Dante's Lyric Poetry

by Dante Alighieri

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  134 Even the adjective vano, more common than the noun vanità, is late to appear with a strong moral-istic sense, which is not present in Sonar bracchetti (“libero core e van d’intendimenti [free heart and empty of love]” [6]), Donne ch’avete (“E se non vuoli andar sì come vana [And if you do not wish to go in vain]” [64]), and Donna pietosa (“e ascoltando le parole vane [and hearing my wild words]” [5]). The moralism of the term is more pronounced in Le dolci rime (“è manifesto i lor diri esser vani [it is clear that what they say is empty]” [75]) and in the great moral canzone Doglia mi reca, where Dante uses not only the adjective vano (“chi con tardare e chi con vana vista [some by delaying and some by empty looks]” [119]) but also the verb vaneggiare, another hapax in the lyrics (“che ’nfinito vaneggia [stretches on to empty infinity]” [73]).

  135 For the connections among all the rime whose theme is a new love after Beatrice’s death – those placed in the Vita Nuova, those placed in the Convivio, those placed in the Commedia, and those remaining outside of any macrotext – see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, chap. 1, “Autocitation and Autobiography.”

  136 The bizarre invention of a different redaction of the Vita Nuova, whose ending conforms to the Convivio’s embrace of Lady Philosophy, is emblematic of the distortions generated by such acritical reasoning. For a meta-critical reading of this current of thought, see my “The Case of the Lost Original Ending of Dante’s Vita Nuova: More Notes toward a Critical Philology,” Medioevo letter-ario d’Italia 11 (2014).

  137 I use “(re)conversion” because, as we know from Beatrice in the earthly paradise, this conversion is not definitive. For Dante, life follows the form of the spiral: “the prefix ri- in the poem’s first verb, ‘ritrovai,’ echoes the form of the spiral, in which no conversion is final” – finality takes the form of a circle (see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, pp. 25–6).

  138 See the first sonnet of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: “e del mio vaneggiar vergogna è il frutto [and of my empty desire shame is the fruit]” (Rvf 1.12).

  139 The lyrics in which a form of vergogna appears but without reference to the self are Se Lippo amico, Per quella via, Io sento sì, and Le dolci rime.

  140 Similarly, in his commentary to the first redaction of Lasso, per forza De Robertis writes of the word lasso: “according to the explanation given in the prose, this is an expression of shame for his straying; in reality it refers to the suffering of his eyes” (ed. comm., p. 414).

  141 See the introductory essay to Lo doloroso amor for the occurrences of the name “Beatrice” in Dante’s rime.

  142 And then in Inf. 9.32: “cigne dintorno la città dolente [surrounds the suffering city].”

  143 It is no coincidence that all these citations are from Purgatorio, the canticle of journeying; for the application of this topos to the second realm, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, chap. 5, “Purgatory as Paradigm: Traveling the New and Never-Before-Traveled Path of This Life / Poem.” Of the nine occasions in which forms of pellegrino/peregrino appear in the Commedia, six are in Purgatorio, three in Paradiso.

  144 According to De Robertis, this opening has “remained without imitators (the only possible exception being Cecco d’Ascoli at the beginning of L’acerba: ‘Oltre non segue più la nostra luce …’)” (ed. comm., p. 402).

  145 See Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, p. 58, for oltre as the “adverbial correlative of trapassare” and passim for Dante’s “Ulyssean” poetics, the poetics of the trapassar del segno.

  146 Other points in common between the two sonnets are the use of the verb passare for the two journeys (“voi passate” [Deh pellegrini, 5]) and the use of the word beatrice in both (“ell’ha perduto la sua beatrice [for she has lost her blessed beatrice]” [Deh pellegrini, 12]). The redaction of Deh pellegrini prepared for the Vita Nuova establishes another connection in the use of the verb intendere, substituted for sentire (“che neente / par che sentisser la sua gravitate” becomes “che neente / par che ’ntendesser la sua gravitate” [7–8]).

  147 The same voyage, undertaken by a pensero rather than a sospiro, is recounted in the second stanza of the canzone Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete:

  Suol esser vita dello cor dolente

  un soave penser che·sse ne gìa

  molte fïate a’ piè del vostro Sire,

  ove una donna glorïar vedea,

  di cui parlav’a·mme sì dolcemente

  che l’anima dicea: “I’ me ·n vo’ gire.” (14–19)

  [The life of my grieving heart was once / a tender thought that frequently would find / its way into the presence of your Lord,/where it would see a lady in glorious light / of whom it would speak to me so sweetly / that my soul would say: “I wish to go there.”]

  148 Paul’s “sive in corpore nescio sive extra corpus nescio” becomes Dante’s “S’i’ era sol di me quel che creasti / novellamente, amor che ’l ciel governi,/tu ’l sai [If I was only the part of me that You created last, love that governs the heavens, You know]” (Par. 73–5). Dante here intimates the presence of the body in a veiled manner, following St Paul. He does not express doubt. As Sapegno notes in his commentary to Paradiso: “E non vuol esser dubbio, anzi attestazione solenne; come se dicesse: ‘Dio lo sa che salivo con tutto me stesso, e non l’animo soltanto’ [There is no doubt, but rather solemn affirmation, as though he were saying: ‘God knows that I was ascending with all of my self, and not with the soul only’].” See Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, p. 148 and the first section of chap. 7.

  149 Dante creates for the donne gentili “a little poetic anthology, prior to the Vita Nuova, the first anthology of Dante’s that we know of” (De Robertis, VN, p. 242), consisting of Oltra la spera, the “cosa nuova” just cited, “co lo precedente sonetto accompagnato, e con un altro che comincia: Venite a ’ntender [with the foregoing sonnet [Deh pellegrini] and with another sonnet that starts, Venite a ’ntender]” (VN XLI.1 [30.1]).

  150 Aristotle is also named in VN XXV.2 (16.2). Dante’s first citation of Aristotle in a poetic text occurs in the canzone on nobility, Le dolci rime: “Quest’è, secondo che l’Etica dice,/un abito eligente / lo qual dimora in mezzo solamente,/e tai parole pone [This is, as stated in the Ethics,/a chosen habit / which occupies the mean alone,/those are its very words]” (85–8). See Barolini, “Aristotle’s Mezzo, Courtly Misura, and Dante’s Canzone Le dolci rime: Humanism, Ethics, and Social Anxiety,” in Dante and the Greeks, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 2014) 163–79.

  151 De Robertis writes that “the adoption of the language of mystical ascent (sale, grado) is evident” (VN, p. 243); Gorni notes the “Pauline mystical experience” (VN, p. 229).

  152 See Barolini, “Sotto benda: The Women of Dante’s Canzone Doglia mi reca in the Light of Cecco d’Ascoli,” Dante Studies 123 (2005): 83–8.

  153 I would like to alert readers to a printing error in line 4 of Oltra la spera in De Robertis’ 2005 commentary edition of the Rime, which reads “piangendo mette il lui” instead of “piangendo mette in lui.” The 2002 editio maior is correct.

  154 On desire in Dante’s thought, and on the longue durée of Dante’s meditation as distilled by these verses, see the introductory essay to Savete giudicar.

  155 The objection is raised by Cecco Angiolieri in the sonnet Dante Alleghier, Cecco, tu’ servo amico:

  Ch’al mio parer ne l’una muta dice

  che non intendi su’ sottil parlare,

  di quel che vide la tua Beatrice;

  e poi hai detto a le tue donne care

  che ben lo intendi: e dunque contradice

  a sé medesmo questo tu’
trovare. (9–14)

  [For in my view in one tercet it says / that you don’t understand the subtle speech / of him who saw your Beatrice;/and then you said to your dear ladies that / you understood it fine: and so it contradicts / itself, this poem of yours.]

  156 The specification that the voice speaks “cortesemente” is in the Lisetta version of the sonnet (verse 7); the adverb is instead “subitamente” in verse 7 of the Licenza version.

  157 For the full explication of the parable and of its theological implications, see Barolini, “Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell,” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 102–21; for the connections between the parable of the Convivio and the Commedia, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, above all chap. 5.

  158 Despite his suppression of her in favour of the allegorical “Licenza,” De Robertis writes that Lisetta is “la Bellezza incarnata in una presenza reale [Beauty incarnate in a real presence]” (ed. comm., p. 327).

  159 The figure of Matelda is in many ways a lyrical figure, even if she is interwoven with classical and historical motifs, and the encounter with Matelda is not lacking in other reminiscences of Lisetta. She arrives as a literal embodiment of se-duction, that which takes you off the path (disviare in Purg. 28.38): “cosa che disvia / per maraviglia tutto altro pensare [a thing that for wonder pushes aside all other thoughts]” (Purg. 28.38–9). Moreover, her path is “painted” with the flowers that she gathers, in a verse – “ond’ era pinta tutta la sua via [with which her pathway was all painted]” (Purg. 28.42) – that echoes and combines the first and last verses of Per quella via.