The moon is more important than the canadians. I dedicate you a poem of the our greatest poet of the period romantic: in italian public schools our youth spends two or three whole weeks to understand the meaning of this poem.
Giacomo Leopardi (italian romantic poet)
"Night Song Of A Wandering Shepherd"
What do you do, moon, aloft? Let me know
what, silent moon, you do.
You rise each night; you go;
you contemplate the deserts; then you sleep.
Do you not have your fill
of ever ranging never-changing scenes?
Do you not loathe returning, are you still
eager for these ravines?
The shepherd's life to him
is like your life. Each morning
he rises at first dawning:
moves on his flocks to other fields, beholds
more flocks, spring water, grasses;
then drops exhausted at the end of day:
expects no other way.
Say, moon, what can be found
of worth in life to him
and to you in your life? where does it lead,
this transient drift of mine
and your eternal round?
Wizened, white-haired and broken,
barefoot and clad in rags,
a load, the heaviest, strung on his back,
by hill and valley track,
on knife-edged stones, through thickets, knee-deep sand,
in wind and tempest, when the hour of day
is oven-hot - or freezes,
he goes, goes on and wheezes,
fords waterfalls and bogs,
falling and rising, always stumbling on,
not resting to take food,
till lacerated, bleeding, he at last
arrives at where the path
and where his painful efforts have been leading:
a vast and horrid chasm
in which he plunges to oblivion.
Such, lunar chastity,
is life - mortality.
The life of man is labour;
just to risk dying is his lifeblood lent him.
He learns what will torment him
among the first things; his progenitors,
mother and father, start
consoling him for birth in their contrition.
Then, as he comes to grow,
one and the other help him. Ceaselessly
in utterance and act
they try to give him heart,
console him for his human destiny.
Parents do well to see
for offspring there is no more seemly pact.
Why bring to light, in fact;
why ever keep alive
one who must be consoled for having life?
If living has no cure
why do we so endure?
Moon, unassailed by touch,
mortality is such.
But, since you are not mortal,
words do perhaps not move you overmuch.
You in eternal, lonely pilgrimage
must be aware, as pensively you go,
of earth-life, what it is,
how we plod sighing as in pain we bend; -
also what dying is, the ultimate
diminishing of features,
how here the case is each man perishes
from off the earth, from every loving friend.
Certain it is you know
the why of things, for you behold the fruit
of evening and of morn,
the silent, endless, passing-by of time.
You know, you, for whom in her delight
the smiles of spring are born,
whom the heat betters, and for what device
the wintertime brings ice.
A thousand things you know, a thousand find,
which are from simple shepherds held from sight.
Often when I observe
your silent stay above the empty plain,
whose far rim gives the sky apparent bounds;
when with my flock I see
you dog my steps - with slow and steady gain;
when I watch stars burn in celestial heights;
a voice speaks in my mind:
Wherefore so many lights?
For what the sky's infinity, for what
the deep, non-finite air? What signifies
this solitude immense? And what am I?
Converse I with myself so: of the chambers
unmeasured and superb,
and of the kin unnumbered they contain;
but in so much activity and motion
of all those things above, and here below,
that with no resting go,
always returning to where they began;
no use or benefit
in them I see. But you must without doubt,
immortal maiden, know the truth of it.
This do I feel and know:
that from the endless gyres
and from my fragile pain
some profit or content
others may have. To me life is a bane.
My flock at rest, how great your happiness:
I do not think you know your misery!
How much I envy you!
Not just because you go
as if completely free,
and every strain and blow -
and every terror - you at once forget;
but more because you do not suffer boredom.
When you upon the grass sit in the shade,
you are content and quiet,
existing mostly so
without distress a great part of the year.
When I sit in the shade upon the grass
thick clouds of torpor pass
across my mind, and pangs as from a spur.
Thus from me, supine, ever more deferred
is any peaceful base.
Yet nothing I desire
and cause for grief had I none until late.
What joy is yours, how great,
I know not, but the gods to you are good.
For me joy has no place,
nor, flock of mine, only at this I sorrow.
For if you understood
I would ask why a beast
which lies down lazily
is calm, fulfilled and blest,
while tedium engulfs me when I rest.
Were wings to elevate
my soul above the clouds
to number off the stars spread everywhere;
or could I like the thunder roam the crags;
I would be happier, oh sweet flock, I would
be happier, moon, whose whiteness rules the air.
Or would truth deviate
at thought of other beings and their fate?
Perhaps whatever state
life may be born to, in a croft or lair,
the time of birth is a funereal date.
