Il passero solitario di Montale: un merlo azzurro e un filo rosso

[Machine translation] Starting from a verse from the Psalms and a sonnet by Petrarca, the figure of the lone sparrow is taken up by various poets, who now make it an example of suffering loneliness, now a sample of melodious singing, more rarely an expression of vital joy. Leopardi's song, rightly famous for its beauty and depth, borders all the precedents in the shadows. Leopardi, who is identified in part with the solitary sparrow, imposes the seal of his style on the image, so that subsequent poets will rarely dare to grapple with that theme. Montale returns, in prose and verse, to the image of the sparrow, with which he does not explicitly identify, while revealing a measured empathy. In his prose writings, he criticizes commentators who have mistaken the protagonist of Leopard's song for a common sparrow, a bird with a modest chirping and sociable nature, while it is a bird of a different species, the blue blackbird or solitarius monticola, a lover of isolation and equipped with a melodious song, which reminds him of an aria of Massenet's Manon Lescaut. In addition, Montale mentions the lone sparrow in various poems, composed starting in 1945 and almost until his death. In these verses, the Ligurian poet reflects, among other things, on the trail that animals leave in the human soul and above all on the remorse for killing a lonely sparrow in his youth, during his summer stays in the Cinque Terre.