Between sound and sense. Phonosymbolism in Giovanni Pascoli’s “Digitale purpurea”

Abstract

Giovanni Pascoli’s poetry is undoubtedly ascribable to the most typical manifestations of European decadent literary climate, often declined in a refined poetic prose with a symbolic, subtly disturbing character. This is what happens in Digital purpurea whose ambivalent, hypnotic and visionary atmosphere is suspended between dream and reality, oneirism and memory. The poetic fabric is continuously amplified by frequent repetitions, onomatopoeia and by the presence of vagueness and indefiniteness; it is based on a complex plot of impressions, fragments, discontinuous segments, phrases autonomous and juxtaposed. The originality of this work mainly resides in its phonic aspect, rather than in the logical one, showing a sort of hypersensitivity which binds sound and meaning. These alogical, irrational relationships reveal something obsessive and obscure.