Human Landscapes
Two poets offer insight for our modern disconnectedness and bring us back into touch with our memories, the landscapes of our childhoods, and the inner world of who (and how) we’re made to be.
By Mary Grace Mangano
In our family kitchen in my childhood home, above the sink was an Irish blessing that my mom had calligraphed for my dad when they were dating. It’s a familiar one that begins: “May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back.” In that same kitchen, every Friday night we would eat homemade pizza, and my dad would greet his daughters with “Buongiorno, principessa!” as in the movie Life is Beautiful. The prayers, food, and language of my ancestry were ever-present and I knew from a very early age that an essential part of who I am was rooted in being Irish-Italian.
Curiosity to know more about the cultures that formed my family led me to take Irish-American literature courses in college and to minor in Italian. It was when I was studying abroad at the Università degli Studi di Padova that I first encountered the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto, who would later become the subject of my senior thesis. And when I was a new teacher, navigating foreign territory in the classroom and a large city, someone gave me John O’Donohue’s poem “The Interim.” Both of these poets spoke to me then. Their poetry and philosophies can also offer insight for our modern disconnectedness, bringing us back into touch with our memories, the landscapes of our childhoods, and the inner world of who (and how) we’re made to be.
Andrea Zanzotto (October 10, 1921–October 18, 2011) was an Italian poet and teacher, regarded as one of Italy’s greatest twentieth-century poets and known for his experimental style of poetry. John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008) was a priest, poet, and philosopher who also became a world-renowned speaker and seminar leader. Both men concluded that landscape is a key part of memory and identity. For Zanzotto, the physical landscape of the place where a person grows up informs who she is and how she speaks about and views the world. For O’Donohue, an invisible world, or inner landscape, exists within each person and forms the basis of what a person knows and sees. For both men, poetry was a way to explore the inner and outer landscapes of a person, and they saw the interconnectedness of these landscapes as central to knowing the essential “I” of a person that exists outside time.
Zanzotto said that he felt compelled to write poetry since a very young age, partially due to feelings of “apart-ness” from reality and history. His intellectual curiosity spurred him to write numerous collections of poetry and selections of prose.
In 1939, at the Università degli Studi di Padova (the same university where I would spend a semester in college), Zanzotto read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and even studied German so he could read Hölderlin, Goethe, and Heine in their original. Informed by Lacan and Heidegger as well, and cognizant of the change from dialect to a national Italian language following World War II, Zanzotto’s own writings began to focus on the limitations of language and the possibilities of poetry. His writing often uses metaphors of nature and the altered landscape of post-war Italy to discuss the ever-changing “I” that pulsates in one’s life. He uses specific techniques to highlight the paradox—and power—of words and language, in addition to playing with form, grammar, and syntax to wake up the reader and force him to focus on the words themselves.
One scene that Zanzotto wants to share repeatedly with his readers is that of the changed landscape of Treviso, his home community in the Euganean hills of the Veneto region of Northern Italy.
Ghan Shyam Singh, a poet, critic, and academic born in India who translated Eugenio Montale and formed important relationships with those such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, wrote a piece published in World Literature Today that studies the connection to landscape that Zanzotto investigates in his poetry. Zanzotto’s lamentation for “the devastation of the landscape and the oppression of universal consumerism” is a theme “at least as old as Wordsworth,” but nonetheless opens Zanzotto’s “poet’s eye [to the] livingness of nature in its subtlest and minutest detail.” This close attention to nature is a hallmark of his work, and in this way, Zanzotto uses “what he observes outside himself as a means whereby to probe within himself.”
Reflecting on the familiar fields around his home is a way for Zanzotto to notice the effects of time on his own identity. The landscape speaks to the inner experience of the “I.” Because the countryside where he grew up in Northern Italy is so much a part of Zanzotto, it is like an extra skin that shows the markings of a life—a life that has a story to share and which the poet can read as indicative of the larger, collective narrative of humanity. What is outside eventually becomes what is inside for Zanzotto. A landscape, especially one that has changed, reminds a person of previous moments there, and can be evocative of a feeling, an emotion, or a spiritual grace. Zanzotto tried to recreate this experience in his poems.
In the first of his IX Ecloghe (eclogues; classical-style poems on a pastoral subject), subtitled “Lament of the lyrical poets,” he writes,
Trees, bushes, grasses, almost real,
almost on the edge of the real,
from the dominion of the mountain which the vast light simulates,
always returning, descending.
to crystallize
in oneiric anthologies:
gentle forest you whisper
a gentle lament, aggrieved
obstinate useless speaking.
Meanings elongate fingers,
sense stretch out their wiry antennae.
Syllables lips clauses
unite with the deep earth.
Most perfect lament, most perfect.
One scene that Zanzotto wants to share repeatedly with his readers is that of the changed landscape of Treviso, his home community in the Euganean hills of the Veneto region of Northern Italy. The changing landscape is a way for him to consider the changing nation of Italy after the war: the move from a predominantly dialect-driven language to a national Italian, along with a more globalized world. Reflecting on this theme in Zanzotto’s poetry, a scholar of his work, John P. Welle, compares Zanzotto’s fixation with Italy’s history to Yeats’s concern with Ireland, quoting, “‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,’ W. H. Auden says of the great modern poet William Butler Yeats. In the case of Andrea Zanzotto, the linguistic situation of postwar Italy, together with our century’s anxiety of the nature of language, has given birth to a Muse that appears in all the myriad forms of the Logos.”
The old language, the landscape, and loved ones are all brought together through poetry.
In “Filò,” a poem from the book da Filò Per il Casanova di Fellini, the language of the landscape is related to the language of history that has been lost. When Italy was nationalized after World War II, regional dialects and various idiomatic expressions were replaced by standardized terms. Many regional dialects became phased out due to this change—which was enhanced by radio and television —and in this poem, the speaker laments this loss. It begins, “Old dialect, a drop of Eve’s milk / lingers in your flavor, / old dialect I can’t remember, / you’ve worn yourself out / day after day in my mouth.” This oral tradition has been lost and remains only in the mouths of those who continue to speak it.
The same poem continues: “you’ve changed with my face / with my skin year after year; / poor speech, of the poor, but pure.” These dialects, most often spoken by poorer people who were not as well-educated or people living in less urban areas, created the changes in speech and gave the Italian language its diverse texture. This lament is connected to others in the book that say, “grandpas and dads have passed away, who used to know you, / grandmas and moms have passed away, who used to invent for you / new babblings for every baby in diapers.” With this, Zanzotto laments the loss of language, of landscape, and loved ones. All of these—the old language, the landscape, and loved ones—are part of the “I,” and are brought together through poetry.
Born into a native Gaelic-speaking family, John O’Donohue lived on a farm that had been in his family for generations. The oldest of four, his responsibilities included the farm chores of tending livestock, raising crops, and carving peat for fuel. He attended the University of Ireland in Maynooth, studying English Literature, Philosophy, and Theology. In 1982, he was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood, completing an MA the same year. He received his PhD in Philosophical Theology in 1990 from the University of Tübingen in Germany, where he’d studied the German philosopher Hegel, who had a strong influence on O’Donohue’s “insights into the Self as an unfolding journey of consciousness, memory and spirit [that] reconciled our contradictory human existence as both Individual Person and Person in Relationship to Other.” Back in Ireland and resuming his duty as a priest, O’Donohue began a post-doctoral dissertation on Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth-century German mystic and philosopher.
His first book, Anam Cara, was published in 1997 and was instantly an international best-seller, beloved by pop-stars and presidents. Much to his own surprise, it pushed him into the spotlight and by the year 2000, O’Donohue had retired from public priestly ministry. However, he retreated somewhat, and lived in a remote cottage in Connemara. He focused on writing and speaking, as well as advocating for social justice, trying to bring about meaningful change through his work.
He spoke and wrote often about the absence of silence in modern life, and the spiritual hunger for belonging. He also believed it important not to fear death, and that people are made for more than productivity and consumption. A large focus of his prayer-like books and poems was beauty—the way a piece of music or light falling on a stone archway can make us present to ourselves.
In one of the last interviews he gave before his unexpected death in 2008, O’Donohue spoke about his philosophy of beauty and the inner landscape of a person with On Being podcast host, Krista Tippett. The episode’s original air date was February 28, 2008, and Tippett says that no conversation she’s ever had has been more beloved. She explains that O’Donohue, “had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with the inner human landscape.”
Early on in their conversation, O’Donohue says, “I think beauty [. . .] is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.”
An experience of beauty is like a return home to the self. And that self contains memory—particularly of the language and landscape of childhood.
Homecoming, then, is a key to understanding O’Donohue’s conception of beauty. In this sense, an experience of beauty is like a return home to the self. And that self contains memory, particularly of the language and landscape of childhood. On where he grew up in Western Ireland, in a region known for limestone, O’Donohue said, “being a child and coming out into that, it was waiting, like a huge, wild invitation to extend your imagination. And then it’s right on the edge of the ocean, as well, so the conversation—an ancient conversation between the ocean and the stone going on.”
O’Donohue also spoke to Tippett about places in the modern world that are desolate, or in some way far from nature and its beauty. If humans are most present to themselves when they encounter beauty, and the essential part of themselves is connected to the landscape, then what do people do who do not come into nature in their daily lives? They aren’t “home,” in a certain sense and are not able to be themselves fully. In his response, O’Donohue said, “I love Pascal’s phrase that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And […] if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.”
This advice in mind—to keep something beautiful in one’s thoughts even when unable to see it or experience it physically—is expressed in his poem “For One Who Is Exhausted, A Blessing.” And in this poem, O’Donohue could be speaking to all of us, marking two years of a pandemic, as he writes:
Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.[…]
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.
In the conversation with Tippet, although he maintained that beauty is one of the main longings of the human heart, he clarified that “one of the huge confusions in our times is to mistake glamour for beauty. And we do live in a culture which is very addicted to the image. And I think that there is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward.”
It is through observing nature’s slow dance and the grace of nature’s beauty that one can return home, even in the midst of loss.
O’Donohue also commented on the fast pace of modern life as one of the things that leads us away from the core part of who we are, and which also leads to our disconnectedness and dissatisfaction. People, he said, “neglect the most important question, which is, how should I be? And I think when you slow it down, then you find your rhythm. And when you come into rhythm, then you come into a different kind of time.” He added that the way we live now is mainly, what he called “surface time, which is really rapid-fire, Ferrari time.” What we need, according to O’Donohue, is to return to a space that exists outside of time, that is connected to the soul and to beauty.
On this note, he quoted Eckhart: “There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor no created thing can touch.” He also uses St. Augustine’s phrase: “Deus intimior intimo meo”— “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.”
We become lost, O’Donohue claimed, due to much of modern life: its noise and isolation, its focus on productivity, its poverty of true beauty. The way to return to ourselves, his work and writing attest, is the way of silence, of blessing, of beauty—and of knowing ourselves through the language, landscape, and memory that formed us.
“Beannacht” is a poem O’Donohue wrote for his mother at the time of his father’s death. A selection from the poem goes,
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
It is through observing nature’s slow dance and the grace of nature’s beauty that one can return home, to the true self, even in the midst of loss.
Knowing ourselves begins in knowing where we’re from. Zanzotto and O’Donohue remind us to look at the world around us, to recall what we knew as children, to look upon something beautiful and return home to ourselves.
For both Zanzotto and O’Donohue, the outer landscape reflected much of what was going on inside a person. Nature, and its beauty, could also help one understand herself—how to be in the world by slowing down, by noticing, and by remembering. In stillness, not in the hurriedness of life, a person can be. Both poets realized that modern life is not designed to let people live like this, but when a person could step outside of the constant flow of daily existence, he could finally live as he was meant to live. When someone turns inward and rests in her true identity as a child of God, as someone unrepeatable and made for fullness—not just productivity or consumption or “likes” and follows and influence—then she is in touch with the eternal part of herself that is not bound by time.
The countryside of Italy and Ireland formed the backdrop for Zanzotto and O’Donohue. And in an equal way, the languages they first spoke as children—regional Northern Italian dialect or the Gaelic tongue—shaped their understanding of themselves. Poetry was a way to bring all of that together and to try and conjure the fullness of their ideas about life and what it means to be human.
What were our first words as children? What prayers did we pray, and what songs did we sing? What did we hear outside our bedroom windows, and what did the horizon look like? Who cared for us and taught us about ourselves? For me, I think about that kitchen where my mom would sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and I think of my paternal grandparents teaching me to make anisette cookies and taking me to the parade on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel by their home.
Knowing ourselves begins in knowing where we’re from. Maybe we’ve forgotten that, or modern life has distracted us from it. Let Zanzotto and O’Donohue remind us to look at the world around us, to recall what we knew as children, to look upon something beautiful and return home to ourselves.
Mary Grace Mangano is a writer and educator having taught middle and high school English in Chicago and New York City. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in America magazine, Dappled Things, Presence, and others. She currently resides in Philadelphia and is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. You can find her website here.