Summary
Highlights
Pianto Antico is an Anacreontic ode belonging to Carducci's 'Rime Nuove' collection, like 'San Martino.' It commemorates the death of his three-year-old son, Dante, on November 9, 1870. Carducci composed the lyric in June 1871 and chose the title 'Pianto Antico' in 1877, reflecting the long process of metabolizing his grief. A letter to his brother Valfredo describes the harrowing details of Dante's death.
Carducci initially accompanied the poem with an epigraph from a funeral song for Bion, attributed to Moschus, a Greek poet of the 2nd century. The verses: 'But we, the great, the strong, the wise, once touched by death, deaf shall remain under the hollow earth in a long sleep without end, without awakening. And you then, buried within the earth, silent will you remain?' The title 'Pianto Antico' refers to a universal and ancient sorrow, the loss of a loved one, especially a child, which is deemed unacceptable.
According to critic Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 'Pianto Antico' alludes to the myth of Demeter mourning her daughter Persephone (Proserpina), who was taken to the underworld by Pluto. Persephone's return to Earth allows nature to flourish, while her absence causes it to wither, paralleling the poet's experience of grief and the cyclical nature of life and death.
The lyric consists of four stanzas, each with four seven-syllable lines. The first line is unrhymed, the second and third rhyme, and the last line is truncated, following an ABBC scheme. The first stanza describes a green pomegranate tree with beautiful red flowers in a silent, solitary garden, which is renewed by June's light and warmth after Dante's death. This imagery uses figures of speech like hypallage ('pargoletta mano'), anastrophe ('bei vermigli fiori'), and personification ('orto muto').
The pomegranate tree, initially a real tree in Carducci's garden, becomes a metaphor for the poet's life. Dante's tiny, chubby hand reaching for the green pomegranate with red flowers evokes sweet memories. The contrast between nature's rebirth and the solitary garden highlights the profound loneliness caused by Dante's absence. The colorful imagery of green, red, and gold represents the return to life, yet it underscores the tragic loss of youth.
In the second and third quatrains, the poem explicitly addresses the dolor of death. Rhetorical figures include anaphora with the repetition of 'Tu' and 'sei,' and the metaphorical 'pianta percossa e inaridita' representing the poet himself. A chiasmus exists between 'fior' (flower) at the beginning and end of the stanza. Dante is depicted as a flower that can never bloom, despite nature's flourishing, unable to enjoy the sun's light, buried in the cold, dark earth.
Carducci expressed his profound sorrow in a letter to his friend Chiarini shortly after his son's death: 'It's useless for you to try to console me... My poor child has died... Consolation is no longer for me... I hate nature now, I hate everything that is evil, and the death of children is an evil... One hears some say that the death of a three-year-old child should be a bearable misery, but it's not true. Three pieces of life go away.' This raw emotion underscores the deep and lasting impact of his loss. Years later, he would revisit his son's death in another lyric, 'Nevicata,' composed in 1881.