Leopardi's «To the Moon»: the idyll of memory and tears
Giacomo Leopardi's idyll To the Moon, written in Recanati in 1819: its origins, its first title, the two lines added in 1835 and its theme of memory.
Sixteen unrhymed hendecasyllables, written in Recanati in 1819, are all Giacomo Leopardi needs to establish one of the most intimate relationships Italian poetry has ever formed with the Moon. The idyll now known as To the Moon was born in the same creative season as The Infinite, when the poet, just over twenty, was experimenting with a short, meditative lyric, far from the grand civic odes of the previous years.
From «The Remembrance» to «To the Moon»
The poem originally had another title, The Remembrance, which openly declared its theme. It appeared in print in 1825 in the Milanese periodical Nuovo Ricoglitore and the following year in the collection Versi, published in Bologna. Only later, in the arrangement of the Canti, did it take its final title, shifting the emphasis from memory to the silent listener the poet addresses.
In the Naples edition of the Canti of 1835, prepared with the publisher Starita, Leopardi added the two lines before the close, those in which he says that remembering is sweet above all in youth, when hope has a long course and memory a short one. It is a tiny change, but it alters the perspective: the mature poet looks at his younger self with a new detachment.
The poetic situation
The scene is very simple. The poet returns to a hill, the same one where a year earlier he had gazed at the Moon with a soul full of anguish, and finds her again hanging above the wood, as she did then. The opening has the tone of a confidence: «O gracious Moon, I remember / that, a year ago, upon this hill». The Moon is a friend who has witnessed a sorrow and can now hear it told.
The tears of that time made the face of the star look tremulous and clouded. The pain, the poet admits, has not changed: his life remains as troubled as it was a year before. Yet something has shifted, because that pain is now also a memory, and memory has a sweetness the present lacks.
The paradox of memory
The heart of the poem lies in this very paradox. Recalling past sorrows, even when they have not ended, brings a subtle pleasure. Leopardi would return to the theme often in the Zibaldone, the great diary of thoughts he kept for years, reflecting on how the past, filtered through memory, takes on a poetic vagueness that makes it dear even when it was painful.
The Moon is what makes this passage possible. Unchanging while man changes, she serves as a fixed point between two moments of life and allows the distance travelled to be measured. It is no accident that the Moon returns in many other poems by Leopardi, from The Evening of the Holiday to The Setting of the Moon, one of the poet's last lyrics.
Brief and almost whispered, To the Moon shows how Leopardi could turn a private experience into a universal reflection on time. Alongside the Night Song, which years later would question the same Moon far more radically, this idyll represents her most affectionate face: that of a friendly star, a discreet witness to the sorrows and hopes of a young man.