Horizon and Adynaton:
The Tornata

We noted earlier that Dante drew on the metaphor of the human soul as horizon in setting out the double fines of humankind in the Monarchia: corruptible as a composite of soul and body, and so ordered to secular happiness, signified by the earthly paradise; incorruptible as a rational soul, and so ordered to the beatific vision (Dante 1979C 496–98). The mind as horizon verging on eternity goes far to explain the turn taken by the sestina in its final stanza, where the adynata, by invoking circumstances that cannot be fulfilled in nature, bring the poem to the boundary of time and eternity.^[65]

The tornata, where the poem's two suns—inner and outer, lady and planet—coincide, presents the lover's crisis in eschatological terms. In one reading, the lady eclipses the sun and annihilates the lover; in other terms, her denial defeats the natural cycle marked by solar motion, and the poem itself ceases. But as we saw, the consummation of the poem is ambiguous. The dangerous maximum of the lady's power coincides with her animation and susceptibility to love. The course of the poem hopes for her descent to the Other, to passion and change.

In the speaker's words, for the lady to fall in love is as implausible as the apocalyptic rivers flowing uphill of the adynata. Temporal and erotic consummation are thus linked. Allusions to the sexual union of speaker and lady petra occur in every stanza of the poem—suggested by barbato in stanza 1, by the hills "covered" with vegetation in 2, by the piccoli colli that are like the lady's breasts in 3, by the reference to the medication of love's wound in 4, and in the fantasy of 5.^[66] Stanza 6 verges on explicitness in staging the speaker's worship of the shadow cast by the lady's dress—a shadow that, at midsummer noon, would be almost directly beneath her. Thus the poem is increasingly erotic as the sun climbs higher and higher in the sky: a striking corroboration of

how the poem fulfills the speaker's fantasy through the movement of the sun.^[67]

The fantasy of joining with the lady is closely linked to the poem's development of the seasons and to the cycles of time. The solar motions as cause of generation and corruption are mirrored thematically in the topic of the speaker's desire for union with the petra, for generation. Desiring union with the petra, the speaker offers submission to the toil of generation, to payment of the debt of nature.^[68] Thus stanza 6 and the tornata refer to the consumption of speaker and lady: the lady's unlikely ignition as green wood, the speaker to be exhausted by "sleeping in stone." In its immediate relation to generation, the sexual dimension of the poem is governed by the circle of the Other, although the speaker's love, and the ultimate telos of generation—species immortality—participate in the circle of the Same. The lower principle is not excluded, but subsumed in the higher.

Consummation as a natural process, governed by the motion of the Other, is thus joined at the end of the poem to consummation in the sense of a cataclysm or apocalypse. Like the relationship of the diurnal poco giorno and the annual gran cerchio d'ombra in the opening verse, the short cycle that contains the narrative of speaker and lady is contained in turn by the series of secular ages and finally by eternity, of which time is merely the imitation.^[69]

The boundary of time and eternity is introduced into the sestina by the adynata in stanza 6. As a rhetorical figure, the adynaton measures the unlikeliness of an event by comparing it to a natural impossibility.^[70] But the language of the sestina does not rule out natural circumstances during which the reversal of rivers and the firing of green wood might occur. Both events are possible during natural cycles: at high tide, a cyclical event, rivers flow backward near the mouth; and green wood ages, in time, to become inflammable.^[71] In view of Dante's debts to Seneca and Ovid, it is striking that the two events involve water and fire: in terms of the cycles outlined in the Naturales quaestiones and the Metamorphoses, both the reversal of rivers and the burning of green wood would occur—the first during the cataclysm, when underground waters rise to cover the hills, the second during the ekpyrosis, when all wood would burn.^[72]

Specifically, Dante's adynata derive from the sestina of Arnaut the appeal to the transformations of nature and time countenanced in a Christian cosmos, where miracles, which violate nature, occur to mani-

fest the will of the Creator (Shapiro 1980 71). The speaker's hope that the lady will take fire (a commonplace in the amorous, "Ovidian" tradition) echoes Arnaut's reference to the flowering of the seca verga in the birth of Christ from a virgin. And for the reversal of rivers we must recall Dante's text of choice when exemplifying allegorical exposition: the return of the Jordan during the Exodus.^[73]

In exitu Israel de Aegypto . . . 
Iordanus conversus est retrorsum. 
           (Psalm 113: 1–2)

When Israel went out of Egypt . . . 
Jordan was turned back.

Like the text of the psalm, the adynaton establishes conditions for polysemy. The questions raised in the tornata regarding the destruction or vindication of the speaker, the cessation of temporal cycles at the end of time, and the repetition of impossible events and miracles suggest that, allusively at least, the sestina is already within this fourfold frame of reference. The fourfold sense of biblical exegesis, which links events to the moral life, to the life of Christ and history of the church, and to the universal dispensation of salvation and damnation—that is, all history—is a developed form of the macro-/microcosmic structure developed in the sestina, in which the cosmic cycles alluded to in the opening verse are mirrored by the turnings of the speaker's mind.

Our view of stanza 6 is strengthened by verses 34–36. As in "Io son venuto" and "Amor, tu vedi ben," the possibility of the speaker's death is raised—dormire in petra (35) anticipates coricare in poca petra as a periphrasis for entombment in "Amor, tu vedi ben."^[74] The reversal of time in stanza 6 is a double one: the cyclical return of the summer solstice guaranteed by the form of the poem, and the greater conversio at the end of time, when the movement of the sun above and below the horizon will cease and the cosmos will be transformed, in the twinkling of an eye, to the immutability of Eternity.^[75] The terms of the adynaton in 6.1 ("ritorneranno i fiumi a colli") echo traditional uses of the figure in the poetic tradition, but for the sestina it has a self-referential meaning as well, alluding to the scheme in which rhyme-words would return to their original positions if the poem were to continue beyond the sixth stanza. Stanza 6 is thus a kind of horizon of recurrence, the threshold of a necessary conversio in the form of the poem.^[76] Although the speaker is apparently fixed at the solstice, he imagines both the possibility of a sex-

ual consummation in the natural world and a final consummation of the ages in the magna dies domini, the great day of the Lord of the prophetic texts and Christian eschatology.^[77] The poem implicitly adds the prospect of a transcendent solstice, the day of the Lord, that doubles and contains the astronomical opposition of winter and summer solstices. The poem's first line, so striking in its syntactic inversion and rhetorical catachresis, in fact foreshadows the terms for the Day of Judgment used by Virgilio as he speaks to Cato in the Purgatorio:^{[ 78]}

"Tu'l sai, ché non ti fu per lei [libertà] amara 
In Utica la morte, ove lasciasti 
La vesta ch'al gran dì  sarà sì chiara." 
           (1.73–75)

In a very precise sense, "Al poco giorno," with its emphasis on effects of shadow, is itself the shadow or adumbration of the total brightness of the last day: pocogiorno at the beginning of the poem and più nera ombra at the end project, per antiphrasin, the gran dì; Dante will, in fact, imagine a transcendent solstice in the Paradiso when he sees Christ in the heaven of the stars—transcendent because the pilgrim is by that time far past the planetary sun.^[79] The negativity of the sestina, both optical and moral, is in potency—and to that extent prepares—the brightness alluded to at the end of the poem. The uses of ombra in the poem (carefully calculated, as with all the rhyme-words) prepare this brightness:

al gran cerchio d'ombra            (1.1) 
gelata come neve a l'ombra            (2.2)
Amor lì viene a stare a l'ombra           (3.4) 
e dal suo lume non mi può far  ombra      (4.5)
l'amor ch'io porto pur a la sua  ombra       (5.3)
per veder do' suoi panni fanno  ombra    (6.6) 
quandunque i colli fanno più nera  ombra            (tornata  1)

The first three uses describe cast shadows, ombre portate: the shadow of night cast by the earth itself; snow in the shade cast by the hills; and Love in the shade of the lady's brows, or personified and worshiping at her side, in the shade she casts. But Love in her eyes is also the ray of her glance, her light; this is the basis of the next use, describing the lover's inability to shade himself from her lume, and the subsequent use as well,

referring to the speaker's devotion to her image (or her shadow). The final use is to the shadow of the lady's body (clothed, or with panni as a synecdoche for the body). But this is the shadow that, in the tornata, is eliminated by the lady's brightness, as the green dress over her body manifests the conjunction of the two heliotropes and the apex of her power. The passive shadows in the first two instances give way to the ambiguous third use, and then to uses that define the lady as light: from her eyes, as an optically formed imago; and in relation to her shadowdispelling brightness. Thus the ombra in the sense of a privation of light in fact disappears gradually throughout the poem, accompanying the development of the lady's power as a stone. Thus, ombra is clearly the most important rhyme-word in the poem. It appears first and last in the stanzas and first in the tornata; it is the single rhyme-word assonant or consonant with all the others (and thus may be said to contain them); and it is itself a variation (or shadow) of Arnaut's rhyme-word cambra, which again appeals to the stanza as a container.^[80]

But the importance of ombra will inevitably be shared with its rhymeword counterpart, donna, which first appears as the last rhyme-word in the first stanza. The sestina's scheme is such that the rhyme-word that appears last in the first stanza will in subsequent stanzas always fill the place just abandoned by the rhyme-word that appears first in the first stanza. This scheme links the other rhyme-words, too, but ombra and donna circumscribe the initial, defining stanza of the poem. Such a feature is not without thematic import: donna repeatedly enters the place previously occupied by ombra. In other words, donna repeatedly eclipses ombra, a substitution that anticipates the lady's cancellation of shadows in the tornata.

In the cantos of Dante's natal sign of Gemini (whose relation to the petrose we have suggested in Chapter 2) we come upon two figures that distinctly recall key principles of the tornata of "Al poco giorno": brightness and inversion. In Canto 25, Dante is blinded by the appearance of John the Evangelist:

Poscia tra esse un lume si schiarì 
sì che, se'l Cancro avesse un tal cristallo 
l'inverno avrebbe un mese d'un sol dì.

Although John is not in the body, as the pilgrim first suspects, Dante's image alludes to the doctrine, to be explained in Canto 25, of the blessed

as possessing two robes, due stole, at the general resurrection on the gran dì. As in the simile, the sun in Cancer (in addition to its normal position in Capricorn at the winter solstice) would make the day last twenty-four hours: it would cancel the night cycle and the poco giorno and eliminate winter. This image is specifically linked to the reference to "unwintering" (svernare ) at the upper confines of Gemini, in the Primum Mobile, and to the reference at the lower confine of Gemini, in Saturn, to the reversal of the Jordan's motion (Paradiso 22.94–96). In our concluding chapter, we shall discuss more fully the relation of the petrose to these scenes in the cantos that bracket Gemini and to the theme of Dante's hope for universal reform in relation to his own poetic power.^[81] We can observe here, however, that the sestina, like the horizon of mind between the temporal and the eternal, is inscribed in a double order of time: insofar as it looks for a natural solution to the speaker's desire—the revolution of the annual cycle—the sestina looks back to its parent canzone "Io son venuto," where the speaker's restoration depends on riding out the negative cycle and awaiting the return of the warm season; but in its incipient, implicit invocation of an eschatological context, "Al poco giorno" points forward to the strategies and terminology of the great "double sestina," "Amor, tu vedi ben," and beyond that, to the Commedia.