Eugenio Montale

Montale, in the 1930s, was between wars but also between women. His ‘hermetic’ style shimmers between suggested meanings or implications. ‘Boats on the Marne’ sounds like a pleasure-outing, a Sunday sail or row, and begins with ‘happiness’ but ends with ‘floating’ (like a corpse?); begins with an upside-down sun, and ends among the stars. A poem whose thought takes the characteristically Montalean form of a cyclone, opening and opening.