The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi
Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), 1819
Poetry that captures the profound beauty and crushing weight of existence, tracing the line from idealized youthful hope to the acceptance of universal melancholy. A slow, lyrical voice moves from youthful hope into grief, with nature, time and death pressing close.
Feels like melancholy, grief and nostalgia. About death, nature and time.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are drawn to Romantic poetry that refuses easy consolation and looks steadily at suffering and mortality. Be aware that the mood is often bleak and the English translation uses archaic phrasing such as “wilt thou” and “Naught,” which can slow a first reading.
Why read it
Leopardi gives melancholy a clear, unsentimental music, and his poems can make an old ache feel shared and articulate.
Pages from the book
The ultimate cessation of feeling is presented as the final relief from life’s burden.
Nor wilt thou rest forever, weary heart.The last illusion is destroyed,That I eternal thought. Destroyed!I feel all hope and all desire depart,For life and its deceitful joys.Forever rest! Enough! Thy throbbings cease!Naught can requite thy miseries;Nor is earth worthy of thy sighs.Life is a bitter, weary load,The world a slough. And now, repose!Despair no more, but find in DeathThe only boon Fate on our race bestows! The Italian song is born from a specific kind of unbearable sorrow.
Thy holy ashes still were warm,Whom hostile fortune ne’er unmanned;Unto whose anger and whose grief,Hell was more grateful than thy native land.Ah, what, but hell, has Italy become?And thy sweet cordsStill trembled at the touch of thy right hand,Unhappy bard of love.Alas, Italian song is still the childOf sorrow born.And yet, less hard to bear,Consuming grief than dull vacuity! A face meant to hold memory can only watch time leave.
Such wast thou: now in earth below,Dust and a skeleton thou art.Above thy bones and clay,Here vainly placed by loving hands,Sole guardian of memory and woe,The image of departed beauty stands.Mute, motionless, it seems with pensive gazeTo watch the flight of the departing days.That gentle look, that, wheresoe’er it fell,As now it seems to fall,Held fast the gazer with its magic spell;That lip, from which as from some copious urn,Redundant pleasure seems to overflow;That neck, on which love once so fondly hung; Giacomo Leopardi.Leopardi's poetry is deeply tied to the Romantic movement, but he rejected its optimism, choosing instead to focus intensely on human suffering and natural indifference.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi for me?
- You may like it if you are drawn to Romantic poetry that refuses easy consolation and looks steadily at suffering and mortality. Be aware that the mood is often bleak and the English translation uses archaic phrasing such as “wilt thou” and “Naught,” which can slow a first reading.
- What is The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi like?
- A slow, lyrical voice moves from youthful hope into grief, with nature, time and death pressing close. Feels like melancholy, grief and nostalgia. About death, nature and time.
- What should I read after The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi?
- If you liked The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi, try The Last Man (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), Jacob’s Room (Virginia Woolf) and Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (Emily Dickinson).
A taste of the feed
What keeps singing in the worst weather and never sends a bill.
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I ‘ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete · Emily Dickinson
The moment when the boundaries between sight, sound, and emotion collapse.
Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles · Thomas Hardy
A sailor's love for the sea has fear in it; landsmen never understand.
We men hat go down for a livin’ in ships to the sea— We love it a different way from you poets that ’bide on the land. We are fond of it, sure! But, you take it as comin’ from me, There’s a fear and a hate in our love that a landsman can’t understand. Oh, who could help likin’ the salty smell, and the blue Of the waves that are lazily breathin’ as if they dreamed in the sun? She’s a Sleepin’ Beauty, the sea—but you can’t tell what she’ll do; And the seamen never trust her—they know too well what she’s done!
Poetry · Henry van Dyke Jr.
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