Text and commentary on the poem “I limoni” from the collection Ossi di seppia by Eugenio Montale. Analysis and commentary by Marco Nicastro.
Eugenio Montale’s Lemons
I limoni is a poem by Eugenio Montale from the collection Ossi di seppia . This work marks Montale’s poetic debut and represents a milestone in twentieth-century literature, fitting into the broader movement of modernist literature.
Lemons: text
Listen to me, the poets laureate
move only among plants
with rarely used names: boxwoods, privets or acanthus.
I, for my part, love the roads that lead to grassy
ditches where in half-dried puddles
the boys catch
a few stray eels:
the little streets that follow the banks,
descend among the tufts of reeds
and lead to the vegetable gardens, among the lemon trees.
Better if the birds’ din dies
away swallowed up by the blue:
more clearly you can hear the whisper
of friendly branches in the air that almost doesn’t move,
and the senses of this smell
that can’t detach itself from the ground
and rains a restless sweetness into your chest.
Here the war of amused passions
miraculously falls silent,
here even we poor people get our share of wealth
and it is the smell of lemons.
You see, in these silences where things
abandon themselves and seem close
to betraying their last secret,
sometimes one expects
to discover a mistake of Nature,
the dead point of the world, the ring that does not hold,
the thread to unravel that finally puts us
in the middle of a truth.
The gaze searches around,
the mind investigates, accords, disunites
in the perfume that spreads
when the day languishes most.
They are the silences in which one sees
in every human shadow that is moving away
some disturbed Divinity.
But the illusion fails and time brings us back
to the noisy cities where the blue shows itself
only in pieces, high up, between the copings.
The rain tires the earth, then;
the tedium of winter crowds the houses,
the light becomes miserly – the soul bitter.
When one day from a badly closed door
among the trees of a courtyard
the yellows of the lemons show themselves to us;
and the frost in our hearts melts away, and in our chests the golden trumpets of sunshine
thunder
their songs .
Lemons: commentary
I cannot help but begin this journey with one of the first poems written by Montale and one of the most famous, I limoni. It always amazes me to think that, from the beginning of his activity as a poet (composed between 1921 and 1922, at the age of 25-26), he was able to write with such a certainty of style, a maturity of writing that one normally reaches only after many years of practice and reading. But this is precisely the distinctive sign of that genius that other common mortals, many of whom toil in the same field to obtain much more modest results, can only admire in absorbed silence.
The poem is dedicated to one of the most typical plants of the Mediterranean area, a simple plant but with very lively fruits. Montale plays right from the start on the contrast between what would usually be worthy of being in a poem , one written by the “laureate poets”, and what is instead worthy for him, as he is keen to specify with a very incisive pleonasm (“io, per me”).
Montale’s distancing from tradition
Montale faces poetic tradition without fear, indeed with a certain effrontery he wants to distance himself from a previous poetry that excessively sublimated its object (the tradition of plants “with rarely used names”) to speak of more marginal but perhaps more significant realities, more capable of touching the heart of modern man and perhaps of giving voice and symbolizing something deeper. And after all, what is poetry if not metaphor? The author moves in the wake of TS Eliot’s poetics called the “objective correlative”, according to which an emotional reality can be better represented from a literary point of view indirectly, through the description-presentation of a concrete object that acts as a symbol of the same.
It should also be noted that the Ligurian poet, if on the one hand he wants to distance himself from a certain courtly and emphatic lyric tradition , for example that of D’Annunzio, at the same time he refers to it and does not completely abandon its presuppositions , such as the tendency to transfigure reality – in a vertical thrust, we could say, that is, from the bottom of everyday life towards the top of the sublime and the exceptional – or to use a very elegant style, just as that tradition did (the two exhortations “Listen to me” and “See”, at the beginning of vv. 1 and 22, are clearly a reference to D’Annunzio’s La pioggia nel pineto: “Be silent…”, “Listen…” etc.). There is therefore a tribute as well as a distancing from tradition.
Returning to the expedient of the objective correlative, the objects/images chosen to represent internal states and abstract concepts are very effective: the eels darting in “half-dried puddles”, the “little streets that follow the banks “, the whisper of the branches against the backdrop of a blue sky and a still air that have swallowed up the usual noises .
I believe that some readers may have found themselves in a similar situation while wandering freely through the countryside, suddenly emerging, after taking a secondary path, in a wilder and more isolated corner of nature. In moments like these, Montale seems to tell us, we might understand something more decisive about ourselves and the world, when ” things seem close to betraying their last secret “. The mind then explores, advances calmly, tries to understand (” investigates, accords, disunifies “), as does the poet who gives the whole description, despite its elegance, a narrative and freer flow, even metrically, from the closed forms of much lyric poetry of those years.
The metric
To remind us, however, that we are in poetry and not in prose, there are the rhymes , scattered here and there in that sober but very effective way typical of Montale, and the presence of a metric, even if subjectively declined. For example, there are canonical hendecasyllables , that is, with the main accents falling on the syllables of the verses indicated by our literary tradition (the fourth and sixth syllable), but also non-canonical hendecasyllables , and the same happens for other types of verse; but there are also verses much longer than a hendecasyllable, real sentences, we could say, more typical of prose (for example v.
20). Finally,
attention to sonority , to the assonances and consonances that support the rhythm of some verses (see v. 14, with the repetition of the vowel a that mimics or perhaps prepares for the act of inspiration, given that immediately in the next verse there is talk of an intense perfume that disquiets; the same assonance is then repeated in v. 32, one of the most beautiful, in my opinion, of the entire poem). These are some highly significant examples of how in poetry, at least in the happiest cases, sound and meaning work together.
The possibility of finding a truth, of glimpsing something different, something higher in some little-trodden corner of our experience seems to vanish as soon as life leads the poet (and all of us) back into the noisy reality of everyday life, where the blue of the sky breaks and boredom impoverishes the self.
Everyday life, Montale tells us, is suffocating, if it were not for these occasional, possible revelations that we can witness thanks to the opening of doors – physical but also interior – through which we glimpse for a moment, almost in glimpse, that beautiful and symbolic color of life: the yellow of lemons.
Conclusion
The poem thus ends in a melting of the poet’s identity as he observes that fruit in a sort of kinesthetic climax, in an almost mystical experience that breaks the insufficiency of life (a moment introduced, temporally, by that very heavy line: «When one day from a badly closed door»). Then the heart «disintegrates», the vision becomes sound perception («their
songs thunder in our chest»), music and vision then merge in a final image of a power that has few equals, I believe, in modern poetry: «the golden trumpets of solarity». A line with an apocalyptic tone (even in the apocalypse, in fact, the angels play the trumpets that announce disasters for man); but here the trumpets, no less solemn, praise the truest life that the vision of the lemons is capable of lighting, dazzled by that yellow that is the color of the life-giving sun (note in this sense the rhyme divinity solarity at the end of the last two stanzas).
The lemons thus become a metaphysical symbol, a sign of some “divine” presence in an everyday world in which man can no longer delude himself, dream, find a deeper meaning. A possibility, Montale seems to tell us in this poem, always possible if the doors are opened, if we know how to observe.
