JOSEPH ZAMMIT TABONA’s poems on the ancient city of Mdina are concatenations breathing life and light beyond its silent streets. The poet speaks with Lara Zammit about his admiration for the city and the search for meaning behind every verse.

The poet Joseph Zammit Tabona describes Mdina as a work of art – “a place uniquely enchanting… a monumental witness to the evolution of the soul of our island people”. His love for the city permeates a great number of the verses he has written over the decades, putting into words the somewhat ineffable bond that links the two.

The poet was recently bestowed the Mdina Gold Medal Award for his writings on the city, which he dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in a gesture of devotion.

Mdina Mayor Peter Joseph Dei Conti Sant Manduca (left), Fr Charlò Camilleri and Joseph Zammit Tabona pose before the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel at the church of the Annunciation of Our Lady in Mdina on July 11, after Zammit Tabona presents his award to Our Lady in a gesture of devotion.

“What strikes you so deeply about Mdina?” I ask. “It’s a difficult feeling to describe,” he answers. “It caught my mind, it caught my eye and it caught my heart.” 

Zammit Tabona was born in Floriana in 1928 and spent his student years at St Edward’s College. During the last years of the war, the college was transferred to the seminary in Mdina and it was then that his love for the city began to take shape.

“I spent about eight years there during the war because we moved from Cottonera, where the bombs fell, to Mdina. It struck me… In one sonnet I call it ‘an invitation to heaven’,” he recounts. 

During his schooldays in Mdina, he was taught by Francis Berry, a professor from England who was considered the third English poet living at the time.

Berry infused in his pupils a great love for literature and would organise an annual Shakespeare play towards the end of the summer term. Zammit Tabona had once played the part of Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and was lauded as an outstanding actor in Shakespearean plays.

Some collections of poetry written by Joseph Zammit Tabona.

“We had very good masters,” he says. “We had literature galore. It ended gloriously at the college when I played the part of Romeo and that flattered me no end.”

It was therefore the poet’s education that primed him to see Mdina so resplendently, but also a certain knack of character.

“My inclination towards the city is also due to my character. I am still looking for something… I don’t know what it is, and I’m nearly 94 years old. One time, before Sir Anthony Mamo, the first president of the republic, Eddie Fenech Adami said to him in court, ‘Dr Zammit Tabona doesn’t know what he wants (qas jaf xi jrid)’, and I have to say that is true.”

There is often mention of transience in Zammit Tabona’s poetry – “O eldest child of silence”, he calls it. In a past Times of Malta article (‘November Musings’, November 21, 2004), the poet says that “transience is the poet’s holy ground”. He goes on to explain that transience is closely linked to the thought of death, which too transpires from his verses.

In these poems, Mdina finds her poet of love- Oliver Friggieri

“I’ve been criticised that the thought of death is never far away in my poetry. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem The Skylark, there is a stanza which reads, ‘We look before and after,/ And pine for what is not:/ Our sincerest laughter/ With some pain is fraught;/ Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.’

“Our poems have a touch of sadness all along”, he explains. “The happiest and the most heavenly still have some sadness.

Joseph Zammit Tabona

“I am very religious, and I often ask, even in my poems, ‘where do we go from here?’ It is an expression of doubt. In a way, I am a Catholic but I am also agnostic because, given what goes on around us, it’s as though God is looking the other way. Some people think they will be around forever, but that is not the case – ‘We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep’, says Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest.”

Human beings are ephemeral creatures and Mdina asks those who pass through its gates to consider their place within the vastness of time. Poetry is an attempt to find the eternal amid the transient. “It is very enriching,” claims the poet.

With Mdina’s gates in mind, he goes on to recite part of the poem popularly known as The Gate of the Year by Minnie Louise Haskins:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied:

“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

Hence, we have an answer to the problem of transience.

Giving an account of his works, Zammit Tabona posits that “the poetic thought in these pages, both in English and in Maltese, bears to the reader a message of the divinity in man, redeeming it from decay.

“In this concatenation of poems, Mdina finds what Oliver Friggieri deemed her ‘poet of love’, on a moral stage beyond the limitations of time – a monument to share in the light of the first great concatenation of humanity: the need for truth and the desire of all things beautiful.”