Canti by Giacomo Leopardi (1835)

On a hillside above Recanati a hedge blocks the horizon, and from that small obstruction the mind floods outward into spaces without end, silences past silence, until to drown in such a sea feels sweet. Leopardi wrote _L'infinito_ before he was twenty-two, a hunchbacked prodigy who had wrecked his health in his father's library and decided the universe was vast, beautiful, and entirely indifferent to him. The wonder of these poems is that he stares straight into that indifference and makes it sing. In _A Silvia_ he mourns a girl dead young and, with her, every hope his own youth promised; in the night-song of a wandering shepherd he asks the moon what any of it is for, and gets no answer. The Italian is the loveliest since Dante, plain words tuned until they ache. He ends on broom flowering across the slopes of Vesuvius, fragile and unbearably alive on the ash that will bury it.