3—
The Sun and the Heliotrope:
"Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra"
Poetic Filiations
Of the petrose, Dante's sestina has been the most studied. Its historical situation between the archetype of the form, Arnaut Daniel's "Lo ferm voler," and Petrarch's multiple essays in the Rime sparse have guaranteed its interest for literary historians.[1] In addition, the intricate scheme governing its rhyme-words has aroused interest among students of poetics. Because the dominant principle of the form is the system of allotting places to the six rhyme-words, readers have emphasized the changing juxtaposition of semantic elements as the main source of the poem's effects and meaning.[2] Contini's view that the sequence of topics in Dante's poem is alogical has been influential in this respect (Dante 1946 157). Although the relevance to the poem's subject of the recurring rhyme-words has been admitted, the tendency to treat the poem as the consequence of a preestablished scheme rather than as a marriage of sentenza and form has with few exceptions persisted.[3] Finally, the poem has generally been regarded as an isolated effort; the view is typified by Contini's judgment that the imitation of Arnaut in the petrose "was, in Dante's intention, but a parenthesis."[4]
We hold that the emphasis on stylistic results at the expense of elucidating the relation of form to subject is anachronistic as an approach to Dante's poem (Bartolozzi 1982 1). Like the other petrose, "Al poco giorno" exhibits a complexity of form and an intensity of thematic development that are interdependent. In these respects, the sestina foreshadows important techniques in the Commedia: there is nothing parenthetical about it. Indeed, the close relation of the sestina to "Io son venuto" fully justifies "A1 poco giorno" as an instance of the microcosmic poetics born in the canzone. Our discussion therefore begins with close attention to the features of "Io son venuto" that are exploited in the sestina. We will then interpret the final verse of the poem, which
has never been given a satisfactory reading and which we find to be a key to the construction of the sestina.
The links between "Io son venuto" and the sestina are manifold. The first two rhyme-words in the canzone are petra and donna, and these recur as the last two rhymes in the first stanza of "Al poco giorno."[5] The two poems share over twenty important terms, as well as similar phrasing.[6] In many respects the sestina, by presenting scenes predominantly in the warm season, answers the question posed at the conclusion of "Io son venuto": what will become of the speaker during the spring and summer, when Love will pour down on earth from the heavens? Implicitly, the existence of the sestina means that the speaker has endured the warm season; thus the dangerous moment foreseen in the canzone has in a sense already been transcended. The sestina is therefore part of the speaker's strategy of overcoming the single moment of fixation, the moment of winter-solstitial danger, and of placing the scenes of his love against a wider temporal background.
The circulation of images in the lover's fantasy has been a principal argument for the essentially static nature of the sestina (Cudini 1982 192). But the lover's fantasy also expands temporally in the verb tenses of the poem. The verbs are in the present tense in stanzas 1 and 2, and the moment of enunciation seems to pass almost imperceptibly from the winter solstice to the early moments of spring, although in fact the entire second stanza, ruled by the simile (similemente ), is still within the ambit of the opening moment: "Al poco giorno . . . son giunto, lasso." Rather than insisting on the fixed initial moment, we note how the use of tenses enlarges the lover's vision, first through recollection, and subsequently through cautious anticipation.
After the present tenses of the first two stanzas, stanza 3 posits a circumstance ("When she wears a garland") more specific than the undifferentiated states of stanzas 1–2, and this leads to the introduction of past tenses, first at 3.5 ("m'ha serrato," "[Love] has locked me") and then at 4.3 ("io son fuggito," "I have fled"). These are not real aorists but have the effect of imperfects, and end by returning to the present: Love has locked me and still locks me; I have fled and still, habitually, flee. But in stanza 5 the past event is treated as an isolated numinous moment: "I saw her once, dressed in green" ("L'ho veduta già vestita a verde"), and this leads to the formulation of a specific wish with an implied future reference: "I have desired her in a fair grass field" ("l'ho chesta in un bel prato d'erba"). A real future then appears in stanza 6,
qualified by its place in an adynaton but qualified in the opposite sense by its allusion to a comprehensive eschatological perspective.
Thus, if the moment of enunciation always returns to the present at the solstice, the range of the lover's meditation grows in its expressive and temporal domain, extending first to a past continuous with the present, then to a specific instance in the past, then to an implied future, and finally to an explicit (even if apparently unhoped-for) future. The subjective present, first a kind of terminus at the solstice, becomes more and more comprehensive. Despite the lover's fixation, the poem shows the speaker's mind illuminated and moved by the petra. Conversely, as we shall show, the lady becomes animated in the lover's mind. Speaker and lady mirror each other's tenacity—refusal, obsession—but also each other's mutability—imaginative reach and inchoate animation. The lover's mind, imagining a spring, transcends the constriction of the punto staged in "Io son venuto."
We have argued that an important device linking the stanzas of "Io son venuto" is the descent of the sun in the sky as it approaches the winter solstice. "Al poco giorno" begins by reiterating the astronomical situation established in the canzone: "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra." The verse is not pleonastic.[7] It establishes not only the brevity of the day but also the annual predominance of darkness, of the night circle. Thus, like "Io son venuto," which mentions the setting of the sun ("il sol si corca," verse 2) and the prevalence of night thought of as opposite the sun in the Tropic of Cancer ("lo grand'arco," 8), the sestina begins with a clear reference to both daily and annual motions of the sun.[8] From a cosmological perspective, the two motions of the sun make visible the motions of the Same and the Other. We will show that Dante's allusion to the logical principles of Same and Other accounts for many of the sestina's features—the tension in the poem between tenacity and change, for example—and will help manifest the principles of the poem's form.[9]
In view of the parallels between "Al poco giorno" and "Io son venuto," it might appear puzzling that there is no explicit mention of the sun in the former except in terms of its effects. These include the "poco giorno," which announces a privation; the "dolce tempo" (10); the growth of plants; and the phenomena of shadow and shade.[10] The lack of explicit reference to the sun in the sestina derives from "Io son venuto," where effects of the sun are named at the beginning of each stanza, at first explicitly, but in stanzas 3–5 implicitly. Positioned op-
posite Gemini in stanza 1, the sun is named in stanza 2 as the cause of winds, but in the third stanza it is heat, and in the fourth the "vertù d' Arïete," that represent solar effects.[11] Least directly, stanza 5 alludes to the sun as remote cause of the warmth in the vaporous waters rising from the earth.[12]
The disappearance of the sun in "Io son venuto" accompanies the figure of the sun's descent as it approaches the solstice. But like the love of the speaker himself, the presence of the sun in its effects counters the seasonal privation of light and heat. The decline of the sun in "Io son venuto" prepares the inexplicit, but central, functions of the sun and solar motion in "Al poco giorno." The canzone shows the persistence of the lover's heat surrounded by winter; the sestina, the speaker's contemplation of the lady set against the turning of the seasons—itself a solar effect.[13] The emphasis on seasonal revolution in canzone and sestina is both thematic and structural: at the end of "Io son venuto," the speaker refuses to turn back; yet the progress of the seasons will operate a return to spring and complete the cycle. The sestina, in turn, generated from the orderly circulation of rhyme-words over the six stanzas, embodies cyclical recurrence as the principle of its form (Durling 1965 84–85; Durling 1976 17; Shapiro 1980 7, 8–10).
Thus the final sirma of "Io son venuto," which reiterates tornare, may be combined with its central verses:
e 'l mio più d'amor porta;
ché li dolzi pensier' non mi son tolti
né mi son dati per volta di tempo,
ma donna li mi dà c'ha picciol tempo.
(36–39)
What results is the pattern for the sestina, a poem in which the speaker's contemplation is juxtaposed to the seasons in nature and in which the lady acts as a luminary that gives and withdraws light. The key terms volgere and tornare come from the middle and end of the canzone, so that, in conjunction with the astronomical parallel that joins the first verses, the sestina is linked to the beginning, middle, and end of "Io son venuto."[14]
The prominence of turning and recurrence in the sestina continues the theme of astronomical inversion announced with the canzone. But the canzone also begins with the birth of Dante's natal sign and of the poetics suited to man as the horizon of corruptible and incorruptible.
In the sestina, the twinning of principles appears thematically in the concern with both rigidity and change, poet and lady, short time and the eternal. But a geminate poetics also emerges in linguistic and formal terms. Although lexical pairing as a poetic device in "Io son venuto" is limited, in formal terms, to the final couplet of each stanza with identical rhyme-words, the pairing of linguistic and formal elements is a key constructive technique of the sestina. Thus, each stanza is linked to the next by identical rhyme-words (in Provençal terminology they are capcaudadas ), both stanzas and verses are taken in pairs, and conjunctions of the six rhyme-words result from a scheme that shifts them in pairs (see below). In addition, as Cudini has shown in an exhaustive analysis of the sestina's diction, the poem exhibits both a persistent bisyllabism and a dittology of terms, an organization of language in terms of binary (and ternary) schemes.[15]
Thus a gemination of linguistic elements and the rotation of rhyme-words distinguish the sestina, not merely as consequences of a rigorous form but as principles closely related to the poetics heralded by the rising of Gemini in "Io son venuto." In that poem, the negative moment is also the birth of a new poetics; it projects an antithetical natal horoscope of the poet, and this principle of astronomical inversion is maintained not only in thematic terms but in features like the inversion of verb and subject at the beginning of each stanza except the first as well. The sestina follows suit by beginning in a dramatic and oft-remarked syntactic inversion, and it stages the negative moment of the lover through the oft-remarked antithesis of light and darkness. Strictly speaking, however, in Dante's cosmos light and darkness are not opposites, for light has no contrary; rather, light and darkness are related as plenitude and privation, act and potency. Thus, although the sestina begins by defining a moment of privation, it implies, and in part represents, the activation of that potency by light. The darkness of the sestina, as if it were a diaphanous gem, attracts the light of the sun.
Quella Ch'a Veder Lo Sol Si Gira
Although the sun is not mentioned in "Al poco giorno," the poem is heliotropic in structure and theme: its formal principles and sequence of topics follow the movement and tropic turns of the sun, the "volta di tempo." Our argument proceeds not from a negative premise but from the traditional relation of privation and act: the seasonal darkness at the
solstice manifests the privation, therefore the potentiality, of light.[16] The argument from privation is appropriate to the sestina. The rhymeword ombra (which appears first and last in the stanzas and first in the tornata ) implies a source of light, while in astronomical terms the poem's beginning at the winter solstice projects the summer solstice six months distant.[17] The logic of privation is explicit in the tornata, where the lady is said to cause the disappearance of shadows. We shall discuss the tornata more fully later, but one of its implications is that the cancellation of shadows signifies the disappearance of the sun as their cause—or the sun's eclipse by a rival source of light.[18]
The enigmatic tornata of "Al poco giorno" derives in part from Arnaut's riddling tornada in "Lo ferm voler."[19] Whatever the problems of Arnaut's verses, Dante's lines have remained without a fully satisfactory literal reading.[20] Like the congedo of "Io son venuto" (and, as we shall see, of "Amor, tu vedi ben" as well), the tornata is a recapitulation and a microcosm of the poem as a whole:
Quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra,
sotto un bel verde la giovane donna
la fa sparer, com'uom petra sott' erba.
(37–39)
Fanno in verse 37 leads to emphasis on far sparire, the only other verbal form in the tornata.[21] Especially striking is the disappearance by zeugma of fa sparer, which remains understood between uom and petra. Far sparer is thus simultaneously doubled and concealed. An elaborate conceit is at work here: the elimination of shadows is literally the disappearance of a nonappearance, and it is rendered by a textual erasure of far sparer itself. Implied is the antithetical principle: the appearance of the lady's light, her brightness, beauty, and power. Dante's text, black on white, renders the lady's full presence only negatively, only as a privation. And the full presence of the lady is highly ambiguous: does it mean the lover's extinction, his disappearance, as most readers assume? Or is there the suggestion of an apocalyptic manifestation, as one reading has claimed?[22] We shall return at the end of this chapter to the question of how the sestina's final antithesis is to be interpreted.
The omission of the verb, like the avoidance of reference to the sun, is an important clue to the meaning of the enigmatic tornata. We propose that the decoding of the last verse depends on its relation to the lore of the heliotropes, both gem and plant. Medieval lapidaries attrib-
ute to the heliotrope stone two related virtues that have direct bearing on the meaning of "Al poco giorno": the power of obscuring the sun, and—in some accounts, consequently—the power of rendering the bearer of the stone invisible.[23] In the lapidaries Dante is likely to have consulted, the power of the gem depends on its conjunction with the plant of similar name, the heliotropium.[24] If the common nouns petra and erba of Dante's tornata refer to the heliotropia (stone) and heliotropium (plant), respectively, then the comparison established in the tornata is between the lady's power of canceling shadows—and thus the light of the sun—and the power of the petra sott' erba to render a man invisible. Thus, we can translate the tornata as follows:
Whenever the green hills make blackest shade,
wearing [lit., under] a lovely green [garment] the young lady
makes it disappear, as stone under plant [makes disappear] a man.
In this way the tornata, like the sestina as a whole, establishes a parallel between the brightness of the petra, whose immature vigor is signified by her mantle of green, and the magical conjunction of stone and herb. Dressed in green, the stony lady embodies the conjunction named in the lapidaries.[25]
We offer this interpretation as a solution to more than the crux of the last line of the poem. The identification of the conjunction of petra and erba in the person of the lady just at the close of the lyric is an important clue to the specific poetics and meaning of the sestina. Three oft-noted aspects of the form are affected by our argument concerning the tornata: first, we confirm Fowler's (1975 38–43) proposal of a relation between the circulation of rhyme-words and the motion of the sun; second, the requirement that stone and herb must be joined in order to be efficacious is represented in the verbal effects of the poem, which depend on the juxtapositions and shifting positions of rhyme-words, on their conjunctions; finally, because the effect of joining stone to herb results in the obscuration of the sun, the poem alludes to a kind of solstitial inversion, the great theme of "Io son venuto," and to the relation between the temporal cycles marked by the luminaries and the end of time, a topic that is explicit in "Amor, tu vedi ben" but appears implicitly in the adynatou of the sestina as well.
Before proceeding, however, we shall anticipate possible objections to our reading of the final verse. In the context of the syntactic boldness and frequent inversions of the petrose, nothing prevents us from reading
uom in the object case and the phrase petra sott' erba as the singular subject of fa sparer.[26] In fact, a similar instance of zeugma and ellipsis is attested in the sestina itself, where the image is of mortar locking stone, "più forte assai che la calcina petra" (18), with serrato (17) understood.[27]
A second difficulty seems to lie in Dante's choice of preposition. Why does he write sott' erba rather than con erba? The latter would seem the logical translation of the relation expressed by the Latin passive in Marbodus's popular account of precious stones: "if [the gem] is joined to an herb of the same name, it draws whoever bears it from human sight."[28] In other lapidaries, however, the placement of the plant beneath the stone is explicit: "if the plant of the same name is placed beneath the stone and consecrated with the proper verses, the gem will render a man invisible."[29] Although relative positions are reversed, the expression subiecta lapidi is similar to the petra sott' erba of the sestina. Sotto does not therefore present significant difficulties.
We turn now to the implications of heliotrope lore for the sestina. After exploring the parallel between the lady and precious stones and its function in the poem, we consider Dante's allusion to the Ovidian myth of Clytie, the keystone to the sestina's emphasis on seasonal change. Then we shall outline the poem's complex mimesis of solar motion. We end by reconsidering the final stanza and tornata and suggesting the implications of Dante's use of the sun and the lore of gems in his version of Arnaut's scheme.
Petra Sott'erba:
The Hidden Stone
One result of sotto in the tornata is the chiastic parallel between the lady dressed in green and the heliotrope stone joined to the plant. Comparison of the donna to a precious stone is of course a topos in the troubadour and stilnuovo traditions.[30] In "Al poco giorno," the relation of the lady to stones or gems is one of the axes of the poem's structure. Paired to her presentation as a stone is her evolving relation to flora: she is clad in green, nuova, garlanded. The contrast of stone and greenery implies again the lady's paradoxical denial of love in her youth. But it also points to the poem's staging of both the lover's wish that the lady yield to him and his fear that her denial will be definitive. Hope and negation are evenly balanced—indeed, interdependent—as the poem evolves.
In the four central stanzas of the sestina, the progress of the lady's
power follows the development of a precious stone. The first two of these stanzas allude to traditional theories regarding the formation of stones from either the conglutination of earth or the freezing of water.[31] The second stanza compares the lady to shaded snow, drawing on the accounts of crystal formed from ice and snow subjected to pressure and cold. The speaker's litotes, "non la move, se non come petra," refers to the subtle effects produced on the lady's hardness by the dolce tempo (ultimately, the sun) as it prepares her for infusion with stellar virtue, as in Guinizelli's "Al cor gentil."[32] The lady's starsi gelata is her potential phase, preparing her transformation into a donna di virtù, a lady of power. These implications are developed in the third stanza, where the image of the lady garlanded with new greenery draws all other images from the speaker's mind, anticipating the oblivion produced by the lady in the tornata. The key term in the third stanza is trarre, which echoes the lapidaries' terminology of the lodestone.[33] The fourth stanza begins with the central verses of the sestina (19 and 20 of thirty-nine), which make explicit the lady's relation to both precious stones and medicinal plants. For the first time in the sestina, petra and erba are consecutive as rhyme-words, anticipating their contiguity in the final verse; at the same time, the fourth stanza records the lady's surpassing of precious stones and her rivalry with the sun, the cause of the stone's preparation.[34] From coagulate earth in the first stanza, to potential crystal in the second, to lodestone in the third, the lady has progressed from potency to action equaling that of a planetary cause. It follows that her beauty in stanza 5 is sufficient to animate other stones, like Beatrice in the Vita nuova, who not only arouses potential love but creates the power to love where it is not innate.[35] The lady's development moves thus: hardness and opacity (stone); hardness and translucence (snow); opacity and power (lodestone); transparency and power (gem); active light (sun).[36]
Comparison of the petra to flora proceeds first by difference, then by way of resemblance. In stanza 1, the lady offers but hard ground for the speaker's evergreen love, and in stanza 2 her snowy immobility contrasts with the hills greening in the sun. But she is also linked to the green hills as examples of the change the speaker wants of her. In stanza 3 the blonde hair of the lady is mixed with the green of a garland. Whereas stanza 4 might appear a retreat from contact between greenery and the lady's body, the appearance of petra and erba together in the stanza unite the lady's effects to the power of gems and medicinal herbs. In stanza 5 direct relation is restored by the lady's wearing green, and in stanza 6
the petra is transformed, in metaphor, to green wood. The tornata summarizes the lady's appearances associated with green: she is dressed in it (hence "under" it); it is an element of her power; it expresses her youth (giovene donna ) and possible susceptibility to love, as suggested in stanza 6 ("come suol far bella donna").
The development of the lady is not objective description but the report of the speaker—a report that derives, with the speaker's desire, from his enracination in her hardness (verse 5). The image of the root is proleptic of the speaker's wish to make love to the petra and itself anticipates the final image of the lady as green wood.[37] The series of images for the power of the lady—ice, stone, gem, sun—is bracketed by both the vigor of the speaker's desire and the lady herself, thought of as a living thing capable of passion. Thus, in the lover's fantasy, the lady becomes increasingly animate (like green wood) as the lover consummates his meditation. Indeed, the development of Dante's sestina is the reverse of Petrarch's in "Giovene donna," where the lady becomes an idol of diamond, topaz, and gold as a result of the speaker's thought (Durling 1971). As we shall show, the lover's attempt, in his fantasy, to render the lady animate is one of the principles governing the distribution of the rhyme-words, a sentenza justifying the intricacies of the sestina. The theme of the lady's animation is closely related to "Amor, tu vedi ben," where the speaker begs Love to put love in the lady's heart, as well as to the cathartic fantasy of revenge in "Così nel mio parlar," where the speaker imagines Love finally striking the petra. In all the petrose, the effect hoped for by the speaker is the reverse of the effect of the Medusa: the lady softens, comes alive, yields to love. But the lady's animation is simultaneous with the culmination of her power—and thus of her danger to the speaker. Consummation of the speaker's wish for a living woman who will return his love is inseparable, in the logic of the poem, from the image of the lady's potentially devastating final denial: the end of the poem marks a limit, a nexus where the speaker's wish and his fear coincide and become undecidably fused. The conjunction of stone and plant, the activation of the heliotrope, also place the speaker and poet at a crisis that is at once erotic and poetic.
The animation of the lady and the lover's fantasy follow the natural metamorphoses determined by the sun: the six stanzas enact the change of seasons through a solar half-year.[38] After the solstitial beginning, the first stanza, juxtaposing snow and the dolce tempo, suggests early spring. The lady's garland in the third stanza points to the iconography of personified spring and to the rituals of Maying; the fronda verde of the
fourth, to the foliage of early summer; and the prato d'erba encircled by high mountains, where the speaker would have his way, to the sexual symbolism of harvests.[39] The sixth stanza foreshadows, with ritorneranno, the theme of solar conversio, which occurs at both solstices: at midsummer, the season found in the poet's fantasy in stanza 5; and at midwinter, the season marked at the poem's beginning.
The development of the lady as a stone, the changing of the seasons, and the lady's union with green, all occurring at the same time, are the discursive equivalent of the conjunction of the speaker's desire in the hard soil of the petra: the poem is the unfolding of the possibilities latent in that initial image, as the speaker's desire, guiding his meditation, transforms the lady into a living thing capable of passion. The poem registers the weaving together of change and fixity, vegetative and mineral worlds, in the order of its terms; petra and erba are thus shifted by the formal scheme such that they coincide—vertically, at the sestina's center, where the lady's relationship to precious stones and medicinal herbs is explicit, and horizontally, in the final verse, where the conjunction of the two heliotropes, one vegetable, one mineral, consummates the action of the poem. The final conjunction imitates the desired and dangerous conjunction of the speaker with the powerful petra, just as it marks the place where the poem both summarizes and exhausts the principles of its making. We shall return to the meaning of this final conjunction; let us note here only that the Same and the Other represent in the sestina the predicaments of speaker and petra, which include both tenacity and mutability, fixation and change. The two principles are shown in the motion of the sun, the model for the structure of the poem, to whose description we now turn.
Heliotropisms
The importance of change in the sestina—the changes rung on the rhyme-words, the modulation of seasons and colors, the development of the lady as stone and legno —has led readers to link the sestina form itself with the problematics of temporal alteration (Durling 1965 83–87; Durling 1976 14–18; Shapiro 1980 53–60). But this is to say that it unfolds under the sun, whose motion in the zodiac is the cause of seasonal change. The identification of the poem's ruling principles with heliotropic movement makes specific the poem's close relationship to the book Dante knew as De rerum transmutatione: Ovid's Metamorphoses.[40]
Dante's reliance on Ovid in the petrose has been documented by En-
rico Fenzi, especially in terms of the ruling theme of petrifaction.[41] In the sestina, both the image of the speaker rooted in the lady's hardness and the lady herself imagined bursting into flame have Ovidian precedents.[42] And if the sestina is governed by the sun, the central placement of the topos of Love's wound ("non può sanar per erba," 20), echoing the untreatable wound of Ovid's Apollo ("nullis amor est sanabilis herbis" Metamorphoses 1.523), is suggestive.[43]
The sestina's implication of the heliotropium invokes specifically the Ovidian tale of Clytie, the girl changed into a sunflower as punishment for her jealousy of the sun, as Vanni Bartolozzi has recently argued.[44] Like Clytie, the speaker of the sestina is rooted in his obsession, "barbato nella dura petra," echoing the enracination of Clytie, radice tenta. But Dante's transfer of Clytie to the sestina is not merely anecdotal.[45] Ovid's book has as its proclaimed intention the narration of how bodies are changed to new forms. It returns repeatedly (though not from a strictly Platonic perspective) to stories of the Same enduring the mutations of the Other.[46] The conclusion of the tale of Clytie is a case in point:
. . . et sub Iove nocte dieque
sedit humo nuda nudis incompta capillis
perque novem luces expers undaeque cibique
rore mero lacrimisque suis ieiunia pavit,
nec se movit humo: tantum spectabat euntis
ora dei vultusque suos flectebat ad ilium.
membra ferunt haesisse solo, partemque coloris
luridus exsangues pallor convertit in herbas:
est in parte rubor, violaque simillimus ora
flos tegit. illa suum, quamvis radice tenetur,
vertitur ad Solem mutataque servat amorem.
(Metamorphoses 4.260–270 [Ovid 1981])
. . . and beneath Jove, the sky, night and day
she sat on the ground unkempt, her hair uncovered,
for nine days she endured hunger and thirst and
fed herself with dew and tears alone; nor did
she move from the ground: she only
gazed at the sun as it went, turned her head to the
face of the god. They say her limbs adhered to the
ground, and her pallid bloodless color turned
partly to the color of grass: remained, in part red;
her face is hidden by a flower almost like a violet.
Though held by her root, she turned her love to
the sun and, though changed, maintained her love.
Ovid's text offers several parallels with the sestina: the change in Clytie's color is echoed by the changing hillsides in stanzas 1–2; her abject prostration on the ground is echoed in the speaker's willingness to sleep in stone and eat grass; her experience of weather and want is echoed in the sestina's concern with temporal mutations in general. But Ovid's text is most compelling as a parallel for formal reasons: it is a microcosm. The ten verses repeatedly juxtapose Clytie's immobility in the earth and her mutation under the sun. The final pointed contiguity "though changed, maintained her love" ("mutata . . . servat")—is the model, repeated at each extreme of the passage, with "night and day she sat" ("nocte dieque / sedit") and "though held . . . she turned ("tenetur / vertitur") each marking the turn of a hexameter and each alluding to both diurnal motion and Clytie's fixity. The verses within the frame then elaborate the same principles, from "for nine days" ("novem luces expers"), to the pivot on "nor did she move" ("nec se movit humo"), back to "gazed at the sun . . . turned her head" ("spectabat . . . flectebat"), and pivoting again on "her limbs adhered" ("membra . . . haesisse solo") through the changes of her external appearance and back to the close of the frame.
Therefore, Ovid's passage gives nested, redundant versions of Clytie's identity and transformation: the account of her gyrations in place is mimetic of the process it describes. Like the sestina itself, which decrees the varying positions of the rhyme-words, Ovid's text is both literally metamorphic and—given its subject—heliotropic, changing with the sun's movement.[47] It is a model of solar motion.[48]
Both the heliotrope and the hliotropium—once Ovid's Clytie—allude by etymology and operation to the sun and its motion. We have noted that the gem is said to affect the light of the sun; moreover, the Latin name, solsequium, indicates that the heliotrope plant turns, like Clytie, and follows the sun in the sky.[49] The gem is active; the plant, passive. Especially significant for the astrological situation of "Al poco giorno" is the fact, widely reported in the encyclopedias, that the plant flowers at the summer solstice. Thus, "heliotrope" also refers to the moment when the sun apparently reverses the direction of its proper motion along the ecliptic. In Isidore's account,
Heliotropum nomen accepit, quod aestivo solstitio floreat, vel quod solis motibus folia circumacta convertat. Unde et a latinis solsequia nuncupatur.
(Etymologiarum 17.9.37 [Isidore 1911])
It is called heliotropium, because it flowers at the summer solstice, or because its leaves are turned around by the motion of the sun. Hence it is called sun-follower by the Latins.
The solstice, the stasis at the reversal of solar movement, and the darkening (conversio ) of the sun by the gem joined to the plant coincide linguistically. Hence, the nature of the plant and the power of the clustered herb and gem focus on the sun's tropisms: the reversals of its motion at the solstices and its conversio or eclipse by the magic of the stone. The joining of stone and plant thus invokes the sun at the limits of its motion. In the context of the whole sestina, the motion of the sun implicit in allusion to the heliotropes regulates the complex movement of the rhyme-words in the stanzas, while the combination of active gem and passive plant, the lady's power and the lover's passion, constitutes the thematic tension of the poem.[50]
The technique of shifting rhyme-words in successive stanzas of the sestina (often described as retrogradatio cruciata ) links "Al poco giorno" closely to the spiral movement of the sun as well as to the solar tropics.[51] Both in the Timaeus and in Macrobius's commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, the highly visible motions of the sun help to reveal the complexity of other celestial motions.[52] The sun's spiral traverse of the sky during the year, minutely analyzed by Dante in the Convivio, demonstrates the combined movement of the Same—the diurnal motion of the celestial sphere—and the Other, which includes the proper motions of the planets.[53]
Now the ordering of the rhyme-words in the sestina requires the combination of two movements, as in the following specimen of rhymeword order for the first two stanzas: 123456 / 615243.[54] Because the second order begins reversed (6,1) and includes a reversed series (6,5,4), there is retrogradation. There is also crossing because part of the first order is reiterated in the usual way (1,2,3) in alternation with the reversed series. Moreover, the two movements are cyclical, with points of departure and return that coincide at the termini of each stanza (e.g., 6,1; 3,4). Although there are several ways of describing it, the scheme must be analyzed as a pair of opposed and superimposed movements. The movement of the rhyme-words is thus analogous to the movement of the sun, whose path across the sky results from the combined, although opposed, motions of Same and Other.[55]
Other aspects of the poem's scheme are modeled on solar movement as well. The procedure for deriving the order of the rhyme-words for the stanzas may be represented as always beginning with the extreme
terms and proceeding to the next most remote term, until two mean terms are selected. The figure so made may be expressed as a diminishing semicircular spiral, the figure that the sun traces in the sky as it rises and sets ever farther south when approaching the winter solstice.[56] In addition, because there is reversal of movement each time a new rhymeword is selected (e.g., 6 to 1, 1 to 5, 5 to 2), the procedure alludes to the tropic points, the movements of conversio in the sun's motion.[57] In this sense the tropic points are themselves the limits of the poem's form. As is observed in Dante 1967 2:265, the system of rhyme-words in the sestina is related to the conversio or antistrophe of the Latin rhetoricians, in which words are repeated at the extremes of successive clauses.[58] Thus the technical description for the poem's most conspicuous feature coincides with the terms for the solstice and for the movements—and effects—of the heliotropes. As we shall see at the end of our discussion, the convergence of linguistic and astronomical patterns is crucial to the efficacy of the poem.
We noted earlier that the principle of combining two movements also applies to larger structures of the poem. The sestina form guarantees that the stanzas will be linked as coblas capcaudadas: that is, the last verse and first verse of contiguous stanzas share a rhyme-word. Dante develops this feature by arranging the topics in stanzas such that each stanza pair displays a thematic chiasmus opposing mean half-stanzas to extreme half-stanzas. The topics are in every case instances of the Same juxtaposed to the Other: persistence intersecting with change. For example, the mean terms of the chiasmus in stanzas 1–2 concern the lady's immutability ("dura petra . . . si sta gelata"), while the extreme terms allude to the cycle of seasons ("al bianchir de' colli . . . gli fa tornar di bianco in verde")—and so on for stanzas 2–6.[59] The pattern is thus the equivalent on the level of sentenza of the scheme determining the position of rhyme-words. And like the retrogradatio cruciata, which assures that all the terms will assume extreme and mean positions in the stanzas, the arrangement of topics means that each pair of subjects will alternately take up the means and extremes of the chiasmus: the cycles not only cross, they also represent a circulation in which inner terms become outer, the center becomes the periphery.
The scheme that distributes rhyme pairs in each stanza is thus repeated in terms of pairs of stanzas.[60] This pattern is in turn mirrored in the whole poem, which joins its center—where erba and petra meet vertically—to its end, where they join on the same line. This weaving together of two cycles in the sentenza and in the form of the poem imi-
tates the macrocosm: the two junction points may be compared to the two crossing points of the Same and the Other in Timaeus's account of the World-Soul. Where, in Timaeus's account, the two points correspond to the equinoxes, in the sestina the two conjunctions represent the limits of solar motion: the solstices.[61] The sestina thus varies Dante's usual representation of the two motions in the pedes and sirma (strophe and antistrophe) of the stanza. With its undivided stanza, the two motions are combined into a single spiral weave that signifies, with great symbolic efficiency, both the embeddedness of the mind in the sublunar world and its kinship to the unchanging Same.
We recall that in the Neoplatonic reading of the Timaeus, the World-Soul is the emanation of noûs, Mind, which it circles as its origin. This circling is the motion of the Same, the revolution upon itself of the World-Soul, which is rational and contemplative of eternal truths. But the World-Soul also attends to the material universe, to what is extended and irrational; this activity corresponds to the circle of the Other, the model for the motions of the planets, associated by Calcidius with motions of passions like wrath or cupidity (Freccero 1986 77). The human soul, made of the same material, has the same revolutions.[62] The highest part of the soul, the intelligence or reason, moves as the circle of the Same: it turns on itself and contemplates eternal things. The soul's revolutions according to the circle of the Other are contrary motions, which represent the soul's other power, the will, in its relationship to the temporal world.
In its double movement the mind also has two foci: when concerned with the object of the will, the mind is turned outside itself; when with the object of the speculative intellect, within itself. These two objects coincide only when the mind identifies both with God: as the object of the will, the Good, which the mind orbits objectively; and as the object of the intellect, the True, which the mind contains and encircles within itself (Freccero 1986 254).
A precise expression of the World-Soul and its two revolutions, internal and external, is given in the central verses of Boethius's "O qui perpetua." In one sense the World-Soul revolves around the Mind, its center in the intelligible hierarchy; in another sense it turns, via the two motions, the cosmic machine of which it itself is the ordering principle:
Tu triplicis mediam naturae cuncta moventem
Conectens animam per consona membra resolvis.
Quae cum secta duos motum glomeravit in orbes,
In semet reditura meat mentemque profundam
Circuit et simili convertit imagine caelum.
(13–17)
To be the midpoint of triple Nature, to move all things,
You attach the soul and diffuse it through adapted members;
and Soul, cut in two, has globed its motion in two orbs,
goes forth to return to itself, turns about the depth
of mind, and curves the heavens to a like pattern.
The movements of the World-Soul as a model for the human mind are of central importance for our reading of Dante's one sestina. For Dante, who did not accept the literal existence of the World-Soul, the poem's heliotropic structure, pointing to the sun, may well reflect the identification of the World-Soul with the sun in medieval commentary on the Timaeus (Gregory 1955 123). Like the anima mundi, which permeates the universe from center to periphery, the sun stands in the middle of the rank of planets (fourth of seven), while mystically it is the center of the zodiac (Freccero 1986 229–231). Like the World-Soul, the horizon of the intelligible world (Mind, circled by the Same), and the physical cosmos (whose changes are governed by the Other), the sun is a mediating symbol of the intellectual sun that is God (Convivio 3.12.6).
We have suggested that the sestina's rhyme-words move in opposed, intersecting circular movements (or combined linear and circular movements), just as the circles of Same and Other move obliquely with respect to each other and intersect at the equinoctial points. The circulation of the lover's imagination—a power peculiarly liminal because both shared with the lower animals and indispensable to the embodied intellect—traces a double movement that is simultaneously meditation intra nos and attention extra nos —the typical movement of mind in the body, turned both in on itself and outward to the physical world.[63] Thus, while on the one hand the sestina mirrors the complex double movement of the sun, which manifests the cosmic motions, on the other hand it embodies the double motion of the speaker's meditation, which circulates the fixed image of the lady in his fantasy—the sun within him—and is turned by the planetary sun as the source of life and seasonal change. The heliotropic movement of the speaker's mind in the sestina is thus an instance of how self-consciousness may be modeled on the principles of celestial motion. As Scartazzini noted long ago (Dante 1875 2:505), Dante's expression for the moment of self-consciousness in the account of human generation in Purgatorio 25.122, "vive e sente e sé
in sé rigira" ("it [the soul] lives and feels and turns on itself"), echoes In semet reditura meat, from "O qui perpetua," on the World-Soul. In fact, Boethius's passage, which refers to Nature, the World-Soul and Mind, is resumed in Dante's reference to life (Nature), sensation (the Soul) and self-consciousness (Mind), nailing down the parallels in micro- and macrocosm. In the sestina, the action of the mind in the body is registered in the form of the poem itself, which, given the repercussion of sixes that marks it, might be described as "sei in sei rigira."[64]
Horizon and Adynaton:
The Tornata
We noted earlier that Dante drew on the metaphor of the human soul as horizon in setting out the double fines of humankind in the Monarchia: corruptible as a composite of soul and body, and so ordered to secular happiness, signified by the earthly paradise; incorruptible as a rational soul, and so ordered to the beatific vision (Dante 1979C 496–98). The mind as horizon verging on eternity goes far to explain the turn taken by the sestina in its final stanza, where the adynata, by invoking circumstances that cannot be fulfilled in nature, bring the poem to the boundary of time and eternity.[65]
The tornata, where the poem's two suns—inner and outer, lady and planet—coincide, presents the lover's crisis in eschatological terms. In one reading, the lady eclipses the sun and annihilates the lover; in other terms, her denial defeats the natural cycle marked by solar motion, and the poem itself ceases. But as we saw, the consummation of the poem is ambiguous. The dangerous maximum of the lady's power coincides with her animation and susceptibility to love. The course of the poem hopes for her descent to the Other, to passion and change.
In the speaker's words, for the lady to fall in love is as implausible as the apocalyptic rivers flowing uphill of the adynata. Temporal and erotic consummation are thus linked. Allusions to the sexual union of speaker and lady petra occur in every stanza of the poem—suggested by barbato in stanza 1, by the hills "covered" with vegetation in 2, by the piccoli colli that are like the lady's breasts in 3, by the reference to the medication of love's wound in 4, and in the fantasy of 5.[66] Stanza 6 verges on explicitness in staging the speaker's worship of the shadow cast by the lady's dress—a shadow that, at midsummer noon, would be almost directly beneath her. Thus the poem is increasingly erotic as the sun climbs higher and higher in the sky: a striking corroboration of
how the poem fulfills the speaker's fantasy through the movement of the sun.[67]
The fantasy of joining with the lady is closely linked to the poem's development of the seasons and to the cycles of time. The solar motions as cause of generation and corruption are mirrored thematically in the topic of the speaker's desire for union with the petra, for generation. Desiring union with the petra, the speaker offers submission to the toil of generation, to payment of the debt of nature.[68] Thus stanza 6 and the tornata refer to the consumption of speaker and lady: the lady's unlikely ignition as green wood, the speaker to be exhausted by "sleeping in stone." In its immediate relation to generation, the sexual dimension of the poem is governed by the circle of the Other, although the speaker's love, and the ultimate telos of generation—species immortality—participate in the circle of the Same. The lower principle is not excluded, but subsumed in the higher.
Consummation as a natural process, governed by the motion of the Other, is thus joined at the end of the poem to consummation in the sense of a cataclysm or apocalypse. Like the relationship of the diurnal poco giorno and the annual gran cerchio d'ombra in the opening verse, the short cycle that contains the narrative of speaker and lady is contained in turn by the series of secular ages and finally by eternity, of which time is merely the imitation.[69]
The boundary of time and eternity is introduced into the sestina by the adynata in stanza 6. As a rhetorical figure, the adynaton measures the unlikeliness of an event by comparing it to a natural impossibility.[70] But the language of the sestina does not rule out natural circumstances during which the reversal of rivers and the firing of green wood might occur. Both events are possible during natural cycles: at high tide, a cyclical event, rivers flow backward near the mouth; and green wood ages, in time, to become inflammable.[71] In view of Dante's debts to Seneca and Ovid, it is striking that the two events involve water and fire: in terms of the cycles outlined in the Naturales quaestiones and the Metamorphoses, both the reversal of rivers and the burning of green wood would occur—the first during the cataclysm, when underground waters rise to cover the hills, the second during the ekpyrosis, when all wood would burn.[72]
Specifically, Dante's adynata derive from the sestina of Arnaut the appeal to the transformations of nature and time countenanced in a Christian cosmos, where miracles, which violate nature, occur to mani-
fest the will of the Creator (Shapiro 1980 71). The speaker's hope that the lady will take fire (a commonplace in the amorous, "Ovidian" tradition) echoes Arnaut's reference to the flowering of the seca verga in the birth of Christ from a virgin. And for the reversal of rivers we must recall Dante's text of choice when exemplifying allegorical exposition: the return of the Jordan during the Exodus.[73]
In exitu Israel de Aegypto . . .
Iordanus conversus est retrorsum.
(Psalm 113: 1–2)
When Israel went out of Egypt . . .
Jordan was turned back.
Like the text of the psalm, the adynaton establishes conditions for polysemy. The questions raised in the tornata regarding the destruction or vindication of the speaker, the cessation of temporal cycles at the end of time, and the repetition of impossible events and miracles suggest that, allusively at least, the sestina is already within this fourfold frame of reference. The fourfold sense of biblical exegesis, which links events to the moral life, to the life of Christ and history of the church, and to the universal dispensation of salvation and damnation—that is, all history—is a developed form of the macro-/microcosmic structure developed in the sestina, in which the cosmic cycles alluded to in the opening verse are mirrored by the turnings of the speaker's mind.
Our view of stanza 6 is strengthened by verses 34–36. As in "Io son venuto" and "Amor, tu vedi ben," the possibility of the speaker's death is raised—dormire in petra (35) anticipates coricare in poca petra as a periphrasis for entombment in "Amor, tu vedi ben."[74] The reversal of time in stanza 6 is a double one: the cyclical return of the summer solstice guaranteed by the form of the poem, and the greater conversio at the end of time, when the movement of the sun above and below the horizon will cease and the cosmos will be transformed, in the twinkling of an eye, to the immutability of Eternity.[75] The terms of the adynaton in 6.1 ("ritorneranno i fiumi a colli") echo traditional uses of the figure in the poetic tradition, but for the sestina it has a self-referential meaning as well, alluding to the scheme in which rhyme-words would return to their original positions if the poem were to continue beyond the sixth stanza. Stanza 6 is thus a kind of horizon of recurrence, the threshold of a necessary conversio in the form of the poem.[76] Although the speaker is apparently fixed at the solstice, he imagines both the possibility of a sex-
ual consummation in the natural world and a final consummation of the ages in the magna dies domini, the great day of the Lord of the prophetic texts and Christian eschatology.[77] The poem implicitly adds the prospect of a transcendent solstice, the day of the Lord, that doubles and contains the astronomical opposition of winter and summer solstices. The poem's first line, so striking in its syntactic inversion and rhetorical catachresis, in fact foreshadows the terms for the Day of Judgment used by Virgilio as he speaks to Cato in the Purgatorio:[ 78]
"Tu'l sai, ché non ti fu per lei [libertà] amara
In Utica la morte, ove lasciasti
La vesta ch'al gran dì sarà sì chiara."
(1.73–75)
In a very precise sense, "Al poco giorno," with its emphasis on effects of shadow, is itself the shadow or adumbration of the total brightness of the last day: pocogiorno at the beginning of the poem and più nera ombra at the end project, per antiphrasin, the gran dì; Dante will, in fact, imagine a transcendent solstice in the Paradiso when he sees Christ in the heaven of the stars—transcendent because the pilgrim is by that time far past the planetary sun.[79] The negativity of the sestina, both optical and moral, is in potency—and to that extent prepares—the brightness alluded to at the end of the poem. The uses of ombra in the poem (carefully calculated, as with all the rhyme-words) prepare this brightness:
al gran cerchio d'ombra (1.1)
gelata come neve a l'ombra (2.2)
Amor lì viene a stare a l'ombra (3.4)
e dal suo lume non mi può far ombra (4.5)
l'amor ch'io porto pur a la sua ombra (5.3)
per veder do' suoi panni fanno ombra (6.6)
quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra (tornata 1)
The first three uses describe cast shadows, ombre portate: the shadow of night cast by the earth itself; snow in the shade cast by the hills; and Love in the shade of the lady's brows, or personified and worshiping at her side, in the shade she casts. But Love in her eyes is also the ray of her glance, her light; this is the basis of the next use, describing the lover's inability to shade himself from her lume, and the subsequent use as well,
referring to the speaker's devotion to her image (or her shadow). The final use is to the shadow of the lady's body (clothed, or with panni as a synecdoche for the body). But this is the shadow that, in the tornata, is eliminated by the lady's brightness, as the green dress over her body manifests the conjunction of the two heliotropes and the apex of her power. The passive shadows in the first two instances give way to the ambiguous third use, and then to uses that define the lady as light: from her eyes, as an optically formed imago; and in relation to her shadowdispelling brightness. Thus the ombra in the sense of a privation of light in fact disappears gradually throughout the poem, accompanying the development of the lady's power as a stone. Thus, ombra is clearly the most important rhyme-word in the poem. It appears first and last in the stanzas and first in the tornata; it is the single rhyme-word assonant or consonant with all the others (and thus may be said to contain them); and it is itself a variation (or shadow) of Arnaut's rhyme-word cambra, which again appeals to the stanza as a container.[80]
But the importance of ombra will inevitably be shared with its rhymeword counterpart, donna, which first appears as the last rhyme-word in the first stanza. The sestina's scheme is such that the rhyme-word that appears last in the first stanza will in subsequent stanzas always fill the place just abandoned by the rhyme-word that appears first in the first stanza. This scheme links the other rhyme-words, too, but ombra and donna circumscribe the initial, defining stanza of the poem. Such a feature is not without thematic import: donna repeatedly enters the place previously occupied by ombra. In other words, donna repeatedly eclipses ombra, a substitution that anticipates the lady's cancellation of shadows in the tornata.
In the cantos of Dante's natal sign of Gemini (whose relation to the petrose we have suggested in Chapter 2) we come upon two figures that distinctly recall key principles of the tornata of "Al poco giorno": brightness and inversion. In Canto 25, Dante is blinded by the appearance of John the Evangelist:
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.
Although John is not in the body, as the pilgrim first suspects, Dante's image alludes to the doctrine, to be explained in Canto 25, of the blessed
as possessing two robes, due stole, at the general resurrection on the gran dì. As in the simile, the sun in Cancer (in addition to its normal position in Capricorn at the winter solstice) would make the day last twenty-four hours: it would cancel the night cycle and the poco giorno and eliminate winter. This image is specifically linked to the reference to "unwintering" (svernare ) at the upper confines of Gemini, in the Primum Mobile, and to the reference at the lower confine of Gemini, in Saturn, to the reversal of the Jordan's motion (Paradiso 22.94–96). In our concluding chapter, we shall discuss more fully the relation of the petrose to these scenes in the cantos that bracket Gemini and to the theme of Dante's hope for universal reform in relation to his own poetic power.[81] We can observe here, however, that the sestina, like the horizon of mind between the temporal and the eternal, is inscribed in a double order of time: insofar as it looks for a natural solution to the speaker's desire—the revolution of the annual cycle—the sestina looks back to its parent canzone "Io son venuto," where the speaker's restoration depends on riding out the negative cycle and awaiting the return of the warm season; but in its incipient, implicit invocation of an eschatological context, "Al poco giorno" points forward to the strategies and terminology of the great "double sestina," "Amor, tu vedi ben," and beyond that, to the Commedia.
The Stay of the Sun
The tornata of "Al poco giorno" embraces the range of meanings that we have brought out thus far: both sexual consummation and the adumbration of the last day; both the fulfillment of natural cycles and the cessation of motion; both the eclipse of the planetary sun by the lady's brilliance—a triumph of the petra that suggests the annihilation of the speaker—and the projection of the poet's wish for a transformation of the petra in a sense favorable to him.
Quandunque, the first word of the tornata, is especially rich in implication. In Dante 1967 2.268 several occasions during the year are suggested as possible referents—winter darkness, but also summer, when the hills are heavy with foliage and cast deep shadows, or even the long shadows at dawn or dusk on a given day. Such a comprehensive quandunque epitomizes the speaker's heliotropic imagination embracing the several seasons and days of the solar year, answering both to the speci-
ficity of the opening—"Al poco giorno"—and to the eschatological sweep of allusions to the cataclysm and the day of the Lord.
Indeed, in formal terms comprehensiveness is one function of the tornata itself, whose traditional name impinges with special force on the sestina. In its embrace of all the rhyme-words (we shall discuss the question of their order in a moment), the tornata fulfills its microcosmic function for the poem and the cycles of time it represents, from the solar day to the solar year to the completion of the six secular ages.[82] With the addition, in the tornata, of six further appearances of the rhyme-words to the thirty-six in the stanzas, the completed poem yields a number like 36 + 6, completing the sestina's allusion to 1296, which was a leap year of 366 days.
After the form itself, the microcosmic richness of the tornata is Dante's most studied adaptation of the poetics of Arnaut's sestina. That there are several interpretations of the adynata in stanza 6 derives from the multiple figural referents for Arnaut's seca verga: Adam and the Virgin Mary, Seth's branch, Aaron's rod, Joseph's wand.[83] The very principle of containment of meaning derives from Arnaut's conception of his poem, in which cambra is a rhyme-word, as a series of structures emboitées, indeed stanze in a self-conscious manner.[84]
Given the importance of the conjunction of stone and plant in Dante's sestina, it is significant that the horizontal conjunction of erba and petra in the final verse is an effect of Dante's careful redistribution of the order of the rhyme-words, as compared with that in Arnaut's tornada. Arnaut's order in both his stanza 6 and his tornada is (in most editions) bDFECA, bEdCfA (rhyme-words are italicized):
B C'aissi s'enpren e s'enongla
D Mos cors en lei cum l'escorss' en la verga;
F q'ill m'es de ioi tors e palaitz e cambra,
E e non am tant fraire, paren ni oncle:
C q'en paradis n'aura doble ioi m'arma,
A si ia nuills hom per ben amar lai intra.
bE Arnautz tramet sa chansson d'ongl'e d'oncle,
dC a grat de lieis que de sa verg'a l'arma,
fA son Desirat, cui pretz en cambra intra.
For so seizes and nails itself
my body to hers like the bark to the branch;
that it is of joy the tower and palace and room,
and I love not so much brother, parent, nor uncle;
such that in paradise my soul will have double joy of her,
if any man for loving well gains entrance there.
Arnaut sends along his song of nail and uncle,
for the pleasure of her who has the soul of his staff,
his Desirat, whose praise enters the chamber.[85]
Arnaut's tornada follows the convention of having the rhyme-words that appear in final position (ECA ) repeat the order of the last three verses in the sixth stanza, so that the tornada is structurally a repetition of the sirma.[86] The scheme also echoes the principle of retrogradatio cruciata by weaving the sequence bdf with the sequence ECA (retrograde with respect to the rhyme-word order of stanza 1) so that—especially in light of the devices noted above—the tornada suggests a convergence toward its center. Finally, Arnaut accents the closure of the tornada by leaving unaltered the positions of the first and last rhyme-words (b,A; inverse order) with respect to the last stanza.
An important consequence of Arnaut's order is the conjunction of four of the rhyme-words in pairs that privilege their semantic relationships: verga/arma and cambra/intra. The conspicuous exception is the pair oncle—ongla singled out as the metonymic name for Arnaut's technique, which often depends on homonymy (Dragonetti 1982 240). Dante's emphasis on the proximity of erba and petra in his sestina alludes to Arnaut's christening of his poem, and points to the proximity of the two heliotrope terms as a key to his own poem's technique: just as oncle and ongla are nearly homonymous, the terms hidden by petra and erba—heliotropium and heliotropia —differ only, so to speak, in ungue.
Dante's rhyme-word order in the tornata of "Al poco giorno" challenges Arnaut's. Because Dante conceived of the sestina as a canzone without diesis, he abandons the convention of echoing the sirma in the tornada. He does adopt Arnaut's idea of echoing the initial rhymewords from the stanzas in the poem's last formal unit. Dante's tornata is ordered as follows:
bA Quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra 37
dF sotto un bel verde la giovane donna 38
eC la fa sparer, com'uom petra sott' erba. 39
AFC echo the first three stanzas (verses 1, 7, 13), bde the second three in inverse order (verses 31, 25, 19). A cycle bAFCedb is thus suggested, de-
parting from b (colli ) and returning to A (ombra ); bA in verse 37 restates, in inverse order, their juxtaposition in the first two lines of the sestina (ombra/colli ). But Dante remains one up on Arnaut, because a segment of the cyclical order starting from the middle (F ) and returning to it (FCedbA ) also reflects the rhyme-words that end the stanzas (FCEDBA ).
Like Arnaut, Dante mirrors the symmetry of the stanzas in the tornata, and by echoing the order of both initial and terminal stanza rhyme-words he doubles the converging elements and enhances the power of his closure. Nor is this all. Compared to Arnaut's tornada, contained by b and A rhyme-words, Dante's might appear to lack closure of its own. In fact its closure, working simultaneously with its reflection of the center of the sestina, is more powerful than that of "Lo ferm voler." The result of Dante's weave is a concluding juxtaposition eC (petra, erba ) that marks the tropic, central point of the cycle AFCedb, which itself reflects the order of the initial rhyme-words in the stanzas (AFCEDB ). That is, Dante has made mean terms into final terms and reiterated the superimposition of center and terminus suggested by the two conjunctions of E and C rhyme-words (petra, erba ) in the text.
The apparent lack of closure in Dante's tornata is a clue to its meaning: what if Dante had used Arnaut's order without change? The words would appear as follows: colli; petra; verde; erba; donna; ombra. They would thus exhibit a logic of semantic pairing much like that in Arnaut's tornada: hills are stony, grass is green. And like Arnaut's oncle and ongla, the remaining pair, donna and ombra, are linked by assonance rather than by semantic relation. Dante's avoidance of the Provençal order is one clue to the extent to which his own order is willed. One result, we have seen, is the crucial meeting of petra and erba. But in accordance with emphasis in the tornata on eschatological closure, it is also significant that, taken consecutively, the six rhyme-words fall into a significant hierarchy: colli; ombra; verde; donna; petra; erba. The order is spatial and causal in terms of how higher levels contain and influence lower. Hills cast shadows; the lady is within the shadows and under her green dress; the speaker, under her influence, places the stone under the plant. And we must reverse petra and erba in our list because the text instructs us to do so: petra sott' erba. The gesture that puts stone under plant is thus also the gesture that determines the poem's final order of
rhyme-words. And because the final rhyme order reflects the entire sestina, it is also the gesture that orders the poem as a whole. The conjunction of stone and plant, of petra and erba, and all they have come to imply, is the key to the poem and to its power.
As a reflection of the chain of being and causation, the final order is a static imitation of the cosmos, just as the sestina proper is a dynamic model of the movements of Same and Other. In the light of the eschatological suggestions at the end of the poem, the rhyme-words, after exhausting their places in the scheme of the sestina, are placed in an order that implicitly summarizes and contains time. As we shall see, this idea will be explicitly worked out in "Amor, tu vedi ben." The effect of the tornata, folding center to periphery, wrapping the poem up on itself, is like the rolling up of the heavens at the Apocalypse: "et caelum recessit sicut liber involutus" (Apocalypse 6.14). The final order is an order, so to speak, of shadows: each element interposed between the source of light and the lover—the hills, the lady's garment, her body, her brows—casts its shadow around him; the sestina is the sum of these shadows, a sum that reflects the geocentric cosmos itself as a series of spheres that transmit, but also obscure, the absolute source of light.
The summation implied by the hierarchy of rhyme-words has a formal dimension as well. One consequence of the structure of the sestina is that the scheme disposing the rhyme-words is not deducible from any given stanza; in the terms of the De vulgari eloquentia (2.ix.2), the "art," the habitus of the verse groups, is not contained in the stanza, as is normally the case in Dante's conception of the canzone. It follows that because a complete cycle of the rhyme-word scheme requires all six stanzas of the sestina, the whole poem, which is the container of the meaning (the sentenza ) coincides with the stanza insofar as the stanza is understood as the container of the form. This makes of the sestina a special case among the gamut of possible canzone forms but also renders it uniquely powerful: the convergence of the formal unit and the unit of meaning harmonizes with the other principles that lead toward a climactic fusion of meaning and formal principles as the poem approaches closure.
The gesture that creates the final order of rhyme-words is also a clue to the importance of inversion in the poem.[87] For in the series of terms as written, petra precedes erba. Here again Dante is borrowing from
Arnaut, who ends his sestina with inverted syntax (en cambra intra ). Like "Io son venuto," too, where all stanzas but the first begin with inverted syntax, "Al poco giorno" both begins and ends with a crucial and rhetorically brilliant inversion (Dante 1946 156). The inversion emphasizes the closure of the form, its recirculation within its limits. But there are other implications as well. The reversal of the order just at the final term—the tropic, the conversio —invites us to read the poem in both directions: literally forward and down to the conjunction of stone and plant, but also logically and allusively backward and upward to the remote cause and antithesis of all shadows: the sun. The tornata, though referring like the sestina as a whole to the obscuration of the sun, is designed also to lead back to the sun—to make us, as readers, heliotropic, to find the sun that the poem's shadows presuppose. In this sense the poem turns the reader's gaze to the heavens—like the obsessed Clytie, to be sure, but also like the philosophical spectator in the Timaeus, who is equipped with eyes precisely so that he may consider the motions of the heavens.
Now the power of the heliotrope, and indeed the very possibility of our interpretation, depend on identifying conjunction—pairing, gemination—and inversion as principles of the poem's technique and structure. In other words, far from presenting an arbitrary sequence of stanzas, the meaning and power of the poem require its having exactly the form and dispositio of terms that it in fact does have. The poem, in which rhetorical (conversio, antistrophe, retrogradatio ) and cosmic order (solar conversio, planetary retrogradation) coincide, is itself the conjunction of stone and plant, the activated talisman. Several of the lapidaries describing the heliotrope in fact prescribe a third element, a versified charm, as an ingredient necessary for activating the power of the heliotrope: the conjunction of stone and herb must be "sacrato legitimo carmine" if it is to be efficacious.[88] Just as Arnaut refers to his sestina as a "chansson d'ongl'e d'oncle," a bizarre encounter of nail and uncle, Dante's verses join stone and plant in a scheme that imitates the cosmos with all the resources of art. It is likely that Petrarch registered the precise relationship of Dante's poem to the lore of lapidaries at the center of the sixth sestina of the Rime sparse:
Et ò cerco poi'l mondo a parte a parte
se versi o petre o suco d'erbe nove
mi rendesser un dì la mente sciolta.
(Rime sparse 214.16–18)[89]
Petrarch brings together the three elements—stone, herb, and verse-required to activate the power of the sestina and free the speaker-lover from obsession with the lady.
Dante's poem works as an artifact not only to deploy a structure of conjunctions, but also magically to enlist the inversions of time and the heavens and focus them on the petra, with the hope of making her fall in love and so release the speaker from his dangerous impasse. The text suggests two possible outcomes at different levels of interpretation. The first, more obvious, has the young petra grow in power until her brilliance overwhelms the speaker, who disappears, like the shadows, with his text. In the second, the marvelous art of the poem that joins petra to erba and activates the heliotrope permits the speaker to escape the negative moment and project an antithetical bright summer that will see the lady burn with love for him: in this sense, the conclusion of the poem is an enfranchisement.[90] But the two outcomes are irremediably entwined, for the increase of the lady's power and the consummation of the poem's scheme are simultaneous. What the lover wishes and what he fears come to fruition at once. The adynata can thus be taken as indications of the improbability of the lover's satisfaction, or as themselves a system of defenses he puts up against the actual—and dangerous—possibility of achieving the lady's love.[91] The poem concludes, then, in aporia. The cycles of time imitated and thus embodied in the poem will not provide the necessary solution, will not bring about the solstice of the lady's acceptance. Dante's next attempt to find the power to move the lady will be the great "double" sestina, "Amor, tu vedi ben," where a transcendent basis to the poet's craft, as well as his love, is shown to be indispensable.