Eugenio Montale, “Perhaps One Morning”
Eugenio Montale
“This poem by Eugenio Montale is very short, so if you’ll allow me, I’ll meander into it.” Such was the preface to the second poem I sent out. Another poem in translation, something I would remedy in future mailings.
The commentary is clear enough, I think. I would remind you that I willfully misread all the way through the analysis, treating the future tense in which the poem is written (“I’ll turn…hills/will suddenly collect…it will be too late’) as if it doesn’t exist. To me, when I read the poem, it is a recounting of experience, but that is not grammatically accurate. The speaker talks about a possible experience; to use the first words of the poem, it is a ‘maybe one morning’ experience. So strong, to me, is the experience that Montale envisions, that I see it as an experience that has happened, not as one that might happen one day in the future.
You’ll encounter my acknowledgement of this misreading in the course of what follows, but I want to warn you at the outset: this is a misreading. In my defense, I would say the poem is so strong that the misreading is warranted, that it goes in the direction Montale would want a reader to go.
You can read a lot of Montale, and I have, and not find a poem as compelling as this one. It is a great, great poem. Not primarily because of any ‘poetic’ quality, but because it recounts something, briefly, that once encountered can never be forgotten. Which is, when you get to the last two lines, what the poem itself claims.
Maybe one morning, walking in dry, glassy air,
I’ll turn and see the miracle occur:
nothing at my back, the void
behind me, with a drunkard’s terror.
Then, as if on a screen, trees houses hills
will suddenly collect for the usual illusion.
But it will be too late, and I’ll walk on silent
among the men who don’t look back, with my secret.
[Translated by Jonathan Galassi]
It is seldom that one stands in utter astonishment before a poem. At least at first reading.
(Perhaps not so for Emily Dickinson, who in a now-famous meeting at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts with the literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson told him, in an a remarkable comment, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?")
But I want to share with you one of those – for me – rare, signal moments when I have read with total astonishment a poem I had not read previously.
I should acknowledge my modest tendency to fix on certain poets whom I think I should understand, who I think should be speaking to me, but who despite repeated rereading remain relatively opaque. Something in each of these ‘great’ poets calls out to me, even as I find them year after year to be close to incomprehensible: I stick with them, reading them again and again, until one day I suddenly find an entrance, a newly opened doorway, and can walk into their poems and finally feel at home. This happened over ten or fifteen years with Charles Baudelaire and Rainer Maria Rilke. Despite lots of work, it had never quite happened with the Italian poet Eugenio Montale.
I was first attracted to Montale by the fact that he had written a poem about a small town in Tuscany, Bagni di Lucca, where my wife, son and I lived for most of a year when I was on a sabbatical from the University of Vermont. The poem, eight lines if I recall rightly, was engraved in marble on the town hall. Since Montale and I had both visited that particular town, I thought I would give him a try, especially since he was reputed to be Italy’s greatest modern poet, the winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature. The translation of his book The Storm and Other Things by William Arrowsmith was wondrous to me: not because I could easily enter the poems, but because reading Arrowsmith’s copious notes – more like commentary – felt to me like taking a seminar with a remarkably observant, extremely accomplished, wonderfully sharing, reader of poetry. I enjoyed reading about the poems so much that in the process I got fairly close to some of them.
So when Jonathan Galassi, president of the publishing firm Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a translation of the collected poems of Montale – a labor of love, since he did the translations simultaneously with his work as an editor and CEO – I bought the volume. ‘Not as good as Arrowsmith,’ I thought, because I missed those notes I had appreciated so much, ‘but a whole lot longer.’
Browsing along over several evenings I encountered a short poem of eight lines, called “Maybe one morning.” I got the poem, almost immediately, and was blown away. Totally. By what it says, and most powerfully by the image at the heart of it.
I have since learned that the poem I ‘discovered’ – an early poem, it seemed to me that I singlehandedly had unearthed it from among the hundreds he had written, that I alone had valued it above some of his more celebrated later poems – was discovered by others too. Notably the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, who wrote a brilliant essay about it, ten pages on the phenomenology of perception as it emerges from this small poem.
I have been rambling, not without purpose, in advance of addressing the poem.
Maybe one morning, walking in dry, glassy air,
I’ll turn and see the miracle occur:
nothing at my back, the void
behind me, with a drunkard’s terror.
Then, as if on a screen, trees houses hills
will suddenly collect for the usual illusion.
But it will be too late, and I’ll walk on silent
among the men who don’t look back, with my secret.
That’s all there is, two short stanzas.
You will see yourself, I think, what an amazing event the poem recounts. Perhaps one morning the speaker of the poem will go out, walking. He will turn around quickly, so quickly that he sees something behind him that he has never been quick enough to see before. He will see what is actually there behind his back. The experience will be miraculous: he will see the void, which has always been there but never seen. He will see that just behind what seems to exist is – nothing.
We can, of course, only see in front of us. We joke about having eyes at the back of our heads, but it is physiologically impossible. (We can use a mirror, but mirrors do not allow us to see reality, only a reflection of something real.) We see in front of us, and if we turn our heads, even if we turn our necks 130 degrees, or pivot rapidly, what we see is still what is in front of our eyes.
So what occurs in lines two and three is both miraculous in its happening, and miraculous in what appears. Nothing. The void. He turns and sees: “nothing at my back, the void/ behind me.”
The speaker’s response is irrational terror. I rather suppose that the terror is a “drunkard’s terror” because it is, like delirium tremens, all-encompassing and inescapable.
The great fiction writer Italo Calvino in writing about the poem makes a good deal of the (dry) air of glass in the first line. He suggests that it may be that this is a moment of remarkable transparency, which is why the miracle can occur. It may be that the air of glass is like a bell jar, momentarily allowing the poet to be cut off from everyday experience, which will rush back soon enough when he leaps the chasm into stanza two.
Calvino, who had memorized the poem when he was young, admits to carrying it around in his head with little mistakes in what he remembered so his reading was, even though he did not intend this, an active reading. So is mine, in a different way. I am so blown away by the poet turning around and seeing the nothing that lies behind him, and behind every man and woman, that I forget this is not a recounting – actual or symbolic – of his experience. The poem begins: “Maybe.” What follows that word is, therefore, something that could happen, it is a possible future sequence, not – as I keep reading it in my willful misreading – the recounting of an experience of the poet. If the poem began, “Maybe one morning I will wake up a hippopotamus,” I would know it is not an experience, but something which might be possible, or might not be.
Though, after using that outlandish example I remembered that Franz Kafka wrote a story, “The Metamorphosis” which begins exactly like my ‘maybe…hippopotamus’ example – though without the ‘maybe’:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into corrugated segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, flimmered helplessly before his eyes. [trans. Vladimir Nabokov]
Back to Montale. In the poem’s second stanza, the world as we know it reasserts itself, although “as if on a screen.” No one, of course, takes the movies as the real world: powerful and engaging as they appear to us, we accept as well that they are only a fiction made up of colored lights reflected on a screen. So what returns is now seen as “the usual illusion.” The world collects itself, and he recollects the reality he has always known, that there is something there in front of us, and that it is composed of objects: “trees houses hills.” The object-world, the actuality of the world of things, is there once again for the poet. The ‘nothing’ has disappeared because now what he sees is full, and not void.
Yet the solidity of trees and hills is “too late:” in the moment of terror when he saw nothing behind him, quite literally nothing, he has recognized that the void is what is real. This is his secret knowledge, a knowledge not shared by “men who don’t look back,” and it marks him out as different, terror-filled, without illusions.
Between his recognition of belatedness – he can no longer feel rooted in the world, since he recognizes that behind all is nothing-ness, and that what he sees is seen “as if on a screen,” – and his awareness that this recognition is his secret knowledge, he has another recognition. (How much knowledge flows from that quick pivot, when he turns only to find “nothing at my back!) The speaker realizes that other men – all? some? – “don’t look back.” Men are unaware of what he has seen in this moment of reverse epiphany. He has seen the void: they have not. His knowledge is secret not only because it is his own, but because he cannot impart it. I believe he is silent in good measure because he can’t tell anyone what he has seen. They would just not understand. “I’ll walk on silent/among men who don’t look back, with my secret.” Read differently, the final two lines reveal the tissue of convention, the “usual illusion” that ties men to one another and weaves for them the social world we inhabit.
As my friend Senator Bernie Sanders, would say, though he uses the phrase in a different context, ‘Huck, this is deep stuff.’
(Before moving away from the poem, let me state a truth that every poet knows: poems are made out of words, and specifically the sounds of words. From this perspective, to me the loveliest thing about this poem is the wonderful rush of nouns, without commas, as the object world comes rushing back to the speaker: “alberi case colli” or in English, “trees houses hills.”)
As I wandered into this poem, I will ramble out of it, by acknowledging that its central recognition is not new to thought. It is not unlike a founding principle of Buddhism, that all is emptiness and void. Nor is it new to poetry.
The epiphany in “Maybe one morning” appears in one of the high points of Shakespeare’s plays, when Macbeth in learns that Lady Macbeth is dead (in critical hifalutin’ language he ‘confronts the reality of death’):
SEYTON
The queen, my lord, is dead.
MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
In Shakespeare’s passage too we encounter the notion that meaning and reality are illusion – a shadow world, a play on the stage. Here too is a failure of language, here too “nothing” comes to the fore.
Montale’s poem was written sometime between 1921 and 1925.
Wallace Stevens, also embarking on would be a great poetic career, wrote a poem in 1921 that bears surprisingly close comparison with Montale’s. If one reads “The Snow Man” as a poem about a literal snowman (made of several spheres of snow, inanimate and as ephemeral as the whimsy of climate allows it to be) it is a different poem than Montale’s, a splendid meditation on a cold wintry scene. But if one reads the poem more symbolically (and the final lines always push me and most other readers in that direction) it can be seen as the double of “Maybe one morning,” a poem which recognizes not only “the nothing that is not there” but also the unyielding “nothing that is.”
THE SNOW MAN
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
[A hint: read Stevens’ poem out loud. In the almost two hundred years since Keats, no one wrote a richer and more resonant English than Stevens.]
Enough meandering. Time to wrap up.
What Montale’s poem has going for it, beyond Shakespeare, beyond Stevens, is just how near the nothingness is. It is just behind our backs, only we do not turn around to see it, and that makes us one with the countless other men who don’t look back. But maybe one morning walking … . we too will turn around and see the void in which our existences take place.
And if we do, we will be, like the person Montale imagines in his poem, ‘transformed, transformed utterly’ with a secret knowledge of the secret of the world: that there is really nothing there.