Annalysse Mason
First Year Seminar
9/3/13
Leopardi focuses on two main themes
throughout his writing in the reader and in the selected poems. The importance
of imagination and understanding of reason are dominant matters in the way in which
he narrates his life. While reading the selected poems and the reader I quickly
realized that the way Leopardi looked at imagination and reason were completely
altered when Silvia, whom I read was Leopardi’s coachman’s daughter, passed
away.
Silvia was the love of Giacomo
Leopardi’s life. She instilled in him a hope for life, a hope for all the
things that life would bring, and a hope for his fate. While reading “To Silvia”
the reader witnesses Leopardi reminiscing in his time with Silvia and gradually
coming to grips, once again, with his current, desolate life without her.
Without Silvia he writes “...My long-mourned hope! ...these the joys, the love,
the tasks, events, we talked so much about, together?” Leopardi has not only lost all of his hope for
life without Silvia but he questions what life is even worth without her. The
reader sees how much Leopardi’s plan of living a happy, love-filled, and long life
with Silvia had vanished so unexpectedly. To Leopardi, Silvia was his reason to
live, and he had no interest in a life without her.
Leopardi states that the only poets
were the ancients and children, for they had not felt, as Leopardi writes, “...the
inevitable unhappiness of the world”. Leopardi was no longer a poet but a
philosopher because he had felt this inevitable happiness, as compared to, as
he states, “merely being acquainted with it.” While writing, long after Silvia’s
death, he states “...my fantasy had almost dried up, not only in the making of
poetry, but also in the appreciation of the beauties of the natural world,
which still leave me as unmoved as a stone.” Without Silvia, Leopardi became a philosopher
in his mind, because he felt like a mind that had experienced the cruelties of
the world could not ever imagine anything, especially happiness, which could later
lead to poetry.
After Silvia’s death we see the
happy, imaginative, and dedicated poet that Leopardi once was disappear as quickly
and unexpectedly as Silvia did, describing her death as “you sleep, for slumber
welcomed you in your quiet rooms: and not a single worry gnaws at you; and you
can’t possibly know or imagine how deep a wound you opened in my breast.” Leopardi’s life without Silvia was a constant,
desperate struggle, which we read in his poems. Giacomo Leopardi, languished
without Silvia, was still capable of writing good poetry even though he
believed he no longer could. Reading the selected poems was a pleasant surprise to me after reading
the reader and seeing the lack of hope he had for his own writing.
You finished with the thought that even though Leopardi claimed it was impossible for him to ever write good poetry again, his writing was just as good as it was before. Leopardi seems like a confused man. In his other works, he talks about desire and imagination saying desire is purely imagination; it cannot be attained. If it is, desire disappears. He desired to love and to be loved in return by Sylvia. When she was alive, his desire was fulfilled so would it would make sense, with his reasoning, that imagination no longer existed for him. It seems fitting to say that one cannot occur without the other the way Leopardi describes desire and imagination. Sylvia had to die for his imagination to exist. If she had not died, his desires would continue to be fulfilled and he would no longer be able to imagine. Yes, a great deal of grief comes with death but once the grieving period is over, imagination is greater than ever because we desire what is no longer attainable which is love in Leopardi's case.
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