«Mirabile è anche un granello di polvere». Barthold Heinrich Brockes, poesie del Creato

[Autom. eng. transl.] The large collection of poems entitled Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott by Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747) celebrates the wonders of the world through the meticulous description of every element of nature, portrayed in the infinite variables of its beauty and presented as a generous gift of a benevolent Creator. Published in nine volumes starting in 1721, the work received an extraordinary success among contemporaries, helping to spread a positive perception of earthly reality no longer conditioned by seventeenth-century pessimism, inclined instead to grasp only the most ephemeral and perishing dimension. This publication proposes the translation into Italian of some of the most significant poems that appeared in the first volume of the collection, which, after three centuries, deserve to be carefully reconsidered. The indefatigable appeal to the admiration of Creation and the condemnation of indifference towards his riches, addressed by Brockes to the reader of the early eighteenth century, seem in fact to exhort even the current public to rediscover the beauties of the world and, at the same time, to re-evaluate responsibly its relationship with the environment, whose preservation appears today an ethical imperative that is more than ever essential.