«L’esiliato rientrava nel paese incorrotto». The Land, the Sea and the Shore in Eugenio Montale’s ‘Mediterraneo’

Abstract

Montale’s short, nine-section poem, ‘Mediterraneo’, constitutes his most notable contribution to the modern reworking of the myth of the sea, which has always been so central to western poetry.

Progressing from an analysis of the semantics of the border in Montale, centred on the limen present in the poem – that threshold separating land from sea – this reading aims to highlight the distinctiveness of the montalian perspective with respect to authors with whom he compares himself, from D’Annunzio to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry, Lautréamont, and Heine to Shelley, to name a few. This comparison contains aspects of consonance, but also and perhaps moreso, of tangible contrast.

Starting from the belief that ‘Mediterraneo’ alludes, however ephemerally, to the Biblical account of the expulsion from Eden, this reading finds the centre of gravity in the dazzling yet dreamlike recognition represented in the fourth movement, in which a glass city, emerging unexpectedly from the abysses of the sea, rises miraculously before the reader to signify the enduring symbol of the lost, authentic homeland (the ‘unspoiled country’ referring in a new way to Ungaretti’s ‘Girovago’); the indisputable marker of the end of the happy season of childhood.

The hypothesis developed is that the expulsion carries an additional penalty for the poet, not – as claimed by authoritative critical theory – in a crisis of identity, but rather in the imprisonment in an identity lacking in evolution and the resulting exclusion from the world of the possibility, of the beyond, of elsewhere.