GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI (1888-1970)

At the Isonzo River, you
first watched baroque clouds reflect in
tides of absence, your silhouette
cut from shadows of Sinai
that taught you the invocation,
in the echo of your footsteps
prayers to approach the great silence.

© Jeffrey C Alfier

Giuseppe Ungaretti was the father of modern Italian poetry. Along with Salvatore Quasimodo he founded the Italian Hermetics, and his work was highly influenced by French Symbolism. The Isonzo River refers to his experience as an infantryman on the Italian front in World War I, where he first wrote poetry in experiences that gave his subsequent poetry a true sense of the tragic. Ungaretti had several themes that continually ran through his poetry including the lost biblical Promise Land, and Mt. Sinai, both being kinds of visionary metonymies. As the son of Italian immigrants in Alexandria, Egypt, he grew up witnessing the colorful blends and worlds of Jewish, Italian, Greek, and Islamic cultures. An overriding feature of his work was man's sense of lostness in the world as he pursued the Promised Land like one whose horizons endlessly flee before him, an Odysseus ever uncertain of his return to Ithaca. The poetic elusiveness was a kind of silence as Ungaretti tried to grasp man's sense of something great that had been lost within him. In the end, what he taught me was that although the goal is elusive it is still worth the journey.