Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli

by Giovanni Pascol

  1855 December 31, Giovanni Agostino Placido Pascoli is born to Caterina Vincenzi Alloccatelli and Ruggero Pascoli as the fourth of ten children in Caterina’s ancestral home in the village of San Mauro, in rural Romagna, on the Adriatic coast, near Rimini.

  1862 The family moves to a nearby farming estate owned by local nobility, where Ruggero has been hired as overseer. They live above the estate’s chapel. Pascoli enters boarding school in Urbino, in the Marche region of central Italy, below Romagna, with his older brothers Giacomo and Luigi. Younger brother Raffaele will enroll in 1865, and the youngest, Giuseppe, in 1868.

  1867 August 10, Ruggero Pascoli is murdered with a shot to the head while riding back from a nearby town. No one is ever tried for the crime, but the family is sure Ruggero has been killed by the man who replaces him as farm manager. Caterina moves the family back to her ancestral home in San Mauro.

  1868 November 13, the firstborn and “little mother” of the Pascoli brood, Margherita, dies of typhus at eighteen years old. She leaves an unpublished manuscript of poems. December 18, Caterina dies of heart failure. The surviving children are left in the care of sixteen-year-old Giacomo and fourteen-year-old Luigi. The two youngest, Ida and Maria, are sent to the nearby town of Sogliano in the care of their mother’s sister, who enrolls them in a local convent school.

  1871 October 19, Luigi dies of cerebral meningitis. Giacomo gathers all the children into a house in the coastal town of Rimini near San Mauro. Ida and Maria are enrolled in a grade school, and Giovanni transfers from his boarding school in Urbino to a local high school.

  1872 Giacomo sends Giovanni to finish high school in Florence. Flunking out in June, Giovanni returns to Romagna and passes the necessary exams in October.

  1873 Giovanni wins a scholarship to compete for one of twenty full scholarships to the University of Bologna. Internationally revered poet Giosuè Carducci is the esteemed Professor of Italian Literature and a member of the admission committee. In his essay “Ricordi di un vecchio scolaro” [“Recollections of an Old Student”] written in 1896, Pascoli describes how his brother Giacomo loaded him onto the train with “too much money for the one giving it and not enough for the one taking it . . . and said ‘Babbo is with you.’” Referring to himself in third person, he recalls his awe at finding that Giosuè Carducci—already celebrated as Italy’s national poet—would give the exam: “Carducci himself? None other than Carducci . . . the boy was called up to elaborate on his answers and he heard—or imagined he heard—that Carducci, the actual Carducci, was now expanding upon and clarifying the boy’s own explanations for the other professors.” Giovanni is awarded first place and given a full scholarship to the University of Bologna.

  1874 Prominent socialist revolutionary Andrea Costa (who would later claim the first socialist seat in parliament, and whose epitaph was written by Pascoli) is arrested in Bologna. Giovanni and Severino Ferrari (a fellow Carducci disciple and poet who would become Pascoli’s lifelong friend) help reorganize Bologna’s socialist movement underground.

  1876 May 12, Giacomo Pascoli dies of typhus after Giovanni has nursed him throughout the night. He leaves behind his newly pregnant wife and their small son, Ruggero. Giovanni stops attending classes and loses his scholarship. Increasingly engaged with Italy’s rising socialist movement, he attends anarchist and socialist meetings throughout Emilia Romagna. He strengthens his friendships with Severino Ferrari and with Andrea Costa, who has been released from prison. During this period, Pascoli writes newspaper articles, struggling for food and rent and often living in debt.

  He experiments with every form of verse, as recounted by his former student Domenico Bulferetti in a 1914 biography of the poet: “He composed Greek poetry with elegant ease. He would write and recite in French, even improvising lines, and even more so in Latin. His Italian verse was without metrical or stylistic limit . . . [His] poems had a subtle, indefinable quality, with delicate but daring onomatopoeia and imagery that delighted his young friends and even Carducci.”

  1877 Raffaele comes to Bologna in search of work and the two brothers move in together.

  1878 February, Carducci arranges a temporary teaching job for Pascoli at a local public high school. The school principal complains that Pascoli often fails to show up, and the job ends in August. Historians suggest that the poet’s erratic behavior may be due to a romance with Erminia Tognacci, daughter of neighbors from San Mauro. Tognacci dies in an accident at the age of seventeen on April 9, 1878.

  1879 September, Accused of inciting violence, Pascoli is arrested upon returning from a protest in Bologna. He spends three months in prison and is released on December 22, after Carducci testifies to his innocence, declaring that “Pascoli is incapable of committing the crimes of which he has been accused.” According to one university friend, the poet ran into Carducci on the day he was released from prison. When Carducci asked what Pascoli had been doing that day, the younger poet replied, “Nothing.” Carducci then asked, “Aren’t you ashamed to keep living like this, given your brilliance? Capable as you are of writing poetry for which even Ariosto would want to take credit?”

  1880 November 8, Pascoli recovers his scholarship to the University of Bologna and, encouraged by Carducci, reenrolls. Carducci hires him to translate Greek, Latin, and French poetry while he is in school.

  1882 Graduates from the University of Bologna with top marks. Pascoli compares his extended period in school with the siege of Troy. His thesis on the ancient Greek poet Alcaeus prompts one professor to declare that in it, “a new poetics is being delineated.” Spends ten days visiting his two sisters at their aunt’s home in Romagna after not having seen them for almost a decade. With Carducci’s assistance, obtains a job as a high school classics teacher in the town of Matera, in the southern region of Basilicata, between Calabria and Apulia on the Ionian Sea.

  1884 Returns to Tuscany for his second job as a high school classics teacher, having requested a transfer from Matera to the Tuscan town of Massa.

  1885 Sends for his teenage sisters Ida and Maria, who have been living with their aunt. The three siblings live together for the next decade.

  1886 Writes the first poems in his sequence “The Last Walk” on the occasion of Severino Ferrari’s wedding.

  1887 Moves with his sisters to the city of Livorno on Tuscany’s coast for his third job as a high school classics teacher.

  1889 Courts a young woman named Lia Bianchi in Livorno, as Ida is courted by a friend of the poet’s from Romagna. For the sake of their re-created family unit, both siblings break off their respective relationships after a few months.

  1891 The first full version of Myricae is published with twenty-two poems by publisher Raffaello Giusti, who will retain the printing rights to the collection in perpetuity. The 1891 version is published as a wedding pamphlet for the July wedding of Pascoli’s university friend Raffaello Marcovigi, with extra copies printed so the poet might sell them.

  1892 The second version of Myricae is published with seventy-two poems. March, Pascoli wins his first gold-medal Hoeufft Prize from Amsterdam’s International Latin Verse Competition for his poem “Veianius,” the first in a cycle of poems inspired by Horace, one of Pascoli’s central Latin models. He will win twelve more gold medals in this annual competition. November, receives a letter from his youngest brother, Giuseppe, who is homeless and desperate for money. The following month, Pascoli writes to Severino about his own and his sisters’ unhappiness: “Having arrived at this point, we’ve all three of us realized, I think, that we’ve made a real mistake with our lives; and there’s no starting over. . . . And: I have this terribly unhappy and terribly unfortunate brother who, as you know, constantly begs me for help because he thinks I’ve become a gentleman, and I want to pull him out of his misery somehow and I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

  1894 November, Pascoli takes a leave of absence from his teaching job in Livorno, having been chosen to serve in Rome as a consultant for the Ministry of Education.
Welcomed by key figures of the modern literary scene, Pascoli begins to solidify his reputation as heir to Carducci and first poet of the new century. The younger and already famous poet Gabriele D’Annunzio has written in an 1892 book review that Pascoli is “the only contemporary poet who has managed to revive the old traditional verse forms”; Pascoli and D’Annunzio begin an intense, competitive friendship that will last throughout Pascoli’s life. Editor Adolfo De Bosis invites Pascoli to write about Dante for the Rome-based journal Il convito, which will also publish much of what will become Pascoli’s 1905 Poemi conviviali. In Rome, Pascoli meets the futurist poet F. T. Marinetti, who will showcase his Poemi conviviali in the debut issue of the journal Poesia. Publishes a third edition of Myricae with 116 poems. Publishes the first edition of Lyra Romana, an anthology of Latin poetry for high school students. In the prefatory dedication, Pascoli writes, “human beings feel the mysterious fibers through which they are tied to humanity that has been and to humanity that will be.” He adds, “there is no population that does not look for its own identity in the past.”

  1895 September 30, Ida Pascoli marries, ending the family unit the three siblings had re-created, and sparking Pascoli’s own impulse to marry. Pascoli begins to court Imelde Morri, a cousin from Rimini. Morri’s father (Caterina’s brother-in-law) had been helpful to the orphaned children after their parents’ deaths. October 15, Giovanni, Maria, and their dog Gulí move to Castelvecchio, a hamlet of the Tuscan hill town of Barga, fifty miles north of Livorno. Overlooking the Garfagnana region, Castelvecchio becomes Giovanni and Maria’s home for the last seventeen years of the poet’s life.

  1896 Becomes Professor of Latin and Greek Grammar at the University of Bologna, and commutes from Castelvecchio. February 9, for the thirty-fifth anniversary of Carducci’s position at the University of Bologna, Pascoli publishes “Recollections of an Old Student” in the local newspaper. Pascoli becomes engaged to Imelde Morri. When Maria hears of her brother’s engagement through acquaintances, he ends it. He writes to Maria, “Regarding that thing, I have already exécuté, that is, I broke it off. You won’t cry anymore.” The two siblings continue to live together until the end of Pascoli’s life.

  1897 Pascoli’s youngest brother, Giuseppe, moves to Bologna with his pregnant stepdaughter, now also his wife. They were married in the graveyard of San Mauro after the death of Giuseppe’s first wife (his stepdaughter’s mother). Giuseppe claims that Ruggero and Caterina treated him brutally when he was a young child, and that Giovanni sexually abused him. Giuseppe demands money. Pascoli quits his teaching post and plans to leave Bologna, writing to a colleague in Barga, “The disgust and discredit of that man is such that after fourteen years, I am compelled to end a career that still holds promise.” Publishes the first edition of Little Poems, with twenty poems, the fourth edition of Myricae, with 152 poems now divided into fifteen sections, and his thoughts about poetry in a series of articles for the literary magazine Il Marzocco. These articles will become chapters in “Il fanciullino,” Pascoli’s famous long essay on the childlike nature of the poet, inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus, psychologist James Sully’s Studies of Childhood, and classical poets. Pascoli identifies poetry as the expression of the child’s innocence. Quietly criticizing Carducci’s ceremonious style, Pascoli writes in “Il fanciullino,” “The poet is a poet, not orator and not prophet . . . And with no offense to the Maestro, the poet is not a blacksmith forging swords, shields and plowshares . . . Italians dazzled by Scipio’s shining helmet are not accustomed to follow the trembling shimmer of dragonflies. How could we possibly hear the rustling of leaves, the gurgling of a stream, or the song of the nightingale . . . if the village band’s trombones and cymbals were deafening the countryside around us?”

  1898 Becomes Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Messina in Sicily, commuting there with Maria and Gulì. Until 1903, they live in Messina during the academic year, and return to Castelvecchio during the summer months. Publishes Minerva oscura. Prolegomeni: La costruzione morale del poema di Dante [Dark Minerva. Prolegomena: The Construction of Morality in Dante’s Poem], an expanded version of the Dantean essays Pascoli had previously published in the magazine Il convito. March, falls ill with typhus. Maria, who nurses him, contracts it in April. Both recover after several months. June, delivers a commemorative speech entitled “A Poet of Dead Language” for renowned Latinist and poet Diego Vitrioli. Pascoli writes that Vitrioli “used the language of the 1500s. In fact, he lived among vanished things, and his mind continuously needed to resurrect dead beauty.” In this speech, Pascoli rejects the notion that languages can die a final death, claiming rather that they are ever-evolving vehicles of thought and feeling. This idea of language and continuity in poetry is further elaborated upon in Pascoli’s preface to the Lyra romana: “Where is the present of a language? πάντα ῥεῖ [everything flows, from sixth century Greek philosopher Heraclitus]. How could we give expression to thought, especially meaningful thought, for even one generation, if we did not turn back while moving forward? Ancient literature! . . . What literature is not ancient, if what we call new continues to stir up ancient life?”

  1900 Publishes the fifth edition of Myricae, with its final number of 156 poems and what can be considered the definitive structural organization, though minor changes will still be made in following editions until the poet’s death; the second edition of Little Poems, expanded to forty-five poems; a new study on Dante: Sotto il velame: Saggio di un’interpretazione generale del poema sacro [Under the Veil: Essay about a General Interpretation of the Sacred Poem]; an anthology for high school students, Sul limitare: Poesie e prose per la scuola italiana [At the Edge: Poetry and Prose Chosen for Italian Schools], with mostly Italian literature but also ancient Latin and Greek authors, Victor Hugo, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, all in translations by Pascoli; and a small book entitled Regole e saggi di metrica neoclassica [Rules and Examples of Neo-Classical Verse] that includes a letter Pascoli wrote to classicist Giuseppe Chiarini, in which he explains his theory of double accentuation to combine the natural prosody of Italian with the rhythmic system of classical meter. Pascoli withdrew this book from publication because he considered it incomplete.

  1901 Publishes another study on Dante: La mirabile visione: Abbozzo di una storia della Divina Commedia [The Extraordinary Vision: Outline of a History of The Divine Comedy].

  1902With gold from five Hoeufft medals, Pascoli buys the house in Castelvecchio that he and Maria have been renting since 1895. Publishes the second, expanded edition of Sul limitare. The anthology will have several editions and reprints well after the poet’s death, into the 1920s.

  1903 April, Publishes the first edition of Canti of Castelvecchio with sixty-one poems. This publication begins his collaboration with famed publishing house Zanichelli, which begins to acquire the rights to Pascoli’s works. August, Publishes the second edition of Canti of Castelvecchio. This edition includes his glossary of less common words, some Romagnolo and some Italian, but many Tuscan, especially of the Garfagnino variety spoken in Barga. Pascoli explained the glossary includes “a list of words that can be supposed unknown to various readers,” and that “these are words that belong to the farms; and those who don’t come from the farms don’t know the words. But the words still live, after centuries, in these secluded mountains. Those who haven’t been here think the words are dead, brought back to life to make these readers feel bad. But that is not why I’m recirculating them. I’ve done so for love of truth, and for brevity. My farmers and mountaineers use this language, and they often speak better than we do, especially when their words are shorter, and stressed on the root syllable to be understood from a distance, from one hill to another; this is language expressive by itself, without needing help from an adjective or adverb. The writer or speaker who uses two words for one idea is like the birder who wastes two shots for one robin, yet doesn’t catch it.” Moves with Maria from Sicily back to Tuscany
to become Professor of Classics at the University of Pisa. He assumes his post with the speech “La mia scuola di grammatica” [“My School of Grammar”] defining grammar as “the art of understanding ancient writers” who express ideas and feelings that are ever relevant and have universal appeal. Publishes the sixth edition of Myricae, with the addition of a bibliographical note explaining the genesis and elaboration of the volume through the previous editions, and Miei pensieri di varia umanità [My Thoughts on Various Humanity], which includes the famous “Il fanciullino,” “Un poeta di lingua morta” [“A Poet of Dead Language”], and several essays on Leopardi’s poems.

  1904 Publishes the third edition of Little Poems with forty-six poems, changing the title to First Little Poems, and the first edition of Poemi conviviali to immense acclaim, gathering his longer, epic-scale narratives about mythical and historical figures.

  1905 Publishes the seventh edition of Myricae, the third edition of Canti of Castelvecchio with sixty-four poems, and the second edition of Poemi conviviali, adding one poem.

  1906 January, Becomes Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna, inheriting the position of Giosuè Carducci, who wins the Nobel Prize this same year. Giovanni and Maria rent a house in Bologna and commute from Castelvecchio. Publishes the first edition of Odes and Hymns.

  1907 January 20, Philosopher and literary critic Benedetto Croce publishes an article on Pascoli in his journal La critica, giving rise to a long confrontation between supporters and detractors of the poet’s work. Croce criticizes the linguistic choices most appreciated by others. February 16, Giosuè Carducci dies. Pascoli pays homage to his professor and mentor with an essay in the newspaper, quoting a line Carducci wrote for Garibaldi, the hero of the Unification: “Today, Italy adores you—this is what the Poet has been told for many years by all of Italy, a place made one through its arms and its laws, but not in its heart—except in this one thing, that it adores its Poet.” Publishes the fourth edition of Canti of Castelvecchio, with 166 poems; the fourth edition of First Little Poems; the second edition of Odes and Hymns, with forty-five poems, and the prose collection Pensieri e discorsi [Thoughts and Speeches], which includes earlier essays and lectures. April 7, Suffering from an unspecified ailment, Pascoli undergoes an operation that limits his activity for several months. This may have been the first manifestation of illness that would lead to digestive and hepatic complaints in the following years before a diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver and stomach cancer in 1912. Publishes the eighth edition of Myricae.