Introduction

The so-called rime petrose are a group of four canzoni all written, as it seems, within a fairly short period of time—perhaps several months. They celebrate Dante's frustrated love for an unnamed and unidentified lady who is compared in each of them to a stone: sometimes a precious stone because of her beauty and her power over him, sometimes an ordinary stone because of her coldness toward him. After the often faltering sweetness of the Vita nuova and the excessive abstractness of the canzoni later to be collected in the Convivio (at least one of them can be dated 1294, "Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete",^[1] in the petrose we find a new power and an approach to poetic form that represents an important—we believe, the decisive—departure from his earlier poems.

The critical tradition has been puzzled by these poems and often embarrassed by their overt expression of sexual desire and violent feeling. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this embarrassment took the form of a tendency to interpret the poems allegorically; the lady was most frequently identified as Philosophy, along the lines of Dante's allegories in the Convivio.^[2] Michele Barbi and Gianfranco Contini led a salutary reaction against the allegorical tendency; Contini in particular strove to free the reading of the poems from the excessive biographical literalism that resulted in endless debates as to the identity or difference of the donna pietra and the donna gentile of the Vita nuova, the "pargoletta," and other real or imagined ladies referred to in Dante's poems. Contini went to another extreme, however: although he insisted on the earthly realism of the petrose, he regarded their importance as almost exclusively stylistic—the lady was for him essentially a pretext for technical experimentation.^[3] This view has become the dominant one, and most recent critics have tended to minimize the thematic seriousness of the petrose; while they see them as an important moment of preparation for the stylistic effects of the Commedia,^[4] they generally accept Contini's dictum that the inspiration of the petrose is "radically fragmentary."^[5] On the other hand, several recent critics have rightly insisted on this the-

matic seriousness, but in a negative sense. For instance, Bruce Comens (1986) sees a theological condemnation of the poet's love as implicit in the poems themselves, which thus become dramatic monologues, a kind of case study in the psychology of sin. We believe that a balanced reading of the petrose requires qualification of both these views—of the first, because the poems are quite serious thematically and are much more than mere stylistic experiments;^[6] of the second, because it cannot as it stands account for the positive side of the struggle with negativity in the poems or for the precision of their autobiographical references.

The Rime Petrose in Dante's Development

The date of the petrose can be plausibly determined. The first poem of the series, "Io son venuto al punto de la rota," opens with an astronomical description that is sufficiently detailed to be dated: it describes the configuration of planets in December 1296, near the winter solstice. Though possible, it is unlikely that the reference was invented retrospectively, and therefore the generally accepted view, which we also adopt, is that the poems date from the winter of 1296–97.^[7]

Not a great deal is known about Dante's life in the last years of the thirteenth century, though our information for this period is greater than for the later ones. In 1296 he was thirty-one years old, having been born, probably toward the end of May, in 1265.^[8] He had been married for some time to Gemma di Manetto de' Donati,^[9] was presumably living with her, and the couple must by now have had several of their children.^[10] There is evidence that Dante had financial difficulties in these years: we know that at some time during this period he became a member of the Arte dei medici e degli speziali, one of the powerful Florentine guilds, which he seems to have joined in order to qualify for political office. Between November 1295 and June 1300 we see him advancing through a series of minor political offices that was to culminate in his election to a normal two-month term (early June-early August 1300) as one of the six priori, the executive council of the city.^[11]

As a public figure Dante must have been much respected, since he was later chosen to be part of a delegation to Pope Boniface VIII seeking help in settling the violent factionalism between the Whites (Dante's party) and the Blacks.^[12] But Boniface had secretly favored the Blacks, and, whether from Florence or from Rome or perhaps while returning from the 1301 mission, Dante was forced to flee the armed coup in Flor-

ence, fostered and countenanced by the pope, which was to mean that he would never see his home again: he was prominent enough among the Whites to be repeatedly singled out for sentencing in absentia and was far too proud and conscious of his worth to accept amnesty at the price of doing public penance.

Thus the petrose mark an extremely interesting moment in Dante's career as a writer, when he was visibly casting about for new directions, and before the unforeseen shipwreck of all his expectations that was to yield its ultimate result in the Commedia. In this book we argue that the moment represented by the petrose is that of the first full emergence in Dante's work of what we will call his microcosmic poetics, a poetics that, as we shall see, points directly toward the poetics of the Commedia both in its positive/constructive aspects and in what, for want of a better term, we must call its problematicity. Some time after 1305, Dante decided to abandon the ambitious project of the Convivio, which he seems to have begun soon after going into exile, in favor of what was to be the Commedia. Although the Convivio remains a puzzling and perhaps misunderstood work, one thing is certainly clear: in comparison with the Commedia, it was not Dante's true poetic vocation. It was an aberration stemming in large part, as we can see from its first book, from the new exile's sense of intense wrong and from his desire to testify explicitly before men both his innocence and the sense of his earlier work. These will be powerful motives in the Commedia as well, but the Commedia represents a return to the principles that govern the petrose, though of course in terms of a much fuller project and a much more extensive knowledge of the philosophy and theology of his time.

The Vita nuova is far more permeated with microcosmic thinking than has been recognized, as we try to demonstrate in Chapter 1, but Dante's grasp of the problematic inherent in his emerging approach to poetry is still preliminary in comparison with the petrose, which set forth a much fuller conception of the possibilities of a microcosmic poetics, as well as of the difficulties and ambiguities of the role of the poet.

It may be helpful to list some of the striking ways in which the petrose represent a new departure for Dante:

For the first time, Dante makes the natural world an explicit focus, assimilating and exploring in his poetry what were thought in his time to be valid scientific concepts, especially from astronomy and astrology.

For the first time, Dante seeks to make the metrical form of his poems—their stanza forms—imitative of the cosmos: imitative not in a generic sense (as might be argued, as we shall see, for sonnet form or canzone form in general), but imitative of the particular aspect of the cosmos focused on by the individual poem.

For the first time, Dante bases the themes and structure of his poetry on the parallels thought to exist between the cosmos and the human body.

For the first time, Dante extends the themes and style of his poetry to include violently negative feelings.

The last-mentioned aspect of the novelty of the petrose is in some respects the key to their significance. The movement we somewhat inexactly call the dolce stil nuovo had, it is true, extended the range of vocabulary and theme of lyric poetry in Italian to include technically precise scientific and philosophical ideas and terms; in the Vita nuova, as we shall see, Dante's intense originality led to the experiment of making complex philosophical ideas the basis of the very structure of some of the poems. The dolce stil nuovo was not a stranger, either, to the idea that the passion of love could lead in a negative direction. The Vita nuova was in part an elaborate refutation of the pessimistic naturalism with which Dante's friend and rival Guido Cavalcanti viewed love, and it included the death of the lady, as well as the death-oriented narcissism of the lover, as central problems, in order to urge that love, rightly followed, led beyond death. But the dolce stil had still remained within a quite limited register of stylistic effects, dominated by a cult of sweetness and euphony that Dante shows many signs in other works of wishing to transcend. The moralizing canzoni, such as "Poscia ch' Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato," and the canzoni of the Convivio represent efforts to transcend the dolce stil primarily in terms of content, adapting its vocabulary, forms, and rhetoric to doctrinal exposition (often compared with the manner of Guittone d'Arezzo) that often involved an essentially arbitrary relation between integument and content.^[13] In the petrose we are still in the realm of love poetry, but the break with the dolce stil is much more thorough; it involves style and form as well as content. In the petrose we see Dante expanding the emotional range of love poetry to a degree unprecedented before him and exploring the limits of poetic language with an extraordinary new intensity.

But we must ask what is the intimate connection between the first

three aspects of the new poetics and the exploration of the theme of violence. It is not simply that a cosmic poetics must include the negative in order to be complete; rather, the converse would seem to be the case for Dante already at the period of the petrose. That is, the negative aspects of his personality and his experience—impulses to violence, violent feelings of frustration, hostility mixed with desire, self-destructive impulses, feelings of subjection to the body and to mortality—are apparently so central to his experience and so powerful that the full force of a cosmic perspective is required for them to be controlled and mastered. This is no "merely stylistic" matter. As we shall see, it is a problem at the very core of Dante's activity as a poet in the Commedia as well as in the petrose.

The question of the relation of the petrose to the Commedia needs to be approached with some caution. The supposition that the Commedia represents some kind of rejection of the petrose has several causes. One is the plausible enough notion that the "pargoletta" with whose love Beatrice seems to reproach Dante in Purgatorio 28 is a reference to the congedo of "Io son venuto al punto de la rota." This is of course possible, but the identification of the "pargoletta," a term used by Dante in several other poems that have no evident relation to the petrose, is entirely hypothetical. Another cause lies in the assumption that the love celebrated in the petrose is sinful—or, better, that in the petrose Dante accepts and identifies himself with the aspects of his difficult love that specifically reflect a fallen nature.^[14] We should be on guard against a logical circle here: we cannot use Beatrice's reproach in Purgatorio 28 as evidence that in the Commedia Dante regarded the enterprise of the petrose as sinful simply because the idea seems plausible.

Another problem is presented by the undeniable references to the petrose in the Medusa episode in Inferno 9. John Freccero (1972) established that the episode concerns the interpretive danger of reading in the letter rather than in the spirit; he pointed out numerous connections of the passage with the petrose, including the presence in them of the theme of the Medusa. Freccero's brilliant and influential article actually devotes little more than a page to the petrose, so that it is difficult to derive from it a clear statement about them; it seems to suggest that Inferno 9 identifies the petrose as the product of a poetic that devoted obsessive attention to the literal surface of the poetic text at the expense of deeper meanings, parallel to erotic fixation on the female body. It is not clear whether that is in fact Freccero's view, but in any case the idea

of the petrose as mere surface would seem to be a version of Gianfranco Contini's formula: the petrose are essentially technical experiments. (Just what may be the relation between poetic surface and inner meaning in the petrose is, of course, the subject of this book.) Another problem with the idea that Inferno 9 condemns the petrose is that the petrose themselves identify and grapple with the danger of the Medusa. What view do they take of it? Is it possible that the references in Inferno 9 are motivated not by a palinodic impulse but by the reverse?

It seems to us that these and many other questions can be answered satisfactorily only when we have achieved a more adequate understanding of the petrose themselves. Only when they are seen in a clearer light will it be possible to define what in them Dante may later have wished to reject. Gianfranco Contini's approach had at least the merit of bracketing the palinodic issue and opening the door to an appreciation of the importance of these complex poems. No one doubts that the experiments with harshness and difficulty of rhyme and diction in the petrose were important technical preparation for the Commedia.^[15] We believe that their importance for the Commedia goes far beyond the merely technical, so that it would be utterly implausible to suppose that Dante could later have rejected their poetics without qualification. Whatever Inferno 9 means must be much more closely specified. And as soon as one approaches the petrose on their own terms—raising such questions as the full meaning of the horoscope that opens "Io son venuto," for instance, or the metaphysical significance of the rhyme scheme of "Amor, tu vedi ben," or of the allusions to the names of Christ in the same poem—one is reminded that, as in the Commedia, there is no such thing in Dante as a technique devoid of important inner significance, no such thing as "mere" surface. As Bruce Comens (1986) properly points out (though in the context of a moralistic condemnation that we see as both narrow and premature), the form of the petrose is not at all external to their themes; rather, it is their necessary vehicle.

Microcosmic Poetics:
Sources and Models

The cosmic perspective of the petrose involves the poet's effort to grasp the significance of his difficult love in terms of his relation to the cosmos as a whole. This involves understanding the cosmic forces that impinge on him: he is embedded in nature, characteristically thought of, in me-

dieval scientific terms, as the formative power of the heavenly bodies shining down on the realms below the moon. Astronomical and astrological doctrines thus play a fundamental role in all these poems. But man himself is traditionally regarded as a microcosm—as possessing a structure closely resembling that of the universe as a whole—and in both the Platonic and the Stoic traditions, health, wisdom, and salvation require the little universe of the soul to imitate the harmony of the great universe. The cosmological theme is thus intimately associated both with the need for self-understanding and with the idea that art is a primary mode in which the soul seeks to pattern itself on the harmony of the universe.

We find in the petrose, then, that just as their explicit themes concern the lover's and the lady's relation to the seasons and to the motions of the planets and the fixed stars, so also in their form—as we might say, in their patterned motions—they imitate the cosmic cycles. The imitation of the heavenly bodies in the poetic form is different in each of the petrose; it is by no means generic but instead closely and intricately shaped by the themes of the individual poem, and it is always part of the poet-lover's struggle toward health. It thus constitutes one of the most interesting and significant aspects of these remarkable poems. In order to understand this imitation we must devote some attention to the "scientific" ideas on which it rests.

The hundred years preceding Dante's birth had seen the assimilation of a major portion of ancient Greek philosophical and scientific thought. During the last half of the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, there was a marked spread of interest in astronomy and the closely allied science of optics. Although in many respects Dante's scientific conceptions were old-fashioned, to some extent the emergence in his poetry of a strong interest in astronomy no doubt reflects the current excitement, and its expression, especially in the Commedia, was certainly facilitated by the growing availability of information: of treatises and astronomical tables, such as the Toledan tables (ca. 1060) and the Alfonsine tables (1272), and of equatories, analog devices for determining planetary positions.

[Ptolemy's] Almagest was first translated into Latin (from the Greek) in c. 1160 by an anonymous Sicilian author, and was followed in 1175 by the very popular translation from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona. The stimulus caused by this diffusion of astronomical theory did not have much effect on astronomical calculation and tables until about the middle

of the thirteenth century, but for the remainder of that century and the whole of the fourteenth there is a flood of new tables and fresh forms of equatoria. This change must be associated with the introduction of the Arabic forms of numerals which first appear in astronomical tables c. 1260 and become standard practice by about 1320.^[16]

We assume in the following that the reader has some familiarity with the traditional geocentric conception of the universe:^[17] earth fixed unmoving in space, surrounded by the seven planets (in order out from earth: the moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn)—which were sometimes (in the wake of Aristotle) thought of as fixed in a series of transparent spheres, sometimes (in the wake of Plato) as moving in mathematically determined orbits—the seven planets themselves surrounded by the sphere of the fixed stars. Onto the sphere of the fixed stars, which was thought to make a complete revolution once (approximately) each day, were projected from the earth such great circles as the equator, the meridian, and the ecliptic (the apparent annual path of the sun, a projection of the earth's own orbit). All change—all generation and decay—was thought to be confined to the region below the moon and to be governed by the influence of the stars and the planets, and all sublunar reality was thought to mirror to some extent the nature of the universe as a whole, to be a microcosm. Man, of course, was the microcosm par excellence.

It is not our purpose to identify the direct sources of Dante's conception of the microcosmic-macrocosmic relation; variants of the doctrine appear in literally hundreds of texts available to him.^[18] The most important sources of the tradition include Plato's Timaeus,^[19] Macrobius's Commentary on the Somnium Scipionis,^[20] and Boethius's masterpiece, the Consolation of Philosophy; Dante had clearly studied closely the latter two and probably also the first, which was available to him, though in fragmentary form, in the fourth- or fifth-century translation and commentary by Calcidius.^[21]

As is now understood, the Vita nuova reveals that Dante studied Boethius—a major channel for Neoplatonic conceptions, both philosophical and artistic—much earlier than used to be thought. We believe that the Vita nuova reveals some further Neoplatonic readings, but clearly neither the Vita nuova nor the petrose reflect the extraordinary effort to master the entire system of scholastic thought that is seen in the Convivio and the Commedia. Nevertheless, the petrose certainly show that Dante had been reading intensively in the astronomical and astro-

logical literature, beyond what is already reflected in the Vita nuova (which reflects al-Fargani's [Alfragano's] epitome of Ptolemy's Almagest, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella, as well as Boethius). The evidence is strong that he was by now familiar with the Timaeus; there is no question as to his knowledge of Seneca's Natural Questions; and he is clearly familiar with the general outlines of the astrological tradition stemming from Ptolemy, whether he read the Tetrabiblos itself or one of its countless epigones, such as Michael Scot's Liber introductorius. He had probably read some astronomical handbook such as Sacrobosco's De sphaera. He must have used an almanac, such as that by Prophatius, to calculate planetary positions. Whether he had read Firmicus Maternus's Mathesis or Manilius's Astronomica is very doubtful. We have not attempted to identify the direct sources of Dante's knowledge of astronomy and astrology any more than of his knowledge of the microcosmic tradition; our quotations will be drawn from the main texts of the tradition and will serve as illustrations.

Plato's whimsical myth of creation in the Timaeus represents the universe as an ideally harmonious and organically unified living being. According to his influential account of the fashioning of the World-Soul (Timaeus 34b–37c), the divine workman, the demiurge, mixed in a bowl equal portions of being, identity, and difference (each already compounded of the intellectual and the physical); he then divided this mixture according to an elaborate set of proportions derived from the Pythagorean lore of the numerical basis of musical intervals:

This entire compound he divided lengthwise into two parts which he joined to one another at the center like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting point, and, comprehending them in a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle. Now the motion of the outer circle he called the motion of the same, and the motion of the inner circle he called the motion of the other or diverse. The motion of the same he carried round by the side to the right, and the motion of the diverse diagonally to the left. And he gave dominion to the motion of the same and like, for that he left single and undivided, but the inner motion he divided into six places and made seven unequal circles having their intervals in ratios of two and three, three of each, and bade the orbits proceed in a direction opposite to one another.^[22]

As the commentators have recognized, Plato almost certainly has in mind here an orrery or spherical model of the heavens (see Cornford

1937 74), constructed of metal strips representing, among other great circles on the celestial sphere, the equator, the ecliptic, and the colures (the meridians) of the equinoxes. His circle of the motion of the same corresponds to the celestial equator (the projection onto the celestial sphere of the earth's equator); the motion of the circle of the Same, then, corresponds to the apparent daily revolution of the entire heaven from east to west, whose direction and rate never vary (a phenomenon we now explain in terms of the rotation of the earth on its axis). The circle of the motion of the Other, within the circle of the Same and making the figure of the Greek letter chi, corresponds to the ecliptic (the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun), along which the sun appears to make a circuit, in a year, from west to east—in other words, in the direction contrary to the daily turning of the sky (a phenomenon we attribute to the fact that as the earth revolves around the sun, our line of sight to the distant stars changes with our position relative to the sun, so that we see a slightly different pattern of stars each successive night).

That Plato has the demiurge place the orbits of all the planets within the circle of the Other shows that he was struck by the fact, apparently not well known in his day (Vlastos 1975 36–51), that the orbits of all the planets visible to the naked eye diverge only slightly from one plane (that of the earth's orbit) and are visible within a band (the zodiac) extending approximately nine degrees north and south of the ecliptic. On the basis of this new scientific fact, Plato was strengthened, it seems, in his claim that the cosmos demonstrated the reconciliation of his fundamental logical and metaphysical principles (being, identity, and difference) and that the principle of identity had primacy because the daily motion of the Same swept along with it the motion of the Other. He thus had also devised a way to represent the mediated derivation of the multiplicity of the cosmos from a principle of unity, since the one circle of the Same is united with the one circle of the Other, differing only in angle and direction, and then the circle of the Other is divided into the orbits of the planets, whose changing relative positions, in conjunction with the influence of the fixed stars, account for all the variety of sublunar things.

The circles of the Same and the Other are representations of particularly conspicuous celestial phenomena, and they are the basis of Timaeus's assertion that men are made according to the model of the cosmos, are microcosms. The main likeness between the world and the

human being is that both are incarnate souls; the human soul is a little analog of the World-Soul. This means that the great principles that govern the cosmos—being, identity, and difference—have their counterparts in the human soul, both as logical principles underlying all forms of knowledge and as the principles of the very life of the soul. Since the visible motions of the cosmos are the expression of the life of the World-Soul, its visible circling reveals the circular and cyclical soul-life that sustains the universe. So also in the little world of man, the spherical head corresponds to the heavens: it houses the soul-motions that, at least ideally, are capable of imitating the ordered perfection of the heavens:

The sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars and the sun and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years have created number and have given us a conception of time, and the power of inquiring about the nature of the universe. And from this source we have derived philosophy. . . . God invented and gave us sight that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven [i.e., the cycles of the World-Soul], and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed, and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.
(Timaeus 47a–c [Plato 1961 1174–75])

For Plato, then, all knowledge and all moral, psychological, or artistic harmony not only imitate the cosmos and the Soul that animates it, but also to some extent partake of their nature.^[23] These conceptions profoundly influenced all the traditions of ancient and medieval thought.

In the rest of this section we shall examine the structure of a poem from Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae, "O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas," the clearest and most recognizable instance of a form that is derived directly from the passages in Plato we have just been examining.^[24] During the Middle Ages, Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae was one of the most widely studied of all philosophical texts. Brilliantly written and shaped, this impassioned handbook of Neoplatonic doctrine had the distinction of Menippean form (alternation of verse and prose). Moreover, many of the poems are among the best ever written in Latin, a fact that by itself would explain the great popularity of the book. The author of a number of important schoolbooks (translations

of Aristotle's organon and Porphyry's introduction to it, commentaries on both, compendia on arithmetic and music) as well as of theological texts, Boethius was the last important Platonic thinker to study at a philosophical school with an uninterrupted tradition, probably at Alexandria rather than at Athens (Courcelle 1948 259–261), and he was fully recognized as an authority by the schools of the high Middle Ages.^[25] That the Consolatio was a major influence on Dante's thought from a period at least as early as the composition of the Vita nuova is well known.^[26]

"O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas" is the ninth poem in the third book of the Consolatio.^[27] The intense crafting of this poem is supported by its exalted tone and magnificent imaginative sweep. It is placed conspicuously at the climax of the third book, in which Philosophia has at least succeeded in raising Boethius's contemplation away from his own narrow circumstances and the vagaries of Fortune to the cosmos as a whole and its creator. It comes at the moment when Boethius grasps the need for the full intellectual ascent and the need for illumination, and although Philosophia is the speaker, she speaks for him. The poem occupies the very midpoint of the work as a whole^[28] and is only twenty-eight lines long, so it can be quoted here in its entirety. The O with which the poem begins represents the passionate outcry of the desiring soul caught in earthly clouds and misery:

              O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas,
              terrarum caelique sator, qui tempus ab aevo
  3          ire iubes stabilisque manens das cuncta moveri,
              quem non externae pepulerunt fingere causae
              materiae fluitantis opus verum insita summi
              forma boni livore carens, tu cuncta superno
  7          ducis ab exemplo, pulchrum pulcherrimus ipse
              mundum mente gerens similique in imagine formans
              perfectasque iubens perfectum absolvere partes.
10          Tu numeris elementa ligas, ut frigora flammis,
              arida conveniant liquidis, ne purior ignis 
              evolet aut mersas deducant pondera terras.
              Tu triplicis mediam naturae cuncta moventem
14          conectens animam per consona membra resolvis;
              quae cum secta duos motum glomeravit in orbes,
              in semet reditura meat mentemque profundam
17          circuit et simili convertit imagine caelum.
              Tu causis animas paribus vitasque minores 
              provehis et levibus sublimes curribus aptans
              in caelum terramque seris, quas lege benigna

21          ad te conversas reduci facis igne reverti.
              Da, pater, augustam menti conscendere sedem, 
              da fontem lustrare boni, da luce reperta 
24          in te conspicuos animi defigere visus.
              Dissice terrenae nebulas et pondera molis 
              atque tuo splendore mica; tu namque serenum, 
              tu requies tranquilla piis, te cernere finis, 
28          principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem.

              O You who with perpetual reason govern the world,
              Sower of earth and sky, who from eternity command
  3          time to move and, fixed, give motion to all else,
              whom no external causes drove to fashion 
              the work of fluid matter, but rather the indwelling form 
              of the highest good, free of all envy: You derive all things 
  7          from the eternal example; most beautiful, You carry
              in mind the beauteous world, form it to like pattern, 
              bid its perfect parts to fill it out and make it complete. 
              You bind the elements with numbers, so that freezings may 
10                  combine with flames,
              dry things with liquid, lest the purer fire 
              fly up or its weight cause earth to drown. 
              To be the mid-point of triple Nature,^[29]  to move all things, 
14          You attach the soul and diffuse it through adapted members;
              and Soul, cut in two, has globed its motion in two orbs, 
              goes forth to return to itself, turns about the depth 
17          of mind, and curves the heavens to a like pattern.
              With similar causes You bring forth souls and lesser lives, 
              and, fitting those sublime creatures to light chariots, 
              You sow them in sky and earth, and, by a kindly law,
21          when they turn back to You, make them return by ascending fire.
              Grant, Father, that the mind climb to Your august throne, 
              grant that it find the fount of good, grant that finding light 
24          the spirit may fix its sharpened sight in You.
              Shake off the clouds and weight of earthly matter 
              and flash forth with your splendor; for You are the clear sky, 
              You are the peaceful rest of the just, to see You the goal, 
              the Beginning, the Mover, the Guide, the Path, the End, 
28                the Same.^[30]

"O qui perpetua" was widely studied out of context because it gives a succinct summary of some of the central doctrines of Plato's Timaeus, in a Neoplatonic version that was particularly congenial to medieval Christian thinkers, treating Plato's demiurge (not given a name by Plato, and of unclear status in his account) as the one transcendent God,

who not only made the universe but also maintains it continuously in being. The poem was frequently used as a school text and was often the subject of commentary; in manuscripts it is often found, with commentary, without the rest of the Consolatio.^[31] It is well known that Dante echoes it a number of times in the Commedia.^[32]

Klingner (1921) derived the form of "O qui perpetua" from the traditional three-part structure of Greek and Roman hymns:^[33]epikléseis, or invocations (1–6); aretalogía, or enumeration of the deeds of the deity (6–21); and euchaí, or petitions (22–26).^[34] Although most of Klingner's discussion concerns questions of doctrine and sources, in a final section he points out that lines 26–28 (from "tu namque serenum" on) have no counterpart in pagan hymns, which without exception end with the petitions, but stem rather from Jewish and Christian tradition, as in the conclusion of the Gloria (". . . miserere nobis. Quoniam tu solus sanctus, tu solus dominus, tu solus altissimus . . .") or of the Lord's Prayer.^[35] The relation of the poem to the traditional pagan hymn seems to us indisputable,^[36] but the division by subject matter does not quite coincide with the divisions Klingner asserts (thus the poem invites several alternate modes of division).

In subject matter the three parts are as follows: the first (lines 1–9) deals with the transcendence of God and with the causes of his creating the world. God is unmoved in eternity and though fixed himself, he moves all things (this notion, as Scheible [1972 102–104] points out, derives from Aristotle's unmoved Mover); his fashioning of the world was motivated solely by his supreme goodness (Timaeus 29e); he fashioned the world according to the eternal Ideas (29a, 37a–38a); the world is complete and perfect (33b, 37d). Actually, these lines descend through the logical hierarchy of causes. First, logically and causally prior, comes the final cause, the reason for the creation (insita summi / forma boni ); next comes the formal cause, the eternal pattern according to which the world is fashioned (cuncta superno / ducis ab exemplo ); then the focus becomes God as efficient cause ( formans ). The material cause is not omitted; it appears at the beginning of the next section (elementa ).

The second part (lines 10–21) describes the structure of the world: first the relation among the elements (10–12), which are joined indissolubly by numerical proportion (Timaeus 31b–32c, 69a); second the World-Soul (13–17), incarnate in the world (13–14; Timaeus 34a, 36d–e), divided into the two motions of the Same and the Other (15; Timaeus 36b–c), by which it revolves on itself in perfect circularity and

so turns the heavens, which are its image (16–17; Timaeus 36d–37b); third the lesser souls sown (Timaeus 41d, 42d) in chariots (41e) through earth and sky (these are human souls), whom the inborn principle of soul, fiery (40a, 45b), causes to turn back toward the Creator (18–21; Timaeus 41c).

The third part of the poem (lines 22–28) is a prayer to the Creator that the mind may ascend to the vision of him, phrased as if the ascent had three stages: conscendere sedem (to ascend to your seat), fontem lustrare boni (to find the fountain of good), in te . . . defigere visus (to fix the eye of the mind in you).^[37] One may say that the first three lines of the final section take us from below all the way to the goal, while the last four resituate us as being below and needing illumination among the clouds and weight of the earthly, setting the goal as at the other extreme (clouds versus the sky beyond). But we can distinguish more sharply: lines 25–26 treat the two extremes as separated; with requies and finis (line 27), motion toward the goal is introduced.

The function of the very last line of the poem is complex. Rhetorically it is a restatement, a recapitulation of the statement of the entire poem.^[38] As the poem begins with the apostrophic naming of God as Creator ("O qui . . ."), so its last line consists of a series of names for him. These names recapitulate the entire cycle of the procession of all things from God and their return to him that the poem has described. They go from God as beginning to God as end; indeed, they have a logical order beyond that: motion precedes the guide, after whom comes the path; dux is at the center of the line, at the point that represents the turning of procession into return. The last word of the line can be read in two ways, either with or without a copula—or, as we might say in English, either with or without capitalizing same: without the capital, "Beginning, mover, guide, path, goal are the same"; with the capital, "The Same [i.e., the Neoplatonic One] is beginning, mover, guide, path, goal." The last line thus represents a circle; like the poem as a whole, it is a kind of projection onto a linear sequence, a kind of straight line, of the circle of procession and return.

The poem in its entirety, then, shows how the world proceeds from and returns to God, and this return has two aspects. The more obvious is the one introduced in line 21, the return of souls to God. The other aspect of return is the fact that the universe as a whole is held in unity by its yearning back toward God and its imitation of God.^[39] This unity of the world is emphasized in lines 10–17, and it is the unity of a sphere:

first in the proportion that holds together the elements with earth at the center, fire at the circumference; then in the circular motion of the incarnate World-Soul. The same verb, converto (to turn in a circle), is used of the turning of the heavens and the turning of the lesser souls back toward the Creator.

The lines on the World-Soul will repay closer examination. First of all, the World-Soul is "the mean of triple nature"—that is, the principle of Soul is (a) at the center of the world (Timaeus 34b) and (b) between the principles of Mind and of matter: it is the principle that enables them to be joined. Soul, then, holds the world together, and it does so by virtue of its own unity-in-division, its combining of the two opposing motions of the Same and the Other. These turn in perfect circularity and are the life—the unity—of the cosmos. They are the return of the cosmos to God, for the World-Soul looks always to God and is always converted toward him: mentemque profundam circuit. As God forms the world in the image (similique in imagine ) of the eternal Idea, so the World-Soul imitates God, turning the heaven into a likeness of what it sees in Mind:

                          . . . mentemque profundam 
circuit et  simili convertit imagine  caelum.^[40]

Now not only does Soul occupy the center of the world, it occupies the center of the poem as well, it holds the poem together and moves the poem, both in that it is named as the principle of motion, especially of return, and in that the poem expresses the fiery desire to return of one of the animae minores. The division of Soul into its two motions occurs at the midpoint of the poem (at secta, line 15) and in the central line of five devoted to the World-Soul,^[41] and of course the two motions are, as line 17 reminds us, made visible in the motion of the heavens (and they are joined in the central region of the heavens, preeminently at the equinoxes, where the ecliptic crosses the equator of the celestial sphere, but also in the entire region between the tropics, where the ecliptic ranges).

The poem itself, then, is a model of the world; not only in theme, in structure, too, it is a microcosm. If the first section of the poem treats God as source, origin of the world, the second, Soul as holding the world stable by its return, and the third, God as goal, it becomes important that the last line of the poem begins with principium, as the first begins with the O , now both a literal instance of the circularity that is the subject of the poem (and the shape of the poem) and an omega, a long O .^[42] For, as the last line shows, the poem is built on the idea of

God as both Alpha and Omega. Furthermore, at the end of line 27 we have te cernere finis; here at the end of the poem finis immediately precedes principium, as well as coming at the end of line 28 in terminus idem. The first and last words of the poem show a similar relation: omega (the end) and idem (the Same, i.e., God as the transcendent One, the origin); they even form a significant sentence, The goal is the Same. Like the universe, then, the poem can be regarded as an expansion of the tautology of its first and last terms.^[43]

A further aspect of the poem as microcosm is the order of the terms that represent its main focuses. It originates in God, his causality being enumerated in a pattern of descent, and then, beginning in line 10, the description of the world moves from elementa to anima to mens and animus. While there is a descent from the World-Soul to the lesser souls (animas vitasque minores, 18), this sequence of terms as a whole also ascends through the principles that constitute the world (matter, soul, mind). Lines 10–28, then, imitate both kinds of return: the return of souls and minds to the Creator in its explicit argument, the stable hierarchical structure of the world in the sequence of terminology. Even the grammatical case of the various nouns contributes: we begin with accusatives (elementa, animam, animas vitasque ) for the objects of creation but move to the dative (of the recipient of a gift—menti ) when the mind prays to be granted ascent, and it contributes a slight but effective nuance that when the mind fully comes into its own the term animus appears in a genitive (of possession— animi ).^[44]

The clearly controlled rhetorical movement of the poem is supported by the emphatic patterns of anaphora that differentiate its three parts: First, Oqui (line I), qui (line 2), quem (line 4); second, Tu (line 10), tu (line 13), tu (line 18); and third, Da (line 22), da (line 23, twice), dissice (line 25). The circular structure of the poem involves these terms also, for the anaphora tu (line 26), tu (line 27), te (line 27) leads to the last line of the poem and the idem, which, as we have seen, looks back to the O with which the poem began.^[45] The function of the pattern of anaphora is complex, for if there are six complete sentences in the poem (or seven, if one counts a full stop after mica in line 26), each is introduced by a monosyllable, O,tu, or da. In fact, this articulatory sequence itself forms a complete sentence: O tu, da, and each of the articulatory monosyllables (and each anaphoric sequence) expresses the nature of one of the traditional parts of the ancient hymn as discussed by Klingner: O [qui]—invocation (epikléseis ); tu [followed by verbs expressing efficient cause]—actions of the deity (aretalogía ); and da —petition (euchaí ).^[46]

It has long been recognized that "O qui perpetua" comes at the midpoint of the entire Consolation of Philosophy, marking the transition between a first half dominated by the traditional negative arguments of the tradition of consolatoria (the fleetingness of worldly goods and the inevitability of reverses of fortune) and a second half concerned with the positive theme of the intellectual ascent to the knowledge of God and his providence (Alfonsi 1942–43). There is an important analogy between this structure of the Consolatio as a whole and the fact that the first part of "O qui perpetua" mirrors the descent of the world from God; the second part, the return to God. Although the accents of "O qui perpetua" are exalted and entirely positive, it is precisely the principle of the descent of the divine power into multiplicity, necessarily entailing the principle of mutability—soon to be defined as the very essence of Fortuna—that accounts for Boethius's misfortune. Just as the principle of soul holds the poem and the cosmos together at their centers, "O qui perpetua" holds together the entire Consolatio; the five lines on the circling soul are the knot that binds all five books.^[47]

In "O qui perpetua" we have a particularly interesting instance of the Neoplatonic conflation of grammatical/rhetorical categories with metaphysical/religious ones. A chief informing principle of the poem is that imitation of the ascent in words is already a mode of practicing it. It would be misleading to suppose that the effect on the reader was thought to be merely vicarious. As Plato argued in the Timaeus, the philosophical ascent has as its goal the imitation of the harmonious cycles of the World-Soul, especially through contemplation of the heavenly cycles;^[48] the imitation of the cosmic cycles in words governed by numerical proportion was clearly intended to move the soul of the reader to an analog of the cosmic harmony, in a process that unified the soul both in its rational, conceptual theoria of the heavens (the explicit subject of the poem) and in its other motions as well (see Chamberlain 1976 80–84, 91–93). This is of course the intent of the Consolatio as a whole, the motions of the soul at its center controlling the large forms of the work as a whole.

Dante's Conception of the Form of the Canzone

Neoplatonic imitations of the motions of the cosmos such as the one just examined occur in texts that were indisputably known and studied

by Dante. As we shall see, as early as the Vita nuova Dante is striving to give the form of his canzoni a metaphysical (if not yet really cosmological) foundation. Our understanding of his conceptions is considerably enhanced by the fact that we have Dante's own discussion of the nature of the canzone in the De vulgari eloquentia,^[49] which he seems to have written—and abandoned—late in the first decade of the fourteenth century, the same time span that saw the writing of the ambitious Convivio, also abandoned, it seems, in favor of the Commedia. In the De vulgari eloquentia we will find strong confirmation of our claims for the nature of the new microcosmic poetics of the petrose.

The first book of the De vulgari eloquentia moves from general topics—the superiority of the vernacular to "grammar" (i.e., Latin and Greek), the origin of language, the confusion of tongues, the interrelation of the Romance languages—to the nature of the noblest Italian vernacular, the vulgare illustre latium (which Dante urges should be based on the language spoken at the most illustrious courts of Italy rather than on the language of any particular region or city). Dante apparently planned to treat the entire subject of eloquence in the vernacular, and he refers in several passages (1.xix.3, 2.iv.6, 2.viii.6) to a fourth book on the middle and low styles; but the work breaks off in the second book, in the midst of the section on the canzone, which follows a first section establishing that the vulgare illustre latium should be used only by the best poets writing on the noblest subjects in the noblest poetic forms.^[50]

One of Dante's aims is to claim for his own lyric poems the standing in the Italian tradition he felt they should have, and if in the course of his discussion he cites many passages from Provençal and Italian poets as representing an authoritative canon (the Italians feature Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and a few others), it is in order to set beside them the poems of his own for which he claims authority. The eleven references to his own poems are interestingly distributed, in fact, among the main categories of his serious lyric: there are three references to the Vita nuova, three to the petrose, one to the Convivio, three to uncollected doctrinal poems, and one to a lost poem. Three canzoni are singled out by being mentioned twice: "Amor, che movi tua virtù dal cielo" (Dante 1979a 174, 216), "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" (pp. 204, 218), and "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra" (pp. 212, 226). Significantly, the rime petrose are cited on an equal footing with "Donne ch'avete," the poem that Dante had identi-

fied as his first major achievement;^[51] they are proudly put forward as instances of the high canzone and are clearly regarded by Dante as embodying the thematic seriousness, as well as the technical mastery, required of the tragic style. They are in no sense being repudiated or apologized for; rather, one purpose of the treatise is to assert normative rather than eccentric status for them. We believe that Dante's references to them, when read in the full context of Book 2, support our readings. For this reason, Book 2 is included, with translation, in Appendix 4.

The section on the canzone, as it comes down to us, argues that the canzone is superior to the sonnet and the ballata, that it is the only form, in fact, worthy to treat the highest subjects (arms, love, virtue) in the noblest (the tragic ) style. It discusses the relation of the canzone to music, the appropriateness of the various verses (Dante excludes verses with even numbers of syllables and those with more than eleven or less than five, effectively limiting the high canzone to the hendecasyllable and the settenario ), the form of the canzone stanza, and the nature of the "tragic" style, covering both vocabulary and syntax. We will focus here on Dante's conception of the form of the canzone stanza; the important sections on the poetic qualities of "smooth" and "hairy" words will come under discussion especially in Chapter 5 (on "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro").

A particularly striking aspect of Dante's discussion of the canzone stanza is his use of apparently musical terminology, which has led to serious misunderstanding.^[52] All canzone stanzas, he asserts, are based on musical principles; each is "constructed to receive a certain melody" ("omnis stantia ad quandam odam recipiendam armonizata est," 2.x.2 [1979a 210]), even though it may never be set to music. In fact, in 2.viii Dante has established the independence, even the superiority, of the words of a canzone relative to the music. After asking whether the term canzone (cantio ) refers to the words or to the music, he decides in favor of the first possibility, never even mentioning that the term might refer to the union of words and music:

Nullus enim tibicen, vel organista, vel citharedus melodiam suam cantionem vocat, nisi in quantum nupta est alicui cantioni; sed armonizantes verba opera sua cantiones vocant, et etiam talia verba in cartulis absque prolatore iacentia cantiones vocamus. Et ideo cantio nichil aliud esse videtur quam actio completa dicentis verba modulationi armonizata.
(2.viii.5–6 [Dante 1979a 202])

For no wind player or organist or string player calls his melody a canzone except insofar as it is wedded to some canzone; but the harmonizers of

words do call their works canzoni, and such words lying on the page in the absence of a performer we still call canzoni. And thus it is clear that a canzone is nothing other than the action, complete in itself, of writing words harmonized with a view to musical setting.

Here Dante clearly is not thinking of the author of the words of a poem as also the composer of an eventual musical setting. Far from it: he thinks of the musical settings as produced by musicians: their melodies (the authorship is clearly assigned) are called canzoni only when "wedded" to texts that carry the name, marriages in which the texts are clearly thought of as the male partners, the melodies as the subordinate, female ones. Likewise, and significantly, there is no mention of the musical aspect in the formal definition of the canzone that sums up this chapter: "a yoking together of equal stanzas, in tragic style, without refrain, treating one thought" ("equalium stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica coniugatio," 2.viii.8 [1979a 204]).

Dante's discussion of the canzone stanza does agree with what is known today about troubadour musical practice,^[53] but he never even mentions the properly musical factors—intonation, melisma, high points, low points, final tones, cadences—that mark the structure of a melody as such; he never refers even to the concept of musical modes, only to repetition and change of melody (or lack of them). His reference to manuscripts of canzoni implies that it was normal for them to lack music: ("talia verba in cartulis absque prolatore iacentia cantiones vocamus" fails conspicuously to mention musical notation). The one representation Dante gives of the singing of one of his poems (Purgatorio 2.106–114) leaves us in the dark about who its composer may have been, though it makes it perfectly clear that it was not Dante. In fact in Italy there had almost certainly never been a direct connection between the writing of a canzone and the composition of its musical setting, such as there had been—in theory, at any rate—in Provence. No Italian melodies for canzoni survive from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the leading student of the subject, though strongly persuaded of the inseparability of canzone and music, concludes that the Italians always borrowed melodies (Monterosso 1970b 808). In any case, nowhere in the De vulgari eloquentia is there any indication that Dante planned to write about the rules of musical composition. He accurately characterizes Italian poetic practice; he tells us nothing about musical practice, and there is no reason to suppose he had any particular technical knowledge of music (his terms derive rather from the rhetorical tradition).

Dante's references to the musical structure of the canzone stanza, then, have quite another function. In the first place, they are to be taken as characterizations of the verbal patterns, the literary-rhetorical forms, de facto and, in his judgment, de jure established as appropriate for musical setting; they retain the literary awareness of a connection between lyric poetry and song. In the second place, they reflect his conviction that the composition of verse is inherently musical in a broader sense, since it is a fashioning of words governed by numerical proportion. For this reason, and also because verse involves the tempering of opposites, such as "combed" and "bristling" words (for discussion of these terms, see Chapter 5) or sweetness and harshness (2.vii), verse is in itself a valid imitation of the musica mundana, the harmony of the universe, and probably for Dante, because of its greater intellectuality, a higher one than music itself.^[54] We shall return to this point after our survey of Dante's discussion.

After having ranked the various verses in hierarchical order, led by the hendecasyllable, Dante turns to the canzone stanza. Just as the canzone includes the entire art of poetry, so also the canzone stanza, he says, includes the entire art of the canzone, the term stanza itself indicating the fact:

. . . hoc vocabulum per solius artis respectum inventum est, videlicet in quo tota cantionis ars esset contenta, illud diceretur stantia, hoc est mansio capax sive receptaculum totius artis. Nam quemadmodum cantio est gremium totius sententie, sic stantia totam artem ingremiat; nec licet aliquid artis sequentibus arrogare, sed solam artem antecedentis induere.
(2.ix.2 [1979a 206])

. . . this term stanza has been chosen for technical reasons exclusively, so that what contains the entire art of the canzone should be called stanza [room], that is, a capacious dwelling or receptacle for the entire craft. For just as the canzone is the container [literally, lap or womb] of the entire thought, so the stanza enfolds its entire technique; and successive stanzas are not permitted to introduce any new technical devices, but must clothe themselves in the devices set by the preceding.

In addition to speaking of the canzone and the stanza as "rooms" or "containers," Dante uses the revealing metaphor of a bundle of sticks, a fascis, in which the sticks correspond to the verses, the bindings to the factors—especially the grammatical constructions and the rhymes—that tie the lines together into a whole (2.v.8, 2.viii.1; cf. 2.iii.1, 2).^[55] The basic unit of construction is not so much the individual line (though

that must receive its due attention) as the group of lines. In this light Dante's description of the stanza form of the canzone is more comprehensible, particularly his assertion that the principal division among stanza types is between those with only one "melody" and those involving a transition from one "melody" to another, the latter always involving the repetition of musical phrases. In poetic terms, then, what Dante is referring to by "melody" is in fact a fixed bundle, a group of lines (of fixed length): the stanza is conceived as built out of a small number of such units (from one to five), depending on whether or not any are repeated within the stanza:

Quia quedam sunt sub una oda continua usque ad ultimum progressive, hoc est sine iteratione modulationis cuiusquam et sine diesi—et diesim dicimus deductionem vergentem de una oda in aliam (hanc voltam vocamus, cum vulgus alloquimur)—: et huiusmodi stantia usus est fere in omnibus cantionibus suis Arnaldus Danielis, et nos eum secuti sumus cum diximus "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra."
(2.x.2 [1979a 210])

For some are governed by one melody progressively from beginning to end, and this without repetition of any musical phrase and without diesis—diesis is the name we give to the passage from one melody to another (which we call volta when speaking to the unlearned).—Arnaut Daniel used this type of stanza in almost all of his canzoni, and we followed him when we wrote "To the short day and the great circle of shade."

In other words, the scheme of "Al poco giorno" would be ABCDEF (the lines are all hendecasyllables, hence the capital letters; the italics indicate rhyme-words rather than rhymes); the stanza has no division and no repetition (it presents the further peculiarity, not mentioned by Dante, of rhyming only between rather than within stanzas).

Other stanzas, however—most, in fact—have diesis and therefore at least one further subdivision. Dante's terminology for the subdivisions in the parts of the stanza is used today:

Quedam vero sunt diesim patientes: et diesis esse non potest, secundum quod eam appellamus, nisi reiteratio unius ode fiat, vel ante diesim, vel post, vel undique. Si ante diesim repetitio fiat, stantiam dicimus habere pedes; et duos habere decet, licet quandoque tres fiant, rarissime tamen. Si repetitio fiat post diesim, tunc dicimus stantiam habere versus. Si ante non fiat repetitio, stantiam dicimus habere frontem. Si post non fiat, dicimus habere sirma, sive caudam.
(2.x.3–4 [1979a 212])

Others, however, involve diesis: and there cannot be diesis, as we use the term, without the repetition of a melody, whether before the diesis, or after it, or both. If there is repetition before the diesis, we say that the stanza has pedes [feet]; and it is fitting for it to have two pedes, though occasionally it is given three, very rarely however. If repetition occurs after the diesis, then we say that the stanza has versus [turnings]. If there is none before, we say the stanza has afrons. If there is none after, we say it has a sirma, or tail.

In these terms the stanza of "Io son venuto al punto de la rota" has two pedes: ABC.ABC and a sirma: CDEeDFF (the last two letters are italicized to indicate repetition of the entire word). "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro" also has two pedes and a sirma: ABbC.ABbC: CDdEE. "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," however, has both pedes and versus: ABBC.ABBC:CDD.CEE; and "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna" is similar except that it has rhyme-words rather than rhymes: ABA.ACA:ADD.AEE (this stanza, however, would seem to depart from Dante's rule that any verse unrhymed in the first pes or versus must be answered in the second; he perhaps thought of the B and C rhyme-words, unanswered within the stanza, as instances of claves ["keys"] like those practiced by Gotto of Mantova, to whom he attributes the term in 2.xiii.5).^[56] Dante apparently wrote only one canzone with (undivided) frons, a lost poem he mentions in 2.xi.5. Dante also says (z.xiii.11) that the versus may be treated as separate from the concatenatio and concluding couplet;^[57] he wrote only one canzone of this type, "Io sento sì d'Amor la gran possanza." (See Figure 1 for these various stanzas; we have specified their rhyme schemes as well as line lengths for convenient reference, but Dante's discussion of the melodic divisions and subdivisions of the stanzas does not specify rhyme.)

Dante's statement that diesis requires the subdivision of one of the two parts of the stanza is not logically founded,^[58] though it does reflect Italian practice, which departs here from Provençal practice. We believe that the petrose reflect Dante's characteristic tendency to establish a metaphysical—cosmological—basis for this traditional practice.^[59]

As Dante points out, the rules of the canzone stanza offer the greatest possible freedom to the poet:

Vide ergo, lector, quanta licentia data sit cantiones poetantibus, et considera cuius rei causa tam largum arbitrium usus sibi asciverit; et si recto calle ratio te duxerit, videbis autoritatis dignitate sola quod dicimus esse concessum.
(2.X.5 [1979a 212])

See, therefore, reader, how much freedom is allowed to those who write canzoni, and consider for what reason custom has assigned to itself such large choice; and if reason leads along the right path, you will see that it is only on account of the dignity of authorship that this freedom has been granted.^[60]

It is in the disposition of the parts of the stanza, the establishing of the complex harmonies of proportion resulting from the interaction of the numbers of syllables and the number of lines from part to part, that the poet's mastery is especially shown; an entire chapter is devoted to this topic (2.xi), and another (2.xii) to the question of the proportion of hendecasyllables to settenarii. It is especially striking to the modern reader, who is used to thinking of stanzas in terms of rhyme schemes, that so far rhyme has not been referred to as in any way constitutive of the form of the stanza. Dante does think of rhyme as a unifying or binding factor, but he speaks of it as if, in the planning of the stanza, it were added to the lines after their number and order (and therefore the syntactic units they can hold) had been determined. He does not speak of it as a musical or melodic factor; there is no association between line endings and musical phrase endings (cadences or semicadences), and therefore the choice between alternate, equally permissible rhyme schemes does not affect the melodic structure of the stanza. Rather, Dante thinks of rhyme in rhetorical terms, as the rhetorical ornament of similiter desinens. In assigning the rhymes, the poet again has great freedom—virtually unlimited in frons and sirma, subject to a few rules in pedes and versus. He clearly thinks of a given "melodic" structure as capable of receiving a number of different rhyme schemes; given a first pes with the rhymes ABBC, for instance, the second pes could evidently be rhymed ABBC, ADDC, CDDA, BAAC, CAAB, and so forth; the first of these alternatives (i.e., ABBC.ABBC) is the scheme of the pedes in "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore." Dante's practice was mainly to have pedes that were duplicates in every respect, but the other alternatives are fully allowed for by his theory—as well as practiced by other poets.^[61]

There is no doubt some inconsistency in Dante's analysis, for if rhyme had no constitutive relation to stanza form, there would be no way of determining the division, or lack of it, of any canzone stanza whatever. In practice, and historically, rhyme is constitutive of stanza form in the vernacular, and it is precisely for that reason that Dante's exclusion of it from the numerical or spatial phase of stanza design is so significant. He is establishing ontological priorities among activities

Fig. 1. 
Terminology of the Canzone (through page 29 )

that could hardly be separated in practice, and his priorities privilege the abstract, intellectualistic aspects of poetic creation, those which most clearly support the analogy with God's creation of the world.

One of the most interesting aspects of the metaphors Dante uses for the construction of the canzone stanza is that they envisage the establishing of the stanzaic scheme as a kind of demarcation of space. This is

Fig 1
(continued)

perhaps more obvious in the metaphor of the room (which is, however, even more abstract than that of the bundle of sticks), since what is to occupy the room is the sententia of the poet and the provisions of his technique. The metaphor of the bundle of sticks is in a real sense closer to the literal, for if the sticks are the lines of verse that are bound together, then the bundle that is formed of these actual lines of verse literally does occupy space. The design of the bundle, then, which is prior to the writing of the lines, is the assignment of empty spaces; that is, the number of syllables in each line, the number of lines in each frons, pes, versus, or sirma, are the limits that demarcate the spaces. The activity of

Fig. 1.
(continued)

designing the stanza is thus a kind of geometry, an assigning of spatial determinations to what was initially undifferentiated. Dante's terminology, from coartare (2.iii.1) to mansio to fascis to modum quo ligare (2.iii.2) to conditor (2.iii.6) to comprehendere (2.iii.8) and contenere (2.ix.2), reflects this conception, which looks back to the figure of God the geometer delineating with his compasses the space within which the world will exist.^[62] It has not, we believe, been observed previously that Dante's other terms for the stanza, receptaculum and gremium, seem to be

Fig. 1.
(continued)

echoes of Plato's terms for space in the cosmogony of the Timaeus, as translated by Calcidius:

Quam igitur eius vim quamve esse naturam putandum est? Opinor, omnium quae gignuntur receptaculum est, quasi quaedam nutricula.
(Timaeus 46a [Plato 1962 46]; emphasis added)

What then shall we consider its power or its nature to be? I think that it is the receptacle of all things that come into being, as it were a kind of nurse.

Decet ergo facere comparationem similitudinemque impertiri illi quidem quod suscipit matris, at vero unde obvenit patris, illi autem naturae quae inter haec duo est prolis.
(Timaeus 50d [1962 48])

Let us use a comparison and say that that which receives is comparable to the mother, that which is the source to the father, and the nature that is between them to the child.

Calcidius's commentary introduces further terms:

Quae quidem corpora cum sola et per se ac sine suscipiente [ex] eadem essentia esse non possunt, quam modo matrem, alias nutriculam, inter-

dum totius generationis gremium, non numquam locum appellat quamque iuniores hylen, nos silvam vocamus.
(Plato 1962 277–278; emphasis added)

For since these bodies cannot exist without a recipient or by virtue of their essence alone, he speaks of the womb of all generation, which more recent writers call hylê and we call matter, sometimes as their mother, sometimes as their nurse, and frequently as space.

Although this theme is not made explicit in what survives of the De vulgari eloquentia, it is implied by its entire analysis; and, as we will try to show, the conception is the key to the form of the petrose, in which the principle of imitation of the musica mundana pervades the poems from the most abstract level of stanza design to theme and the shape of sententia (see Chapter 5, note 9).

The idea that human song imitates the cosmos is explicit in the Timaeus, of course, but Dante also knew of Plato's idea of the circling orbits of the planets as song (the idea later known as the music of the spheres) from Cicero's Dream of Scipio and Macrobius's Commentary on it, one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages, and a principal source of Dante's knowledge of Platonic and Neoplatonic lore. Macrobius explains that human music imitates the music of the cosmos even in its strophaic forms:

Hinc Plato in Re publica sua cum de sphaerarum caelestium volubilitate tractaret, singulas ait Sirenas singulis orbis insidere significans sphaerarum motu cantum numinibus exhiberi. nam Siren dea cantans intellectu valet. theologi quoque novem Musas octo sphaerarum musicos cantus et unam maximam concinentiam quae confit ex omnibus, esse voluerunt . . . ideo canere caelum etiam theologi comprobantes sonos musicos sacrificiis adhibuerunt, qui apud alios lyra vel cithara, apud nonnullos tibiis aliisve musicis instrumentis fieri solebant. in ipsis quoque hymnis deorum . . . per stropham rectus orbis stelliferi motus, per antistropham diversus vagarum regressus praedicaretur ex quibus duobus motibus primus in natura hymnus dicandus deo sumpsit exordium.
(Commentary 2.3.1–6; Macrobius 1970a 103–105)

Therefore Plato, when in his Republic he came to treat of the revolutions of the celestial spheres, said that a Siren was sitting on each orb, signifying that the motion of the spheres was to the gods audible music. For Siren in Greek means a singing goddess. The theologians have explained the nine Muses to be the musical song of the eight spheres plus the one

greater harmony that is made up of all of them . . . and so, the theologians agreeing that the heavens are singing, they included music in their sacrifices, which was customarily made with lyre or harp or in many cases with pipes and other musical instruments. In the very hymns to the gods they demonstrated out of what two motions that first hymn sung to God by nature took its beginning, . . . in the strophe the direct motion of the sphere of fixed stars, in the antistrophe the varying returnings of the planets.

Exactly what Macrobius may have had in mind in comparing the classical strophe to the motion of the Same, the antistrophe to the motion of the Other, is difficult to say, since we cannot determine what kinds of performance of choral odes may have been accessible to him. But for Dante the basis of the analogy lies in the parallel between the recurring form of the stanza and the motion of the heavens as cyclical, as well as in the notion that the stanza is made up of contrasting or opposing motions. For, returning to the De vulgari eloquentia, diesis divides the canzone stanza into two parts governed by different melodies, different formal patterns. Diesis thus involves a transition to difference. In the stanza with diesis as practiced by Dante, there are always two pedes: that is, the stanza proceeds through a subdivision involving repetition of an identical scheme (the pes ); at the diesis the identity is abandoned and the stanza enters into its other motion, usually involving many more rhymes. In the canzone as a whole, then, the entire complex system of cycles and subcycles is repeated in each stanza, the principle of identity (the motion of the Same) thus governing and carrying forward the whole.

The elements of stanza form are not of Dante's invention, but he was tireless in seeking theoretical foundations for his practice, even—or perhaps especially—when it was based on tradition. And the influence of Dante's practice (though perhaps not the influence of the De vulgari eloquentia, which remained virtually unknown until published by Trissino in the sixteenth century) reinforced certain structural possibilities at the expense of others. Dante's preferences were certainly based in part on the ontological and cosmological considerations we have outlined. After him it became normative for canzoni to consist exclusively of hendecasyllables and settenarii, for stanzas with diesis to have two pedes and a sirma, and for them to be joined by what Dante calls a pulcra concatenatio —a last element of stanza form which in the petrose has clear cosmological significance. In the De vulgari eloquentia he explains that

the poet is free to interweave rhymes from the first part into the second (cf., once more, the stanza of "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore"):

Et quidam diversos faciunt esse rithimos eorum que post diesim carmina sunt a rithimis eorum que sunt ante; quidam vero non sic, sed desinentias anterioris stantie inter postera carmina referentes intexunt. Sepissime tamen hoc fit in desinentia primi posteriorum, quam plerique rithimantur ei qui est priorum posterioris: quod non aliud esse videtur quam quedam ipsius stantie concatenatio pulcra.
(2.xiii.7 [Dante 1979a 228–230])

And some make the rhymes after the diesis different from those before it; others do not so, but interweave rhymes from the first part of the stanza with those of the second. But this is done most frequently with the first line of the second part, which many rhyme with the last line of the first part: and this seems to be none other than a lovely chaining together [concatenation] of the stanza.

The concatenation is a particular kind of echo effect, which Dante uses skillfully for a variety of purposes in different poems; significantly, in the context of the microcosmic concerns of the petrose Dante thinks of it as a kind of concrete linking of the two parts of the stanza. In the petrose, in a small way, it is like the point at which the Demiurge joins the circle of the Same to the circle of the Other.

Precious Stones

The idea of stone and especially of precious stone is naturally fundamental to the rime petrose, which develop as their central motif the idea that the lady is a petra: as hard as a stone, but also as beautiful and as powerful as a precious stone. In Dante's time, precious stones are believed to have powers deriving from the star or planet that fashioned them. As one might expect, this power is thought of as radiating invisibly from them; it is hidden, but its propagation is nonetheless thought of on the model of light. Dante writes of the influence of the donnapetra as if it were a kind of light proceeding in a straight line toward him from her, against which he has no shield; often it is implicitly or explicitly identified with the lady's gaze. In "Così nel mio parlar" the metaphorics of light is exchanged for that of combat: the lady's glance is like an arrow or a spear from afar; in the course of the poem this combat at a distance turns into hand-to-hand combat and finally into the act of love, which culminates in a return to the exchange of glances, this time the

prolonged—and ultimately peaceful—mutual gaze of the lovers, finally reconciled, at least in fantasy.

As one would expect, the petrose give special prominence to the term petra. Petra is the only generic substantive for stone (or precious stone) used in the entire series; such generic terms as gemma, sasso, scoglio, roccia, speco, and grotta never appear. The third petrosa, "Amor, tu vedi ben," in which petra is used as a rhyme-word thirteen times, deploys the full range of Dante's use of the term. It is used generically in lines 11, 12, 18, 41, and 57, with metaphorical reference to the lady in line 62. It is used of a rock or stone (the normal word would be sasso ) in line 16, and of precious stones in lines 19 and 26, with metaphorical reference to the lady in lines 22 and 56. It is used of a specific precious stone, crystal, in line 26. In "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra" there is a similar range of usage: generic in lines 5, 9, 18, 26, and 34 (metaphorically of the lady in line 5), and of precious stone (metaphorically, again) in line 39.^[63] In "Io son venuto" and "Così nel mio parlar," the term petra, in rhyme with itself, is used for the very first mention of the lady—in "Io son venuto," as the concluding rhyme-word of the first stanza; in "Così nel mio parlar," in the second line of the poem, in a rime riche with the verb impetra ("acquires" or "turns to stone").

For the most part, the names of specific stones or precious stones are not used in the rime petrose. The exceptions are marmo in "Io son venuto," the adjective cristallina in "Amor, tu vedi ben," and diaspro in "Così nel mio parlar." Vital to the meaning of the second petrosa, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," is the specific meaning concealed in the last, apparently generic, use of the term. In each of the petrose, then, one kind of stone is specified either explicitly or by the context. As we shall see, the stones are significantly related in terms of opacity versus transparency: crystal permitting all to be seen, but jasper, marble, and the hidden stone opaque in differing ways. They are also related rhetorically, tropically: marmo and diaspro are the proper specific terms for what they name; in cristallina petra the substantive is generic, the specification adjectival; in "Al poco giorno" the specification is suppressed, and the generic term is troped (but occulte, in a hidden way) to refer to the specific one.

Moreover, Dante draws widely on the lore of precious stones (and of stones in general). In the Middle Ages occult or hidden powers were attributed to precious stones, as well as to a number of metals. These beliefs no doubt had their origin in popular superstition, but in the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were shared by the educated; in fact they had received "scientific" explanation as a particular type of influence exerted by the heavenly bodies on sublunar substances. In other words, the "virtue" or hidden power of such a metal as gold was thought of as the concentrated power of the star, planet, or astronomical/astrological configuration that had brought it into being: in the case of gold, the sun.

In the universe as conceived by the more Aristotelian as well as the more Platonic thinkers of the high Middle Ages, the heavenly bodies governed all modes of change in the sublunar world, the realm of the elements and of things made out of them, including human bodies and temperaments.^[64] In the Commedia Dante was to assert that, other than the human soul, only three things had been directly created by God: the angels, the heavens, and first matter (Paradiso 29.25–36); the implication is that all else was brought into being by the heavens and their angelic movers.^[65] Aristotle had asserted (Meteorologica 3.4) that minerals—stones and metals—were formed from "exhalations" underground, which were then acted on by the force of the heavens. Aquinas's commentary on the passage explains:

Ita quod principium activum principale est virtus coelestis, quae dicitur virtus mineralis, a qua habent fossilia quaedam, puta lapides pretiosi, quandam virtutem coelestem et occultam: per quam occultas operationes vere exercent.
(Lectio 13 [Aquinas 1875 23:531])

Thus, because the heavenly bodies are the principal active principle, through a power of theirs known as the mineral-producing power, certain minerals, for instance precious stones, have a certain hidden power: through which they actually work hidden operations.

The supposed properties of precious stones were the subject of a large number of treatises of various lengths. The shorter and more typical form consists of a simple list of the properties of individual stones, often in alphabetical order. In many cases these go back to Pliny^[66] and Isidore of Seville's adaptation of him,^[67] as well as to treatises supposedly by Aristotle and Theophrastus; they exist in both prose and verse, in both Latin and vernacular versions.^[68] A particularly popular and widely read one, by the eleventh-century Marbodus, bishop of Rennes, discusses some two dozen precious stones in elegant and succinct Latin hexameters (PL 171; Riddle 1977).

The most famous literary account of the formation of precious stones is in Guido Guinizelli's canzone "Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore";^[69] we may call it the simple Aristotelian theory:

          Foco d'amore in gentil cor s'aprende 
come vertute in petra preziosa, 
     che da la stella valor no i discende 
anti che '1 sol la faccia gentil cosa; 
          poi che n'ha tratto fòre 
per sua forza lo sol ciò che li è vile, 
stella li dà valore: 
così lo cor ch'è fatto da natura 
asletto, pur, gentile, 
donna a guisa di stella lo 'nnamora. 
               (11–20 [Contini 1960 2:463])

The fire of love is lit in a noble heart as is the virtue in a precious stone, for the power does not descend into it from its star until the sun makes it a noble thing; after the sun has drawn from it all that is base, its star gives it power: so a heart that nature has made elect, pure, noble: a lady, like the star, fills it with love.

Here three phases are distinguished in the production of the precious stone: the existence of a suitable material, the preparation of the material by the sun, and the descent of virtue into the stone from the star—which clearly implies the idea of the imposition of a substantial form on the prepared material.^[70]

The next stanzas further develop the analogy between lover and gem, distinguishing between the proud, who are like the mud (opaque to the rays of the sun and thus incapable of being prepared to receive the valore from the star), and the noble, who are like clear water (transparent and capable of form). A further stanza compares the lover, who takes his cues for action from the starlike lady, to the angels taking intention from the sight of God and turning their heavens according to it.^[71]

It was generally agreed that the light of the heavenly bodies, along with their motion and their changing positions, was the major principle of becoming in the sublunar realm. Even Aquinas asserted that the light of each of the heavenly bodies differed formally (i.e., substantially) from that of every other; he believed each to be unique in its species because intended to exert a distinct effect on the sublunar:

Si autem lux primo die facta, intelligitur lux corporalis, oportet dicere quod lux primo die fuit producta secundum communem lucis naturam;

quarto autem die attributa est luminibus determinata virtus ad determinatos effectus, secundum quod videmus alios effectus habere radium solis, et alios radium lunae, et sic de aliis.
(Summa theologica Ia, quaest. 70, art. 1 [Aquinas 1875 1:437])^[72]

For if the light made on the first day is understood to be corporeal light, we must say that on the first day light was produced according to the common nature of light; but that on the fourth day the heavenly bodies received specific powers ordered toward specific effects, as we see that the rays of the sun have effects different from those of the moon, and so on.

The simple or naive form of this doctrine has the inconvenience of making the earthly material entirely passive, attributing all imposition of form to the direct agency of the heavenly bodies (thus violating Aristotle's principle of indwelling causes).^[73] An extreme version is the following by the thirteenth-century Polish optical theorist Witelo, a follower of Albertus Magnus, in the dedication of his optical treatise to William of Moerbeck (Aquinas's associate and one of the most distinguished translators of the century):

Est enim lumen supremarum formarum corporalium diffusio per naturam corporalis formae materiis inferiorum corporum se applicans, et secum delatas formas divinorum et individualium artificum per medium divisibilem caducis corporibus imprimens, suique cum illis incorporatione novas semper formas specificas aut individuas producens, in quibus resultat per actum luminis divinum artificium tam motorum orbium quam moventium virtutum.
([Witelo] 1535 fol. 1)^[74]

For the light of the forms of the heavenly bodies is the diffusion through nature of the corporeal forms that apply themselves to the material of sublunar bodies, and, having brought down the forms of the divine individual makers into the mode of the divisible and imprinting them on bodies that pass away, through its incorporation with them it produces ever new specific or individual forms, in which we can see, because of the active light, the divine workmanship both of the heavenly spheres and of the intelligences that move them.

Witelo is thinking of the light of the stars and planets (especially, of course, that of the sun) as actually carrying down from above and imprinting on the elements the substantial forms they bear. Somehow the visible forms of things were transmitted by light through the air. Witelo is here expressing a view close to Robert Grosseteste's "metaphysics of

light"—by which he was influenced—a view that helps explain the intensity with which optics was studied in this period.^[75]

For many reasons, the most interesting medieval mineralogical treatise is the Mineralium liber by Albertus Magnus (1890–99 5:1–55),^[76] which has been translated and annotated by Dorothy Wyckoff (1967).^[77] As Bruno Nardi established, in both the Convivio and the Commedia Albert is a major influence on Dante's metaphysical and cosmological ideas;^[78] whether or not Dante knew the Mineralium liber, its positions are in most respects similar to those taken in others of Albert's works that Dante did know.^[79] Albert seeks to give an exhaustive philosophical-scientific account of the formation and virtues of stones, precious stones, engraved gems, and metals. After his general discussions, he includes alphabetically arranged lists that subsume most of the "information" contained in earlier lapidaries. Albert used a fairly wide variety of sources;^[80] he also adds comments of his own and refers frequently to his own experience.

All stones, Albert says, are formed from either earth or water: from earth by conglutinatio, from water by congelatio. Transparent stones are a kind of mean between earth and water, retaining qualities of each. Albert thinks of the four elements as embodiments of the basic qualities: hot, cold, wet, dry. The transformation of one element into another involves its gradual taking on of the other's properties. Thus if water is cold and wet, earth cold and dry, he finds it logical to think of stones as formed by water's gradually taking on the dryness of earth, which accounts for its solidity:

Cum enim terra ad se convertit aquam, primo virtutes terrae intrant substantiam, et alterant eam, et aquae quasi dominantes tenent eam: et tunc incipit aqua stare et terminari, et tamen adhuc perspicuitatem non omittit, et tunc deinde corrumpitur, et transit in terram, et accipit terrae qualitates, quae sunt opacum siccum.
(Albertus Magnus 1890–99 5: 12)

For when Earth converts Water into [Earth], first of all the power of Earth enters into the substance [of Water] and alters it, but that of Water, still dominant, contains it; then the Water begins to grow firm and be limited by a boundary, although as yet it does not lose its transparency; and then finally it is destroyed and passes into Earth, and takes on the qualities of Earth, opacity and dryness.
(Albertus Magnus 1967 33; translation revised)

Thus if the process is fixated while the material still retains the transparency of water, we have crystal and other transparent stones. The influence of external cold is thought of as a kind of pressure:

In montibus altissimis frigiditas est perpetua, quae est excellens . . . quae frigiditas exprimendo humidum apprehendit aquam a nivibus congelatam, et inducit in eam proprietates sicci, sicut est naturae frigiditatis excellentis: et ex illo sicco coagulat glaciem in crystallum vel alium lapidem perspicuum.
(1890–99 5:12; emphasis added)

In very high mountains there is perpetual and extreme cold . . . And this cold, by squeezing out the moisture, attacks the Water frozen by the snows, and induces in it the properties of dryness—for this is the nature of extreme cold—and then, out of that dryness, solidifies the ice into crystal or some other transparent stone.
(1967 32; translation slightly revised)

This is very close in conception to Seneca's description of the formation of crystal:

Aqua enim caelestis minimum in se terreni habens, cum induruit longioris frigoris pertinacia spissatur magis ac magis, donec omni aere excluso in se tota compressa est, et umor qui fuerat lapis effectus est.^[81]

For when water from heaven, that has very little of earth in it, has hardened through the persistence of long cold, it grows thicker and thicker, until, all the air having been expelled, it is entirely compressed into itself, and what was liquid has become a stone.

Seneca attributes the transparency of crystal to the purity of the air from which the water itself had been formed. Albert follows Aristotle's notion of transparency as a quality supremely possessed by the heavenly spheres:

Aliquando autem vis terrea apprehendit aquam ita quod frigidum iam exprimit humidum, et siccum terminat materia in seipsa, manente aquae transparentia. Pervietas enim aquae non convenit eidem in quantum est frigidum vel humidum vel utramque habens qualitatem, sed in quantum convenit cum coelesti corpore.
(1890–99 5:13)

Sometimes, too, an earthly force attacks Water in such a way that cold expels its moisture, and dryness causes it to take on the shape of a solid, although the transparency of the Water remains unchanged. For the

clearness of Water does not depend on how much it contains of the qualities of cold or moisture, or both, but upon how much it has in common with the substance of the heavens [Ether].
(1967 34)

Albert criticizes four theories of the production of stones in general: three of them are erroneous—(1) that they are formed by volcanic heat; (2) that they are produced by a soul of the stone; (3) that no substantial forms are produced—and the fourth is too general (1.1.4; 1890–99 5:6–7). The same pattern appears in his critique of the theories of the "virtues" of precious stones; three are erroneous—(1) that they derive from the elements that compose the stones; (2) that in them the supernal idea or form is less submerged in matter than in other objects; (3) that they are produced by the imaginings of the movers of the spheres (i.e., the angelic intelligences)—and the fourth is too general. The fourth, general cause in each case is the influence of the heavenly bodies.

On the powers of precious stones, Albert explains, "Hermes"^[82] and his followers believed

omnium inferiorum virtutes esse in stellis et imaginibus coelorum. Omnes autem virtutes infundi in inferioribus omnibus per circulum Alaur, quem primum circulum imaginum coelestium esse dicebant. Has autem virtutes descendere in res naturae nobiliter et ignobiliter. Nobiliter autem quando materiae recipientes has virtutes, fuerint superioribus imaginibus similes in lumine et perspicuitate. Ignobiliter autem, quando materiae fuerint confusae et foetulentae, in qua quasi opprimitur virtus coelestis. Haec igitur causam isti dicunt, quoniam lapides pretiosi prae aliis habent mirabiles virtutes: quia videlicet in substantia magis simulantur superioribus, et in lumine et perspicuitate: propter quod a quibusdam eorum stellae elementales esse dicuntur lapides pretiosi.
(Mineralium liber 2.1.2 [1890–99 5:26])

that all the powers of sublunar things are in the stars and constellations. For all powers are poured into sublunar things by the circle Alaur, which they said was the first circle of constellations, but they descend into natural things either nobly or basely: nobly when the materials that receive them are more similar to the heavenly bodies in brightness and transparency, basely when the materials are confused and muddy, in which the heavenly virtue is almost drowned. And this is the reason, they say, why precious stones have marvelous powers beyond other things, for they are in substance more like the heavenly bodies in brightness and trans-

parency, for which reason they are called by some "elemental stars" [i.e., stars made from the four elements, not from the "fifth essence"].
(our translation)

Except that it does not mention the phase in which the material is prepared, this theory is exactly the one implied by Guinizelli's analogy. Indeed, we have just seen that Albert attributes the transparency of certain stones precisely to their similarity to the heavens. He does not deny this theory, he regards it as too general:

hic non quaerimus causas agentes et moventes primas, quae forte sunt stellae et stellarum virtutes et dispositiones: hoc enim alterius scientiae proprium est: sed quaerimus causas efficientes proximas, quae in materia existentes materiam transmutant.
(Mineralium liber 1.1.4 [1890–99 5:6])

Here we are not inquiring into the first active and moving causes, which may be the stars and the virtues and positions of the stars, for this is the subject matter proper to another science; but we are inquiring into the proximate efficient causes that, existing in matter, transmute matter.

Albert's explanation is elaborate; the vis mineralis, he argues, comes into being only where the appropriate materials exist in a place naturally apt to produce minerals,^[83] and it functions in a way strictly analogous to that of the vis formativa in the father's seed as it shapes the embryo in the womb:^[84]

Dicimus igitur quod sicut in semine animalis quod est superfluum nutrimenti, descendit a vasis seminariis vis formativa animalis, quae format et efficit animal, et est in semine per modum illum quo artifex est in artificiato quod facit per artem: sic est etiam in materia aptata lapidibus virtus formans et efficiens lapides et producens ad formam lapidis hujus vel illius . . . cum materia sicci passi ab humido unctuoso, vel materia humidi passi, aptatur lapidi a sicco terrestri, et generatur in ipsa ex virtute stellarum et loci . . . virtus formativa lapidis, sicut generativa in semine a testiculis quando semen fluerit attractum ad vasa seminaria, et unaquaque materia secundum speciem propria virtus. Et hoc est quod dicit Plato, secundum merita materiae infunduntur virtutes caelestes.
(Mineralium liber 1.1.4 [1890–99 5:7])

We say, therefore, that as in the seed of an animal, which is superfluous food, there descends from the seminal vessels the animal formative power, which forms and fashions the animal, and which is in the seed in the mode by which the craftsman is in the object shaped by his craft: so also

in materials made suitable to be stones there is a power that forms and fashions the stones and produces them in the form of this or that particular stone . . . when there is dry matter that has undergone the action of oily moisture, or moist matter that has been acted on [by dry], and there is generated in it, out of the power of the stars and of the place . . . a power that forms stones, as the generative [power] descends into the seed from the testicles when it is attracted to the seminal vessels, and in each particular material its own power according to its species. And this is what Plato says: the celestial powers are infused according to the merit of the material.
(our translation)

Where there is suitable material in a suitable place, then, the stars infuse the vis mineralis, which operates purposefully (as an entelechy) through the hot and cold of the elements as through tools. It prepares the materials and imposes on them the substantial form of the stone. Albert insists that the vis mineralis is infused into the matter, operates within it, and eventually becomes the substantial form of the stone and thus, in the case of a precious stone, the source of its power (1890–99 5:11, 26).

Striking in Albert's theory is the projection onto the cosmic scale of the principles of sexual reproduction, the influence of the heavens being parallel to the pouring of seed into the womb of the earth. In essence, this is a version of the ancient myth of the hieròs gamós, the marriage of sky and earth. At another level it is interesting as an effort to devise a theory that will give a certain autonomy to earthly process, thought of as initiated by the first causes but proceeding in some sense on its own.^[85]

When he attempts to answer the question of why some places and not others are capable of producing minerals, Albert produces a clear statement of an analogy—very important for our understanding of the petrose —between the influence of the stars and the activity of human craftsmen:

. . . stellae qualitate et lumine et situ et motu movent et ordinant mundum secundum omnem materiam et locum generabilium et corruptibilium. Virtus autem sic determinata a stellis infunditur loco generationis unicuique rei, et modo quo in naturis locorum determinatum est. Haec enim virtus et elementi et elementati omnis est productiva et generativa.

Et est ista virtus loci ex tribus virtutibus congregata, quarum una est virtus motoris orbis moti. Secunda est virtus orbis moti cum omnibus

partibus suis et figuris partium quae resultant ex situ partium diversimodi se respicientium propter multimodam motorum velocitatem et tarditatem. Tertia autem est virtus elementaris. . . . Est autem prima harum virtutum ut forma dirigens et formans omne quod generatur, sicut virtus artis ad materiam artificiati se habet. Et secunda est sicut operatio manus. Et tertia sicut operatio instrumenti quod manu movetur et dirigitur ad finem inceptum ab artifice. Et ideo dixit Aristoteles quod omne opus naturae est opus intelligentiae. Locus enim recipit has virtutes, sicut matrix recipit virtutem formativam embrionis. Haec igitur virtus determinata ad lapidum generationem, in materia terrestri vel aquea est, in qua conveniunt omnia loca in quibus lapides generantur.
(1890–99 5: 11)

. . . the stars, by their [differences in] quality, light, position, and motion, move and order the world [by influencing] the matter and place of everything that can be generated or corrupted. The power of the stars, determined in this way, is poured into the place of the generation proper to each single thing, as has been explained in The Nature of Places. For this power generates and produces both the elements and elemented things.

The power of a place, then, is a combination of three [powers]. One of these is the power of the Mover that moves the sphere. The second is the power of the sphere that is moved, with all its parts, and the figures that result from the varying position of the parts with respect to each other as they move more rapidly or more slowly. The third is the power of the elements. . . . Now the first of these powers, since it is the form that shapes everything that is generated, is related to the matter of the thing made as is the virtue of art. And the second is related to it as is the operation of the hand. And the third corresponds to the operation of a tool that is moved by the hand and directed to the end conceived by the artisan. And therefore Aristotle said that every work of nature is a work of Intelligence: for the place receives these powers just as the womb receives the power that forms the embryo. This power, then, determined to the generation of stones, is in the earthy or watery materials which are common to all places where stones are generated.
(1967 29–30)^[86]

Albert was extremely fond of this analogy between human art and the operation of the heavens, and it occurs frequently in his works.^[87] Here the heavenly—angelic—intelligence (the "Mover") takes its idea from the eternal patterns of things in the mind of God, and through a power that is analogous to the virtus or habitus of art in human beings it directs the motion of the sphere, compared in its turn to the motion of the hand of a human artist. The elemental powers—the qualities hot, cold, dry, and wet—are like tools held by the hand because they act on the matter that is being shaped, as we have seen: "primo virtutes terrae

intrant substantiam [aquae]" (1890–99 5:12).^[88] The analogy between the heavenly bodies and the human craftsman necessarily involves the converse: that the process whereby the human artist shapes his material is like the shaping influence of the revolving heavens. As we have already suggested, this is one of the fundamental principles of Dante's new poetics. Also, the petrose ask what kind of causality can be exerted by human art—whether in the shaping of the artifact or through the shaped object itself.^[89]

The connection of human art with the causality of the heavens is more than just an analogy, for human intelligence and the capacity for artistic creation are themselves to some extent produced by the influence of the stars and planets in the horoscope of the individual; Dante unmistakably takes this view in his invocation of the stars of Gemini in Paradiso 22.^[90] Albert and Thomas both insist that human actions are not determined by the stars; still, the passage in which Aquinas discusses the indirect influence of the stars on the mind is very revealing:

Sciendum est tamen quod, licet corpora coelestia directe intelligentiae nostrae causae esse non possint, aliquid tamen ad hoc operantur indirecte. Licet enim intellectus non sit virtus corporea, tamen in nobis intellectus operatio compleri non potest sine operatione virtutum corporearum, quae sunt imaginatio, et vis memorativa, et cogitativa . . . ; et inde est quod, impeditis harum virtutum operationibus propter aliquam indispositionem corporis, impeditur operatio intellectus, sicut patet in phreneticis et lethargicis et aliis hujusmodi; et propter hoc etiam bonitas dispositionis corporis humani facit aptum ad bene intelligendum, in quantum ex hoc praedictae vires fortiores existunt; unde dicitur in secundo De anima, c. ix, quod "molles carne aptos mente videmus."

Dispositio autem corporis humani subiacet coelestibus virtutibus. . . . Ideo indirecte corpora coelestia ad bonitatem operantur; et sic, sicut medici possunt iudicare de bonitate intellectus ex corporis complexione, sicut ex dispositione proxima, ita astrologus ex motibus coelestibus sicut ex causa remota talis dispositionis. Et per hunc modum potest verificari quod Ptolomaeus in Centiloquio dicit: "Quum fuerit Mercurius in nativitate alicujus, in aliqua domorum Saturni, et ipse fortis in esse suo, dat bonitatem intelligentiae medullitus in rebus."
(Summa contra Gentiles 3.84 [Aquinas 1875 12:359]; see Nardi 1967a 71)

However, we should note that, though celestial bodies cannot be directly the causes of our understanding, they may do something indirectly in regard to it. For although the understanding is not a corporeal power, the operation of understanding cannot be accomplished in us without the operation of corporeal powers: that is, the imagination, the power of

memory, and the cogitative power. . . . And as a result, if the operations of these powers are blocked by some indisposition of the body, the operation of the intellect is impeded, as is evident in demented and sleeping persons, and in others similarly affected. And that is why even the good disposition of the human body makes one able to understand well, for, as a result of this, the aforesaid powers are in a stronger condition. Thus it is stated in De anima 2.9 that "we observe that men with soft flesh are well endowed mentally."

Now the condition of the human body is subject to the influence of the celestial motions. . . . So, the celestial bodies act indirectly on the good condition of understanding. Thus, just as physicians may judge the goodness of an intellect from the condition of its body, as from a proximate cause, so also an astrologer may judge from the celestial motions, as from a remote cause. And in this way can come true what Ptolemy wrote in the Centiloquium, "When Mercury is in the nativity of some one, in a house of Saturn, and is strong in his being, he gives a goodness of intelligence that sees deeply into things."
(Aquinas 1956 2:17–18; translation altered)

Dante states this doctrine explicitly in Book 4, chapter 2, of the Convivio:

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. Ché altrimenti è disposta la terra nel principio de la primavera a ricevere in sé la informazione de l'erbe e de li fiori, e altrimenti lo verno; e altrimenti è disposta una stagione a ricevere lo seme che un'altra; e così la nostra mente, in quanto ella è fondata sopra la complessione del corpo, che a seguitare la circulazione del cielo altrimenti è disposta a un tempo e altrimenti a un altro.^[91]

One of the most curious parts of Albertus Magnus's treatise on minerals is his discussion of the powers possessed by precious stones engraved with images (sigilla )—usually, in his notion, astrological images,^[92] such as representations of constellations (we have seen him use the term figura for constellations, and there is no question that he thinks of them as a kind of picture outlined by the stars). He believes that the stars themselves sometimes imprint such images on stones and discusses the phenomenon at length, deciding that it is simply a special case of the imposition of form by the influence of the heavens.

Albert's explanation of the fact (as he regards it) that stones engraved by men have occult powers is most interesting. The typical case is a seal representing a constellation: it must be carved at the time the constel-

lation is in force, and usually it will possess virtue only when the astrological situation of its carving is repeated.^[93] Both in the intention of the carver and in the form he imposes on the stone, the constellation is the cause of the image, and it naturally will exert its influence through the human agency (carving) most fully when it is astrologically in power. The philosophical basis for this astounding notion is the doctrine of the transitivity of causal relations:

Non autem dubitandum, quin omne quod est causa aliquo modo causae, est etiam aliquo modo causa causati. Si igitur vis et afflatus siderum influit quandam causalitatem artis in artifice, pro certo nisi impediatur, influet omnibus operibus artis aliquid suae virtutis.
(Albertus Magnus 1890–99 5:51)

And it is not to be doubted that everything that is somehow the cause of a thing is also somehow the cause of whatever results. If, then, the force and inspiration of the stars pour some influence causing art into the artisan, certainly, unless it is somehow prevented, it will pour something of its power into all the works of the art.
(Albertus Magnus 1967 135; translation revised)

Albertus, Aquinas, and Dante all agree that, to the extent that artistic creation draws on fantasy, memory, and the power of association (vis cogitativa ), the three bodily faculties listed by Aquinas, it is affected by the influence of the heavenly bodies. The influence of the heavens, moreover, does not end at birth; it extends not only to the artist's basic complexion or constitution, but also to the daily, weekly, and seasonal variations of his bodily state as affected by the heavens.

As we shall see, these astrological doctrines of the influence of the heavens in shaping sublunar things, of the transitivity of heavenly causality through such privileged objects as precious stones, of the direct influence, both at birth and from day to day, of the heavens on the human temperament (including faculties directly involved in all artistic creation), and of the analogy between the influence of the heavens and the shaping activities of human craftsmen are all reflected in the rime petrose. In fact, it is not going too far to say that the petrose cannot be understood without taking these doctrines into account.

The Problematic of the Petrose

The petrose grow out of the rich traditions which we have sketched thus far, to which we will frequently refer in the chapters that follow. Our

purpose is more than simply to recover "medieval" meanings of the poems for which modern readers need annotation. A sense of the intellectual backgrounds of the poems deepens our sense of the fundamental issues that are at stake, issues that Dante increasingly realized were for him inherent in the very activity of writing poetry. To a surprising degree, the petrose show Dante grappling with problems that anticipate those of the Commedia, particularly the need to understand and represent as fully as possible his own nature in its relation to the universe as a whole and—agonizingly—the mutual alienation between the poet and those he most wishes to reach: in the petrose, the lady; in the Commedia, the Florentines.

First, two preliminary questions. The first regards the dramatic situation implied by the poems: how long has the lover been wooing the lady? Already in the first poem, "Io son venuto al punto de la rota," it is clearly implied that the speaker's love is no recent phenomenon, no new emotion born in the winter being described, for, as the central stanza puts it, although all animals' spirits are deadened by the cold, his love is increased ("e il mio [spirito] più d'amor porta"). In other words, his love preexisted the winter and is now increasing. The second poem, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," intimates the return of spring, for the lady is said to be frozen in both seasons (though it is not completely clear whether the spring in question is the one that preceded the winter of "Io son venuto"—perhaps the time of his falling in love—or the one that follows it). Similarly, the third poem in the series, "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," refers to the lady's disdain for love as existing "in all seasons" (line 2).

Now these indications are fairly general: they do not permit the establishment of a chronology of events, for no specific events are related. Their function would seem to be exclusively that of establishing, as the basic situation, the idea that the speaker's love for the lady has existed, and that the lady has been rejecting his advances, for an extended though unspecified period of time, perhaps as much as a year. In fact, the poems do not really imply that they are the product of successive occasions; rather, all spring from the same ideal present: they are successive confrontations of a single problem, and they rest on a coherent analysis of it.^[94]

Second, is the love celebrated in the petrose to be thought of as adulterous? One should consider that none of Dante's works makes the slightest reference to his marriage. For example, the issue of adultery is excluded

from the Vita nuova partly by the religious theme of the book and its insistence (beginning in chapter 2) that sensuality played no part in the love that Beatrice inspired. More fundamentally, Dante's marriage is not part of the fictional situation; within the Vita nuova —in the fiction of the book—it simply does not exist. In fact, it had to be rigorously excluded, unless the issue of adultery was to become explicitly a theme. Those who observe Dante in church (chapter 5) and the ladies who question him about the purpose of his love for Beatrice (chapter 18) are not thinking of him as a married man with family responsibilities (as he in fact was), and if Beatrice had so regarded him she would surely have snubbed him much sooner! In other words, although we do not always reflect on the fact as we read, the Vita nuova must be read as if Dante had not been married. To be sure, there must have been a relation between the realities of Dante's marriage and the fictions of the Vita nuova, almost certainly a deeply significant one; but we cannot know it.

It is important to see that the theme of adultery as an issue is also rigorously excluded from the petrose, although the same is not true of the theme of sexuality. It is not that the petrose assert the superiority of a lover's claim to a husband's, a frequent theme in the Provençal and Old French tradition; rather, the issue is simply excluded. Thus it will not do to assume that the love represented in the petrose is adulterous. There is nothing in the poems to justify the assertion, which could only be made on the basis of some quite unjustifiable appeal to the facts of Dante's biography. Married or not, Dante was perfectly capable of writing poems about nonadulterous love, as the Vita nuova shows. For that matter, if biography is to enter the interpretation of the petrose, it would be quite as legitimate to see them as about some real or imagined phase of Dante's relationship with his wife, who at least had a stunningly appropriate name: Gemma (a word that, both as a name and as a common noun, is absent from the poems). By the same token, it seems to us a serious mistake for modern readers to label the sexuality of the petrose as obviously reprehensible. The complexity of the poems can only emerge if we resist the temptation of a priori judgments.

The problematic that emerges from the poems can be set forth as follows: The goal the lover aims for is given in the last stanza of the last of the poems, "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro":

          Ancor ne li occhi, ond'escon le faville 
che m'infiammano il cor, ch'io porto anciso, 
guarderei presso e fiso

per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face; 
e poi le renderei con amor pace. 
          (76–80)

In other words, the imagined goal of the lover, represented as a prolonged mutual gaze (itself the culmination of the act of love), is complete reciprocity and a complete communion of intersubjectivity. The actual situation, however, is the opposite of mutual and peaceful intersubjectivity, for the lady utterly refuses the lover's claims on her attention: lover and lady are antagonists, each actively denying the subjectivity of the other. The poems are represented as the lover's effort to express and communicate the nature of his predicament, as well as to work through it. The traditional status of love poems—that they are addressed to, and woo, the lady (this becomes explicit in the last poem)—gives us the basis of the identity of the erotic problem with the poetic one, as we shall see.

Since the lover is blocked in his wooing of the lady, because she refuses and flees his love (and the petrose represent the refusal as much more radical and thorough than is customary in the troubadour and Italian traditions), the lover is in a fundamental sense alone with his desire, and he must find a way to deal with it. The petrose represent him, as it were, alone in the cosmos, confronting with his individual faculties a whole array of negative forces. The difficulty of his situation is represented at one level by the winter that is the scene of the first and third poems; yet the winter is itself the product of cosmic forces, the power of the stars. The forces arrayed against the lover range from the lady's hostility to the influence of the stars (a kind of conspiracy of the entire cosmos against him) to the destructive forces inherent in his own nature (traceable to his nativity and strongly affected by astrological influence). Against these forces the lover strives for a positive victory, and the analysis and representation of the negative forces is essential to the enterprise. The new microcosmic poetics, in short, is represented as a determined—and hopeful—response to the difficulty of the lover's situation.

This poetics, then, represents the struggle between positive and negative aspects of the poet-lover's situation and of his nature. Thus it requires a certain deliberate self-division by which the poet pits the two sides of his nature against each other. He understands these two sides in terms of the Platonic analogy between the two "motions" of the World-Soul—called by Plato the motions of the Same and the Other—and the two basic motions of the human soul, roughly identifiable with rational

and irrational.^[95] Each of the petrose is a phase of the effort to deal with negativity by allowing it scope, within the higher coherence of the poet-lover as ultimately master of himself and confident of the positive value of his love. His love is not merely irrational desire, but it does include that component (the Other, the irrational)—ultimately, he hopes, governed and contained, like the cosmos, by the Same. In fact, each successive petrosa optimistically allows greater scope to the negative, taking greater and greater risks, both psychological and artistic.

In the last poem of the sequence the negative motives—anger, frustration, violence, and self-destructiveness—must be confronted directly. "Così nel mio parlar" has two phases: a katabasis involving successive retreats into inner allegorical stages, in which the violence is increasingly identified as within the lover himself, and an anabasis in which the violence is imagined as redirected outward, turned into "playful" erotic violence, and gradually disarmed, so that the poem culminates in the prolonged gaze of mutual acceptance and reconciliation. As a symbolic or imagined working through of the problem (thus at the imaginative level a kind of victory over it), these are phases of repeated (self-)destructive division overcome, in intention at least, by reintegration.

In terms of the drama between the lover and the lady, the sequence can of course have no solution other than a fantasy of reconciliation. The violence could be fully disarmed only in a reciprocal relation in which the lady would be the match of the lover in every respect. And this leads close to the core of the problem. The adoption of the microcosmic poetics—the very effort to represent in all its complexity the lover's relation to the cosmos as a whole—in itself constitutes simultaneously the choice of a certain solitude and the effort to break out of that solitude. In terms of the tradition of love poetry, this solitude is supposed to be merely provisional, a temporary deferral. But we can already see in the petrose how powerful in Dante is the sense—and to some extent the choice—of isolation within the cosmos created by poetry, how violent the need for living communication with the world. The erotic and the poetic problematics are identical: both include the paradox that the difficulty of eliciting response requires the elaboration of the poetry, but the elaboration of the poetry requires the indefinite deferral of direct interaction and therefore of response. There is also the (unanswerable) question of to what degree both aspects of the lover's situation—his impasse with the lady and his isolation within the poetic cosmos—are expressions of sexual fear.

In modern terms, of course, one must be struck by the absence of any but a mythicized representation of the psychology of the lady. Her refusal of the lover is depicted as so absolute that the possibility that the lover might do well to try to understand the Other better is simply excluded. There is no questioning of the status of the male subject as such: obviously Dante lived in an age when the politics of gender were far from understood. They provide the background against which the potential tragedy of the impasse must be seen. Though his insights were partial, Dante had a strong intuition into what linked his isolation, his monologism, his violent anger, and the traditions of courtly love song. The poem in which he is finally able to speak his anger at the lack of true reciprocity between the sexes, though this anger takes a most disturbing form, is a landmark in the history of love poetry.

Moreover, the petrose show us one of the fundamental structures of the Commedia. To be sure, the scope of the masterpiece is immeasurably greater, including all of history as well as the entire cosmos, setting forth a profoundly original and intensely meditated analysis of the social and spiritual evils that plagued the world, as well as a fully elaborated philosophical position and a religious quest that has often been mistaken for practicing mysticism. An important core of the situation of the Commedia, however, is closely parallel to that of the petrose. First, like the petrose, the Commedia represents—and in fact springs from—a situation in the "real" world in which the speaker is almost totally blocked. In the Commedia this obstruction has two main dimensions. First, whatever the date at which the Commedia was first planned and its composition begun, a very large portion of it was written after 1313,^[96] the year of the death of the emperor Henry VII, to whom Dante had looked as the savior of the political situation in Italy and the rest of Europe. From Dante's point of view, as countless passages in the Commedia and other works make clear, the dominant political tendencies of his day—especially the weakness of the Empire, the rise of the French crown, and the involvement of the papacy in temporal affairs (not to mention its corruption and the corruption of the monastic and religious orders)—were leading Florence, Italy, and the whole of Europe to disaster. Dante had worked extremely hard to further the success of Henry's effort to gain control of Italy. In the Commedia, he is divinely charged to return to the world and write the poem; the poem thus becomes a divine intervention in history, represented in the cantos of the

sun and Mars (Paradiso 10–17) as parallel to the intervention at a similar moment of crisis that inspired the foundation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. In other words, the writing of the Commedia is, as a political act, in large measure the expression of Dante's despair at the political realities and the normal avenues of political action.

The second way in which the poet is blocked in the outside world—no less important than the first—is the fact that he is exiled from his native city and that his fellow citizens have repeatedly demonstrated a literally murderous hostility toward him. Significantly, in the Commedia the city of Florence is personified as a woman: in one particularly revealing passage, as a bride (Paradiso 15.97–102), in another as like Phaedra (Paradiso 17.46–48). The first pain of exile, as Cacciaguida tells Dante, is that one is barred from what one most loves:

Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta 
     più caramente; e questo è quello strale 
     che l'arco de l'essilio saetta prima. 
                             ( Paradiso  17.55–57)

Compare the unfailing arrows of "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," lines 9–12:

     ed ella ancide, e non val ch'om si chiuda 
né si dilunghi da' colpi mortali 
che, com'avesser ali, 
giungono altrui e spezzan ciascun arme.

An important parallel obtains between the hostility of the city of Florence and that of the donna pietra. Even though Dante's picture of the lady's hostility is no doubt poetic hyperbole, one can understand why earlier in this century Guerri and Filippini, disregarding the reliable grounds we have for dating the poems prior to Dante's exile, interpreted the lady of the petrose as an allegory of Florence (Dante 1946 149).

The point is not that the situation of the Commedia can be reduced to that of the petrose, but that they share a fundamental parallel in the structure of the poet's relation to the world and to his poetry. In both, the relation with the audience he wishes to win is intensely conflicted. In both, the relation between poetry and action in the world is paradoxical. The Commedia gives us Dante the poet-prophet driven to write the poem by his despair of the world of history; confronting a hostile world, he woos the world and his city. And the poem deals with the poet's situation in the world by constructing an elaborate model of the

universe as he hopes it to be, a universe in which the difficulties he faces are not palliated but are inevitably taken toward their resolution, in which the ultimate victory of what the poet stands for is assured. These statements apply almost without revision to the petrose. And if the petrose show the lover moving, through a katabasis into his own self-destructive violence, to a mutual gaze of reconciliation, the Commedia gives us a protagonist who must go through an even more violent katabasis into his own and others' negativity—Hell itself—and who ascends beyond this into ever more perfect intersubjectivity (culminating, not by accident, in a prolonged gaze into the light).

Thus one of the fundamental problems in the Commedia—for Dante as well as for his readers—is the blurring of the line between the representation of "reality" and religious faith on the one hand and what must be called wish fulfillment on the other. The nub of the problem can be represented in the Commedia's claim to speak for God, which Dante realizes is dangerously close to fraud. Modern readers have a further problem in that Dante's effort to make philosophically and scientifically true statements about the universe increases the difference between his model of the universe and the real one as we know it. (How aware Dante may have been of this problem is an intriguing question: to what extent did he understand that his very ability to construct so lucidly his elaborate model was inherently a sign—even a cause—of its imminent rejection?) In any case, no matter how powerfully Dante imagines the resolution of his solitary activity, whether in perfect reconciliation with the lady or in perfect communion with God, the more ambitious his poem is, the more effectively it commits him to his alternate universe, as opposed to the real one. This problem—and Dante's awareness of it—is already sharply present in the petrose. In the petrose, too, the poet's effort to achieve power over the lady is, by the choice of poetry, inevitably shifted away from the practical goal into the alternate universe of art, in spite of the poet's fierce desire. Beginning with the petrose, Dante's poetry exists in the tension of this unresolvable paradox.