Paschal Moon: like a relic

The most common picture that comes to mind when we hear “First World War” is probably trenches snaking across Belgium and Northern France. We may have some vague notion of activities on the Eastern Front, or along the Dardanelles—or even Jerusalem and Damascus. But the war along the Italian Alps almost never makes the headlines (unless you’re a Hemingway fan).

And yet the Isonzo River was the scene of no fewer than twelve distinct, ghastly battles. Historian Mark Thompson sets the stage: “Imagine the flat or gently rolling horizon of Flanders tilting at 30 or 40 degrees, made of grey limestone that turns blinding white in summer.” And imagine the futility of launching attack after attack against entrenched fortifications across the seasons in that terrain.

From December 1915, Giuseppe Ungaretti served in the Brescia Brigade along the Isonzo—in his late 20s, he’d already absorbed the cultures of Egypt (where he was born to immigrants from Tuscany), Paris (where he went to study, and was influenced by Rimbaud, Apollinaire and other modernists) and Turin (where he’d trained to be a teacher). His poems are distilled down to the bare essence of his observations and experiences.

In today’s National Poetry Month entry, Ungaretti frames the confluence of the flow of his life in terms of the rivers symbolic of his experiences, converging on the Isonzo, which polishes him like a stone. It was written in August, 1916.

“Rivers”

I cling to this mangled tree

Left to lie in the crevasse

That has all the indolence

Of a circus

Before or after the show

And I watch

The tranquil passing

Of clouds across the moon.

This morning

I stretched out

In an urn of water

And like a relic

Rested.

The Isonzo rushing

Polished me

As one of its stones.

I pulled

My bones together

And off I went

On the water

Like an acrobat.

I squatted down

Beside my clothes

Filthy with war and like a Bedouin

I bowed to receive

The sun

This is the Isonzo

And here I best

Acknowledged myself

A pliant fiber

In the Universe.

My torment

Comes when

I think myself

Out of harmony. But those hidden Hands

That immerse me

Give me freely

An uncommon

Happiness.

I have gone

Through the stages

Of my life

These are my rivers.

This is the Serchio

From which perhaps two thousand

Years of my own country folk

And my father and my mother

Have drawn their water

This is the Nile

That saw me born

And saw me grow

In unawareness

On the expansive plains.

This is the Seine

And in its swirl I mingled

And I came to know myself

These are my rivers

Tallied in the Isonzo.

This is my nostalgia

That in each of them

It comes to me

Now that night has fallen

That my life to me seems

A flower

Of shadows.