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

by Dante Alighieri

  Carducci accurately noted “the ease of versification; the building up of the verses, one upon the other; the placing of the caesura, especially in line 11; and the bold and forthright movement of the argument from the first to the second tercet” (Barbi-Maggini, p. 188). Striking also is the enjambment between lines 3 and 4, which strongly highlights the name of “la Garisenda / torre,” and creates the bold rhyme emenda / Garisenda / prenda / intenda.

  This set of rhymes provides the key to my discussion of No me poriano. It is important to say explicitly what this lyric is not, and where we would not expect to find it: it is not stilnovist, and we would not expect to find it in the Vita Nuova. It is not stilnovist because of its specificity, its historicity – in other words because of words like the proper name “Garisenda.” Dante’s stil novo is achieved by means of a process of elimination, of purification: the lexicon used by Dante in stil novo poems is more restricted than his earlier lexicon, although the poet is more mature. Even the Vita Nuova’s prose, more detailed and historicized than the poetry, doesn’t ever name, for example, the city of Florence that functions as the background of the action.

  It is in this stylistic context that we can better appreciate the profound significance of the anecdote about “la Garisenda / torre” that is recounted in this sonnet: the anecdote plunges us into the world of history and lived experience (it does not matter that the particular moment of history is not verified or verifiable), and transports us into the life of the city in all its specific and irreducible detail – the life that was going on in the towers of the magnate families of Bologna. The poet who employs the anecdote about the Garisenda is using a lens for observing the real, not dissimilar to the lens he will one day use to make visible that world full of details, proper names, anecdotes, history, and local life that is the Commedia.

  In Inferno 31 the word “Carisenda” rhymes with “prenda,” present in our sonnet, and with “penda,” not in the sonnet. The three words that rhyme with “Garisenda” in No me poriano (emenda or ammenda / prenda / intenda) are encountered, again rhyming with each other, in Inferno 27, in the passage in which Guido da Montefeltro curses Boniface VIII with the phrase “a cui mal prenda! [to whom may ill befall!]” (Inf. 27.70):

  Io fui uom d’arme, e poi fui cordigliero,

  credendomi, sì cinto, fare ammenda;

  e certo il creder mio venìa intero,

  se non fosse il gran prete, a cui mal prenda!,

  che mi rimise ne le prime colpe;

  e come e quare, voglio che m’intenda. (Inf. 27.67–-72)

  [I was a warrior, and then a friar, thinking, corded so, to make amends. And surely my belief would have been fulfilled but for the great priest – to whom may ill befall! – who drew me back to my old ways. And I would like to tell you how and why.]

  Guido’s imprecation copies the phrase that is found in No me poriano, where the offence of his eyes leads the poet to curse: “ma· lor prenda!”//“mal lor prenda” (5). The word “emenda,” in the Tuscan form “ammenda,” will have a notable history in the Commedia: occurring five times, it appears a full four times in rhyme, first in the canto of Guido da Montefelto cited above and then three times in Purgatorio 20, where it is one of the very few words (along with “Cristo” and “vidi”) that is used in rhyme with itself (see the scathing sarcasm of the thrice repeated “per ammenda [for amends]” in Purg. 20.65–9). The lexicon of No me poriano assumes therefore a certain weight in Dante’s memory.

  In addition it is important to note in No me poriano the traces of Dante’s combinatorial art, an art of continual and irrepressible experimentation. In this instance he mixes highly divergent stylistic elements. Specifically, if in the octave we find the historicist and not at all stilnovist elements that we just talked about, the tercets bring us back to the stil novo, thanks to the locution “li mei spirti”//“li miei spirti [my spirits]” (12), and conclude the reprimand of the eyes with the Cavalcantian “scanosenti”//“scanoscenti [lacking in canoscenza, knowledge]” (14). Such contaminatio is typical of Dante: there are poets who use the forms of the stil novo and poets who write in a reality-based and anecdotal vein, but there are few poets indeed who combine these registers in the same text.

  16 (B LI; C 8; FB 14; DR 42)

  Two Redactions

  Redaction 1: Emilian (De Robertis)

  No me poriano zamai far emenda de lor gran fallo gl’ocli mei, set elli non s’acecaser, poi la Garisenda

  No, never could they hope to make amends for their mistake, these eyes of mine, except by going blind, for they beheld the tower

  4

  torre miraro cum li sguardi belli, e non conover quella, ma· lor prenda!, ch’è la maçor dela qual se favelli: per zo zascun de lor voi che m’intenda

  of Garisenda with its lovely view and failed to see the one (they’ll pay for this!) who ranks supreme among those talked about: so both of them have got to understand

  8

  che zamai pace no i farò, sonelli

  that I will never grant them amnesty.

  poi tanto furo, che zo che sentire dovean a raxon senza veduta,

  Such was their fault that what they should have seen without a look they failed to recognize

  11

  non conover vedendo, unde dolenti sun li mei spirti per lo lor falire; e dico ben, se ’l voler no me muta,

  while seeing it; and so their oversight has left my spirits in state of grief, and I do swear, unless I change my mind,

  14

  ch’eo stesso gl’ocidrò quî scanosenti.

  I’ll kill them both myself, these imbeciles.

  Redaction 2: Tuscan (Contini)

  Non mi poriano già mai fare ammenda del lor gran fallo gli occhi miei, sed elli non s’accecasser, poi la Garisenda

  4

  torre miraro co’ risguardi belli, e non conobber quella (mal lor prenda) ch’è la maggior de la qual si favelli: però ciascun di lor voi’ che m’intenda

  8

  che già mai pace non farò con elli;

  poi tanto furo, che ciò che sentire doveano a ragion senza veduta,

  11

  non conobber vedendo; onde dolenti son li miei spirti per lo lor fallire, e dico ben, se ’l voler non mi muta,

  14

  ch’eo stesso li uccidrò, que’ scanoscenti.

  METRE: sonnet ABAB ABAB CDE CDE.

  17 Sonar bracchetti e cacciatori aizzare

  To understand Sonar bracchetti e cacciatori aizzare it is necessary to consider two other texts. I begin with the sonnet E di febbraio vi dono bella caccia from the sonnet cycle on the courtly pastimes enjoyed during each of the months of the year, written by Folgore da San Gimignano, Dante’s contemporary (ca. 1270–ca. 1332). In E di febbraio, his sonnet on February, Folgore writes about the chivalrous pleasures of the hunt:

  E di febbraio vi dono bella caccia

  di cerbi, cavriuoli e di cinghiari,

  corte gonnelle con grossi calzari,

  e compagnia che vi diletti e piaccia;

  can da guinzagli e segugi da traccia.

  (E di febbraio, 1–5)

  [In February I provide you with fine hunting

  of deer, wild goats, and boars,

  short trousers with boots thigh high,

  and companionship that thrills and pleases you;

  both greyhounds and bloodhounds.]

  In the same way that Folgore’s first quatrain culminates with the line “and companionship that thrills and pleases” (4), so too, for Dante, the importance of the lively scene that he describes in the first quatrain of Sonar bracchetti is in the delight that it produces: “assai credo che deggia dilettare [must surely be a source of great delight]” (5). On the other hand, in Dante’s poem there is not the emphasis on the “compagnia” (E di febbraio, 4), what Folgore will elsewhere call the “brigata” or group of male comrades.39 While Folgore’s sonnet focuses only and always on the life of the brigata (even after the shift, noted by Picone in his commentary, from the out
door hunting scene to the indoor evening parties), Dante’s sonnet accomplishes a further shift, from the external life of the hunt to the interior life of the self.

  The inner life of the poet brings us to love, and so to the second textual reference. Notable in Sonar bracchetti is the opening stylistic move: the accumulation, one after another, of infinitive phrases that function as subjects, as in the octave of Biltà di donna e di saccente core by Cavalcanti. This octave lends its first four rhyme-words to Sonar bracchetti (core, genti, amore, correnti):

  Biltà di donna e di saccente core

  e cavalieri armati che sien genti;

  cantar d’augelli e ragionar d’amore;

  adorni legni ’n mar forte correnti;

  aria serena quand’apar l’albore

  e bianca neve scender senza venti;

  rivera d’acqua e prato d’ogni fiore;

  oro, argento, azzuro ’n ornamenti.

  (Biltà di donna e di saccente core, 1–8)

  [A woman’s beauty and her knowing heart

  and knights in armor who are courteous;

  singing of birds and talk of love;

  and ships equipped to sail rough seas;

  gentle breezes at the hour of dawn

  and white snow falling with no wind;

  riverbank and meadow full of every flower;

  silver, gold, and sapphire set in ornaments.]

  In this sonnet Cavalcanti lists that which is notably beautiful and “pleasurable” (the form derives from the Provençal genre plazer, from the verb “to please”) to arrive at the declaration that the beauty and “valore [worth]” of his lady surpass every possible term of comparison.

  Therefore, with the sonnet Sonar bracchetti Dante enters unequivocably into the field of Cavalcanti’s influence. What is more, in the opening of Sonar bracchetti Dante combines a poetic register of heightened but recognizable reality – a description of a hunt – with the very different poetic register of the amorous idyll of Cavalcanti. The result is a new and original hybrid: Cavalcantian love-plazer + Folgorian delight of the hunt = Dantean hybrid, in which conventions are mixed that usually, in the hands of these poets, do not coexist. The expression of the self via the lover’s thought that speaks in direct discourse, for example, is a stil novo technique that typically does not coexist with hunting scenes. The rhetorical hybridity of Sonar bracchetti is deeply functional: as we shall see, it serves to reinforce the dichotomy between male and female that is the ideological fulcrum of this poem and that constitutes its most remarkable characteristic.

  Sonar bracchetti offers a crystal-clear vision of a world that is polarized and dichotomized by gender: indeed, female and male serve here as poles around which two totally different ideologies crystallize. The sonnet takes off with a vigorous verbal explosion of enormous vitality, presenting the male world of action through a series of seven infinitives that evoke the hunt as a flurry of activity: “Sonar bracchetti e cacciatori aizzare,/lepri levare ed isgridar le genti,/e di guinzagli uscir veltri correnti,/per belle piagge volger e ’mboccare [The beagles’ belling and the hunters’ cries,/the hares flushed out, the cheering of the crowd,/the greyhounds loosed from leashes, dashing by,/careening through the fields in search of prey]” (1–4). All that, says the poet, ought to delight a heart that is free from thoughts of love: “assai credo che deggia dilettare / libero core e van d’intendimenti [must surely be a source of great delight / to any heart not bound by love’s demands]” (5–6).

  The logic of Sonar bracchetti establishes a precise dichotomy: love and its lexicon (“core,” “intendimenti”) represent the opposite of the hunt, and the hunt and the world it represents can delight only someone free from love. In this way the poet contrasts love with the male world of action that he depicts in the opening lines: love is what might transform someone who is free of love’s demands (“van d’intendimenti” [6]) into an individual who is not free and who is burdened with love – into someone therefore incapable of enjoying the baying hounds, leaping hares, and so forth. Love is on one side, with the lady; freedom, the world out of doors, the hunt, the active verbs, and maleness are on the other.40 Boccaccio, perhaps influenced by Dante’s sonnet, used this same formula to conjure maleness in the Proem to the Decameron, where a string of infinitives that features many outdoor activities (including cacciare and variants thereon) indicate the freedom of being a man, someone who can “andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare [go about, see and hear many things, go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding and gambling, or attend to their business affairs].”41

  Our male poet, however, is unable to enjoy his birthright. Using the sonnet’s formal dichotomy as a template for presenting ideological dichotomy, the poem swerves toward the end of the octave (verse 7) to engage a different reality. His inner life enters the scene in the form of a thought that derides him: “Ed io, fra gli amorosi pensamenti,/d’uno sono schernito in tale affare,/e dicemi esto motto per usanza [But in my thoughts of love I find myself / put down and mocked by one of them;/and as it’s done before, it jokes and says]” (7–9). And what exactly does his mocking thought say? It reprimands him severely for abandoning the courtly world of women and love for the “selvaggia dilettanza” of the hunt (“selvaggia dilettanza” is literally “rustic pleasure”; in “selvaggia” we catch overtones of both sylvan and savage). As a result of love, he is now fearful, ashamed, and emotionally and spiritually weighed down, quite the opposite of “libero.” Utilizing a keyword from the code of courtly love – leggiadria (elegance and gracefulness both inner and outer: the courtly virtue to which Dante will dedicate the canzone Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato) – the thought sarcastically points out that leggiadria is a virtue that Dante does not possess, given that he can think of abandoning the ladies for such a pastime: “Or ecco leggiadria di gentil core / per una sì selvaggia dilettanza / lasciar le donne e lor gaia sembianza! [Now here’s refinement in a gentleman,/deserting ladies and their gaiety / for such a rough-and-tumble sport as this]” (10–12).

  The world of ladies and love is therefore represented as opposing the world of men and male pastimes, by means of a programmatically dichotomized rhetoric. The second part of Sonar bracchetti – we could say its “female” part – is as full of static nouns and adjectives as the first – “male” – part is crowded with dynamic verbs. The transition from the male to the female domains of the poem is typified by the transition from “dilettare” (verb) to “selvaggia dilettanza” (abstract noun). While the lexicon of the first part is realistic, specific, and concrete, that of the second part is generic, abstract, codified, and courtly: the nouns, for example, pass from bracchetti, cacciatori, lepri, genti, guinzagli, veltri, piagge (beagles, hunters, hares, people, leashes, greyhounds, hillsides) to core, intendimenti, pensamenti, affare, motto, usanza, leggiadria, dilettanza, donne, sembianza, Amore, vergogna, pesanza (heart, amorous understandings, thoughts, event, expression, habit, gracefulness, delight, ladies, appearance, Love, shame, heaviness). While the male world is constructed of tumultuous and dynamic verbs (sonare, aizzare, levare, isgridare, uscire, volgere, imboccare) and of concrete nouns drawn from daily life and the world as we know it (even if we don’t all go hunting, we all know about dogs, rabbits, and yelling onlookers), the female world is instead constructed with a generic and highly stylized lexicon associated with the system of values we label “courtly love.”

  In Sonar bracchetti these two worlds stand opposed: what works in one does not work in the other. The poet therefore stands accused (actually self-accused, by the part of himself associated with love) for his lack of courtly values, for an ideological deficit – for not having enough of the necessary “leggiadria di gentil core.” The sign of his deficiency is that he might accept abandoning the world of women for the male world of the hunt, and the sonnet asks him the following pointed question in this regard: how can he, even for a moment, even only in his thoughts, associate with those who
“per una sì selvaggia dilettanza” could “lasciar le donne e lor gaia sembianza”?

  From the ideological point of view, Sonar bracchetti functions both as an ideological correction and as a clue that the “I” of this sonnet experiences his commitment to courtly values with an ambivalence strong enough to require that correction. The sonnet indicates that the poet-lover feels the need to record his internal conflict by means of the two worlds depicted here, and that he feels the need to correct himself in a somewhat aggressive manner through the self-rebuke administered by his thought. It is worth noting that Sonar bracchetti is not the only sonnet in which Dante dramatizes such ambivalence. Volgete gli occhi a veder chi mi tira opens with an existential drama in which the poet must choose between his friends and love: on the one side are the male friends with whom the poet had intended to go and to whom he addresses himself directly in the incipit, excusing his negligence toward them with the exhortation to look and to see who it is that drags him off in the other direction; on the other side is Love who imperiously “pulls” him. And there is a probing voice that asks him the question with which Volgete gli occhi closes: “Dunque, vuo’ tu per neente / agli occhi tuoi sì bella donna tôrre? [Would you, for nothing in return,/remove so fair a lady from your eyes?]” (13–14). The question confirms that the only valid choice for the poet-lover is to adore madonna; every other activity is annulled, defined as literally “nothing” (“neente”).