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.