Dante's Lyric Poetry

by Dante Alighieri

  In A ciascun’alma Dante addresses himself to all captive souls and noble hearts to ask for the deciphering of a “vision.” (Later he will write only to noble women, as in Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore or in Li occhi dolenti: “donne gentili, volentier con vui,/non voi parlare altrui,/se non a cor gentil che in donna sia [my gentle ladies, willingly with you / I choose to speak to none / except a lady with a gentle heart]” (Li occhi dolenti, 9–11). The word “visione” is used in the prose of Vita Nuova III (1), the chapter in which A ciascun’alma is placed as the first poetic composition of the libello: “E pensando di lei, mi sopragiunse uno soave sonno, ne lo quale m’apparve una maravigliosa visione [And thinking about her, a sweet sleep came over me, in which appeared a tremendous vision]” (III.3 [1.14]). The word visione is not present in A ciascun’alma (while it is in Dante da Maiano’s riddle sonnet, Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone); this kind of divergence between poem and prose, by which the prose enriches and transforms the poem, is programmatic in the Vita Nuova.

  As we are now dealing for the first time with a text inserted by Dante into the Vita Nuova, the moment has come to emphasize the reflexiveness that is at the origin of the libello: a text forged in the reflexive act of returning (between 1292 and 1294 circa) to poems composed quite a while earlier, from early Guittonian efforts to more recent ones of rigorous stilnovist purity, and of choosing some among them to set into the new prose setting. The chosen lyrics undergo not only a passive revision during the selection process, but an active revision as well, thanks to the prose narrative, which moves the poems in a new direction consonant with the ideology of the new life of the poet. The resulting modifications of original intention produce narrative reversals: for example, poems written for other women in other contexts are now presented as written for Beatrice. Thus in this commentary I will refer to “Beatrice” only when she is explicitly named; otherwise, if she is named “Beatrice” in the prose but not in the poetry, I will limit myself to “madonna” (my lady).

  Madonna is precisely the word used in the vision described in A ciascun’alma: it involves an apparition of Love who, joyful, holds in his hand the poet’s heart and in his arms “madonna involta in un drappo dormendo [my Lady wrapped within a cloth, asleep]” (11). Love then wakes the lady and gives her the heart to eat – “Poi la svegliava, e d’esto core ardendo / lei paventosa umilmente pascea [He woke her then, and she, beset by fear,/began to humbly eat my burning heart]” (12–13) – after which Love leaves, in tears (“piangendo” [14]).

  The verb pascere is rare in Dante’s lyrics: we find it only in the sonnet A ciascun’alma and then in the sestina Al poco giorno (“tutto ’l mio tempo e gir pascendo l’erba [all my time and go around eating grass]” [35]). The “pascea” of A ciascun’alma is most likely the first use by Dante of a verb that will have some lexical importance in the Commedia, as in the simile of the mother bird at the opening of Paradiso 23 (“per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca [to find the food she feeds them with]” [Par. 23.5]). Being an aulic synonym of the quotidian mangiare, pascere is tied to a vast array of human behaviours.16 The prose of Vita Nuova III (1) glosses “pascea” with mangiare (“che le facea mangiare questa cosa che in mano li ardea, la quale ella mangiava dubitosamente [that he had her eat the thing burning in his hands, which she anxiously ate]” VN III.6 [1.17]), clearly demonstrating the change of register facilitated by the prose. The lightning shifts of register deployed in the Commedia are first practised by Dante in the Vita Nuova’s shifts from aulic lyric to quotidian prose gloss.

  The vision is presented in language and syntax that are relatively straightforward compared to what we saw in the exchange with Dante da Maiano. There were three responses to A ciascun’alma. Guido Cavalcanti emphasizes the visionary aspect of A ciascun’alma in the first word of his formidable incipit, Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore; he interprets the sonnet in the key of achieved happiness. In the first two lines of his response, “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore / e tutto gioco e quanto bene om sente [You saw, it seems to me, all worth, and every joy and all the good man feels],” Guido imagines that Dante has attained precisely that maximum of joy and existential, epistemological completeness (“onne valore,” “tutto gioco,” “quanto bene”) that in his poetry Guido denies to himself. Another response, probably from Terino da Castelfiorentino, interprets the vision in the key of requited love (Naturalmente chere ogne amadore).

  The response from Dante da Maiano, instead, completely rejects the visionary aspect of A ciascun’alma and insists with rough physicality that Dante Alighieri is delirious (“hai farnetico” [11]) and that he won’t change his opinion “finché tua acqua al medico no stendo [till I submit your urine to the doctor]” (Di ciò che stato sè dimandatore, 14). Perhaps Dante Alighieri has violated a boundary that Dante da Maiano could not or did not want to cross. As discussed in the introductory essay to the tenzone del duol d’amore, the gendered aggression of Dante da Maiano’s suggestion – “che lavi la tua collia largamente / a ciò che stinga e passi lo vapore / lo qual ti fa favoleggiar loquendo [you should give your balls a thorough wash / so as to quench and dissipate the fumes / that make you fantasize when you converse]” (7–9) – suggests that the boundary is related to gender and that Dante Alighieri’s favoleggiar had violated some masculine code. When Dante Alighieri then uses precisely the word farneticare in the phenomenology of the vision that accompanies the canzone Donna pietosa, his lexical choice functions as a rejection of the cultural provincialism and educational limitations of Dante da Maiano and those like him: within Dante Alighieri’s larger cultural horizons, visionary behaviour can belong to the repertory of a man.

  The enigma proposed by A ciascun’alma presa is lastly deciphered by Dante himself, in the prose of the Vita Nuova, where he indicates in rather baroque fashion that the sonnet was composed by him at the age of eighteen, thus in 1283. According to the Vita Nuova the vision described by A ciascun’alma occurred the night after Beatrice’s first greeting; the greeting took place nine years after their first encounter; and the encounter occurred when Dante was nine years old. The fact that Dante retroactively fit A ciascun’alma into a complex autobiographical scheme manufactured years later does not, however, take away from the plausibility of 1283 as the date of the sonnet, given its congruence with other examples of Dante’s poetry from this early period.

  We note the Vita Nuova’s autobiographical energy, which signals a core feature of Dante’s art: namely, the conviction that the past is never disposable. Rather, it is to be retrieved, repackaged, reinterpreted. Given the interpretive zeal that Dante had already demonstrated with respect to Dante da Maiano’s slight riddle, we can hardly be astonished at the interpretive vigour that he now manifests with regard to his own life experience.

  This early sonnet is therefore resemanticized in the context of the Vita Nuova, where it is laden with meanings not inferrable from the poetic text. The prose, succulent and rich with details, confers meaning on the comparatively thin poem. We start with a text that does not even authorize us to identify madonna with Beatrice, and we finish – by means of the aggressive hermeneutic work of the prose – with a first announcement of Beatrice’s death, made possible by adding the further information of her departure for heaven: while the sonnet only says, “appresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo [then I saw him go away in tears]” (14), the prose specifies, “e con essa mi parea che si ne gisse verso lo cielo [and with her he seemed to go off toward the sky]” (Vita Nuova III.7 [1.18]). Here we see – and it is but one example among many – how a verse that is ideologically thin undergoes retroactive enrichment by the prose. This early sonnet is used by the author of the Vita Nuova as a point of departure for a new ideological adventure.

  The shrewdness of the Vita Nuova in its construction of a new authorial persona cannot be overstated. This is true despite the fact that Dante himself, in the subsequent archeological layer of his self-creation (the philosophical treatise Convivio), dismisses the Vita Nuova as ju
venilia. An apparently simple but magisterial instance of Dante’s authorial shrewdness is his use of spatial design to support his false chronology: by introducing each poem as though written for a given occasion just described in the prose, and placing the poem materially in the book after the prose event that supposedly occasions it, Dante reifies the false notion that the poems came into existence after the prose. For discussion of this programmatic “macrotextual deceit,” see the essay on Era venuta nella mente mia.

  This commentary is not the place to undertake a systematic comparison between the prose and the poems of the libello – a task that, ideally, should be undertaken by a commentator of the Vita Nuova.17 My task here is to read the Vita Nuova poems as though they were not in the Vita Nuova. As I note in the Introduction to this volume, this task proved not so easy: I learned that in order to show what each poem does on its own, independent of the Vita Nuova, I had first to acknowledge the meaning that accrues to the poem within the libello and then show the reader how much of that meaning is the work of the prose. In this way I experienced firsthand the deep imperatives that condition editors to resist removing the poems from the “organic” and “unified” Vita Nuova in order to include them materially among the rime.18

  Gathering thirty-one poems and placing them in a prose setting constituted Dante’s first great demiurgic act: the act with which the poet, using his past as raw material, remolds himself, remodels himself, reconfigures himself – in effect re-creates himself. Thus a sonnet written at eighteen years of age will serve a much more mature ideology in the Vita Nuova, where it illuminates the great archeological project through whose multiple strata Dante becomes Dante.

  5 (B I; FB 6; DR 26; VN III.10–12 [1.21–3])

  A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core nel cui cospetto vèn lo dir presente, in ciò che mi riscrivan suo parvente,

  To every captive soul and noble heart before whose eyes my present words appear, beseeching them the favor of reply, accept my greeting in the name of Love. A third of night had almost run its course, a time that every star is shining bright, when Love appeared before me suddenly, the memory of whose manner frightens me.

  4

  salute in lor segnor, cioè Amore. Già eran quasi che aterzate l’ore del tempo che omne stella n’è lucente, quando m’apparve Amor subitamente,

  Jubilant, Love seemed to hold my heart within his hand, and in his arms he held my Lady wrapped within a cloth, asleep. He woke her then, and she, beset by fear, began to humbly eat my burning heart. And then I saw him go away in tears.

  8

  cui essenza membrar mi dà orrore.

  Allegro mi sembrava Amor tenendo meo core in mano, e nelle braccia avea

  11

  madonna involta in un drappo dormendo. Poi la svegliava, e d’esto core ardendo lei paventosa umilmente pascea.

  14

  Apresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo.

  METRE: sonnet ABBA ABBA CDC CDC.

  6 Se Lippo amico sè tu che mi leggi

  While on one hand Se Lippo amico demonstrates the evident immaturity of the poet, on the other hand it highlights his precocious literary sensibility.

  The poet’s youth shows in his use of non-Florentine rhymes and forms, such as rhyming the i of “scritto” with the e of “imprometto” and “metto” (defined by Contini as “Aretine, or better, Guittonian rhymes” [p. 22]), the past participle in the form “cognosciuda” (19), and, above all, in his deployment of the metrical form known as sonetto rinterzato (literally “layered sonnet”) or sonetto doppio. The “layering” of the sonetto rinterzato is achieved by inserting settenario verses (seven-syllable verses) between a sonnet’s fourteen canonical hendecasyllables (eleven-syllable verses). In the same way that the rhyme schemes of sonnets vary, the rhyme schemes of sonetti rinterzati vary too; the rinterzi – the inserted seven-syllable verses – are added to the base of whichever sonnet rhyme scheme has been adopted by the poet. In the case of Se Lippo amico, the base rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. The new rhyme scheme is formed by inserting a settenario after each odd-numbered verse of the quatrains and after the second (even) hendecasyllable of each tercet. The settenari are thus inserted after verses 1, 3, 5, 7 of the quatrains and after verse 2 of each tercet, which are verses 10 and 13 of the whole poem, to yield the following rhyme scheme for Se Lippo amico: AaBBbA AaBBbA CDdC DCcD.19

  The sonetto rinterzato was invented by Guittone d’Arezzo, who boasts twenty-one instances of it in his canzoniere. There are two other sonetti rinterzati among Dante’s lyrics, both early works and both later placed in the Vita Nuova (O voi che per la via and Morte villana),20 where they function as indicators of an early Guittonian poetic phase – one left behind in order to forge the dolce stil novo. One of the tasks that Dante sets himself in the Vita Nuova is the systematic reclassification of the stages of his own earlier poetic life, which are put into perspective by the prose and revealed to be in different ways unworthy of the “new” poet that he now aspires to be. The two sonetti rinterzati in the Vita Nuova thus function as stylistic markers of an outworn poetic phase that Dante can retrospectively place under the rubric, with a not inconsiderable part of his early poetic production, of “Guittone d’Arezzo.”21

  Se Lippo amico certainly belongs under this rubric as well. Even the opening of Se Lippo amico is Guittonian, as Barbi and Contini note, who cite Guittone’s sonnets Messer Bottaccio amico, ogn’animale; Messer Giovanni amico, ’n vostro amore; Mastro Bandino amico, el mio preghero; and Finfo amico, dire io voi presente. And in fact the incipit Se Lippo amico recalls the four instances of the word amico in the extremely Guittonian sonnets exchanged by Dante Alighieri with Dante da Maiano. See the introductory essays to those tenzoni for the evolving significance of the word amico in Dante’s lexicon.

  Not at all Guittonian, however, is the fluid syntax of our sonetto rinterzato, which stands in marked contrast to the tortuous syntax of the tenzoni with Dante da Maiano. Se Lippo amico speaks in the first person, presenting himself to “Lippo amico” (plausibly identified with Lippo Pasci de’ Bardi) and defining himself as a “humble sonnet”: “io che m’apello umil[e] sonetto [a humble sonnet I am called]” (10). The task of the humble sonnet is to serve as companion to a “naked girl” – “Lo qual ti guido esta pulcella nuda [So I bestow on you this unclothed girl]” (13) – that is, to the single-stanza canzone Lo meo servente core (the next poem in this edition). The stanza is “nuda,” continues the sonnet, “perch’ella non ha vesta in cui si chiuda [because she hasn’t any clothes to wear]” (16), that is, according to the commonly held interpretation, because it is divested of music. Given its nakedness, the pulcella / stanza “vien rieto a me [il sonetto] sì vergognosa [follows me (the sonnet) with such a sense of shame]” (14) and does not dare to circulate: “ch’atorno gir non osa [she dares not go about]” (15). The sonnet asks Lippo to dress it and to be her friend, so that she may circulate and introduce herself: “e prego il gentil cor che ’n te riposa / che la rivesta e tegnala per druda [Hence I would ask you out of charity / to clothe her and regard her as your friend]” (17–18).

  Notable in this poem is its emphatic metatextual lexicon, which offers a glimpse into an already hyperliterary world, one that is no longer, in late thirteenth-century Italy, only oral. Even if the presumed lack of music is considered a serious flaw, the context is self-consciously and unequivocally committed to writing and textuality. The incipit sets off a chain of textual and literary terms – “tu che mi leggi” (you who are reading me) (1), “a le parole” (to the words) (3), “mi t’ha scritto” (wrote to me about you) (4), “umil[e] sonetto” (humble sonnet) (10) – to say nothing of other terms (“vesta” [clothes] [16], “rivesta” [he may clothe] [18]) with literary associations that harken back to the ancient allegorical tradition.

  The young Dante who already shows that he is attracted to literary and textual vocabulary will, as a mature poet, often call our attention to the writerliness of his poetry. Consider, for instance, a verse from the Infe
rno such as “e li altri due che ’l canto suso appella [the other two whom my canto names above]” (Inf. 33.90). Here the adverb “suso” indicates that a hypertextual domain has fully absorbed the poet’s “canto” (whose origins in an oral tradition are nonetheless clearly revealed in its etymology): Dante refers to Ugolino’s sons as those whose names are registered “suso,” that is, “above,” in the material dimension of a written text.22

  Noteworthy as well is the careful coding of lyrical genres as sexual beings, characterized according to sexual stereotypes: on the one hand the masculine sonnet, who acts as guide and protector; on the other hand the pulcella / stanza, whose feminine nakedness is represented as a sign of vulnerability and need – a topos we will later see elaborated in the great canzone of exile, Tre donne. The dynamic between nakedness and being dressed in “colori rettorici” is presented in the Vita Nuova – “grande vergogna sarebbe a colui che rimasse cose sotto vesta di figura o di colore rettorico, e poscia, domandato, non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotale vesta, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento [it would be shameful for one who wrote poetry dressed up with figures or rhetorical color not to know how to strip his words of such dress, upon being asked to do so, showing their true sense]” (VN XXV.10 [16.10]) – and will be taken up again by Petrarch: “Se ’l pensier che mi strugge, / com’è pungente et saldo, / così vestisse d’un color conforme [If the thought that destroys me, since it’s so sharp and strong, were dressed like this in a similar color]” (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta23 125.1–3).