Sunflowers by Ikeda Zuigetsu (Japanese,1877-1944).
“Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it”
Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it
in my land burnt by saltine,
and monsters all day to the blue mirror
the anxiety of his yellow face is from heaven.
Dark things tend to the light,
bodies are depleted in a stream
of dyes: these in music. Fading away
So it is the venture of ventures.
Bring me the plant that leads
where transparent blondes come from
and life vaporizes what essence;
bring me the sunflower crazy.
Composition by Eugenio Montale taken from “Bones of cuttlefish” (1925), a collection that made the poet one of the most original voices of the Italian ‘900s.
The sunflower, a symbol of the search for light, is somewhere else a fact of purity that contrasts with the “ground scorched by salt” (V. 2), in this case not only a reminder of the marine environment, but a metaphor for the arid life marked by the evil of living.
Montale, an introvert and melancholy man, intertwines his self with a universal need: to escape the weight of earthly opacity to reach a brighter dimension, where dark things dissolve and everything tends to "clarity" (V. 5)
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Sunflowers by Ikeda Zuigetsu（Japanese, 1877-1944).
