Rileggendo Meriggiare pallido e assorto di Eugenio Montale

The essay starts from the thoughtful silence of the poet, who listens to the music of small things, at the garden wall, in search of the humblest voices of nature, so as to highlight unexplored aspects of existence. Hence the investigation of the rhythm of poetry, of phonetic insistence, of the magic spell of sound, which reshapes and transforms words. Another significant issue discussed concerns the relationship between «necessity and miracle», a topos often encountered in Montale’s poems. The place where, in Meriggiare, this encounter between necessity and miracle takes place is, perhaps, precisely the «garden wall», an ambivalent threshold between the iron chain of determinism and a «vanishing point», in search of the incalculable and the unexpected.