5—
Breaking the Ice:
"Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro"

The last of the rime petrose, long neglected by criticism, has slowly regained its original status as a masterpiece of lyric art.^[1] Yet in many respects the old reluctance remains. Contini (Dante 1946 165), while ranking the poem with "Io son venuto," judges it "too abstract and solitary a thesis" and finds the language becoming an end to itself, divorced from sentenza. His views, with a few exceptions, have dominated criticism of the poem.^[2] Peter Dronke's brief discussion (1968 162–66) hypothesizing that the lady's harshness is a reflex of her desire has made fresh evaluation of the canzone possible and necessary.

The grouping of "Così nel mio parlar" with the petrose is apparently not supported by the textual tradition of the poem, which depends heavily on Boccaccio's transcriptions of Dante's canzoni. Boccaccio placed "Così" first among the fifteen canzoni he transcribes, and the other petrose in seventh, eighth, and ninth positions, centrally in the collection.^[3] In many respects the poem is unlike the other petrose. We look in vain for explicit mention of the heavens or the seasons. Nor do the poem's formal properties resemble the rigorous patterns of the other petrose. Only close interpretation will reveal the importance of the speaker as microcosm in the poem's structure. And of course "Così" tells a very different story: the three other petrose are contemplative, mirroring the speaker and nature at the frozen impasse of the winter solstice. They project larger and larger contexts in which the poet's negativity and frustration are framed. But they are in a sense mute, do not address the question of speaking directly to the lady. "Così" imagines the speaker retaliating against the petra, speaking to her, making love to her. First Love, then the lady, are placed in the role of the antagonist whom the speaker must in some sense understand and accommodate but must also dominate, if he is to integrate his nature. Thus, the divergences from the other petrose are a symptom of a crisis in the poetics of the petrose

themselves and a final attempt of the speaker to devise an efficacious poetics that will persuade the petra—this time with recourse to violence. The poet attempts to break out of the isolation he has achieved in the elaboration of his own splendid artifices; the poem, consequently, is based on the problematic of inner and outer, in a sense the problematic of language and representation itself.

Despite its differences from the other petrose, there is widespread agreement that "Così" belongs in a group with them (Pernicone 1970C 233). The linguistic links with the other petrose have long been recognized (parallels in Baldelli 1978a 13). In "Così" there is special emphasis on terms from the last five verses of the final stanza of "Io son venuto"—that is, the last of the sections introduced by the adversative ("e io . . .")—so that "Così" in a sense begins where "Io son venuto" leaves off. The speaker's refusal to step back (un passo a retro ) is met in "Così" with the lady's dodging (s'arretra, 6) of Love. Guerra in the last stanza of "Io son venuto" holds the position occupied in all previous stanzas by the term Amor: this warfare of the speaker is expanded into the panoply of combat we find in "Così." The imagined sweetness of death ("la morte de' passare ogni altro dolce," 65) returns, though in quite different terms, in "Così" when the lover, taking his revenge, outlasts the canonical hours ("passerei vespero e squille," 69). These substitutions war temporarily replacing love, the parlar aspro replacing the martiro dolce and morte dolce of "Io son venuto"—typify the passage from the paralysis of "Io son venuto" to the dynamism of "Così." The final rhymeword of "Io son venuto," dolce, is matched by its antithesis in the first rhyme of "Così," aspro.^[4] Both petra and donna, the rhyme-words from the first two stanzas of "Io son venuto," appear at the beginning (2) and end (79) of "Così." Moreover, petra undergoes a significant transformation into the verb impetrare. The transformation of the senhal of the petrose, connoting immobility, into an ambiguous verb implying either hostile desire or static rigidity is also typical of the greater dynamism in the language of "Così nel mio parlar."^[5] And it states at the outset the riddle at the heart of the poem: is the lady's insensibility to love the result of a self-enclosure that excludes all but cruelty (impetra, first meaning)? Or does her request (impetra, second meaning) for greater cruelty mask—and therefore reveal—her desire?

In addition to the recurrence of identical words in rhyme, the close relationship of "Così" to the other petrose is especially apparent in the domination of two features in the handling of rhymes. First, the couplet

that concludes the stanza of "Così" alludes to the concluding couplet with identical rhyme-words in "Io son venuto" and "Amor, tu vedi ben" and to the appearance of rhyme-words in pairs in contiguous stanzas in "Al poco giorno." Moreover, "Così" has a high proportion of rich (or "derivative") rhyme, especially early in the poem: already in the first stanza, three pairs (aspro/diaspro, petra/impetra, arme/atarme ) establish the link with the technique of the other petrose (Baldelli 1973 931–32). Of these, the initial pair is definitive: it expresses the equivalence of power between petra and lover that the poem will attempt to achieve, and thus at the very outset relates the power of the poem and the virtue of a precious stone.^[6]

The formal nod to paired rhymes points also to the most important link of "Così" to "Amor, tu vedi ben": Dante's discussion of faults of rhyme in the De vulgari eloquentia 2.xiii. After mentioning "Amor, tu vedi ben" as a feat that justified repetition of rhymes, Dante goes on to include "harshness of rhymes" ("asperitas rithimorum") as a fault to be avoided, "unless it be mixed with softness" ("nisi forte sit lenitate permixta"), adopting the same phrase that justified breaking the rule in the case of "Amor, tu vedi ben."^[7] Dante's language suggests that "Così," exemplifying the poet's willful choice of harsh rhymes, is a pendant to "Amor, tu vedi ben" and to the reiterated rhyme-words that are the key to its nova forma. In the case of "Così," it is the mixture, or tempering, of harsh and smooth sounds ("lenium asperorumque mixtura" ) that offers the key to the specific poetics of "Così" and its relation to the cosmological tradition.

The metaphor of temperament, invoked frequently in the De vulgari eloquentia, derives from the notion of the canzone as a harmony of contrasting parts.^[8] The metaphor has roots in the metaphysical tradition that characterized the soul itself as a harmony, in the cosmological tradition where temperament refers to the mixture of the four elements in all material substances, and in the medical tradition, where it refers to the mixture of humors in the body.^[9]

That the poem is a tempering of harsh and smooth is apparent from an inventory of its rhymes. Of the eighty-three words in rhyming position, forty-four include syllables that are aspre; thirty-nine—nearly half—consist of syllables that are dolci.^[10] The mixture is varied from stanza to stanza and indeed from pedes to sirma: the pedes of stanzas 1, 4, and 5, in which the lady, Love, and the lover mount their attacks, have the highest proportion of harsh rhymes. In stanza 5, where the lover

obtains the upper hand, all the rhymes are aspre, marking the speaker's hostile domination. But the sirma of 5 has two harsh rhymes out of three (–orro and –elli ), that of 6 only one, and the tornata none.^[11] The fact that of the sirme only one, that of stanza 4, in which the lover faces death, has a majority of harsh rhymes (3/2), whereas in the pedes three stanzas have a majority of harsh rhymes, one a minority (2: it reflects the lover's defenselessness), and two a parity of harsh and smooth rhymes, suggests that the pedes and sirma represent opposed principles, their joining a harmonization of those principles.^[12] As we shall see, Dante's treatment of the stanzas bears out this supposition. Far from overwhelming the poem, Dante's use of harsh rhymes is modulated and expressive and results in the "shining" of tragic form ("ipsa tragoedia nitescit"). Like "Amor, tu vedi ben," the art of "Così nel mio parlar" justifies its boldness and extremity and maintains the rules of decorum that Dante would outline in the De vulgari eloquentia.^{[ 13]}

The changing balance of harshness and sweetness in the rhymes reflects the speaker's attempt to equal the aggression of the petra with his own speech, to balance her oppression of him with his rima (1–2, 11–13). The principle that Dante invokes in the first verses can, it is true, be documented in contemporary vernacular texts;^[14] but it is also conspicuous in the Platonizing tradition in the form given it by Boethius, when Philosophy reminds her pupil that "you have learned under Plato's authority that words should be akin to the things spoken about"—a formulation of mimetic decorum echoed by writers from Alain of Lille to Jean de Meun and Chaucer.^[15]

The principle of decorum in "Così" is closely echoed in the Inferno at the entrance to Cocito, the final ring of Hell, where reminiscences of the canzone are abundant.^[16] In his need for the harsh rhymes ("rime aspre e chiocce") adequate to the center of the earth Dante appeals to the muses of the mythical founder of Thebes, Amphion, whose lyre moved stones to form city walls.^[17] The link of Amphion to the speaker of the petrose is rich with implications. Amphion is one of the examples adopted by Macrobius (among others) to exemplify the power of music over inanimate objects and recalcitrant individuals.^[18] The choice of rime aspre for "Così" may thus be an instance of deliberate election of the appropriate musical ethos for the persuasion of the indurate petra; for, as Boethius notes in the De musica, the harsher modes are appropriate for moving ruder peoples, the softer for more civilized ones.^[19] And the speaker himself, by indulging in the harsh mode, may also obtain a measure of relief—a musically induced catharsis.^[20]

In other respects as well, Macrobius's discussion of the music of the spheres (1970a 103–7) is relevant to the speaker's choice of an aspro speech. At the beginning of the discussion, Macrobius observes that sounds are harmonious if the blows producing them occur according to proportion ("dulce in aures . . . et musicum defert"), harsh if they do not ("ineptum et asperum personat").^[21] The opposition of proportional and deformed sounds is followed by an account of the World-Soul fashioned according to the squares and cubes of the first odd and even numbers, which provides the basis for the physical cosmos and its harmonies.^[22] These harmonies, Macrobius goes on, can be found also in the human microcosm and its products; here we encounter Macrobius's claim that the Same and Other in the World-Soul are reflected in the strophe and antistrophe of the choric stanza. Throughout his discussion, Macrobius writes of the World-Soul as woven from odd and even numbers (contexta ), like the celestial music that imitates it.

In the De vulgari eloquentia and elsewhere, Dante too uses forms of texere, though for the activity of assembling words, syntactic units, verses, or stanzas in relations that are musical.^[23] The tempering or harmonizing of rough and smooth rhymes in the canzone points, we suggest, to how "Così" might be seen broadly to reflect cosmological ideas: as a weave of contrary principles—feminine and masculine, Other and Same, irrational and rational, even and odd—that form a harmony.^[24]

Dante's terminology when discussing the difference of harsh rhymes and sweet (or smooth) suggests a more specific link between "Così nel mio parlar" and the theoretical discussion of the De vulgari eloquentia. The metaphors of combed (pexa ) and hairy (yrsuta ), slippery (lubricia ) and bristly (reburra ), for words including smooth (pexa, lubricia ) or harsh (yrsuta, reburra ) syllables are derived not only from the texture of cloth but, as traditional rhetorics make explicit, also from that of human hair, combed or unkempt. Verses, says Geoffroi de Vinsauf, may be "combed" or "shaggy" depending on their diction and syntax.^[25]

In "Così," the lady's hair is mentioned in the fifth and sixth stanzas, where the speaker seizes it. The gesture is ambiguous: is he undoing her braids? Or entering them, joining them? The gesture refers in a veiled way to a sexual embrace and suggests how the fantasy is an act of release for both lover and lady, the exchange of an ornatus that is restrictive and combed (pexa ) for one that is yrsuta, like the rime aspre themselves. Since the lady's hair is curled and gilded by Love himself ("ch' Amor per consumarmi increspa e dora," 64), the lover's handling of the braids is a specific countermeasure to Love's prior attack.^[26] But in the context of

the aspro diction of the canzone, the lady's hair, curls, and braids are also a reflexive image of the poetics of the canzone, its harmonizing weave of harsh and smooth, Same and Other, violence and peace.^[27]

It is significant that so much of the specificity of "Così" lies in its lexis and rhymes, which for Dante were the metaphysically least important—the last—of concerns. They are the ornatus, the final clothing or adornment (as the metaphors for harsh words suggest) of the framework of the canzone: implicitly they are the equivalent of the flesh, in relation to the spirit. The emphasis on the ornatus as the distinguishing feature of the poem will be significant, both as concerns the domination of a verbal trope—metaphor—in the language of the poem and in the implications of the speaker's undoing of the lady's adornment in the concluding fantasy. More important, the underscoring of ornament operates a kind of metaphysical inversion, making what is logically and metaphysically last, first. This gesture is echoed in the action of the canzone.

Thus, in "Così" the speaker gives scope both to the dangerous power of a dark eros that threatens to kill him and to his own fantasies of a violent "pacification" of the petra. Although the poem is not explicitly cosmological in structure or theme, in some respects it has the widest range, imagining a descent to a caldo borro that corresponds to a kind of sexual inferno and a subsequent ascent to a moment of profound mutual understanding that anticipates the pilgrim's final vision in the Commedia.^[28] The poem therefore attempts to include what is verbally and psychologically at the extremes of normative and orthodox experience—harshness of rhyme, suicidal despair, sexual violence—and to recover them in the terms of the final pacification. The attempt to equal the aggression of the petra is not only a vendetta, but also an attempt to balance her violence, to lift both lovers from the impasse of frustrated lust and displaced aggression. The attempt and the results are problematic, as we shall see; but "Così" remains so far consistent with the general project of the petrose, and unmatched in its disturbing power among lyric poems of any age.

Katabasis

The poem begins with the lady's evasion of Love's attack (1, pedes ), shifts to her attack on the speaker (1, sirma; 2, pedes ), and shifts again to the destruction, through the lady's image, of the speaker's internal

senses (2, sirma; 3, pedes ). A personified god of love presents a direct threat to his life (3, sirma ; 4, pedes, sirma ). The situation is then reversed, with the speaker imagining the lady's vulnerability, first to Love's stroke (5, pedes ), then to his own grip and caresses (5, sirma ). The final scene (6, pedes, sirma ), with the speaker dominant and close to the lady, reverses the speaker's subjection to the god of love in the central stanzas. The final configuration is also transformed: if Love's attack on the speaker is treacherous, the speaker's violence is presented as beneficial to both speaker and lady. Both position and intention are reversed.

The structure of "Così nel mio parlar" is thus demarcated by the development of the dominant metaphor of combat and by the antithesis between the lover's inner experience and his relation with the outside world.^[29] At the outset (stanzas 1 and 2), the struggle with the lady is described in terms of combat at a distance: the two are archers shooting at each other from afar. The lover's arrows, even if they reach their mark, do not penetrate the lady's armor, but hers penetrate all his defenses and reach their mark no matter how he flees her presence or tries to conceal himself. His relation to what is outside, other than the lady, is likewise one of fearful silence and anxious defensive concealment (24–30). Because so many of the lady's arrows have found their mark, his life is threatened.

In the sirma of stanza 2 the lover is attacked by the lady's viso, the image of her beauty that penetrates his eye.^[30] His inner experience is dominated by the lady's image ("de la mia mente tien la cima"), which attacks him from within. Finally (lines 22–26), Death is gnawing at his faculties (lines 31–34). The image of the file wearing through a scorza a scorza transforms the idea of piercing armor to a vision of scraping the outer layers of bark to reach the quick. The teeth of Love, with which Death is gnawing him, intensify the file metaphor to that of something like a wild animal, with the object of attack his senses.^[31] Thus, the tree metaphor and the animal metaphor, in addition to constituting a rise in intensity, include in their range the deep life (the quick within the scorza ) only dimly available to awareness as well as an outer, much more perceptible level, that of the experience of the senses, still firmly represented as inner experience.

By the second pes of stanza 2, the speaker's defense is vested in his art (rima ), though inadequate to the burden of the lady's image ("il peso che m'affonda"). The metaphor of the burden on the speaker, taken over from the first stanza of "Io son venuto" (10–14), is thus linked to

the system of inner/outer distinctions: sinking to lower levels is parallel to entering deeper and deeper into the speaker's life.^[32]

Stanzas 2 and 3 also develop the tension between inner and outer experience in terms of the relation of inner suffering and verbal expression. In the sirma of stanza 2, expression (rima ) would balance the crushing weight on the lover: in one sense, then, expression redresses the balance, brings the lover back up to the surface. The sirma of stanza 2 is parallel in structure: the speaker's defense would be speech, a dire altrui exposing the source of power behind the image and behind the lady. Just after mention of the inner awareness of the file wearing through successive layers of strength comes the passage on the lover's anxiety to prevent any observer from seeing into his inner state (27–30): he must both try to shield himself against the lady's arrows and prevent any external expression. The open avowal of the penser ("per tema non traluca / lo mio penser") would defend the speaker from the lady's destructiveness by breaching the laws of courtoisie that bind him to his fate.^[33]

This tension between the lover's need for external expression and the necessity of preventing it gradually becomes extreme, reaching its high point in the next stanza. The inverted logical sequence of the pedes of stanza 3, like their inverted syntax, contributes strongly to this tension: the lover is said to fear discovery more than death, and the sequence moves from the trembling of the heart in its fear of being seen from the outside, to the inner experience of the slow loss of vital sensation—said to be less feared, but represented as actual rather than hypothetical. The inversion also means that the poem continues to progress, with anguished strain, both downward and inward.

At this moment, with the sirma of stanza 3, comes the first major shift in the metaphor of combat. The combat is abruptly transferred from the outer world of the hostile relation of lover and lady to the inner scene, and it is no longer combat at a distance but a hand-to-hand struggle with the personified god of love, represented as having reached its final phase with the defeat and imminent death of the lover. The earlier metaphors of descent and of filing and gnawing have prepared for this moment, which is situated in the innermost parts of life and which finds the lover cast down and helpless. But the scene also derives much of its power from the earlier tension arising from the ban on expression, because implicitly it is an unmasking of impersonal, unconscious agencies to reveal the conscious and determined hostility of a human figure—which remains, nonetheless, a mask.

The struggle is represented in several stages. In the first, the god has struck the lover to the ground and is standing over him; the lover cries out and humbly begs for mercy, but the god seems determined to refuse it (sirma of stanza 3, 35–39). It may seem obvious to say that the struggle (though internal) is represented as if taking place in the outside world; it is important that the lover is still experiencing it as if from within his body, but also as if his body were there in the internal scene. For instance, in this first stage he cries out, and he must interpret Love's facial expressions and bodily attitude ("par messo al niego").

If in this first stage Love is simply standing over the lover after having felled him, in the next stage (first pes of stanza 4, 40–43) Love moves into action: he raises his hand again and again as if to strike and holds the lover forcibly to the ground supine (a riverso ) and too exhausted to struggle any longer ("d'ogni guizzo stanco"). The moment of the death blow seems to have arrived, and the lover has the inner experience of the physical combat:

   allor mi surgon ne la mente strida; 
e '1 sangue, ch'è per le vene disperso, 
fuggendo corre verso 
lo cor, che 'l chiama; ond'io rimango bianco. 
           (44–47)

The first line of this sccond pes of stanza 4 is in some ways the most remarkable in the poem.^[34] Within the allegory on the inner stage, the division between inner and outer is maintained: there is a kind of retreat (parallel to the file's action a scorza a scorza ) to further levels of inner awareness. And in the terror of awaiting the death blow (as if from outside), the lover is now again blocked from "outward" expression ("allor surgon ne la mente strida," 44), whereas in the previous pes he has been represented as crying aloud. Of course, part of the surprising power of line 44 lies precisely in the ambiguity of ne la mente: since the locus of the entire allegorical scene is the lover's mente, the phrase both maintains the inner/outer distinction and the blockage of expression in the personified combat and obliterates that distinction, placing the silent inner screaming in what we may call the "real" mind of the lover, blocked from the outside world by his obsessive inner conflict. The ambiguity is mapped in references to the sword, which is presented both objectively and subjectively: properly as the aggressive weapon (spada ), then metonymically as cause (mano, fiede ) and effect (dolor ). The ambiguity is maintained in the rest of the pes, for the lines about the blood

rushing to the heart and the resultant pallor of the lover apply both to the events of the imagined combat and to the "actual" bodily state of the lover caught up in the intensity of his imagining.

The third stage of the hand-to-hand combat with Love is the sirma of stanza 4 (48–52). We are back in the allegorical fiction, as Love strikes with his sword under the lover's left arm:

Elli mi fiede sotto il braccio manco 
sì forte che 'I dolor nel cor rimbalza; 
allor dico: "S' elli alza 
un'altra volta, Morte m'avrè chiuso 
prima che '1 colpo sia sceso giuso."

What is the status of lines 50–52? Like the strida, this speech is within the lover in the inner drama; but again like the strida, it is understood to be silent, both within the lover in the allegory and within the lover as he exists in the "real" world. Expression is enclosed doubly in the lover, and death, it is said, will close him up entirely if Love raises his hand another time. The most profound enclosure—the ultimate silence of death—coincides with the threat of a final descent (sceso giuso ). The speaker can fall, and withdraw, no further.

At this moment the allegorical combat is suspended. With the opening of the next stanza the major transition of the poem takes place, and it brings the next major change in the treatment of the metaphor of combat. The lady is substituted for the lover as the victim of Love's blow:

Così vedess' io lui fender per mezzo 
lo core a la crudele che '1 mio squatra . . .

We have been abruptly returned to the "outer" world and to the combat between lover and lady that had dominated until the sirma of stanza 3. The pattern is maintained in the reversal of circumstances that takes place in stanzas 5–6, where first Love (lui ) then the speaker (io ) are the aggressors, while the lady is persistently the victim. In rapid succession, the blow to the heart, the barks of frustration, the tresses (Love's whips), and thefaville are, in the speaker's wish, inflicted on the lady. What had been her gestures and devices of attack become the lover's weapons, and she becomes the victim. The reversal of agent and patient is thus the turn that in a sense activates the text, as we shall discuss below.

Two aspects of the combat with Love require further comment here. One is the fact that each of the three stages of the struggle involves some kind of speech on the part of the lover, while the god of love him-

self is entirely silent (the closest he comes to speech is his defiance—"sfida la debole mia vita"—which presumably refers to the announcement of intention in his gestures and facial expression). There is a progression from the grido of line 37 (which is understood to be aloud, though within the inner drama) to the strida of line 44 (which are within the lover within the inner drama) to the dico of line 50 (which are at a first level clearly still within the lover within the inner drama, like the strida, but whose term, dico, is ambiguous). However, it is clear that the inchoate attempts at expression in the central stanzas, and the very tension between extreme inwardness and an externalizing representation of that inwardness, are a function of the speaker's re-ascent and reemergence through the medium of his own speech, the rima that redresses the balance of the lady's harshness, which is then secured by the turn to the "outer" world in stanza 5.

The other aspect is more striking still. While the nature of the allusion to Dido and Aeneas in lines 35–36, which state that Love has struck the lover down "con quella spada ond'elli ancise Dido," will be addressed more fully below, here we wish to emphasize the fact that Dido committed suicide with the sword in question. In other words, the sudden irruption of the hand-to-hand combat with Love reveals, more clearly than heretofore in the sequence of the petrose, that the suffering repeatedly said to be leading the lover toward death derives from a self-destructive or even suicidal tendency within himself.^[35]

Aissi L'enverse

A dominant theme of"Così" is, we have argued, the tempering of lover and lady in a sexual commixtio oppositorum. This pattern is prepared by a pattern of reversals and inversions.^[36] What in "Amor, tu vedi ben" is the lover's petition for a transformation in the lady is replaced in "Così" with the lover's shift from victim of the lady's refusal to agent of retaliation. This narrative reversal is one of a series of inversions at several levels of the poem's organization. The speaker's original assumption of the parlar aspro is both in emulation and in opposition to the lady's attack: the poem is an extended antiphrasis—predicated, ultimately, on the assumption that the aggression of the petra is itself an inversion of love. The astronomical reversal and rhyme-word inversions in the other petrose are replaced in "Così" by the gradual reversal of physical and psychological domination. And the elaborate exchange of weapons between speaker and lady is matched at the expressive level by an exchange

of metaphor, as the speaker reclaims, so to speak, the figurative language associated early in the poem with the lady. Finally, the most challenging and problematic inversion in the poem is the implicit claim that the poem's violence is in the service of reconciliation, "quia bellum est propter pacem."^[37] We turn first to the inverted stanza structure and narrative reversal in the poem, subsequently to the treatment of figurative language (especially the centrally placed personification of Amor), and finally to the poem's emphasis on return, by means of the aspro language itself, from discord to peace.

The reversal of roles in the poem is mirrored in the shifts in the poem's stanza form from disjunction to harmony of content and form. With respect to the construction of the stanza, "Così nel mio parlar" differs significantly from "Io son venuto," where the depressed "subdiesis" suggests the constraint on the speaker. In "Così," however, Dante's manipulation of the stanza gives the effect of rapid movement toward a goal, working first against the thematic emphasis on inward movement (thus, for example, the tormented syntax of the pedes in stanza 3) and subsequently in synchrony with the poem's movement out and away from the speaker's inner life.^[38] The single settenario of "Io son venuto" is expanded in "Così" to three, symmetrically disposed (lines 3, 7, and 11 of thirteen), rendering the stanza less weighty.^[39] The rima baciata that closes each settenario, combined with marked consonance and alliteration, reiterates the impression of agility.^[40] The stanzas are rounded out with four consecutive rime baciate, unique in Dante's practice.^[41]

Subtleties in the stanza structure, however, temper the effect of speed. The consecutive couplets, emphasizing forward motion, are answered by the settenarii, symmetrically disposed, which establish a dominance of the center.^[42] As Momigliano noted (Dante 1946 166), the sirma repeats the structure of the pedes, adding only the third endecasillabo, so that the stanza falls into three units, each built around a settenario. The sirma (CDdEE), moreover, is equal in weight to the first five lines, outside the series of couplets, and symmetrical with it. Thus the principle that brought the pedes down into the sirma in "Io son venuto" by having the first three verses of the sirma duplicate the form of the pedes works in "Così" to shift the point of articulation back above the diesis, to the center of the stanza.

The stanza in "Così" thus balances great dynamism with underlying stability. In terms of the stanza as a complexion of parts, Dante's practice in "Così" tests, but does not violate, the licentia poets may claim in

fashioning the stanza, and mirrors, in its tensions, the exacerbated complexio of the speaker.^[43] It alludes to the topics of descort but remains an orthodox canzone.^[44]

The overlap of descent and return in the stanzas extends through the canzone. Dante continues the subject matter of each sirma into the pedes of the following stanza.^[45] The effect is notable. Over stanzas 1 and 2 the lady's blows ("spezzan ciascun arme," 1.12) also shatter the speaker's shield ("ch'ella non mi spezzi," stanza 2.1). Over stanzas 2 and 3 the topic of internal corrosion (lima, scemi, rodere ) recurs at the diesis of the next stanza (denti, manduca, bruca ). Still more thorough is the progress of Love's killing blows in stanzas 3–4; struck to the ground at the diesis of stanza 3, the speaker must face Amor again at beginning, diesis, and end of stanza 4. In a decisive turn for the poem's narrative, this last blow is imagined striking the lady at stanza 5.1, thus carrying the topic of Love's blows into the next stanza, where the persistence of the topic becomes part of the scheme of retribution for the lady's violence ("dà nel sol quanto nel rezzo," 57). In stanzas 5–6 the lover's grip on the lady's hair is carried through the next stanza in terms of the sferza, the lady's braids as Love's whips.

This maintenance of logical units of sentenza across the division between stanzas is much more than an extension of the troubadour techniques for linking stanzas with repeated elements (coblas capfinidas, capcaudadas ).^[46] New subjects are begun in the sirma and continued into the pedes of the next stanza, so that the synchrony of topics and formal units is displaced by the measure of the sirma; since topics are so often introduced in the sirma (or cauda, "tail"), it becomes in a sense a frons, or head. With an effect similar to that of consecutive couplets, the stanza appears to be out of temperament—inverted, in fact. The overlapping of stanzas is one of several patterns guiding the overall movement of the canzone. Boyde (1971 143) notes a comprehensive pattern dividing the poem into three main sections: stanzas 1–3, in which the speaker is attacked by the lady and her image; stanza 4, the center of the canzone, where the speaker faces death; and stanzas 5–6, which turn the tables.^[47] The divisions are well marked. A proliferation of negatives characterizes stanzas 1–3, culminating with the denial of the speaker's plea for mercy by the god of love ("messo al niego," 39).^[48] The scene of the speaker's subjection to Amor is defined by anaphoric reference to love at formal articulations (sirma, pes, sirma in stanzas 3 and 4): E', Egli, Elli. And the last section is characterized by the optative and conditional forms describing the speaker's fantasy, from Così vedess'io to renderei.^[49] They coun-

terbalance, in the expression of a hypothetical satisfaction of desire, the negatives of stanzas 1–3; in some cases explicitly, as the speaker denies his previous timidity: "e non sarei pietoso né cortese" (stanza 5.6).

In these larger patterns we can see how the disjunction of logic and form in stanzas 1–3 is countered in stanzas 5–6 by an opposing tendency returning the stanzas to harmony. The shift toward re-alignment of the pedes and sirma with logical units begins with the repetition of Elli, Love's pronoun, introduced in the sirma of stanza 3 and then repeated in the first pes and the sirma of stanza 4. Thus the anaphoric—or perhaps we should say antistrophic—repetition returns the poem to a normal relation of pedes and sirma, reasserting the movement of the Same.^[50] The last instances ofEgli (stanzas 3.9, 4.9) center the poem, for their center is the central verse of the text, where rhyme, consonance, and assonance on –e(r)so dominate: "esto perverso / che disteso a riverso." This stanza also marks the return to the harmonious relation of pedes and sirma by being internally unified, linked at its extremes by identical instances of elli alza (1, 11) and by the antithesis of alza and giuso. Stanzas 3–4 are thus the zone of overlap, or crossing, between the domination of the petra and the domination of the speaker, the crisis preceding the decisive reversal of roles; by the same token, they mark the crossing of domination between Other and Same, for it is as the death blow is about to fall, between stanzas 4 and 5, that the speaker imagines Love's sword striking not himself, but the petra.

The return to harmony of stanzaic form is underlined by the return in stanza 5 to the opening words of the canzone: "Così vedess'io," optative, expresses the desire that is the poem's efficient cause (Vallone 1974 259). The related beginning to stanza 6, "S'io avessi," identifies stanzas 5–6 as parallel. In fact, the two stanzas restate the idea of retaliation at corresponding points:

la crudele che'l mio squatra    (5.2) 
che fatte son per me scudiscio e ferza    (6.2) 

per me, com'io per lei    (5.8) 
io mi vendicherei di più di mille    (6.8) 

ch'Amor per consumarmi increspa e dora   (5.12) 
per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face     (6.12)

The persistence from sirma to pedes of the topic—here, the lady's braids—serves to bind the parallel stanzas together, so that the impetus created by the overlap of logic and form is redefined, by the dominance

of the Same, as a return to rather than a departure from harmony. These parallel instances of retaliation in the last two stanzas also mark the lover's withdrawal from violence and are thus crucial to the attempt to transform the poem's ethos as it nears its conclusion (see below).

Beyond the relation between the speaker's imbalance and the imbalance of the stanzas, the inversion of the stanza is linked to the content and movement of the poem as a whole. The topic overlapping each stanza division is related to the warfare between speaker and lady, specifically to penetration: the lady's colpi, the ferocious denti d'Amor, Love's blows, and the speaker's gestures, seizing the lady's hair and ambiguously "pleasing" her, are part of a single series of gestures suffered by the lover in stanzas 1–4 and by the lady in the fantasy of stanzas 5–6. The formal dynamism of the poem thus prepares the prosopopoeic metamorphosis, in the congedo, of the canzone into an archer who fires the lover's words into the lady's heart.^[51] The production of the poem as an arrow aimed at the lady is the last step in the lover's emergence from the blocked expression of the early stanzas: it represents the ultimate turning outward and rendering audible of his speech in the form of actual publication. The reversal of roles and the lover's emergence from the depth and inwardness of his perilous nadir are thus closely related. In the terms of the opening verse, he has found the parlar aspro that can match the aggression of the petra, and the rima that can balance his own negative tendency ("tal che non potrebbe adequar rima," 21).

At the stanzaic level, the friction of constant forward insistence and centric symmetry restates the thematic tension between descent and return, inwardness and publicity, initial violence and final peace. In the terms of the Timaeus, "Così" risks a maximum degree of departure into the Other—giving irrationality a maximum of scope, both in lexical choice and formally in the gremium of the stanza—to return, finally, within the dominant circle of the Same. In terms that resonate with the final stanza of "Io son venuto," "Così nel mio parlar" is an occasion for the lover both to give maximum scope to the violent sexual contest with the petra and to bring to the surface what is Other, and potentially most dangerous, within himself.

Metaphors of Love

As readers have seen, "Così" depends for its chief effects on the ornatus of translatio, or metaphor.^[52] Not only rhetorically, but also thematically and structurally, the poem is built around its metaphors, and it ends

with a stunning conversio of the poem into an archer—but not before the poem has broached the possibility of discarding all ornatus, all rhetoric in the imagined approach of the lover and the petra.

A central axis of metaphor in the canzone turns on rapid metamorphosis in the meaning of the term Amor. As in the Vita nuova, the lover's decay and recovery are expressed in the various appearances assumed by Love.^[53] The term Amor appears five times in stanza 3, four times in stanza 4, twice in stanza 5, and once in stanza 6; if we count pronouns and implicit uses, then once in 1, twice in 2, six times in 3, four times in 4, twice in 5, once in 6, and not at all in the congedo —an increase and diminution of frequency that recalls the pattern of the rhymewords in "Amor, tu vedi ben."

In the initial situation, not Love but the lady attacks the speaker, though in a sense it must be Love who fires the arrows that she evades in verses 7–8. Thus, in stanza 1 Love appears only by the metonymy of his arrows. In stanza 2 the speaker seems to say that the lady is within him, dominating his mind, but the lima in verse 22, as Contini (Dante 1946 168) suggests, is identifiable with Love ("il chiuso e doloroso Amore"), so that Love appears in stanza 2 via metonymy of effect for cause. And because Love is addressed with the personal pronoun ("ti dà forza," 26), the personification of Love in the next stanza is anticipated.^[54] In stanza 3, love is first mentioned explicitly—"li denti d'Amor" —and then personified as a subject:

E' m'ha percosso in terra e stammi sopra 
con quella spada ond'elli ancise Dido, 
Amore, a cui io grido 
merzé chiamando . . . 
          (35–38)

The appearance of Amor personified announces the crisis. Love becomes apparently most real when the lover is nearest death.^[55] As often in Duecento poetry, Love is verbally closely linked to death ("s'elli alza / un'altra voltA , MOR te m'avrà chiuso," 50–51).^[56] The personification of Amor locates the center of the poem (leaving aside the congedo ), framed, as we noted earlier, by pronouns referring to Love. The personification is further marked by being set in both verse and syntactic juxtaposition to the name of Dido, the first appearance of a classical name in Dante's poetry and the only such name to appear in his extant lyrics.^[57]

It is important that Love personified also signals the end of Love's

domination; with the term chiuso, used by the speaker to name the final blockage of death, Love as an aggressor begins to retreat from the poem. In stanza 5 he appears, hypothetically attacking the lady (vedess'io lui ) and, less vividly, as the lady's coiffeur. Though still personified, Amor has become a remote agent, as in stanzas 1 and 2; the same is true in stanza 6, where, although he wields a whip, it is the lady's braids that do the lashing. Love works finally through human agents: the arrow fired by the poem is Love's arrow, but it is the ardent love of the speaker for the petra, not the personified Amor of the middle of the poem.

The figure of Amor in "Così" has a conspicuous origin and history. Rhetorically, the central stanzas are dominated by the reified terminology of Amour courtois: the Love of the central stanzas is akin to the god of love of the Fiore or the Amor of Francesca in the Commedia: an allegory of sexual libido as an ineluctable force.^[58] This Amor is represented in the central scene in a manner reminiscent of Cavalcanti's lyrics, where the scene of the heart slain by Love frequently recurs. In Cavalcanti, Love is just such a hostile agent, destructive of intellectual activity and life both figuratively and literally.^[59] From the same naturalscientific tradition, Dante draws the representation of the lover's plight as the crisis of a disease, with the lover going pale and enduring repeated strokes to the heart: his senses are "unstrung" (allenta ); he goes limp (disteso ) and cannot move (guizzo ).^[60] In sharp distinction to the poems of Cavalcanti, however, "Così" represents the lover as fighting back. The reaction is led by the body: screams rise from the threatened lower soul into his brain, and blood rushes to the heart that summons it.^[61] The consequence of this reactive behavior is the irascible outburst of the following stanza.^[62] The domination of the lover's mind by the hostile images of the lady, which echoes the symptoms of the melancholic disease of hereos, in which love dominates the subject, is broken not by reason, but by the body's irascible retaliation.^[63]

The mutations of love suggest how the canzone works by stripping away and reallocating metaphors and screens, schermi.^[64] The early stanzas are rich in troped terms: the lady's jasper, signifying her freedom from love's harm; her winged blows (presumably her glances); her rule of the lover compared to a flower topping its stem; comparison of her to a ship; Love as a file; and Love's teeth. The two central stanzas (3–4) dominated by the personification of love, suggest an allegory of the lover's heart as a vanquished knight.^[65] As in Cavalcanti's allegories, where the heart is represented as a chamber, the central scene, which

seems to be experienced and observed by the lover simultaneously and to occur both inside the heart and to the whole body, manifests the lover's inner division, his negativity aligned against his own life.^[66]

In the final two stanzas, the frequency of figurative terms diminishes notably. In stanza 5, to be sure, we have the lady as scherana and the periphrastic caldo borro, but the emphasis is on the lady herself. Her lack of defenses puts the spotlight on her body—her hair, her eyes—rather than on her metaphorical bolts, jasper, or file.^[67] And having reached her hair, the lover returns to it and rests finally in her eyes. Although figure and metaphor are not absent in stanzas 5–6—the lady's eyes give out sparks, and the lover compares himself to a bear—Love is here the speaker's love, physical and spiritual.

There is thus a metalepsis of Love, from an implied agent to a personified figure, a rhetorical simulacrum like that of the Vita nuova, to the love of the speaker himself for the lady and her desire for him. The decisive turn in stanza 5 removes a screen, allowing lady and lover to meet with unmediated directness: a meeting that concludes with the lover looking directly into her eyes, the source of his pain.^[68] The result, as in the Vita nuova, is a breakthrough in the understanding of the relation of speaker and lady. The figure of Amor acts as hinge mediating the shift in power from petra to speaker imagined in the poem. And because Love is the agent first of the lady and subsequently of the speaker—who imagines Love striking the petra and the canzone as an archer, like Amor—, he becomes a basis for the complicity of the protagonists. Each first acts through Love's trappings and then abandons them.

Removing the schermi of Love is one of a series of revelations. First, the person attacking the speaker is not a god of love but the lady herself; that is, the love assailing the speaker is in fact, however displaced, her love. Second, while the sword that killed Dido was Aeneas's sword, it was Dido who wielded it.^[69] As in Dido's case, we infer, the speaker's harm results in part from his own hand: Love's arm, Love's hand (mano, 40), are ultimately his own. The periphrasis about Love's sword thus makes a key point about the figure of Love: it is an image of the speaker himself as a near-suicide, locked in a schizoid condition that, as in the case of Pier delle Vigna in the Commedia, puts him at risk of becoming unjust to himself. In the context of "Io son venuto," it is the lover's diseased temperament, which we might attribute to negative elements in his Saturnine horoscope, that is helping to kill him: suicide was a typical fate of Saturn's melancholy children.^[70]

The allusion to Dido exemplifies some of the functions of figurative

language sketched above.^[71] Love kills Dido because, as the son of Anchises and Venus, Aeneas was half-brother to Cupid (traditionally the son of Venus and Jupiter).^[72] Although the logic is tortuous, the allusion introduces important parallels between the speaker and Dido and among the petra, Love, and Aeneas that reverse the sexes of the corresponding protagonists in Virgil's poem. The allusion is thus in one sense an inverted comparison, discordant like the relation of content and form in the stanzas and a preparation for the subsequent reversal of roles. But in a deeper and more important sense it is another instance of the speaker's masking, his assumption of the place of the victim, of the irrational Other: self-comparison to Dido, like the personification of Amor as the Lover's own suicidal disposition, is a splitting of the self required for the eventual purpose of reconciling the two sides of his nature—for the union of the two Gemini represented in the mutual gaze of the last stanza.

In Virgil's poem, it is Aeneas who is unyielding, who is compared to stone when he abandons Dido.^[73] And it is Dido who—like the lover is wounded by love's arrow and haunted by an image of Aeneas that slowly destroys her. The events of the canzone digest several passages from Dido's history in the Aeneid, not merely by way of allusion but also as a parallel narrative.^[74] The culminating parallel, the sword that Dido uses to kill herself, was obtained in an exchange of gifts: Dido gave Aeneas the sword ornamented with jasper that he wears when he receives Mercury's embassy from Jupiter.^[75] Dido and Aeneas thus exchanged virtues: Dido surrenders her decorum and safety, suggested by the jasper-studded sword; Aeneas relinquishes the sword that signifies his virility and independence.^[76]

The exchange of virility for chastity anticipates the narrative reversal we find in "Così nel mio parlar": supine and victimized, deprived of the manly sword held by Amor, the lover imagines taking his love directly to the petra in stanzas 5 and 6. Love's sword in the central scene returns, veiled in the guise of the speaker placing his hands (like Love's mano ) in the lady's hair. Ironically, the status of Amor as a foreshadowing of the lover himself prepares the lover's active role in the final scene, so that the lover's defeat prepares his recovery. Indeed, the immediate threat of death, crystallized by the allusion to the exemplum of suicide and the unmasking of Love's real agency, releases the lover's irascible strength and permits his breakout from the crippling conventions of reticence and passivity imposed by courtoisie. For of course the lover does not finish like Dido—he does not commit suicide. Nor in the lover's fantasy

of turning the tables does the lady adopt Dido's role—she does not ask for death (mortem orat ); rather, the lover imagines her asking for love, thus reversing the request for greater cruelty attributed to her at the beginning of the poem.

In a larger sense, Dante's use of the Dido episode in the Aeneid reiterates the import of the parlar aspro as a dialectical response to the lady's attack. We recall that in "Io son venuto" the project of the petrose is announced by the discord between the lover and the rest of nature. This topos, which was to resonate in subsequent lyric, is derived in part, as we saw, from Dido's sleepless anxiety while the rest of nature is at peace.^[77] The passage is the more conspicuous for being introduced with an adversative construction ("At non infelix  . . . Phoenissa") similar to that which opens the book itself ("At regina . . . " ). The Virgilian model is adopted by Dante in "Io son venuto" for the presentation of a male lover whose persistent love is discordant with the winter season.^[78] In "Così nel mio parlar," the manifest discord is that between the lover and the petra, whose recalcitrance (s'arretra ) is an unnatural and disingenuous refusal of love; at a deeper level it is between the lover and a Love that is at once outrageous (esto perverso ) but also in a sense the will of the lover himself. Thus, with its allusion to the pathos of Dido as the example for the moribund lover, "Così" rewrites an important page of Augustine's itinerary, where sympathy with Dido, the victim of passion, is presented as the specific tendency that the autobiographer must attempt to transcend. "Così nel mio parlar," by permitting the disintegration of the erotic protagonist into the roles both of perverse Eros and of Love's victim is a first step of that "Romanesque" poetics of prosopopoeia that permits a dialectical recuperation of the tragedy of damnation in the Inferno.

The allusion to Dido is significant also in relation to the transformation of the poem into the lover's weapon in the congedo. The image of Love stabbing the speaker is a condensed or metaleptic scene of the causes that are propelling the lover to the verge of extinction. In this sense, it draws on the narrative of Dido, for the identification of the causes that lead to misfortune is a topos of tragedy and of elegiac love poetry and figures prominently in Dido's story.^[79] The extreme resonance of the periphrasis, alluding to the series of Dido's enamorment and death, to the exchange of swords, to the ambiguous relationship of Aeneas and Love, and to the scene of Dido's suicide itself, marks a shift from a tropic to a metonymic mode in which the final term, the effect, implies a series of causes.^[80] The outcome of Heroides 7—the metamor-

phosis of Aeneas's suicidal sword into Dido's pathetic pen—is thus also reversed in the congedo of the canzone, where the pen proves stronger than the sword.

Metaphors are thus both volatile and mutable over the course of the canzone. The poem molts its vesti di figura as it progresses, the same dynamism of its syntax and stanza form operating in the use and development of metaphorical terms.^[81] Metaphor in medieval poetics has been characterized as the trope of the unquiet heart that longs to rest in its home, where there is neither metaphor nor language.^[82] In this sense, metaphor itself is implicated in the poem's teleological movement toward the lady and toward concrete terms. One of the movements of "Così" leads from the schermo of Amor at the center of the poem to the demythologized love that fires the lady and the lover in the final scene of the poem. It is to the specifically teleological function of metaphor itself as it leads to the final scene, and to the teleological structure of the whole poem, that we now turn.

The Poem As Telos

The goal of the poem as metaphor is the description of the congedo as an archer—itself a common figure for purposeful action. In Dante's philosophical tradition, the falling of a stone, the animal seeking nourishment or its mate, the arrow fired at its target, and the instrument in the hand of the artisan are examples of action directed to an end.^[83] In the Paradiso, the figure of the arrow describes the pilgrim's rapid and purposeful ascent through the heavens;^[84] in the canzone the arrow's target, as of all the poem's art, is the lady's heart. But the figure also informs the sense in which the poem's language moves to an end: the persuasion of the lady and the peace that the poet hopes will follow his success.^[85] And if the figure posits the lady's heart as the segno, the target, it also projects the speaker as the arrow's origin, as the bow that is found slack (disteso, allenta ) at the center of the poem but taut and effective at the end. The figure of the speaker as an archer, firing the arrow of his desire at the lady's heart, contains the whole utterance of the lyric, from the attacco ("Così . . . voglio" ), through the center, to the congedo.^[86]

Stanzas 2–3, the speaker's descent to his nadir, also concentrate the teleological imagery. The figure of corrosion that begins with the lima and concludes with the feral denti d'amor (32) outlines the attack on the speaker's life in terms of an animal gnawing its food (rodermi, manduca ). And the three consecutive figures in stanza 2—the fior di fronda,

the lady as legno, and the speaker's obsession as a peso that sinks him illustrate the natural movement of elements and the movement of the will toward the goal that satisfies it: the blossom crowns the stem, earth sinks below water, and human agents create instruments, like ships, that reach elected goals.^[87] The ship directed for port is of course a common figure for the goal-oriented pilgrimage of life, for the work of art and for the lover.^[88] The cima della mente occupied by the lady is the locus of the proprium or distinguishing perfection of humanity, the rational mind.^[89]

The simultaneous mention of rising fire and descending stones as expressions of natural motion is a topos of Platonic discourse (Patch 1932). Its most famous appearance is in Augustine's Confessions 13.9.10:

Fire tends upwards; a stone downwards. They are impelled by their own weights; they seek their own places. . . . Not put in proper order, they are without rest; when they are set in due order, they are at rest. My love is my weight! I am borne about by it, wheresoever I am borne. By your gift we are enkindled, and we are borne upwards. We glow with inward fire, and we go on . . . for we go upwards to "the peace of Jerusalem."^[90]

The passage documents the links between the figurative language of stanza 2 and the poem's other dominant images: the sparks in the lady's eyes that ignite the speaker, the heart that drives him, the evolution of the canzone as a form toward the harmony of its parts (ordinantur ), the speaker's drive to seek the peace of the final verse, in concert with things animate and inanimate.^[91]

Surveying the whole canzone, the thematic return to peace emerges as a return of both form and content: the stanza returns from the discord of logic and form to harmony in the final stanzas; an elaborate variation of topics articulates the reversal of roles between lover and lady; the speaker returns from his katabasis to a position of parity with the lady; ornatus is stripped away; and, invoking retributive justice, the speaker transforms the lady's violence into eros and brings peace ("renderei . . . pace," 78), the telos of violence. These patterns find their goal in the speaker's final gaze into the lady's eyes:

     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. 
           (74–78)

The juxtaposition of amor and pace at poem's end recalls the juxtaposition Dido/Amore at the poem's center. But whereas in verse 31 the terms are separated by inverted syntax and a verse break, here the terms come together on the same line and approach synonymy.

The lover's gaze into the lady's eyes and his concession of peace with love are the goals of his fantasy, the equivalent of the pilgrim's gaze into the light at the end of the Commedia. As in Dante's gloss to "Donne ch'avete" in the Vita nuova, the eyes and mouth of the lady are respectively the origin and goal of love: "ne l'una dico de li occhi, li quali sono principio d'amore; ne la seconda dico de la bocca, la quale è fine d'amore" (Dante 1980 132).

The last sirma of the canzone is the conjunction of the origin and goal of the speaker's love, its Alpha and Omega.^[92] A complete cycle is implied: the procession of Love (escon ) from her eyes and its return by the speaker to her eyes and mouth (renderei ). This descent and return is modeled ultimately on the procession and return of love: even the harshness of "Così" can stand as what pseudo-Dionysius would call an echo (resonantia ) of Love on a cosmic scale.^[93] The final gestures are prepared over the entire canzone—in its form, diction, and figurative language.

As we noted above, Dante's final sirma on the eyes of the petra echoes the terms of "Donne ch'avete," which exemplifies the procession and return of love through Beatrice:^[94]

     De li occhi suoi, come ch'ella li mova 
escono spirti d'amore inflammati, 
che feron li occhi a qual che allor la guati 
   e passan sì che'l cor ciascun retrova. 
           (51–54)

It is striking that in the Vita nuova this is but the second explicit mention of Beatrice's eyes, and the first in verse.^[95] Dante exercises a similar restraint in "Così": we are surprised that the lady's eyes are mentioned for the first time in the final sirma (verse 74), for Dante has throughout the canzone narrated the effects of the lady's penetrating glance, from the winged colpi (the rays of her eyes) to the generalized viso in stanza 2 to the visual species (optical images) that compose the phantasm.^[96] But all these references to the eyes are veiled: when the poet confronts the lady's eyes as the efficient cause of his suffering, the poem immediately concludes. The lady's eyes are the concrete term toward which tends the series of figurative expressions referring to eyes.^[97]

The emergence of the lady's eyes—and implicitly, her recognition of the speaker's love—as the goal of the poem's aspro diction and restless metaphors is the process by which the poem, to adapt Contini's phrase, converts its petroso content into form and so fulfills the poet's desire to fashion a parlar aspro that will match the lady's acts.^[98] In "Così," this process is worked out in detail: the figurative language for the lady's acts and the lover's suffering is reassigned as tropes for the canzone as the instrument of the speaker's revenge and gratification. Lady and poem exchange figurative terms, and the poem's increase in referential concreteness with regard to the lady is accompanied by the troping of the poem's language as a series of metaphors for its own efficacy. The speaker's return of the lady's gaze in the narrative is mimed by the poem itself as a message (meant to be a trenchant one) for the lady's eyes. Like the crystalline "Amor, tu vedi ben," "Così," which presents the congedo as an archer, is a device, a machina intended to move the lady, to make her fall in love. The sum of the poem's parts and their relations is subordinated to this telos, the final cause of the poem's composition and the purpose of its metaphorical dynamic. This final trope is registered not only in the reallocation of the metaphors, but in the content of the metaphors themselves: arrow, ship, file, teeth, sword, braids.

The dominant figure in the poem is Love's arrow: shot from the lady's eyes at the speaker in stanza I, these projectiles are literally returned by the archer who personifies the canzone in the congedo: "e dàlle per lo cor d'una saetta" (82). The final dàlle echoes the lady's empowerment of Love ("chi ti dà forza," 26), her indiscriminate firing ("dà nel sol," 57), and the speaker's restitution of peace after gazing into the lady's eyes (renderei ).^[99] The poem's achievement is visible in the promotion of saetta, found in initial position in stanza 1, to rhyming status with vendetta, the last word of the poem. Transforming the poem into an archer, the speaker completes the repossession of the weapons of Amor—bow and arrows, as well as torch ( faville, 74)—previously controlled by the lady.^[100] In the poem, these weapons culminate in the sword of Love, whose redirection by the speaker in the interval between stanzas 4 and 5 is decisive: it could be said that the sword, always implicitly a phallus (as in the Aeneid ), becomes directly attached to the desire of the speaker to possess the lady physically.^[101]

The shift in possession of Love's weapons illustrates the transformation, developed over the entire canzone, of the lady's glances, her rays and arrows, into the speaker's words, into his parlar. The lady's hostility

is mediated by her looks, by her phantasm in the speaker, and by the appearance of Amor—all understandable as optical phenomena.^[102] Even the speaker's fear of discovery is given in optical terms:

per tema non  traluca 
lo mio penser di fuor si che sì scopra. 
           (29–30)

By contrast, the speaker's defenses and his retaliation are verbal. His early inability to match her with rhymes, his refusal to publish her name, are nearly fatal. It is as he begins to "speak" that the situation is reversed: from the rising, if still internal, strida in the mind and the summons from the heart (chiama ) to the imagined shout in the borro ("Io ti socorro," 47), to the act of speech of the poem itself. From the poem's perspective, it would signify the speaker's victory if he could both see her suffering Love ("Così vedess'io," 53) and make her call out for him ("perchè non latra per me," 58). He would then possess her Medusan strength and impose on her his desire that she speak her love. On a deeper level, the purpose of the poem is the achievement of the speaker's expression, escape from the blockage that nearly kills him, and the provocation of the petra so that she, too, may reveal her love. Thus the poem is fashioned so as to lead to a turning outward of both speaker and lady, allowing their meeting in a common acknowledgment of love.

The lover's actions toward the lady, as far as the explicit statements of the poem go, are directed toward her long braids, and only one of his gestures is concretely named: "nei biondi capelli . . . metterei mano"; "S'io avessi le belle trecce prese . . . pigliandole." We are told that he would pass the entire day with those braids ("anzi terza . . . con esse passerei vespero e squille"), that he would not be "pietoso né cortese" but like a playing bear, and that he would take revenge a thousand times ("io mi vendicherei di più di mille") for the suffering they have caused him; he compares them here to whips (which are also braided ).

It has sometimes been supposed that the meaning of these lines is that the lover would literally whip the lady with her own braids. This misses the point entirely. The lady's hair stands here for her entire sexual nature and desirability; that her hair is braided stands for her customary courtly ornatus, including the elaborate clothing of a noble woman; laying hands on the hair of her head—and maintaining the grasp—signifies an abrupt transition to intimacy. The braids are scudiscio e ferza, of course, because the lady's refusal has been painful, but also because they

incite his desire, they are a target and symbol of desire. The implications of the detail of the lover's putting his hands in her braids are considerable; we return to them shortly.

The pattern that has the speaker repossessing the weapons of Love thus extends to the only weapons that are part of her body: the lady's tresses. The change from arrows, armor, and swords to parts of the body marks the approach to the imagined reconciliation through lovemaking that distinguishes the end of the poem: it is part of the ritual of casting away weapons, of making peace.^[103] The reference to Love's artistry ("ch'Amor per consumarmi increspa e dora," 64), connected with the traditional figure of composition as weaving, and the emphasis in stanza 5 on the lady's hair bring, as we have already suggested, a key self-reflexive moment in the poem. They recall the metaphoric terms of aspro and leno, of pexa and yrsuta, lubricia and reburra, describing the ethos, the diction, and the phonic substance of Dante's composition.^[104] The lady's braid is the concrete term for the figurative expressions that define Dante's style in "Così"—in other words, the term that the poem's own metaphors for art approach as a goal, for it marks the speaker's arrival at the object of his desire and the narrowly specific definition of the poetics of the canzone as aspro. Seizing the lady's hair, the speaker mimes his fashioning of the parlar aspro.

The emphasis in "Così" on figures of movement toward a goal culminates in the final scene, where there is a saturation of terms that denote or imply satisfaction and rest. The lady's fire, her faville, is returned to her via the speaker's own, so that in terms of the tendency of elements (used metaphorically, of course) the poet's ardor has found the place of its rest, its proper sphere.^[105] And the completion of the speaker's revenge both allays his rage and fulfills positive justice, allowing him and the petra to participate in the larger harmony that pervades the cosmos.^[106] On this level of harmony, the poem's reacquired proportion—what Dante called the harmony of its parts (armonia compaginis )—echoes the reconciliation, the pax, between the lovers.^[107] The return of peace, which is the goal of the poem's violence and, indeed, of all movement, is accompanied by the gaze facies ad faciem that evokes traditional terms for contemplation and the beatific vision.^[108] Similarly, the kiss implied in the last verse suggests the mutual inherence of the lover and the beloved described in the Song of Songs (whose relevance for the petrose we have already noted).^[109] The final gaze is also a double reversal: the power of the gaze is assumed by the speaker, and it is used not to pet-

rify, but to mollify.^[110] The imagined moment of plenary mutual interiority is matched by the external operation of the poem, the publication of the speaker's word announced in the congedo, and thus is the logical conclusion of the theme of private and public in the canzone; nevertheless, it remains one of great tension, for though the private fantasy is peaceful, the public word is still aggressive.

Vivos De Marmore Vultus

It will seem scandalous to many readers that Dante's poem of violent sexual fantasy concludes with the terms—they are quite unmistakable—of the beatific vision. But to declare the scene parody would be an oversimplification.^[111] We must read again the last two stanzas, in detail, if we are to appreciate their very subtle shifts of meaning.

The fantasy of the lady's reciprocation begins with her being plunged into the hot pit of sexual desire and frustration, exacerbated to the point that its expression is bestial, latra; this state is attributed to the lover ("com'io per lei"), and in spite of its evident hyperbole (for his speech, however violent, is still superbly articulated), the term latra carries a real shock value (particularly as it is the culminating term in the series of B/b rhymes, perhaps the most intrinsically harsh rhymes in the entire poem: squatra, atra, latra, latra, the equivocal rhyme of the last two contributing considerable emphasis to the effect).^[112] So also the caldo borro, which continues the themes of sinking, drowning, and enclosure (cf. especially "il peso che m'affonda," line 20). The fantasy of both protagonists being reduced to bestiality naturally includes the most difficult question raised by the poem: can such exasperated lust ever be humanized, ever be reconciled with the principle of love? This question is more profound and difficult than the question of what a lover should do when confronted with an unwilling lady (obviously he should leave her and find another), and it is what justifies Dronke's insistence that the central theme of the poem is the struggle for the lady's acknowledgment that her hostility is in fact the mask of an intensity of desire that matches the lover's.

Dante's claim within the poem would seem to be that lust can be redeemed for love only by granting it its scope, always within a largeness of spirit that gradually disarms its inevitable aggressive component. This view is part and parcel of the refusal we have traced in the other petrose to renounce either of the two principles (flesh and spirit, body

and soul) represented by the Twins of Gemini. The caldo borro, of course, is one of several indirect references to the sexual organs, in this case clearly to the female organ, and there is a strong suggestion that the next lines (especially the mention of the lady's hair) involve a certain exchange of upper for lower.^[113]

Thus the lover's imagined response, "Io vi soccorro," is really quite ambiguous.^[114] In the first place, one of the overt meanings derives from the notion that the lady is sinking or drowning in a pit from which the lover can withdraw her. But there is an element of irony, too, for the help he offers involves her subjection to her lust as well as to his desire. Later, at the level imagined as reached in the last line of the last stanza, his help has led to peace, has rescued her from the inhuman state of the borro. One of the most striking things about the passage, however, is that once the lover takes action, the borro itself disappears from the poem. We are free to imagine that the lover joins the lady there, but the suggestion is really much stronger that the locus of the encounter is the literal bed. This change is an important step in the demystifying movement of the last two stanzas, which we associate with the poem's overall de-metaphorizing activity.

The last stanza of the poem, then, is an indirect representation of sexual intercourse. "Con esse passerei vespero e squille": the braids are to be undone slowly and gradually; this stands for the removal of all ornatus, including clothing. "Non sarei pietoso né cortese": there is to be no holding back or sparing of the lady out of false delicacy or the sentimental passivity of the traditional courtly lover (who, like Lancelot, is often imagined as paralyzed when offered the object of his desire). "Anzi farei com'orso quando scherza": obviously this means that the lover will be rough and potentially dangerous, but it probably implies as well an extreme delicacy and precision of movement. The image of the bear also includes the greater physical size and weight of the lover compared to the lady (and, as we have already noted, the lover's being supine under the blows of Love's sword clearly implies, when the fantasy is reversed, the lady's being supine). Thus, the puzzling line "io mi vendicherei di più di mille," still explicitly referring to the lady's trecce, invites (especially since the trecce have been called whips) the completion mile colpi, "a thousand blows." In the context of the earlier stanzas, the implied blows are strongly suggested to be blows of what is represented in the poem by Aeneas's sword: the penis.

It is easy to lose sight here of the insistence on slowness earlier in the

stanza. In the sirma, the gradual disarming of hostility and violence is completed, and full communication and reconciliation are represented as achieved in the long unflinching gaze of the couple into each other's eyes: "Ancor ne li occhi . . . / guarderei presso e fiso / per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face." The "vengeance" here is no infliction of pain: the lady must endure the lover's gaze, and he hers. In the context of all the petrose, the sustained gaze of the lover here represents the refusal of aversion from the lady's glance, breaking the power of the lady's gaze in "Così" as in the other poems. The prolonged mutual gaze of the two lovers is a pointed demystification of the idea that the lady could be a Medusa.^[115] The now merely human couple has been divested of all mythology. And of course the time scheme of the pedes governs the sirma. That is, the gazing takes place at the same time as the earlier gesture of seizing the hair. "Nei biondi capelli . . . metterei mano" establishes contact with the lady's head, and the mutual gaze of the last lines brings the two heads close together. The reference to the traditional kiss on the lips that marks the ritual reconciliation of former enemies means that in the course of the stanza the term vendicare has undergone important changes. The injury said to be avenged changes: in the previous stanza the lady's golden hair is described as consuming the lover, in the last stanza the trecce are whips; but in the sirma the injury to be avenged is the lady's very absence, her avoidance of the lover. So, too, the mode of the so-called vengeance diminishes from the thousand blows of the pedes to the fixed gaze of the sirma. One of the ambiguities of the stanza lies precisely in this shift. At one level the violence is all playful, sharply bracketed, and identified as lovers' play, since the entire scene presupposes the lady's willing participation; at another the couple's mutual hostility and resistance are represented as very real, but these reactions, by being given scope and worked through, are shown to be disarmable.

The speaker's fantasy is not technically one of rape. His wish is that the lady call for him ("perché non latra / per me, com'io per lei," 59–60), that she feel the goad of love that he feels and reach out to him for its appeasement. The fantasy is thus that the lady will desire him. Dronke argues that the petra is herself moved by Amor, that her hostility to the lover is the sign of an unacknowledged investment. The poem purports to be as much a mirror held up to show the petra her violence as it is an admission, and catharsis, of the speaker's own violence. The imagined lovemaking in the last two stanzas would then be no more than what the lady herself wants; indeed, it is the lady's pleasure that is imagined

("piacere'le"). In this respect the poem must be distinguished from poems like Guinizelli's "Chi vedesse a Lucia un var capuzzo," where the fantasy is precisely the pleasure of taking a woman by force.^[116] Unlike Guinizelli's fantasy, moreover, "Così" does not (in feudal terms) ameliorate the violence it depicts by lowering the social class of the woman: Dante characterizes the petra not as a femina but as a donna, a lady of power and station deserving of the honorific voi ("Io vi soccorro," 63)—a connotation that the irony does not eliminate.

It will have struck readers that the peace achieved in the body of the poem appears to vanish in the congedo, where, returning to the diegetic present, the speaker commands the poem to attack the lady. The congedo expresses the reversal of roles active in the poem as well as the poem's antiphrastic quality by inverting generic expectations; rather than a petition placed humbly at the feet of the domina, a suppliant envoi, it is an imperious assailant. But the congedo is also ironic (though in a sense different from line 63), for it proposes to make the lady fall in love. The poem would be the arrow of love that the lady has hitherto evaded; love comes most suddenly and violently to those who pretend immunity from it, like Virgil's Dido or Chaucer's Troilus. The feudal ethos of the final verse—"che bell'onor s'acquista in far vendetta"—is thus curiously ameliorated by its sentenza, which is that the petra, unnaturally rigid and averse to love, be mollified.^[117]

In this sense the poem is a call or lure (richiamo ) attempting to win the lady over to Love.^[118] Her answering call, were it to come, would fall into the pattern of calls and requests in the poem: it would reverse the lady's request for greater and greater cruelty ("impetra più natura cruda," 4) and compensate Love's (but also in a sense the lady's) refusal of the speaker ("merzé chiamando ," 38). The speaker would answer the lady, running to help her ("'10 vi soccorro ,"' 61) as the speaker's own blood answers the heart's call ("corre verso lo cor, ch'el chiama," 47) and saves him from running to his death ("ov'io per sua bellezza corro ," 56). Thus, whatever else might be said, it is clear that mutual recognition and reciprocity is the ideal posited by the poem, and that Dante strcngly insists on the aggressive component of desire. In this respect the poem is a demystification of the idolatry of the lady in the courtly tradition, which places her on a pedestal supposedly far above all strenuous sexual encounter and makes the lover her submissive servant in spite of the avowedly sexual nature of his intentions. Indeed, one of the most interesting suggestions of the poem is that the traditional courtly elevation of the lady is itself partly an expression of a fear of women and resultant

anger toward them. That the violence in "Così" is as much within the lover as in the lady is acknowledged; the disarming of the violence within the lover, it is suggested, could take place only within a relationship in which that violence was indeed matched within the lady.^[119]

Sed contra. All this said, the poem's sexual politics remain disconcerting. The fact that the lady's desire for violent lovemaking is presupposed at the beginning of stanza 5 really does not palliate the fact that, whatever peace is imagined as achieved at the end, the fantasy is avowedly violent. In the prolonged gaze of the sirma of stanza 6, too, one may see merely the infliction on the subjected and humiliated woman of the victorious superiority of the male. Moreover, the premise, advanced by Dronke, that the lady's hostility is a repressed eroticism, and its corollary, that the lady will be stirred to acknowledge her own desire by reading the poem, are also suspect: the gambit that no is really yes, pervasive enough to have enjoyed a "scientific" revival in the psychoanalytic theory of denegation, has received of late its sufficient critique. At the same time, one is not free to simplify the issue. The denial of the possibility of the kind of violence the poem ascribes to the lady would be as naive as the denial of the expression of male violence in the poem.

But the problem may lie still deeper. The poet's wish is for a word, a logos, that can move the will of the petra. Thus, the fantasy of making the lady fall in love might also seem the wish to forcibly alter her will: the metaphorics of the poem, in this view, would sublimate literal force, the force of the hand, for the force of the pen, of language—an effect that may be seen as increased, not diminished, by the elaborate periphrasis and allusion. Indeed, we saw that this exchange of pen for sword is latent in the background of the canzone, in the language of Ovid's letter from Dido to Aeneas. Not only the tropes that present the lover's suffering and subsequent revenge—shields, swords, arrows, the file, whips—remain phallic and warlike; the poem's elaborate investment in and enlistment of the intellectual constructs of the scholastic age—the implication that the lady's refusal is unnatural, a retrograde motion blocking the natural telos of desire, the always intractable Other that must be bent back within the harmonious order of the Same—are subtle and powerful ways in which concerted ideological force is applied to the petra as recipient of the poem's message. In this sense, the suggestion of the petrose that the petra in fact does not yield presents itself as rather a vindicating datum: her difficulty is not expunged, her difference not reduced.

For it remains that the poem's elevation of its language to act, to ex-

ercise power, remains hypothetical, a possibility never realized. The poem, though it rears up to fire its words at the lady, never does so in fact; it can only be a metaphor, the rhetorical image of an archer. It is finally but a parlar aspro, and its satisfaction of vengeance and pleasure are expressed in contrary-to-fact conditional terms. The bravado of the congedo, the passage from petition to imperative (dàlle ), the apotropaic and exorcistic quality of the poem's language are linguistic gambits that cannot guarantee the lady's return of love. The lover cannot know, within the poem, if the poem will work and change her. The relation of poetry to the "real world" remains deeply problematic: all that he has secured is the survival of his own voice.

Both because of its violent content and because the result of the enunciation must remain suspended, the final effect of the poem is profoundly ambiguous. A measure of its ambiguities, and of the poet's own uneasy relation to the admixture of love and violence, may be taken by considering the reigning myths, inexplicit but deeply ingrained, of the petrose—Medusa, Narcissus, and Pygmalion.^[120] As we saw, by grasping the lady's hair and gazing into her eyes, the speaker in one sense transcends the threat, one that haunts the four poems, of petrifaction by the lady's harsh and unyielding beauty.^[121] The mutual gaze of the lovers suggests the speaker's escape from his frustrated obsession and the lady's emergence from her inhuman rigidity. But the scene of the speaker's violence also raises the specter of the Gorgon's origin: because her violation by Neptune occurred in Minerva's temple, Minerva turned Medusa's loveliest feature—her hair—into snakes.^[122] Thus the Gorgon is a type of the punished victim, virtually an icon of the raped female. The uncanny, overdetermined return to the lady's hair—evoking the special attribute of Medusa—in the narrative and technique of "Così" raises again the question of the content and origin of the speaker's fantasy: is the poem a revised memory or fantasy of a rape?^[123]

If the myth of Medusa raises the question of the lady as threatening the lover with petrifaction, the myth of Pygmalion, in which the lady begins as a rigid statue fashioned by the artist, is its antithesis and complement, raising the question of the poet himself as producer and idolater of reified images.^[124] Pygmalion, the sculptor who falls in love with an image of his own making that, at his request, is brought to life by Venus, resembles the poet-speaker of the petrose, who attempts, in dazzling exercises of art, to find the verbal formula that will persuade his petra, the lady of his desire, to feel love, to act, as he says, "come suol far

bella donna."^[125] In one sense, then, all the petrose are attempting to bring the petra to life, to reverse the petrifying power of the Medusa.^[126] This demiurgic function of the poet reflects medieval interpretations of Pygmalion, who was sometimes compared to Prometheus, animator of the first humans, and thus allegorically to the creator God himself, who made man after his own image.^[127] But Pygmalion was also seen as a type of the idolater, the fool who fashions and adores an image of his own creation.^[128] The myths of Medusa and Pygmalion thus encapsulate the dilemmas that the petrose repeatedly raise: a hard-won but substantial reconciliation, or indulgence in fantasies of rape? Persuasion, or reification?^[129]

The specter of the lover's paralysis presented by the Medusa myth is in fact the specular complement of the lady as a statue brought to life by art and desire in the Pygmalion myth. This speculation, the mind of the obsessed lover mirrored in the frozen image of the petra, is an originary Narcissism that threatens to envelop both terms, both the subject and the object of contemplation. The final danger in the petrose, as we have anticipated, is not so much the death of the lover or the persisting inflexibility of the lady, but the self-enclosure of the poet in his own vision, his own private universe—his own monologism. The statue is dead because it cannot speak: Pygmalion's ivory girl is froide, sourde et mue; the petra must be forced, in the speaker's fantasy, to cry out for him ("perché non latra per me . . .").^[130] But the poet of the petrose is barred from the facile fantasy of the Roman de la rose, where the animated image speaks and offers the sculptor his heart's desire. For the petra really to speak would have breached the confines of lyric art as Dante practiced it. When the poet's lady does speak, in the person of Beatrice in the Commedia, it is from the transcendent status of a soul in glory: one of the dead.

Dante required the Commedia—and a different interpretation of the agency of the lady in the economy of love and salvation—to solve the dilemma posed by the sexuality of the idolized donna. Or perhaps merely to displace it. When she returns in Purgatorio 30–33, Beatrice appears in many of the guises of the petra: she comes sotto verde manto (30.32; the petra is sotto un bel verde in "Al poco giorno," 38).^[131] She attacks the pilgrim ("nell'atto . . . proterva," 30.70) with sword-sharp words ("volgendo suo parlare a me per punta") and bitter (acro ) terms and attitudes that recall the petra of "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," whose atti are harsh (aspro ) and blows telling. In passages that,

like "Così," are dense with military terminology, the pilgrim's responses are those of a broken crossbow ("la voce allentò," 31.21) like the distempered lover of"Così" ("n'allenta l'opra," 34).^[132] The virtues have brought the pilgrim before Beatrice's eyes, which are precious stones:

"posto t'avem  dinanzi a li smeraldi 
ond'Amor già ti trasse le sue armi." 
          (Purgatorio  31.116–117)

Her several reckonings, which earlier left him momentarily frozen ("sì come neve . . . ," 30.85) and later leave him petrified ("impietrato, tinto," 33.74), repeat the lover's terror before the Gorgon-like petra ("dinanzi dal sembiante freddo," "Amor, tu vedi ben," 31).^[133] The first petrosa also recurs in Purgatorio 30–33 in relation to weather and winds: 32.53, for instance, an allusion to Aries ("la vertù d'Ariete," "Io son venuto," 41), and 31.72, "quello [vento] che spira dalla terra di larba" ("lo vento peregrin che l'Italia turba," "Io son venuto," 15; noted in Dante 1946 153). The recurrence of impetra, nuda, and atra, three rime aspre characteristic of "Così," in the text of Purgatorio 30–33 is strong corroboration for this return of language and scenes from the rime petrose along with the return of Beatrice.^[134] Beatrice as a dangerous, even petrifying, power is not new: we saw it in "Donne ch'avete," where she ennobles the good but destroys the ignoble. In Purgatorio, however, her return, more powerful than her old self ("vincer parìemi più sé stessa antica," 31.83), seems also to mark her assimilation of the dangerous beauty and aggressiveness of the petra along with the attributes of the biblical Wisdom and of Boethius's Lady Philosophy. Indeed, Dante seems to have literally incorporated the petra—as harshness, as phonic material—in his conception of Beatrice's name, inclusive at its center of the -atr cluster of atra.^{[ 135]} Like Dante's revision of his response to the Sapienza of the Convivio—first fera e disdegnosa owing to the defect of the observer, and later, when properly understood, seen as benign, even umile—the passage of the attributes ofpetra to Beatrice redefines them as the just indignation of a slighted benefactor, the rigorous solicitude of a parent and moral teacher.^[136] It is striking that Beatrice never seems more like a real woman than when she returns at the summit of the Purgatorio—when she fiercely attacks Dante, when she is most like the petra.