Various poems

Manzoni wrote a number of “minor” poems at various points in his life, poems that are worthy of attention on account of their autobiographical content and literary significance. Following the two poems relating to the decline and fall of the Napoleonic regime (Aprile 1814 and Il proclama di Rimini), two satirical texts of 1817 are of particular interest, both indicating Manzoni’s participation in the Romantic polemic. One is L’ira di Apollo, in which the classical God of poetry is depicted as going to Milan in anger to punish the Romantic Berchet. Written jointly with Ermes Visconti, the other text is a parody of canto XVI of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, in which the two friends turn the love story of Rinaldo and Armida into farce, making fun of the languid and pathetic extremes of the melodrama. There are also several shorter occasional poems, often consisting of witty notes to friends (including Porta, Grossi, Cattaneo, the painter Francesco Hayez, Rosmini). Among his serious poems, Natale del 1833 is worth mentioning. Written in the grip of anguish following Henriette’s death, this unfinished poem deploys the metrical structure and genre features of his Inni sacri, as do several later poems, such as Ognissanti (1847) and Strofe per una prima comunione (1832-1855). At the age of eighty-three, Manzoni also wrote poems in Latin, producing the elegiac distichs of Volucres (“Birds”) in 1868, inspired by his daily walks in public parks with friends and relatives: alluding subtly to his own condition, he compares caged birds with those that fly freely across the pond. His last piece of poetry consists of two lines of sorrowful comment on his aging condition, but also containing a flash of the biting self-irony found in his work as a narrator, and here apparently laughing at the problem of truth (which for Manzoni was primary): Gambe, occhio, orecchio, naso, e ahimé pensiero / Non n’ho più uno che mi dica il vero (“Legs, eyes, ears, nose, and, alas, my mind too: not one among them can tell me the truth”).