Dei Sepolcri (Of the Sepulchres): formal structure

The poem is composed of 295 blank hendecasyllables, a verse Foscolo especially liked for its full, intense expressive potential, used for epic compositions and by the poet in those months for the translation of the Iliad. The absence of prosodic limitations and the narrative dimension of the verse, constantly broken by pauses and enjambements, help the complex articulation of the poem that proceeds in a asystematic way, via combinations and transitions through which the conceptual nuclei of the poem are exposed. Questions, assertive and sententious modalities, lyrical and elegiac insertions, evocative and mythical tones and meditative moments alternate in the discourse; in short, there is a great variety of expressive forms that had the function of amazing, exciting and marvelling the reader. Foscolo aims for a sublime style in which obscurity is considered legitimate because the writer must concentrate on the principle ideas, leading the reader with “la noia di desumere le intermedie” ("the boredom of deducing the middle parts") (EN VI, p. 508). Foscolo's sublime is very different to the Romantic sublime understood as overcoming the rules of virtue in exultation of personal inclinations, it is deeply rooted in tradition, which is constantly present both in terms of the use of classical Latin (Virgil first and foremost) and Italian (Petrarch) sources and in terms of the debt owed to contemporary poets, Monti and Parini above all. The language is always elevated, dominated by rhetorical devices of the inversion of syntactic order and a search for phonic effects that contribute to fixing the meanings of the poem in absolute formulas and evoking a sacred, mythical dimension.