In The Echoes of Love the heroine, Venetia, is waiting for Paolo in his study, when she comes across a book:

She crossed over to the opposite wall, between two of the huge windows, where floor-to-ceiling bookcases stood. Looking round, she could see that more vast bookcases stretched up between three other windows. Clearly Paolo was a voracious reader. Running her fingers over the beautiful leather-bound tomes, she walked alongside the shelves and suddenly stopped as something caught her eye, lying sideways on the top of the books.

She picked out the small volume, a copy of Canti by the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi that she has always admired. This was an antique version of the same book Judd had bought her one day as they were browsing through the antiquarian bookshops of Charing Cross. Her heart lurched in surprise at the sight of it, and a painful reverberation coursed through her. Was Fate yet again sending her a message of some sort, pushing her towards this man that seemed to steal inside her soul at every turn?

I knew at once, when I wrote this scene, that the book Venetia finds must be the Canti – for the fact that Paolo owns it and Venetia admires it says so much about their shared qualities: passion, imagination, intelligence and, of course, a rich vein of romance running through all.

Have you read the Canti? Penguin publishing house describes it as follows:

Revisited and reorganized over his lifetime, this extraordinary work was described by Leopardi as a ‘reliquary’ for his ideas, feelings and deepest preoccupations. It encompasses drastic shifts in tone and material, and includes early personal elegies and idylls; radical public poems on history and politics; philosophical satires; his great, dark, despairing odes such as ‘To Silvia’; and later masterworks such as ‘The Setting of the Moon’, written not long before Leopardi’s death. Infused with classical allusion and nostalgia, yet disarmingly modern in their spare, meditative style and their sense of alienation and scepticism, the Canti influenced the following two centuries of Western lyric poetry, and inspired thinkers and writers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Beckett and Lowell.

Today, I’m sharing with you two of my favourite poems from the Canti.

‘The Infinite’ so beautifully captures that moment when you are alone with nature and you feel a connection to the universe. It’s a humbling, restorative, beautiful moment, and one which I think so many of us seek in our modern world of buzz and busyness and disconnection.

The Infinite (XII)

It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,

and this hedgerow here, that closes off my view,

from so much of the ultimate horizon.

But sitting here, and watching here,

in thought, I create interminable spaces,

greater than human silences, and deepest

quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.

When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,

I go on to compare that infinite silence

with this voice, and I remember the eternal

and the dead seasons, and the living present,

and its sound, so that in this immensity

my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck

seems sweet to me in this sea.

‘First Love’ is one of the most moving poems I’ve ever read. Leopardi so perfectly encapsulates the angst of first love – the ‘torment’. Whenever I read this poem I’m transported back to my youth and plunged into the whirlpool of feelings, aching and raw, that overtook me then. It serves as a powerful reminder that we carry in our hearts all the feelings of our past; that eternally ‘the fire still lives’.

First Love (X)

 My thoughts turn to the day when I felt love

war in me, for the first time, and I said:

‘Ah, if this is love, how it torments me!’

When, with eyes fixed wholly on the ground,

I marvelled at her, she who was first to open,

all innocent, the passage to my heart.

Ah, Love, how badly you’ve treated me!

Why does such sweet affection bring

so much desire, and so much grief?

And why did such delight enter my heart

not serenely, not entire and pure,

but filled with agony and trouble?

Tell me, gentle heart, what fear

what anguish entered with that thought,

compared with which all pleasures were annoyance?

Fulfilling thought that offered up yourself,

in the day and night, when all things seem

to be at peace in this hemisphere,

you troubled me, unquiet, happy,

wretched, lying beneath the covers,

throbbing strongly at every moment.

And whenever, sad, afflicted, weary,

I closed my eyes in sleep: sleep vanished

consumed by fever and delirium.

Oh how the sweet vision rose, living,

among the shadows, my closed eyes

gazing at it beneath my eyelids!

Oh, how that sweetest of motions spread

through my bones, oh, how a thousand

confused thoughts rolled through

my trembling soul! As a breeze, flows

through the heights of an ancient forest,

and creates a long, uncertain murmuring.

And oh, my heart, while I was silent, while

I failed to struggle, what did you say, as she departed,

she the source of pain and throbbing?

I’d no sooner felt the burning

of that blaze of love, than the little breeze

that fanned the flame, flew on its way.

I lay there sleepless in the dawn,

and heard those horses, that would leave me lost,

stamping their hooves outside my ancestral home.

And I, secret, timid, and unsure, turned

my eager hearing, eyes open in vain,

towards the balcony in the darkness,

to hear the last words, that might fall

from her lips: to hear that voice:

alas, since heaven took all else away.

The servants’ voices often struck

my doubting ear, and a chill took me,

and my heart beat more fiercely!

And when that dear voice finally sank

into my heart, mixed with the sounds

of carriage wheels and horses:

I was left deserted, huddled trembling

on my bed, and, eyes closed, pressed

my hand to my heart and sighed.

Later, stupefied, dragging my

shaking limbs round the silent room,

I said: ‘What else could ever move my heart?’

Then the bitterest memory

rooted in my mind, and closed my heart

to all other voices, every other form.

And a deep grief searched my breast,

as when the heavens rain widely,

washing the fields with melancholy.

Nor did I, a boy of eighteen summers

recognise you, Love, when you first tried

your power on one born to weep.

When I scorned every joy, and the stars’

smiles did not please, not dawn’s

calm silence, not green fields.

Even the love of glory was silent

in my heart that it used to warm,

where once love of beauty lived.

My eyes would not return to my studies,

and that which I thought had made

all other desires vain, seemed vain itself.

Ah how could I have altered so, in myself,

how had one love taken all others from me?

Ah, in truth, how changeable we are!

Only my heart pleased, and that

perpetual dialogue buried in my heart,

keeping a guard on grief.

And my eyes that searched the earth or myself,

and allowed no fugitive or wandering glance

to light on any face, vile or lovely:

fearing to disturb the bright, virgin

image that I held in my heart, as waves

in a lake may be stirred by the breeze.

And that regret, for not having fully

delighted in fleeting days,

that weighs on the spirit,

changing to poison past delight,

stung my heart wholly: while shame

with its harsh bite still had no power.

I swear to heaven, to you, great spirits,

that there was no low desire in my heart:

it burned with pure, unblemished fire.

That fire still lives, affection lives,

the lovely image breathes in my thought,

from which I draw no delight that is not

heavenly, and that, alone, satisfies me.