticism of life and manners, and mere literary antiquarianism. This was an important distinction for Leopardi, one of whose reasons for going to Rome was to explore the city’s libraries and continue several translation projects he had begun in Recanati. Part of him was sympathetic to the cult of the past for the past’s sake, but basically he rejected such an attitude because it was a hindrance to the kind of cultural renewal he had been thinking about in the previous few years, as seen in the passages cited above from Lo Zibaldone.

There was a more hopeful side of his experiences in Rome, which emerges from another part of the same letter. It begins with a short account of his visit to the grave of Torquato Tasso, the first sight of which had brought tears to his eyes when he reflected on the contrast between the poet’s greatness and the inconspicuous plot of ground containing his remains. He was also reminded of the poet’s tragic last years as a wanderer in search of peace after long confinement in a hospital for the insane and years of torment caused by the severe criticism some of his lyrical verse had been subjected to by Catholic Church officials and by the ruling Este family dynasty in Ferrara. Leopardi arrived at his destination after walking down a country road that led to the cemetery. When he recalled this moment of his visit to Tasso’s tomb, his mood changed from sadness to almost idyllic happiness. This section of the letter puts us in touch with a side of Leopardi’s personality that is much less known than that of the melancholy poet-philosopher:

The road that leads to [Tasso’s grave] prepares one’s mind for the impressions of one’s feelings. It is entirely lined on both sides by houses equipped for manufacturing, and resounds with the clatter of looms and of other tools, and with the singing of women and workers involved in their labors. In an idle, dissipated city, without method, as are capital cities, it is still lovely to consider the image of a cohesive life, ordered and involved with useful professions. Also the faces and manners of the people whom one meets on this road have something simpler and more human than those of other people; and they show you the customs and the character of people whose life is based on the true and not the false, who live by labor and not by intrigues, imposture and deception, like the great majority of this population.[10]

This paragraph is a milestone in what I have called, in the title of this book, Leopardi’s search for a common life, his long struggle to rise above his own origins and social class in order to connect himself to the lives and labors of ordinary humanity.

Two things should be kept in mind in relation to what Leopardi says in this letter. The first is that the Rome he was commenting on here was Restoration Rome, the capital city of the Papal States that, since the entrance of French troops into Italy in 1796, had been fiercely contested terrain, torn by internal dissension and fought over by France and Austria, resulting in yet another dismal chapter in the long history of how the Catholic Church and the institution of the Papacy played into the hands of foreign powers in vain attempts to save its own independence and influence. Napoleon had alternately supported and opposed the aims of the Papal regime.

After the Emperor’s defeat, the ensuing Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815 restored temporal power to the Papal States, but at the cost of placing the Papacy under Austrian hegemony. A brief struggle by a small group of republican revolutionaries to create an independent secular and republican order in Rome in 1798 was now nothing but a memory;[11] the new reality after 1815 was based on principles diametrically opposed to those of republicanism and popular democracy. It was reaction pure and simple, and favored the interests of a class in Italy, to which Leopardi’s family belonged, that had been rudely challenged and denied many of its prerogatives by the wave of reformism and revolution that swept over Europe during Napoleon’s approximately fifteen years as the primary arbiter of European politics. There was thus a highly personal dimension to Leopardi’s five-month stay in Rome, one that sharpened his awareness of what can happen to a society when oligarchic and plutocratic forces acquire a position of dominance. He himself was a member of the social class that had benefited from the Restoration. His painful consciousness of his own complicity in a regime that was entirely incompatible with his ideals could easily explain why he stopped to admire the scene of a laboring humanity that he had observed on the way to Tasso’s grave.

The other thing to be remembered in evaluating Leopardi’s ideas and attitudes at this juncture is that, by 1822–1823, he was already known as a vigorous exponent of Italian freedom, a new voice in a long history of Italian poetry, going back to the late Middle Ages, rooted in protest, lamentation, and feelings of wounded patriotic pride. In other words, the questions he raised in his Zibaldone and alluded to in his letter were already integral features of his own literary practice.

In his patriotic odes of 1818, “To Italy” and “On the Monument to Dante Being Erected in Florence,” and in his poem of 1820 dedicated to the classical scholar Angelo Mai, who had recently brought to light large fragments of Cicero’s De re publica that he had uncovered in the Vatican library, Leopardi placed himself squarely in his own Italian historical and literary tradition and in that of Greco-Roman antiquity. In effect, these were for Leopardi but two phases of one and the same literary tradition.

As a modern Italian poet, Leopardi saw himself and his fellow Italians as beneficiaries of a literary inheritance best exemplified by Dante and Petrarch, who represented not only Italian literary achievements of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries but also a politically inspired poetry, one of whose central metaphors, which Leopardi used for his own purposes in “To Italy,” pictured Italy as a beautiful but impoverished and gravely wounded woman left to die on the wasteland of political and military defeat. For both Dante and Petrarch, as for Leopardi, this tragic image was designed to shake Italians out of their torpor and rally them to take up arms against their oppressors.

Dante and Petrarch do not appear in the ode “To Angelo Mai”; they are replaced by three other Italian literary greats, two of whom, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, are not customarily associated with Italian nationalism. But they served Leopardi’s purposes: no sooner had Ariosto disappeared from the scene in 1533, Leopardi tells us in this ode, than all of his “lovely fantasies,” all of the “happy dreams,” all of the “arms and loves” he had depicted in Orlando Furioso with such unmatched brilliance had been rudely “cast away” by an indifferent people. There was no further use for his kind of joy and imaginative freedom in an Italy dominated by the Counter-Reformation and by the loss of any semblance of political independence, once the Spanish monarchy established its hegemony on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This lament over a bygone era, as exemplified by the eclipse of Ariosto’s star, is followed by a stanza dedicated to Torquato Tasso in which Leopardi hinted at a direct connection between the poet’s sad fate and the situation of Italian poetry in the 1820s. He did this by alluding to “the hatred and the foul malice of courtiers and tyrants” that had made Tasso’s life such a torment. A free poetic spirit, Leopardi was implying, cannot thrive under tyranny.

It is important to realize that Leopardi had himself already experienced the strictures of censorship by both religious and civil authorities, which gave a certain “subversive” allure to his patriotic verses. His books, in part or in toto, were repeatedly rejected by both ecclesiastical and civil censors. In April 1826, for example, responding from Milan to Giuseppe Melchiorri’s request for a copy of his canzoni, he sent it with the hope that “they don’t stop it in Lombardy where the canzoni are prohibited and proscribed.”[12] He was also keenly aware of the crushing blows that Italian liberals and nationalists had suffered in the revolts that had shaken Naples and other Italian cities in 1820 and 1821. In the course of his reflections on these events, Leopardi strongly identified himself with all Italian writers, especially those in his own time, whose principles had brought them into conflict with their own domestic ruling class and with a succession of foreign powers to which this class owed its privileged status, principally Austria in the first half of the nineteenth century. After the Congress of Vienna had eliminated an immediate threat from France, Austria alone remained directly or indirectly in control of a broad swath of territory in central and north-central Italy reaching from the Lombard-Venetian Kingdom to the regions of Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna, and the Papal States.

Together with Ariosto and Tasso, the third Italian writer on whom Leopardi focused attention in his poem was close in time and ethos to his own, the Piedmontese tragedian Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803). Alfieri had already played a major role in the work of another of Leopardi’s near contemporaries, Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827). In his autobiographical epistolary novel The Last Letters of Iacopo Ortis, published in 1803, and even more dramatically in his ode Dei sepolcri (On Tombs), published in 1807, both works that Leopardi knew very well and read repeatedly during his formative years, Foscolo composed an elaborate hymn to the virtues of poets who, in their lives and writings, could inspire Italians with a new resolve to commit themselves once and for all to their country’s national redemption. Leopardi was well aware of Foscolo’s principled decision not to accept the humiliating conditions that would have been imposed on him by the regime in power in Milan, the capital of the Austrian-ruled Lombard-Venetian Kingdom, had he accepted its offer to become editor of a new literary review. Instead, on March 31, 1815, he went into self-imposed exile, first to Switzerland, and then to London, where he lived the last years of his life in dire poverty and died penniless in 1827.

It was Foscolo’s idealized but stirring portrait of Alfieri in Dei sepolcri that Leopardi appropriated for his own purposes in “To Angelo Mai.” Foscolo revered Alfieri, who is portrayed in lines 189 to 197 of Dei sepolcri as an “austere” figure “angry at the nation’s gods,” meaning that he, more than any other writer of his time, had expressed an angry defiance of all compromise with Italy’s tyrannical rulers. For this attitude toward power, and by reason of the tragedies he wrote in which self-centered passion and high ideals clash with each other in a psychologically dense and complex manner, Foscolo elevated Alfieri to the highest rank of Italian poets and dramatists. He also revered Alfieri for several of his treatises, notably On Tyranny and On The Prince and Literature, both works that emphasize the necessary independence and individuality of the writer vis-à-vis all forms of political authority. In the latter work especially, Alfieri expounded a heroic conception of the poet as compelled by the intrinsic morality of his or her profession to help create a society of free people. The treatise ended with an exhortation to “free Italy from the barbarians,” echoing similar appeals made centuries earlier by Pope Julius II and Machiavelli, and before them, by Petrarch.

Leopardi was obviously touched by Foscolo’s portrait of Alfieri. In the ode “To Angelo Mai,” like Foscolo in Dei sepolcri, he addresses the tragedian by his first name, suggesting a feeling of kinship and solidarity, and above all a sense of personal identification with a writer who had consciously taken upon himself the role of poeta-vate, the poet as spokesman of his people.[13] This was what Leopardi was alluding to in his own evocation of Alfieri’s life and work. The last stanza of “To Angelo Mai” is a ringing paean to Alfieri and an appeal to Mai to “persevere” in his search for manuscripts attesting to the greatness of Italy’s classical forebears, since the present generation was asleep, indifferent to its own heritage:

Disdainful and enraged, he lived

his whole life pure,

and death prevented him from seeing worse.

My Vittorio, this age and land

were not for you. Other times, another place

are fit for genius. Now we live

ready for rest, with mediocrities

as company: the wise man has descended

and the crowd has risen to his level,

with the world.[14]

One implication of this passage, which encapsulates the vision of life that informs Leopardi’s work in the early to mid-1820s, calls for comment. It is that in his patriotic imaginary, with the one exception of Christopher Columbus, who is given his due as an illustrious Italian forebear, poets and writers have all the glory; they are the exalted figures who stand above an otherwise barren landscape. Tom O’Neill sees this idea as fundamental in Alfieri and Foscolo. He might just as easily have said the same of Leopardi, at least in the poems we are dealing with here. With all of their magnanimity and genius, Alfieri and Foscolo, and Leopardi after them, indulged in a form of heroic individualism from which all other aspects and dimensions of reality seem to fade away. This is a trait that, in Leopardi’s case, if not in that of Alfieri and Foscolo, is offset by his sensitivity to the lives of ordinary people, who have a role to play in many of his poems that are not explicitly concerned with the redemption of Italy from centuries of oppression. But the discourse of patriotism seems to have almost effaced Leopardi’s otherwise strong penchant for scenes of everyday Italian life in which ordinary people make their appearance on the stage of life.

There is, however, one passage in “To Italy” and another in “On the Monument to Dante” that touch on the lives and fortunes of Italians coming from social strata that were not those of most intellectuals and poets. Leopardi was moved and outraged by the large number of Italian youths who, either as volunteers or as conscripts, had been enrolled in Napoleon’s armies as foot soldiers just prior to the invasion of Russia. They had died by the thousands, in a land not their own, and for a cause that was basically alien to their own. In “On the Monument to Dante” Leopardi coupled his lament for Italian blood spilled on foreign lands with a more general denunciation of the insults and the despoliation of art suffered by Italy at the hands of the invading French army under the command of Napoleon’s generals in the late 1790s. This was the period in which French troops occupied Leopardi’s hometown on two different occasions, from February to June 1798 and again in August 1799, when his father Monaldo was forced to hand over to the French, not works of art, but substantial amounts of food and other supplies requisitioned by the occupying army, consisting of some five thousand troops. An echo of these humiliating episodes can be heard in the last lines of the seventh stanza of “On the Monument to Dante”:

Who doesn’t grieve? What have we not suffered?

What did those felons leave untouched—

What temple, altar, crime?[15]

I mentioned above that Leopardi’s patriotism was fired not only by Italian writers from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries but equally by Greek and Roman poets who wrote of key events in their own national history. One example will suffice here to illustrate this point. In “To Italy,” Leopardi takes verses attributed to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (556–468 B.C.) and integrates them into his own celebration of a military heroism whose absence in contemporary Italy he gravely lamented. What he gives us in these lines is a celebration of blood spilled in the defense of a nation by valiant youth totally devoted to their cause, ready to sacrifice their lives and fortunes for the defense of their country. Clearly inspired in these lines by Homer and Virgil, Leopardi gave his descriptive powers free rein in recalling a famous episode in Greek history, the defense of the Greek homeland against Persian troops in the battle of Thermopylae. With tears streaming down his face, Simonides utters words that Leopardi wanted Italians to take to heart and remember whenever they were tempted to capitulate to their oppressors. Apparently, from what some of his contemporaries had to say about this and his other patriotic poems, Leopardi did have some impact on the sentiments of young people in his own time.[16] One wonders to what extent these qualities are responsible for the constant stream of people of all types and ages who come to the Leopardi palazzo in Recanati with eager curiosity about the poet who was born and raised there. Some are foreign tourists, but most are ordinary Italians anxious to visit the birthplace of one of their most revered poets, whose work forms a part of the curriculum of studies taught in Italian public and private schools. This is in itself a fact of considerable importance in weighing Leopardi’s contribution to the way in which Italians think about themselves.

Poetry that celebrates great poets was not Leopardi’s only way of expounding the values he regarded as essential to the rebirth of the Italian nation. He had a more realistic and theoretically more comprehensive way of thinking about this question, which he articulated in an early note in the Zibaldone, dated July 2, 1820. The whole course of Italian literary history, he believed, with rare exceptions, was characterized by a fatal gap between writers and the people. What was missing was the kind of vital connection between writer and the masses that had flourished in ancient Greece and Republican Rome and, more recently, in France, England, and other countries with a unified national culture. His way of formulating his point of view has become familiar to us since the birth of modern literary sociology later in the nineteenth century, to which Marxist thinkers have made signal contributions. Mme de Staël’s De la littérature dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales should be kept in mind as a possible contemporary source of his reflections on literature and society. After observing that Greek and Roman literature flourished before, and not as a result of, the theories of Aristotle and Horace, meaning that practice is the basis of theory in literary matters, Leopardi made the following claims:

So isn’t it helpful that good taste be promoted and promulgated, and established as a norm of literary works? Certainly good taste is needed in a nation, but this must be in individuals and in the entire nation, and not in an academic gathering, or a legislative body, or a dictatorship. In the first place it isn’t easy to promote works of genius. Honors glory applause advantages are very effective means to promote them, but not the honors and the glory that derive from the applause of an Academy. The ancient Greeks and the Romans too had their public literary competitions, and Herodotus wrote his history in order to read it to the people. This was quite a different stimulus than that of a small society composed entirely of very cultured and educated people where the effect can never be the kind that is achieved in the people, and to please the critics one writes: 1) with fear, which is deadly; 2) extraordinary things are sought for, refinements, with a thousand bagatelles. Only the popular listening audience can being about the originality the greatness and the naturalness of the composition. In the second place, if promoting genius is of no avail, if spurs do not help it, restraints kill it, I mean a restraint placed on it by others and not by one’s own genius. If this personal judgment is missing, there is no remedy . . .[17]

Among other things, these thoughts reflect Leopardi’s own experience coping with censors, and his belief that, while all political systems were faulty, a “free democratic state” was the least tainted and the most likely to protect individuals against the incursions of established governmental authority. On this point, the Zibaldone is filled with views such as the following:

True eloquence has never flourished except when it had the people as an audience: I mean a people that is its own master, and not a slave, a living people and not a dead one . . .[18]

A great reason for the disappearance of true originality and the creative faculty that happened immediately in Italian literature, an originality that ended with Dante and Petrarch, soon after the birth of this literature, is quite possibly the extinction of freedom, and the passage from the republican form to the monarchical one, which forces the impeded mind, crushed or limited in ideas and substances to find refuge in words.[19]

Even more forceful statements of Leopardi’s belief in the need for closing the gap between Italian writers and common people can be found in his correspondence of these years. For example, in a letter to Professor Giuseppe Montani, known to be a fervent patriot, Leopardi had this to say:

. . . as a crown to our misfortunes, since the seventeenth century a wall has been built between men of letters and the people, a wall that gets higher and higher, which is something unknown to other nations. And while we love our classics, we don’t want to see that all of the Greek, Latin, and Italian classical writers wrote for their own time, and according to the needs, desires, and customs, and above all, the knowledge and intelligence of their compatriots and contemporaries.[20]

We know that Leopardi did not escape the long hand of despotism. He was harassed by censors from the beginning to the end of his writing career, and was kept under close police surveillance during his stays in Milan, Bologna, and Florence. In Florence, in 1831–1832, his frequent visits to the home of the general and historian Pietro Colletta were regularly noted in a file kept by the Grand Duchy’s political police.[21] He was not exempt from the meddling of a postal system that allowed government spies to open the mail of persons suspected of harboring liberal or radical views, nor was he free to travel from one Italian city or region to another without visas and passports that had to be obtained from politically controlled agencies. On more than one occasion, like all of his countrymen except those in high official positions, he was forced to ask influential people, usually his father or one of his uncles, to help him obtain the necessary documents for travel. To go from Recanati to Bologna, and from Bologna to Milan, was almost as difficult in 1825 as is going from New York City to Havana today for an ordinary American.

We come now to a series of lyrical poems in which the poet as moralist and prophet of national renewal is replaced by the poet as solitary figure whose alienation from the everyday life of ordinary people is the predominant animating theme. Yet even as we suffer along with the alienated poet, we should not allow ourselves to become so caught up in his existential anguish that we lose sight of another dimension of his life that he conveys by evoking scenes, sometimes consisting of only a few lines, where ordinary people occupy the center of the poet’s attention. In this way Leopardi makes us witness to the occasional pleasures and the unremitting toil that characterize life in a provincial Italian town. These scenes are interspersed among the poet’s sorrowful feelings of being excluded, unloved, almost entirely cut off from the pulse of social life around him.

Leopardi brought two different sides of his personality to bear in his lyrical poems. One of these reflects his origins and education as an aristocrat separated from common people by mutual suspicion and class prejudice. The other was a poet able to appreciate the vitality and virtues of ordinary people who, in the final analysis, embodied the Italy in whose name the great poets and heroic individualists were fighting their battles on the literary front. It would not be wise to overstate the importance of this connection between Leopardi and common people, but it would also be unwise to disregard it. I’ll have occasion in chapter nine to comment briefly on Leopardi’s affection for and mastery of popular Italian modes of expression. He was anything but indifferent to forms and expressions of popular life and language. Leopardi fashioned a whole poetic universe out of materials that were humble, quotidian, and fleeting in nature, yet also strangely compelling.

Even in the confined private space of his lyrical poems, he found a way to be inclusive. In “The Solitary Thrush,” conceived in 1820 but finished much later and not published until 1835, we hear in the background the “bleating of sheep” and “the mooing of cows” in the valley below, as the poet rethinks the events of the day that left him bereft of hope and resigned to a loveless existence. The brief allusion reminds us that agricultural labor and farm animals are the staple features of country life. In this contemplative state of mind, the poet identifies not with the peasant laborers but with the bird of the poem’s title, whose nature, like his own, demands that it remain aloof from its fellow creatures. But as he gazes on the valley and tracks the flight of the solitary bird, the poet lets his mind’s eye stop for a moment to focus on a familiar scene, the townspeople, especially the youth, enjoying themselves on the village square. The poet’s alienation and suffering is not the poem’s only subject. There is a life separate from his that has its own inner necessity, its own reason for being:

You hear the sound of bells in the bright sky

and often rifle-fire reports far off

from farm to farm.

Dressed up to celebrate,

the young people of the place

leave their homes and gather in the streets,

and, seeing and being seen, are glad.[22]

Immediately following this evocation of a typical village scene the poet returns to his own loneliness as he observes a life in which he participates as an observer, not actively. This state of mind is what occupies the poet’s main interest, but he lets us know that there is a social world to which he belongs, even if he cannot enjoy its simple pleasures. The point is that we cannot fully understand what the poet wants to communicate in “The Solitary Thrush” unless we include aspects of life from which he is excluded, or excludes himself. The celebrations, the church bells, the sound of hunters’ gunfire, the farm animals, the young people wearing their holiday outfits and sharing admiring glances are part of the total reality that the poem offers to the reader. To savor the poem’s riches, one needs to take the whole scene into account, not just the poet’s part in it. The poet is disconsolate, resigned to live his life as an exile in his own land. But the world he observes around him maintains its rhythms, its independent life that acts as a kind of counterpoint to the melancholy ruminations of the poet about his own fate. The truth is in the whole, not in the parts.

“The Evening of the Holiday,” probably written in 1820, is one of a group of poems Leopardi called “idylls.”[23] It presents its point-counterpoint in three forms. One is a young girl the poet had seen during the day’s festivities who is now fast asleep, unaware of the wound of love she had opened in his breast. He suffers with feelings of rejection and abandonment, while she, the cause of his delight and his pain, is blissfully unaware of her effect on him. The second is the figure of a workman, an “artisan,” whom we see, or rather hear, returning to his “poor home” after the day’s festivities; he sings a “solitary song” as he wends his way home. The third aspect of life that the poet evokes as a background against which we see the poet’s suffering is nothing less than the entire era of Roman imperial might. This historical period too has passed, leaving only “peace and silence” behind, just as the workman’s song is heard for a moment, only then to fade out of earshot. They are both transitory and evanescent. The effect is startling, for the workman’s song seems so real and immediate, whereas the “sound of those ancient peoples” is remote and comes out of the poet’s historical imagination. Yet both serve to highlight the particular dimension of experience within which Leopardi wants the reader to situate his melancholy reflections on time, loss, and oblivion. It is the passing of time and the eventual disappearance of all traces of events and experiences through which human beings think of themselves as somehow permanent presences on the earth that occupy the poet’s attention. The unifying symbol of this passing away of all things human, as opposed to the eternal life of nature, is the workman’s song. We are made aware of the song on the evening of the holiday, the present tense of the poem, after which, following the verses on the death of ancient Rome, we are taken back to it at the end of the poem, when the poet recalls his early years and thinks back to a song that, similarly, “slowly died on the far-off path” guiding the workman home.

Leopardi almost always lets the reader know the part played in his poetic consciousness by people, places, and events in relation to which he experienced his own private torment. Society and history exist as indispensable contexts for his personal story. On the other hand, it must also be said that poems such as “The Evening of the Holiday” could easily lead an impressionable reader to view current political events sub specie aeternitatis rather than as part of a sociopolitical order that needed to be fought against and changed. No single definition can adequately explain what Leopardi tried to accomplish in his poems. Different sides of his personality and conception of life competed for expression throughout his life.

In much the same way as “The Evening of the Holiday,” “The Solitary Life,” written at about the same time, in the early 1820s, opens with a view of country life: the morning rain, the hen that “merrily flaps her wings,” the farmer who looks out his window to “scan the fields”; these details accompany the early morning hours of the poet as he rises from bed and takes a moment “to bless the fragile clouds.” What follows this idyllic scene are sad meditations on the beginning and inevitable end of love, which lead to verses that celebrate “the face of some endearing maiden.” This image gives way to the sound of another young girl’s song as she works long into the night at her loom. Like its predecessors, this poem offers no consolation to a poet whose destiny is to suffer in isolation, surrounded by the social world from which he is estranged.

In the mid-1820s, Leopardi devoted himself to several philological projects that were commissioned by the Milanese publisher Antonio Fortunato Stella, and to completing his Essays and Dialogues. Toward the end of that decade, feeling renewed by an eight-month stay in Pisa, poetic inspiration returned to him, resulting in some of his finest works: “To Silvia,” “Remembrances,” “Night Song of a Wandering Asian Shepherd,” “The Calm after the Storm,” and “Saturday in the Village.” Of these, “Saturday in the Village” shows to best advantage the characteristic features of Leopardi’s poetic universe; it gives us a more extended and detailed tableau of life in a small town than do the others.

At the time of its composition, September 1829, Leopardi was living in Recanati, but was already in contact with friends in Florence, and was soon to take up residence in the Tuscan capital. In this poem, the poet makes effective use of internal rhymes, as means with which to mark the passing of time during the last working day of the week. The musicality of Leopardi’s verse serves to heighten our enjoyment of the word painting that he offers us in the poem’s first thirty-five lines, which are followed by a fifteen-line concluding section, sub-divided into two stanzas where we encounter once again the gloomy reflections of a man who wants us to remember the realities of life: that this last working day of the week is the most pleasurable, because it is the time when we look forward to the Sunday holiday. When Sunday comes, he reminds us, “boredom and sorrow” will assail us again, as we think about the next day of work. In other words, pleasure consists in looking forward to an anticipated event, but when it arrives we are no longer able to appreciate it.

Quite striking is the fact that each one of the human figures briefly sketched in this poem is doing something practical and useful: the maiden carries a bundle of grass and flowers with which she will adorn herself on the morrow; an old woman is seated at a spinning wheel, while telling stories of her youth; a farmhand is hurrying home from work to his frugal meal; amidst the reigning silence of evening, “you hear the beating hammer and the saw / of the carpenter, / up late in his shuttered shop, / hurrying as he works by lantern light / to have his job done before dawn.”[24]

The poem ends with an apostophe directed at a little boy, whom the poet urges to enjoy this workaday Saturday to the fullest, and not to think too much about the holiday to follow, for it, like the whole of adult life, will likely bring him more unhappiness than he can now imagine.

The poems we have just briefly reviewed anticipate some of the key passages of “The Broom Plant or the Desert Flower,” a work that once again proves to be a fertile source for understanding the full extent of Leopardi’s development.

In this final summing up and restatement of his favorite themes, Leopardi takes the many details of his earlier poems and places them more emphatically in a political and historical context. The tone of the verse is also much more assertive and polemical than in the earlier poems, and the sketches of ordinary people as they face the threat of Mount Vesuvius are more realistic and dramatic than those of their counterparts in the poems I just surveyed.

First, as to the politics of “The Broom Plant,” Leopardi’s message is clearly stated in the poem’s third section, lines eighty-seven to one hundred fifty-seven, which also contain the passages we looked at in the first two chapters in commenting on how he gave new meaning to the concepts of nobility and love. These two concepts are what give life to the poet’s universalizing summons to his readers to join forces with all peoples and nations, “offering and expecting real and ready aid / in the alternating dangers and concerns / of our common struggle.” These lines prepare us for the call that follows to all people involved in the struggle against the assaults of nature not to use violence against each other, for to do this would be like attacking one’s fellow soldiers during a battle one is waging together with them against a common enemy. Without denying the universalism of Leopardi’s appeal in this section of the poem, I feel confident that he also had his own patriotic Italian cause in mind when he made his appeal for solidarity and unity in the common fight. He certainly did not want schismatic and sectarian groups to wrangle with each other as they faced a common challenge.

In the sixth and penultimate section of the poem, Leopardi brings his lofty message of kinship and solidarity down to earth by contrasting the awesome power of Mount Vesuvius with the humble figure of a peasant farmer tending his vineyards as he looks out with fear at “that fateful summit.” The poet emphasizes the man’s poverty, his “rustic hovel,” where he lives with his wife and children, and his anxiety when “within the household well he hears / the water hiss and gurgle.” A new eruption is about to take place, just as it had in 79 A.D. when it destroyed the nearby city of Pompei. Having escaped the immediate threat of annihilation, the farmer looks back and “watches from afar / their longtime nest and the small field / that was their one defense from hunger / fall prey to the burning flood, / which advances hissing and unstoppable, / pouring over them unendingly.”[25]

There is nothing explicitly political or patriotic in “The Broom Plant.” Yet the poem expands our consciousness of humankind’s everlasting struggle against the destructive force of nature, and in doing so, makes a heartfelt plea for human connectedness in the face of a common danger. The flower of the broom plant, it will be recalled, symbolizes the nobility of soul that, in Leopardi’s view of things, inspires those rare human beings who are able to look fearlessly at the unfortunate condition of human life, and gain strength from that awareness. The flower, with its sweet scent that lingers in the air, can be interpreted as symbolic of such awareness, and also as the gift that poetry offers to those able to understand its inherent dignity. But it is helpless, it cannot survive for long, and in its very fragility achieves its greatness. Its function in life, as Leopardi sees it, is contemplative, not active; meditative, not engaged. Purity and beauty are its salient traits, and the courage to accept its fate without complaints or easy rationalizations. In sum, the plant’s existence and destiny are moral and aesthetic in nature, a part of, yet also removed from, the real world that surrounds and destroys it.

And the peasant tending to his vineyard? Are he and his family comparable in any way to the broom plant, or better, to the human traits associated with the plant? They too bear the full brunt of the volcano’s fury. But they act in their own defense, they take measures to protect themselves, they escape death because of the farmer’s vigilance and foresight, aided by his historical memory. They are determined to survive. They will begin again, rebuild their hovel, till the soil as they always have, in a never-ending struggle with and against nature. This is a somewhat different type of dignity than that embodied in the broom plant. In this sense, a reader looking for a reason to live can take comfort from the example set by this obscure peasant, who does not act solely for himself, but for his wife and children as well. His life is attached to theirs, just as inexorably as the flow of lava is attached to death. There is no mention in the poem of other families, but it isn’t difficult to imagine that Leopardi’s peasant family is but one of many in the same situation. Such an imagining is encouraged by the poet’s sense of place, which he explicitly names, reminding us that this poem has very strong connections with the real world. The dreaded lava pouring forth from the volcano winds down its path “along the sand ridge, its lurid light / in Capri’s bay reflected, / at Mergellina and in Naples’s port.” These are places known by most Italians, and as such add a note of close familiarity to the otherwise “desert wastes” that dominate the landscape evoked by the poem.