Eugenio Montale
Ossi di Seppia

The fluttering feather in "Forrest Gump" or the plastic bag at the mercy of the currents in "American Beauty" may be clichéd images and not particularly refined, but one must admit that the subtext that permeates them always retains a certain power, an inherent effectiveness whose echo inevitably resonates with the viewer in turn.

Of course, they don't exactly mean the same thing: if the feather symbolizes the lightness of Fate that with its foils always - in one way or another - closes the circle of our lives, the plastic bag refers to the idea of an authentic Beauty that breaks free from classical stereotypes and settles in the most unlikely places.

The title Montale chooses for his first collection of poems is identical in spirit to these two cinematic escamotage and is used in a very precise sense. A rather cryptic name whose meaning is clarified only in an allegory of the final poem where the poet feels tossed like a cuttlebone by the ebb and flow of the sea, then gradually vanishes.

The core and sense of "Ossi di Seppia" lie in the twenty-two small compositions of the eponymous section of the collection where an inert, petrified, apathetic consciousness, reduced to the barest minimum, sways in the small motions depicted by the marine/agricultural scenery before its eyes. A man not only irretrievably estranged from the communion of his fellow beings but above all a being whose sensitivity is stripped to the bone, whose only hope is to find refuge in "divine Indifference".

In bucolic backdrops characterized by an exasperated stillness, the blind power of life manages to break forth from every small crevice, from the foam of the surf, from the chirping of cicadas. Nature speaks, but the poet only hears the nullity of existence, this "scialo di triti fatti/vano più che crudele" which translates into an existential calm devoid of any passion, cleansed from any ancestral inquiry, and set against the mysticism of a d'Annunzio.

Montale makes extensive use of what T.S. Eliot called the "objective correlative", that is, "a series of objects, a situation, a chain of events ready to become the formula of a particular emotion": to evoke a precise sensation, the artist does not indulge in rhetorical lengths or conceptual abstractions, but rather relies on images calibrated to hit the mark and thus achieve his goal.

This characteristic, combined with a certain typically classical taste in verse structure and the intermittent use of lexical archaisms, brings Montale's poetry much closer to the allegorical titanism of a Dante than to the style of some of his contemporaries: the experimentalism of an Ungaretti or the colloquialism of a Saba travel decidedly on different tracks.

In the nine poems of "Mediterraneo", the other central cycle of "Ossi di Seppia", Montale lingers particularly on the morphology of the Ligurian coast dissected with meticulous detail; the compositions lengthen, and the sea becomes the sole recipient of poetic inspiration. A sea seen as a primordial, alien, disconcerting, almost hostile element, symbol of a stepmother Nature manifested in all its deaf authority, echoing the cosmic pessimism of Leopardian thought.

If in the section "Movimenti" that opens the collection Montale seems to explore the potential of his lyre by tuning it to various heterogeneous themes, it is with the last cycle of poems, "Meriggi e Ombre", that the poet focuses on episodes concerning his biography.

In these lyrics, the nostalgia of childhood dominates, the yearning for the loss of the only possible golden age on this Earth, which, just like Pascoli's "nest", preserves and protects man from the iniquity of life, from the future malaise of living, from the "morso secreto", from the "vento che nel cuore soffia".

It must have been at least twenty years since I last picked up these poems. But at a time like this, when I feel terribly passive, indifferent, and devoid of any desire to communicate, well... I felt it was the right moment.

I don’t mind feeling this way: it's simply a period like many others, a period to be traversed.

I don’t mind feeling like a cuttlebone lost among the waves or, possibly, pecked at by some passing canary.

In the end, we are all in the same cage.