The Poetic Thought of Felice Mastroianni: The Mediterranean as a Metaphor

Poetry - writes Mastroianni in the introduction to L’arcarta sul sereno (The Arch Over the Serene) - is “like a blue ‘arch’ that opens over the ‘serene,’ over myth and over hope, and thus over youth which it relives like a tale, and over death which feels like a mysterious landing place beyond the edge of an ever thickening shadow. And the present? The present is found entirely in that search for a far off light that gives the soul a sense of height and liberation.” (In Quest’ombra sul terreno, op.cit. p.35) But poetry is also a questioning and a self-questioning, and as such is a prison. One can agree with Friderich Holderlin that to write poetry is to search inwardly for someone else, with which poetry is a dialogue between those things that we are. It is not by chance that the verses of Holderlin were placed as an epigraph at the beginning of Quest’ombra sul terreno.

In Mastroianni there is always an attempt at dialogue, if only to escape the solitude that envelops him and envelops the world. A dialogue with “a land of men always living,” with the humble who represent his land, with the peasant Rocco, with whom he identifies himself, with nature, with simple things, with that “connection of the heart,” that seems to have been lost, with the sorrow of the past. Therefore poetry becomes sublimation, something that transcends the specificity of reality to assume a dimension that, in terms of the laity, we can call divine . For the poet from Platania, then, the relation between God and poetry and between nature and God is inseparable: we could even say that for him nature and God assume a sort of identity, natura sive Deus (whether nature or God).

The God and Poetry relationship is rendered explicit in Disincanto (Disenchantment) in the Trilogia neoellenica (Neo-Hellenic Trilogy): “I have beaten fear/In my century of iron/But I’m disarmed/I have nothing but this heart of mine/Read inside my Heart:/You will find two names:/God and poetry” (Trilogia, op.cit., p.128) The love for god and poetry made Mario Luzi, the friend of the poet from Platania, think and do the preface for the collection Il Vento Dopo Mezzodi (The Wind After Midday). The Florentine poet maintains that after poetry ends, prayer begins, or rather that “high poetry” is prayer, because it is the height of conceptual and linguistic communication that has the capacity of relating itself to the absolute. It is a sort of return to the original word—see Vangelo di Giovanni—to that word that made itself flesh for the sake of love, a sort of relation-revelation between the divine and the human by means of language.

Poetry appears to Mastroianni also as a return from the exile of the world, a recovery of genuineness and of ingenuousness, of solidarity, of serenity and of happiness that, perhaps, exist through poetic language. For him it is important “that there be a heart of a poet” that knows how to recreate the tale of the land of men always living. “Every place in the world can be a land of men always living, but under two conditions: that, as in mine, the faces and hearts of everybody, whether smiling or weeping, be bent over every cradle that rocks and over every coffin; and that there be the heart of a poet that knows how to recreate a tale of men always living.” But he fears that, once the heart is broken, the tale can no longer be told. But he hopes that “there might be another heart that will resurrect it.”