The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Eugenio Montale · a book of poems in six sections · first edition Piero Gobetti, Turin, 1925; second edition, enlarged, Ribet, Turin, 1928 · scored as the book of 1928, in Montale’s order, on Montale’s Italian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Italian quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beside it, and Jonathan Galassi’s Collected Poems 1920 to 1954 for sense
Mode
The lyric of objects that carry a state of mind: short poems of one perception and one turn, and longer argued poems addressed to a “tu”, in the traditional Italian line made rough
Mythos
The dry land against the sea as origin and law; the sea addressed as father; childhood’s coast as a fallen paradise; the varco, the gap by which one might step out of the net, named and not found
Phase
From a threshold through the musical early pieces, the bones, the sea suite and the long poems of noon and shade, to a close on the coast and a hope of renewal
Presentation
A book of poems in six sections, “In limine”, “Movimenti”, “Ossi di seppia”, “Mediterraneo”, “Meriggi e ombre” and “Riviere”; mostly endecasillabi and settenari, with lines stretched past both, and rhyme frequent, irregular and harsh
Register
Dry, lucid and exact; a cold elevation in short flashes; a voice kept apart, refusing consolation and asking for none
Scale
One consciousness on one coast: a hedge, a wall, lemon trees, a cuttlebone, the sea, a house on the shore
Governing Proposition
A first book of short poems from the Ligurian coast, published in Turin in 1925 by an antifascist press and enlarged in 1928, which takes the noon, the heat and the shore that its great predecessor had made into a fusion of the self with nature, and drains them to a dry world of walls, stones and bones. The wager of the book is that the old Italian line, the endecasillabo with its rhyme, bent and roughened, can carry a new and negative knowledge: that the lyric can say only what we are not, that life is a walk beside a wall, and that any salvation would be a flaw in necessity, a link in the chain that does not hold.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Eugenio Montale’s first book, Ossi di seppia, was published in Turin in 1925 by Piero Gobetti, whose press was antifascist, in the year the regime consolidated its hold. A second edition, enlarged, followed from Ribet in Turin in 1928, adding poems to “Meriggi e ombre”, “Arsenio” among them. That is substantially the text read since, and it is the book scored here, in Montale’s Italian and in his order. “In limine” stands at the threshold. “Movimenti” holds “I limoni”, “Corno inglese”, “Falsetto”, “Minstrels” and the poems for Camillo Sbarbaro. “Ossi di seppia”, the short poems that give the book its name, follows; then “Mediterraneo”, a suite addressed to the sea; then “Meriggi e ombre”, with “Fine dell’infanzia”, “L’agave su lo scoglio”, “Arsenio”, “Crisalide”, “Casa sul mare”, “I morti”, “Delta” and “Incontro”; and “Riviere” closes.
The title is an argument. Cuttlefish bones are what the sea throws up on the shore: white, light, emptied, the residue of a living thing. The poems of the title section are residues of that kind, each compressed to one perception and one turn. The brevity is not modesty. It is what lets the poems claim a negative knowledge without building a system to hold it, and what keeps that knowledge from hardening into doctrine. A book of short poems is weighed at its own scale, and weighed most on the poems that carry it: “I limoni”, “Non chiederci la parola”, “Meriggiare pallido e assorto”, “Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato”, “Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro”, “Cigola la carrucola del pozzo”, the “Mediterraneo” suite, “Arsenio” and “Casa sul mare”.
The metre is the traditional Italian line: the endecasillabo and the settenario, and lines that stretch past both and are pulled back. Rhyme is frequent but irregular, often harsh and consonantal, and assonance and the rima ipermetra are used freely. The book keeps what the avant-garde of its years was throwing away, and bends it. “In limine” gives the first instruction, to look for a flaw in what binds: “cerca una maglia rotta nella rete / che ci stringe, tu balza fuori, fuggi!” (look for a broken link in the net that binds us; leap out, flee!). The whole book can be read as that search, and as the report that the broken link has not been found.
Movement II
Behind the book stands D’Annunzio, whose Alcyone (1903) had made the Tuscan summer noon a panic fusion of the self with nature. Montale takes the same noon, the same coast and the same heat, and drains them. The meriggio, the hour of noon, becomes aridity; the fusion becomes a wall. Where D’Annunzio’s rhymes were sweet, these are rough, and the diction admits prose words, technical words and words of dialect. The swerve is made inside the tradition rather than outside it, and that is the riskier wager, since the old line has to be made to carry a knowledge it had not carried before.
“I limoni” names the opponent at its start: “i poeti laureati” (the laurelled poets), who move only among plants “dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri o acanti” (with little-used names: box, privet or acanthus). Against them the poem offers lemon trees and ditches, a plainer ground and a plainer speech. It states the book’s hope in the form the book will keep: a flaw in necessity, “l’anello che non tiene” (the link that does not hold), the place where the chain might give. And it ends with the “trombe d’oro della solarità” (golden trumpets of sunlight) breaking into a grey city courtyard: elevation, briefly, in the middle of the ordinary.
The way was not wholly unbroken. The crepuscolari, Gozzano among them, had already lowered the lyric voice, and so had Camillo Sbarbaro, to whom the book gives poems of its own. Ungaretti’s L’allegria broke the line more radically. Montale did not join the avant-garde: he kept the endecasillabo and rhyme and bent them, and that cost him the easier modernist credit. The stake was real, the old line made to carry a new negative knowledge, though it was not extreme. The softer, musical pieces of “Movimenti”, “Corno inglese” and “Minstrels”, belong to the manner the book is leaving behind, and it keeps them as a record of the passage out of it.
Movement III
“Non chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato / l’animo nostro informe”
“Do not ask us for the word that squares our formless soul on every side.” The poem is the book’s statement of method, and it is a statement about the modern lyric and the modern self. It closes on what can still be said: “Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, / ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo” (this alone we can tell you today: what we are not, what we do not want). Knowledge arrives only negatively, and the poet’s authority is the refusal of a false one. In twelve lines whose rhymes refuse to settle, the poem enacts what it refuses; set out in prose, the same claim would be a manifesto. It is the truth of one consciousness, and the history of its year is deliberately outside it.
“Meriggiare pallido e assorto” moves in four stanzas from the hedge and the ants to the wall. It is built almost wholly of verbs in the infinitive, to pass the noon, to listen, to spy, to watch, to feel, so that no subject appears at all until the close turns on the whole of life. The syntax is the meaning: a life given as a series of acts with no one performing them. The close states that “tutta la vita e il suo travaglio” (all of life and its labour) is “in questo seguitare una muraglia / che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia” (in this walking along a wall that has sharp shards of bottle on its top). The rhyme of “muraglia” on “bottiglia” is harsh, and the harshness is the aridity heard.
“Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato” is eight lines in two quatrains. The first gives three images of the evil of living: “il rivo strozzato che gorgoglia”, “l’incartocciarsi della foglia / riarsa”, “il cavallo stramazzato” (the choked stream that gurgles; the curling of the parched leaf; the fallen horse). The last word of the quatrain falls like the horse. The second rises to the counter-image, “la divina Indifferenza” (the divine Indifference), with the statue, the cloud and the falcon high up. Nothing can be taken away; remove a line and the scale collapses. Whether that Indifference is a stoic good or a void is one of the questions the poem has kept open for a century.
Movement IV
“il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietro / di me, con un terrore di ubriaco”
“the nothing at my back, the void behind me, with a drunkard’s terror.” “Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro” is a morning walk in air like glass. The walker turns and sees the void, and it is one of the sharpest metaphysical frights in the century’s lyric, given on an ordinary morning. Whether it is a vision or a hallucination has not been settled, and the poem does not need it settled. The elevation of the book is of this kind: cold, short and recurring, in the title section and again in “Meriggi e ombre”.
“Mediterraneo” turns from the dry land to the sea and addresses it directly. The sea is father, origin and law, the measure the speaker fails: this is the book’s one deliberate myth. Set against it is the dry Ligurian coast, wall, stone and noon sun, and the pattern of land against sea runs through the whole book. But the suite restates its argument across more movements than the argument needs, and it reaches toward the sublime of the sea in a manner that in places is more declared than achieved. The sea’s paternity is asserted in apostrophe rather than enacted: a declared relation, not a structure the poems build and stand on.
The other figures of the book are of the same kind. The boy’s coast of “Fine dell’infanzia” is a fallen paradise. The varco, the gap or the miracle by which one might step out of the net, recurs from “In limine” onward as a structure of salvation without a saviour, and it remains a possibility named, not a story built. The bones, the wall, the agave on its rock and the lemon trees acquire weight more often than they acquire myth; they are emblems. That is the limit of the book’s depth of pattern: its particulars are made to bear a mind, not a myth.
Movement V
The late poems of “Meriggi e ombre” point forward. “Arsenio”, added in 1928, gives a man arrested in a storm on the shore, held still while everything around him moves: the nearest the book comes to an archetype of its own. With “Casa sul mare” it already speaks the narrative, addressed lyric of Le occasioni, an argument with a “tu”. Set beside “Corno inglese” or “Minstrels”, musical and impressionist, Debussy in words, these poems share the coast and the wind but not quite the physics: the early pieces are moods, the late ones are arguments. One law, the dry world, the wall, the varco not found, the self kept apart and lucid, governs the title section and “Meriggi e ombre”. At both ends of the book it bends.
“Riviere” closes the book on a reconciliation with the coast and a hope of renewal. It sits uneasily beside “ciò che non siamo”, and whether it is a conclusion or an error is still argued. The order of the book, from the musical “Movimenti” through the bones to the sea suite and the long poems of noon and shade, records the coming of a voice, and the arc is real; it is less necessary than the single poems. What the book holds is narrow and deep: consciousness, the natural order in exact particulars, the sacred in negative, childhood and its loss, love in the late “tu”, death. It refuses the public world of 1925, history, the state, labour and the city, and the refusal is part of its meaning.
With Ungaretti’s L’allegria it is one of the two founding books of twentieth-century Italian poetry. It established a poetry of objects that carry a state of mind, which Montale later related to Eliot’s objective correlative, and an argued lyric in the traditional line. Sereni, Caproni, Zanzotto and Pasolini define themselves with or against it; Lowell made versions of Montale in Imitations, and Arrowsmith and Galassi translated the book. In Italy every pupil reads “Meriggiare” and “Spesso il male di vivere”, a century on. The wall still has its broken glass, the net its unbroken mesh, and the book’s hope is still the one it named at the start: the link that does not hold.
Act III · The Twelve
The title section is close to irreducible. “Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato” is eight lines in two quatrains: three images of the evil of living, “il rivo strozzato che gorgoglia”, “l’incartocciarsi della foglia / riarsa”, “il cavallo stramazzato” (the choked stream that gurgles, the curling of the parched leaf, the fallen horse), then the counter-image of a divine Indifference; remove a line and the scale collapses. “Meriggiare pallido e assorto” walks four stanzas toward a final turn the whole poem was moving to. The book is less compelled. “Movimenti” carries softer, musical apprentice pieces, “Corno inglese” and “Minstrels”, which the book could lose and know nearly as much, and “Mediterraneo” restates its argument across more movements than it needs.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The book states a condition, not a weather. “Non chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato / l’animo nostro informe” (do not ask us for the word that squares our formless soul on every side) closes on “Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, / ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo” (this alone we can tell you today, what we are not, what we do not want): knowledge arrives only negatively, and the poet’s authority is the refusal of a false one. Life is a walk beside a wall topped with broken glass; hope is a flaw in necessity, “l’anello che non tiene” (the link that does not hold). These are meanings, stated and holding. Held below 9.0 because the condition is one consciousness’s, and the history of 1925 is kept outside.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The elevation is cold, and it recurs. “Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro” turns, on a morning’s walk, to see “il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietro / di me, con un terrore di ubriaco” (the nothing at my back, the void behind me, with a drunkard’s terror): one of the sharpest metaphysical frights in the century’s lyric. “Spesso il male di vivere” rises in its second quatrain to the divine Indifference, the statue, the cloud and the falcon high up. “I limoni” ends with the “trombe d’oro della solarità” (golden trumpets of sunlight) breaking into a grey city courtyard. The charge: “Mediterraneo” reaches for the sea’s sublime directly and in parts declares more than it achieves. The summits are short, which is the form.
Score: 8.5 / 10
There is a built pattern: the dry land of the Ligurian coast, wall, stone and noon sun, set against the sea as origin and law. “Mediterraneo” addresses the sea as father and as the measure the speaker fails, the book’s one deliberate myth; the boy’s coast of “Fine dell’infanzia” is a fallen paradise; the varco, the gap by which one might step out of the net, recurs as a structure of salvation without a saviour; and Arsenio, held still in a storm on the shore while everything moves, is close to archetype. What holds the axis at 8.2 is that much of this is evoked rather than load-bearing. The sea’s paternity is asserted in apostrophe, not enacted, and the miracle stays a possibility named, not a story built.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The swerve is from D’Annunzio, whose Alcyone (1903) had made the Tuscan summer noon a panic fusion of the self with nature. Montale takes the same noon, coast and heat and drains them: the noon becomes aridity, the fusion a wall. “I limoni” names the opponent at once, “i poeti laureati” who move only among plants “dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri o acanti” (the laurelled poets; with little-used names, box, privet or acanthus), and offers lemon trees and ditches instead. The rhymes are rough where D’Annunzio’s were sweet, and the old line is kept and bent, a riskier wager inside the tradition than outside it. Held at 8.5 because the crepuscolari, Gozzano among them, and Sbarbaro had already lowered the lyric voice, and Ungaretti’s L’allegria broke the line more radically.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The title is the form’s argument: cuttlefish bones, what the sea throws up, white, light and emptied, the residue of a living thing. The short poems of the title section are such residues, each compressed to one perception and one turn, and that brevity lets them claim a negative knowledge without a system. Put “Non chiederci la parola” into a prose essay on the limits of poetry and it becomes a manifesto; in twelve lines whose rhymes refuse to settle it enacts its refusal. The harsh rhyme of “muraglia” on “bottiglia” is the aridity heard. The order of the book records the coming of the voice, from the musical early pieces to the long late poems; the arc is real, but less necessary than the single poems.
Score: 8.6 / 10
A century of return, in evidence. The book has carried continuous Italian commentary since the 1920s, through Contini’s essays and the long tradition of annotated school editions, and the debate over its relation to Leopardi, to D’Annunzio, to Dante’s rime petrose and to the later Montale has not closed. The short poems reopen in particular: whether “Forse un mattino” is a vision or a hallucination, whether the divine Indifference is a stoic good or a void, whether “Riviere” is a conclusion or an error. The formal depth matches: under an apparently free line, the metrics reveal the old measures. Held at 8.7 because some of “Movimenti” yields little on return.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The intrinsic force is high: with Ungaretti’s L’allegria, the book reorganised the possibilities of the Italian lyric after D’Annunzio, establishing a poetry of objects that carry a state of mind, which Montale later related to Eliot’s objective correlative, and a discursive, argued lyric in the traditional line. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the generations after, Sereni in Gli strumenti umani, Caproni, and later Zanzotto and Pasolini, define themselves with or against Montale, and Italian critics name a period manner after him; abroad, Robert Lowell’s versions in Imitations (1961) and the translations of Arrowsmith and Galassi carry it. Held at 8.7 because the Nobel of 1975 crowned the whole work, and the international reach rests partly on the later books.
Score: 8.7 / 10
A hundred and one years have passed since 1925, and a hundred since the text of 1928. The text is whole and stable, kept under the author’s control through later editions, and nothing is lost. Presence in Italy is the widest a book of poems can have: “Meriggiare pallido e assorto” and “Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato” are school texts read by every pupil, and the book has been continuously in print. Outside Italy the presence is real but narrower, a poet’s poet in English translation more than a general reader’s book. That is what holds the axis at 9.1 and not above: wide in its own language, moderate beyond it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the Italian, and the making is load-bearing. The endecasillabo is handled with a freedom that never loses its count; lines stretch to fourteen or sixteen syllables and are pulled back. The rhyme is Dante’s rime aspre relearned, “muraglia” on “bottiglia”, and “stramazzato” closes the first quatrain of “Spesso il male di vivere” like a fall. “Meriggiare” is built almost wholly of infinitives, so that no subject appears until the close turns on the whole of life: a decision of syntax that is the poem’s meaning. The lexicon is precise and rare without preciosity: “schiocchi di merli, frusci di serpi” (cracks of blackbirds, rustlings of snakes). The charges: the weaker “Movimenti” pieces are competent and derivative, and “Mediterraneo” is at times rhetorical.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the title section and “Meriggi e ombre”: the dry world, the wall, the varco not found, the self kept apart and lucid. Take the two most distant elements. “Corno inglese” and “Minstrels” are musical and impressionist, Debussy in words; “Arsenio” and “Casa sul mare” already speak the narrative, addressed lyric of Le occasioni. They share the coast and the wind but not quite the physics: the first are moods, the last are arguments with a “tu”. “Riviere”, closing on a reconciliation with the coast and a hope of renewal, sits uneasily beside “ciò che non siamo”. Held at 8.4 because the range is moderate, and the law, which holds over most of it, bends at both ends.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a book of short lyrics holds. Consciousness; the natural order, sea, land, weather, plants and animals, in exact particulars; the sacred in negative, the miracle, the divine Indifference, the absent God; childhood and its loss, in “Fine dell’infanzia”; love, in the later poems’ “tu”; death, in “I morti”. What is absent is absent by choice: history, the state, labour, the city except as a grey courtyard, the family except as childhood’s frame. The book refuses the public world of 1925, and the refusal is part of its meaning, but this axis weighs what is held. That holds it at 7.3, the lowest of the twelve: what the book encompasses is narrow and deep.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Made at 9.0, then The Unconcealment at 8.8. A text whole and stable for a century and read by every Italian pupil; a command of the endecasillabo and of harsh rhyme that makes the making load-bearing, as in the infinitives of “Meriggiare pallido e assorto”; and a negative knowledge stated and holding, that the lyric can say only what we are not.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: consciousness, the natural order, the sacred in negative, childhood, love and death are held, while history, the state, labour and the city are refused. Among the gated axes The Archetypal Deep is lowest, at 8.2: the sea as father is asserted in apostrophe and the varco stays a possibility named, so that the book’s figures are emblems more often than myth.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. The twelve sum to 102.1 and the book stands at 8.5, below the summit on its aggregate as well as at the gate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Eugenio Montale’s Ossi di seppia in the second edition, enlarged, Ribet, Turin, 1928, which is substantially the text read since; the first edition (Piero Gobetti, Turin, 1925) is named as the book’s first form and not scored. The unit is the book in its six sections, “In limine”, “Movimenti”, “Ossi di seppia”, “Mediterraneo”, “Meriggi e ombre” and “Riviere”, in Montale’s order. Weighed most: “I limoni”, “Non chiederci la parola”, “Meriggiare pallido e assorto”, “Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato”, “Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro”, “Cigola la carrucola del pozzo”, the “Mediterraneo” suite, “Arsenio” and “Casa sul mare”. Known less closely, and argued from in no particular: “Minstrels” and “Quasi una fantasia” in “Movimenti”, and “Flussi”, “Clivo” and “Marezzo” in “Meriggi e ombre”. Every score is judged on the Italian, which is not in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Italian is quoted only where its words are certain; with each quotation stands a close English rendering, made for this page and not taken from any published translation. The metre and rhyme are heard as a reader of Italian verse hears them; no claim is made on the finer points of Ligurian dialect diction. Translations · Jonathan Galassi’s Collected Poems 1920 to 1954 (1998), close and annotated, for sense; William Arrowsmith’s Cuttlefish Bones (1992) as the second. Neither is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the poems. Poems are cited by title or by first line. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of poems in the book, in its title section and in the sea suite; the dates of particular poems; the first printing of “Arsenio”; the introduction to the edition of 1928; Montale’s part in the protests of intellectuals in 1925; his own later judgment of “Riviere”; the editors of particular annotated editions; and the subject of Brodsky’s essay on Montale.