Eugenio Montale
Ossi di seppia

"Often I have encountered the evil of living", Eugenio Montale (Ita) from “Ossi di seppia” (1925)

it was the strangled brook that gurgles

it was the curling of the leaf

scorched, it was the horse collapsed.

Good I knew not, except for the miracle

that opens divine Indifference:

it was the statue in the drowsiness

of the noon, and the cloud, and the hawk risen high.

Two quatrains of hendecasyllables except for the last double septenary verse (Rhyme: ABBA and CDDA).

The three great “montalian” issues that emerge from this poem are essentially the existentialist* approach of the author towards life, finding the solution to the ills and pains of living in a kind of apathy and indifference that should lead to a Stoic embrace (which the poet himself will define as “divine indifference”) and, finally, that art (poetry specifically) has no power to change or improve the ultimate end of existence (suffering and death) and therefore can only describe it and be its faithful chronicler.

Indeed here Montale in the first part merely reports with a minimal language, but paying attention to a deliberately aggressive lexicon (“strangled”, “scorched”, “collapsed”) to counter any aulic drift, the “Evil” that manifests in life (and not by chance he chooses three figures to represent the three naturalistic realms) while in the second (which should exalt the philosophical duality of living through the solutions that “Good” has on its side) he praises Apatheia in Art and Nature.

Contradiction within contradiction Montale places apathy both in the obvious indifference of the inanimate material of sculpture and in the distance from earthly things of those who simply are above them (the soaring of the hawk) and of those who are too close to divinity (and thus by definition incapable of empathy for human things) to feel more than the simple narration of facts (the cloud).

All this with the addition of the various and complex rhetorical figures used and, above all, that particular “montalian trademark” which is the “Objective Correlative” in so little “space” makes “Often I have encountered the evil of living” a small and admirable compendium of contemporary poetry.

One of my bad teachers...

...often loved to repeat that at a certain point in individual growth the big questions are no longer “who are we?”, “what are we?”, “where are we going?” (and above all “where are we going will there be room?” to quote him correctly) but rather the more prosaic “how much does it cost?”, “do I make it to the end of the month?”, “can it be repaired?” etc...

Another one in a less “politically correct” way simply pointed out that an “existential crisis” (I swear he used exactly this phrase) was easier to face at the edge of a swimming pool sipping a LIIT surrounded by beautiful girls (perhaps reading “Liberazione” in a fit of contemporary hypocrisy ) than at the end of the cycle of a scrubber surrounded by humanity, “fiercely hairy and masculine”, varied and of mixed origin “venetokosovotunisian” reducing it all to the fact that “Poetry” is stuff for the rich (and therefore it is dead).

Obviously both were provoking knowing they were provoking (being both poets among other things) but the funny thing is that they probably believed it deep down...

For different (and let's say it... more obvious) reasons many exegetes(?) of philosophy in Art love to repeat that “Cinema is dead”, “Rock is dead”, “Aesthetics is dead” (this one has always made me laugh quite rudely I admit...) and others in a whirlwind of rapid and absolute statements that cannot but end with the confirmation that “I'm not feeling well either”.

As in the various triumphs of death that the History of Art is full of where the artist tries to render the “fantastic” objective (without however slyly renouncing to send more or less hidden messages through an iconography of metaphorical allusions) Montale too seems to want to tell us that there is nothing to understand except to accept things as they are and limit oneself to reporting: if the moral rigor of the Genoese poet were not known it would be legitimate to wonder if it is not a bit of a mockery to declare having accepted the defeat of Art, in overcoming even mere human questions, raising such an intense and evolved “white flag” even in eight “simple” verses.

I am sure there is a message and it is much older (just look around) than the (alleged) 85 years of this poem: understanding it might perhaps lead to overcoming certain silly merely syntactic questions (even in times of crisis).

Mo.

* Indeed it would be incorrect to place Montale in the Existentialist movement (despite the obvious “leopardian” influences that could indeed place him, although obviously anachronistic for excess, among the precursors) but many themes of his thinking nonetheless oblige citing the similarities in addressing the great questions of existence.