This post discusses the intertextuality between Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” and Montale’s “Portami il girasole, (Bring me the Sunflower).”
It aims to illustrate how the latter could be a source for the former. While the poems are published at a distance of three decades (Montale’s in 1925 and Ginsberg’s in 1955), they both draw upon the sunflower as a symbol of hope and address modernity’s ontological limitations. However, of particular salience, is how Ginsberg’s use of imagery, syntax, and semantics mirrors Montale’s.
Montale is an Italian 20th C. poet, born in Genoa, Italy, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 while Allen Ginsberg is best known as a central and founding poet of the Beat Generation.
Portami il girasole is a poem within Montale’s first collection of poetry “Ossi di Seppia”, (Cuttlefish Bones). His poetics, for simplicity’s sake, can be described as Impressionism meets Eliot’s objective correlative. Inspired by the jagged cliffs, rocky shores, and the ebb and flow of the iridescent Mediterranean along the Ligurian shore, his voice is investigative and contemplative. He is completely immersed in the sights and sounds of the surrounding marine life. His visual and auditory acuity pierces through nature’s imperceptibility and elusiveness, creating an aperture to where truth is revealed and where divinity contraposes reality. An example of this theme is more explicit in another of his poems from the same collection entitled “I Limoni” or “The Lemons”
You see – in these silences in which things
surrender themselves and seem close
to betraying their ultimate secret,
sometimes we half expect
to discover a flaw in Nature,
the still point of the world, the link that comes loose,
the thread to unravel that finally takes us
to the heart of a truth.
The eye searches around,
the mind examines, harmonises, dissects
in the fragrance that overflows
when the day most languishes.
It is in these silences that we see
in every passing human shadow
some disturbed Divinity.
Ginsberg’s title “Sunflower Sutra” suggests this same search for divinity that pervades Montale’s “Ossia di seppia.” This is most explicit in the last stanza of his poem, We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside.
However, as previously mentioned, of particular interest is Ginsberg’s use of imagery, syntax, and semantics. Along these lines, compare Montale’s verses Portami il girasole ch’io lo trapianti/ nel mio terreno bruciato dal salino. (Bring me the sunflower that I may replant it/ in my soil scorched with sea-salt) to Ginsberg’s lines: Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky,/ big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—. Here, Ginsberg employs the same image of the sunflower atop an arid pile of dust as a metaphor for modernity’s ontological limitations. Also, in these verses, Ginsberg uses the imperative “Look” which parallels Montale’s imperative “Bring” while, syntactically, both imperatives are placed at the beginning of the verse. Another parallelism, which may or may not be worth consideration when comparing these verses, is Ginsberg’s phonological mimesis: Portami/pile, ancient/bruciato, sawdust/salino. Finally, the image of the sunflower atop an arid land also repeats itself in the verse, withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust. Thus, given these correspondences, it is not inconceivable that Montale’s “Portami il girasole” informed Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” especially if one considers how both poets use the landscape to communicate the corrosion of one’s identity- best exemplified when Ginsberg asks, Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower?
Another recurring visual element Ginsberg employs which is reminiscent of Montale’s “Portami il girasole” is the interplay between dark and light. The sunflower is a dead gray shadow against the sky and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset. These images recall Montale’s sunflower anxiously gazing into the azure sky. In each case, the chairoscuro motif functions as a metaphor for man’s natural impulse to seek vitality notwithstanding the obscurity surrounding him.
The final points of convergence between the two poems occur in their climactic endings. First, each poem concludes with the sunflower, symbolic of humanity’s hope, regaining consciousness of itself and thus modernity’s deceit. You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!, Ginsberg exclaims. Montale, on the other hand, meditates Tending towards clarity are things obscure. Within this heightened context of awareness, of even greater significance, (as it relates to a discussion on intertextualtity) is Ginsberg’s choice of diction in his final verses, growing into mad black formal/ sunflowers in the sunset which imitates Montale’s final verse portami il girasole impazzito di luce/ Bring to me the sunflower maddened by light. Here, Ginsberg’s choice in diction can’t be a mere coincidence if one considers the thematic, symbolic, syntatic and visual parallels already at play.
In the final analysis, there is a strong case to be made for the intertextuality between Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra’ and Montale’s “Ossia di seppia/ Bring me the Sunflower”, arguing that Ginsberg’s baroque-esque Beat poetics draws from Montale’s more skeletal and abstract verse.
September 1972: Italian poet Eugenio Montale, (1896 – 1981), at a flower show at Milan. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac 1950s
You draw out some really fascinating intertextual connections. I wonder if part of their connection, or the ways these poems speak to one another, is perhaps not direct, but through a shared tradition that extends from romanticism through modernism and into the post-WWI era. I read that when Montale accepted his nobel prize for poetry in 1975, he wondered if poetry was possible a postmodern world where technology and consumerism have clouded truth and beauty. It follows that so much of his poetry–as with the lemons and sunflowers–reaches for that still point (Eliot: still point in a turning world), that epiphany, that remnant of some coherent splendor. Ginsberg carries on that recovery work in an updated idiom, but essential via that same striving.
Great attention to detail here–really fascinating!