The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Giacomo Leopardi · a book of forty-one lyric poems · thirty-six canti and five fragments in hendecasyllables and settenari, composed about 1816 to 1836 · scored as the body in the Florence edition of 1845, edited by Antonio Ranieri after Leopardi’s death in the order and with the corrections Leopardi left for it, on Leopardi’s Italian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Italian quoted only where its words are certain, with Jonathan Galassi’s complete translation (2010) for sense
Mode
Lyric of thought; idyll turned to the mind’s own events, civic canzone, love lyric, sepulchral meditation, satire and cosmic ode in one book
Mythos
The human being who asks and is not answered; the promise of youth unkept; the creature standing before death without begging or pride
Phase
About 1816 to 1836, from the civic canzoni of an Italy under foreign rule to the volcano above Naples; a life read through youth, memory and the last years
Presentation
Poems; thirty-six numbered canti and five fragments, from the regular Petrarchan canzone of the early poems to the free canzone of the great poems from 1828; L’infinito fifteen lines, La ginestra three hundred and seventeen
Register
Apostrophe and classicising oratory in the early canzoni; plain words, long vowels and the short line breaking the long stanza in the idylls and the Pisa and Recanati canti; irony in the Palinodia
Scale
One mind in a small town, the moon and stars, ancient Rome and modern Italy, the buried cities, the human race against nature
Governing Proposition
Forty-one poems by one mind that looks from a hill in the Marche at the infinite, at the girls of its town who died young, at the moon that does not answer, and at last at a flower growing on the lava of Vesuvius. The wager of the book is that the truth about nature, which is indifferent to the creatures it makes and betrays the hopes of youth by its own law, can be stated in lyric verse and held there without consolation, and that from that truth an ethic can be drawn: that men should stand together against the common enemy rather than war on one another.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A man sits on a hill, and a hedge shuts out most of the horizon. That is the whole occasion of L’infinito (1819), fifteen hendecasyllables of blank verse. Behind the hedge the mind builds what the eye cannot see, “interminati spazi”, unending spaces, and an infinite silence; then the wind moves in the leaves, and its voice brings back time. The poem points as it goes, this hedge, that silence, this voice, and the lines run over their ends as the thought runs past the hedge, until near and far are one sea. It ends: “e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”
“and shipwreck is sweet to me in this sea”.
The book is scored here as one work: the Canti as printed in Florence in 1845, edited by Antonio Ranieri after the poet’s death in Naples in 1837, following the order and the corrections Leopardi left for it. It holds forty-one poems, thirty-six numbered canti and five fragments, composed from about 1816 to 1836. About a fifth of the book is the civic and philosophical canzoni that open it; the first idylls, the Pisa and Recanati canti and the fragments are each about an eighth; the rest falls in smaller groups, among them the four Aspasia poems, two sepulchral poems and the three last major poems. Its earlier states, the Canzoni of 1824, the Versi of 1826, the Florence Canti of 1831 and the Naples edition of 1835, are context; the last two of the major poems, Il tramonto della luna and La ginestra, were not in the Naples edition.
L’infinito calls itself an idyll, and the word marks the book’s first turn. A pastoral kind is given to the mind’s own events: nothing happens but a thought meeting what it cannot reach. La sera del dì di festa opens on the same scale, “Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento”
“Sweet and clear is the night and without wind”, and turns to the silence of Rome and Augustus. The small town and the vanished empire are held in one evening.
Movement II
The book does not open on the idylls. It opens in the regular Petrarchan canzone, in apostrophe: All’Italia, Sopra il monumento di Dante, Ad Angelo Mai, poems that lament the arms and glory of the ancients before an Italy under foreign rule. They are a fifth of the book, and they are not its great poems; their Latinate syntax is stiff, and their rhetoric is one the later poems would not need. But they are not weak. Bruto minore and the Ultimo canto di Saffo are among the first statements of the book’s philosophy.
In Pisa, in April 1828, the verse changes. A Silvia is sixty-three lines in the free canzone, stanzas of unequal length, hendecasyllables and settenari mixed, rhyme placed freely and late: “Silvia, rimembri ancora / quel tempo della tua vita mortale”
“Silvia, do you still remember that time of your mortal life”. The girl’s eyes were “ridenti e fuggitivi”, laughing and fleeting. She died before her youth’s flower, and the poem turns from her to hope itself, which fell with her. The rhyme lands on each stanza’s end, and the long line of memory breaks on the short one.
Le ricordanze opens “Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa”, lovely stars of the Bear, its long vowels slowing the line as the memory slows. Silvia and Nerina remain girls of Recanati, and they become the figure of youth’s promise unkept. The disclosure is not a mood: the hopes of youth are not betrayed by accident, but by the law of the nature that made them.
Movement III
The Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia, written at Recanati in 1829 and 1830, gives the question to a nameless shepherd far from Italy: “Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che fai, / silenziosa luna?”
“What do you do, moon, in the sky? tell me, what do you do, silent moon?” He asks what all of it is for. In the poem an old man runs through torrents and storms to fall at last into the abyss. The moon does not answer.
The shepherd is built, not summoned. He has no name and no history, and he is made the type of every human being who asks; the poem rests its whole weight on him, and without him its questions would be an essayist’s. Its last line is the book’s hardest: “è funesto a chi nasce il dì natale”
“the day of birth is deadly to whoever is born”. The moon has governed the book from Alla luna, and will govern it to Il tramonto della luna; here it is most silent.
Two poems of the same years carry the argument into the village. In La quiete dopo la tempesta the craftsman goes back to his work when the storm has passed. In Il sabato del villaggio a girl comes home “in sul calar del sole”, at the falling of the sun, the carpenter works late, and the long evening of expectation is answered by the brief moral of the last stanza: Saturday against Sunday, youth against what follows. Il passero solitario fixes its bird, its tower and its evening in one opening line: “D’in su la vetta della torre antica”
“From the top of the ancient tower”.
Movement IV
A se stesso is sixteen lines, built of short clauses and full stops, a renunciation addressed to the poet’s own heart: “Or poserai per sempre, / stanco mio cor”
“Now you will rest for ever, my tired heart”. Within its sixteen lines stands “e fango è il mondo”, and the world is mud. Nothing in it can be spared. It belongs to the Aspasia poems, four canti of a love that remains personal, whose object readers still place between a woman and the idea of love; the two sepulchral poems follow.
The Palinodia turns the same truth into satire of the century’s politics, and it set the poet against the Florentine liberals who were his friends, as La ginestra would. The irony sits uneasily in a book whose law is otherwise stated straight, and the light pieces, Imitazione and Scherzo, and the fragments stand a little outside that law. The poet kept them in the book, and the book is the unit.
Two centuries of reading have not closed these poems. Francesco De Sanctis set their author beside Schopenhauer; Croce kept the idylls and denied the philosophy a place in the poetry; in 1947 Walter Binni and Cesare Luporini read the late poet as heroic and progressive; Sebastiano Timpanaro read a materialist, Emanuele Severino a philosopher of nothingness. Schopenhauer himself named him a kindred spirit, Nietzsche praised his prose, and Beckett took the epigraph of his Proust (1931) from this sixteen-line poem.
Movement V
La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto, written near Torre del Greco in 1836, is the longest poem in the book, three hundred and seventeen lines in seven stanzas, under an epigraph from the Gospel of John (3:19). It is set on the slopes of “sterminator Vesevo”, exterminating Vesuvius, on the lava that buried the cities, where the broom grows “contenta dei deserti”, content with deserts. From the volcano the poem goes to history, from history to the stars, to whose scale the earth is a point, and back to the flower. The return is the meaning.
Here the truth of the book yields an ethic. Nature is the enemy of the creatures it makes; men should therefore cease to war on one another and stand together against it. The poem mocks “le magnifiche sorti e progressive”, the magnificent and progressive destinies its century promised, and sets against them the broom, which neither begs nor proudly resists. Whether the poem is a social programme or a stoic posture is still argued. It is, in either reading, a disclosure that can be stated and holds.
The book’s first poem and its last obey one law. All’Italia lamented the virtue of the ancients, who lived by illusions that gave them strength; La ginestra asks what dignity is left to those who know the truth, and finds it in solidarity. The free canzone the book made became the form of modern Italian verse, and the poets after it, Carducci, Pascoli, Ungaretti, Montale and Saba, measured themselves against it. The text survives whole, on the poet’s own corrections, and in Italy it is read in every school and known by heart.
Act III · The Twelve
Inside the great poems almost nothing can be taken away. L’infinito is fifteen lines and each turns the one before, and A Silvia is built so that each stanza is required by the next. The order of the book is an argument too: it moves from the civic to the inward to the cosmic, and La ginestra at the end answers All’Italia at the start, a civic poem again, now addressed to the human race. But the subtractive test bites on the body. A quarter of the forty-one could go and the book would lose little it does not say better elsewhere: the exhortations of Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina and A un vincitore nel pallone, the Inno ai patriarchi, the sentimental deathbed of Consalvo, Scherzo, Imitazione and the fragments. That slack quarter holds the axis lowest.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds without the poet’s metaphysics. The mind desires an infinite pleasure that no finite thing can supply, and nature promises in youth what it will not give: “O natura, o natura, / perché non rendi poi / quel che prometti allor?”
“O nature, nature, why do you not give back later what you promise then?” The shepherd of Asia, who has no learning, puts the question for everyone, and his poem closes “è funesto a chi nasce il dì natale”
“the day of birth is deadly to whoever is born”. Then La ginestra draws the social consequence: a solidarity of all against nature, and scorn for “le magnifiche sorti e progressive”, the magnificent and progressive destinies. Held off the top because part of the middle book renders mood more than meaning, and the early canzoni disclose a political wish more than a truth.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Height is reached often and in several kinds. The visionary, in the fifteen lines of L’infinito. The cold sublime of the Canto notturno: “Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che fai, / silenziosa luna?”
“What do you do, moon, in the sky? tell me, what do you do, silent moon?” The elegiac close of A Silvia, where hope points from afar to “la fredda morte ed una tomba ignuda”, cold death and a naked tomb. The dreadful height of La ginestra, on the lava of “sterminator Vesevo”, exterminating Vesuvius, under stars to whose scale the earth is a point. The bare height of A se stesso, which ends on “l’infinita vanità del tutto”, the infinite vanity of all. Held below the top because the height comes in some fifteen poems, not forty-one: the civic canzoni are oratory, the Aspasia poems run in places to self-pity, and the Palinodia is satire.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The book strips illusions, and a book that subtracts myth evokes more than it builds. The classical figures of the early canzoni, the patriarchs, the gods of spring, Brutus and Sappho, are summoned in nostalgia, not constructed. But a counter-myth is built, and in the central poems it bears weight. Nature as the mother who is a stepmother is a figure made, not borrowed from a creed, and it governs from A Silvia to La ginestra. Silvia and Nerina stay girls of Recanati and become the figure of youth’s hope, so that the girl’s death and the death of hope are one event. The nameless shepherd of Asia is made the type of every human being who asks; the broom on the volcano is an emblem built into the argument of the poem that ends on it. Built in four or five places, evoked in many more.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the oldest form in Italian poetry, Petrarch’s canzone, its fixed stanza repeated through the poem for five centuries. The turn was the canzone libera: from A Silvia on, stanzas of unequal length, hendecasyllables and settenari mixed at the poem’s need, rhyme free and returning where it is wanted. It freed the lyric’s central form from within and became the form of modern Italian verse. The second turn was of matter: a materialist, anti-providential philosophy at the centre of lyric, against Manzoni’s Catholic Romanticism and the liberal faith in progress. The stake was paid: the Naples edition of 1835 met the censors, and the Palinodia and La ginestra set the poet against the Florentine liberals who were his friends. Held below 9.0: the diction stays classical and Petrarchan inside the tradition it bends, and the turn of form came over ten years, not at a stroke.
Score: 8.9 / 10
In the great poems the form is the knowledge. L’infinito knows that the infinite is made by a limit, and makes it in its syntax: from “questa siepe”, this hedge, to “quello / infinito silenzio”, that infinite silence, and back to “questa voce”, this voice, the lines running over their ends until near and far change places. In the free canzone the stanza lasts as long as the thought, and the settenario’s short fall at a stanza’s end carries the disappointment, so that in A Silvia and Le ricordanze recollection swells and breaks. Il sabato del villaggio sets the eve before the feast because pleasure lives in expectation. Held at 9.0: the book’s form is looser than a cycle’s, the civic canzoni’s regular form is a container, and the codas, the moral to the “garzoncello scherzoso”, playful boy, sometimes state what the image already knew.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence, not promise. Two centuries of reading have not closed the book, and the readings conflict. Francesco De Sanctis set Leopardi beside Schopenhauer; Benedetto Croce divided the poet of the idylls from the thinker; Walter Binni’s La nuova poetica leopardiana and Cesare Luporini’s Leopardi progressivo, both of 1947, reversed him and read the late, heroic poet of La ginestra as the height of the work; Sebastiano Timpanaro read a materialist of the Enlightenment line, Emanuele Severino a philosopher of nothingness. The questions stay open: whether the centre is the idyll or the late heroic poem, whether La ginestra is a political poem or a cosmic one, whether the pessimism is a doctrine or a stance taken for the sake of solidarity. The verse yields on return, read aloud. Held a step below the top: in the middle book the doctrine repeats without deepening.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is the poetry of Italy and, beyond it, the European lyric of the century. Intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of the Italian lyric in its central form, the canzone libera, in its matter, a lyric of argument without a god, and in its lexicon of the indefinite and the remembered. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Italy the twentieth century defined itself through him, in Ungaretti’s lectures and his Sentimento del tempo (1933), in Montale and Saba; beyond Italy the reach is named and particular, Schopenhauer citing him in 1844, Nietzsche praising the prose, Beckett’s Proust (1931) taking its epigraph from A se stesso, Lowell’s Imitations (1961), Calvino’s lectures on exactitude. Held below 9.0: Carducci and Pascoli admired him without taking his form or matter as their method, much of the reach came a century late, and abroad it was particular rather than formative.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole: the 1845 edition rests on the poet’s own corrections and order, and the textual questions, a few readings, the order of the last poems and the fragments, touch no poem’s form. Form takes no charge. The span is about one hundred and eighty years from the edition and a little more from the poems. Presence in Italy is as wide as any lyric’s after Petrarch: L’infinito and A Silvia are learned in every school, and the book has been in print without a break. Outside Italy it is steady and narrower, kept by poets, scholars and translators more than by a general readership. Nothing in the surface has dated but the civic canzoni’s address to an Italy not yet one, which is history the poems survive. Charged a tenth for the narrower presence abroad.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the Italian. At its height the making is load-bearing and among the finest in the language. The blank hendecasyllable of L’infinito runs across the line so that the sentence itself founders into its last. “Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento”
“Sweet and clear is the night and without wind” is made of plain words in an order no other would improve. A Silvia works by echo, “rimembri ancora”, do you still remember, its rhymes returning at the stanza ends like a bell. “D’in su la vetta della torre antica”
“From the top of the ancient tower” fixes the bird, the tower and the evening of Il passero solitario in a line, and La ginestra holds a long argumentative syntax over three hundred lines without losing the music. Held at 9.3 by what the book also carries: the stiff Latinate inversions of the first canzoni, the slackness of the Palinodia, the conventional diction of Consalvo.
Score: 9.3 / 10
One law governs, and it is stated in development rather than broken by it: a finite being’s desire for an infinite happiness, and a nature that wakes the desire and denies it. Take the two most distant elements. All’Italia (1818) sees the walls and arches of the ancestors, “ma la gloria non vedo”, but I do not see the glory; La ginestra (1836) sets the human race against nature. The first laments a vitality lost to history; the last finds that the loss was nature’s from the start, and turns the civic voice from Italy to mankind. The village Saturday, the moon over Asia and the Aspasia poems obey the same law: illusion lives in expectation and dies in arrival. Held below 9.0: the early canzoni obey the law in matter but not in voice, and the Palinodia’s irony and the Scherzo stand apart in tone.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what a lyric body holds, and high for one, because the orders are many and one law integrates them. Consciousness throughout: memory, boredom, the mind against the infinite. The family, in the father’s house and garden of Le ricordanze and the sister’s wedding. Love, in Silvia, Nerina and Aspasia; death everywhere. The village and its labour: the girl coming home “in sul calar del sole”, at the falling of the sun, the carpenter working by lamplight on Saturday night, the craftsman back at his work after the storm. The nation and history: Italy, Rome, Dante, the buried cities. The century’s creeds of progress; the moon and stars, the volcano and the broom; the sacred, as an absence argued. Held at 8.5: the state and the economy appear only as satire or aspiration, and every order is seen from one solitary vantage.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and The Made, each at 9.3, then The Unconcealment at 9.2. Height reached often and in several kinds, from the infinite in fifteen lines to the volcano and the stars; two centuries of readings that conflict and stay open; a hendecasyllable that at its height is load-bearing and among the finest in the language; and a disclosure of nature’s indifference that can be stated, holds, and in the poem of the broom on Vesuvius yields an ethic.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2: inside the great poems almost nothing can be taken, but a quarter of the forty-one, the lesser civic canzoni, a sentimental deathbed poem, the light pieces and the fragments, could go with little loss. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.5, high for a lyric body: consciousness, the family, love, the village, history and the cosmos are held, but the state and the economy only as satire or aspiration, and every order from one vantage.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest counted axis is The Inevitable at 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti, scored as the body in the Florence edition of 1845 (Le Monnier), edited by Antonio Ranieri after the poet’s death in Naples in 1837 and following the order and the corrections Leopardi left for it: forty-one poems, thirty-six numbered canti and five fragments, composed from about 1816 to 1836. The earlier states, the Canzoni of 1824, the Versi of 1826, the Florence Canti of 1831 and the Naples edition of 1835, are context, not the unit. The poems weighed most are L’infinito, La sera del dì di festa, A Silvia, Le ricordanze, the Canto notturno, La quiete dopo la tempesta, Il sabato del villaggio, A se stesso and La ginestra, with the Ultimo canto di Saffo, Il passero solitario and Aspasia behind them. No text was in hand, and no quotation was checked against a file. The Italian of the major poems is known well, the civic canzoni and the fragments less closely; line counts are given only where certain. Every axis is judged on the Italian; the hendecasyllable and settenario are heard and judged, but the finer points of the poet’s diction against his regional and classical sources are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. Italian is quoted only where its words are certain, with the page’s own close rendering. Translation · Jonathan Galassi’s complete Canti (2010), used for sense; it is not quoted, and no translation is charged to the poems. Matters not verified or contested are not given or are given as contested: the dating of the fragments and of some poems, among them Il passero solitario, is disputed and nothing here rests on it.