Nearing again the legendary isle

Where sirens sang and mariners were skinned,

We wonder now what was there to beguile

That such stout fellows left their bones behind.

Those chorus-girls are surely past their prime,

Voices grow shrill and paint is wearing thin,

Lips that sealed up the sense from gnawing time

Now beg the favour with a graveyard grin.

We have no flesh to spare and they can’t bite,

Hunger and sweat have stripped us to the bone;

A skeleton crew toil upon the tide

And mock the theme-song meant to lure us on:

No need to stop the ears, avert the eyes

From purple rhetoric of evening skies.

 TRADUZIONE

RIACCOSTANDO L’ISOLA LEGGENDARIA

Riaccostando l’isola leggendaria

Del canto delle sirene, dove i naviganti venivano spolpati

Ci chiediamo oggi quale inganno allora attirava

Uomini provetti che lì lasciarono le ossa.

Queste ballerine di fila non hanno più l’età:

Voci ormai stridule e trucco che si disfa,

Labbra che schermavano i sensi dal rodere del tempo

Adesso invitano con un ghigno sepolcrale.

Noi non abbiamo carne di riserva, e loro non possono addentare,

Fame e sudore ci hanno ridotti tutt’ossa;

Ciurma scheletrica fatichiamo tra le maree

Tenendo testa alla canzone che doveva adescarci:

Non occorre tapparsi gli orecchi, né sviare lo sguardo

Dalla purpurea retorica dei cieli al tramonto.

 COMMENTO

This poetry is included in the collection"An Italian visit"(1947) and, beginning from the ancient myth of sirens that populated the seas around the "legendary isle" of Sicily, expecially the Straits of Messina, the poet wants to underline the vanity of their bewitching songs for a crew by now without "flesh"(v 9):in this case the word "flesh"is not interpreted in its phisical sens but it means flesh of heart, of values and therefore"sirens sang"turned into "graveyard grin"(v 8)and their charming image changes into an image of death. They are like the chorus-girl who had almost finished their career(vv 5-6). Here there is maybe a reference to Dega’s dancers; they are no more the "protagonists" and they cannot more bite(v 9) anyone of the poet’s shipmates because hunger and sweat have stripped them to the bone(v 10). In this verse we can note a remarkable resemblance with Coleridge’s ballad:"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": it is the story of a crime and its punishment told by the protagonist himself, an old mariner condemned for killing an albatross to expiate his crime, to travel for ever from land to land telling his story and teaching by his example, love and reverence for all God’s creatures. Even if this poetry is extremely representative of the individual’s crisis of the twentieth-century, because of the deep feeling of sorrow, expressed by the poet in the most sober and composite way, we can note something nostalgic in the last two verses:infact when Lewis speaks about the "purple rhetoric of evening skies" he surely wants to focuse his mind to the past, to a long period of the human history ended for so long…For ages sunsets had been the moment of memories and of melancholy, Dante too,in the eighth canto of the "Purgatory" wrote about it, and the last verse seems to be taken from Dante’s "Divina Commedia". Here the Sicily becomes the land in which everything arrives to the bound of life and where neither the death frightens, so we can only look at its as a wanderful isle on which a lot of myths are concentrated.