Cosmic Pessimism in Giacomo Leopardi’s “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia”

Sha Ha

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijclts.v.7n.1p.14

Abstract

The present paper analyses the lyrical expression of ‘cosmic pessimism’ contained in the “Night song of a wandering shepherd in Asia” of the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1836), a central figure of the European literary and cultural landscape of the first half of the 19th century, who was acclaimed as ‘the greatest Italian poet after Dante’ by the British cultural critic Matthew Arnold. The ‘song’, composed in the period 1828-1829, bridges neoclassic and romantic sensibilities: it is composed of 143 verses without rhyme, subdivided into six parts, called ‘stanze’ and the scenario is that of a night in a desert landscape where a flock is sleeping, while the shepherd addresses himself to the moon, posing her unanswered questions about the meaning of life.

Highlights

Pessimism is a recurrent theme in the history of western literature
Several other illustrious examples of literary pessimism can be found among western writers and philosophers, as duly argued by the scholar Joshua Foa Dienstag (2006), in his book “Pessimism – Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit”: he observes that pessimism is an anti-systematic philosophy which rejects the idea of social progress, which was born in France in the second half of the 18th century with the Enlightenment, as a twin sister of optimism: both utilize the same rational analysis of the human condition, coming to opposite conclusions
The American philosopher Eugene Thacker (2015) published an essay entitled “Cosmic Pessimism”, where he wrote: ‘Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Pessimism is a recurrent theme in the history of western literature. Shakespeare’s verses (Craig, 1974) from “Macbeth” (Act V, Scene V, 24-28) constitute a well-known example of literary pessimism:. Aim of the present research is to analyze Giacomo Leopardi’s response, expressed through poems and essays (Leopardi, 1983, 1997, 2004) in the course of his short life: the strongly lyrical quality of his poetry, that bridged neoclassic and romantic sensibilities, made him a central figure of the European and international literary and cultural landscape during the first half of the 19th century, when he was welcomed by Schopenhauer, author of the philosophical treatise “The world as Will and Representation”, as ‘his southern cousin’. IJCLTS 7(1): song of a wandering shepherd in Asia”, and “La ginestra” (The broom), composed in 1837, are evidence of this last phase of Leopardi’s pessi-mism In the latter poem Leopardi calls for a great alliance of all human beings, a ‘social chain’ that should unite them all against the brute force of nature. The debate on Leopardi’s work was oriented, in 1900s, towards the finding of a consonance of his poems and philosophical works with the Existentialist thought: Leopardi, through his attention on the problem of Nothingness (Severino, 1990), like the Danish philosopher Soeren Kirkegaard, the author of “Either – Or” (Hong & Hong, 2000) and, later on, the Jewish Austrian writer Franz Kafka (Foulkes, 1967), not forgetting Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, can be seen as precursors of Existentialism

NIGHT SONG TO THE MOON OF A SHEPHERD WANDERING IN ASIA

CONCLUSIONS