Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale

First published:Ossi di seppia, 1925 (English translation, 1992)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, writers of the Hermetic school, Eugenio Montale is one of the most influential poets to shape Italian letters in the twentieth century. Although Montale also wrote literary criticism and about fifteen hundred newspaper and periodical articles, it was his first volume of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones, marked by its precision, concision, and concreteness, that gained him public recognition. In its prosody, the collection breaks from traditional Italian poetry in many ways. Most significantly, it marks a final shift from the style of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Montale abandons the linear and rhetorically flourished narrative line and works instead in a highly associative style, in an Italian really spoken, with images as the loci of meaning and abstractions arising from the images. The tone becomes direct and sometimes conversational, and fixed stanzaic patterns modulate to a mix of free verse with varied meters. Montale declared his aesthetic intent: “to rid myself of all waste” in the interest of precision.

Montalean images derive in large part from the world of nature. The imagery of Cuttlefish Bones is extremely influenced by the environs of the Cinque Terre area of the Ligurian coast, with its “enchanting arc of rocks and sky,” where he went during summers until he was thirty years old. The title refers to fragments of remains of the octopus washed ashore. Indeed, throughout the collection, the sea tosses its “bones” onto the shore and hurls the “sea-wrack starfish cork” “onto the beaches”: All of this flotsam is heaved up, “hurled aside by the torrent of life.” The section within Cuttlefish Bones with the same title abounds in recurring Ligurian images of the seacoast, the bright sun and the evocation of heat (“that land of searing sun where the air/ goes hazy with mosquitos”), the rocky shoreline, and the cuttlebones. The desolate images of rocks, of “stonebound suffering,” are every now and then juxtaposed with messages of inspiration like those of the epiphany of light in the lemon trees, of the re-creation of the winter wonderland of childhood, and of the sunflower, “crazed with light,” that can be found where “life evaporates as essence.” In contrast, “The Mediterranean” evokes the expansiveness of the sea. Montale apostrophizes: “O immensity, it was you, redeeming/ even the stones in their suffering.”

Cuttlefish Bones presages the rest of Montale’s work both aesthetically and thematically. The symbol system of the collection is established in “In limine,” wherein images of walls, which are representative of boundaries and stasis as well as of the preestablished, are contrasted by the fluidity of the water and the unconfined movement of the wind, which are shown to be emblematic of change, movement, and transformation.

Montale described himself in “The Mediterranean” as “a man intent/ on observing, in himself, and others, the furor/ of fleeting life.” He treats this theme and others typical of his times: alienation and anguish in living; isolation and enclosure emblematized by recurrent images of walls and the transgressing of those walls into boundlessness; exile from place, from childhood, from nature; the mixed virtues of being unencumbered by relationships; and the search for the authentic self.

The collection was originally received as a metaphysical statement. The face of a passerby on a crowded street, for instance, shows for a moment “an invisible suffering,” but no one notices. Facing the abyss of “nothingness at my back,/ emptiness behind me,” the speaker says: “I will feel the terror of the drunken man.” After that flash of metaphysical anguish, things of commonplace reality return. Having seen life as void of meaning once, he calls those everyday objects, the “trees, houses and hills,” “the usual deception”; he states quietly that he will continue on, “silently,” “bearing my secret among the men who do not look back.” The “real” world becomes unreal—a motif in his early poetry.

In “The Mediterranean,” he describes the sense of futility of a poet trying to say something in the presence of the sea with its “vast language,” which contrasts his “moldy dictionary words” and his “clichés/ which student rabble might tomorrow steal in real poetry.” Overwhelmed and overawed by the elemental power of the Mediterranean, his consciousness is razed: “My thoughts fail, they leave me.” His senses leave him as well, but this has its beneficent side also, in that having no thoughts, and no senses, he is no longer conscious and therefore no longer bound. He has, as he says, “No limit.”

Montale’s work is not void of the kind of inspiration that can often mount to a statement of faith in the human spirit’s drive to endure. In “The Lemon Trees,” he describes and defines his poetic, separating it from its predecessors, whom he shows as “the laureled poets” of tradition who walk among “shrubs/ with learned names.” He eschews them, the lushness of tradition, and their poetics in favor of those streets that “end in grassy/ ditches” in which boys catch “a few famished eels from drying puddles”—an image that exemplifies Montale’s aesthetic decision to create in a language of sparseness, bringing thoughts to meaning through evocative images. In contrast to the images of dryness, paths of water wend their way “into the orchards, among the lemon trees.” The smell of the earth “rains its restless sweetness in the heart,” and the “smell of the lemon trees” becomes one of the “riches of the world” in which even “we the poor share.” These riches, the lemon trees, have the power to melt the “heart’s ice,” as they transform into “trumpets of gold” which “pour forth/ epiphanies of Light!”

“Don’t ask me for words” provided for many the basis on which to term Cuttlefish Bones a volume exemplifying Montale’s skepticism. The poem confronts with negations. The poet establishes an anti-idealistic situation by telling readers that he cannot give words that will tell about the soul, and he ends by telling he cannot use language to “open worlds”; all he can tell is a negation, he says: “what we are not, what we do not want.” He cannot, he says, cast what he cannot tell in “letters of fire,” emblazoning and illuminating as if it were at once a shining harbinger of hope against a background of emptiness and decay, “lost crocus in a dusty field,” and also an emblem of the difficulty of speaking to his generation immediately after World War I. Humanity, he says, confident and “striding,” connected with others, is unaware that its impress, its “shadow”—perhaps its soul—might become emblazoned on “a crumbling wall.” People are unaware that even their soul, in becoming part of or associated with this crumbling wall, this thing of substance that fades and fails, will not be eternal. Montale the poet speaks directly to the reader, going against Romanticism in saying the poet has only “gnarled syllables,” which are “branch-dry,” through which he can tell of nothing eternal: not of the soul, and truly not of “formulas” that will help people to see.

“To laze at noon, pale and thoughtful,” known to most readers of Italian poetry, almost suspends itself in its lack of action verbs and the repetition of infinitives: “to laze,” “to listen,” “to gaze,” “to peer.” The image of the blaze is repeated from the first poem in the series in the image of “a blazing garden wall.” In the last sequence of this poem, the action finally moves, and “walking out, dazed with light,” the realization dawns on the speaker that life is “trudging along a wall,” and that the wall is “spiked/ with jagged shards of broken bottles”—an image typical in rural northern Italy.

“Don’t take shelter in the shade” repeats images from “To laze at noon, pale and thoughtful”: the shade, the waves, the cliffs, the action of “lazing,” and, again, dazzling light, stated to be the “one certainty.” The poem “To laze at noon” is transformed: The “lazing” is done by the waves in a time of “distress,” and the very material images of earthiness transform into the evanescent; a windhover is like summer lightning, life “powders away,” and our passing is done “in a shimmer of dust,” the cliffs “fray/ in a webbing of haze,” and even the light becomes a “flare of ash.” The ash, however, in the last stanza, is illusion burning (or purifying) and vanishing into the certainty of “light”; the movement counters the previous movement in the admonition to another, “let’s not throw our strayed lives/ to a bottomless abyss.”

Montale acknowledges that one is always part of one’s tradition, even when seeming to write against it. In his allusions to such writers as Dante Alighieri and Giacomo Leopardi, he situates himself distinctly in the history of Italian letters as he diverges into new directions. One of the most significant literary artists of the twentieth century, Montale focuses in his poetry upon fragments of objects in order to attempt to transform fragmented vision into a vision of wholeness.

Bibliography

Almansi, Guido, and Bruce Merry. Eugenio Montale: The Private Language of Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977. Provides close reading and examination of sources.

Arrowsmith, William, ed. and trans. Cuttlefish Bones: 1920-1927, by Eugenio Montale. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Arrowsmith’s extensive notes and commentary provide invaluable insight into the collection.

Becker, Jared. Eugenio Montale. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Introductory overview of Montale’s life and work. The chapter on Cuttlefish Bones examines themes, images, and characters.

Brook, Clodagh J. The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: Metaphor, Negation, and Silence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Examines the struggle with language that Brook defines as a central component of Montale’s poetry.

Cambon, Glauco. Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Dream in Reason’s Presence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. Cambon’s section on Cuttlefish Bones treats not only the themes of the book but also the prosody and influences.

Pell, Gregory M. Memorial Space, Poetic Time: The Triumph of Memory in Eugenio Montale. Leicester, England: Troubador, 2005. Focuses on the meaning of memory in Cuttlefish Bones and other works by Montale. Describes how Montale uses memory as a metaphor for a world “where all has been printed before time” and the poet’s task is to “recollect what was already there.”

Pipa, Arshi. Montale and Dante. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968. First full study in English. Explores Dante’s tremendous and formative influence on Montale.

Sica, Paola. Modernist Forms of Rejuvenation: Eugenio Montale and T. S. Eliot. Florence, Italy: L. S. Olschki, 2003. Compares the work of the two poets, demonstrating how their nihilism is balanced by a belief in the spiritual, creative, and political power of idealized youth. Describes how both poets sought to rejuvenate what they perceived as a decaying Western culture.

Singh, Ghan Shyam. Eugenio Montale: A Critical Study of His Poetry, Prose, and Criticism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973. An excellent discussion by a translator who received personal commentary from Montale. The introduction effectively places Montale within his tradition.

West, Rebecca J. Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. An invaluable and detailed study of Montale’s themes, style, and poetics.