The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi

Chapter 38: SCHERZO.

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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.

SCHERZO.

When, as a boy, I went To study in the Muses’ school, One of them came to me, and took Me by the hand, and all that day, She through the work-shop led me graciously, The mysteries of the craft to see. She guided me Through every part, And showed me all The instruments of art, And did their uses all rehearse, In works alike of prose and verse. I looked, and paused awhile, Then asked: “O Muse, where is the file?” “The file is out of order, friend, and we Now do without it,” answered she. “But, to repair it, then, have you no care?” “We should, indeed, but have no time to spare.”