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

For “all of us who have made that last trek up the hill that overlooks the far-off sea or merely through the streets, we will make ourselves find the enchantment of the home’s threshold, with our smile, with our voices, and with our heart, because the beautiful tale is not extinguished and the dear illusion of a poet still lives for the memory and the comfort of men” (The Land of Men Still Living, op.cit. p.96). Perhaps the “dear illusion of a poet” might render life more acceptable and more livable, even through one’s memories and the bitterness, which is not, as Oreste Borrello writes in La Poesia dei Ritorni, (The Poetry of Coming Back), the bitter sweetness of Fellini; rather, it is that “sudden and spontaneous gushing, which embodies in itself the need and breadth of great space” (Borrello, La Poesia dei Ritorni, op.cit. p.143).

Recollections in the poetry of Mastroianni are projected into the present through a “religious realism” in which myth assumes an important and qualifying dimension, because it forms part of “a memory that reveals itself as historically mythical and not mythically historical" (Borrello, La Poesia dei Ritorni, op.cit. p.171). One can further maintain, along with Borrello, that Mastroianni is “a poet of memories who doesn’t give joy, but still teaches us to live in acceptable sorrow, when we miss that which we secretly want to believe will joyously reappear” (Borrello, La Poesia. . .op.cit. 171). It is tragic poetry, that of Mastroianni, which through memories, bitterness, myth, tales, and the return to one’s primordial origins, among other things, tries to render more bearable the pain of living.

May be it’s true, as Nietzsche would say, that poetry and philosophy express the tragic essence of the world, and further try to give to sense, which it appears not to have, to life itself, to that sunset that could announce the dawn and the new day, perhaps to overtake one’s goal. “Don’t flee from me/Angels of silence and solitude/I have need of you. I have walked a lot/I am a survivor/And now I am almost near my primordial origins/I feel the wet leaves/Offering me their mouths/like intoxicating cups of purity” (Angeli del silenzio e della solitudine (Angels of Silence and Solitude) in Trilogia. . ., op. cit. p.212). The return to the past, to primordial origins through poetry should give comfort to the sad existential condition of man of today who is so uncertain of modernity. But the poet asks himself: “Can it save us from the days that embody the sorrow of the past?” (Lettera a Paolo Calangianus (Letter to Paolo Calangianus), in Quest’ombra sul terreno, op.cit. p.156)

The word, and therefore poetry itself, assume in him an almost sacred function, and have as their scope to render more bearable the human condition, which is the passing of “this shadow on the ground.”