Dante's Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the 'Vita Nuova'

by Dante Alighieri

  In Se Lippo amico Dante creates categories that are not only metapoetic but also sexual, a move with interesting ramifications for a poet who belonged to the world of codified eroticism that is the courtly lyric. As we will have occasion to see, Dante’s lyrics delineate the development of the poet’s thought with regard to many of the ideological categories inherited from the courtly system, including the categories of gender. The issue of gender is central to Dante’s lyrics, and so it will be central to this commentary.

  What matters is not so much Dante’s creation in this early composition of completely conventional – in fact, stereotypical – sexual categories, as his readiness to deal with this material. Se Lippo amico gives us a baseline by which we can gauge the development in Dante’s thinking about sexual categories. By the time he writes the Commedia, Dante will enter this same ideological arena in a way that is anything but conventional. The case of Beatrice is exemplary: from the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova, whose silence is a feature that connects her to the lady of the courtly lyric, she becomes the Beatrix loquax – far from silent, naked, or vulnerable – of the Commedia.24

  6 (B XLVIII; C 5; FB 8; DR 31)

  Se Lippo amico sè tu che mi leggi, avanti che proveggi

  My dear friend Lippo, if you’re reading this, before you undertake

  a le parole che dir t’imprometto, da parte di colui che mi t’ha scritto in tua balìa mi metto

  to scan the gist of what I have to say, by one who’s written me on your behalf I yield to your command

  6

  e rècoti salute quali eleggi. Per cortesia audir prego mi deggi e co·ll’udir richieggi d[e l]’ascoltar la mente e lo ’ntelletto: io che m’apello umil[e] sonetto davanti al tu’ conspetto

  and send such greetings you’d be glad to have. Respectfully I pray you listen now and as you do, invite your mind and intellect to listen too. A humble sonnet I am called, and join your present company

  12

  vegno, perché al non-caler non feggi.

  lest you should choose to disregard my plea.

  Lo qual ti guido esta pulcella nuda che vien di rieto a me sì vergognosa ch’atorno gir non osa

  So I bestow on you this undressed girl who follows me with such a sense of shame she dares not go about

  16

  perch’ella non ha vesta in cui si chiuda; e prego il cor gentil che ’n te riposa che la rivesta e tegnala per druda, sì che sia cognosciuda

  because she hasn’t any clothes to wear. Hence I would ask you out of charity to clothe her and then keep her as your own, so she will then be known

  20

  e possa andar là ’vunqu’è disïosa.

  and go wherever she should wish to go.

  METRE: sonetto rinterzato of twenty lines with rhyme scheme AaBBbA AaBBbA CDdC DCcD, with a base fourteen-hendecasyllable scheme of ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. Lower-case letters indicate settenari or seven-syllable verses. Cf. O voi che per la via and Morte villana.

  7 Lo meo servente core

  This canzone, which consists of a single stanza, is plausibly Dante’s first canzone. Dante wrote two other single-strophe canzoni, also early compositions: Madonna, quel signor che voi portate and Sì lungiamente m’ha tenuto Amore. The latter was placed in Vita Nuova XXVII (18). The fact that Lo meo servente core is the only canzone in Dante’s canon to open with a settenario (seven-syllable verse) is another indication of immaturity; later, in the post-exilic treatise De vulgari eloquentia, Dante formulates the principle whereby a canzone ought to begin with a hendecasyllable. For Contini, the incipit composed of a settenario “is a Guittonianism” (p. 24), but we can go back further, to the Sicilians; Giacomo da Lentini, for example, writes canzoni made entirely of settenari (for instance, Meravigliosamente). And in fact, given the Provençalisms and the markedly more flowing, breezy style – less bristly and difficult than we find, for example, in the tenzoni with Dante da Maiano – we can affirm that Lo meo servente core is more notable for its Sicilianizing than for its fidelity to Guittone.

  The poet writes a letter in verse to his lady, a letter occasioned by their separation; we think of the great Occitan theme of amor de lonh. But in contrast to typical poetry of absence, in this case the poet expresses himself in an optimistic register, saying that the sweet hope of return already comforts him: “mi tien già confortato / di ritornar la mia dolce speranza [a pleasant hope / of soon returning here consoles my mind]” (7–8). The theme of far-off love is lexically dominant: we note “avanti ch’io mi sia guari allungato” (before being very far away) (6); “Dëo, quanto fï’ poca adimoranza” (Ah, how brief will be the sojourn) (9); “per che ne lo meo gire e adimorando” (because in my going and staying far away) (13). Also of Occitan derivation is the feudal and courtly lexicon that infuses this canzone: the first verse features the lover’s “servente core,” literally engaged in love-service to the lady, and in the last verses the lover commends himself to his “gentil mia donna” or noble lady: “gentil mia donna, a voi mi raccomando” (14).

  This same feudal ambience will nourish “la corte del cielo [the court of heaven]” of Inferno 2, where one donna gentile (“Donna è gentil nel ciel che si compiange [A noble woman is in heaven who commiserates]” [Inf. 2.94]) commends the lost poet to another donna gentile, using the same verb raccomandare that harkens back to our youthful monostrophic canzone: “Or ha bisogno il tuo fedele / di te, e io a te lo raccomando [Your faithful one needs you now, and I commend him to you]” (Inf. 2.98–9).

  Of particular interest in Lo meo servente core is the insistence on memory and recall, which we see not only in “di me vi rechi alcuna rimembranza [bring to you some memory of me]” (4) but also in the poet’s memory (“la mente”) that frequently turns him back (“mi volge”) in longing for his lady: “ché mi volge sovente / la mente per mirar vostra sembianza [for memory / now often makes me gaze back on your image]” (11–12). This turning back, with its innuendo of a spiralling curve inscribed within the linearity of the human journey, is very Dantean. Dante re-finds himself in the first verses of the Commedia: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai” (Inf. 1.1–2). Here the prefix ri- of “mi ritrovai” echoes the form of the spiral, a form made up of many small successive conversions none of which is absolute or final (finality is the jurisdiction not of the spiral, but of the circle). Turning nostalgically and orphically toward the past is a key Dantean trope.25

  In fact, the verb volge in “mi volge sovente / la mente” anticipates the great use of the same verb in Purgatorio 8, also in a context of voyage and absence: “Era già l’ora che volge il disio / ai navicanti [It was already the hour that turns the desire of seafarers]” (Purg. 8.1–2). And, while the internal rhyme of “mi volge sovente/la mente per mirar vostra sembianza” is a technical device that to Contini seems “partly Sicilian and partly Guittonian in taste” (p. 25), I would stress that it is far from an un-motivated formalism. The rimalmezzo between sovente and mente places the accent precisely on the central point of this composition: the mind that turns, the memory that is seized in the moment of its conversion to the past.

  7 (B XLIX; C 6; FB 9; DR 32)

  Lo meo servente core

  Love gave to you

  vi raccomando: Amor vi l’ha dato; e Mercé d’altro lato

  my loyal heart, which I entrust to you; let Kindness bring

  4

  di me vi rechi alcuna rimembranza; ché del vostro valore

  to you besides some memory of me, for well before

  avanti ch’io mi sia guari allungato, mi tien già confortato

  my journey takes me far from your great worth, a pleasant hope

  8

  di ritornar la mia dolce speranza. Dëo, quanto fi’ poca adimoranza secondo il mio parvente! ché mi volge sovente

  of soon returning here consoles my mind.

  Ah yes, how brief a sojourn this will be,

  it seems to me:

  for memory

  12

  la mente per mirar vostra s
embianza: per che ne lo meo gire e adimorando,

  now often makes me gaze back on your image.

  14

  gentil mia donna, a voi mi raccomando.

  My noble lady, while I dwell afar, it is to you that I commend myself.

  METRE: isolated canzone stanza of fourteen verses (nine hendecasyllables and five settenari), with rhyme scheme (a5) b(c5)DdE bDdE Eaa(a3)ECC. The fronte is eight verses, divided into two piedi of four verses each (4 + 4); the sirma is six verses. Internal rhyme (rimalmezzo), outmoded in taste like the choice of the opening settenario, is a notable feature of this canzone, and is indicated by the notations in parentheses. For example, “(a5)” indicates that an internal rhyme on –ente occurs at five syllables in the first line, which will be picked up in verses 10 and 11, as well as in an internal rhyme at three syllables in verse 12, indicated by the notation “(a3)”.

  8 O voi che per la via d’Amor passate

  First Redaction

  This sonetto rinterzato, judged by Barbi, precisely because a sonetto rinterzato, to be “one of Dante’s oldest poems” (36), was placed by Dante in chapter VII (2) of the Vita Nuova. Here it is printed not in the version of the Vita Nuova but in an earlier version written before that work, published by De Robertis in his edition of Dante’s lyrics. (See the Introduction to this volume for discussion of the thirteen Vita Nuova poems that exist in a first redaction.) It is a “lamentanza,” according to the definition of the libello, where we are told that the sonnet was written to lament the departure of a woman. In the convoluted context of the Vita Nuova, but not of the sonnet, Dante fakes passion for a woman in order to hide his own love for Beatrice: “E pensando che se de la sua partita io non parlasse alquanto dolorosamente, le persone sarebbero accorte più tosto de lo mio nascondere, propuosi di farne alcuna lamentanza in uno sonetto [And realizing that, if I didn’t speak about her departure somewhat despondently, people would soon catch on to my cover, I decided to lament it in a sonnet]” (VII.2 [2.13]).

  As Foster-Boyde note, there is nothing in the sonnet that connects it necessarily with the story of the Vita Nuova. Leaving aside what is recounted in the prose of the libello, O voi che per la via is a sonnet that laments a love first granted and then taken away. Stylistically and thematically, it is a conventional courtly sonnet – with the exception of the incipit, to which we will return. Underscoring the conventionally courtly nature of the poem is the label lamentanza, a technical term that indicates an Occitan poetic genre.

  The poet invites the followers of Love, “voi che per la via d’Amor passate [you who walk along the path of Love]” (1), to confirm that there is no suffering equal to his: the line “s’egli è dolor alcun quanto ’l mio grave [if there be any grief as deep as mine]” (3) echoes the tenzone on love’s suffering with Dante da Maiano, where “il dol maggio d’Amore” (the worst pain of love) (Per pruova di saper, 10) was under discussion. In the past Love had granted him the life longed for by every courtly lover, “mi puose in vita sì dolce soave [made my life so pleasant and so sweet]” (9), to the point that he had become an object of envy among people who could be heard saying: “Dio, per qual dignitate / questi così legiadro lo cor have? [Good Lord, what worthiness / confers upon this one so glad a heart?]” (11–12). The interrogative form already indicates the instability of this courtly paradise. The following line both brings us emphatically into the present – “Or [Now]” – and engineers a reversal in the poet’s state: “Or ho perduta tutta mia baldanza [Now I have lost my sense of confidence]” (13). From here we proceed to the conclusion: while once he was rich, the lover is now “povero” – poor – (“ond’io pover dimoro [so I find myself in penury]” [15]), so much that he is ashamed to reveal it, thus putting on an outer appearance of being happy while “dentro da lo cor mi struggo e ploro [deep inside my heart I grieve and weep]” (20).

  The lexicon of O voi che per la via is thick with Provençalisms; there are also some straightforward Sicilianisms (“have” for “ha [he has]” at line 12). The metrical form of a sonetto rinterzato is, as we noted in the commentary on Se Lippo amico, of Guittonian pedigree. The placement of this sonnet a short distance from the beginning of the Vita Nuova, and near to the only other sonetto rinterzato that we encounter in that text (Morte villana is in chapter VIII [3]), highlights the wish to trace in the libello a metapoetic trajectory that demonstrates how the young poet, having gone through courtly, Guittonian, and Cavalcantian phases, ended up discovering – with the help of the Guinizzellian poetic – his new style. As I wrote in Dante’s Poets: “As first the Vita Nuova depicts the transition from Dante’s early Guittonianism to his Cavalcantian stage, it then depicts the transition from his Cavalcantianism to the moment when, in Donne ch’avete, he finds his own voice.”26 Dante uses the structure of the Vita Nuova to put the label “old style” on this sonnet.

  Even though it is used by Dante in the Vita Nuova to attest to an outmoded stage, O voi che per la via nevertheless advances, as nearly always occurs in Dante’s lyrics, various innovative ideas. We have already seen how Dante imagines a paradise of love – a “vita sì dolce soave [life so pleasant and so sweet]” (9) – whose strictly courtly nature is indicated, for example, by the cor leggiadro possessed by the lover before love is taken from him: “Dio, per qual dignitate / questi così legiadro lo cor have? [Good Lord, what worthiness / confers upon this one so glad a heart?]” (11–12). Here we find likely Dante’s first use of the important lexeme leggiadr-, attested in the lyrics by both the noun leggiadria and the adjective leggiadro.27

  Leggiadria, from the Provençal leujairia, is the courtly virtue of grace, or charm, somewhat akin to Castiglione’s later sprezzatura, which also prizes lightness over ponderous execution. To leggiadria Dante will dedicate the canzone Poscia ch’Amor, in which he weds courtly virtues with ethical and moral virtues, thereby preserving courtly values that would otherwise be displaced.28 Later, the ambivalent ideology of Poscia ch’Amor will give way to the ideology of the canzone Doglia mi reca, in which courtly values are swept away by moral virtues. But, in the long run, Poscia ch’Amor, suspended between cortesia and ethics, fascinatingly anticipates Paradiso, where courtly values, transformed and reinvigorated, will be reprised.

  One testament to the reprising of courtly values in Paradiso is the word leggiadria, used only once in the entire Commedia, to describe the archangel Gabriel: “Baldezza e leggiadria/quant’ esser puote in angelo e in alma,/tutta è in lui [All confidence and grace, as much as there can be in angel or in soul, is in him]” (Par. 32.109–11).29 The trajectory of the word leggiadria, beginning in the courtly paradise of the lyrics and reaching a quite other paradise, goes back to this humble sonetto rinterzato, in which we find the same proximity of the word leggiadro with the word baldanza that in Paradiso has mutated into “Baldezza e leggiadria”: “Dio, per qual dignitate / questi così legiadro lo cor have?/Or ho perduta tutta mia baldanza [Good Lord, what worthiness / confers upon this one so glad a heart?/Now I have lost my sense of confidence]” (11–13).

  Here, however, we are in an explicitly, unequivocally, and restrictedly courtly setting. But perhaps things are not so simple, even in this simple sonnet. In fact the courtly paradise of O voi che per la via is contaminated by a different value system, immediately in its first verse: the incipit is a poetic paraphrase of the Book of Lamentations by the prophet Jeremiah. The biblical text – “O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus” (Lam. 1:12) – is translated by Dante: “O voi che per la via d’Amor passate,/attendete e guardate / s’egli è dolor alcun quanto ’l mio grave [O you who walk along the path of Love,/behold and see / if there be any grief as deep as mine]” (1–3). The opening of Lamentations will be used later by Dante in the prose of the Vita Nuova to announce the death of Beatrice (VN XXVIII [19]), and Lam. 1:12 will be cited again by a sinner in the thirtieth canto of the Inferno: “guardate e attendete / a la miseria del maestro Adamo [look at and regard the misery of Master Adam]”
(Inf. 30.60–1).

  The history traced by the verses from Lamentations, a biblical text to which Dante was clearly attached, thus stretches from Dante’s prehistory – from the version of O voi che per la via that existed before the Vita Nuova – through the Vita Nuova, where it appears both in the poetry and in the prose, to the Inferno. From this history we learn not only something about the tenacity of Dante’s memory, but above all that Dante was capable of using biblical texts in one of his poetic texts very early on, even before the overt theologizing accomplished by the Vita Nuova. The young poet who adds “d’Amor” to the Italian translation of the biblical “O vos omnes qui transitis per viam,” thus attaining the remarkable “O voi che per la via d’Amor passate,” is already interested in combining various registers and ideologies, in this case the courtly with the biblical.

  In the prose of the Vita Nuova a slightly more mature Dante emphasizes precisely this combinatory move when he cites Jeramiah’s text as source: “ne la prima intendo chiamare li fedeli d’Amore per quelle parole di Geremia profeta che dicono: ‘O vos omnes qui transitis per viam …’ [in the first I mean to call on Love’s faithful, with those words of the prophet Jeremiah: ‘O vos omnes qui transitis per viam …’]” (VII.7 [2.18]). The presence in the prose of the original verse from Jeremiah serves to draw the reader’s attention to the aspect of the sonnet that the poet considers most important and innovative, and that best suits the new theologizing context. O voi che per la via contaminates biblical-theological textuality with secular-courtly textuality and thereby contains in seed a practice – the radical fusion of various textual elements without qualms about respecting the usual rhetorical boundaries – whose systematic exploration will be a distinctive stamp of the Commedia.