The Rime Petrose in Dante's Development

The date of the petrose can be plausibly determined. The first poem of the series, "Io son venuto al punto de la rota," opens with an astronomical description that is sufficiently detailed to be dated: it describes the configuration of planets in December 1296, near the winter solstice. Though possible, it is unlikely that the reference was invented retrospectively, and therefore the generally accepted view, which we also adopt, is that the poems date from the winter of 1296–97.^[7]

Not a great deal is known about Dante's life in the last years of the thirteenth century, though our information for this period is greater than for the later ones. In 1296 he was thirty-one years old, having been born, probably toward the end of May, in 1265.^[8] He had been married for some time to Gemma di Manetto de' Donati,^[9] was presumably living with her, and the couple must by now have had several of their children.^[10] There is evidence that Dante had financial difficulties in these years: we know that at some time during this period he became a member of the Arte dei medici e degli speziali, one of the powerful Florentine guilds, which he seems to have joined in order to qualify for political office. Between November 1295 and June 1300 we see him advancing through a series of minor political offices that was to culminate in his election to a normal two-month term (early June-early August 1300) as one of the six priori, the executive council of the city.^[11]

As a public figure Dante must have been much respected, since he was later chosen to be part of a delegation to Pope Boniface VIII seeking help in settling the violent factionalism between the Whites (Dante's party) and the Blacks.^[12] But Boniface had secretly favored the Blacks, and, whether from Florence or from Rome or perhaps while returning from the 1301 mission, Dante was forced to flee the armed coup in Flor-

ence, fostered and countenanced by the pope, which was to mean that he would never see his home again: he was prominent enough among the Whites to be repeatedly singled out for sentencing in absentia and was far too proud and conscious of his worth to accept amnesty at the price of doing public penance.

Thus the petrose mark an extremely interesting moment in Dante's career as a writer, when he was visibly casting about for new directions, and before the unforeseen shipwreck of all his expectations that was to yield its ultimate result in the Commedia. In this book we argue that the moment represented by the petrose is that of the first full emergence in Dante's work of what we will call his microcosmic poetics, a poetics that, as we shall see, points directly toward the poetics of the Commedia both in its positive/constructive aspects and in what, for want of a better term, we must call its problematicity. Some time after 1305, Dante decided to abandon the ambitious project of the Convivio, which he seems to have begun soon after going into exile, in favor of what was to be the Commedia. Although the Convivio remains a puzzling and perhaps misunderstood work, one thing is certainly clear: in comparison with the Commedia, it was not Dante's true poetic vocation. It was an aberration stemming in large part, as we can see from its first book, from the new exile's sense of intense wrong and from his desire to testify explicitly before men both his innocence and the sense of his earlier work. These will be powerful motives in the Commedia as well, but the Commedia represents a return to the principles that govern the petrose, though of course in terms of a much fuller project and a much more extensive knowledge of the philosophy and theology of his time.

The Vita nuova is far more permeated with microcosmic thinking than has been recognized, as we try to demonstrate in Chapter 1, but Dante's grasp of the problematic inherent in his emerging approach to poetry is still preliminary in comparison with the petrose, which set forth a much fuller conception of the possibilities of a microcosmic poetics, as well as of the difficulties and ambiguities of the role of the poet.

It may be helpful to list some of the striking ways in which the petrose represent a new departure for Dante:

For the first time, Dante makes the natural world an explicit focus, assimilating and exploring in his poetry what were thought in his time to be valid scientific concepts, especially from astronomy and astrology.

For the first time, Dante seeks to make the metrical form of his poems—their stanza forms—imitative of the cosmos: imitative not in a generic sense (as might be argued, as we shall see, for sonnet form or canzone form in general), but imitative of the particular aspect of the cosmos focused on by the individual poem.

For the first time, Dante bases the themes and structure of his poetry on the parallels thought to exist between the cosmos and the human body.

For the first time, Dante extends the themes and style of his poetry to include violently negative feelings.

The last-mentioned aspect of the novelty of the petrose is in some respects the key to their significance. The movement we somewhat inexactly call the dolce stil nuovo had, it is true, extended the range of vocabulary and theme of lyric poetry in Italian to include technically precise scientific and philosophical ideas and terms; in the Vita nuova, as we shall see, Dante's intense originality led to the experiment of making complex philosophical ideas the basis of the very structure of some of the poems. The dolce stil nuovo was not a stranger, either, to the idea that the passion of love could lead in a negative direction. The Vita nuova was in part an elaborate refutation of the pessimistic naturalism with which Dante's friend and rival Guido Cavalcanti viewed love, and it included the death of the lady, as well as the death-oriented narcissism of the lover, as central problems, in order to urge that love, rightly followed, led beyond death. But the dolce stil had still remained within a quite limited register of stylistic effects, dominated by a cult of sweetness and euphony that Dante shows many signs in other works of wishing to transcend. The moralizing canzoni, such as "Poscia ch' Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato," and the canzoni of the Convivio represent efforts to transcend the dolce stil primarily in terms of content, adapting its vocabulary, forms, and rhetoric to doctrinal exposition (often compared with the manner of Guittone d'Arezzo) that often involved an essentially arbitrary relation between integument and content.^[13] In the petrose we are still in the realm of love poetry, but the break with the dolce stil is much more thorough; it involves style and form as well as content. In the petrose we see Dante expanding the emotional range of love poetry to a degree unprecedented before him and exploring the limits of poetic language with an extraordinary new intensity.

But we must ask what is the intimate connection between the first

three aspects of the new poetics and the exploration of the theme of violence. It is not simply that a cosmic poetics must include the negative in order to be complete; rather, the converse would seem to be the case for Dante already at the period of the petrose. That is, the negative aspects of his personality and his experience—impulses to violence, violent feelings of frustration, hostility mixed with desire, self-destructive impulses, feelings of subjection to the body and to mortality—are apparently so central to his experience and so powerful that the full force of a cosmic perspective is required for them to be controlled and mastered. This is no "merely stylistic" matter. As we shall see, it is a problem at the very core of Dante's activity as a poet in the Commedia as well as in the petrose.

The question of the relation of the petrose to the Commedia needs to be approached with some caution. The supposition that the Commedia represents some kind of rejection of the petrose has several causes. One is the plausible enough notion that the "pargoletta" with whose love Beatrice seems to reproach Dante in Purgatorio 28 is a reference to the congedo of "Io son venuto al punto de la rota." This is of course possible, but the identification of the "pargoletta," a term used by Dante in several other poems that have no evident relation to the petrose, is entirely hypothetical. Another cause lies in the assumption that the love celebrated in the petrose is sinful—or, better, that in the petrose Dante accepts and identifies himself with the aspects of his difficult love that specifically reflect a fallen nature.^[14] We should be on guard against a logical circle here: we cannot use Beatrice's reproach in Purgatorio 28 as evidence that in the Commedia Dante regarded the enterprise of the petrose as sinful simply because the idea seems plausible.

Another problem is presented by the undeniable references to the petrose in the Medusa episode in Inferno 9. John Freccero (1972) established that the episode concerns the interpretive danger of reading in the letter rather than in the spirit; he pointed out numerous connections of the passage with the petrose, including the presence in them of the theme of the Medusa. Freccero's brilliant and influential article actually devotes little more than a page to the petrose, so that it is difficult to derive from it a clear statement about them; it seems to suggest that Inferno 9 identifies the petrose as the product of a poetic that devoted obsessive attention to the literal surface of the poetic text at the expense of deeper meanings, parallel to erotic fixation on the female body. It is not clear whether that is in fact Freccero's view, but in any case the idea

of the petrose as mere surface would seem to be a version of Gianfranco Contini's formula: the petrose are essentially technical experiments. (Just what may be the relation between poetic surface and inner meaning in the petrose is, of course, the subject of this book.) Another problem with the idea that Inferno 9 condemns the petrose is that the petrose themselves identify and grapple with the danger of the Medusa. What view do they take of it? Is it possible that the references in Inferno 9 are motivated not by a palinodic impulse but by the reverse?

It seems to us that these and many other questions can be answered satisfactorily only when we have achieved a more adequate understanding of the petrose themselves. Only when they are seen in a clearer light will it be possible to define what in them Dante may later have wished to reject. Gianfranco Contini's approach had at least the merit of bracketing the palinodic issue and opening the door to an appreciation of the importance of these complex poems. No one doubts that the experiments with harshness and difficulty of rhyme and diction in the petrose were important technical preparation for the Commedia.^[15] We believe that their importance for the Commedia goes far beyond the merely technical, so that it would be utterly implausible to suppose that Dante could later have rejected their poetics without qualification. Whatever Inferno 9 means must be much more closely specified. And as soon as one approaches the petrose on their own terms—raising such questions as the full meaning of the horoscope that opens "Io son venuto," for instance, or the metaphysical significance of the rhyme scheme of "Amor, tu vedi ben," or of the allusions to the names of Christ in the same poem—one is reminded that, as in the Commedia, there is no such thing in Dante as a technique devoid of important inner significance, no such thing as "mere" surface. As Bruce Comens (1986) properly points out (though in the context of a moralistic condemnation that we see as both narrow and premature), the form of the petrose is not at all external to their themes; rather, it is their necessary vehicle.