Like Leaves in Autumn by Carlo Pirozzi et al sampler

their use relying more on the evocative power of the sounds, reduced
simply to phoné, a pure issue of voice like the ‘final vowel’ in the first
line of the last poem written by another giant of poetry, Seamus Heaney.
In Heaney’s ‘Banks of a Canal’, pure sound seems to have the power
of ‘towing silence’, of silencing the entire world:
Say ‘canal’ and there’s that final vowel
Towing silence with it, slowing time
To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam
Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still.
The ‘world stands still’ while the demiurge poet is grappling with the
naming of the world and the emptying of semantic language, with the
death and rebirth of the word. We are witnessing a dramatisation of
an expectation of meaning. Returning to Ungaretti, this poetic
validation and obliteration of the world is the essence of his poetry,
and shows that his work goes beyond the life of one man because it
belongs to all time:
The poet goes there
and then returns to the light with his songs
and scatters them there
As a conclusion and as a tribute to Scottish poetry, these lines from
‘The Buried Harbour’ can be set alongside some lines of another soldier
poet, from another war – the Second World War: Hamish Henderson.
He was one of the fathers of Scotland’s 20th-century folk renaissance,
and also the first translator of Gramsci into English. One of his poems
‘Under the earth I go’ seems to have been inspired by and blends with
the above verse by Ungaretti:
Maker, ye maun sing them…
Tomorrow, songs
Will flow free again, and new voices
Be borne on the carrying stream.
22 like leaves in autumn