In other words, the textual fusion carried out in Ne le man vostre is not of biblical elements with generically stil novo elements, as in the sonnet O voi che per la via d’Amor passate – a sonnet that Dante did place in the Vita Nuova. Rather, in Ne le man vostre biblical elements are mixed with Cavalcantian elements. The result of this formula, Bible + Cavalcanti, is a text akin to a great canzone from this same poetic period, also excluded from the Vita Nuova, whose Cavalcantian pedigree is clearly stated in its opening words: E’ m’incresce di me sì duramente.
There are two biblical allusions in Ne le man vostre, the first at the sonnet’s opening and a second at lines 7–8, where the dying spirit invokes Love with more words from the Passion of Christ: “Segnore,/qualunque vuoi di me, quel vo’ che sia [My Lord,/what you should wish of me, I wish as well]” (echoing Mark 14:36: “non quod ego volo, sed quod tu [yet not what I will, but what thou wilt]”). These biblical citations set up analogies that might, if not analysed, seem like those that underlie the Vita Nuova, but in fact they are profoundly divergent. The analogies of Ne le man vostre do not function correctly from the point of view of the spiritual economy of the libello.
In the Vita Nuova Dante theologizes the courtly lady, the same “gentil donna mia” who is invoked in the opening and again in line 12 of Ne le man vostre (“Gentil mia donna”), positing an analogy between Beatrice and Christ: both are bringers of beatitude, salutary, worthy of all praise and able to redeem the lover even after death. In contrast, in Ne le man vostre it is the lover and not the beloved who is compared to Christ: the lover suffers and dies in the way that Christ suffers and dies.
Barbi is therefore incorrect when he states that “far from any sense of desecration, the religious tone [of this sonnet] is the same as in many passages of the Vita Nuova” (Barbi-Maggini, p. 231). In the Vita Nuova the Christological language of the Passion is never used for the suffering lover. For instance, when Dante echoes the catastrophes that precede the Passion (the dishevelled women, the sun going dark, the birds falling down dead, the earthquakes; cf. VN XXIII.5 [14.5]), he does so not with respect to the lover but to the imagined death of madonna.79
Also of note is the use of the adjective consolato in the line “per tal ch’i’ mora consolato in pace [so I at least might die a peaceful death]” (13). This word, meaning “one who has received consolation,” is drawn from a religious matrix (see the examples of consolazione in TLIO).80 Its presence contributes to the unstable religiosity of Ne le man vostre, to its tone of profanation, owing to the idea that consolatio can be offered by a living woman to her dying lover. In sharp contrast, in a canzone such as Li occhi dolenti, on the death of Beatrice, consolatio is offered by the dead lady to her living lover. In Li occhi dolenti, the analogy is aligned “correctly”: Beatrice, dead, gives renewed hope to her lover crying over her death, in this way reaffirming the connection between her and Christ.
We can learn from Ne le man vostre what Dante himself must have learned: it is one thing to theologize the courtly system in a Guinizzellian direction, always expanding upon the salutary effects of the donna gentile, but it is quite another to theologize on a Cavalcantian base, concentrating on the sufferings of the poet-lover. One road leads to a poetics of sublimation, of exaltation, to a poetics that strives – like the “sospiro ch’esce del mio core [the sigh that issues from my heart]” in the last sonnet of the Vita Nuova – to go “Oltra la spera [Beyond the (crystalline) sphere].” We might define this as a successfully spiritualized poetics (despite the attempts of Cecco Angiolieri and of the heroic minority that attempted from the beginning to strip away its spiritual authority), successful precisely because the terms of the analogy are acceptable to the reader. The other road leads to the inevitable collapse of the spiritualizing and theologizing thrust, a collapse that occurs when the terms of the analogy are not acceptable to the reader, when they appear “excessive”: Cavalcanti’s imaginary world is not capable of sustaining the comparison between the death of the courtly lover and the Passion of Christ. Ne le man vostre is an experiment that Dante rejected because it did not provide a workable model for the theologized program of the Vita Nuova.
30 (B LXVI; C 19; FB 31; DR 50)
Ne le man vostre, gentil donna mia, raccomando lo spirito che more: e’ se ne va sì dolente, che Amore
My gentle noble lady, in your hands I now entrust my spirit as it dies: such pain does its departure bring that Love,
4
lo mira con pietà, che ·l manda via. Voi lo legaste a la sua segnoria, sì che non ebbe poi alcun valore di poter lui chiamar se non: “Segnore,
who bids it leave, looks on with sympathy. You bound it fast to Love’s authority so that it then no longer had the strength to utter any words except: “My Lord,
8
qualunque vuoi di me, quel vo’ che sia.”
what you should wish of me, I wish as well.”
Io so ch’a voi ogni torto dispiace; però la morte, ch’i’ non ho servita,
I know that you dislike what is unjust, and that is why this death, so undeserved,
11
molto più m’entra ne lo core amara. Gentil mia donna, mentr’i’ ho de la vita, per tal ch’i’ mora consolato in pace,
besets my heart with greater bitterness. My noble lady, while I’m still alive, so I at least might die a peaceful death,
14
vi piaccia a li occhi miei non esser cara.
do not deny my eyes the sight of you.
METRE: sonnet ABBA ABBA CDE DCE.
31 Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce
As clearly indicated by its first words, the canzone Lo doloroso amor is about “painful love.” Barbi places Lo doloroso amor immediately after the other great early canzone of tormented and sorrowful love, E’ m’incresce di me sì duramente. Contini follows Barbi with respect to placement, here as elsewhere, noting, however, that “in an ideal chronology of the rime dolorose for Beatrice, this canzone is certainly the oldest” (p. 67). Features that support an early date of composition are the two unrhymed lines in every stanza and in the congedo, the congedo that does not correspond to the sirma, and the use of an imperfect rhyme at line 26. Foster and Boyde pick up on the implicit suggestion in Contini’s comment, putting Lo doloroso amor first among Dante’s rime dolorose, including those from the Vita Nuova. In this way, Foster and Boyde place Lo doloroso amor literally in the “posto più antico” of this thematic group and take advantage of the programmatic quality of the incipit. And yet, for reasons that I will explain, De Robertis places it last among the canzoni.
As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, every editorial attempt to order Dante’s lyrics – whether it be an order that seeks an approximate chronology like that of Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, and myself or an order that follows in the footsteps of the editorial tradition like that of De Robertis – is necessarily an invention: editorial, not authorial. All editors of Dante’s rime are working in the absence of an authorial ordering, with the exception of the authorial orderings that we find in Dante’s hybrid texts of prose mixed with poetry: the Vita Nuova and Convivio.
In the absence of a Dantean ordering of the rime, various editorial solutions have been proposed in the course of the centuries-long commentary tradition. The poems were traditionally divided by genre, the canzoni isolated from the sonnets and ballate; more recently, in the last century, the ordering by genre gave way to the attempt to put the poems in a chronological order. In 2002, De Robertis returned to the traditional ordering by genre, placing the canzoni first, as is traditional in ancient anthologies; with respect to the order of the canzoni he follows Boccaccio, who transcribed fifteen of Dante’s canzoni. These are the so-called canzoni distese, an expression that derives from the phrase with which Boccaccio concludes his transcription in codex Chigiano L.V.176 (“finiscono le canzoni distese di Dante”).
Boccaccio (or someone before him, according to a recent proposal)81 thus chose the ordering of the canzoni that we find
in De Robertis’ edition. But Boccaccio omitted the canzone Lo doloroso amor from his transcription of canzoni distese. Given the non-inclusion of Lo doloroso amor among Boccaccio’s fifteen canzoni distese, the canzone is placed by De Robertis in the sixteenth position in his edition, after the fifteen canzoni transcribed by Boccaccio. This position is given to Lo doloroso amor despite the fact that it is, according to the unanimous consensus of Dante’s editors (including De Robertis), an early canzone.
I cannot endorse De Robertis’ editorial solution, which puts Lo doloroso amor in a marginal position, suspended between the post-exilic canzone Amor, da che convien and the nonexistent canzone (cited in De vulgari eloquentia) Trag[g]emi de la mente Amor la stiva. Nor do I follow Foster-Boyde, who separate Lo doloroso amor from E’ m’incresce di me, in order to place it first among the rime dolorose. Rather, I take this opportunity to place Lo doloroso amor immediately before its sister canzone, E’ m’incresce di me, in order to produce a reading of maximum ideological cohesion.
Foster and Boyde consider Lo doloroso amor an archaic canzone, stylistically linked to La dispietata mente, a canzone with Sicilian features but “not specifically Cavalcantian” (p. 72). I, on the other hand, consider Lo doloroso amor profoundly Cavalcantian. Moreover, it is a canzone to whose Cavalcantian matrix theologized elements are added, exactly as seen in the sonnet that precedes it in my order, Ne le man vostre, and as will be seen again in the canzone that follows it, E’ m’incresce di me, where we encounter not just generically theologized elements but elements pertaining to the Vita Nuova. In fact, the canzoni Lo doloroso amor and E’ m’incresce di me are hermeneutically linked and lend themselves to a unitary interpretation, as Barbi suggested by placing them next to one another (but in inverted order, with E’ m’incresce di me coming first). Given the elements typical of the Vita Nuova that can be found in E m’incresce di me, these canzoni suggest a reading based on an ideological / poetic path that was first experimented with and then discarded. Specifically, a commentary that connects Lo doloroso amor and E’ m’incresce di me allows us to see that Dante experimented with what seems retrospectively like an ideological oxymoron: a Cavalcantian Vita Nuova.
The great interest of the canzoni Lo doloroso amor and E’ m’incresce di me lies precisely in their relationship with the Vita Nuova: the text from which they were excluded and that their very existence helps us to better comprehend. These canzoni clearly demonstrate that Dante imagined a course antithetical to the one he later followed in the libello. On the basis of these canzoni, we can infer that Dante conceived of an experience that could be defined in the oxymoronic terms of a Cavalcantian Vita Nuova. Cavalcanti’s hold on Dante’s imagination is still very strong – and we should not forget that his hold extends beyond the Vita Nuova: Dante wrote mature lyrics that are Cavalcantian.82
The canzoni Lo doloroso amor and E’ m’incresce di me offer interpretive clues fundamental for the reconstruction of Dante’s itinerary up to the threshold of the Vita Nuova. They provide tools with which to understand the creation of the figure of Beatrice: they show us that the making of Beatrice as she is presented in the Vita Nuova was a gradual process, a gradatio that we can to some degree reconstruct. In these canzoni we witness an “unholy matrimony”: on the one hand there are the traces of an event that is already conceived of as miraculous, hyperbolic, and theologized, but on the other hand these innovations are presented against a background whose ideology is still courtly and / or Cavalcantian.
Above all, the beloved lady in Lo doloroso amor is explicitly called Beatrice, but the Beatrice in question retains the features of Cavalcanti’s “homicidal” (“micidiale”) lady. From this it can also be deduced that Dante found the name “Beatrice” before arriving at a final decision on how to take advantage of the meaning of that name. Even more, the canzone indicates that Dante was originally quite capable of treating the Vita Nuova’s principle “nomina sunt consequentia rerum” ironically, and of linking the nomen Beatrice to an explicitly non-beatifying res. She is, in fact, not a giver of life but of death: the verse in which Dante names her – the name “Beatrice” is present only here in the lyrics excluded from the Vita Nuova83 – is “Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice [I die for her whose name is Beatrice]” [14]). Here Dante does not name Beatrice casually, as he names Violetta, Fioretta, or Lisetta, other ladies in his lyrics; rather, he records her name as the structural equivalent of his own death. The extraordinary verse in which he does so – “Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice” (14) – is the concluding verse of the first stanza.
When, in Purgatorio 27.41–2, Dante writes of “il nome / che ne la mente sempre mi rampolla [the name that’s always flowering within my mind],” we should think, à propos the “always” in “sempre rampolla,” of Lo doloroso amor: the first recorded flowering of the name “Beatrice” in Dante’s mind occurs in this early canzone. But this is a perverse flowering, for in the canzone we learn that though the name of Beatrice may be sweet, yet it makes his heart bitter, and he experiences this bitterness every time that he sees it written (interesting proof of the intense writerliness of our poet, confirmed by the supporting metaphor of the self as glossator in the Vita Nuova): “Quel dolce nome che mi fa il cor agro,/tutte fïate ch’i’ lo vedrò scritto / mi farà nuovo ogni dolor ch’i’ sento [The sweet name that embitters so my heart / each time I see it written down someplace / will make the pain I feel renew itself]” [15–17]). These verses begin the second stanza, and they underline the concluding message of the preceding stanza. In the event that the reader did not sufficiently grasp line 14’s affirmation regarding the name that does not function as it ought to, the incipit of the second stanza reinforces the antithesis Beatrice/moro with the chiasmus dolce-nome/cor-agro that underlines it.
This play in malo on the name “Beatrice” is placed by Dante in a position of high relief, in the concluding verse of the first stanza. The first stanza provides in this way a model that will serve for the whole canzone, insofar as it is typical of Lo doloroso amor to begin the stanzas in a fairly conventional manner and to then conclude them with material that is more hyperbolic than normal, more theologized. Thus the first stanza begins with a sorrowful love, conventionally lethal, that is retroactively radicalized by the introduction of the name “Beatrice” in the final verse. That the poet suffers from a “doloroso amor che mi conduce / a·ffin di morte per piacer di quella / che lo mio cor solea tener gioioso [painful love that leads me to my end / in death – resulting from an act of her / who used to fill my heart with joyfulness]” [1–3]) is not particularly notable; nor is it notable that the effect of the lady on the lover is antithetical to her senhal (think of Guittone’s bella gioia, who brings him so much noia). What is notable is the exasperation of these conventional motifs brought about by their fusion with theological motifs, as happens through the introduction of the name “Beatrice.”
From this point of view, Lo doloroso amor anticipates Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, where, too, a conventionally erotic discourse is projected onto a theological backdrop and in this way radically transformed. The major difference between Lo doloroso amor and Donne ch’avete is that in the first canzone the theologized material is used in a systematically deviant manner: in this perverse variant of the Vita Nuova (a label that can be applied even more rigorously to E’ m’incresce di me), “nomina non sunt consquentia rerum” and Beatrice is not a principle of life but of death. Lo doloroso amor and E’ m’incresce di me give the impression that Dante posed himself the problem of making the sum Guinizzelli + Cavalcanti to see what the result would be: to the Guinizzellian strategy of theologizing the erotic-courtly code is added the theme of lethal love presented in a hyper-Cavalcantian key (and in fact not even Guido addresses a congedo to “Morte,” as Dante does uniquely in Lo doloroso amor).
The second stanza of Lo doloroso amor prolongs the initial antithesis (“Quel dolce nome che mi fa il cor agro”) with the idea that the name of the lady will give the lover n
ot new life and hope but instead (in a motif that will be dear to Petrarch) renewed pain: “mi farà nuovo ogni dolor ch’i’ sento [will make the pain I feel renew itself]” (17). The suffering continues as the dominant motif in a canzone that opens with “painful love that leads me to my end / in death” and that closes when the lover imagines himself having arrived at the death to which love has led him: the circle closes as it opened, and the last word of Lo doloroso amor is “dolore.”
In the second stanza, where the lover is still going along the journey towards the death of the congedo, the poet documents the afflictions that consume him, leaving him so wasted, “sì magro / della persona [my body wasted]” (18–19), that “it will then take but a little breeze / to sweep me off so that I fall down dead”: “non trarrà sì poco vento / che non mi meni, sì ch’io cadrò freddo” (21–2). These verses, which include the only occurrence in Dante’s lyrics of magro (or its variant macro), will be remembered in the Commedia: in the Paradiso, it is the “poema sacro,” rather than doloroso amor, “che m’ha fatto per molti anni macro [sacred poem … that made me thin through many years]” [Par. 25.1–3]). In the context of paradise, thinness assumes the odour, not of sexual passion, but of holiness: Saint Peter and Saint Paul are “magri e scalzi [thin and barefoot]” [Par. 21.128]).