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Atlantis
IWhen I thought about writing a poem inspired
by Atlantis, I inevitably looked to the 1800s. No period has
fed the ancient Platonic myth with more fantasy than the nineteenth
century. Atlantis was – as with this century –
imagined as a perfect “golden” world, traversed
by the silent karstic river of decadence. “My”
Atlantis, therefore, is not that of marble glitz and the ostentatious
shimmer of a Hollywood production; “my” Atlantis
is the continent of the end, of ocean mists and sunset flares
that are found in a Turner painting, where the ruins of a
temple are caressed by golden light, in a perpetual sunset.
The “sung” verses of this final place are by Byron:
great sailing ships abandoned drowned the marine’s abysses
– “And ocean all stood still /And nothing stirred
within their silent depths”; or the “other world”
horizons of astounding Wagnerian music. I have, however another
a poignant vision of Atlantis, a world revealed at sunset,
there were no witnesses to its stunning magnificence, its
light and reflections, reach us clinging to a memory we no
longer recall. Therefore is everything “distant”
and “elsewhere”? Only partly, because after all
“my” Atlantis “came” to me in my music
and only because it speaks of a feeling of the end, of that
sense of finality that, in one way or another, spans our West
– this “land of the evening” as is its etymological
meaning – from eighteen hundreds and onwards
Luigi Maiella
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