Eugenio Montale

The Poetry of the Later Years

Eanna O Ceallachain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781900755450
• eBook ISBN: 9781351198257
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) is best known for the intense lyrical vision of his first three collections of poetry, written between the 1920s and early 1950s. With the publication of ""Satura"" in 1971, the profile of his work changes irrevocably as a new disillusioned voice emerged, commenting ironically on post-war Italian society and debunking his own previous poetic myths. O'Ceallachin, while placing this body of work firmly in its historical and ideological context, explores the poetic texts in detail, approaching the work from a variety of interpretative and thematic angles, and constructing a comprehensive reading of Montale's later work."

Chapter 1
Mosca and her Predecessors

The dialogue with a female tu represents perhaps the most persistent and deeply rooted figurative device employed by Montale. It is, among other things, one of the main vehicles through which he expresses his ideological positions, and the changing identities and attributes of his interlocutors reflect also his changing relationship with historical realities. Before discussing Mosca, the woman who dominates the later poetry, it may be useful to give a brief overview of the roles and functions of the various female figures in the first three collections, in order both to place the figure of Mosca in context and to help exemplify some of the radical thematic and formal changes that characterize the poetry of the later years.

Arletta

The first female figure with an important and enduring role in Montale's poetry was also the last to emerge with a name and clearly-delineated features into the full light of day in both the poetry itself and the critical literature. Arletta, as she is generally known, is the poetic transfiguration of a young girl, Anna degli Uberti, whose family rented the villa beside that of Montale's family in Monterosso for several years around 1920 (see Appendix). In 'Annetta' (1972), the poet makes an expiatory gesture towards her memory:

Perdona Annetta se dove tu sei
(non certo tra di noi, i sedicenti
vivi) poco ti giunge il mio ricordo.
Le tue apparizioni furono per molti anni
rare e impreviste, non certo da te volute
Anche i luoghi (la rupe dei doganieri,
la foce del Bisagno dove ti trasformasti in Dafhe)
non avevano senso senza di te.
[...] (OV 490)

Thus Montale finally named explicitly the woman whose presence, though of fundamental importance in many poems, had remained deliberately submerged up till then. The poetic 'luoghi' referred to are unmistakable: the cliffiop of 'La casa dei doganieri' (Occasioni) and the 'foce' of 'Incontro' (Ossi), where she was transformed:

[...] e farsi mia
un'altra vita sento, ingombro d'una
forma che mi fu tolta; e quasi anelli
alle dita non foglie mi si attorcono
ma capelli.

Poi più nulla. Oh sommersa!: tu dispari
qual sei venuta, e nulla so di te.
[...] (OV 97)

From Le occasioni to Satura, the figure of Arietta is largely eclipsed by those of other ispiratrici (notably Clizia), but her enduring (not to say growing) significance begins to be appreciated by critics from the 1970s onwards, in parallel with her explicit re-emergence in new poems. Luciano Rebay, with the help of direct indications on Montale's part, is the first to spell out the extent of the Arletta cycle in Le occasioni.¹ The poet underlines the significance of Arletta when he describes her to Cima in 1977 as 'il personaggio più reale e che resiste nel tempo'.² Eventually, Grignani extends Arletta's presence right into the heart of La bufera e altro, thus bearing out the poet's indication of her 'resistance' throughout his work.³ So Arletta has assumed, retrospectively, a privileged position in Montale's opus, and indeed this shadowy figure can now be seen to have significant ideological or historical connotations from her earliest appearances.

In 'Incontro', as Jacomuzzi points out, a dense web of Dantesque references and echoes superimposes an 'infernal' moral landscape on the Genoese urban setting and leads to the possibility of an allegorical reading through an embryonic system of 'doppia denotazione'.⁴ The 'incontro' of the title can thus also be seen to represent Montale's meeting with Dante's poetry, an encounter between Arletta and Beatrice in which Arletta becomes a 'figura di Beatrice', so that this text highlights Montale's rejection of 'elegy' (the 'tristezza' of the opening line) in favour of 'una conoscenza e una rappresentazione "altra", almeno tendenzialmente allegorica del reale'.⁵ This establishes a useful framework for an allegorical reading of this and subsequent collections, so that, beyond the intertextuality of the Dantesque allusions, one can begin to read references to contemporary historical reality, as for example a denunciation of what Cambon calls the 'political and moral atmosphere' of the mid-1920s via such infernal figures as those of the 'incappati di corteo' of 'Incontro'.⁶

Similarly, Arshi Pipa traces a 'hellish atmosphere' through various texts in Ossi, and while elements of Pipa's approach are highly questionable (such as his constant search for 'cryptograms' of political opposition), he rightly points out the allegorical function of the relationship with the beloved woman, so that in 'Incontro', for example, 'the poet's ideal of redemptive love is rooted in political reality'.⁷ But this poem, coining as it does at the close of the period of Ossi, is merely a first inkling of the later centrality of female figures and of their political function. As such it constitutes a prologue to the descent into gathering darkness of Le occasioni, as seen in its closing lines:

[...] Prega per me
aUora ch'io discenda altro cammino
che una via di città,
nell'aria persa, innanzi al brulichio
dei vivi; ch'io ti senta accanto; ch'io
scenda senza viltà. (OV 97)

An atmosphere of deep gloom pervades much of Montale's second collection, written, Cataldi notes, against the background of the consolidation of Fascism and the comprehensive defeat of liberal ideals: 'A1 fondo c'è la sconfitta di un'utopia: quella, per intendersi, gobettiana.'⁸ The result is a sense of enclosure, suffocation and oppression, in which literature becomes a key value to be preserved. For the Florentine intellectuals grouped around the journals Solaria and Letteratura, culture and art become the last line of defence, through which ideological opposition can, as Luperini puts it, be sublimated: 'La sublimazione è la risposta che un'intera cultura dà a quel clima di assedio cui alludono molte poesie delle Occasioni'. An attachment to a broad European tradition of cultural enlightenment leads to a belief in poetry as a value in itself, to be strenuously defended, and which in turn protects its adepts. In this context Montale's female interlocutor becomes 'l'intermediaria di una religione della cultura e della poesia', a 'religion' that springs from the very concrete historical tragedy of the 1930s.⁹

The need, signalled in die closing lines of 'Incontro', for the io to 'feel' Arletta beside him in this tragic atmosphere, is in evidence in several poems in Occasioni, most notably 'La casa dei doganieri'. In this poem (dated 1930) the increasingly bleak political outlook has its correlative in troubled meteorological imager)' (continuing a vein found already in several texts in Ossi):

Libeccio sferza da anni le vecchie mura
e il suono del tuo riso lion è più lieto:
la bussola va impazzita all' avventura
[...] (OV 161)

In the 'desolation' of the woman's absence the poetic persona is left in a shadowy, twilight world where meaning is problematic: 'Tu non ricordi la casa di questa / mia sera. Ed io non so chi va e chi resta'. The poem is a memorable early formulation of the insuperable detachment, the 'otherness' of the absent woman ('altro tempo frastorna / la tua memoria'), who is thus seen in opposition to the negative, temporal-historical reality that contains the io. It also brings together key elements of Arietta as a 'crepuscular' figure. Thus the twilight setting is laden with associations of loss, absence, regret: 'desolata t'attende dalla sera'; 'ma tu resti sola / né qui respiri nell' oscurità'. The Ligurian coastal landscape, already associated with Arietta in Ossi, also contains what is perhaps her most enduring senhal (in the somewhat inaccurate sense of this term later famously employed by the poet himself with reference to Clizia¹⁰), the intermittent light indicating a possible (though uncertain) path to salvation:

Oh 1'orizzonte in fuga, dove s'accende
rara la luce della petroliera!
II varco è qui?

This intermittent gleam of light, in its more usual form of the 'faro', also occurs in 'Vecchi versi', where Arletta's recurrent motifs can also be seen to have historical overtones. Superficially, there is nothing more than the date of composition (1926) and the explicit setting of the Cinque Terre to link this poem to other Arletta texts (although the link is confirmed by Montale's personal statement to Rebay¹¹). However, in this 'crepuscolo', her senhal shines through: 'il punto atono / del faro che baluginava sulla / roccia del Tino' (OV 111). It is this poem, the first in Le occasioni proper, that establishes the spatial opposition between interior and exterior that will constitute a fundamental component of some of the collection's most important texts: from this interior scene we can look ahead to those of 'Nuove stanze' or 'Notizie dall' Amiata', where the outside world looms large and threatening.

And here in 'Vecchi versi', through the window (an important recurring element of these spatial representations) comes the macabre intrusion of the moth: 'Era un insetto orribile dal becco / aguzzo [...] / [...] al dosso il teschio / umano' (OV 111-12). This sinister intrusion from the exterior world, characterized by the sign of the skull, into the protected realm of home, family and childhood memories (as indicated by the presence of'mia madre', the nephews' games and the 'volti familian' of the dead) undoubtedly carries implicit historical resonances. But perhaps more telling is a strictly literary resonance with the crepuscular world of Guido Gozzano. Although Gozzano's 'Le farfalle' (including 'Acherontia Atropos', a poem bearing remarkable coincidental similarities to aspects of 'Vecchi versi') was not published until the 1930s, there is an earlier appearance, in 'La signorina Felicita', of the same sinister moth, including references to the 'segno spaventoso' on its back, and its 'ronzo lamentoso'.¹²

In fact echoes of Gozzano and other crepuscolari can be found throughout the Arietta cycle, with its archetypal images of childhood, loss, and above all, premature death.¹³ This 'crepuscular' dimension is identified by Becker as a key to the ideological and historical meaning of the poems. For him, the adoption in the 1920s of 'weak' crepuscular motifs (nostalgia for childhood, self-absorption, twilight) must be seen in part as a rejection of D'Annunzian bluster, reflecting the poet's 'antagonism to the triumphant new regime'.¹⁴ This is not to say, however, that Montale subscribes wholeheartedly here to the stance of impotent irony so characteristic of the crepuscolari. His distance from their more self-indulgent excesses was clearly signalled in the essay 'Stile e tradizione' (1925), where, while on the one hand rejecting 'superomismo, messianismo e altre bacature', he also lamented the status of poetry as 'una solitaria vergogna individuale' (SMAMS 11, 14). So while the literary resonances of the Arietta cycle highlight the isolation of the poetic io, his alienation from historical reality and his inability to act in the practical world, these crepuscular resonances are inserted by Montale into an increasingly tragic, Dantesque scenario, rather than one of ironic, Gozzanian isolation.¹⁵

By the time of 'Eastbourne' (dated '1933 e 1935'), the tragic and historical dimension comes to the fore in a way that tests the boundaries of the Arietta cycle and ultimately demonstrates the limitations of this interlocutor. The coastal setting, despite its geographical dislocation, is in keeping with the girl's previous appearances, as are other senhals, such as the 'guizzo' of light reflecting from windows to cliffs, the word 'varco', the gloom of evening ('Si fa tardi'), her 'respiro' (OV 170). But the sense of an obscure threat acquires a new urgency here as the characteristic meteorological motif ('Freddo un vento m'investe') is followed by disturbing images of the holiday: wheelchair-bound 'mutilati' (almost certainly warwounded)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Mosca and her Predecessors
• 2 Satura: The Poetry of Public Discourse
• 3 The Poet's Persona: Isolation and Withdrawal
• 4 L'Altro
• 5 Memories: 'Fummo felici un giorno ...'
• Appendix: Montale's Women
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Montale's Poems