Quella Ch'a Veder Lo Sol Si Gira

Although the sun is not mentioned in "Al poco giorno," the poem is heliotropic in structure and theme: its formal principles and sequence of topics follow the movement and tropic turns of the sun, the "volta di tempo." Our argument proceeds not from a negative premise but from the traditional relation of privation and act: the seasonal darkness at the

solstice manifests the privation, therefore the potentiality, of light.^[16] The argument from privation is appropriate to the sestina. The rhymeword ombra (which appears first and last in the stanzas and first in the tornata ) implies a source of light, while in astronomical terms the poem's beginning at the winter solstice projects the summer solstice six months distant.^[17] The logic of privation is explicit in the tornata, where the lady is said to cause the disappearance of shadows. We shall discuss the tornata more fully later, but one of its implications is that the cancellation of shadows signifies the disappearance of the sun as their cause—or the sun's eclipse by a rival source of light.^[18]

The enigmatic tornata of "Al poco giorno" derives in part from Arnaut's riddling tornada in "Lo ferm voler."^[19] Whatever the problems of Arnaut's verses, Dante's lines have remained without a fully satisfactory literal reading.^[20] Like the congedo of "Io son venuto" (and, as we shall see, of "Amor, tu vedi ben" as well), the tornata is a recapitulation and a microcosm of the poem as a whole:

Quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra, 
sotto un bel verde la giovane donna 
la fa sparer, com'uom petra sott' erba. 
           (37–39)

Fanno in verse 37 leads to emphasis on far sparire, the only other verbal form in the tornata.^[21] Especially striking is the disappearance by zeugma of fa sparer, which remains understood between uom and petra. Far sparer is thus simultaneously doubled and concealed. An elaborate conceit is at work here: the elimination of shadows is literally the disappearance of a nonappearance, and it is rendered by a textual erasure of far sparer itself. Implied is the antithetical principle: the appearance of the lady's light, her brightness, beauty, and power. Dante's text, black on white, renders the lady's full presence only negatively, only as a privation. And the full presence of the lady is highly ambiguous: does it mean the lover's extinction, his disappearance, as most readers assume? Or is there the suggestion of an apocalyptic manifestation, as one reading has claimed?^[22] We shall return at the end of this chapter to the question of how the sestina's final antithesis is to be interpreted.

The omission of the verb, like the avoidance of reference to the sun, is an important clue to the meaning of the enigmatic tornata. We propose that the decoding of the last verse depends on its relation to the lore of the heliotropes, both gem and plant. Medieval lapidaries attrib-

ute to the heliotrope stone two related virtues that have direct bearing on the meaning of "Al poco giorno": the power of obscuring the sun, and—in some accounts, consequently—the power of rendering the bearer of the stone invisible.^[23] In the lapidaries Dante is likely to have consulted, the power of the gem depends on its conjunction with the plant of similar name, the heliotropium.^[24] If the common nouns petra and erba of Dante's tornata refer to the heliotropia (stone) and heliotropium (plant), respectively, then the comparison established in the tornata is between the lady's power of canceling shadows—and thus the light of the sun—and the power of the petra sott' erba to render a man invisible. Thus, we can translate the tornata as follows:

Whenever the green hills make blackest shade, 
wearing [lit., under] a lovely green [garment] the young lady 
makes it disappear, as stone under plant [makes disappear] a man.

In this way the tornata, like the sestina as a whole, establishes a parallel between the brightness of the petra, whose immature vigor is signified by her mantle of green, and the magical conjunction of stone and herb. Dressed in green, the stony lady embodies the conjunction named in the lapidaries.^[25]

We offer this interpretation as a solution to more than the crux of the last line of the poem. The identification of the conjunction of petra and erba in the person of the lady just at the close of the lyric is an important clue to the specific poetics and meaning of the sestina. Three oft-noted aspects of the form are affected by our argument concerning the tornata: first, we confirm Fowler's (1975 38–43) proposal of a relation between the circulation of rhyme-words and the motion of the sun; second, the requirement that stone and herb must be joined in order to be efficacious is represented in the verbal effects of the poem, which depend on the juxtapositions and shifting positions of rhyme-words, on their conjunctions; finally, because the effect of joining stone to herb results in the obscuration of the sun, the poem alludes to a kind of solstitial inversion, the great theme of "Io son venuto," and to the relation between the temporal cycles marked by the luminaries and the end of time, a topic that is explicit in "Amor, tu vedi ben" but appears implicitly in the adynatou of the sestina as well.

Before proceeding, however, we shall anticipate possible objections to our reading of the final verse. In the context of the syntactic boldness and frequent inversions of the petrose, nothing prevents us from reading

uom in the object case and the phrase petra sott' erba as the singular subject of fa sparer.^[26] In fact, a similar instance of zeugma and ellipsis is attested in the sestina itself, where the image is of mortar locking stone, "più forte assai che la calcina petra" (18), with serrato (17) understood.^[27]

A second difficulty seems to lie in Dante's choice of preposition. Why does he write sott' erba rather than con erba? The latter would seem the logical translation of the relation expressed by the Latin passive in Marbodus's popular account of precious stones: "if [the gem] is joined to an herb of the same name, it draws whoever bears it from human sight."^[28] In other lapidaries, however, the placement of the plant beneath the stone is explicit: "if the plant of the same name is placed beneath the stone and consecrated with the proper verses, the gem will render a man invisible."^[29] Although relative positions are reversed, the expression subiecta lapidi is similar to the petra sott' erba of the sestina. Sotto does not therefore present significant difficulties.

We turn now to the implications of heliotrope lore for the sestina. After exploring the parallel between the lady and precious stones and its function in the poem, we consider Dante's allusion to the Ovidian myth of Clytie, the keystone to the sestina's emphasis on seasonal change. Then we shall outline the poem's complex mimesis of solar motion. We end by reconsidering the final stanza and tornata and suggesting the implications of Dante's use of the sun and the lore of gems in his version of Arnaut's scheme.