Cantico delle Creature

• ENGLISH VERSION

In the issue nr. 350 of “L’immaginazione” (Manni Editori, November-December 2025, year XLI), Antonio Prete, one of Italy’s leading critics, poets, and translators — whose works include “Il pensiero poetante – Saggio su Leopardi” (1980), the curatorship of “Operette morali” (1992) and of “Pensieri” (1994) by Leopardi and the translation of Baudelaire’s “I Fiori del male” (2003), all published by Feltrinelli – dedicates a brief but, as usual, elegant reflection to the “Cantico delle Creature” by Francis of Assisi, the first text in vernacular poetry in our tradition, which celebrated its eighth centenary last year.

Composed in the Umbrian vernacular, the text’s luminous harmony combines praise and prayer, with clear biblical influences from Genesis and the Psalms, and was almost certainly intended to be sung. “in the Assisi manuscript, Prete informs us, the copyist left a blank space on three lines, intended to receive the indication of neumes, which suggests a syllabic chant similar to the Gregorian chant of the Psalms” – the Canticle of the Creatures has not failed to arouse admiration and devotion throughout the centuries.

And in his rapid but highly learned analysis, Antonio Prete does not fail to highlight the severe and clear articulation of “musical prayer” or “theological chant” in an initial part in which Francis addresses a You (Most High, all-powerful, good Lord, Yours are the praises, the glory, the honor, and all blessing. To You alone, Most High, do they belong, and no human is worthy to mention Your name.”) that no longer has only the characteristics of interiority typical of prayer, but is here “represented on the stage of a new theater, the theater of creation,” emphasizing the presence and dynamic force of the divine in facts, gestures, and elements of Nature — from Brother Sun to Sister Water, from our mother Earth to our sister bodily Death—summoned in the text in the fullness of their own simple and defenseless meekness. It is therefore a very exposed theater, permeated by a doctrine of light that the Stilnovisti will make their own “in its dual essence, physical and theological,” characterized by elements and attributes accountable to the medieval courtly tradition (such as Brother Sun, for example), explicit in reaffirming the concepts of brotherhood and sisterhood, praise and sharing, cornerstones of the idea of fraternitas, the luminous founding principle of the Franciscan Rule.

Of particular interest to me, in the current times, is the attention given, in the stanza dedicated to our sister Mother Earth, to the generative and fruitful power of nature that produces various fruits with colorful flowers and grass, line of disarming springtime beauty, line fully “unheard” in its strident actuality, insulted by the behavior of a corrupt and degraded society such as ours, devoted to ecological and social euthanasia, intoxicated by individual and national selfishness and wickedness, stunned between a song and a pair of underpants at the Sanremo Festival and the like on the brink of – and indeed already in the midst of – World War III. And it is certainly no coincidence that this lassio inspired Laudato si’, the Encyclical Letter on the care of our common home that Pope Francis made public in 2015 and in which, with reference to the Earth, we read: “We have grown up thinking that we are its owners and rulers, authorized to plunder it. The violence present in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness we perceive in the soil, in the water, in the air and in living beings (…) We forget that we ourselves are earth (cf. Gen 2:7).” From Francis to Francis, in short, through the centuries traveled by a humanity that does not listen, does not learn, does not remember, and drags with it the chains of presumption.

However, poetry resists, perhaps above all according to the beautiful definition given by Gabrio Vitali in his “Poesia che fa civiltà” (Moretti&Vitali 2024) as “the technical creation of linguistic-musical facts of experiential value for all,” which is precisely what makes poetry “an operator of civilization.” And it was by following this thread of discourse, almost walking a tightrope, that I came across an extraordinary sequence of five texts that the American poet Gregory Corso composed and dedicated to St. Francis in the spring of 1960, the first part of which, entitled “Francis and the Birds,” I reproduce here:

I praise you for your love,
Your benediction of animals and men,
When the night-horn blew,
And the world’s property was disproportioned,
Where ere the winged children,
The rabbit,
The afterglow –
Good human tree, birds come to rest;
Not only those which chirp
But also those that honk and caw;
I see you with eagle,
Penguin, vulture, seagull;
Nor be it a bird
But an elephant, a herd!
All on your goodly compassionate shoulders.

Here is Francis of Assisi, good human tree, tree home and refuge for all creatures, not only those that chirp, but also those that bray and moo, for all, for everyone, on your benevolent, compassionate shoulders still capable of hosting and comforting the slightest glimmers of hope, imagination, prayer, and presence.

(The poem “Francis & the birds” is taken from “Poesia degli ultimi americani” edited by Fernanda Pivano, Feltrinelli, 1964, translation by Fernanda Pivano).