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.