Nobel Prize Winner
18 August 25
Reflections: Salvatore Quasimodo
By RW Bro Tony Maiorana
‘I remain, the sun turns back behind me like a hawk, and the earth re-echoes my voice in yours. And visible time again starts in the eye which finds again the light. I lost nothing. To lose is to cross a sky’s diagram over the gestures of dreams, a river brimful of leaves.’ - From I Have Lost Nothing
In 1959, a light was enkindled in the Temple of the World: Salvatore Quasimodo – humble son of Sicily, poet of the soul, and faithful Freemason – received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Today, sixty years onward, his voice continues to reverberate not only through the pages of world poetry, but within the hidden sanctum of the masonic heart.
Quasimodo was not merely a man of verse, nor only a chronicler of human suffering. He was a seeker – of truth, of illumination, of meaning beyond the veil. His work, deeply marked by the wounds of war and the disillusionment of the twentieth century, speaks with the pathos of experience and the serenity of esoteric understanding. Like the mason who journeys from west to east, ascending the winding staircase from darkness into light, Quasimodo’s poetry charts a course from fragmentation toward unity, from sorrow into sacred order.
His final collection, Dare e Avere (To Give and To Have), written shortly before his passing in 1968, offers a spiritual testament in the form of verse. In the poem Non ho perduto nulla (I Have Lost Nothing) Quasimodo leaves us more than poetry: he offers a ciphered truth, a glimmer of the Master’s insight. In this line, ‘To lose is to cross a sky’s diagram’, we are drawn into the sacred language of Freemasonry: the celestial tracing board, the cosmic order, the Great Architect’s design in which loss is never meaningless, but metamorphic.
The images he employs – the hawk, the river brimming with leaves, the diagram of the sky – are not mere poetic ornaments. They are symbols familiar to the Initiate. The hawk, ever vigilant, circles like the sun itself; the river, ever flowing, echoes the course of mortal life; the diagram of the sky recalls the heavenly chart that guides the spiritual builder in tracing his destiny. These are living emblems, living light.
Quasimodo did not shrink from the horrors of his age. He bore witness. And in bearing witness, he transformed anguish into architecture. His poetry is a temple built not of stone, but of syllable and silence. It is accessible only to those who hear with the ear of the heart, who perceive with the inner sight.
To remember the Nobel Prize of Salvatore Quasimodo is not simply to commemorate a laureate. It is to celebrate a brother who walked the path of the Initiate. A man who descended into the shadows of history and emerged bearing a lamp. His life and work affirm what we, as masons, hold sacred: that the journey is the work, and the work is the light.
Let us, then, as Freemasons and seekers of truth, take his words to heart:
‘I have lost nothing.’
For in the labour of the true mason, nothing is ever lost. It is only transformed.
Above Left - The Nobel Prize for Literature medal depicts a man sitting under a laurel tree transcribing the Song of the Muse. Photo courtesy of Sailko
Above Right - Salvatore Quasimodo, 1901–68, won many awards, including the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1959