The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi

Chapter 30: TO HIMSELF.

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About This Book

This collection gathers lyrical, satirical, and occasional philosophical poems that move between intense personal feeling and broad speculative melancholy. The verses examine love, solitude, bodily frailty, death, and the consolations and disappointments of beauty, while also addressing patriotic yearning and classical learning. Formally diverse—odes, songs, satires, impassioned monologues, and fragments—the pieces alternate elegiac reflection with sharper irony and occasional lightness. Recurring images of nature and memory frame meditations on human limitation and yearning, producing an austere but richly allusive record of a highly sensitive, erudite voice confronting longing, loss, and the impossibility of lasting consolation.

TO HIMSELF.

Nor wilt thou rest forever, weary heart. The last illusion is destroyed, That I eternal thought. Destroyed! I feel all hope and all desire depart, For life and its deceitful joys. Forever rest! Enough! Thy throbbings cease! Naught can requite thy miseries; Nor is earth worthy of thy sighs. Life is a bitter, weary load, The world a slough. And now, repose! Despair no more, but find in Death The only boon Fate on our race bestows! Still, Nature, art thou doomed to fall, The victim scorned of that blind, brutal power That rules and ruins all.