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.