Poetic Filiations

Of the petrose, Dante's sestina has been the most studied. Its historical situation between the archetype of the form, Arnaut Daniel's "Lo ferm voler," and Petrarch's multiple essays in the Rime sparse have guaranteed its interest for literary historians.^[1] In addition, the intricate scheme governing its rhyme-words has aroused interest among students of poetics. Because the dominant principle of the form is the system of allotting places to the six rhyme-words, readers have emphasized the changing juxtaposition of semantic elements as the main source of the poem's effects and meaning.^[2] Contini's view that the sequence of topics in Dante's poem is alogical has been influential in this respect (Dante 1946 157). Although the relevance to the poem's subject of the recurring rhyme-words has been admitted, the tendency to treat the poem as the consequence of a preestablished scheme rather than as a marriage of sentenza and form has with few exceptions persisted.^[3] Finally, the poem has generally been regarded as an isolated effort; the view is typified by Contini's judgment that the imitation of Arnaut in the petrose "was, in Dante's intention, but a parenthesis."^[4]

We hold that the emphasis on stylistic results at the expense of elucidating the relation of form to subject is anachronistic as an approach to Dante's poem (Bartolozzi 1982 1). Like the other petrose, "Al poco giorno" exhibits a complexity of form and an intensity of thematic development that are interdependent. In these respects, the sestina foreshadows important techniques in the Commedia: there is nothing parenthetical about it. Indeed, the close relation of the sestina to "Io son venuto" fully justifies "A1 poco giorno" as an instance of the microcosmic poetics born in the canzone. Our discussion therefore begins with close attention to the features of "Io son venuto" that are exploited in the sestina. We will then interpret the final verse of the poem, which

has never been given a satisfactory reading and which we find to be a key to the construction of the sestina.

The links between "Io son venuto" and the sestina are manifold. The first two rhyme-words in the canzone are petra and donna, and these recur as the last two rhymes in the first stanza of "Al poco giorno."^[5] The two poems share over twenty important terms, as well as similar phrasing.^[6] In many respects the sestina, by presenting scenes predominantly in the warm season, answers the question posed at the conclusion of "Io son venuto": what will become of the speaker during the spring and summer, when Love will pour down on earth from the heavens? Implicitly, the existence of the sestina means that the speaker has endured the warm season; thus the dangerous moment foreseen in the canzone has in a sense already been transcended. The sestina is therefore part of the speaker's strategy of overcoming the single moment of fixation, the moment of winter-solstitial danger, and of placing the scenes of his love against a wider temporal background.

The circulation of images in the lover's fantasy has been a principal argument for the essentially static nature of the sestina (Cudini 1982 192). But the lover's fantasy also expands temporally in the verb tenses of the poem. The verbs are in the present tense in stanzas 1 and 2, and the moment of enunciation seems to pass almost imperceptibly from the winter solstice to the early moments of spring, although in fact the entire second stanza, ruled by the simile (similemente ), is still within the ambit of the opening moment: "Al poco giorno . . . son giunto, lasso." Rather than insisting on the fixed initial moment, we note how the use of tenses enlarges the lover's vision, first through recollection, and subsequently through cautious anticipation.

After the present tenses of the first two stanzas, stanza 3 posits a circumstance ("When she wears a garland") more specific than the undifferentiated states of stanzas 1–2, and this leads to the introduction of past tenses, first at 3.5 ("m'ha serrato," "[Love] has locked me") and then at 4.3 ("io son fuggito," "I have fled"). These are not real aorists but have the effect of imperfects, and end by returning to the present: Love has locked me and still locks me; I have fled and still, habitually, flee. But in stanza 5 the past event is treated as an isolated numinous moment: "I saw her once, dressed in green" ("L'ho veduta già vestita a verde"), and this leads to the formulation of a specific wish with an implied future reference: "I have desired her in a fair grass field" ("l'ho chesta in un bel prato d'erba"). A real future then appears in stanza 6,

qualified by its place in an adynaton but qualified in the opposite sense by its allusion to a comprehensive eschatological perspective.

Thus, if the moment of enunciation always returns to the present at the solstice, the range of the lover's meditation grows in its expressive and temporal domain, extending first to a past continuous with the present, then to a specific instance in the past, then to an implied future, and finally to an explicit (even if apparently unhoped-for) future. The subjective present, first a kind of terminus at the solstice, becomes more and more comprehensive. Despite the lover's fixation, the poem shows the speaker's mind illuminated and moved by the petra. Conversely, as we shall show, the lady becomes animated in the lover's mind. Speaker and lady mirror each other's tenacity—refusal, obsession—but also each other's mutability—imaginative reach and inchoate animation. The lover's mind, imagining a spring, transcends the constriction of the punto staged in "Io son venuto."

We have argued that an important device linking the stanzas of "Io son venuto" is the descent of the sun in the sky as it approaches the winter solstice. "Al poco giorno" begins by reiterating the astronomical situation established in the canzone: "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra." The verse is not pleonastic.^[7] It establishes not only the brevity of the day but also the annual predominance of darkness, of the night circle. Thus, like "Io son venuto," which mentions the setting of the sun ("il sol si corca," verse 2) and the prevalence of night thought of as opposite the sun in the Tropic of Cancer ("lo grand'arco," 8), the sestina begins with a clear reference to both daily and annual motions of the sun.^[8] From a cosmological perspective, the two motions of the sun make visible the motions of the Same and the Other. We will show that Dante's allusion to the logical principles of Same and Other accounts for many of the sestina's features—the tension in the poem between tenacity and change, for example—and will help manifest the principles of the poem's form.^[9]

In view of the parallels between "Al poco giorno" and "Io son venuto," it might appear puzzling that there is no explicit mention of the sun in the former except in terms of its effects. These include the "poco giorno," which announces a privation; the "dolce tempo" (10); the growth of plants; and the phenomena of shadow and shade.^[10] The lack of explicit reference to the sun in the sestina derives from "Io son venuto," where effects of the sun are named at the beginning of each stanza, at first explicitly, but in stanzas 3–5 implicitly. Positioned op-

posite Gemini in stanza 1, the sun is named in stanza 2 as the cause of winds, but in the third stanza it is heat, and in the fourth the "vertù d' Arïete," that represent solar effects.^[11] Least directly, stanza 5 alludes to the sun as remote cause of the warmth in the vaporous waters rising from the earth.^[12]

The disappearance of the sun in "Io son venuto" accompanies the figure of the sun's descent as it approaches the solstice. But like the love of the speaker himself, the presence of the sun in its effects counters the seasonal privation of light and heat. The decline of the sun in "Io son venuto" prepares the inexplicit, but central, functions of the sun and solar motion in "Al poco giorno." The canzone shows the persistence of the lover's heat surrounded by winter; the sestina, the speaker's contemplation of the lady set against the turning of the seasons—itself a solar effect.^[13] The emphasis on seasonal revolution in canzone and sestina is both thematic and structural: at the end of "Io son venuto," the speaker refuses to turn back; yet the progress of the seasons will operate a return to spring and complete the cycle. The sestina, in turn, generated from the orderly circulation of rhyme-words over the six stanzas, embodies cyclical recurrence as the principle of its form (Durling 1965 84–85; Durling 1976 17; Shapiro 1980 7, 8–10).

Thus the final sirma of "Io son venuto," which reiterates tornare, may be combined with its central verses:

e 'l mio più d'amor porta;
ché li dolzi pensier' non mi son tolti 
né mi son dati per  volta  di tempo, 
ma donna li mi dà c'ha picciol tempo. 
           (36–39)

What results is the pattern for the sestina, a poem in which the speaker's contemplation is juxtaposed to the seasons in nature and in which the lady acts as a luminary that gives and withdraws light. The key terms volgere and tornare come from the middle and end of the canzone, so that, in conjunction with the astronomical parallel that joins the first verses, the sestina is linked to the beginning, middle, and end of "Io son venuto."^[14]

The prominence of turning and recurrence in the sestina continues the theme of astronomical inversion announced with the canzone. But the canzone also begins with the birth of Dante's natal sign and of the poetics suited to man as the horizon of corruptible and incorruptible.

In the sestina, the twinning of principles appears thematically in the concern with both rigidity and change, poet and lady, short time and the eternal. But a geminate poetics also emerges in linguistic and formal terms. Although lexical pairing as a poetic device in "Io son venuto" is limited, in formal terms, to the final couplet of each stanza with identical rhyme-words, the pairing of linguistic and formal elements is a key constructive technique of the sestina. Thus, each stanza is linked to the next by identical rhyme-words (in Provençal terminology they are capcaudadas ), both stanzas and verses are taken in pairs, and conjunctions of the six rhyme-words result from a scheme that shifts them in pairs (see below). In addition, as Cudini has shown in an exhaustive analysis of the sestina's diction, the poem exhibits both a persistent bisyllabism and a dittology of terms, an organization of language in terms of binary (and ternary) schemes.^[15]

Thus a gemination of linguistic elements and the rotation of rhyme-words distinguish the sestina, not merely as consequences of a rigorous form but as principles closely related to the poetics heralded by the rising of Gemini in "Io son venuto." In that poem, the negative moment is also the birth of a new poetics; it projects an antithetical natal horoscope of the poet, and this principle of astronomical inversion is maintained not only in thematic terms but in features like the inversion of verb and subject at the beginning of each stanza except the first as well. The sestina follows suit by beginning in a dramatic and oft-remarked syntactic inversion, and it stages the negative moment of the lover through the oft-remarked antithesis of light and darkness. Strictly speaking, however, in Dante's cosmos light and darkness are not opposites, for light has no contrary; rather, light and darkness are related as plenitude and privation, act and potency. Thus, although the sestina begins by defining a moment of privation, it implies, and in part represents, the activation of that potency by light. The darkness of the sestina, as if it were a diaphanous gem, attracts the light of the sun.