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.