Fili d'Erba

“Notturno” is a short sequence of lyric poems in Italian, closer to symbolist prose-poetry in tone than to narrative verse. Across ten titled pieces, an “I” speaker meditates on night, desire, and human limitation through dense natural imagery and personification. The arc moves from cosmic seascapes to intimate dawn, tracing a descent from awe to fragile tenderness.

In “Nocturne,” the sea is imagined as a fallen giant kneeling, “praying” to a mute sky under lonely stars. “Dreaming” shifts indoors: in houses that “smell of flesh,” men and women sleep like corpses, yet the “white wing” of dream passes over their closed eyes. Erotic intimacy appears in “The Image,” where covering a lover’s pale breasts evokes warm nests and wings that know the blue sky.

Several poems stage allegorical dialogues: the Moon answers a fountain jet that she drinks not from it but from “the small veins of the mountains,” and a “child star” falls and is “killed” by the wind, leaving a flower in darkness. Other pieces offer aphoristic reflections on blindness, ambition (“the last rung” leads to vertigo and emptiness), beauty as cold perfection (“the goddess is stone”), and the sovereign “Doubt” wandering with his children “If” and “Perhaps.” The sequence ends at morning with the speaker hovering near a beloved’s cold mouth, sensing violets beginning to sicken and die.