Katabasis

The poem begins with the lady's evasion of Love's attack (1, pedes ), shifts to her attack on the speaker (1, sirma; 2, pedes ), and shifts again to the destruction, through the lady's image, of the speaker's internal

senses (2, sirma; 3, pedes ). A personified god of love presents a direct threat to his life (3, sirma ; 4, pedes, sirma ). The situation is then reversed, with the speaker imagining the lady's vulnerability, first to Love's stroke (5, pedes ), then to his own grip and caresses (5, sirma ). The final scene (6, pedes, sirma ), with the speaker dominant and close to the lady, reverses the speaker's subjection to the god of love in the central stanzas. The final configuration is also transformed: if Love's attack on the speaker is treacherous, the speaker's violence is presented as beneficial to both speaker and lady. Both position and intention are reversed.

The structure of "Così nel mio parlar" is thus demarcated by the development of the dominant metaphor of combat and by the antithesis between the lover's inner experience and his relation with the outside world.^[29] At the outset (stanzas 1 and 2), the struggle with the lady is described in terms of combat at a distance: the two are archers shooting at each other from afar. The lover's arrows, even if they reach their mark, do not penetrate the lady's armor, but hers penetrate all his defenses and reach their mark no matter how he flees her presence or tries to conceal himself. His relation to what is outside, other than the lady, is likewise one of fearful silence and anxious defensive concealment (24–30). Because so many of the lady's arrows have found their mark, his life is threatened.

In the sirma of stanza 2 the lover is attacked by the lady's viso, the image of her beauty that penetrates his eye.^[30] His inner experience is dominated by the lady's image ("de la mia mente tien la cima"), which attacks him from within. Finally (lines 22–26), Death is gnawing at his faculties (lines 31–34). The image of the file wearing through a scorza a scorza transforms the idea of piercing armor to a vision of scraping the outer layers of bark to reach the quick. The teeth of Love, with which Death is gnawing him, intensify the file metaphor to that of something like a wild animal, with the object of attack his senses.^[31] Thus, the tree metaphor and the animal metaphor, in addition to constituting a rise in intensity, include in their range the deep life (the quick within the scorza ) only dimly available to awareness as well as an outer, much more perceptible level, that of the experience of the senses, still firmly represented as inner experience.

By the second pes of stanza 2, the speaker's defense is vested in his art (rima ), though inadequate to the burden of the lady's image ("il peso che m'affonda"). The metaphor of the burden on the speaker, taken over from the first stanza of "Io son venuto" (10–14), is thus linked to

the system of inner/outer distinctions: sinking to lower levels is parallel to entering deeper and deeper into the speaker's life.^[32]

Stanzas 2 and 3 also develop the tension between inner and outer experience in terms of the relation of inner suffering and verbal expression. In the sirma of stanza 2, expression (rima ) would balance the crushing weight on the lover: in one sense, then, expression redresses the balance, brings the lover back up to the surface. The sirma of stanza 2 is parallel in structure: the speaker's defense would be speech, a dire altrui exposing the source of power behind the image and behind the lady. Just after mention of the inner awareness of the file wearing through successive layers of strength comes the passage on the lover's anxiety to prevent any observer from seeing into his inner state (27–30): he must both try to shield himself against the lady's arrows and prevent any external expression. The open avowal of the penser ("per tema non traluca / lo mio penser") would defend the speaker from the lady's destructiveness by breaching the laws of courtoisie that bind him to his fate.^[33]

This tension between the lover's need for external expression and the necessity of preventing it gradually becomes extreme, reaching its high point in the next stanza. The inverted logical sequence of the pedes of stanza 3, like their inverted syntax, contributes strongly to this tension: the lover is said to fear discovery more than death, and the sequence moves from the trembling of the heart in its fear of being seen from the outside, to the inner experience of the slow loss of vital sensation—said to be less feared, but represented as actual rather than hypothetical. The inversion also means that the poem continues to progress, with anguished strain, both downward and inward.

At this moment, with the sirma of stanza 3, comes the first major shift in the metaphor of combat. The combat is abruptly transferred from the outer world of the hostile relation of lover and lady to the inner scene, and it is no longer combat at a distance but a hand-to-hand struggle with the personified god of love, represented as having reached its final phase with the defeat and imminent death of the lover. The earlier metaphors of descent and of filing and gnawing have prepared for this moment, which is situated in the innermost parts of life and which finds the lover cast down and helpless. But the scene also derives much of its power from the earlier tension arising from the ban on expression, because implicitly it is an unmasking of impersonal, unconscious agencies to reveal the conscious and determined hostility of a human figure—which remains, nonetheless, a mask.

The struggle is represented in several stages. In the first, the god has struck the lover to the ground and is standing over him; the lover cries out and humbly begs for mercy, but the god seems determined to refuse it (sirma of stanza 3, 35–39). It may seem obvious to say that the struggle (though internal) is represented as if taking place in the outside world; it is important that the lover is still experiencing it as if from within his body, but also as if his body were there in the internal scene. For instance, in this first stage he cries out, and he must interpret Love's facial expressions and bodily attitude ("par messo al niego").

If in this first stage Love is simply standing over the lover after having felled him, in the next stage (first pes of stanza 4, 40–43) Love moves into action: he raises his hand again and again as if to strike and holds the lover forcibly to the ground supine (a riverso ) and too exhausted to struggle any longer ("d'ogni guizzo stanco"). The moment of the death blow seems to have arrived, and the lover has the inner experience of the physical combat:

   allor mi surgon ne la mente strida; 
e '1 sangue, ch'è per le vene disperso, 
fuggendo corre verso 
lo cor, che 'l chiama; ond'io rimango bianco. 
           (44–47)

The first line of this sccond pes of stanza 4 is in some ways the most remarkable in the poem.^[34] Within the allegory on the inner stage, the division between inner and outer is maintained: there is a kind of retreat (parallel to the file's action a scorza a scorza ) to further levels of inner awareness. And in the terror of awaiting the death blow (as if from outside), the lover is now again blocked from "outward" expression ("allor surgon ne la mente strida," 44), whereas in the previous pes he has been represented as crying aloud. Of course, part of the surprising power of line 44 lies precisely in the ambiguity of ne la mente: since the locus of the entire allegorical scene is the lover's mente, the phrase both maintains the inner/outer distinction and the blockage of expression in the personified combat and obliterates that distinction, placing the silent inner screaming in what we may call the "real" mind of the lover, blocked from the outside world by his obsessive inner conflict. The ambiguity is mapped in references to the sword, which is presented both objectively and subjectively: properly as the aggressive weapon (spada ), then metonymically as cause (mano, fiede ) and effect (dolor ). The ambiguity is maintained in the rest of the pes, for the lines about the blood

rushing to the heart and the resultant pallor of the lover apply both to the events of the imagined combat and to the "actual" bodily state of the lover caught up in the intensity of his imagining.

The third stage of the hand-to-hand combat with Love is the sirma of stanza 4 (48–52). We are back in the allegorical fiction, as Love strikes with his sword under the lover's left arm:

Elli mi fiede sotto il braccio manco 
sì forte che 'I dolor nel cor rimbalza; 
allor dico: "S' elli alza 
un'altra volta, Morte m'avrè chiuso 
prima che '1 colpo sia sceso giuso."

What is the status of lines 50–52? Like the strida, this speech is within the lover in the inner drama; but again like the strida, it is understood to be silent, both within the lover in the allegory and within the lover as he exists in the "real" world. Expression is enclosed doubly in the lover, and death, it is said, will close him up entirely if Love raises his hand another time. The most profound enclosure—the ultimate silence of death—coincides with the threat of a final descent (sceso giuso ). The speaker can fall, and withdraw, no further.

At this moment the allegorical combat is suspended. With the opening of the next stanza the major transition of the poem takes place, and it brings the next major change in the treatment of the metaphor of combat. The lady is substituted for the lover as the victim of Love's blow:

Così vedess' io lui fender per mezzo 
lo core a la crudele che '1 mio squatra . . .

We have been abruptly returned to the "outer" world and to the combat between lover and lady that had dominated until the sirma of stanza 3. The pattern is maintained in the reversal of circumstances that takes place in stanzas 5–6, where first Love (lui ) then the speaker (io ) are the aggressors, while the lady is persistently the victim. In rapid succession, the blow to the heart, the barks of frustration, the tresses (Love's whips), and thefaville are, in the speaker's wish, inflicted on the lady. What had been her gestures and devices of attack become the lover's weapons, and she becomes the victim. The reversal of agent and patient is thus the turn that in a sense activates the text, as we shall discuss below.

Two aspects of the combat with Love require further comment here. One is the fact that each of the three stages of the struggle involves some kind of speech on the part of the lover, while the god of love him-

self is entirely silent (the closest he comes to speech is his defiance—"sfida la debole mia vita"—which presumably refers to the announcement of intention in his gestures and facial expression). There is a progression from the grido of line 37 (which is understood to be aloud, though within the inner drama) to the strida of line 44 (which are within the lover within the inner drama) to the dico of line 50 (which are at a first level clearly still within the lover within the inner drama, like the strida, but whose term, dico, is ambiguous). However, it is clear that the inchoate attempts at expression in the central stanzas, and the very tension between extreme inwardness and an externalizing representation of that inwardness, are a function of the speaker's re-ascent and reemergence through the medium of his own speech, the rima that redresses the balance of the lady's harshness, which is then secured by the turn to the "outer" world in stanza 5.

The other aspect is more striking still. While the nature of the allusion to Dido and Aeneas in lines 35–36, which state that Love has struck the lover down "con quella spada ond'elli ancise Dido," will be addressed more fully below, here we wish to emphasize the fact that Dido committed suicide with the sword in question. In other words, the sudden irruption of the hand-to-hand combat with Love reveals, more clearly than heretofore in the sequence of the petrose, that the suffering repeatedly said to be leading the lover toward death derives from a self-destructive or even suicidal tendency within himself.^[35]