L’uccellino del freddo / Winter Wren (CC 1905)
L’uccellino del freddo—literally, “the little bird of the cold”: This poem follows the canzone form of sestets, and a refrain that mimics the wren’s song. Pascoli’s meter is particularly elaborate beyond the already unfamiliar novenario: in even-numbered stanzas, the second, fifth, and eighth syllable of each line are stressed as part of a dactylic rhythm. In odd-numbered stanzas, the pattern is anapestic.
l. 2 sgricciolo [small wren]: Pascoli uses this Tuscan form of scricciolo (wren) to establish a close relationship between the wren’s voice and the winter sounds that contextualize its song. The verb sgrigiola in line 6 is a Tuscan form of the Italian verb scricchiolare, which describes the sound of breaking ice or glass.
l. 8 verno [winter]: Pascoli substitutes verno for inverno. In his 1903 glossary, he writes, “One cannot say ‘in inverno.’ [“in winter”]” Cf. “The Night Hour” and “Narcissi.”
l. 9 tecco [the sealed, dry well / of cold]: In his glossary, Pascoli defines tecco as “shivering from the cold / chilled to the bone or hurt.” It is a word from the dialect of the Garfagnana region of Tuscany.
ll. 10–11 Tu somigli un guscio di noce, / che ruzzola con rumor secco [You look like the shell / of a nut dropping, click]: As Pascoli explains in his glossary, the wren is also called cocla in the Romagnolo dialect, meaning “nutshell” (cf. guscio di noce [shell / of a nut]); Pascoli brings the shell into the poem’s soundscape as it rolls to the ground. He adds that “the reader can learn more about this graceful little bird in a lively book by A. Bacchi della Lega called Caccie e costumi degli uccelli silvani [Hunting and the Habits of Forest Birds]. From this book, I have also taken the dry verse of the wren, with very slight variation: trr trr trr terit tirit.”
ll. 15–16 Nel tuo verso suona scrio scrio / con piccoli crepiti e stiocchi [From your tune trips / a clitter and clatter and clack]: scrio scrio is a variant of scrivo scrivo [exactly like that; cf. “Huddle”]. This variant of the Tuscan idiom becomes an onomatopoeic aspect of the bird’s voice that resembles the scricchiolettio [creaking] of dry wood. In his glossary, Pascoli defines stiocchi as “cracks or claps (sound).”
l. 27 la grecchia [switch grass]: In his glossary, Pascoli defines grecchia as Tuscan dialect for “a smaller variety of feather grass that blooms in autumn. Tufts.”
l. 31 una stiampa [strips of bark]: In his glossary, Pascoli defines stiampa as Romagnolo for “kindling.” He also writes, “Because of schooling, those who are not Tuscan always and inevitably reject their vernacular, thinking it banned from literature. I want to show how they can (often, beautifully, and correctly) use words from their own mother tongue, which is wrongly either beloved or despised—either because those words are common to the living and pure Tuscan dialect spoken in the mountains, or because they are necessary, or at least useful, even if not Tuscan. For example . . . with the word schiampa or stiampa, a good Romagnolo would not venture to use it in writing, nor would they say it before a public audience.”
l. 37 Nell’Alpe lontana [In the faraway Alps]: Pascoli refers here to the Apuan Alps that run through the Garfagnana region of Tuscany, separating it from Romagna. He could see their ridge from his Castelvecchio home. In his glossary, he defines them as “the high mountains.”
Nebbia / Fog (CC 1903)
ll. 9–10 Ch’io veda soltanto la siepe / dell’orto: [That I might see only this hedge / in the garden]: This line echoes the first three lines of Leopardi’s “L’infinito,” which reads, Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle, / e questa siepe, che da tanta parte / dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude [This solitary hill was always dear to me / and this hedge, that almost entirely / blocks the distant horizon]. The garden in “Fog” refers to a large expanse of lawn beside Pascoli’s Castelvecchio home, filled with flowers and fruit trees; many of his poems are set there.
L’or di notte / The Night Hour (CC 1903)
l. 5 porta . . . uno in collo [reaching to touch a third on his head]: In his glossary, Pascoli defines collo (portare in): “It’s said of men who carry burdens. Women carry ‘on the head.’ ”
l. 9 tre, poi cinque, sette tocchi [three, five, seven times]: The chime of bells is heard from the farmhouse where a family prepares for bed, as Pascoli explains in his glossary: “If they listen in the first hour of night, when silence is already deep, my readers will hear the church bell sound first three, then five, then seven rings. And if they come to Caprona [the little hill on which Pascoli’s Castelvecchio home and a small chapel were built], one hour before, they will hear a smaller bell [schilletta or squilletta].” The system of chimes is no longer as elaborate as it was in Pascoli’s time. In 2014, the translators wrote to The Bell Ringers Association of Barga to ask about the significance of the poem’s three-five-seven chime system, and a member of the association responded as follows: “With the disappearance of farm life, some forms of communication have been lost. Even . . . the bells for last rites and funerals are no longer used . . . they used to play different bells depending on who had died, a woman or a man or a person of the cloth. And each town had its own traditions. Barga had a curfew bell . . . at nine in the evening in winter and at ten in summer, the middle bell (corresponding to the classic don don in Pascoli’s poems) would ring for about two minutes to announce that the town gates would soon close, warning those outside the walls to hurry back. Now regulations on noise pollution limit the sound of the double-bells to high mass or the festival of a patron saint.”
l. 13 borgo alle croci [that town / where the dead are from]: Literally, the words mean “town of the crosses,” a Tuscan expression for the cemetery.
l. 15 Fate piano! piano! piano! [Shhh, quiet, be quiet]: After the evening call to prayer, the Requiem would be recited for the dead. Through the sound of the bell’s call, voices from the cemetery’s “faraway town” attempt to hush the noise of the living. As with “Night Snow,” Pascoli lets human speech stand in for sounds made by objects, so the rhythm of quiet suggests the bell’s chime.
Canzone di marzo / Song for March (CC 1903)
The poem was first published in June 1902, in Matilde Serao’s Naples-based literary journal La settimana. Serao, who received several nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature, was the first woman to establish a journal in Italy.
ll. 16–18 In sogno gettavano al vento / le loro pezzuole [and whipped / their shawls at the wind / in their dreams]: At the end of his glossary, Pascoli writes about various country superstitions, folktales, and rituals, describing how, “in these mountains, when young women see the first serpents of the year, they throw their shawls in the air.”
l. 36 la garrula prole [their garrulous chicks]: Pascoli uses the adjective garrulo often. Its antecedent can be found in Virgil’s fourth Georgic, lines 306–7, Ante / garrula quam tignis nidum suspendat hirundo [Before / the garrulous swallow hangs her nest in the eaves].
Il gelsomino notturno / Night-Blooming Jasmine (CC 1903)
The novenari of these quatrains alternate stress patterns, moving each stanza from a slower, more solemn rhythm to a faster, anapestic one.
The poem was written for the 1901 wedding of Gabriele Briganti. In a note for its publication in Canti of Castelvecchio, Pascoli wrote, “And may Gabriele Briganti think of me whenever he inhales the scent of that flower which makes night shadows and silence fragrant . . . in those hours, a tiny bloom had budded, bringing together (as [Briganti] intended) the name of a god, and an angel, with the name of a great man: I mean to say that Dante Gabriele Giovanni was born.” With Pascoli’s reference here to Briganti’s son, we understand the poem is not only an epithalamium but also an anticipation of the act of conception, when the “lamp, carried upstairs, / glows, then goes dim.”
l. 15 La Chioccetta per l’aia azzurra / va col suo pigolìo di stelle [The Pleiades steer chirping stars / through the sky’s blue barnyard]: In his glossary, Pascoli defines Chioccetta as the “farmers’ name for the Pleiades.”
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sp; ll. 21–22 i petali / un poco gualciti: In order to keep line 21, which is technically decasyllabic, to a nine-syllable count, Pascoli elides the last syllable -li of petali with the opening u of the next verse, un poco gualciti. Thus, the peta inside petali rhymes with segreta. He performs similar hypermetrical tricks elsewhere.
La guazza / Dew (CC 1903)
Three novenari followed by one six-syllable line for each quatrain. In line 2, a line of ten instead of nine syllables ends on scalpito—emphasizing the ninth and penultimate syllable so scalpito can be heard as an echo in place of the expected rhyme with Alpi in line 4. Begun in the late 1890s with the working title of “La partenza” [“The Departure”], the poem was first published as “La guazza” in the literary journal La riviera ligure in 1901.
l.19 riflette il tuo Sole, o mio Sole: [It mirrors your sun, / oh my sun]: In 1899, Pascoli gave a speech in Messina entitled “L’era nuova” [“The New Era”], in which he asked: “Who among us, even knowing much more than the nothing I know about astronomy, sense they are revolving, together with our small unlit globe, in silent space, the infinite starry shadow?”
L’imbrunire / Nightfall (CC 1907)
This poem was originally published with the title “La sera” [“The Evening”] in the 1906 first edition of Odes and Hymns. It was retitled “L’imbrunire,” which implies the approach of evening more than evening itself, when Pascoli moved it to the fourth edition of the Canti.
ll. 1–2 Cielo e Terra dicono qualcosa / l’uno all’altro nella dolce sera [Sky and Earth converse in the rose-colored evening]: These lines may have been inspired by the first-century Roman poet Statius’s Silvae, Book 1: hoc et sub nocte silenti, / cum superis terrena placent, tua turba relicto / labetur caelo miscebitque oscula iuxta [In the silent night / when those on earth please those in the sky, your clan / will fly down from the sky, mingling kisses].
ll. 12–14 sette case nel tacito borgo, / sette Pleiadi un poco più su. // Case nere: bianche gallinelle! [Seven homes in the town / and seven Pleiades above. // Dark homes: little, white hens!]: the constellation is first mentioned by its mythological and astronomical name, then recalled by its “farmers’ name,” gallinelle [little hens]; this shifting description strengthens the correspondence between sky and earth.
l. 13 Sirio, Algol, Arturo: Sirius in Canis Major, Algol in Perseus, and Arcturus in Boötes are three of the brightest stars in the night sky. Pascoli was fascinated by astronomy since his school days in Urbino where one of his teachers, Alessandro Serpieri, was a noted astronomer.
Le rane / Frogs (CC 1903)
Originally printed in Il Marzocco in April, 1897, it was published that same month in the wedding pamphlet for the daughter of Leopoldo Tosi, the mayor of San Mauro. The wedding took place at the farm Pascoli’s father had managed, and the poem was later included in the “Return to San Mauro” section of the Canti.
l. 6 penero: In his glossary, Pascoli defines penero as “fringe.” The word suggests the fringe at the hem of a piece of cloth.
l. 13 il suo tinnulo invito [quick, tinny voice]: The phrase recalls the voce carmina tinnula in line 13 of Catullus’s poem LXI, with tinnula evoking a metallic sound in the wedding song Catullus describes.
Casa mia / Home (CC 1903)
Originally published in Il Marzocco in 1897, one month after “Frogs,” this poem was also included in the Tosi wedding pamphlet, and then published in the section entitled “Return to San Mauro”. The poem was inspired by Pascoli’s return to Romagna between the end of April and early May 1897. He stayed as a guest of his sister Ida, who lived nearby. On May 2, the poet visited San Mauro, and afterward he wrote a letter to “the citizens,” describing their town as “my ideal world . . . which has for its borders the Salto and Uso Rivers, and for its centers, the tiny chapel of the Madonna of the Waters and the graveyard shadowed by cypress trees.” He continued: “I see you and hear you again; again, I see the little house where I was born, and again I hear the sweet invitation from the living, and from the dead, there where they remain resting, those I loved.”
l. 1 Mia madre era al cancello [My mother stood by the gate]: This gate suggests both the gate to the family home and to the graveyard in San Mauro where Pascoli’s mother, father, three sisters, and two brothers were buried by the time the poet was twenty-one.
ll. 5–8 and ll. 65–68 M’era la casa avanti, / tacita al vespro puro, / tutta fiorita al muro / di rose rampicanti [the house / remained quiet at dusk, / climbing roses / in bloom on the walls]: Pascoli’s mother’s ancestral home in San Mauro, where she returned with her children after their father’s murder, and where she died a year later, weeks after her oldest daughter’s death from typhus. In 1873, Pascoli’s elder brother Giacomo moved his new family into the home, and in 1876, he also died of typhus there.
ll. 9–12 “Sai, dopo la disgrazia, / ci ristringemmo un po’. . .” [“We had /to cut back . . . after / what happened. You know . . .’ ” : La disgrazia or “what happened” refers to the murder of her husband, Pascoli’s father, Ruggero Pascoli, on August 10, 1867. After he was shot by two unidentified men, the family was forced to leave the farming estate Ruggero had managed. They struggled for money to keep the children in school. Pascoli’s mother, Caterina, wrote a letter to the farm owners (local nobility) begging payment for grain that Ruggero sold the day before his death.
l. 55–56 “Ma dove / son io, figliuolo, sai, / ci nevica e ci piove!” [“But it rains here, / my sweet boy, and snows”]: The figure of the mother describes the weather in graveyard, conflating the “two centers” of the “ideal world” that Pascoli describes to the citizens of San Mauro: his home and the graveyard.
Il bolide / The Meteor (CC 1903)
While the use of terza rima for a shorter poem is unusual, it does follow the hendecasyllabic meter of Dante’s form, unlike “Sunday Dawn.”
l. 3 Rio Salto: This stream passed the farm near San Mauro that Ruggero Pascoli managed (and where the family lived until his death) on its way to the nearby Adriatic Sea.
Temporale / Squall (CC 1903)
The poem echoes Leopardi’s 1829 poem “La quiete dopo la tempesta” [The Quiet after the Storm], which describes the gallina, / Tornata in su la via, / Che ripete il suo verso [hen, / returned to her path, / repeating her call].
l. 1 È mezzodí. Rintomba [Noon. The sky entombed]: In his glossary, Pascoli explains that rintomba is a Tuscan expression, “used when the weather closes up, and the sky darkens.”
l. 15 anta [shutters]: In his glossary, Pascoli defines anta as a “shutter on a door or window.”
l. 24 vi sbisciano i lampi [lightning darts through]: In his glossary, Pascoli defines the primarily Tuscan sbisciare as “darting like garden snakes.”
l. 35 croccolare [firm cluck]: In his glossary, Pascoli defines it as “the sound of the hen [gallina] about to lay an egg, or the sound of the mother [chiocchia] leading her chicks. It’s also used for the sound of wine when poured from the jug with no funnel.”
from Diario autunnale / Autumn Diary (CC 1910)
The eight poems in this series were published in Il Marzocco in 1907; they were later gathered under the title Autumn Diary and dedicated to Maria as an appendix to the fifth edition of Canti of Castelvecchio (1910).
Bologna, 2 novembre / Bologna, November 2
November 2 is The Day of the Dead, or All Souls’ Day, honoring departed souls and especially those in Purgatory.
l. 4 San Michele in Bosco [Saint Michael in the Woods]: a well-known church on one of the hills outside Bologna, visible from the house Pascoli rented after he inherited Carducci’s teaching post. The church includes a large courtyard and complex that was once a monastery; this poem was written after the monastery was converted into a hospital.
Torre di San Mauro. Notte dal 9 al 10 novembre / San Mauro Tower. Night between November 9 and 10
l. 1 Torre [Tower]: The nickname for the farm Ruggero Pascoli had managed in Romagna, and where the family had lived in an apartment
above the farm’s one-room chapel. The poet, elected as an honorary member of the town council in 1907, returned to San Mauro on November 9 and stopped at the farm for the night.
The farm is no longer active, and the little building that housed the chapel and the Pascoli family is mostly boarded up, with a front room used for storage by a nearby restaurant. Locked, the chapel is still furnished with pews and a painting of the Madonna and Child. The steps leading to the room where Pascoli and his siblings slept are in ruins.
Bologna, 14 novembre / Bologna, November 14
ll. 3–5 No: non ci sono frati, ma bambini . . . // Han l’ali rotte [those are not friars, but children . . . Their wings are hurt]: In 1896, the convent surrounding the church of Saint Michael in Bologna became the Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute, still the major orthopedic hospital in Italy. In line 5, Pascoli refers to the pediatric ward where children recovered from ailments and broken bones.
Bologna, 12 dicembre. Narcissi / Bologna, December 12. Narcissi,
The two sections are both set off by the dashes Pascoli sometimes used to indicate direct speech. In the first section, a narrator or perhaps the wildflowers speak to the narcissi, and in the second section, the narcissi respond with envy.
(Odi e Inni / ODES AND HYMNS)
Pascoli wrote much of this collection during his years in Messina and Pisa, and he published it in 1906 after taking Carducci’s position at the University of Bologna. A second edition was published in 1907, and a third posthumously in 1913. In the preface, Pascoli describes coming back to his college town: “Returned to my dear mother Bologna a few days ago, I found myself
Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli Page 13
