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.