Canzone in four verses of varied length, composed in the spring of 1836 at Torre del Greco; with La ginestra, it was published only posthumously in the Canti overseen by Antonio Ranieri in 1845 (he wrote the manuscript to the last six verses, dictated to him by Leopardi).
The comparison between the setting of the moon and the end of youth, with the desultory corollary that if the first will rise again the second is instead lost for ever, condemning man to “old age”, “than dread death much harder” (v. 43), show how Leopardi was convinced of the “biological” impossibility that man can experience happiness:
Troppo mite decreto
quel che sentenzia ogni animale a morte,
s’anco mezza la via
lor non si desse in pria
della terribil morte assai più dura.
D’intelletti imortali
degno trovato (= “invenzione”), estremo
di tutti i mali, ritrovàr gli eterni
la vecchiezza ... (vv. 39-47).
The objectivity, so as to say, of the idea is sustained by the absence in the Canto of the poet’s being: in the initial description of the lunar “nocturne” it has indeed been possible to trace some elements of his youthful “idyllic” verse, but it is important to underline that this behaviour was not aimed at the merely describing nature, but it included Leopardi’s reflections on his own being (as Leopardi himself wrote in his Disegni letterari/Literary designs: “idylls expressing situations, affections, historic adventures of my soul”). Instead, in this extreme Canto it is not his own personal experience he deals with but human condition in general: the scene enacted is the common destiny of mortals. The idyll, in the Tramonto/Sunset has, so as to say, dilated, and Leopardi universalises those that were the “situations, affections, historic adventures” of his own soul, to the point of including all those of “mortal nature” (v. 26): of each one of us.
It should be noted, from the point of view of poetic “technique”, in the first phrase, that there is a similitude which continues for as many as twenty two verses.
Il tramonto della luna
