Amore e Morte

Amore e Morte (Love and Death) is a Canzone in four verses, composed at Florence perhaps in 1833 and first published in the Naples 1835 edition.

It is part of the so-called “Aspasia cycle”, and is closely linked to the Consalvo (where one reads: “two beautiful things does the world possess: / love and death”, vv. 99-100and with Il pensiero dominante (but also with Dialogo di Tristano e un amico, in the Operette morali).

It is pointless to underline how Leopardi’s considerations on the concepts of life and death are intense, and how they are expressed in many of his works; explicitly linked to this Canto we can at least consider the letter written to Fanny Targioni Tozzetti on16 August 1833: “love and death are the only beautiful things the world possess, and the only and truly only worthy of being desidered”.

In this Canto the theme is treated in an explicitly romantic form, also in the choice of a “beautiful and piteous Death” (v. 98), “Beautiful young girl, / sweet to the sight”, who “all great pain, / all great evil annuls”(vv. 8-11): if in the Pensiero dominante love was considered to anti-ethically be  both “Most sweet” and “terrible”, in Amore e Morte it reveals itself to be a “grave tempest”; and the poet, disillusioned, cannot but invoke Death, the only thing that can alleviate his “sufferance”: “do not tarry any longer, bow to / lost qualities, / close to light / these sad eyes” (vv. 104-7).

It should however be noted how Leopardi invokes death but only at the end of an ethically “heroic” life: may Death come, but to find him “with raised brow, armed, / recalcitrant toward fate”:

Me certo troverai, qual si sia l’ora

Che tu le penne al mio pregar dispieghi,

erta la fronte, armato,

e renitente al fato,

la man che flagellando si colora

nel mio sangue innocente

non ricolmar di lode,

non benedir, com’usa

per antica viltà l’umana gente (vv. 108-16).