Poetry and Prayer

Yesterday, I attended the last day of a very interesting conference, New York Encounter, in New York City organized by "Communion and Liberation" -- a Catholic organization founded in 1954 by the late Msgr. Luigi Giussani and devoted in part to cultural education of Catholics.  The panel I attended was devoted to the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi, perhaps the most important Italian poet of the 19th century and (with Petrarch) one of its two greatest lyric poets ever.  Leopardi's work had, I learned, been a major source of inspiration for Fr. Giussani.

The panel was composed of Jonathan Galassi, the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and translator of a very recent and wonderful edition of Leopardi's poetry; a very interesting Italian poet named Davide Rondoni; and law professor Joseph Weiler.

One might wonder why Professor Weiler was on the program -- and even he asked the question in his presentation.  But after his talk, there was little doubt as to why.  In the first place, Weiler is extremely broadly read; he was quite knowledgeable about Leopardi's life and writings.  Second, Weiler has great synthetic abilities (perhaps one of the areas in which law professors have a special comparative advantage).  He offered a quite close, careful, and illuminating comparison of various sections of the book of Genesis with a poem by Leopardi called, Hymn to the Patriarchs: Or of the Beginnings of the Human Race. 

But beyond that, and in keeping with the synthetic nature of his talk, Weiler reflected on how one's experience of prayer is quite like one's experience of poetry.  The idea was that for either of these pursuits, to enjoy and benefit from them fully, one needs to cultivate a habit of mind in which they become repeated and altogether ordinary, or regular, activities.  If one only comes to pray or to read poetry occasionally -- in the exceptional or extraordinary situations of life -- then one will not be able to enjoy and be transformed by the full richness of the experience.

In some ways Leopardi was an unexpected choice for a conference such as this; he was an atheist who rebelled against what he perceived was the repressive and bourgeois Italian Catholicism of his youth, and his decidedly pessimistic Romatic orientation is not quite a perfect fit.  And yet, consider what is perhaps his best known poem, "The Infinite" (after the jump):

It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea.

The yearning of the poem was an inspiration to Fr. Giussani -- a secular poem which, Giussani believed, expressed something profound of the "religious sense."

My own favorite of Leopardi's poems is the deeply melancholy and regretful, La Ginestra: O Il Fiore Del Deserto ("The Broom: Or the Flower of the Desert"), the epigraph of which comes from the Gospel of John: E gli uomini vollero piuttosto le tenebre che la luce ("And men far preferred the darkness to the light.").  Grab a copy if you can! 

A very interesting conference, hopefully to be repeated next year.  And Weiler's ruminations on the relationship between poetry and prayer were original and provocative.