Ungaretti endows his verbal structures with thematic force [in L'Allegria]; the syntactic and semantic encodations converge in such a way that the former becomes a transcription of the latter. Encoded within the poems' structural patterns lies L'Allegria's central myth of Edenic harmony and cosmic immersion: the "paese innocente". The convergence is in fact threefold: syntax and semantics both parallel Ungaretti's psychological experience of Edenic unification in the trench. The most striking characteristics of that experience are the poet's sense of identification with his fellow soldiers and all natural phenomena, on the one hand, and the sense of spatial and temporal immobility, on the other hand. These two conditions are transcribed thematically into a static Edenic vision of universal harmony. Their structural counterparts are, respectively, metaphor and parataxis.

By metaphor I refer to the immediate and synthetic verbal representation of relations of identity; by parataxis, the syntactical representation...