Corrected draft

"Radici","roots" in English, is the fourth studio album of the italian singer and songwriter Francesco Guccini. It may be considered Guccini's most important album,also for the inclusion of his masterpiece "La locomotiva",maybe his most known and famous song. In this essay I'm going to focus my attention on a song titled "La Canzone dei dodici mesi",because its lyrics are strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's poetic production,in particular by "The Waste Land" and "Gerontion". 

My analysis starts from the structure of the song. Lyrics have the same structure in every stanza with the telling of the flowing of an year month by month. This cyclical stanzas seem to take inspiration from T.S Eliot's "The Burial of the dead",when the poet writes about a season and then another completing the Season's cycle.

The most important and direct reference to T.S. Eliot is about april. Indeed, Guccini sings: "Con giorni lunghi al sonno dedicati il dolce aprile viene, quali segreti scoprì in te il poeta che ti chiamò crudele,ma nei tuoi giorni è bello addormentarsi dopo fatto l'amore come la terra dorme nella notte dopo un giorno di sole". Let's proceed from the "dolce aprile","sweet april" in English. With this expression, Guccini confirms Geoffrey Chaucer verse of the Canterbury Tales, "April is the sweetest month". The same Caucher's line is totally overturned by T.S.Eliot,when he writes that "April is the cruelest month". This pushes Guccini to wonder what kind of segrets had T.S.Eliot discovered when he wrote The Burial of the Dead,to refer to April as "Cruel". 

In the traditional Poetry, spring had a positive connotation. It was seen as the regenartion of nature and it was usually pulled together with flowers or other natural elements. In this case even flowers have a negative connotation,because they are violet, recalling the violet decorations of Priests'clothes during funerals. It is clear that T.S. Eliott had the intention to break with tradition, considering spring at the same level as the desolated and isolated human Spirit. It is also important to say that spring means also "zampillo", another term that deals with life,energy,movement and so on and so on,all images in strong contrapposition with the sterility of human Spirit, the main theme of the Poem.

Speaking of sterility,it can be useful to analyze the second part of Guccini's lyrics about April. "Addormentarsi dopo fatto l'amore come la terra dorme nella notte dopo un giorno di sole". "Fare l' amore" is "To make love" in english, and it can obviously be seen as the opposite of sterility. Then, Guccini recalls the importance of the ground,personificated in something that sleeps by night after a sunny day. It is important to underline two aspects: the first one is the personification of a natural element, used also by T.S. Eliot in his "The Burial of the Dead" with the snow;the second one is the theme of ground or terrain,that has an enormous relevance in T.S. Eliot's Poetry,so much that the title of one of his most important short poems is "The Waste Land",where the waste terrain is compared to human Spirit. 

Being still on ground,in The Burial of the Dead sterilty is represented also through the image of drought roots from which nothing borns. It is not a case that, as I said before, Guccini's album is called roots.

Another reference to T.S. Eliot is "nasce Cristo la tigre", obviously in the month of December. T.S. Eliot used to refer as Christ as a tiger in his poem "Gerontion",a dramatic monologue with a strong religious meaning that has many features in common with the Waste Land and other Eliot's poems, features such as the theme of nature,ground'sterility in contrapposition with rain and the superposition of different kind of times,following Henri Bergson's new conceptions.

In conclusion, I can say that there's a strong influence of T.S. Eliot's work in Guccini's "La canzone dei dodici mesi", but also in other italian singers-songwriters such as Fabrizio De Andrè in his "Via della Povertà". My intention was to demonstrate that the Theory of intertextuality is really active not only in licterature, interpreted as Novel and Poetry, but also in music, which I personally consider my favourite expression of art.