Giacomo Leopardi's "Infinite" and "To Sylvia"... 'Leopardi is generally considered the greatest Italian lyric poet of the nineteenth century '
I greatly enjoy Leopardi's writing; truly moving.
~ Editor K.
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HERE
Giacomo Leopardi
(1798-1837)
Poetry by Count Giacomo Leopardi - Infinite
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea.
Poetry by Count Giacomo Leopardi - To Silvia
the moments, in your mortal life,
when beauty still shone
in your sidelong, laughing eyes,
and you, light and thoughtful,
went
beyond girlhood's limits?
The quiet rooms and the streets
around you, sounded
to your endless singing,
when you sat, happily content,
intent, on that woman's work,
the vague future, arriving alive in your mind.
It was the scented May, and that's how
you spent your day.
I would leave my intoxicating studies,
and the turned-down pages,
where my young life,
the best of me, was left,
and from the balcony of my father's house
strain to catch the sound of your voice,
and your hand, quick,
running over the loom.
I would look at the serene sky,
the gold lit gardens and paths,
that side the mountains, this side the far-off sea.
And human tongue cannot say
what I felt then.
What sweet thoughts,
what hopes, what hearts, O Silvia mia!
How it appeared to us then,
all human life and fate!
When I recall that hope
such feelings pain me,
harsh, disconsolate,
I brood on my own destiny.
Oh Nature, Nature
why do you not give now
what you promised then? Why
do you so deceive your children?
Attacked, and conquered, by secret disease,
you died, my tenderest one, and did not see
your years flower, or feel your heart moved,
by sweet praise of your black hair
your shy, loving looks.
No friends talked with you,
on holidays, about love.
My sweet hopes died also
little by little: to me too
Fate has denied those years. Oh,
how you have passed me by,
dear friend of my new life,
my saddened hope!
Is this the world, the dreams,
the loves, events, delights,
we spoke about so much together?
Is this our human life?
At the advance of Truth
you fell, unhappy one,
and from the distance,
with your hand, you pointed
towards death's coldness and the silent grave.
HERE
Giacomo Leopardi 1798-1837
(Full name Giacomo Talegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi, Conte) Italian poet, philosopher, and scholar.
INTRODUCTION
Leopardi is generally considered the greatest Italian lyric poet of the nineteenth century and one of the finest writers of the period. An accomplished classical scholar who mastered Greek and Latin at a very young age, Leopardi occupies a unique place between Classicism and Romanticism in Italian literature. His poetry combines established lyric forms, such as the Petrarchan canzone, with notable developments in metrical flexibility and blank-verse composition, and is pervaded with his profoundly pessimistic vision. Coupled to this, Leopardi's verse expresses a characteristically Romantic longing for the infinite and concern with the lost human affinity to nature. Leopardi's principal poetic mood is melancholic, and themes of solitude, suffering, despair, and disappointed love predominate, as in his lyric masterpiece “A Sylvia” and the late, philosophical poem “La ginestra.” While typically studied as a poet rather than as a systematic thinker, Leopardi's prose writings—collected in his wide-ranging Zibaldone, (“notebook” or “miscellany”)—as well as in his letters, essays, and dialogues, are also viewed as significant both as explanatory adjuncts to his poetry and as eloquent articulations of his materialist, atheistic, skeptical, and decidedly modern thought.
Biographical Information
Leopardi was born in Recanati, Italy, the eldest son of Count Monaldo Leopardi. Guided by his father's desire that he become a classical scholar, the young Leopardi lived a sheltered life and was refused to make even modest excursions away from Recanati, though he later observed in his Zibaldone that his childhood was a joyous one. Leopardi's father provided him with the finest education he could make available; a battery of private tutors coupled with the boy's prodigious talents and disciplined self-study in his father's sizable library led to his mastery of classic Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and a number of modern European languages by the age of sixteen. He wrote commentaries on classical and early Christian texts, made skillful poetic translations, and produced numerous erudite essays while still in his teens and before reaching his twenties had become one of the outstanding European philologists of the day. The years of indefatigable learning exacted an irreversible toll on Leopardi's body, however, contributing to a pronounced curvature of his spine as well as a weakened heart and lungs that continued to deteriorate with age. His pivotal first experience of love occurred in late 1817 with the appearance of his cousin, Countess Gertrude Cassi, at Recanati. The married Cassi could not have returned the feelings of the shy, hunchbacked Leopardi, and the unrequited emotion became an important motif in his subsequent poetry as well as being duly noted in his Diario d'amore (“Diary of Love”). First in 1819 and thenceforth, Leopardi was subject to bouts of temporary blindness in one eye. This problem, together with his other maladies, contributed to the omnipresent sense of pessimism in Leopardi's mature works, although the poet generally offered other rationalizations for his outlook. Meanwhile, Leopardi's increasingly philosophical musings of the period began a process of transformation in the writer, bringing him closer to an interest in modern literature while leaving his appreciation for classical poetry and the Italian verse of Petrarch and Tasso intact. He left Recanati for the first time in November of 1822, accompanied by his uncle on a tour of Rome. Disillusioned by the shallowness of urban intellectual life he encountered there, Leopardi began to write his cynical Operette morali del conte Giacomo Leopardi (1827; Essays and Dialogues of Giacomo Leopardi) on his return to Recanati in the spring of 1823.
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