So what’s happening? Is Montale implying that words ‘slip, slide and perish’ (Eliot again, Burnt Norton 5:20)? Do we have a deliberate fracturing of syntax and ambiguity of meaning? As I read these fragments, am I to discard them, like Wittgenstein’s ladder?—

                        ‘My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes
                        them as senseless, when he has climbed through them, on them, over them. (He must
                        so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

                        ‘He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

                        ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

                               Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.54, translated by C.K.Ogden

     This is not such a far-fetched notion; at least one other critic (G.Cambon) suggests an approach to this poetry close to a Zen-like attitude towards paradox and absurdity. If ineffability is (paradoxically) ever effable, I see no reason for doubting those who assert it can be made so for them by reading poetry. For myself I make no strong claim in this direction as regards The Motets; I don’t feel them in that way. But the approach must be mentioned.

OUTLINE

1 He asks the woman, as lightning goddess, why she waits.

2 It is day, the squirrel is up, the moon has descended, the morning haze enfolds her.

3 If she should strike with lightning out of the haze she could bring the world to an end.

SUMMARY
As a lightning goddess she could bring the world to an end. Why not do it now?

COMMENT
The sequence does not develop a linear plot. Instead, each new motet adds a new cluster of ideas and feelings about the woman who is no longer with him. Now, despite his despondency in Motet 5, in which he describes her departure by train, and despite seeming in Motet 6 to blame her for having dazzled him so much that he couldn’t get a true sense of her—despite these things he is prepared to deify her. In this piece she is a lightning goddess who could bring the world to an end. Indeed, he asks, why doesn’t she do just that? Why wait?

     If he is sincere in asking such a question, he must be feeling a nihilism which is indifferent to whether the world continues or not. The images each motet presents—here we have a squirrel and a half-moon fading in the dawn—accumulate with no apparent relationship to one another. To him they are arcane signs.

He is not simply capturing aspects of scenery but sensations which have branded themselves on his memory and which bear a deep meaning for him. Everything so vividly remembered is a revelation. A squirrel in a pine-tree beats a tail like a flaming torch. The idea of burning is continued in the dawn’s light which quenches the moon, then in the lightning which is the woman’s essence. The squirrel is an omen of a destructive beauty which could end the world as daylight snuffs out the moon.

     I am put on alert by ‘you as lightning’ (tu fólgore): these images seem also to be symbols, and I’ve not so far felt that his imagery was like this. I must read motets which follow with symbolism in mind, and the earlier ones might be revisited to see how wrong I may have been in this respect from the beginning.

OUTLINE

1 Souls fond of lively pleasures are fired by an esoteric fervour.

2 Her voice is full of such spirit.

3 He is speaking about something ‘other’ which is like a showy yet banal music.

SUMMARY
He speaks of her voice, an otherworldly sound nourished by the showy and banal.

     A certain type of jaunty recklessness is often associated with street life. The poem speaks of the kind of soul that goes in for, or ‘dispenses’,

                                   mazurka and rigadoon with each new

                                   season on the street

                                   furlana e rigodone ad ogni nuova

                                   stagione della strada

                                   (forlana and rigadoon with each new

                                   season of the street).

     I take the allusion to ‘each new | season on the street’ (i.e. each new common fashion) to be sarcastic and disapproving. Dispense (dispensare) is an unusual verb in this context. I suppose it means ‘distribute or make a show of’ but it sounds haughty, implies censure, and makes me pause. His apparent approval is ironic.

     It might not have been unusual for the common people to go in for the dances mentioned. I find an example in the poet with whom I’m comparing Montale. Pablo Neruda, who grew up in a working-class quarter of a cold and wet frontier town (Temuco) in Chile, says in his Memoirs, ‘I saw mazurkas and quadrilles in that living room’ (Condor ed., p.10, translated by Hardie St. Martin). I know, on the strength alone of the motets covered so far, that Montale felt repugnance towards the common people. He must have been bitter to note that the woman who most inspired this sequence, whoever she was, delighted in wild and vulgar parties. Yet he reasons, and reasoning is what he retreats to, that her passion for pleasure, manifesting itself more intensely every time he sees it, is in some way ‘recondite’ (chiusa—shut off, uncommunicative, secret). Is he saying that her passion is hard for him to fathom because she chooses not to explain its source, or cannot explain it, feckless creature that she is? Who can tell? All is in doubt. Or nearly. Can it really be doubted that there is irony of a most baleful kind, à la Laforgue, in the ending?—

                                   to others who don’t know you, its subject this,

                                   and there, insisting—da-dum da-dum da-do

                                   Parlo d’altro,

                                   ad altri che t’ignora e il suo disegno

                                   è là che insiste do re la sol sol
                                   (I speak of [the] other
                                   to anyone who doesn’t know you and its theme
                                   is there that insists do re la sol sol).

     I assume that ‘da-dum da-dum da-do’ (do re la sol sol—perhaps an actual tune) continues the music theme and mocks it.

     Is he ironic, though, as I’ve supposed? It’s hard to tell. Yet despite the difficulty of tone there is great pleasure to be had from this chiselled miniature. Could any lines be cleverer in sound, more complex in sense, than these that speak of her voice?

                                   By wire, wing, wind or chance its echoes go,

                                   by favour of the muse or artifice,

                                   joyful or sad

                                   Su fili, su ali, al vento, a caso, col

                                   favore della musa o d’un ordegno,

                                   ritorna lieta o triste

                                   (By wire, by wing, on the wind, by chance, with the

                                   favour of the muse or of a machine / instrument / tool,

                                   it echoes, happy or sad).

     The melodic beat of Su fili, su ali, al vento, the leap from ‘wind’ to ‘chance’, to say nothing of the ambiguity I’ve mentioned, are almost Shakespearean in invention and daring.

OUTLINE

1 She is a lofty, angelic creature damaged by the elements.

2 Nature is ominous; the shadowy people on the streets are not aware of her.

SUMMARY
She is magnificent but damaged by a world unconscious of her.

COMMENT
In the last line of this piece Montale again reveals his fastidious pessimism. The ‘other shadows, which duck into | alleys [and] do not even know that [she—an angelic presence] is here [among them]’ are symbolic of the shadowy mass of humanity as a whole, for which he has very little love. Not only are they insub-stantial shadows, like lost wraiths in Dante’s Inferno, they also furtively

                                   duck into | alleys

                                   scantonano | nel vicolo

                                   (duck / slip | into the alley).

She, by contrast, is a creature of celestial heights. By implication a supernatural muse and inspiration, she is nonetheless torn by her contact with sublunary world and needs her poet to alleviate her suffering, free her from her thorny crown of icicles. This female Christ-cum-Calliope needs her special worshipper, the poet who, inspired by her, protects and comforts her in return. He puts himself above the masses and even, in one sense at least, above his Muse also.

     The world is a cold place: even the sun is ‘chill’ (freddoloso). It is noteworthy that the surreptitious creatures who dodge into narrow courts off the main square are ‘the other shadows’. If they are the ‘others’, who are the main people, the important ones? Presumably he himself and she, his muse, who comprise a small, intense élite.

     What significance the medlar has, why this and not another tree has been chosen to represent the darkly ominous, I cannot guess. It is a tree that suits a world that is a kind of Hades or realm of the dead, with its thorns, its weird hairy leaves and apple-like fruit that is left on the bough to rot before it is eaten.

     I find it significant that although he deifies her she is less than all-powerful. He does not see her as a representation of the whole of Nature. She is an inspiring muse but as exposed to the perils of Nature as he is himself.

OUTLINE

1 The garish colour and fake jollity of Venice daze and confuse him.

2 The tall Venetian doors seem to exclude her. His depression is as deep as ever.

3 The crowds below are dull and unfeeling, yet they arouse an intensity in him.

SUMMARY 
The pointless jollity of Venice depresses him but makes him intensely alert.

COMMENT 
In the sequence as a whole the scene shifts to different times and places in Italy. Nearly always Montale is deprived of the presence of the woman he addresses. Here it is the high doors in the old Venetian houses which seem to exclude her. As usual, he is not very pleased by the crude amusements of the masses, and as usual he says this indirectly, supplying strong imagery and a scene which has to be worked out. For instance, since gondolas move there, it must be a canal surface which presents him with

                    dazzling tar and poppy-red

                    un forte bagliore di catrame e di papaveri

                    (a strong dazzle of tar and poppies).

And how, I might ask, is it that songs emanate from piles of rope?—

                    the fraudulent song that has emanated from

                    bundles of mooring rope

                    la subdola canzone che s’alzava

                    da masse di cordame

                    (the sneaky / deceitful / underhand song which rose

                    from masses / bunches / piles of rope).

     It takes a number of attentive steps in poetic logic to understand this. It could be that the ropes, when they were stretched out once, used to sing in the wind. That song was deceitful because it promised happiness to folk who could never hope for it. Or perhaps a workman is singing under a heavy bundle of rope. This ambiguity of the distinct, this indecisive clarity, is a mark of the Modernism which started with the symbolism of de Nerval (b.1808), Baudelaire (b.1821) and Mallarmé (b.1842) and was packed with extra layers of allusion and degrees of elusiveness by the generation of T.S.Eliot (b.1888) and Montale (b.1896) himself.

     I am not sure that in The Motets the remote beloved ever represents one single and constant idea. She is not Nature as a whole, but as the poet’s muse she could, I suppose, stand for anything in Nature which gives him a sign, which inspires him to write. And there’s an aspect of Nature, and of a beloved, which is commonly aired in poetry: deceitfulness. The world and loved ones are not what they seem. What we get from them is a surface, dazzling in beauty to the point of blinding us.

     Another theme has to do with one part of the surface of things which is not, to Montale, so beautiful, namely the pleasures of the masses, seen as meretricious, gaudy and in general not worthy of his fastidious regard.

                    Tossing below

                    is an insensate muddle

                    S’agita laggiù

                    uno smorto groviglio

                    (Restless / stirring / worked up down there

                    [is] an expressionless / lifeless tangle / muddle).

     I infer that the muddle is a holiday crowd chiefly because of the ‘masked jollity’ (risa di maschere—laugh / laughter / delight of masks / disguises). The idea that in common pleasures all is vanity is evident enough in the words bagliore (dazzle) applied to the colours on the canals, and subdola (deceitful, underhand) applied to the singing which seems to emanate even from the heaps of rope by the mooring places.

     Yet although the pleasures of others accentuate the poet’s own apartness, they also make his perception keener. Not an unusual thought, this, but it is given unusual and sharp focus by the type of person he compares himself to, an attentive eel-fisher:

                    but it arouses me—more

                    and even more—until I am absorbed

                    like that fisherman of eels upon the shore

                    che m’avviva

                    a stratti e mi fa eguale a quell’assorto

                    pescatore d’anguille dalla riva

                    ( […the muddle] which arouses me

                    by starts / stages and makes me like that intent / absorbed /engrossed

                    fisher of eels on the bank / shore.)

‘Absorbed’ is fortunately available to fit the aural texture, but it additionally implies, as does the Italian assorto, that the poet is not only engrossed, he is also completely drawn and absorbed into the scene which he contemplates. Playing with paradox, and mocking himself somewhat, the fastidious outsider is captivated by what he would like to reject.

OUTLINE

1 Bad hailstorms rage as if she, a Nature goddess, had set them off herself.

2 The sound of a Pianola rises from below to mingle with the hailstones.

3 The hail glitters in the music, reminding him of her when she tried to sing opera.

SUMMARY 
With irony he says that the hailstorm is like her, destructive and glittering, when she tried to sing opera.

COMMENT 
A musical piece about his music and his muse. He plays with paradox again. A hailstorm which flattens the flowers also sparkles (brilla). Its sight and sound remind him of his lover when she attempted to sing opera:

                                    it sparkles as you did

                                    when simulating with your ornate trill

                                    The Song of the Bell from Lakmé by Delibes

                                    brilla come te

                                    quando fingevi col tuo trillo d’aria

                                    Lakmé nell’Aria delle Campanelle

                                    (it shines / glitters / sparkles like you

                                    when you pretended to be, with your aria-trill,

                                    Lakmé in (i.e. singing) the Bell Song).

It’s fortunate for my translation that Lakmé is both the title of Delibes’ opera and the name of its eponymous heroine.

     The meaning and sound of this motet are rich in texture. Comparing hail to salt, for instance, is a fine touch: the very idea of a storm of salt is so strange, and yet seems so natural, that for a moment I feel as if storms of dry salt (not of seawater, though that comes to mind) are as common as rain. Could anything better suggest the destructive nature of hail? And could lines with this clear complexity of meaning have better company than this music:

                                    the bellflower and deracinates verbena

                                    Fa strage

                                    di campanule, svelle la cedrina

                                    (It carries out a massacre of / it lays low

                                    bellflowers / campanulas, it uproots verbena)?

The flower-names are generic: there are many kinds of campanulas and verbenas. I’m content to accept the allure of the sound these words make, and to visualise the campanulas and verbenas I know from gardens. There was a time, not long ago, when the closest I could come to a bellflower was a bluebell, and I couldn’t have said if a verbena was like a rose or a daisy. Such knowledge of specifics is helpful but not essential. It’s unlikely that anyone can say for sure which particular plants, from the hundreds of varieties of campanulas and verbenas, Montale himself knew.

     As I’ve noted about his previous attitude to his muse, she is human as well as goddess-like. The Bell Song may well suggest the insistence of hailstones from heaven. The ringing of this storm of frozen water, on the windows perhaps, makes him feel submerged:

                                    An underwater carillon approaches

                                    as if you awakened it

                                    Un rintocco subacqueo s’avvicina,

                                    quale tu lo destavi

                                    (an underwater bell-ringing draws near

                                    as if you awakened / aroused / quickened it.)

But he swerves away from further apotheosis, reminding himself that she is flesh and blood, a part of the vulgar world. The noise of a common Pianola, which plays melodies automatically from punched rolls, rises from ‘places underground / caverns below’ (inferi)—from lower rooms in his building, no doubt. Then this artificial tinkling blends with the pelting ice-storm’s evocation of undersea bells and meets the sparkling hail. This is witty stuff. He’s not saying that his lady once sang the Bell Song like a diva; on the contrary, ‘you pretended (fingevi) to be Lakmé…’ is a put-down if ever there was one.

     There are other translations in which the inferi (nether caves) suggest Hell, and where no irony is discerned. Take your pick.

OUTLINE

1 At daybreak when he hears the noise of caged rail workers, and...

2 at nightfall when bad signs occur about the state of the world,

3 all remains decently human so long as her spirit is a part of the scene.

SUMMARY 
When the signs are bad everything stays human so long her nature is a part of it.

COMMENT 
As Montale himself acknowledged, these motets do not very noticeably develop a narrative or argument. Instead, as in a piece of music, themes are revisited. The notion of signs has occurred before. In No. 6 ‘a furbelowed lackey’ (un servo gallonato—a servant / footman ornamented with lace) whom he once caught sight of seems to have lodged in his memory as a sign of something, he doesn’t say what. Whether Montale did in fact have a superstitious side which saw no reason why he shouldn’t in one way or another believe (or suspend disbelief) in omens, is not a matter that concerns me. It’s safe to read these pieces as if their author believed in omens. On the level of normal, reasonable speech it’s anyway quite usual for people to say that certain events—preparations for war, for example—are signs of what’s in the offing.

     For the first time in The Motets the plight of workers is regarded with a modicum of sympathy, if indirectly. Railway workers, who are ‘caged’ or enclosed (chiusi) in tunnels or cuttings, are heard at daybreak making their usual noise (rumore). And this is a token, discordant yet lit by some kind of hope in the uncertain light from the sky, reflected in puddles perhaps, of a state approaching normality. At nightfall, however, a bored bureaucrat viciously stabs at his deskwork, and ‘a guard’s | jackboot gets closer’ (il passo | del guardiano s’accosta—the step of the guard approaches). One way or another the times are out of joint. But human values survive so long as a spiritual essence, personified by her, his muse, stitches time together—day and night and every moment of human decency:

                                light and darkness, yet there’s a human pause

                                if you’ll but interweave things with your thread

                                al chiaro e al buio, soste ancora umane

                                se tu a intrecciarle col tuo refe insisti

                                (in light and in darkness, still [there are] human pauses / rests / moments

                                if you persist by interlacing / gathering them with your thread / yarn).

     Like its predecessors, this little piece is intricate in sound, tentative in its claims. There are many rhymes and half-rhymes tying the day piece of the first half to the night piece of the second. Rhyming on this scale in English would force the translation to say things which are not there in the original. To compensate, I’ve tried to capture the effect by thickening the texture—with staccato ‘k’ sounds, for example.

     It’s impossible to ignore the hints about the political state of affairs. The approaching guard is not necessarily a jackbooted one, as I’ve said in my translation, nor does the hacked desk have to suggest a sadistic bureaucrat, as I’ve just suggested in this note, but there is something menacing in

                                the spike which gnaws

                                a desk renews its

                                viciousness, and a guard’s

                                jackboot comes closer

                                il bulino che tarla

                                la scrivanìa rafforza

                                il suo fervore e il passo

                                del guardiano s’accosta

                                (the burin / engraving tool which chews / moth-eats

                                the writing-desk renews the force of / reinforces

                                its fervour, and the footstep

                                of the guard draws near).

Perhaps there is panic here: an artist or cartoonist hastens in secret or captivity as a fascist guard stamps outside his studio or cell. The verb tarlare does not usually mean or even imply engraving, but is intransitive and means ‘to be moth-eaten’. The picture is precise but unlocalisable. Nothing is well determined, not even the guard.

OUTLINE

1 The air between the lovers is purer than the blue of the forget-me-not flower.

2 But it grows dark and the cable car takes him across a gulf away from her.

SUMMARY
The blue and hopeful air between the lovers darkens as he is carried away from her.

COMMENT 
This is a tuneful and evocative piece that makes its point only in the final word. In a pattern already familiar, two verses bear a contrast in meaning and tone. In the first five lines the air itself which separates them is described in terms of the brave blueness of a forget-me-not flower growing on the rim of a volcano or a Dantesque abyss. In the second five lines the air is darkening and the mood is more sombre as it becomes clear that the poet is being borne away from his lover by a cable car.

     The two verses, and the two moods, are made part of a single experience by the use of subtly irregular and shared rhyming. There’s much concealed cleverness and allusion to enjoy. The flower which with its name repeats, from the very edge of the pit (dall’orlo del burrato), the plea of all lovers not to be forgotten, is a reminder of the epigraph of The Motets as a whole: ‘Upon the volcano the flower’ (Sobre el volcán la flor), a phrase from the lyrical Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–1870). Dante too is evoked in the Inferno’s word for pit or craggy rock-face (burrato). The azure blue of the air in the first stanza is referred to as pervicace in the second, an adjective usually translated as ‘stubborn’, ‘obstinate’. The idea of stubborn persistence recalls the flower that insistently repeats the lover’s plea not to be forgotten. Another artful touch is the shift from the evocations of lightness and purity in the first half to the discordant squeak of the cable car and the almost palpable darkening of the air in the second. What appears to be casual is not. And nothing is simple-minded.

     This cleverness carries a corollary: it is pervasive, and what emotion exists, for me at least, seems factitious. Deep feeling does not of course have to be dramatic or sensational. Restraint need not be evidence of cold aloofness. Nevertheless, with so many signs of Mon-tale’s emulation of the medieval and renaissance practice of using an idealised female to represent something more than herself, it is not surprising if a note of deep personal anguish is absent.

He consciously drifts away from the older tradition of using his muse as a spiritual guide or manifestation of divine will. He has more in common with those Provençal troubadours whose muses were earthier. Yet she is not so earthy as to give me any clue as to what she was like, or what contact they had.

     Consequently I sense her as an almost empty figure used by Montale to evoke his own bleak view of life. His is not on the whole a joyous attitude. But he does mine the immediate world and his memory for looming impressions, rendered in a language which has density and an edge which can suddenly cuff me awake. There is music but not sweetness, and it’s all the better for that. Perhaps he is more interested in the ‘far halt’ (opposta | tappa—opposing, objecting, impudent, appended / stage, platform, halt, refuge) as another stage in life than he is in their separation.

I’ve picked up the squeaking (cigolìo) of the cable car at the start of the second verse and repeated it as a grinding in the last line. That’s not in the original, but it’s that sort of translation.

OUTLINE

1 The sound of frogs, trees and beetles accompanies his thoughts about the countryside’s stifling greed.

2 The sky is black, heralding an apocalyptic storm.

SUMMARY 
Rural sounds remind him of Nature’s voracity. The sky prophesies violence to come.

COMMENT 
Far from being about love or the poet’s dubious muse, this piece is about life itself in its ultimate form. Animate Nature is a stifling web of predation. The opening does not immediately suggest this; the point is made as late as lines 7 and 8, in ‘the greedy | life of the countryside’ (avara | vita della campagna). Beetles come in many forms; some do indeed feed on other creatures’ juices, strongly suggested by the Italian linfe (lymph), a word once also a poetic expression for water.

     It’s the very noise made by Nature that disturbs him. At first the sounds don’t seem to be of a disconcerting kind, after all the frog merely tries out (ritentar) the musical string (corda) of its instrument (the stagna or pond, presumably); and it’s just the rustle (stormire) of carob-trees, the humming (ronzìo) of beetles, that he hears. But to all these sounds is allied an eerie otherness. There is a pond ‘which is ditch-like’ (che affossa), choked with reeds and the reflections of clouds that in turn portend a catastrophic storm.

     This cold morning late in the year, when the frog is the first to break the dawn’s silence, is oppressive. The carob-trees are congested, entwined (conserti). The beetles not only buzz or hum, they are also greedily sucking life-juices from other creatures. These sounds, says Montale, are ultimate, definitive—they are Nature’s first and last word. The hour of dawn, of a ‘frozen sun’ (un sole senza caldo), no sooner begins than it expires with a gasp (con un soffio | l’ora s’estingue).

     These uncomfortable lines end with an apocalyptic vision worthy of Revelation. From a sky as dark as a blackboard comes the threat of thunder and lightning more frightening than any storm that ever was, a tempest that rumbles like starved or skeletal (scarni) horses striking fierce fire from their hooves.

The poet’s muse isn’t mentioned. We know he hasn’t apotheosised her as Nature, so she is not there in the noises he hears. As inspiration as well as old flame, she is threatened by the cruelties of mortality just as much as he and his poetry are. She isn’t invoked, but this solitary, bleak motet—placed among the nineteen others that do speak of her—automatically implicates her as victim. Sibylline utterances are heard which do not come from her. They’re conveyed in hard and deliberately overworked language. Modernist in that it abstains from sweet euphemism—the beetles barbarously suck (suggono), the sky is as dark as a common blackboard (lavagna)—this little piece is nevertheless carefully wrought in a highly mannered, literary style. It’s evident throughout, from the mostly strict, traditional hendecasyllabic line, which sometimes contains elaborate elision across caesuras,

to the inversions (‘late among | the flowers’— tardo ai fiori) and the thickly textured, stately music, never better displayed than in the splendidly percussive final two lines.

OUTLINE

1 He hopes that no cutting tool will excise her from his memory.

2 It is late in the year and cicada husks are snipped from the acacia into the mud.

SUMMARY 
Twigs and moulted cicada cases are snipped into the mud. He hopes she will not be cut from his mind.

COMMENT 
A few words bear an extreme burden of meaning, as the many commentators testify. It’s not at first exactly clear what the ‘cicada husks’ are (il guscio di cicala—the shell / covering of the cicada). In Italian a guscio is any type of shell, husk or outer casing: bag, tree-bark, egg-shell, husk, apparel, ship’s hull. To knock the life out of a body by killing it is trar l’anima del guscio, literally ‘to jerk / extract the soul from the shell’. Perhaps most Italian readers would know something about acacias and the life-cycle of the cicada. At first I did not. After some reading I learnt:

     1. Acacias are shrubs and trees with feathery (pinnate) leaves; in Europe they are often ornamental.

     2. There are about 1,500 species of cicada. They have an amazing life-cycle. One tree can be completely smothered in tens of thousands of them. The males make a shrill racket, a ‘zizzing’ stridulation that attracts mates and keeps predators at bay. The noise, travelling in waves, can be maddening or musical, depending on how far away its source is. It is made by the clicking of two membranous ‘timbals’ at the base of each insect’s abdomen. Cicadas copulate in the trees which they stifle, then the females fly off to other trees. There each uses her egg-laying apparatus (‘ovipositor’) to drill many times into the bark, laying from 400 to 600 eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae or ‘nymphs’ drop to the ground and use their claws to burrow into the ground. There these grubs live from one to seventeen years, according to species, sucking juice from the roots of trees and other plants. Periodically they shed their skins in order to grow. They do not pupate into chrysalises. When they are ready to become adults, the larvae emerge from the ground, climb up a tree or similar object, perform a last moult and reveal their winged, fully adult bodies. The old skins stay in the tree and may to the casual observer look like actual insects too. The cycle then starts over again. The adults live up to six weeks. Some species don’t eat. Those that do must drill into trees to suck the sap. They can cause immense damage to orchards and crops. Images of them have been used as magical emblems and their bodies as medicine and food. One myth has the mortal Tithonus, beloved by the goddess of the dawn, transformed into a cicada. The noisiest and largest of the European species is Tibicen plebejus.

    When Montale talks of trimming an acacia he imagines, or remembers, the shed skins of the cicadas’ last moult dropping from the tree. It becomes important, therefore, to know a few facts like those above to interpret a poem like this. It’s written in a Modernist shorthand which takes for granted that the private knowledge of the author can be used as if it is public currency, even though there can be no presumption that the result will be fully understood. For all I can tell, for instance, there might be a further layer of meaning in the cicada lines, a truly private association, as was the case with the allusion to jackals being walked on a leash in Motet 6. Are these cicadas symbolic of poetry that wishes to be immortal but, like Tithonus, cannot be forever fresh and young? The image of moulted cicada husks, clipped by the gardener’s shears into the mud along with the leaves and stems of the acacia, is a grim one. Here is Death the Reaper. Nothing is immortal.

OUTLINE

1 Within the temporal there are signs: a reed quivers; dragonflies skip; a dog fetches.

2 He does not wish to know what these signs mean.

3 However, a vision of a cross in the sky appears to him. This puts him outside time with no need of his muse.

SUMMARY 
There are temporal signs which he does not try to understand. A cross in the sky, a vision of world sorrow, puts him beyond time and poetic interpretation.

COMMENT 
The most mystical, the most hermetic, of all the motets. In the note on the 2nd Motet I wrote:

And on the 7th Motet:

If in Motet 7 Montale became a vague, tormented presence, here in Motet 19 he has practically written himself—and his secular muse—out of the script completely. He does not presume to understand earthly signs or to know what the world of appearance is about. Soon after 312AD the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great adopted Christianity (though he was baptised only on his deathbed in 337AD), since he had allegedly seen, prior to winning a battle against his rival Maxentius, a cross athwart the sun and the words in hoc signo vinces (‘in this sign you will be victorious’). Montale also has a vision of crossed beams of light in the sky, and he claims, I think, to have been transported beyond time.

     But what I’ve just assumed is not a reading that will satisfy everyone. Hermeticism does not deliver precise and unambiguous meanings, any more than the fan-shaped reeds and skipping dragonflies do. Above all, I am on thin ice when I deduce that the words ‘And time passes’ (E il tempo passa) signify that time is passing not just in the ordinary sense but also with the implication that time is passing beyond him, and thus he beyond time.

     I believe he is alluding to some kind of mystical transcendence. There is the immediately preceding cross of light in the sky; and there is the assertion that this cruciform light is ‘beyond her irises’ (more literally her pupils, oltre le sue | pupille), i.e. beyond poetic inspiration. My belief that the last line (‘And time passes’) implies the ultramundane is necessary for the way I see the first half of this poem. To me his reeds and dragonflies are intended to evoke a very present earthiness, an emphatic experience of being in this world. And if the cross of light is a sign, as it was to Constantine, then the reeds and so on are signs too. Yet earthly signs, he tells us, do not really reveal anything. They merely are, and they convey nothing about what ‘lies behind’, about what ‘supports’ the apparent.

     The cross of light, on the other hand, might be a revelation which is able to take him beyond this obscure world of surfaces, beyond its facts that refuse to explain themselves or to ‘say’ anything. Accepting the fact that the artist interprets the world, he is paradoxically unhappy that the world does not interpret itself in the first place—as if it could! There is another but less hopeful way of thinking of the cross in the sky. I shall come to it in a moment.

     The language has become even more mannered, elaborate and convoluted. In the hands of a skilled writer who is fully aware of what he is doing, this high style can work as well as any other. It tells us that poems do not pretend to be spontaneous utterances in the language of ordinary people. Poems are artificial additions to reality. They comment on the real but they cannot totally explain it, for then they would have to explain themselves, then explain their explanations, in infinite regress. As total interpretation, art, like philosophy and science, is doomed to fail.

     But art and science do more than assert meaning. They present the intellect with objects as curious, and as obdurate, as Nature itself does. What we experience we cannot help reflecting on. Art and science are amplifications of everyday thought. Reverie is all very well, but the moment we take a stick and doodle in the sand we are on the way to symphonies, cathedrals, fiction and physics.

     Art has no duty to be simple and ‘natural’, as if Nature were simple! Art oscillates between disguising its artificiality and highlighting it. In this poem Montale seems to dispense with his muse. He is in no mood to reach easy conclusions.

     The baroque touches are there from the start. Flabello is no more common a word in Italian than ‘flabellum’ is in English. In biology it is a fan-shaped part of a body; in the Roman Catholic Church it is a fan used in a service to keep away insects. Montale uses another rare word, dispiuma, from spiumáre (‘to shake or ruffle feathers’—and also perhaps, by suggestion, ‘to un-feather’, ‘to shake up or shake off plumage or down’ etc, from the noun piuma, ‘feather, plume’). A rèdola is a gravelled garden walk, hardly what one would expect to find in a ditch: another example of subtle and decorative irony.

     The first half of this motet is a series of noun phrases which do not lead to a completed sentence. Even in the second section there is only one main clause:

                               here and now it’s not my concern to know

                               oggi qui non mi tocca riconoscere

                               (today here it does not concern / affect me to recognise / identify [these things])

After this statement there is a return to the flat setting down of noun phrases, with more irony. Look, he is saying, here is another sign. He may be suggesting the mystical possibility which I’ve outlined above, but I could just as easily read these lines about two crossed bundles or beams of light as a laconic observation of another kind. The idea could be political. The sign in the sky might not be a hopeful Constantinian vision of a heavenly crucifix, but a pessimistic reflection on the ascendancy of the Fascist pasty.

     Due | fasci di luce means ‘two beams of light’, but in Italian ‘fasci’ are also the Ancient Roman fasces. The fasces consisted of a bundle of birch or elm rods bound with scarlet thongs and containing an axe. This bundle was carried in front of magistrates and dictators and signified the right to punish. Between 1919 and 1945 the Fascist party of Italy adopted the fasces as its own official emblem. This motet was written in 1938, with the Second World War impending.

It’s not easy to get at the essence here. The cross is a symbol of suffering and redemption. And if the sky’s mirror (its ‘reflection’, riverbero) actually looks baking hot (since it ‘roasts’, cuoce) beneath dark lowering clouds (il nuvolo s’abbassa: ‘the cloud droops, drops, hangs, falls low’), then we might be looking at a blood-red morning or evening sky with storm clouds brewing. As to:

                               beyond her irises, | by now remote

                               oltre le sue | pupille ormai remote

                               (beyond her | pupils (by) now remote / distant),

who is to say whether ‘beyond’ (oltre) means that the sign reflected in the sky is even farther, more mysterious, than any message about the world reflected in the eyes of his muse, or if it’s towards the sky that her eyes direct his gaze? Is she still helping him? To me she is not. In Motet 5 she physically left him, going off by train. Now, spiritually, he abandons her too, dispensing with his muse.

OUTLINE

1 He concludes by focusing upon small aspects of ordinary life: the sound of a lonely cornet; the image of a volcano inside an oyster-shell; a coin in a lava paperweight.

2 Life is really a very small matter, not limitless and mysterious.

SUMMARY 
Life is insignificant, unmysterious. It is the sum of disparate experiences. Things are what they are, not signs of anything deeper.

COMMENT 
The poems in The Motets have shown a demoralised search for significance, for signs in experience which will explain life. At first Montale seems to have thought, in this arrangement, that by focusing on a past lover as an ever-present muse he might write poetry that would somehow make him perceptive. Generally, however, his experience in this poetic quest has led to feelings of disconnectedness and disenchantment. He has reached an end to his musings and pronounces a disconsolate ‘amen’, ‘so be it’, accepting that for him there can be no revelation.

     He gives up the search for meaning in objects which have struck him with memorable force. He seems to turn his back on symbolism, at least for the sake of the story sketched out in this cycle. It might even sound as if he’s forsaking poetry itself, indeed every form of writing, since words in the most ordinary sense are symbols—of things, actions, connections.

     However, literature is always throwing up great symbolic works: in ancient writings where stories of the gods call for interpretation; in ancient Jewish texts such as Isaiah and Ezekiel, which are deliberately visionary, oracular; in the apocalyptic symbolism of Revelation, the last book in the Christian Bible; in Dante’s Divina Commedia, where allegorical characters illustrate sins and virtues; in the symbolic imagery of Shakespeare; in the various strands developed from Blake and Baudelaire. There has always been this mode of representing, in contrast to ‘realist’ styles which exalt the ordinary and reject mystery. So a poet like Montale, later to write masterpieces like The Eel (L’anguilla) and The Coastguard House (La casa dei doganieri), could never seriously have thought of becoming a celebrator of the plain, whatever he says here.

     If he rejects anything, in this hour of morose surrender, it might be the idea of a muse. Perhaps he’s giving up his belief in a woman, real or invented, as a poetic stimulant. She appears only very obliquely anyway, at the end when he says that ‘life … | … is smaller than your handkerchief’ (La vita … | … è più breve del tuo fazzoletto). Although conceivably ‘your’ (tuo) could refer to the reader, or to the poet himself, I think it really does refer to the woman he has addressed throughout, sometimes as a spirit which has sent him signs, at other times as a lover who walked out on him.

     Whether he is giving her up or not, one note is obvious, the appalling, downbeat conclusion:

                                    And life, which had once seemed

                                    vast, is smaller than your handkerchief

                                    La vita che sembrava

                                    vasta è più breve del tuo fazzoletto

                                    (Life which seemed

                                    Vast / limitless / immense is smaller than your handkerchief).

     Tawdry souvenirs—a volcano painted in an oyster-shell, a coin embedded in a lava paperweight—remind him of a vigorous life of which he is not a part. The cornetta or cornet was a valved, mellow-sounding instrument, largely replaced by the trumpet. How Montale came to hear it along with the noise of insects swarming in trees, either bees or the cicadas of Motet 18, is impossible to say. A cornet played on its own and not as part of a band suggests melancholy, an instrument out of its element.

     The poet is not active in a world he imitates but cannot interpret. He plays a lonely instrument.