Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde (Nor ever more to touch the sacred shores)

This sonnet, written between the summer of 1802 and the spring of 1803 and published in the Milan edition of Poesie of 1802, celebrates the poet's land of birth, the island of Zante in the Ionian Sea. The main theme is substantially a rejection of the hypothesis of being able to overcome the negative nature of existence though memory and the recollections represented by Zante, the homeland the poet feels irremediably separated from and which becomes a symbol of an impossible existential destination. The poet's separation from the island is caused by a contingent fact (the turbulent existence of Foscolo, who is always wandering and in exile), but from the start it assumes a symbolic value: Zante becomes a symbol of an unreachable peace, of a promise of serenity and affection denied to the poet who is without reference points and certainties. But the Greek island also has a mythical-sacred identity that goes beyond the biographical element: situated on the Ionian Sea, from whose waves Venus, the goddess of love, was born, and celebrated by Homer in his poems, in this classic context Zante assumes a mythical value that reverberates on its child, Foscolo himself, who is explicitly compared to Ulysses, who was also an exile, and, in an implicit way, placed alongside Homer, as both poets celebrated the island. Indeed, the only redemption possible for the wandering poet is poetry; the “canto” of  verse 12, in which the poet is fictionally reunited with Zante, is the only occasion to save the individual from the oblivion which he is condemned to also by the lack of a fitting sepulchre and the impossibility of being remembered with affection by the living; the theme of poetry overcoming the oblivion of history and bringing redemption from the destruction of time and matter is a theme that would be developed further, not just in relation to the history of the individual but also to that of nations, in the verses of Dei Sepolcri.