Reversal and Return

The Nest of the Twins

In the heaven of the poet's natal sign of Gemini, the themes and poetics of the petrose return, transformed, with special force. The return of the

poetics of the petrose is one among several. Neoplatonic influence is strong, and with reason. In Paradiso 4.49–60, Plato's doctrine of the descent of souls from the stars is countenanced if taken as referring to the influence of the stars. In Paradiso 22 the tolerant option becomes the poem's fact, as the pilgrim, voyaging to the stars that presided over his birth, recognizes in the technical sense their influence over his genius, as we noted earlier.^[131] The pilgrim's return, by visual retrospection, to earth (twice: "col viso ritornai," 22.133, and "adima / il viso," 27.77–78), to which he must also soon return in the body ("per il mortal pondo, / ancor giù tornerai," 27.63–64), also touches on several Platonic topics. Leaving the planetary spheres behind, the pilgrim comprehends their motions (22.142–150)—a feat held in the Timaeus to be impossible without a model (Plato 1961 1169). In the same passage, Dante subtly recuperates a Platonic tenet by giving the planets in the "astrological" order ascribed to Plato (Macrobius 1970a 73–74, 89), placing Mercury and Venus above the sun.^[132] Dante's reordering is perhaps only verbal; but the principle of benigne interpretare (echoing Macrobius's own attempt to minimize Plato's error) is affirmed, inspired perhaps by the pilgrim's approach to the Good ("Lo ben che fa contenta questa corte," 26.16), in terms Plato and Boethius would recognize, and in his professed love for all the creatures (26.64–65).^[133]

The presence of Adam (26.82–142) suggests, however, that the poet's return is not only intellectual. In returning to his stars, the pilgrim (properly, for a Gemini) acknowledges both his natures, utranque naturam. The reference to Christ as Alpha and Omega (26.17) implies the whole adventure of human time, from creation to apocalypse, and notably the drama of the Fall and redemption: of exile, exodus, and return to Eden. The pilgrim, sitting his exams in the theological virtues, has come to Jerusalem from Egypt (25.55–56); his meeting with James the apostle excites reference to Galicia, where the apostle's tomb was an important destination for pilgrims (25.17–18); meeting Peter is like a pilgrimage to Rome, where Peter was martyred and buried.^[134] But the pilgrimage sites are also figures for the final destination, the celestial Jerusalem: and so the pilgrim's return is also to Paradise, the celestial garden of the lily and the rose, Christ and the Virgin (23.73–74), and to first father Adam, who forfeited the paradise to which his descendant now returns. And if the poet imagines a journey back to his oldest ancestor, he also sketches a future return to his native city of Florence, the specific terrestrial situs where he was born after his information by the stars, indeed to the bap-

tismal font where he was enrolled among the souls that might expect salvation. Gemini, traditionally the gate for returning souls, locates a series of cycles or returns, both in the fiction of the poem and with reference to the future of the poet, both in the abstract terms of Platonic remeatio and in the concrete terms of the poet's own history.^[135] The pilgrim's journey of the intellect and the tragic destiny of the poet form a double cycle, each wound around and reflecting the other.

The pilgrim's journey to the origins of both his natures is also in the largest sense the return to his auctores.^[136] As in the sun, there is a host of writers. Included in the census are the intellectual and spiritual influences that formed Dante's mind and spirit: philosophers (Aristotle by name, Peter Lombard by allusion), Apostles (Peter, James, John, Paul by citation), Moses, David and the prophets, the Muses. Sacred sources and, if more subtly, classical learning are represented.^[137] During his examination on the theological virtues, the pilgrim refers to his authorities as stars, "da molte stelle mi vien questa luce" (25.70).^[138] Dante's ruling metaphor is that the auctores —indifferently the texts and their authors—are like stars because they have poured their power into him, shaping him as the stars help shape sublunar creatures. For his conceit, Dante could draw on Augustine's account of the apostles and fathers of the Church as the heavenly bodies (see Chapter 2, note 75).^[139] He also had his own precedent in the Purgatorio, where the virtues appear first as stars and subsequently as nymphs dancing around the chariot of the Church.^[140] Both Christ and the Virgin, objects of the great double triumph of Canto 23, are stars: Christ is the daystar, sol degli angeli as Beatrice calls him in the sun (10.53); the Virgin is the viva stella invoked day and night by the pilgrim (23.92).^[141]

The principle of return also applies to the text. The sun is mentioned more often in Gemini than in the sun itself.^[142] The beautiful lunar imagery in Canto 23 points to a cosmic proportion: the sun is to Christ—sol degli angeli—as the moon is to the planetary sun. As the sun illuminates the crowns of stars formed by the wise men, Christ illuminates the host of the blessed, a star cluster or galaxy.^[143] Echoes of the cantos of the sun return in countless details: in mention of clocks, gyres, and round dances;^[144] of sapientia and syllogisms;^[145] of feudal and military metaphors;^[146] and of the mystic marriage of moon and sun, of bride and bridegroom.^[147] The text doubles over on itself and brings the sun into Gemini as if to reiterate their conjunction at the poet's birth. (During the time of the poem, of course, the planetary sun is in Aries, two signs away.)

Like the heaven of the sun, the heaven of the Twins is studded with binaries: the double crown of theologians and the double biographies of Francis and Dominic are answered by the double downward look of the pilgrim (Cantos 22, 27) and the double triumph of Christ and Mary (23). Echoing the double crowns, the triumphs enact a cosmic dance and mystery play.^[148] On a smaller scale, the heaven is filled with pairs that represent the mediation of authority. The triumphant Christ and the militant pilgrim suggest the institutional mediation of the Church.^[149] The soul and body, doppia vesta (25.92), and the pairing of Christ and Adam suggest the mediation of heaven and earth in man himself. Double, too, is Scripture ("le nove e le scritture antiche," 25.88), and double are the instruments of authority and revelation ("filosofici argomenti e per autorità," 26.25). There are two kinds of proof, physical and metaphysical ("fisice e metafisice," 24.134); even the terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, form and matter ("la lega e'l peso," 24.84), which provide the discursive forms for the pilgrim's confession of faith, are a pair. Finally, there are personal pairs, like the harmony of Franciscans and Dominicans in the sun; examples include the apostles Peter and Paul and Peter and James, compared to cooing doves ("l'uno a l'altro pande / girando e mormorando, l'affezione," 25.19–20), and the frequently mentioned relation of master and disciple.^[150]

One reason why Dante imagined such a network of links between sun and Gemini might be found in the Convivio, where certain features of the starry heaven (its 1,022 discernible stars along with the Milky Way, its visible and invisible poles, its daily and precessional motions) signify both the sublunar realm governed by the movements of the sun, whose science is physics, and the incorruptible realm, whose proper science is metaphysics.^[151] The starry heaven (the heaven of Gemini) is thus both a sphere of double motion and a horizon between the visible and invisible cosmos. Like the sun, marked with the two reformers and ordered in terms of the two cosmic motions, Dante's heaven of stars is a geminato cielo writ large and small.

More subtle are the returns of the darkest moments of the Inferno— texts whose relevance to the petrose we have already discussed—in the heaven of Gemini. The teeth of love ("con quanti denti questo amor ti morde," Paradiso 26.51) contrast with Ugolino's gnawing on Ruggieri ("riprese il teschio misero coi denti," Inferno 33.77).^[152] The wolves who corrupt the church and promote civil war (Paradiso 25.6, 27.55) recall the Guelph (= Welf) Ugolino and his sons as wolves and cubs.^[153] The poet's appeal to the Muses ("Polimnïa con le suore," 23.56) for help with

a ponderoso tema that strains his mortal shoulders (omero mortal ) is modeled on the appeal to Amphion's Muses in Inferno 32, where the subject is even weightier.^[154] The parallels suggest that the poetics that locks the damned at the center of the earth is to be specifically relaxed in the poetics of the Paradiso, which is modeled after the music of the swiftly whirling spheres.^[155] The magnificent paired triumphs of Christ and Mary, and the circolata melodia reenacting Gabriel's seminal annunciation, are the poet's reward (to himself, to the reader) for having endured the burden of describing the fondo, the static center of the cosmos.^[156] Thus, the terms for both the inspiration and expression of the writer are of expansiveness and fluidity: meare (23.79), roratelo (24.8), s'io spandessi (24.56), diffondere (24.92), piove (24.135), ploia (24.91), distillò (25.71), stillasti (25.76), repluo (25.79). Compression and rigidity are supplanted by grace and generosity (ubertà, 23.130). Consonant with the larghezza proclaimed by Beatrice, grace is showered on the pilgrim in a profusion of elements: light and heat (fire, dry and hot) appear over thirty times; the breath of the Holy Spirit (air, warm and moist) appears over ten times (cf. "l'alito di Dio," 23.114); water and milk (cold and moist) and food (cold and dry), almost twenty times.^[157]

The symptomatic echo of Cocito in Gemini is the opening simile of Canto 23, in which Beatrice, expecting the appearance of Christ, is compared to a mother bird waiting for sunrise so she can forage for her young. The passage is especially important because it is a kind of microcosm of the heaven as a whole. In the simile, Dante transforms the scene of Ugolino watching his sons as the orribile torre is nailed shut (Inferno 33–43–75):

Come l'augello, intra l'amate fronde, 
   posato al nido de' suoi dolci nati 
   la notte che le cose ci nasconde, 
che, per veder li aspetti disï0ati 
   e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca, 
   in che gravi labor li sono aggrati, 
previene il tempo in su aperta frasca, 
   e con ardente affetto il sole aspetta, 
   fiso guardando pur che l'alba nasca . . . 
           (23.1–9)

The parallels are subtle but resonant. To the mother bird in the nest with her young are juxtaposed Ugolino and his sons in the muda, a place where fledglings molt and hawks are tamed; to the concealing

night, the darkness of the nights in the prison; to the mother's eagerness ("previene il tempo") for the light by which she will see her young ("per veder li aspetti disiati"), Ugolino's dreadful premonitions ("già il mio cor s'annunziava," Inferno 33.41) and the sight of his dying children mirroring him ("scorsi / per quattro visi il mio aspetto stesso," 33.56–57). But the differences are critical. In this canto of the Virgin and her Son, the vengeful father is replaced by a careful mother. There are verbal echoes (veder li aspetti and visi . . . aspetto ) but no common rhymes. The bird is on the "aperta frasca" rather than the closed tower ("in che convien ch'altrui si chiuda," Inferno 33.24). What is ordinarily negative becomes positive when illuminated by love: night conceals the chicks and prevents foraging but also evokes the mother's patience and solicitude, as the darkness and terror of the muda is the backdrop for the eucharistic offer of Ugolino's offspring. The grave labor of finding food is cheerfully assumed (note the shift effected between gravi and -grati ) because it is the dolci nati that are to be fed. The changes measure the poetics by which Dante transmutes the blindness, hatred, and despair of Ugolino. Indeed, the passage clearly enshrines the theological virtues: Faith ( previene ), Hope (s'aspetta ), and Love (amata fronda, ardente affetto ).

The remarkable transformations of Ugolino's darkness into the hopefulness of the simile is an effect of the stars of Gemini and of the sun on the poet's ingegno. More directly, they are consequences of that mediation by Beatrice, gazing at the sol salutis, that is the tenor of the whole passage. With respect to the darkness of the Ugolino episode, the sun rises in the text just as it will rise for the mother bird, just as the poet hopes it will rise for him during the erotic and poetic agon of the petrose. Ernesto Proto has noted that the expectation of the mother bird for the rising sun recalls the verses on the Phoenix attributed to Lactantius: "converso novos Phoebi nascentis ad ortus / exspectat radios et iubar exoriens."'^[158] The immediate import of the allusion is clear: as the Phoenix expects its resurrection to spring from the fire of the sun, Beatrice will transmit the rising light of promised resurrection to the pilgrim. The Phoenix however is also suggestive as the emblem of a poetics that constantly renews itself. The bird cares instinctively for her chicks, cued by the sun and the design of Nature ("quella virtù ch'è forma per li nidi," Paradiso 18.111). In the present context, however, the bird's love of her environment is a clue to the poet's own love of his linguistic dwelling. The amatefronde reiterate a common synecdoche in

the Commedia for language and poetry.^[159] The simile is accordingly rich in echoes of Dante's poetic trajectory. It draws on the topoi of the dawn song, the alba, itself a genre of love poetry; the bird on the bough is a figure of the poet, as in "Io son venuto."^[160] The bird in its habitat also invokes Guinizelli's cardinal "Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore," where the ausello nella verdura is compared to Love dwelling naturally in the noble heart, paired with the sun as the power that prepares earth for transformation into a gem.^[161] This Phoenix, then, is the poet's genius, acknowledging its repeated reinvigoration by the sun. And no ordinary sun: strikingly, when Beatrice turns to gaze at the sun of Christ, where "il sol mostra men fretta" (that is, nearest the zenith, where the sun appears at noon on the summer solstice), the position of the planetary sun is equinoctial and the simile is of dawn. In what we must call a hyperiotropism, all the cardinal positions of the sun in its diurnal and annual movements are implied.^[162] But the passage is further complicated by the maternal imagery—for Beatrice is the antithesis of Ugolino, a father blind to the loving offer of his children and deaf to their requests for consolation. Like the Virgin at the end of the canto, she is a nourishing mother, alma mater.^[163] But Beatrice's role is not narrowly that of a mediatrix for the paschal lamb (il benedetto agnello ) that is Christ. Beatrice as a mother attentive to her dolci nati foreshadows the Virgin as nurse to the souls compared to fantolin at the end of the canto.^[164] And both Beatrice and the Virgin as nurses focus on the latte . . . dolcissimo of the Muses at 23.57. The feminine sources of the poet's inspiration and nurture are closely related and form a decisive counterpart to his information by the auctores. As shown of the poet's virtù in the cantos of the sun, the heaven of Gemini, which contains an abundance—we should say ubertá —of figurative language (Scaglione counts ten similes in Canto 23), is evidence that the poet, nurtured by the sphere of the galaxy, has drunk the milk of Paradise.^[165]

The maternal solicitude of Beatrice and the Virgin are thus more than pretexts for affective poetry. In the heaven of Dante's natal sign, which both begins and ends with allusions to birth (22.112–117, 27.98), the poet's formation and education are implicitly staged. The apostles and the philosophers examine him as if he were a university student, a baccellier. If they have provided spiritual and intellectual food (Dante's adjective is almi, nourishing), the Virgin provides the sustenance of grace and the Muses the inspiration, the latte, of the poetic gift.^[166] The topics of feeding and nurture evoke, as well as allegories of the Muses,

infantile contexts and images: the fantolin that reaches for the breast, the mother bird solicitous for her young, the pilgrim as innocent lamb (dormi agnello ).

In fact, throughout the heaven of the fixed stars Dante returns repeatedly to the language of genealogy and filiation. The planets themselves, during the pilgrim's glance down in Canto 22, are arranged as families: Jupiter mediates between father (Saturn) and son (Mars), Mercury is called Maia after his mother, Venus is called Latona after hers. The apostles are fathers and brothers; Beatrice is a sister (suora, 24.28) to Peter. John approaches his fellow apostles and the pilgrim like a virgin debutant ("a la novizia," 23.105); the Church is the bride of Christ; Adam is the old father, padre antico (26.92). Mothers and fathers together imply generation. Beginning the heaven of stars, Dante had referred to his sign as pregnant, "lume pregno di gran vertù." In the balance of the heaven there is direct reference to but a single conception—but it is an important one. The Annunciation is recalled at the center of the triumph of Mary in Canto 23:

"Io sono amore angelico, che giro 
   l'alta letizia che spira del ventre 
   che fu albergo del nostro disiro . . ." 
           (23.103–105)

The circular song of Gabriel around Mary more than commemorates the Annunciation: it is an archetype for the seminal effect of the stars and planets as they circle the sublunar world, and reiterates the specially propitious placement of the heavens at the time of the Incarnation.^[167] In the heaven of Gemini, authority and intellect (represented by apostles, philosophers, and the Logos) and a loving nature (Mary, the Muses) celebrate a mystic marriage, a hieròs gamós, whose direct beneficiaries are the mind and imagination of the pilgrim.^[168]

Thus, if properly speaking the heaven entered by the pilgrim is a celestial sign, several of its metaphoric names—seno, manto (of the Primum Mobile above it), sfera tondo, arche, ovile, basilica, and especially il bel nido di Leda —argue that Gemini evokes the womb of the pilgrim's gestation, in which he was infused with his physical characteristics, in part by the effect of the stars, in part through the fleshly inheritance from Adam.^[169] The poet's formation reiterates the hieròs gamós of the Creation and Incarnation, as does his tuition, a series of infusions from the apostolic and poetic tradition that shape his segnato cervello.^[170] Ulti-

mately, the image of the mother bird hovering over the nest is a figure for the care the heavens, revolving around the earth, have exercised in forming the pilgrim-poet, directing his development as the writer who would compose the Commedia .^[171] And if Gemini is a figure of the womb, then implicit in the space of the pilgrim's natal sign ("la vostra regïon," 22.120) is also the archetype of the space of the poem itself. As we noted earlier, Plato called the absolute space within which the cosmos is formed the receptacle, or womb (receptaculum, gremium ), of nature: terms Dante then adopts in his treatise for the space—the stanza —in which the poem is elaborated. In Gemini we find albergo for the Virgin's womb, seno for the heaven itself. The sexual metaphor functions equally for the creation and ornatus of the universe, for the information and nurture of the poet, for the matter and form of the poem. The poet's sojourn in Gemini is a happy return to the womb. But it is also a brief one, lasting—not by chance—no longer than Adam's stay in Paradise.

Reversed Polarity

At the center of the vast heaven of Gemini, Dante airs his hopes for the reception of his poem in Florence:

Se mai continga che il poema sacro 
   al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra, 
   sì che m'ha fatto per molti anni macro, 
vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra 
   del bello ovil ov' io dormi' agnello, 
   nimico ai lupi, che li danno guerra; 
con altra voce omai, con altro vello 
   ritornerò poeta, ed in sul fonte 
   del mio battesmo prenderò 'l cappello. 
perchè nella fede, che fa conte 
   l'anime a Dio, quivi entra' io, e poi 
   Pietro per lei sì mi girò la fronte. 
          (Paradiso  25.1–12)

The central position of the passage underlines the relation between the baptismal font, entrance to the faith, and Gemini, the gate to the invisible heavens, associated in the cosmological tradition with the Milky Way.^[172] Thus, a ratio is established between the baptismal font, Florence as the sheepfold, and Gemini as the womb, the nido.^[173] The triple circling of the pilgrim's brow by Peter echoes the circling of Mary by

Gabriel and ratifies the poet's investiture by the stars. The passage may also derive some of its power from astronomical reference. In the heaven of Gemini, which recalls the sun in the poet's natal sign ("con voi nasceva") at his birth ("quand'io senti' di prima I'aere tosco," 22.117), mention of the vello may also allude to the sun. The vello, as the pairing of agnello and vello in rhyme suggests, is that of the ram—and the ram of Jason's fleece became Aries, the place where the sun rises and sets during the spring equinox.^[174] The pilgrim, taking the evergreen crown in San Giovanni, would imitate the most celebrated of returns, the return of the sun to its equinoctial point—the moment celebrated at the beginning of the Paradiso (1.37–42).^[175]

The passage also summarizes the concerns we have broached regarding the relation of the petrose to the Commedia.^[176] It focuses the inevitable topics of Gemini: the doubleness of human ends, earthly and celestial; the problematic necessity to include and give scope to the negative impulses in the poet in order to understand them and integrate the self. The poema sacro is one to which both heaven and earth have contributed. In the metaphor of the hand of heaven, the operation of the heavens as the tools or instruments of the divine will is implicit. The passage echoes the juxtaposition, in the invocation of Canto 23, of the sacrato poema and the ponderoso tema, of celestial power and burdensome responsibility, of the task of sustaining both heaven and earth.^[177] The poems' traverse of earth is recalled: the rhyme on terra/serra/guerra from "Io son venuto" (61–62) echoes the entrance to Cocito, where, in the form of Antaeus, figlio della terra, the earth assists the pilgrim. The aspro poetics returns literally in the consecutive rhymes -acro, -erra, -ello, and emblematically in the poet's altro vello, at once the sign of poetic maturity, the trophy of his quest, and an echo of the vello of Lucifer, which assisted his escape from Hell. The echoes of the petrose and the Inferno suggest that the pilgrim's experience of Hell, and of his own temperament and negativity, have in a sense coauthored his poem.

But the passage also locates many of the problematics we have identified with the petrose: the poet's successful traverse of Hell and his crowning in Gemini contrast starkly with his exclusion from his earthly nido, Florence.^[178] The wolves and hounds of Ugolino's dream return in the lupi of civil war that keep the poet from his city. Against the safe enclosures of womb and sheepfold must be placed the strife-torn world, the threshing floor ("l'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci," 22.151) mentioned at both limits of Gemini. Though the passage begins the canto of Hope,

and appears to express that virtue, the construction is cautious, marked more by resignation than by optimism. The poet's hope for the crown at the place of his baptism echoes Boethius's yearning for the fons boni; but the return envisioned is an earthly one, the crown celebrates poetic virtù rather than the martyr's victory.^[179] The abyss separating the pilgrim's crowning by Peter in heaven and the desired but improbable return to Florence creates an effect of intense poignancy.

Ducite Carmina:
The Poem as Charm

Centrally located in the heaven of Gemini, at its focal point so to speak, the verses on the poet's return to Florence have the quality of a magical charm or adjuration. Peter's triple turn around the pilgrim; the subjunctive mood; the embedded mythological and astronomical patterns; the recall of the solemn initiation of baptism, of the poem as sacrato, and of the poet's physical sacrifice—these gestures attempt to harness the implicit power of the poem and refract it as a force capable of breaking the obstinacy of the Florentines. It is a gesture, we have argued, that Dante first learns with the petrose. And it is a gesture that is repeatedly employed in the heaven of Gemini, where what we might call the magical strategies of the petrose as powerful forms that transmit the craft of the poet and of his makers are re-attempted in terms of the much larger stakes of the Commedia.

When the souls ascend, Dante describes their movement as a reverse snowfall:^[180]

Sì come di vapor gelati fiocca 
     in giuso l'aer nostro, quando il corno 
     della capra del ciel col sol si tocca, 
in sù vidi'io Così l'etera adorno 
     farsi . . .  
           (27.67–71)

The inversions of direction (flakes fall upward), of element (souls are predominantly fires or lights), and of season (Paradise is an endless summer) are accompanied by the name Capricorn in a periphrasis ("il corno / della Capra") that disassembles and inverts the order of its elements, so that the passage is also a kind of rebus.

The reversal in the natural order is one of a series; reversals frame the heaven of Gemini. Gemini is enclosed by the ladder of Saturn preceding and by the vision of the angelic hierarchies following: that is, first by a vertical, subsequently by a concentric model of procession and re-

turn.^[181] The shift from a ladder with angels ascending and descending to a set of circles that reverse center and periphery expresses in symbolic terms the pilgrim's transition from Saturn through Gemini to the Primum Mobile. As readers have seen, the universe turns inside out. In this climate of inversions, both Saturn, at the foot of the ladder, and the Primum Mobile, where the angelic hierarchies are shown in their real order (rather than in relation to their respective spheres), locate striking, explicit inversions. The reference to the Jordan's backward turn (retrorso ) at 22.94 (Gemini begins at 22.100) balances the apparent confusion of the seasons that will result from the centesma negletta in the calendar: after nine thousand years, the equinox, falling in December, will make January a spring month (Gemini ends at 27.98–99). The passage lists two additional reversals, which are in fact rectifications:

Ma prima che gennaio tutto si sverni 
   per la centesma ch'è là giù negletta, 
   raggeran sì questi cerchi superni, 
che la fortuna che tanto s'aspetta, 
   le poppe volgerà u' son le prore, 
   sì che la classe correrà diretta; 
e vero frutto verrà dopo '1 fiore. 
           (27.142–48) ^[182]

In Dante's conception (a kind of false adynaton ), the turning heavens will effect a reversal of human fortunes. The great event will correspond in effect if not in fact to an apokatastasis —the return of stars, as in the great year, to their original positions. The result will be a new Golden Age. The appearance of the topic of cosmic renewal in this region of Paradise is scarcely casual. Rabuse shows that the topics of the aurea secula accompany the pilgrim's sojourn in the saturnia regna of contemplation and tranquillity of the "monastic" heaven. The mildness of the sphere results from the position of Saturn, a cold planet, in Leo, the house of the sun (Rabuse 1978 20–21). The temperate Saturn of contemplation (anticipated in the opening simile of the seventh bolgia ) is the inversion of the negative Saturn of Hell, dominated by water and cold, and the negative astrological moment of the poet in the petrose, dominated by cold, lust, and weeping.

As in the previous passage, reversals in the natural cosmos are expressed in similar language. The term svernare will be once reiterated ("sbernare," 28.118) and once echoed (by verna at 30.126). Sbernare (from exhibernare ), referring to the angelic hosannahs, means "to greet the spring with song." The paradox of a perpetual transition from winter

to spring anticipates verna of the Empyrean rose, always blossoming in perpetual spring. But svernare at 27.142 also means precisely "to unwinter": the privation signified by the prefix s- is foremost. Like the implied abolition of shadows in "Al poco giorno," svernare negates the season of corruption and privation. And in the subsequent angelic praise, the perpetual refreshment of spring is also affirmed with the negation of a negation, with a spring "che notturno Arïete non dispoglia" ("un-despoiled by a nocturnal Aries"—that is, by a sun in Libra, bringing the autumnal stripping of foliage).^[183] Finally, the svernare/ verna group recalls the words of Bocca degli Abate, who quips in Cocito that the traitors are "wintering" there ("dietro a me verna," 33.135), so that the term itself is unwintered, its meaning literally and cosmically reversed.

We saw that in Paradiso 27.67 mention of vapor gelati, of Capricorn and winter, suggests an inversion of seasons that brings the cold of Cocito and the petrose into the text of the Paradiso. But the cold returns in the form of crystal, and it is a cold that emits fire—first tempering the cold of Saturn, then as a shining sun, and finally in the heaven nearest the fire (pyr ) of the Empyrean, the cristallino.^[184] In Saturn, Dante sees the golden Jacob's ladder within the crystalline sphere:

Dentro al cristallo che'l vocabol porta, 
   cerchiando il mondo, del suo caro duce 
   sotto cui giacque ogne malizia morta, 
di color d'oro in che raggio traluce 
   vid' io uno scaleo eretto in suso 
   tanto, che nol seguiva mia luce. 
           (21.25–30)

What follows—the descent of the souls ("tanti splendor," 32) who strike the rungs like sparks ("quello sfavillar," 41), the image of the souls as rooks seeking to warm themselves ("a scaldar")—confirms that the crystal of Saturn is a conduit of light and heat from the Empyrean. In the most stunning implicit reversal within Gemini, John the Evangelist is compared to a crystal bright as the sun, in a passage that includes the only rima tronca (technically an asprezza ) in the entire Paradiso:

Poscia tra esse un lume si schiarì 
   sì che, se 'l Cancro avesse un tal cristallo, 
   l'inverno avrebbe un mese d'un sol dì. 
           (25.100–102)

As Saturn is tempered by its position in the house of the sun, the pairing of the winter sun in Capricorn with a second sun in Cancer (which the sun enters at the summer solstice) is a poetic parhelion, a second or twin sun that abolishes night and winter.^[185] The poet's natal sign becomes the zone of surplus light, the gran dì absolutely inverting the poco giorno of the sestina. And in the context of the pilgrim's attempt to see John's body, the double sun prefigures the future coincidence of due stole of soul and glorified body in heaven, the final and complete integration of utranque naturam, as suggested by the mystical interpretation of crystal as a symbol of the Incarnation—and thus in one sense a significant purpose of the poem.^[186]

The last crystal in the Paradiso glows with the light of the original fiat lux:

E come in vetro, in ambra, o in cristallo 
   raggio resplende sì, che dal venire 
   a l'esser tutto non è intervallo. . . . 
           (29.25–27)

The three uses of cristallo in the upper heaven bracket Gemini as Gemini is bracketed by Saturn and the Primum Mobile.^[187] Each higher mention of crystal is more inclusive and glowing with a more exalted light: cristallo of Saturn refers only to the planet; in Gemini the term refers to a soul compared to a sun; but in the crystalline heaven itself ("il sovrano edificio del mondo, che tutti gli altri inchiude") it is a term of comparison for the whole cosmos: the cosmos as a crystal instantaneously filled with the Creator's light.^[188]

In the heaven of Gemini, where the poet's imagination is, in a sense, nearest its source, Dante's wish to imagine his poetic virtù as efficacious, like the will of God himself, comes to the surface. The passages discussed above show parallels with specific devices in the petrose that raise the question of poetic effectiveness. The upward snowfall, the return of the Jordan, and the backward slip of January closely resemble the adynata of the sestina, which cautiously imagine circumstances in which the lady might be transformed, the bright solstice of her consent achieved.^[189] Other reversals—the notturno Arïete, the winter sun in Cancer—echo the nocturnal risings and horoscopic inversions that shape the latent power of "Io son venuto." The increasingly inclusive crystals of the upper spheres match the struggle toward first principles that moves "Amor, tu vedi ben"; the light that fills those crystals recalls

the poet's hope of using the beauty and luminosity of his poem to stir the petra. And the verses at the center of Gemini, as if they were the focal point of the entire vast heaven, render explicit, as in "Così nel mio parlar," the hope that the poem will move hearts that are hardened to him—as if the capital acquired in creating the forms of the petrose, and in representing the whole cosmos, were sufficient to alter the historical reality of his city. Like the petrose, conceived as talismans directed to changing the lady's mind, the Commedia would be the poet's Archimedean point, from which he might move the political and religious renewal that his direct participation had failed to achieve.^[190] The Commedia might thus be thought of as a great crystal, its composition reflecting both the celestial influence intrinsic in its author—his horoscope—and his personal judgment, desire, and acquired skill.^[191]

The attempt to fashion a poem that will have genuine power is marked by terrible risk. As in the case of the petrose, it isolates the poet in a fictional world, a representation of the cosmos that must be truly inspired, truly the result of heavenly causes, if it is to have authenticity and success. When Dante invokes the centesma negletta, the error of the Julian calendar, in his prophecy of a coming reform, he runs the prophet's customary risk of being refuted by events. But not only that risk: the neglected hundredth is also a measure of the inaccuracy of his own poem in relation to the real cosmos. Dante knew, of course, that the conventional date of the equinox (March 21) was in error by more than a week: in 1300 the true equinox fell on March 12. The dates and positions of the planets in the poem were thus—for Dante—all slightly out of focus. Such an error was perhaps negligible and no doubt rhetorically justified, as Moore has convincingly argued. But another much greater and more important error is not so easily dismissed, and to this error Dante may also have alluded with his mention of the centesma negletta. We refer, of course, to the precession of the equinoxes, by which (as Dante reckoned it) the position of the equinox on the zodiac precessed eastward one degree every hundred years, or 1/100 degree per year—a centesma.^{[ 192]} Otherwise excluded from Dante's astronomical calculations for the Commedia, this amount coincides almost exactly with the error in the Julian calendar of eleven minutes per year.^[193] Thus, assuming the astronomical conventions of the Commedia, in the nine thousand years required for the equinox to fall in late December because of the error in the calendar, the equinox would precede into Capri-

corn, and the winter solstice would fall in Libra: an inversion of solstices and equinoxes. But already in Dante's day the error was considerable; the equinox was in Pisces, and Dante's natal stars were perhaps not those of Gemini but of Taurus (see Figures 3 and 4).

If the Commedia is treated simply as a fiction, these variances between convention and reality perhaps do not matter very much. But what of the announced intent of changing the Florentines and reforming the corrupt world? Dante's evocation of the neglected fraction, the temporal margin of error, opens the possibility that he was aware that his poem would have to renounce its hope (its pretense?) of power deriving from the stars and planets.^[194] Once again, the possibility of the poem's being fraudulent (though deeply implicit) haunts Dante. If he read Isidore and Marbodus on precious stones, he also read that the distinction of true ones from counterfeits was extremely difficult.^[195]

The petrose are thus truly microcosmic of the Commedia, truly the great poem in nuce: not only in their experiments in diction and realism, in their greater inclusiveness of negative themes; not only in their dazzling formal complexity and daring—they are also prototypical of the Commedia in their intentions and in the problematic that besets them, in their aspirations for the power and consequence of poetry and in their haunting intuition of its limits. It is not merely that Dante draws on the astronomical and natural themes of the petrose; the specific problematic of the petrose is assumed into the body and problematic of the Commedia, the poema grows out of the nucleus of the lyrics, which remain central to it. Although the theme of reification is part of their problematic, the petrose do not exemplify it in their poetics, which demonstrate, as perhaps no other juncture of Dante's career as a lyric poet does so well, his capacity for self-transformation through his craft.