Dante's Lyric Poetry

by Dante Alighieri

  38 De Robertis advances the hypothesis that Dante wrote the sonnet in Bolognese: “the last hypothesis is that this was the original form of the sonnet, with a perfect, functional adaptation to the setting; I advance this hypothesis not in order to take the sonnet from Dante, but to assign it to him also as testament to his incessant linguistic drive, apparent from his earliest years, and as a homage rendered by him to a language [Bolognese] that in De vulgari eloquentia 1.15.6 he will recognize as the primary vernacular of all the tongues in Italy” (ed. crit., Testi, p. 330).

  39 The text of E di febbraio is edited, with commentary, by Michelangelo Picone in “Le due corone: sonetti della Semana e dei Mesi con il commento di Michelangelo Picone,” in Il giuoco della vita bella, Folgore da San Gimignano: Studi e testi, ed. Picone (San Gimignano: Nencini Poggibonsi, 1988), pp. 79–125. On the brigata in Folgore and others, see Barolini, “Sociology of the Brigata: Gendered Groups in Dante, Forese, Folgore, Boccaccio – From Guido, i’ vorrei to Griselda,” Italian Studies 67.1 (2012): 4–22.

  40 Hunting dogs of various types remain in Dante’s repertory. A passage in the Convivio that establishes a rigid dichotomy of male and female (based on facial hair) constructs an analogy via recourse to hunting dogs: “E qui è da sapere che ogni bontade propria in alcuna cosa, è amabile in quella: sì come ne la maschiezza essere ben barbuto, e nella femminezza essere ben pulita di barba in tutta la faccia; sì come nel bracco bene odorare, e sì come nel veltro ben correre. [Here it should be observed that every goodness proper to a thing is deserving of love in that thing, as in masculinity to have a full beard and in femininity to have the entire face free of hair, just as in the foxhound to have a keen scent, and in the greyhound to have great speed.]” (1.12.8).

  41 For the significance of these verbs see my essay “‘Le parole son donne e i fatti son maschi’: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Dec. 2.9, 2.10, 5.10),” 1993, rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 281–303.

  42 For both normative and non-normative social groups as recorded in literary texts, see my “Sociology of the Brigata.”

  43 Dante himself will reference the hunt in the amatory and not the realistic sense in the sonnet to Cino I’ ho veduto già senza radice. Here he advises his friend against chasing the lady, using the noun caccia: “parmi che ·lla tua caccia [non] seguer de’ [I don’t think you should keep on hunting]” (14).

  44 For the development of Dante’s thought on gender, see my essays “Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (with an Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli)” and “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax,” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 333–59, 360–78.

  45 Aristotle dedicates books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics to friendship. In the treatise De Amicitia Cicero explains the etymological link between amor and amicitia: “Amor enim, ex quo amicitia nominata est [For it is ‘amor’ (love) from which the word ‘amicitia’ (friendship) is derived]” (8.26).

  46 “Lapo” is the reading of almost all the manuscripts traditionally accepted by editors of the Rime, who think of Lapo Gianni de’ Ricevuti, Florentine poet and notary. De Robertis opts for “Lippo” instead of “Lapo” in the wake of Guglielmo Gorni, who suggested Lippo Pasci de’ Bardi (to whom Dante wrote the sonnet Se Lippo amico) rather than Lapo Gianni as the third protagonist of this sonnet; see Il nodo della lingua e il verbo d’amore (Florence: Olschki, 1981), pp. 99–124. The reasons given by De Robertis are extratextual and therefore not compelling: “The stemma … definitely puts Lippo in the minority with respect to Lapo, popularly Lapo Gianni, who until now was seen as present in the invitation and so a member of the society of stilnovisti … The fact is that after Gorni’s suggestion … various documents turn out to be marked by an equivalence of Lippo-Lapo, more than once Lippus seu Lapus (Lippo or Lapo) … To write Lapo is to write Lippo: and the variant Lippo, totally neutral, here firmly adopted, simply means not Lapo Gianni” (crit. ed., Testi, p. 306). In his 2005 commentary edition, De Robertis writes, more simply, “Lippo or Lapo” (comm. ed., p. 288). In a case where the choice of variant is, in De Robertis’ words, “totally neutral,” and the change is made for reasons that are explicitly nontextual but interpretative, I prefer not to change the text. See Lino Leonardi, “Nota sull’edizione critica delle Rime di Dante a cura di Domenico De Robertis,” Medioevo Romanzo 28 (2004): 63–113, who points out on p. 104 that the change in this incipit creates a contradiction with Cavalcanti’s Se vedi Amore, where a “Lapo” is a member of the group of friends: “Se vedi Amore, assai ti priego, Dante,/in parte là ’ve Lapo sia presente [I pray you, Dante, if you should see Love / in any place where Lapo’s present too]”). And see Giunta, pp. 166–7, for his reasons for retaining “Lapo” in his edition.

  47 Guido’s response to Guido, i’ vorrei is typical of what we call the Cavalcantian mode: it evinces a pessimistic view of love based on the abject nature of the lover-poet, his lack of worth. Thus, Guido courteously refuses to participate in Dante’s vision of happiness in the vasello because of his own lack of “valore” (the last word of S’io fosse quelli): “S’io fosse quelli che d’Amor fu degno,/del qual non trovo sol che rimembranza,/e la donna tenesse altra sembianza,/assai mi piaceria siffatto legno [If I were one who still was worthy of Love,/of which I only have a memory,/and if my lady had a different air,/a boat like this would please me very much]” (1–4). Thus, Guido does not accept – not even in fantasy – Dante’s more positive view of love.

  48 The word amico is rather rare in the lyrics: it appears in the sonnets exchanged with Dante da Maiano, in the incipit of Se Lippo amico, and then more generically in La dispietata mente, Tre donne, and Doglia mi reca. It does not appear in this great poem dedicated to friendship. It is not, however, rare in the prose of the Vita Nuova. As can be seen in the two passages of the Vita Nuova just cited – “primo de li miei amici” and “lo principio de l’amistà tra lui e me” – one of the tasks of the prose is to thematize friendship. In chapter XXXII (21) Dante situates Beatrice’s brother within his hierarchy of friendship: “uno, lo quale, secondo li gradi de l’amistade, è amico a me immediatamente dopo lo primo [one who, in degree of friendship, is the friend of mine right after the first]” (VN XXXII.1 [21.1]).

  49 The consolatoria by Cino is the canzone Avegna ched el m’aggia più per tempo. See the introductory essay to Li occhi dolenti for further discussion of I’ vegno’l giorno a·tte as an “anti-consolatoria.”

  50 The poem that represents Cino in the catalogue of DVE 2.6.6 is precisely the consolatoria on the death of Beatrice. Lapo Gianni too is mentioned in DVE, as one who – with Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, and Cino da Pistoia – had made use of an excellent vernacular (“vulgaris excellentiam cognovisse” [DVE 1.13.3]). Gorni maintains that in this case as well the common reading Lapum is to be put aside as facilior and that Dante’s text actually refers to Lippo Pasci de’ Bardi.

  51 See the first chapter of my Dante’s Poets for Dante’s autocitations – the first paired with Casella, the second with Forese, and the third with Carlo Martello – and chapters 2 and 3 for the encounters with poets.

  52 As in my book The Undivine Comedy, I use “difference” in the way that Dante uses it (“In the abstract it means the ‘divergence’ between two or more elements”; Fernando Salsano, s.v. “differenza,” Enciclopedia dantesca, gen. ed. Umberto Bosco, 6 vols. [Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–78]), and essentially in the way that Thomas Aquinas uses distinctio: “any type of non-identity between objects and things. Often called diversity or difference” (T. Gilby, Glossary, in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Blackfriars ed. [New York: McGraw-Hill / London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964–81], 8:164). In other words, as is clear in the discussion on time and difference in The Undivine Comedy, my use is essentially Aristotelian.

  53 Contini connects the vasel with Merlin’s vessel in the Arthurian romances, recalled
also in Mare amoroso, lines 212–16 (“E se potesse avere una barchetta,/tal com’ fu quella che donò Merlino / a la valente donna d’Avalona,/ch’andassi sanza remi e sanza vela / altressì ben per terra com’ per aqua [And if he could have a little boat like the one that Merlin gave to the excellent lady of Avalon, which went without oars and without a sail as well on earth as through water]”) and 226–9.

  54 See Giacomo da Lentini: “Lo vostr’amor che m’ave / in mare tempestoso,/è sì como la nave / c’a la fortuna getta ogni pesanti [My love for you, which places me / upon a stormy sea,/is like a ship in peril / that must cast overboard its heavy bulk]” (Madonna, dir vo voglio, 49–52).

  55 On the question of the tension between the one and the many in Dante’s Paradiso, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, esp. chap. 8, “Problems in Paradise: The Mimesis of Time and the Paradox of più e meno.”

  56 The citation is from Physics 4.11.219b1. Dante writes: “Lo tempo, secondo che dice Aristotile nel quarto de la Fisica, è ‘numero di movimento, secondo prima e poi’; e ‘numero di movimento celestiale,’ lo quale dispone le cose di qua giù diversamente a ricevere alcuna informazione [Time, as Aristotle says in the fourth book of the Physics, is ‘number of motion, with respect to before and after,’ and ‘number of celestial movement’ is that which disposes things here below to receive the informing powers diversely]” (Conv. 4.2.6).

  57 Proper names are signifiers of irreducible historicity in epic poetry (we recall the catalogue of ships in the second book of the Iliad, which comes to Dante via the seventh book of the Aeneid). Dante’s own equivalent of the Iliad’s catalogue of ships is the catalogue of Florentine names in Paradiso 16; see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, pp. 139–40.

  58 The name “Vanna” appears again – this time together with “monna Bice” – in the sonnet Io mi senti’ svegliar. A “monna Lagia” (the diminutive of Alagia) is referenced also in the incipit of Amore e monna Lagia e Guido ed io and in Cavalcanti’s sonnet Dante, un sospiro messagger del core.

  59 See Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 148.

  60 On the relationship between Dante and Guido see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, esp. chap. 2, and my essay “Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love),” 1998, rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 70–101.

  61 For my reasons against accepting De Robertis’ stylistic arguments for Dantean paternity of this sonetto rinterzato, see the introductory essay to Se Lippo amico.

  62 So interprets Lino Leonardi, in “Nota sull’edizione critica delle Rime di Dante,” pp. 63–113: “four sonnets are recovered from that Appendix and placed in the canon, but with the cautionary label ‘probably Dante’s’; three more sonnets and the trilingual canzone 18 Aï faus ris are more decisively ‘restored to Dante,’ as the label states however only for 18 and 34” (p. 86).

  63 Other examples of ideological or interpretive rather than philological reasoning are De Robertis’ choice of “Lippo” over “Lapo” in Guido, i’ vorrei and his choice of “Licenza” over “Lisetta” in Per quella via; see the introductory essays to the poems in question. See too my discussion of De Robertis’ stylistic reasons for accepting Dantean paternity of Quando ’l consiglio in the introductory essay to Se Lippo amico. More on this topic may be found in my “Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History,” 2004, rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 245–78.

  64 Frank O’Hara wonderfully captures the Cavalcantian persona in “A Poem in Envy of Cavalcanti” (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]):

  Oh! my heart, although it sounds better

  in French, I must say in my native tongue

  that I am sick with desire. To be, Guido,

  a simple and elegant province all by myself

  like you, would mean that a toss of my head,

  a wink, a lurch against the nearest brick

  had captured painful felicity and all its opaque

  nourishment in a near and cosmic stanza, ah!

  But I only wither to the earth, my personal

  mess, and am unable to utter a good word.

  65 On Guido’s disdegno, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 145–6.

  66 See the discussion of In un boschetto and the earthly paradise in Barolini, Dante’s Poets, chap. 2, pp. 148–53.

  67 Of the Commedia’s four uses of ghirlanda (three in the singular and one plural), two apply to the wise men in the heaven of the sun (Par. 10.92 and Par. 12.20).

  68 For the new in Dante, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, chap. 2, “Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New,” esp. pp. 21–6.

  69 “In my opinion, the first words of each composition – ‘Cavalcando’ and ‘Ballata’ – are intended to refer to Cavalcanti, one directly to his name (“Cavalcando” is a hapax in the Vita Nuova and Dante’s lyric production in general, and is especially striking in its initial capitalized position), and the other to his favorite genre, the ballata” (Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 137).

  70 On Love’s clothing see the long note in Barbi-Maggini, pp. 45–50.

  71 See the introductory essay to Amore e monna Lagia for the deep significance of “foresette” – etymologically connected to “fore,” outside – within the economy of a Cavalcantian poetics of outsideness.

  72 On the importance of this parlare see my “Notes Toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax,” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 371–3: “In this declaration that love moved her and makes her speak, Dante both conjures Beatrice’s past and scripts for her a radically new future. This future, which will unfold in the Com-media, is contained in the verb parlare, a verb betokening an activity utterly alien from the agenda of the lyric lady” (p. 371).

  73 For the poetic “cammino” see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, chap. 2 and passim; for the cammin riciso of Par. 23, see esp. chap. 10, “The Sacred Poem Is Forced to Jump: Closure and the Poetics of Enjambment.”

  74 For mystical experience as defined by this passage of Purgatorio, which contains the word “estatica,” a hapax in all Dante’s production, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, chap. 7, “Nonfalse Errors and the True Dreams of the Evangelist.”

  75 The final redaction of Ciò che m’incontra offers instead “se ’l perir t’è noia,” in a change typical of the transition from first redaction to the redaction used in the Vita Nuova: while the sense does not change, the substitution of “perir” (perish) for “morir” (die) in a context where there are already many forms of morire and morte adds variety and linguistic range.

  76 I note that gridare, never used by the more toned-down Cavalcanti, appears rather frequently in Dante’s lyrics: in two canzoni of violent eros (E’ m’incresce di me, Così nel mio parlar), in two theologized canzoni (Donne ch’avete, Donna pietosa), and in this sonnet.

  77 See chapter 7 of Barolini, The Undivine Comedy for discussion of Augustine’s De genesi ad litteram in the context of raptus.

  78 Gorni changes Barbi’s reading into the nonsyncopated and more familiar form un terremoto.

  79 “This and the other ‘signs’ of the death of Beatrice are a part of the biblical repertoire of the signs of the death of Christ, and still more of the wrath of God and the end of the world” (De Robertis, VN, p. 153).

  80 Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini, http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it / TLIO.

  81 Giuliano Tanturli has advanced the idea that the anthology of fifteen canzoni existed before Boccaccio; see Tanturli, “L’edizione critica delle Rime e il libro delle canzoni di Dante,” Studi Danteschi 68 (2003): 250–66, and the discussion in the Introduction to this volume.

  82 On this theme and for an examination of Cavalcantianism in Dante’s lyrics and beyond, see my essay “Dante and Guido Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love),” 1998, rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 70–101.

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p; 83 In the lyrics not in the Vita Nuova, the name “Beatrice” appears only in Lo doloroso amor; in the lyrics that are in the Vita Nuova it occurs two times in the canzone Li occhi dolenti and once in the sonnet Oltra la spera, while the sonnet Deh pellegrini contains the noun “beatrice.” The diminutive “Bice” occurs only in the sonnet Io mi senti’ svegliar, included in the Vita Nuova.

  84 In filologia dantesca (Dantean philology) the word “estravagante” is used to refer to Dante’s poems not included in the Vita Nuova and in the Convivio, the poems kept “out,” and thus forced to remain “wandering outsiders”; on the cultural freight of estravaganti see my essay “Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History,” 2004, rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 245–78.

  85 Other than a use of scacciare similar to what we find in E’ m’incresce di me in the sonnet Onde venite voi così pensose? (“sì·mm’ha in tutto Amor da·ssé scacciato [so completely has Love driven me away from him]” [10]), the other uses both of the verb cacciare and of the noun caccia in Dante’s lyrics come from his more mature poems. In the canzone Amor che movi tua vertù dal cielo, the poet describes the actions of Love, as in E’ m’incresce di me, but portrays a Love who acts not cruelly but virtuously: “tu cacci la viltà altrui del core [you banish baseness from all hearts]” (7). In the sonnet to Cino I’ ho veduto già senza radice, Dante advises his friend not to pursue the “giovane donna”: “parmi che·lla tua caccia [non] seguer de’ [I don’t think you should keep on hunting]” (14). And in the canzone of exile, Tre donne, the political congedo features the verb cacciare: “canzone, caccia con li neri veltri [canzone, hunt with the black greyhounds]” (102).