The maturity that Montale displayed in his very first book —Ossi di Seppia, published in 1925—makes it more difficult to account for his development. Already here he has subverted the ubiquitous music of the Italian hendecasyl- labics, assuming a deliberately monotonous intonation that is occasionally made shrill by the addition of feet or is muted by their omission—one of the many techniques he employs in order to avoid prosodic inertia. If one recalls Montale's immediate predecessors (and the flashiest figure among them is certainly D'Annunzio), it becomes clear that stylistically Montale is indebted to nobody—or to everybody he bounces up against in his verse, for polemic is one form of inheritance.
This continuity through rejection is evident in Montale's use of rhyme. Apart from its function as a kind of linguistic echo, a sort of homage to the language, a rhyme lends a sense of inevitability to the poet's statement. Advantageous as it is, the repetitive nature of a rhyme scheme (or for that matter, of any scheme) creates the danger of overstatement, not to mention the distancing of the past from the reader. To prevent this, Montale often shifts from rhymed to unrhymed verse within the same poem. His objection to stylistic excess is clearly an ethical as well as an aesthetic one—proving that a poem is a form of the closest possible interplay between ethics and aesthetics.
This interplay, lamentably, is precisely what tends to vanish in translation. Still, despite the loss of his "vertebrate compactness" (in the words of his most perceptive critic, Glauco Cambon), Montale survives translation well. By lapsing inevitably into a different tonality, translation— because of its explanatory nature—somehow catches up with the original by clarifying those things which could be regarded by the author as self-evident and thus elude the native reader. Though much of the subtle, discreet music is lost, the American reader has an advantage in understanding the meaning, and would be less likely to repeat in English an Italian's charges of obscurity. Speaking of the present collection, one only regrets that the footnotes do not include indications of the rhyme scheme and metric patterns of the poems. After all, a footnote is where civilization survives.
Perhaps the term "development" is not applicable to a poet of Montale's sensitivity, if only because it implies a linear process; poetic thinking always has a synthesizing quality and employs—as Montale himself expresses it in one of his poems—a kind of "bat-radar" technique, i.e., when thought operates in a 360-degree range. Also, at any given time a poet is in possession of an entire language; his preference for an archaic word, for instance, is dictated by his subject matter or his nerves rather than by a preconceived stylistic program. The same is true of syntax, stan- zaic design, and the like. For sixty years Montale has managed to sustain his poetry on a stylistic plateau, the altitude of which one senses even in translation.
New Poerm; is, I believe, Montale's sixth book to appear in English. But unlike previous editions, which aspired to give a comprehensive idea of the poet's entire career, this vol- ^e contains only poems written during the last decade, coinciding thus with Montale's most recent ( 1971) collection—Safura. And though it would be senseless to view them as the ultimate word of the poet, still—because of their author's age and their unifying theme, the death of his wife—each conveys to some extent an air of finality. For death as a theme always produces a self-portrait.
In poetry, as in any other form of discourse, the addressee matters no less than the speaker. The protagonist of the New Poerm; is preoccupied with the attempt to estimate the distance between himself and his "interlocutor" and then to figure out the response "she" would have made had she been present. The silence into which his speech necessarily has been directed harbors, by implication, more in the way of answers than human imagination can afford—a fact which endows Montale's "her" with undoubted superiority. In this respect Montale resembles neither T. S. Eliot nor Thomas Hardy, with whom he has been frequently compared, but rather the Robert Frost of the "New Hampshire period," with his idea that woman was created out of man's rib (a nickname for heart), neither to be loved nor to be loving, nor to be judged, but to be "a judge of thee."
Unlike Frost, however, Montale is dealing with a form of superiority diat is a fait accompli—superiority in absentia— and this stirs in him not so much a sense of guilt as a feeling of disjunction: his persona in these poems has been exiled into "outer time."
This is, therefore, love poetry in which death plays approximately the same role it does in La Divina Commedia or in Petrarch's sonnets to Madonna Laura: the role of a guide. But here quite a different person is moving along familiar lines; his speech has nothing to do with sacred anticipation. What Montale displays in New Poems is that tenaciousness of imagination, that urge to outflank death, which might enable a person, upon arriving in the domain of shadows and finding "Kilroy was here," to recognize his own handwriting.
Yet there is no morbid fascination with death, no falsetto in these poems; what the poet is talking about here is the absence which lets itself be felt in exactly the same nuances of language and feeling as those which "she" once used to manifest "her" presence—the language of intimacy. Hence the extremely private tone of the poems: in their metrics and in their choice of detail. This voice, of a man speaking —often muttering—to himself, is generally the most conspicuous characteristic of Montale's poetry. But this time the personal note is enforced by the fact that the poet's persona is talking about things only the real he and the real she had knowledge of—shoehorns, suitcases, the names of hotels where they used to stay, mutual acquaintances, books they had both read. Out of this sort of realia, and out of the inertia of intimate speech, emerges a private mythology which gradually acquires all the traits appropriate to any mythology, including surrealistic visions, metamorphoses, and the like. In this mythology, instead of some female- breasted sphinx, there is the image of "her," minus her glasses: this is the surrealism of subtraction, and this subtraction, affecting either subject matter or tonality, is what gives unity to this collection.
Death is always a song of "innocence," never of experience. And from the beginning of his career Montale shows his preference for song over confession. Although less explicit than the latter, a song is less repeatable; as is loss. Over the course of a lifetime, psychological acquisitions become more real than real estate. There is nothing more moving than an alienated man resorting to elegy:
With my arm in yours I have descended at least
a million stairs, and now that you aren't here, a void opens at each step.
Even so our longjourney has been brief. Mine continues still, though I've no more use for connections, bookings, traps, and the disenchantment of him who believes that the real is what one sees.
I have descended millions of stairs with my arm in yours,
not, of course, that with four eyes one might
see better. I descended them because I knew that even though so bedimmed yours were the only true eyes.
Other considerations aside, this reference to a continuing solitary descent of stairs echoes something in La Divina Commedia. "Xenia I" and "Xenia II," as well as "Diary of 71" and "Diary of 72," the poems that make up the present volume, are full of references to Dante. Sometimes a reference consists of a single word, sometimes an entire poem is an echo—like No. 13 of "Xenia I," which echoes the conclusion of the twenty-first Song in the Purgatorio, the most stunning scene in the whole Cantica. But what marks Montale's poetic and human wisdom is his rather bleak, almost exhausted, falling intonation. After all, he is speaking to a woman with whom he has spent many years: he lmows her well enough to realize that she would not appreciate a tragic tremolo. He knows, certainly, that he is speaking into silence; the pauses that punctuate his lines suggest the closeness of that void, which is made somewhat familiar— if not actually inhabited—because of his belief that "she" might be somewhere out there. And it is the sense of her presence that keeps him from resorting to expressionistic devices, elaborate imagery, high-pitched catch-phrases, and so forth. She who died would resent verbal flamboyance as well. Montale is old enough to know that the classically "great" line, however immaculate its conception, flatters the audience and by and large is self-serving, whereas he is perfectly aware toward whom and where his speech is directed.