Merit Pascoli was to enter the Italian poetry in the great river of European symbolism. That is, in that current of pure poetry, with Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme (the four symbols for the most authentic pure poets, poets in an absolute sense) relies on the discovery of poetry lighting, symbolic of the relationships that exist between things, between men and things, between men and their unconscious. Over and out of ordinary language, practical, and is used for communication, the Symbolists, the empty word of its original meaning, etymology, content and use it to describe not realistic to establish objectively landscapes, human figures or stories, but to suggest other than to evoke the mystery, to call and express the unknowable that surrounds and besieging man.
I - BIOGRAPHICAL TRAGEDY AND IDEOLOGY
Two basic facts cast their shadow on the life of Giovanni Pascoli (born in San Mauro di Romagna, 1855 and died in Castelvecchio di Barga, near Lucca, in 1912, Professor of Latin Literature at the Universities of Messina and Pisa, and Carducci's successor in the prestigious chair University of Bologna): his father's murder and the anarchist-socialist militancy.
a) The death of the father (the nest destroyed)
The killing of the father Ruggero Pascoli, an estate administrator of the principles of Torlonia, at the hands of unknown persons while on his returning gig Cesena from the market (read the lyrics X August, nest farlotti II, The mare gray mare) and the lack of punishment of the guilty represent a traumatic experience for the twelve year old Johnnie (John), letting him know early pain and evil (which is "bigger than God"). Economic difficulties, the other domestic disasters, the death of his sister Margaret, the mother and then again his brother Luigi, the dispersal of the family (the nest destroyed) result in 'deep crisis teenager destined to last for years to mature, make him conceive a negative feeling, terrified the world, dominated by death and evil, the cruel injustice of men.
b) The humanitarian socialism
The injustice suffered by the death of his father (the murderess was never found), misery and bitter unrest orient the young anarchist, preaching to the Pasture revolutionary socialist Romagna Andrea Costa. During his university years Bologna, participated in antigovernment demonstrations, suffer arrest and three months' imprisonment, later wrote that Pascoli then "tried as criminals are those who aspired to remove evil from the world." The anarchist and socialist riellismo Pascoli remains essentially humanitarian and non-classist. The Socialists pasture not know the class struggle and Marxist doctrine, in the belief "that the phallus of love and charity has greater importance and consistency, I will say so scientific, that your social and economic theories," The idea and hope of a humanity free from the need, interest in the case of migrants (in the poem Italy) and the hard work in a foreign land determine another connotation of socialism pasture that is both nationalist and internationalist. According to Pascoli, the Socialists' support in the economic struggle as the workers against the bosses, so in political struggle should support countries (poor and working class) against the empires (rich and hegemony).
To get to this road Pascoli official speech, strong, dangerous nationalist emphasis, The great proletarian (Italy) hath been moved, in 1911, that he accepts and justifies the colonial campaign in Libya like a 'undertaking to Justice socialistically chivalry, remain tulle tirades for war, all convictions of militarism previously advanced in the name of humanitarian ideals and social peace.
II - the poetics of "Girl"
For Pascoli's poetry assumes the office just around the Decadent detection. The poet tries to uncover the mystery of the universe denied to scientific knowledge, that mystery, that unknown that reason and science have not been able to explore. The intuition of the mystery through the visionary poetry of the young child. Organic manifestation of the idea and function of Pascoli's poetry is precisely the young child, an article published in the "Marzocco" (newspaper decadent aestheticism Florence) in 1897 and final edition in 1902.
Taking an image and reinterpreting Plato (in the dialogue Phaedo Cebes Socrates says that everyone has within himself a little boy who fears death and has to be reassured), Pascoli says that all men will bring in a young child, a way that is pre-rational, intuitive and poetco, to look at aspects of the world, to hear the fears and joys of life with fresh eyes, amazed childhood, with its imaginative and warm the soul of the child that sees the first time. This little boy (the hidden and silent in adults because busy, distracted by practical concerns, but to be ready to talk even more when their suffer, are enthusiastic and are moved) "in the light seems to dream dreams or remembering things about the beasts, the trees, the stones, the population of ghosts and shadows of the sky."
The little boy looks for poetry in the little things, even in everyday things, family members "as the burnet (herb) on the chasm behind the house is new for those who can see it" or a complete found in the great things handed down by legend and the little story, that is particularly modest, pure.
The poem does not present itself intentionally utilitarian purposes, should not be "applied poetry." The poet-child "is poet, orator, not Tribune, no philosopher, historian, not teacher, not the stands or demagogue, not a state official or court. " The sociality of poetry is poetry in its being only in its being reduced to "corner" of the heart. But for this to be a dream and vision, wonder and comfort, poetry does away with the hatred and unites people.
III .- TECHNICAL ISSUES AND EXPRESSIVE
From tragedy to the family mystery of the universe.
We have said that the basic themes, the most profound poetry of Pascoli and qualifying structures and express themselves in symbolic language. What are the issues? The family tragedy, never subsided and resigned, returning always painfully obsessive memory. The revelation of the unconscious, the descent into the murky areas of the instincts and stuck with the ambiguity and restlessness of adolescence, some autobiographical moments of ambiguous sexuality and painful. The world events of the fields (first the landscape Romagna, the "sunny Romagna", then the Garfagnana in Tuscany, Castelvecchio instead of his native Romagna too tied to mournful memories) because "the simple life and family and in the contemplation of nature, especially in the country, there is a great consolation, "the mystery of the universe, the immense sky and the abyss cosmic damage, to think and even more to hear, an unsettling dizziness, a "cold horror" and a shudder of death.
SYMBOLS, physiognomic, Onomatopoeia
These four issues, family drama, autobiographical penetration of the unconscious, nature and country comforter, cosmic mystery, are made with new structures and expressive techniques that use symbols (symbolic images and shapes dream, dream), the physiognomic (similarities and synesthesia), onomatopoeia.
Significant symbols Pascoli, intimate products from the existence of the poet, and violated offended by the men, upset by the trauma of family tragedy that has marked for ever the symbol of the nest, the nest destroyed, the family, the family environment, safe, warm affections unduly affected and destroyed by violence and evil men. Another symbol, this time the cosmic, the book (in the opera of the same name), peeled by an invisible hand, the book is to show the huge shadow of the universe and of life, when men are lost without vainly to find the answers to the questions of their existence (The book of mystery).
in addition to figurative, symbolic images of the nest as destroyed, the book, and others that we will see by examining the collection Myricae, the Pascoli symbolism goes even more openly on the floor with technical operations at phonic-metric. Acting on the word regardless of its meaning, its semantic value, grazing privileges the game sounds, maneuver musical arrangements, sound imitation that the word itself may suggest. The symbolism engineer or physiognomic Pascolian introduces a dense network of similarities and synesthesia, sounds and onomatopoeia to evoke, suggest distant reality, deep and mysterious.
Frequently similarities and synaesthesia that bind, combine in new ways and bold sense impressions as different: There, dark blue items, an association, we repeat, in terms different, belonging to different sensory (items, relates to the hearing, dark blue, about the view) to express the sound of bells in the night. Other synaesthesia: black noise of a train, a silence hung trembling opal, where mergers and exchanges occur between sensory spheres shifted auditory (noise, silence hangs) and visual color (black opal). Are words fonoespressivi: Stroscio and hissing wind, long-wave roars (the bell and the echo of its widespread tolling); sensational cones (the dried leaves of maize under the movements of urchins frolic, make noise). Famous onomatopoeia, the signs are created in imitation of natural sounds with which Pascoli plays the sound of the bells (ding-dong or Don-Don) and the call, the cry dell'assiuolo Night (jug).
IV. COURSE WORK
Framework synthetic
I. "Myricae"
the mysterious and symbolic analysis
Lavender (the plow symbol of existential loneliness)
analysis of the ox (cosmic landscape threatening and scary)
analysis of X in August (the swallow-father killed and destroyed the home-nest)
analysis of The assiuolo (the cry of warning and premonition of death jug)
II - The "poem" and "Songs of Castelvecchio"
the cycle of seasons and agricultural work in the Garfagnana
analysis of the hedge (ideological symbol of small properties)
flowers and their sexual symbolism
analysis of foxglove (the ambiguity and the charm of the youthful temptation)
analysis of the night jasmine (the mystery and miracle of carnal generate)
III. The "Poems convivial", the myths of classical antiquity up to date and interpreted as symbols of modern existential
I "Myricae" means a natural reality mysterious and symbolic
In the first collection of poems 1891-1903, with the title of Myricae, taken from a verse of the fourth Eclogue of Virgil (where the name of humble plants, tamarisk, arguments and figures indicated in style resigned) meetings, as the preface warns the same pasture, "flapping of birds and rustle of cypress trees, distant singing of the bells", dedicated to the memory of his dead father (" these songs remain remain on the grave of my father !...").
horizons are short of fields within the seasons (dawns festive vespers, thunderstorms, October evenings, nights of snow), quick notes and colors of the landscape and nature Romagna, animals and birds, moments and aspects of the trades and the daily grind (seamstresses, laundresses, carters, cultivators, harvesters). All these elements are captured and represented, however, with new attitudes and modes of expression. Not only realistic in their evidence, through the clear outlines, visible presence of their materials, but also in the climate of secrecy and allusive, and symbolic meaning in their music to a different, more profound and mysterious reality.
a) In the "washing" the 'plow' abandoned expresses the loneliness
To measure the great distance that separates the original poetic attitude Pascolian from Naturalism / realism, let us consider the poem in Myricae Lavender (1894) where use auditory and visual impressions that are not only more realistic, but most allusive and symbolic.
The plow is in the field, forgotten in the fog early morning of November after plowing, comes from a realistic picture of seasonal lines of a landscape-type stuff rod to become an iconic figure , a negative sign of life. The plow is no herd in the symbol of a painful human condition and troubled: the rhyming verse that while rinsing the laundry and beating the clothes (onomatopoeic evocative rhythms of lapping and thuds thick) suffers from the inner loneliness and abandonment: "When you left (always present to you a heart, the lover, fiancé) as I stayed! / As the plow in the middle of the fallow. " The state of loneliness, the existential situation of abandonment and neglect - the plow forgotten, forgotten perhaps the woman - made by the plow with visual symbolism property without oxen, is then completed and in-depth musically, by analogy of music, from long folk chant that speaks of wind, snow, leaving a long time ago loved one who has not yet returned.
b) "II ox" a "larger world" shocked and disturbing.
again confronted bove The Carducci's famous sonnet (1872) with each other to shepherd the ox (1890), always in Myricae. Carducci, with strong nostalgic sense of the Maremma landscape and the cultural and trace "Georgica" of his Virgil (his favorite Latin poet) stands in admiration before the "devout ox 'sees' massive and placid beast" (as explained in a letter), pure and sacred, when it stands in the midst of the monumental 'fields free and fruitful, "or when the patient and" happy "under the yoke helps people working in the fields.
Different perspective Pascoli. Not the look of the poet, not the admiring contemplation of the "pious ox" (which stirs in a "feeling of strength and peace"), but the "big eyes" of the ox in the same act as the point of view Pastures in the sonnet. The world around, saw it with "big eyes" of the ox, through its macroscopic optics which is supposed to greatly magnify things, Pascoli leads to upset the landscape, not only to alter the proportions, the measures (the 'Rio thin " the little stream that turns into blue, "cenilo 'river), but to change, to deform the same meaning. The landscape grows like a scary, mysterious nightmare, as the evening shadows fall. The rampant nature and appearance is altered in a visionary, the size of a cosmic mystery as ever threatening and scary, birds and clouds at sunset take on strange shapes unreal; become "rapacious image" (Figures of prey) and 'silent chimeras "(mythological monsters ).
dilating and digging in the direction of metaphysics, The Ox Pasture than natural and Georgics Carducci is - with new procedure decadent - another restless and unknowable reality, another universe, the nagging and mysterious presence of "a larger world."
e) The lyric "X in August" and the symbol of the "nest destroyed." The most significant symbols Pascoli arising from the tragic experience of the poet's childhood, the family drama (the unpunished murder of his father) that has shocked, marked him forever, destinations - as an adult, even by older man - a sore, incurable anguish, fear of a long and continuous defense, alarmed his life against other men. We have already mentioned the symbol of the nest destroyed. Let's see how the lyric X August (1896) carries this symbol, rooted in the blood and memory.
Written on the anniversary of the killing of his father thirty years earlier (August 10, 1867), the poem follows the popular legend that sees in the summer phenomenon of shooting stars the tears of St. Lawrence and interprets this legend lives on as proof of the invincible presence and recurrence of evil on earth (in the liturgical calendar, the martyrdom of the saint falls precisely on August 10). The memory tenacious, obsessive Pascoli expands the cruel private event in the universal drama of evil everywhere in the world, deaf and indifferent to the sufferings of men. And he invents a series of symbols instinctive and painful: the swallow-father killed while returning to his home-nest, the swallow killed, crucified, outstretched on the ground like a cross, still in his mouth Vinsetto-swallows-dinner for his children, family day-care waiting unnecessarily, and deteriorating, also died, worn out from hunger (the nest in the dark "waiting / chirping ever more slowly).
d) Dreams and dream symbols. The symbolism of birds and "The assiuolo"
Typical materials and decadent poetic forms, dreams and dream symbols occur in the short lyric Carrier (always Myricae), with the main character, a carter coal dreaming the simple joy of Christmas and fabulous during his night journey between the gorges of the mountains. Even in abstract landscape, metaphysical, the clatter, "the desert floor, infinity" and the nightmare produced by the mysterious gallop (meaning death) are elements belonging to dream, dream of projections in a state of psychological distress. Symbols and engineers often use onomatopoeia in Myricae grazing remakes to the birds (warblers of a tac tac, a tin tin of robins, finches of a rerere), the results are dazzling poetic ("Viro ... said the Swallow. It was day "). The symbolism of birds often takes on a meaning of death. As in double quatrains novenaries L'assiuolo.
The chill of death that singing at dawn dell'assiuolo (also called a nocturnal bird of prey Chiu, bringer of death and misery according to popular belief) is transmitted to humans by Pascoli expressed by the means of a phonic symbolism shrewd and sensitive. In The assiuolo opera, all sung in eerie and frightening reminder of the bird, jug, each stanza ends with the plea, with onomatopoeic chorus and significant, with the monosyllabic call of the night bird jug ("a voice came from the fields: / jug. .. "" rang out the sob: jug ..."; "and that there was crying death ... jug ") to indicate pain, dark, suggesting disturbance in the unconscious, mysterious and foreboding warning of death, tears and death for humans.
The night birds, owls, the assiuolo, with their mournful song (the "shrill laughter" of the owl, the distant voice and the "hiccup" of the jug) stir in the areas of the unconscious presence of death, a deadly sense of distress that invades and disturbs the life. The symbolism of night birds Pascoli awakens in the human subconscious psychological states of anxiety and fear hazy, mysterious and deep chills of death.
II. The "poem" and "Songs of Castelvecchio" means a larger design
The short, brilliant lyrics of Myricae become the long stories in verse in the early poems (1897-1904) of New poems (1909) and Songs Castelvecchio (1903-1907-1912). A campaign themes, grouped in as many sections entitled to work the land, the seeds, the tillering (herbs and plants growing), harvesting, harvest poetically tell the story of rural and seasonal Castelvecchio Garfagnana in Tuscany (where Pastures owned a house). The descriptions carry large, rich in detail, with precise knowledge, even technical jobs Agriculture, with words often reported directly from the vernacular language of the people Garfagnana.
a) The rural world and saving the "small property" nor "The hedge."
However, even the rural environment and the real-allegorical story of the birth of love blossoming of Rose and Rigo and size of their family end up idealized and transfigured. Even the peasants gestures, daily routines and seasonal practices of the people and moments of the fields become symbols of a rite of existence, are an exemplary life, and having considered as a model to live with the good nature who comforts and protects.
significant indizianti in this respect, in the first poem, the triplets of the hedge, which are read in today's sociological, allegorical, sociological as the manifesto of Pascoli bourgeois and petty landowner. The 'hedge, useful and pious' surrounds' the pitch' as' the ring on his finger, "and as the sacred and indissoluble bond, the wedding ring. For her, defended his fence ("never sufficiently strong and dense and thorny," says an article in Pascoli enhances the feeling of agricultural land), the poet-owner can live "free and sovereign." The hedge is therefore a symbol, this time ideological as well as existential, private property, which guarantees and protects the lives and property of the poet against the vastness of the alien and hostile world.
b) "foxglove", "Jasmine Night II" and their sexual symbols.
The trend of symbolist Pascoli not disappoint. And in the early poems and songs of Castel-old stand-effective examples of symbolism pastures not be placed in the unconscious, in the troubled areas of the instincts, fears and feelings locked. We saw death in Myricae message transmitting the night birds. And after the assiuolo, The jug found in the new poems where he returns to state (with its "sweet and sad the same eternal Word"), the loneliness, the fear of Viola for her sister, married, has faced "who knows what martyrdom." Well, like the nocturnal bird species, including images of flowers and nature have been used for grazing country to communicate with the world beyond the disturbing reality visible. At the floral symbolism Pascolian belong foxglove (in the first poems) and the jasmine night (I / Canti di Castelvecchio), two-hypnotic and visionary lyrics that symbolist and decadent two leading names in the title of flowers.
In the plot of Foxglove meet two old college mates, two boarding-school girls: the blond, virtuous Maria (the sister of the poet, "the simple dress and looks) and the less virtuous Rachel, brown eyes that" glow. " In their dialogue reminiscent of the foxglove, the 'flower of death "charming and poisonous aroma that one day away has upset their adolescence. While Mary has stood the morbid fascination of the forbidden flower (in the shape of fingers, like a human hand "stained with blood"), Rachel has instead succumbed to the temptation. The bottom of the erotic poem in her floral symbol indicates the repulsion-attraction of juvenile pleasure, alludes to the ambiguity and the allure of temptation. The introspective and morbid sexuality of foxglove, in his insinuating sweetness ("It felt me: come! / Vie-ni / E was much kindness! Moltal / so that, .../... see you die!" ) means the mysterious attraction of death and desolation, according to the decadent taste that identifies love and death, pleasure and death, Eros and Thanatos (to put it in Freudian terms).
Another flower, jasmine of Spain, the so-called "good night" which opens its petals on summer evenings and closes them at dawn, a symbolic expression with floral symbolism in The night jasmine a moment autobiographical sexuality Pascoli sweetly ambiguous and painful. The opera is written for the wedding of a dear friend, according to a notice from the same pasture, "And I think Gabriele Briganti affected by the smell of the flower out fragrance shadow and silence: the smell of night jasmine. In those hours a little flower bloomed ... I mean, was born to his Dante Gabriel John "(he was born, in the sense of: it was designed /
It The night jasmine two parallel stories occupy the space of time from night dawn. That of the young couple in the house cozy and quiet spend their wedding night. And that the poet from the outside ("bee late" that is "already taken cells"), as an outcast, a man without a woman, devoid of love (Cast Autobiographical Pascoli to a condition of perpetual celibacy "forcibly chaste and horribly sad '), some saw the wedding night that prepare ("shines a light there in the room", "Switch the light on the stairs; / shines on the first floor has faded ...") and partly carnal and guess the mystery of the miraculous rise (which is happening ), with leaps of childlike curiosity regressed. Until dawn, "close the petals a little crumpled" to mean the act of love is now consumed with wedding conception of another creature human ("urn springs and secret" means precisely that the mother's womb 'hatching', that is prepared, the couple hoped to be a new happiness).
With foxglove and Jasmine evokes night grazing areas of otherwise indecipherable mystery, descends into the darkness of the subconscious where the human creature in Digital Rachele purpurea, the poet himself in the night jasmine, are subject to psychic experiences and traumatic shock existential.
III. In "Poems Conviviali" rethought the myths as symbols of life.
The trend run of poetic narrative of wide- flow continues in the friendly Poems, 1904 (the so-called magazine's aestheticism Roman "The Banquet" which first appeared), Pascoli with the development of myths, legends, classic and early Christian times. The characters of pagan antiquity, Sappho, Achilles, Odysseus, Homer, Hesiod, Alexander the Great, are reconsidered in the light of modern humanity, symbolic and pre-Christian, they become creatures who feel the vanity of their lives just as it reaches its climax.
coupling with its achievements to the limits of the earth, Alexan-Dros faces the ocean, vast desert that is the constant anxiety, the suggestion the mystery is still dissatisfied after many adventurous goals. The last trip reinterprets the myth of Ulysses in key existential decadence, with Circe, the Sirens, which depict the vain flattery of the senses and the sinking of the Isle of Calypso (the Nasconditrice) expressing the close of each illusion.
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