Leopardi's Night Song: a shepherd's questions to the Moon
Leopardi's Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia: the travel source behind it, the dialogue with the silent Moon, the flock and the theme of ennui.
Between October 1829 and April 1830, in Recanati, Giacomo Leopardi composed one of the finest works of nineteenth-century European poetry: the Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia. Published in Florence in the 1831 edition of the Canti, the poem gives a nomadic shepherd the task of questioning the Moon about the meaning of life, pain and time. The Moon does not answer, yet her very silence becomes the heart of the song.
An unexpected source: the shepherds of Central Asia
The idea came to Leopardi from his reading. The Journal des Savants had carried a review of the account of a journey made in 1820 by Baron Meyendorff from Orenburg to Bukhara. It reported that some nomadic shepherds of the region spent the night seated on a stone, gazing at the Moon and improvising melancholy songs. Leopardi turned that piece of travel news into a universal poetic situation, valid for every human being and every age.
The choice of an Asian shepherd, remote in time and space, is no exotic affectation. Leopardi was looking for a voice stripped of learning, able to ask the essential questions with the simplicity of someone who lives close to nature. The shepherd is not a philosopher, yet he reasons like one: he watches his flock, the course of the stars and his own existence, and demands an account of everything.
The dialogue with a silent Moon
The poem opens with a famous question: «What are you doing, Moon, in the sky? Tell me, what are you doing, / silent Moon?». The Moon is called to witness a journey that resembles the human one: she rises in the evening, travels contemplating the deserts, then comes to rest. The shepherd wonders whether she too is weary of travelling the same paths, and whether she knows the purpose of that ceaseless motion.
Then comes the harshest comparison: human life is like the run of a white-haired, infirm old man who, through stones, torrents and storms, finally reaches a horrid abyss into which he falls and forgets everything. «Virgin Moon, such / is mortal life», the shepherd concludes. The Moon, soon afterwards called «immortal maiden», perhaps understands what remains obscure to humankind: why we are born, why we suffer, what the passing of time is for.
The flock and ennui
In the second part the shepherd turns to his sheep. He sees them as happy because they are unaware of their own misery and do not know ennui, the tedium that seizes a man even when he rests in the shade, on the grass. Here the poem touches one of the central themes of Leopardi's thought: ennui as a sign of the disproportion between human desire, which reaches towards the infinite, and a reality that is always limited.
The last stanza puts forward an extreme hypothesis: perhaps, if he had wings to fly above the clouds, the shepherd would be happier. But the thought immediately turns on itself, and the final line sounds like a verdict valid for every creature, human or animal, in cradle or den: «the day of birth is fatal to whoever is born».
The Night Song belongs to the group of the so-called great idylls, together with To Silvia and The Recollections. Its Moon is no longer the confidante of youth but a remote and indifferent star, whose beauty makes the questions all the sharper. It is precisely this tension between enchantment and clarity that has made the poem a constant point of reference for modern poetry and philosophy.