But the note is new also in Italian poetry: nothing quite comparable can be found in any of the love poetry preceding Dante. It is true that Cavalcanti had written three love poems of pure praise, and Guinizelli at least two;9 moreover, one of these latter (“Io voglio del ver …”) offers in the tercets a picture of the moral effects on others of the lady’s perfection. In fact, the last lines of this sonnet evoke the same situation as that of the central stanza of Dante’s first canzone: Guinizelli, too, presents the lady as she passes before others:
Passa per via adorna, e sì gentile
ch’abassa orgoglio a cui dona salute,
e fa ’l de nostra fé se non la crede;
e nolle pò apressare om che sia vile;
ancor ve dirò c’ha maggior vertute:
null’ om pò mal pensar fin che la vede.
(With decorum and such grace she passes by,
and her gift of salutation makes pride bow,
converting non-believers to our faith;
no evil man can come within her bounds;
there is more to tell; even greater powers has she:
no man can have a base thought in her presence.)
But one detail at least is lacking that was found in Dante’s poem, in which Beatrice’s efficacy is presented as not only regenerative but punitive: “E qual soffrisse di starla a vedere/ diverria nobil cosa, o si morria” This suggests, somehow, the Beatrice of Fur gat or y XXX, come to judge her lover.
And surely there is nothing in earlier literature to compare with the second stanza: the scene in Heaven when the radiance emanating from Beatrice is perceived, and the miracle of her nature recognized by all the coelestes—so different from the heavenly scene of recantation that closes Guinizelli’s canzone which Dante admired so much: “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore.” Finally, in stanza IV is proclaimed Love’s recognition of the Divine plan for Beatrice: “… e fra se stesso giura/che Dio ne ’ntenda di far cosa nuova.” It was of course a topos in medieval love poetry to claim that the lady was created directly by God, from the beginning unique and miraculous, but the “cosa nuova” intended by God in these lines is something still in store for Beatrice. She will become more.
In Chapter XXI Dante writes again in praise of his lady-more briefly, more simply, limiting himself to the sonnet form: “Ne li occhi porta la mia donna Amore.” In fact, this sonnet is a reworking of the central stanza (also of fourteen lines) of the first canzone: again Beatrice is seen passing before the people who gaze upon her with awe. This is also the theme of the next two poems of praise, both found in Chapter XXVI. The first is Dante’s most famous sonnet, and one of the most famous in world literature:
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare
la donna mia quand’ella altrui saluta,
ch’ogne lingua deven tremando muta,
e li occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare.
Ella si va, sentendosi laudare,
benignamente d’umilità vestuta;
e par che sia una cosa venuta
dal cielo in terra a mìracol mostrare.
Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira,
che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core,
che ’ntender no la può chi no la prova:
e par che de la sua labbia si mova
un spirito soave pien d’amore,
che va dicendo a l’anima: “Sospira!”
(Such sweet decorum and such gentle grace
attend my lady’s greeting as she moves
that lips can only tremble into silence,
and eyes dare not attempt to gaze at her.
Moving, benignly clothed in humility,
untouched by all the praise along her way,
she seems to be a creature come from Heaven
to earth to manifest a miracle.
Miraculously gracious to behold,
her sweetness reaches, through the eyes, the heart
(who has not felt this cannot understand),
and from her lips it seems there moves a gracious
spirit, so deeply loving that it glides
into the souls of men, whispering: “Sigh!”)
The first quatrain describes a single, crystalized moment (which we must imagine forever repeated), the moment of Beatrice’s greeting, with its immediate electrical effect upon the individual so honored; the second quatrain is all fluidity as the lady, having come from afar, moves ahead in space and time, to the rhythm of ella si va; the apparent break with the tercets is effaced by the fusion of mostrare and Mostrasi. There is a flow of sweetness, that can only be distilled in a “sigh.”—In the second sonnet (“Vede perfettamente onne salute”) the lady is seen not alone but attended by other ladies who, somehow, seem to partake of her perfection: “… ciascuna per lei receve onore.”
In Chapter XXVII we are told that the protagonist, after re-reading the last two sonnets, decides to change his theme, his reason being that he had failed to include in them any reference to himself. And so, finding these poems defective (“pare-ami defettivamente avere parlato”), he begins to write a canzone about the effect of Beatrice upon him. But in Chapter XVIII he had decided that from then on he would choose material for his poems that would be only in praise of his lady (“propuosi di prendere per matera de lo mio parlare sempre mai quello che fosse loda di questa gentilissima”). How can this reversal of position be explained? Perhaps he believed that with the practice gained by writing four poems of selfless adoration he could take up once again a more personal theme without fear of giving way to self-infatuation; that he could describe the effects of his lady’s virtues upon him with the same objectivity he had displayed in describing the reactions of others to his lady’s beauty. Moreover, he indirectly promises his reader that he will have something new to say about his feelings (“quello che al presente tempo adoperava in me”); and indeed, the calm, opening lines of the canzone he was never to finish do suggest a new stage in his feelings:
Sì lungiamente w’ha tenuto Amore
e costumato a la sua segnoria,
che sì com’elli m’era forte in pria,
così mi sta soave ora nel core.
(So long a time has Love kept me a slave
and in his lordship fully seasoned me,
that even though at first I felt him harsh
now tender is his power in my heart.)
At least we are led to expect a poem of happiness and poise. But, in the lines that follow, it becomes evident that the sweetness of which he speaks (“soave … nel core”) is still a sickly sweetness. The first detail offered is the loss of his strength: he speaks of his fainting soul and of the pallor of his face, and twice the disequilibrium of his spiriti is mentioned. But not only does he offer a morbid description of his condition: the picture of the spiriti of sight that are dispossessed by Love has been offered three times before (in the prose of Chapter XI, in the prose and in the poem of Chapter XIV). This repetition gives the impression that he is moved by some mechanical force, and this suggestion of the mechanical is strengthened by the penultimate line with its insistence on the inevitability of this destructive process: “Questo m’avvene ovunque ella mi vede….” And with this fourteen-line stanza ends the poem (interrupted by the death of Beatrice) that was to have been a canzone because, as the protagonist had confidently declared, the short form of the sonnet would not have sufficed to describe the “new” state of his feelings. There is, perhaps, poetic justice in the fact that his abortive attempt to describe his supposed new happiness should take the form of an abortive poem.
It is theoretically possible that, if conditions had allowed the protagonist to finish his unfinished canzone, the total effect would have been quite different from that made by the opening stanza. Perhaps he would have picked up the note of the last line referring to his lady’s “humility” (“… e si e cosa umil, che nol si crede”) in order, finally, to subordinate his own emotional experience to her excellence. But this is not very likely, in the light of the words with whi
ch he describes his own judgment of the two preceding sonnets: “seeing … that I had not mentioned anything about the effect she had on me at the present time, I realized that I had spoken insufficiently (‘defettivamente’).” Not only does he decide to write a poem about himself: he reads over two poems in praise of his lady, including the exquisite sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare,” and judges them to be defective on the grounds that they contain no mention of himself! And to remedy the situation he decides that, if he would describe his condition adequately, he should write not a sonnet but a poem as lengthy as his first poem of praise, “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.” He was able to allow for the overshadowing of his sonnets of praise by a monument to his own feelings. And, in judging defective the sonnets of Chapter XXVI, it is almost as if he were ready to cancel out the last two poems of praise, thus reducing the total achievement of his new program to two poems (the first canzone and the sonnet in Chapter XXI). For our protagonist will never write another poem of praise (that is, one devoted solely to this theme).
The critics, as we know, have considered the protagonist’s decision to limit his love poems to praise of the lady as the turning point of the action of the Vita nuova, the turning point of his spiritual development as a lover. According to some (e.g. Singleton) the lover goes beyond the stage reached in the first canzone; according to others (e.g. De Robertis) there is no higher stage than this reached in the course of the Vita nuova. I know of no critic who speaks of the breakdown of his program of praise. But there was a breakdown!
It may well be that the unfinished canzone which Dante places immediately after the last poem of praise was actually among the earliest poems of his youthful period. But this would not diminish in the least our right to interpret these lines according to their position in the text. For, whenever it was written and whatever may have been its inspiration, the only fact of importance for the reader of the Vita nuova, as I stated in the Preface, is that its author has chosen to place it where he did.10
After Chapter XXVIII, in which Beatrice’s death is announced, it would be impossible to find poems of praise in the conventional sense, but we might have expected that the shock of her death would have inspired in the lover a new kind of praise concerned only with her heavenly attributes (a suggestion of this was already present in the first canzone)11 But instead of a rekindling of his inspiration, there is a calamitous collapse into his early mood of emotional self-indulgence. The four poems that open the period of his life after Beatrice’s death are characterized by the most arrant self-pity: there are five references to sighs, thirteen to tears, and twenty-four to anguish, and there are numerous similar references in the prose that precedes them. The time has come to scrutinize more carefully the poetry of praise contained in the Vita nuova, and also to examine, for the first time in detail, the circumstances responsible for the protagonist’s adoption of his new program.
As for the events leading up to the adoption of this new program of praise, it is in Chapter XVII, as we know, that the lover decides to abandon the theme of morbid self-analysis. But he also announces, anticipating what he will tell us in the following chapter, that he has found the new theme; and the account of his finding it, he promises, will be pleasant to listen to.
The narrative of Chapter XVIII opens with a background of ladies gathered together enjoying each other’s company (with “dilettandosi l’una ne la compagnia de l’altra” we are reminded of the many social scenes in the Decameron). These are ladies who happen to be well aware of the protagonist’s love and of its disastrous effects on him; as he happens to pass by, one of them hails him. The background of ladies forms a tryptic: some laughing together, some watching him, and some talking together. It is one of these who abruptly asks the lover a question: “To what end do you love this lady of yours, if you cannot resist the sight of her?” She insists on an answer (since the goal of such a love must be strange indeed). With this, the three groups of ladies become one, as all wait for the answer. He replies: “Ladies, the end and aim of my love formerly lay in the greeting of this lady, to whom you are perhaps referring, and in this greeting dwelt the bliss which was the end of all my desires. But since it pleased her to deny it to me, my lord, Love, through his grace, has placed all my bliss in something that cannot fail me.” The first response to his sanctimonious remark is a flow of words and sighs from the ladies, which reminds him of the fall of rain mingled with beautiful flakes of snow (and inspires the only complete simile in the Vita nuova; see note 6). But one of the ladies, the one who had first hailed him, is not impressed by his verbosity nor is she put off by his evasiveness. She asks him point-blank in what his bliss now consists. He answers, as briefly: “In those words that praise my lady.” She retorts: “If you are telling us the truth, then those words you wrote her about your feelings must have been composed with other intentions.” And as he leaves the group, he is ashamed and filled with astonishment that he had written as he had.12 It is then that for the first time he decides to choose praise of his lady as his theme—after hearing himself announce that as his program, forced into this announcement by the insistent prodding of the lady. So, this lady whose only purpose has been to taunt him becomes, in spite of herself, the Muse of his new poetry, a Muse, to be sure, quite different from the usual one, who guides the poetic flight of the poet already possessed of his theme. Here his Muse forces him to find a theme.13
But he will not start writing immediately, lacking the boldness to undertake a theme too lofty for his talents, and the chapter ends with his conflicting emotions, his desire to compose and his hesitancy to begin the task. He has still not begun when the next chapter opens. Thinking first in terms of the correct poetic procedure, he decides that his unborn poem can only be addressed to refined ladies. This decided upon, his tongue, he tells us, suddenly moved as if of its own accord and spoke the words “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.” Recognizing that this must be the opening line of his poem, he joyfully stored it away in his memory and, after some days of reflection, began to write.
Most critics of the Vita nuova speak of the spontaneity of the composition of Dante’s magnificent first canzone, characteristic of the so-called dolce stil novo.14 But, in the first place, it owes much to pure chance: it is the result of a coincidental meeting (the protagonist himself stresses the fact that he was directed to the ladies as if guided by fortune), and of being pushed into a verbal corner.15 It is also the result of a struggle, the struggle to make good the words forced out of him by an acidulous young lady (one cannot fail to note the untranscen-dental nature of his Muse). And when his tongue is finally inspired to speak, it speaks in terms only of the audience he has chosen: “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.” (In a somewhat similar way he chose the audience for whom he would write his first sonnet, this time an audience composed of fellow-poets.) It is only later, after much reflection, that the real substance of his poem came to him. Given the reluctant nature of his inspiration, it is not surprising that he found this inspiration difficult to sustain for long.
It was said earlier that in the first canzone a new note had been sounded, not only in the poetry of the Vita nuova but in Italian poetry. But in the three poems of praise that follow, the “new note” is muted: the sternness of Beatrice’s demeanor in the middle stanza of the first canzone, that seemed to point ahead to the Beatrice of Purgatory, has dissolved.16 Not only do the sonnets offer a more sentimentalized version of the central stanza of the first canzone, there is also suggested, in spite of their high poetic quality, taken singly, a certain staleness of imagination. The poet-lover cannot conceive a new situation in which to present Beatrice: three more times he must show her passing before the people, and the purifying effect of her beauty, of her glance.17
And what he is repeating, of course, is a concept that he has borrowed from Guinizelli (“Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare”), who himself, to the best of my knowledge, had borrowed it from no one. At least I know of no love poem in I
talian literature before Guinizelli, or in Provençal love poetry, where we find such a blend of sensuous and spiritual beauty in the portrait of a lady, together with an account of the galvanizing effect of her qualities—and this against the delicately suggested background of the society in which the lady lives and which she transforms.18 Guinizelli (see note 8) concentrated his invention in the tercets of his sonnet; the quatrains are very different. Metaphor is piled on metaphor as the lady is compared to what she is not: from the sweet-smelling rose and lily to the radiant morning star to the bright colors of nature and of art—all suggesting sensuous beauty. Then, after a transitional line with an intimation of the spiritual (line 8), appears the lady herself, the purity of her beauty in the tercets enhanced by the sensuous background of the quatrains. So, Guinizelli invented the theme “the lady passes,” presented it as the climax of a sonnet, and never returned to it again. Dante borrowed it, magnified it to the full length of a sonnet, and used it four times to praise his lady. In one case, it is true (the central stanza of the first canzone), his adaptation had a power and a sublimity beyond that of its model, but in this one case we have not the climax of an upward movement but a brilliant beginning which is itself the end: there was no further development from this canzone in the Vita nuova. But how could there be one in this little book? That was to be for another, greater book.
In fact, the first canzone is immediately followed by a poem whose theme bears no direct relationship to the main action of the story. It is a generic treatment of the origin of love in the human heart: “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa.” In the first quatrain the identity of love and the gentle heart is proclaimed and insisted upon; the second speaks of their common origin (both created by Nature in an amorous mood) and of the function served by the heart to provide a home in which love may sleep. The tercets describe the three stages preparatory to the awakening of love in the man’s heart, the last line attributing the same process to feminine psychology. This line (“E simil face in donna omo valente.”) is sheer bathos. And the sonnet as a whole, completely lacking in lyrical inspiration, is weakly imitative: the quatrains are clearly reminiscent of Guinizelli; the tercets could be from any poet from Giacomo da Lentino on—except, perhaps, for the final line.
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