Landscapes 1:
The Semblance of Winter

Inferno 24–25—more exactly, the seventh bolgia of Malebolge—is especially rich in reference to the petrose. Rime aspre abound (-astro, -appa, -eggia, -ucci, -adro, -oppa, -orra ), including the rare instance of a word aspro because of excessive syllabic length, disconvenevole.^[32] But we also find instances of equivocal rhyme and rich rhyme (tempra, 24.2, 6; tempo, attempo, 26.8, 10, 12) opening and closing the bolgia, and of course the rhyme on -opia (copia, Etïopia, elitropia, 25.89, 91, 93) linked to "Io son venuto" and, less obviously, to the sestina. The three terms tempra, tempo, and -tropia define the thematic axis the bolgia shares with the petrose: temporal cycles. The bolgia opens with reference to the seasons and repeatedly invokes the human life span ("chi sua vita consuma," 24.49), the life of the Phoenix ("more e poi rinasce," 24.107), and shorter cycles like that of Vanni Fucci's combustion or the mutations of the thieves; it closes with the poet's allusion to his own life ("più m'attempo"). Within this frame, there is a systematic evocation of the annual winds from the third stanza of "Io son venuto" in Vanni Fucci's hostile prophecy of Florentine strife (24.142–151).

The terms of Vanni Fucci's prophecy evoke the elemental world of "Io son venuto." His opening, "Tragge Marte vapor . . . ," echoes, and has the energy of, the finite verbs beginning the stanzas of that canzone (cf. especially "Levasi de la rena d'Etïopia / lo vento peregrin . . . ," 14–15). "Di torbidi nuvoli involuto" (146) and "spezzerà la nebbia" (149) resume the snow-bearing scirocco of "Io son venuto" 14–22, especially "l'aere turba " (15) and "copia / di nebbia" (17–18). And Vanni Fucci tells his prophecy to cause the pilgrim sorrow ("perché doler ti debbia," 151) in a way reminiscent of the speaker's aggressive conclusion to "Così nel mio parlar": "dàlle per lo cor d'una saetta." Vanni Fucci's meteorological allegory, moreover, forms a clear pendant to the long opening simile. Because this is an astronomical incipit of great scope and significance, it is a fitting companion to the incipits described above. In it Dante establishes, as in "Io son venuto," a complete microcosm; as in that canzone, the establishment of a winter scene prepares for an inversion, an eventual "unwintering."^[33]

At the beginning of Canto 24, after the narrow escape from Malacoda and his devils in the bolgia of barratry, the pilgrim's reaction to Virgilio's change of expression is compared to a shepherd's response to the landscape during an early morning in February:

In quella parte del giovanetto anno 
   che'l sole i crin sotto l'Aquario tempra 
   e già le notti al mezzo dì sen vanno, 
quando la brina in su la terra assempra 
   l'imagine di sua sorella bianca, 
   ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra, 
lo villanello, a cui la roba manca, 
   si leva, e guarda, e vede la campagna 
   biancheggiar tutta; ond' ei si batte l'anca, 
ritorna in casa, e qua e là si lagna, 
   come 'l tapin che non sa che si faccia; 
   poi riede, e la speranza ringavagna, 
veggendo il mondo aver cangiata faccia 
   in poco d'ora, e prende suo vincastro 
   e fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia. 
Così mi fece sbigottir lo mastro, 
   quand' io li vidi sì turbar la fronte, 
   e così tosto al mal giunse lo 'mpiastro; 
ché, come noi venimmo al guasto ponte, 
   lo duca mio si volse con quel piglio 
   dolce ch'io vidi prima a piè del monte. 
           (1–21)

Like "Io son venuto," the passage descends through creation, from the stars of Aquarius, to the sun, to the sphere of air from which frost condenses, finally to the display of hoarfrost on the ground. The final term is a human microcosm, the shepherd. The parallels of macro- and microcosm are developed through parallels between the human realm and the natural world: the year is a youth; the sun tempers his locks in the water of Aquarius; hoarfrost, snow's sister, writes itself on the earth with a pen. The anthropomorphisms prepare the application of the vehicle to the tenor, Virgilio's change of expression, which passes from a turbata fronte to the piglio dolce he had at the beginning of the poem. The changes recorded are of the soul as they are manifest, or written, in the body: for Dante, the face is the supreme physical expression of the soul (Convivio 3.8.7–8), so the transformations described are signs of the inner man, of the occulta cordis. The passage establishes a thread linking the movement of the heavens to the psyche.

Because tenor and vehicle are mediated by a discernible change, the passage also implies a panorama of time in the cosmos and in man: if Virgilio's expression is mapped by the changing appearance of the earth (and thus, in a metonymy of effect for cause, by the whole cosmos), the

brevity of this change is the smallest of a series of intervals that includes the melting of hoarfrost (in poco d'ora ), the daily routine of the shepherd, the duration of seasons, and the annual motion of the sun.^[34] The linking of the cosmic scale with the rural vignette is probably one that Dante considered characteristic of pastoral.^[35]

Thus the parallels between the petrose and the simile that opens Inferno 24 involve the topics of the microcosm with respect to both cyclical time and hierarchical space. The simile is framed by references to the sun. The first, to Apollo, is explicit; but the second is implicit: Virgilio's sweet look harks back to the scene in Inferno 1 where the pilgrim is comforted first by the sun, and then by Virgilio, whose voice serves "là dove il sol tace" (Inferno 1.60). Dolce is thus already linked to the comforting effects of the sun and the spring, "la dolce stagione" (Inferno 1.43).^[36] The pairing in the simile of the sun's position with the movement of night to the south recalls the astronomical openings of "Io son venuto" and "Al poco giorno," which juxtapose the predominant darkness to the remote sun; we shall return to this important detail in a moment.

Simile and petrose also show parallels in the use of brina and bianco, terms associated with meteorological events.^[37] Transitory weather phenomena are rendered in both contexts with cangiare and tornare: the cangiata faccia of the world in the Inferno contrasts with the lover's refusal to change in the petrose ("e'l mio disio . . . non cangia il verde," "Al poco giorno," 4) and echoes the return of green to the earth under the effect of the sun ("il dolce tempo . . . / . . . che li fa tornar di bianco in verde," "Al poco giorno," 10–11).^[38] A similar principle governs the use of poco in Inferno 24: the pen of the frost poco dura, so the interval the villanello must wait is poco d'ora. Poco in these cases echoes the catachretic poco in "Al poco giorno," though with opposed meaning: in the sestina, the brevity of the day marks the sun's yearly nadir; in the Inferno, the brevity of the frost marks the sun's return.

In technique as well as diction the passage echoes the moment of the petrose. The use of identical rhymes (tempra, faccia ), rich rhymes (anno, vanno ), and harsh rhymes (-astro, -anca, -agna, -accia, -empra ) makes the derivation certain (Dante 1957b 263). For readers who treat the petrose as examples of a fixated poetics, their reprise in the language of this simile has only negative implications: the risk of paralysis, the loss of Virgilio, the end of the quest.^[39] In a related view, the passage is a double warning: to the poet as author, reminding him that his own writing is

as ephemeral as the hoarfrost, and to the reader, who is liable, like the villanello, to misread what is before him.^[40] These readings assume that the technical mastery in the simile and subsequent cantos is divorced from true inspiration and therefore an instance of the poet's reprehensible virtuosity.^[41] In our view this reading neglects a major dimension of the text.

A difficulty with treating the winter simile as the embodiment of a paralyzed poetics is that the immediate (and demonstrably the latent) sense of the simile is positive. The scene is one of winter relaxing, of hope returning. The suffering of the villanello is temporary, the trend back to warmth will prevail. Far from expressing stagnation, the allusion to the petrose here focuses on the return of spring; it also recalls a previous artistic and personal triumph against odds. The poco d'ora in the passage is not only part of a tour de force unfolding a brief frown on Virgil's face into a panorama of seasonal change; it is itself an atom of that change and prepares for the larger vistas that follow.

For the application of the simile to the pilgrim's situation is auspicious. The pilgrim's fear at Virgilio's perturbation is a result of the danger just escaped—a peril that, given the nature of the previous bolgia, must in some sense recall the successful escape of the historical Dante from prosecution for barratry. The return of Virgilio's original expression from il piè del monte both comforts the pilgrim and presages the next cantica, which will unfold on the slopes of a mountain.^[42] Suggesting the unlocking of winter's grip in February, a full month before the equinox, the simile anticipates the wayfarer's escape from wintry Cocito and his emergence, on Easter Sunday, on the shores of Purgatory, where Venus and Love, not Saturn and cold, dominate the sky. In Purgatory, the pilgrim will enjoy the bucolic otium of the Valley of Princes and hear Virgil's eclogue quoted by Stazio; pastoral similes will adorn the text. In Eden, which Matelda will identify with the Golden Age of classical poetry, the pilgrim will be poco tempo silvano.^[43] The pastoral quality of the passage, though the villanello 's lot be a hard one, is a striking relief from the fumy arzanà of the devils (as traditional commentary has always agreed); more important, it is a promise of better to come. The simile is a kind of pertugio or channel, replacing the broken bridge over the bolgia and revealing what is ahead.

The melting of the hoarfrost, some readers argue, marks the erasure of both a text and its writer.^[44] But this erasure is less a cautionary example for poet and reader than the advent of a new poetics, underwrit-

ten by the sun. The hoarfrost, less permanent than ice or snow, is an unlikely symbol for a threatening poetics.^[45] The echo of the opening chapter of the Vita nuova in assempra suggests rather that the hoarfrost is a phantasm, a negative ombra of snow, and its erasure an image of the mind in its ability to become a tabula rasa for new forms, new "writing."^[46] In addition, that the hoarfrost is erased by the sun is only part of the story. The equivocal rhyme on tempra establishes the ratio between the quickly blunted penna of the hoarfrost and the sun's rays (crini ) acquiring temper—that is, strength—in the cold water of Aquarius.^[47] The implication of the simile is that the sun's rays, too, are a writing instrument but that its "words" are to be (in a metaphor not infrequent in Dante) the foliage of the new season.^[48] Dante is in a sense reinverting Raimbaut's description of ice crystals as inverted flowers, flor enversa: in Dante's simile, the writing of the sun will supplant the frosty script of winter. But this "solar" writing will be different because of its tempering in the cold waters of Aquarius; that is, the sun's remission in winter is part of its discipline, a tempering that will make it—or, out of metaphor, the poet—write all the better. The tempering implied involves both the sun and the writer: it is cosmic.

The impoverished villanello of the simile and the weather of February create a scene that is unmistakably Saturnine, and so appropriate to the planet whose house is Aquarius.^[49] The pastoral context of the passage, however, suggests that Saturn's domination will itself be transformed. We have suggested that the opposition of the sun in Aquarius and the nights that head al mezzo dì is a specific point of contact between the simile and the petrose. As in "Io son venuto," the positions in the simile of night and day in relation to the zodiac are suggestive: if the sun is in Aquarius, a house of Saturn, then the night (thought of as a point) is in Leo, the house of the sun. More significant still, Aquarius is one of the extreme terms of the zodiacal division between the luminaries and the planets that gives rise to the rhyme-word scheme of "Al poco giorno."^[50] The signs between Aquarius and Cancer are lunar, those between Leo and Capricorn solar. Aquarius (with Capricorn) are the two houses of Saturn, the most distant planet from the luminaries; they are also the hinge where the system of apportioning planets to signs reverses direction and moves back toward the sun and moon. In this sense Aquarius, like the solar nadir of the petrose, is a cosmic extreme, from which the sun and the cosmos are bound to return, indeed are already returning.^[51]

As in the petrose, moreover, we are invited to foresee the antithetical season. Should we have difficulty doing so, Dante gives us, at the beginning of the next bolgia, a pastoral scene of fireflies observed by a villan at high summer:

Quante 'l villan ch'al poggio si riposa, 
   nel tempo che colui che 'l mondo schiara 
   la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa, 
come la mosca cede a la zanzara, 
   vede lucciole giù per la vallea, 
   forse colà dov' e' vendemmia e ara  . . . 
          (Inferno  26.25–30)

Whereas the winter scene emphasizes labor, the chill of early morning, and the sun still tempered by cold, the summer scene depicts leisure (si riposa ), dusk, and the season when the sun shines longest.^[52] The hope of the villanello, marked in the winter simile by an image of gathering (la speranza ringavagna ), is fulfilled in the summer simile in the intimations of harvest (vendemmia e ara ); he is no longer giù per la vallea but resting on the slope, al poggio si riposa. We would seem to have here another preview of the bucolic scenes awaited in the Purgatorio.^[53] But there is more. The image of the sun tempered in Aquarius projects how the present Saturnine season will be replaced by the Saturn of the Paradiso. There, Saturn in Leo, the house of the sun, tempers its cold and regains the distinction of ruler of the Golden Age, the saturnia regna of Virgil's fourth bucolic. In the sphere of perfected monastic contemplation, the hoarfrost of February will be transformed into crystal, ice so cold that it can emit fire.^[54] As in the petrose, the ultimate import of Saturnine influence in the poet's life is to strengthen his bent for intellectual work and contemplation, to temper his gifts and make him worthy of his high task.