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]