The first words may be quoted in Dante’s Tuscan Italian:Donne, ch‘avete intelletto d’amore,
i’ vo’ con voi de la mia donna dire,
non perchao creda sua laude finire,
ma ragionar per isfogar la mente.
[Ladies who have an understanding of love,
I wish to speak to you of my lady,
not that I believe I may exhaust her praise,
but to converse to ease my mind.]
Dante sets the tone of his song of praise:And I do not wish to speak so loftily
as to become through daring inept,
but will speak of her gentle estate
with respect for her discreetly.
In the second section of the seventy-line canzone, Dante, as he says in his gloss, tells “what is understood of [Beatrice] in heaven”—“The lady is desired in highest heaven”—and “what is understood on earth”:when she goes along the way,
into villainous hearts Love casts a chill,
whereby all their thoughts freeze and perish.
In the last section, Dante sends his poem on its way:Canzone, I know that you will go forth speaking
to many ladies after I have released you ...
Strive, if you can, to open yourself
only to ladies and to men of courtly ways.
There is a fluidity and grace in the poem (as may well be detected in Dino Cervigni’s beautifully attuned translation) beyond anything Dante had yet written, and a fresh vitality of language. The canzone may be said to have inaugurated a new mode of lyric poetry in Italy: the dolce stil nuovo as it came to be called. The phrase is that of Dante, who puts it into the mouth of the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca, with whom he converses on the next to last terrace of Purgatory. Bonagiunta asks him if he is the one who “invented the new rhyming, beginning with ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d‘amore.’”Dante in reply offers a classically high-toned expression of himself: “I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and, in the manner in which he dictates within me, goes setting it out” (vo significando). Now, says Bonagiunta, he understands what it was that held him and others back from “the sweet new style (dolce stil nuovo) of which I have heard.”
Dante himself named as his most honored predecessor in the new style Guido Guinizelli of Bologna, a poet who died in exile (he was a Ghibelline adherent) in 1276. Dante never knew him in real life, though during the short visit Dante paid to Bologna in the fall of 1287 (seemingly), he could talk with poetic affiliates and students of Guido, be directed to his poems, and absorb the atmosphere in which he had flourished. But Dante does meet him in Purgatory (xxvi), not long after the exchange with Bonagiunta. The figure comes forward with a singularly engaging self-identification: “Son Guido Guinizelli e già mi purgo” [I am Guido Guinizelli, and already I purge myself] (the English is less rhythmic). Dante addresses Guido as his father, padre mio, joining him with Virgil and Brunetto Latini in the visionary paternity. He adds that Guido was also the poetic father of others better than himself, no doubt thinking of Guido Cavalcanti and Lapo Gianni. Why, asks Guinizelli, does Dante hold him so highly? And Dante answers:your sweet songs
which so long as modern use shall last
will make their very ink precious.
“Modern use” (uso moderno) was none other than the sweet new style, which in Dante’s lifetime succeeded the Provençal and Sicilian styles, along with that of the voluminous Guittone d‘Arezzo—with their various characteristics of languidness, hardness, or obscurity—that had dominated lyric poetry in Italy for many decades. The leading voices in the stil nuovo were the Florentines Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, and Dante, as Dante declared on many occasions, and never more sweetly than in the sonnet already quoted: “Guido i’vorrei che tu e Lapoed io.... ”
The new style practiced by these three, following Guido Guinizelli of Bologna, was poetry in praise of the loved one, without a trace of bravado, totally bereft of irony or double-edged wit, and emanating from “the gentle heart.” Love and the gentle heart—this is the very theme of one of Guinizelli’s best-known poems:Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore ... [The gentle heart betakes itself always to love ... ]
Dante echoed the thought in a sonnet composed at the request of a friend (Forese Donati, perhaps), who had been much moved by Dante’s canzone “Donne, ch‘avete intelletto d’amore” and who wanted Dante to tell him more simply “what love is.” The sonnet’s opening lines:Amore e’l cor gentil sono una cosa,
sì com il saggio in suo dittare pone,
[Love and the gentle heart are but one thing,
even as the sage pronounces in his poem.]
Dante, speaking to the sage Guinizelli in Purgatory, refers to Guinizelli’s “sweet songs” (he calls them detti, which might be translated “sayings”), and the musical charm of his new sonnet is further tribute to his forerunner.
We have arrived at mid-fall 1289. Dante had gone through an exceedingly active summer, on the battlefield at Campaldino and in the siege at Caprona, with the strenuous preparations and journeying for the two events. The military exploits, however, found no immediate outlet in his poetry, though war memories would recur in the Comedy . It is as though Dante’s spirit now cherished something far removed from the derring-do of war. The sweetness and gentleness of the new poetry, that is, was an aesthetic reaction to the months preceding. But Dante in his young manhood—he was now twenty-four—was increasingly given to vibrantly shifting impulses, to major changes of attention. His emerging greatness as a personality lay partly in the coexistence of these large divergent impulses and in his capacity to move his whole being from one to another. The American reader may think perhaps of Walt Whitman, who could perform simultaneously or successively as a poet of cosmic range and unexcelled inventiveness, as an uncannily shrewd commentator on the drift of social and political democracy, as a lover, and as a recorder of war.
External events, of course, affected Dante’s shifts of focus. He wrote a sonnet elaborating on the theme of the now famous canzone and with the same musical lilt:Ne li occhi porta la mia donna Amore ...
[In her eyes my lady brings Love,
whereby is ennobled everything she looks upon.]
And then, not many months later, Dante learned of the death of Folco Portinari, Beatrice’s father and a man, Dante said, who was “in the highest degree good.” We know from existing records that Portinari died on December 31, 1289.
From this moment on, death is the countertheme with love in the Vita Nuova. Death had made an appearance earlier, in section VIII, when a young woman friend of Beatrice’s had died and Dante duly wrote a commemorative sonnet, “Weep, lovers, since love weeps.” But after Portinari’s demise, death is a constantly lingering presence up through the actual death of Beatrice herself, only six months later.
Dante felt called upon to write some lines for the heart-broken daughter of Portinari, and he contrived two sonnets, the first and more compelling of which begins:You who bear your aspect downcast,
with eyes lowered, showing sorrow,
whence do you come that your color
appears changed into pity’s own?
“A few days after that,” Dante related, “it happened that in a part of my body I was seized by a dolorous illness, from which continuously for nine days I suffered bitterest pain.” We may question the “nine days”—every arithmetical calculation in Dante’s writing is a multiple of three, by astrological necessity—but it was a drawn-out illness and may have been something like rheumatic fever. He falls prey to feverish fantasies of death—his own death, announced by a horde of disheveled women, then the death of Beatrice—“dead lies our lady”—followed by visions of darkening skies, earthquakes, birds falling to the ground—the end of the world.
But even as he wept fever-clouded tears, Dante had another vision, of Beatrice in heaven, with a look of such humility and peacefulness that Dante calls out, “Sweet Death, come to me, and be not unkind, for you must be noble.” He comes slowly
back to reality, to find “a lady, young and gentle,” standing at his bedside weeping with compassion. It is his sister (her name has vanished), one “joined to me by the closest blood relation” (rather than his half-sister Tana).
The other ladies ask his sister to leave, and in answer to their questioning, Dante gradually reveals the entire “false imagining,” as he calls it, holding back only the name of Beatrice.
When he had fully recovered, Dante wrote a canzone about what had happened to him, alluding at the start to his grieving sister:Donna pietosa e di novella etate,
adorna assai di gentilezze umane ...
[A lady compassionate and young,
richly adorned with gentle qualities]
who was there, where often I called on Death,
seeing my eyes filled with pain,
and hearing my empty words,
was moved by fear to bitter weeping.
The canzone chants its way through eighty-four lines, and before it is through Dante has told again of his sickbed experience, his “false imagining” (he repeats the phrase) of his death and Beatrice’s and the end of all things, and then the extraordinary transformation of vision and spirit when Beatrice appears to him sublimely at peace, with Death as something sweet and noble.
This is the second crucial turning point in the Vita Nuova, and, it is not too much to say, in Dante’s understanding of the meaning of life and death. Francis Fergusson provides the compelling insight: that in a radical departure from the romantic medieval tradition of love and death identified together “with the mystic sweetness of night and the void,” Dante now welcomes and praises death as the passage into immortality. “At the end the sweetness of death signifies his faith in Beatrice’s immortality,” Fergusson says, “thereby bringing about a reaffirmation of the human being, and restoring the poet to the waking world with a new sanity.”
The new sanity expressed itself in a series of happy-hearted sonnets, and, following the first of them, in a discourse on the nature of poetic language. Dante had imaged Love as a human being, approaching him in the street, smiling and talking. He now knows perfectly well that Love is not a separate entity but something emanating from the soul, and that it is the privilege of poets writing in the vernacular to use such fanciful figures—so long as they can explain them. He and Guido Cavalcanti, Dante says, are familiar with some poets who fail to explain and “rhyme senselessly.”
The third sonnet is particularly captivating.
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia quand’ ella altrui saluta
The words delicately resonate:So gentle and so honest appears
my lady when she greets others
that every tongue, trembling, becomes mute,
and eyes dare not look at her.
The winter of 1290 passed, and the spring, and there arrived the day when Dante learned that Beatrice really had died. By one of his most complex calculations, invoking the Syrian calendar (which began in October) and “the perfect number nine” being completed “nine times,” Dante tells us that Beatrice died in June 1290. He will not in this place dwell upon the event, because his language would be inadequate “to deal with it properly.”
He did compose a tearstained poem, a “rueful canzone,” as he called it, and bade it go from him, weeping, to find the ladies left disconsolate by the death of Beatrice. After this he was visited by one of Beatrice’s brothers, who had apparently become one of the poet’s best friends, for whom he wrote a sonnet purportedly about the departure of some other lady.
But after an interval, Dante did more than write an occasional poem of memorial grief; he put together the work to which he gave the title La Vita Nuova di Dante Alighieri. It was essentially an act of compilation, probably begun in 1293 and finished two years later. Dante drew up a narrative account of his relationship with Beatrice Portinari, from his first sight of her at the May Day party in 1274 to her death sixteen years later, sprinkling through it the poems—canzones, sonnets, a ballad—written to enshrine each successive moment. A few of these poems may have been written in the 1290s, in order to complete the presentation, but most of them were composed at the times described.
But “Dante the maker” (to borrow the title of William Anderson’s very fine study) was wholly in command as the compilation took shape, and the result is a beautifully paced work, rhythmically rising and falling, with a prologue and three main acts. In the prologue, Dante recounts his first two meetings with Beatrice, through the epochal greeting in 1283. The first act comes to its climax in section XIX with the canzone “Donne ch‘avete intelletto d’amore”; the second reaches its peak with the canzone “Donna pietosa e di novella etate” in section XXIII. The third portion, deliberately indecisive and perhaps a little overextended, passes through the death of Beatrice and its aftermath.
A little more than a year after Beatrice’s death, while Dante was sitting in some public place, thinking painful thoughts, he happened to look up at the building opposite. “I then saw a gentle lady, young and very beautiful, who from a window watched me so compassionately, to judge by her look, that all pity seemed to be generated in her.” Before long, Dante found himself addressing a sonnet to the window-lady:My eyes saw how much pity had appeared on your face ...
In the days following, Dante sought out the unnamed young woman, until sorrowful appreciation turned to positive desire and delight. It is an unexpected but humanly understandable episode—Beatrice will scold him roundly for it when they meet in the Earthly Paradise (an important stage in the long process, acted out in the Comedy, of Dante’s self confrontation)—but aesthetically unclear. It lasts through sections XXXV-XXXVIII, until Dante argues himself out of the obsessions. He is now visited by a powerful new imagining: the vision of Beatrice as she was on that first May Day, “With the crimson vestments in which she first appeared before my eyes.”
The poetic story is now complete; the Dante of 1274, entranced observer of Beatrice, is merged with the Dante of 1295, memoirist, poet, lover. He resolves “to write no more of this blessed one until I could more worthily treat of her.” Should God permit him to live long enough, he will “say of her what was never said of any other woman.” After this foreshadowing of some enormous poetic endeavor, the work ends with the inscription:HERE ENDS
THE
NEW LIFE
OF
DANTE ALIGHIERI.
The new life is above all the life of Dante as a poet; one who has found in the writing of poetry the great purpose of his existence. In his new state of being, his understanding has been fortified as well by the vision of life eternal.
FIVE
The Way of Politics: 1295-1302
DESPITE HIS DISCLAIMER toward the end of the Vita Nuova and despite a good deal of inner torment, Dante continued to court the window-lady, with poetry and ardent glances (and even, perhaps, a secret encounter or two) for more than two years. The relationship reached a climax with a canzone—captivating but enigmatic—written late in the year 1294. It began:Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete,
udite il ragionar ch’e nel mio core,
ch’io nol so dire altrui, si mi par novo.
It is addressed to the angels, or intelligences, who through their act of understanding (intendendo) move the third heaven, that of Venus:[You who by understanding move the third heaven, listen to the argument that is in my heart, which I know not how to say to others, so strange it seems to me.]
The argument tells again of the conflict in Dante’s soul between his grief over the departed Beatrice and his attraction to the “beautiful woman” (bella donna) who had so profoundly transformed his life. A new spirit of Love tells Dante to observe how full of pity and how humble the lady is and urges him to take her to his heart—“ Resolve to call her your lady henceforth.”
In the Convivio, the discourse on poetry and knowledge written during the early years of his exile (1306-1308), Dante tells of composing the canzone “Voi che ’ntendendo.” He says that it had in
deed to do with the “gentle lady of whom I made mention at the end of the Vita Nuova” and recalls the long battle between the pull of the new love “and that which ran counter to it, and still held the fortress of my mind on behalf of that glorious Beatrice.” But he now maintains that what he discovered during the period of suffering and searching was nothing else but philosophy; and that in the canzone he wrote about the experience, “I imagined her as made in the likeness of a gentle lady; and I could not think of her in an actual form as anything but compassionate.”
There seems virtually no doubt that the window-lady was a very real person and that Dante was strongly drawn to her, even while condemning himself for it. Through all the mists of a romantic literary tradition, real human beings, especially women, make their appearance in the Vita Nuova, as they did in Dante’s young life. The fictionalizing of the window-lady in the Convivio was itself an act of fiction, one suited to Dante’s self-characterizing purpose at the moment.
But it remains true that Dante came to the reading of philosophy in the time after Beatrice’s death. Turning to philosophy for consolation, he inevitably found himself immersed in the De Consolatione Philosophiae by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius. Written in his last years, in prison at Pavia (he died there in 524), it is a work of prose, interspersed with poetry, describing how, through philosophy, the soul finds ultimate comfort in a vision of God. (Dante would find the treatise still more personally important when he reread it in exile, himself under sentence of death.) Dante, as he records, also found nourishment in Cicero, particularly his essay on friendship, De Amicitia, where there is wise counsel about the loss of a loved one.
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 5