“On the Threshold” (“In Limine”) was originally published in Eugenio Montale’s first volume of verse, Cuttlefish Bones (Ossi di seppia, 1925). It is a short poem in four stanzas: the first and third stanzas have five lines each; the second and fourth are quatrains. In Italian, the poem has a subtle rhyme scheme that enhances the meanings conveyed by the words.
The poem describes thoughts inspired by a walled fruit orchard close to a turbulent sea. But the sequence of ideas expressed is metaphysical, not physical, and the poem poses difficulties of interpretation by shifting metaphors forcefully in mid-conceit. “On the Threshold” could well be compared to the metaphysical poetry of John Donne as profitably as it can be compared to the poems of other early 20th-century European modernists.
In the first stanza, for instance, only the first and fifth lines rhyme (a, x, x¹, a), so that the words thus emphasized are orchard (pomario) and reliquary (reliquiario). The rhyme equates these two words, reinforcing the stanza’s proposition that the orchard is a sort of shrine where certain relics are kept or hidden. This first stanza is an apostrophe to an unnamed auditor urging the listener to “be happy if the wind inside the orchard” draws back “the tidal surge of life” and makes the orchard seem not a garden (orto) “but a reliquary” of memories.
In short, the stanza suggests that the “dead web / of memories” (un morto / viluppo di memorie) is under the surface, drawn down the way that waves draw items strewn on a beach and perhaps bury them in the pebbles or sand. The second stanza, which rhymes b, c, c, b (volo, grembo, lembo, crogiuolo), picks up and extends the imagery relating to the wind mentioned in the first line of the poem. The circularity of the rhyme scheme also draws attention to this stanza’s topic: the “whir” (Il frullo) of “the eternal womb” (eterno grembo), which transforms the orchard into a “crucible” (crogiuolo).
The third stanza, which rhymes d, e, x², e, d, describes the turbulence on the other side of the orchard wall—a turbulence that has made and will continue to make history—and suggests that beyond the wall one could come suddenly and unexpectedly upon a ghost or phantom of personal redemption (this idea is proposed in the disorientingly unrhymed line). The words for “wall” and “future” (muro, futuro), at the ends of the first and last lines, do rhyme, however, thereby reinforcing the poem’s suggestion that within the orchard one is somehow in a fertile place, sheltered from the forces of history.
The final stanza issues another command: to search for a gap or tear in the netting of memories that binds one to this place and to escape through it to freedom. This stanza, rhymed f, x³, f, x⁴ (rete, fuggi, sete, ruggine), ends with suggestive consonance (in the uggi-) but avoids a conclusive rhyme; the speaker finally breaks free from each of the expected sound patterns that the rhymes have established earlier.
In the end the speaker, it seems, has been addressing himself all along. “On the Threshold” is thus self-reflexive, exhortative, and future-oriented. The poem ends with references to quenchable thirst and the dissipation of bitter rancor—outcomes possible once the poet is able to leave the reliquary of memory, the place of gestation, the shelter of rooted ways.
As G. Singh points out in the introduction to his translation of Montale’s Quaderno di Quattro Anni, a much later volume, Montale explored certain key concepts in countless poems all through his poetic career: the present’s incontrovertible link to the past, the legacy of the past as a burden from which one must attempt a break, the dead hand of history versus new promises of fertility, and the self-conscious formation of an ever-new identity (see Singh viii–xi).
These core ideas all appear in “On the Threshold,” an early poem by one of Italy’s greatest modernist poets.
Bibliography
Montale, Eugenio. “On the Threshold.” Translated by Jonathan Galassi. In Montale in English, edited by Harry Thomas, 4–5. London: Penguin, 2005.
Singh, G. “Introduction” to Eugenio Montale, It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook / Quaderno di Quattro Anni. New York: New Directions, 1980.