2 Vita Nuova
CHAPTER 2
Vita Nuova
Dante’s first work was the Vita nova, or nuova. I could say that it was his first finished work, but in a way it’s not finished; it’s a deliberately unfinished work. Many of Dante’s works remain unfinished. He interrupts them, as he breaks off and decides to move on to other projects. This is the case with the philosophical Convivio (Banquet). It is true for his text on language, the De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular). And it is also true, in a way, with the Vita nuova. The text ends with a vision, but we don’t know what will happen after this conclusion. There is a kind of suspension that occurs. At any rate, we cannot call it finished, but we may call this the first full work that Dante writes.
The title means “a new life,” which probably refers to Dante’s youth, for the work describes the autobiographical account of Dante as a young lover, as the poet who falls in love with Beatrice. You may recall that I referred to their encounter, which occurred in his early life, soon after the death of his mother, as a decisive event for Dante. What is interesting in the text is that Dante describes this love for Beatrice, but he also subsequently describes her death. As a result, Dante the pilgrim, the lover, the poet, goes on to record the confusion and the sense of loss that ensues in the wake of Beatrice’s death. His betrayals become an ethical drama, as most lyrical poetry of the Middle Ages does, and then he ends up having his final vision. So, there is youth, there is a new life, but there is also death, and this youthful new life will thus be seen to be a multifaceted signifier, the various meanings of which the narrative will be shown to sustain. Besides “new,” the Italian nuova means “surprising,” “unexpected,” even “strange,” “novel,” “marvelous,” and this variety of meanings gives a certain direction to the way in which we should read the story. Primarily, we have to accept that all of these meanings are true as we move forward.
At the same time, the novelty and strangeness are paired with “life,” that is to say with autobiography, which literally means “writing about myself.” So, I should say a few things about this structure and the questions it raises before we get into the narrative as such. From one point of view, we might all agree easily that the text belongs to a tradition of Provençal poets, if you know that they would often write about what they would call vida—life, a word that lingers in modern Spanish. These poets, among them Jaufré Rudel, would write their poems and append a brief account of their lives to their works.
Let’s say, then, that in the Vita nuova Dante is writing about himself and inserting the poems as part of the texture of his own life. As an autobiography, though, the text also echoes and is modeled on the most important autobiography written in the Middle Ages. In fact, it was written by a man who could be called the founder of the autobiographical genre, St. Augustine, who wrote The Confessions. A confession, which is a witnessing, is really, in this case, part of the story of his life, from his childhood in Africa; to his growing up as a gifted young philosopher-turned-rhetorician; to his move to Rome, where he becomes a teacher despised and paid by his students; to another move to Milan, where the narrative’s climactic conversion takes place. This particular conversion is achieved in a garden and leads into a discussion of the hermeneutics of the biblical Genesis, as if the new life that he found through the conversion could only issue into a commentary about all beginnings.
Furthermore, the whole idea of autobiography for Augustine is that it coincides with a conversion. I can say that Augustine is fully aware that autobiography is, in effect, the same thing as a conversion because autobiography demands two voices all the time. It is necessarily ambivalent—it demands the voice of the narrator who is outside the narrative and who can look back. The mode of writing autobiographies is always retrospection: I look back at my life and try to figure out what are the stages, what are the events, what is it that makes me the person that I am now. As a result, there’s a necessary distance between the voice of the protagonist and that of the narrator, who knows more than what the protagonist knew. You may have the most abbreviated version of an autobiography, that is to say a journal or a diary, and you may go home at night and jot down all the great events of the day, but you may overlook the most important one. You may have had a meeting with someone, you may have caught sight of some person, who will reenter your life ten years from now and give an altogether different direction to your life. All autobiographical experiments, like all diary entries, are uncertain and fundamentally false because you can only write about what you know at that point and you can never really write about the whole structure of your life. To be able to write about the structure of your life, you have to die, which is Augustine’s ultimate idea of conversion here. It’s a symbolic death by means of which you come back into existence, you come back into life as a new man with a new life, and only from that standpoint can you have all the necessary detachment to look at your past and decipher that which was previously in a haze.
The other reason you need this double voice in autobiographies is obvious. Because if I go on writing about my life without any sense of what my life is about, can you imagine what happens? I end up writing down every single thing that I do, which means that I would need another life to be able to say, “Well, I got up in the morning, then I brushed my teeth . . .” and so on. It becomes a random, senseless accumulation of facts without any particular meaning or direction. Not to say that this is what we see in the autobiographical writings that precede Augustine, the most powerful of which for Augustine are the Psalms of King David, which display a kind of reflection, a turning inward, while they try to pinpoint his shifts in mood, moral judgments, temptations, the idea of his own system. But even this method is really only an internalization of one’s life. Augustine will go into the interiority of his self, into the interiority of his consciousness, but he will also describe what has happened to him in the public space. Thus, the dual voice persists as he goes inside and outside all the time.
Dante’s Vita nuova is a really complicated text from this point of view: while it is an autobiography, it is amazing how little he actually tells us about his own life. There is nothing concrete about this text. We know that it takes place in Florence, but Florence is not even mentioned. We only infer that it’s Florence because at one point there’s a description of a river that crosses by it. And in fact, Dante uses this image primarily because he has had an inspiration, and his words come to him with the same kind of strength and naturalness with which the waters of the river flow.
So, what is Dante really doing here? It’s a little abstract. It’s kind of an enigmatic account, unlike that of Augustine, beginning with a reference to the book of memory: “In my book of memory, in the early part where there is little to be read, there comes a chapter with the rubric: Incipit vita nova. It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that heading—if not all of them, at least the essence of their meaning.”1
First of all, it’s a book of memory, not necessarily an act of retrospection, and memory has a number of other implications and dangers. What are the implications? Well, Dante is writing this when he’s twenty-four or twenty-five years old; it’s a provisional retrospection of his growth as a poet. He certainly knows the famous Greek myth that memory, Mnemosyne, lay with Jupiter for nine successive nights and from their copulations the nine muses came into being, so Memory is the mother of the Muses, which means that art is always an act of remembrance. There are also some dangers on which Dante will reflect at length, such as the fact that if you get caught up in the activity of memory, you run a serious risk, namely that of changing your sense of life and reality into phantasms. The Greeks used to place memory in the heart, and as you may know, in Italian we still say ricordarsi, “to remember,” which contains the etymology of the heart—cor/cordis. But in the Middle Ages memory is already part of the imagination; it’s called the eye of the imagination, which means that it has a visionary component to it. Still, with memory it’s like you’re always looking backward, and you’re not Janus-like, you don’t look in all directions, you don’t look ahead. As a result, Dante will ultimately turn against memory.
The second thing that we get from that little exordium at the outset of the text is that Dante finds words that have been the inscriptions of memory, and he’s not going to repeat them all, only some of them. We know that Dante has cast himself as the editor of his own book; that’s the double structure of this little text of his. The text is full of doubles: it’s a book of poetry, and it’s a book of prose. It’s not an unusual structure: Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy is written like that. Dante also writes other texts like that, but what are the implications of this form? Well, there’s a lyrical self who has been in the throes of a great passion for Beatrice, who struggles sometimes with his inspiration, who waits. And that’s the crisis he has: he’s always waiting for words to come to him, always waiting for Beatrice to say hello to him. There is a way in which he casts himself as a passive protagonist, weak-willed, unable, believing that the will can direct him wherever the will wants. But he finally understands that he had better get out of that mode, and in effect, just talking about the formal structure now, the whole text is written in the past mode, a commemoration of a great event in the private life of Dante, the love that he cannot even define, the woman he did not even know. He doesn’t even know what passion is, and part of the tension of this text is his attempt to understand what passion means and what it is that it’s doing to him and to his mind.
By the end of the text, chapter 41, we read a sonnet about the famous vision of Beatrice sitting at the foot of God’s throne, and Dante decides he has to go there to meet her. He says, “After I wrote this sonnet there came to me a miraculous vision in which I saw things”—a visionary burden of the narrative is maintained throughout—“that made me resolve to say no more about this blessed one until I would be capable of writing about her in a nobler way.” It should be noted here that “blessed” in Italian, beata, is a pun on the name of Beatrice, the one who is blessed, the one who is the bearer of the good. He can’t write more about her now, since he needs to do more work first. So, he will stop. That’s what I call an inevitably unfinished narrative. “To achieve this I am striving as hard as I can, and this she truly knows. Accordingly, if it be the pleasure of Him through whom all things live that my life continue for a few more years, I hope to write of her that which has never been written before of any other woman. And then it may please the One who is the Lord of graciousness that my soul ascend to behold the glory of its lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who in glory contemplates the countenance of the One qui est per omnia secula benedictus”—that is to say “and to all times blessed,” so that the work ends with another pun on the name of Beatrice.2
To me the most important point of this paragraph is the intrusion of the verb of the future, the only time you find it in the narrative: “I hope.” The whole text is contained within an exercise of memory, an idea of something which is past, and that tempts him greatly because if something is past and you think that you can control it, you can certainly decipher it, you can hope to extract from it some particular meaning, complacently or not. But then he ends with a projection of the self into the future, another work of his that is to come. This is the preamble to something more that he cannot really contain, so memory is abandoned and the work ends with an image within the horizon of the future. This is a crucial moment. The limitations of memory can be understood only from this point of view of the future, signaled by hope, which is grammatically tied to the future. He says, “I hope to write,” there’s no future there; “I hope” is in the present. But to hope is a verb that in Latin, for example, always take the future participle. One says in English, “I hope that I will do this”; “I hope I would have done this” doesn’t work. “Hope” is a verb of the future. It is also, in substantial terms, a virtue. To say “I hope” is a theological virtue, and hope here too always implies the future. It says that the past is not really over and done with because once you enter into the category of hope, you really believe you can change the meaning of the past. The fact that things may happen whereby all your past errors can and will be seen in terms of a new life means that there is the possibility of change instead of destruction.
To summarize, we have prose and poetry, we have the voice of the lover and the voice of the editor, we have a text of memory that at the same time turns against itself, points out the limitations of memory, and opens to the future through hope, and you have this idea that something amazing is going to happen, something that, though no concrete sign of this is given, will take place within the self. It’s the moment where Dante abandons Augustine. I began by saying that the rhetorical mode that Dante really follows is Augustine’s Confessions, which is a text of retrospection and ends with a commentary of Genesis. Dante, instead, ends with what we call a prolepsis, which means a projection to the future. Autobiography has this kind of future dimension and cannot be contained. In other words, it’s not over and done with.
Just to make this even more intelligible, a text that is most like what Dante has written in the Vita nuova is really The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. If you cannot have a conversion, if you cannot die as Augustine says you have to do when you write an autobiography, then what you can do is write about yourself with a kind of temporal distance that is brought by time. You can say, “I’m no longer the young man I used to be, but I do know those passions.” You can remove yourself from them in exactly the same way that Joyce does in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which ends with the projection of descending into the smithy and writing, forging the epic of the future. It ends with a project for the future, a mode of autobiographical writing that Dante clearly put forth first.
All right, that’s the mode of the text, but what actually happens in it? It’s a love story. It’s the love story of a young man who meets, at the age of nine, a young woman who is roughly the same age. He doesn’t even know who she is, but he feels a kind of bliss in her presence. Then he sees her again nine years later, so we know that there is a kind of numerical symbolism running through the text, where the number for Beatrice is nine, a multiple of three, a Trinitarian number. Anyway, she reappears, and Dante is convinced that this is going to be the love of his life, but he doesn’t even know what love is. At the beginning he knows only that he does not know what love is, and thus the economy of this narrative generally focuses on trying to ponder what love may be.
The culture of the Middle Ages is filled with the literature of love. The Vita nuova could be viewed as one of the many love books of the Middle Ages, but what are the other famous love books of the Middle Ages, which are completely different from the love books that preceded them? One example is The Art of Courtly Love of Andreas Capellanus, which is a codification of what love is: the idea that love is an art, the “art of courtly love,” that it’s obviously natural instinct or thrust or passion and yet has to be changed through a sentimental education. One has to learn how to contain, how to hold off excesses, how to hold off the potential disruptions and violence that love will commute. There are the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, which are all about love at the court, the place of pleasure within the unfolding of responsible life. There are so many other texts from this period, many of the Provençal poets come to mind, that Dante evokes when he writes about love. And of course, the Middle Ages are not the first time that people reflect upon love. The Greeks tried to do that, and you may remember that Socrates always wonders what love is. Is it a figure of speech, a manner of feeling, or is there such a thing as love? Is it a god that possesses me? Is this a natural instinct that we call love? This variety of passions, this variety of ways of understanding love, all figure within Dante’s text.
The main thing is that Dante meets Beatrice, and his love for her comes over him suddenly and powerfully. The whole point of this narrative is that things seem to be happening to him. He is a passive figure, and even love comes to him. He doesn’t will it, he doesn’t look for it, and in many ways, it gives itself to him, as indicated by this passage from chapter 2:
Nine times already since my birth the heaven of light had circled back to almost the same point, when there appeared before my eyes the now glorious lady of my mind, who was called Beatrice even by those who did not know what her name was. She had been in this life long enough for the heaven of fixed stars to be able to move a twelfth of a degree to the East in her time; that is, she appeared to me at about the beginning of her ninth year, and I first saw her near the end of my ninth year. She appeared dressed in the most patrician of colors, a subdued and decorous crimson. . . . At that very moment, and I speak the truth, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words: “Here is a god stronger than I who is coming to rule over me.”3
These are set descriptions of what love is. The point is that Dante doesn’t will it. Why does he present himself as unwilling this passion? Because passions that are unwilled seem to be more important then the things that we will. If they are unwilled and they happen to me, then they may have the mark of a secret necessity. There may be a pattern behind them that I cannot comprehend. Dante will find out in time that the will needs to be in turn ruled by reason, but here this figure of love is a god, really a literary conceit. Dante has no real idea who is speaking to him. He takes refuge in the chamber of his mind, and there he is engaged in deliriums, dreams, and so on, which is to say, all the clinical signs of love. He thinks that love is a passion that debilitates him.
This whole problem will come to a head with the first sonnet that he writes. Dante was eighteen years old when he wrote this poem, and it is really a kind of dream. And it begins, “To every captive soul,” so you can tell from the outset that it is going to be a horrifying dream:
To every captive soul and loving heart
to whom these words I have composed are sent
for your elucidation in reply,
greetings I bring for your sweet lord’s sake, Love.
The first three hours, the hours of the time
of shining stars, were coming to an end,
when suddenly Love appeared before me
(to remember how he really was appalls me).
Joyous, Love seemed to me, holding my heart
within his hand, and in his arms he had
my lady, loosely wrapped in folds, asleep.
He woke her then, and gently fed to her
the burning heart; she ate it, terrified.
And then I saw him disappear in tears.4
So the poem is a nightmare about a lady who is asleep, held in the arms of the lord of love. She wakes and eats the heart that is given to her. It’s a story of how the heart nourishes love, that’s the sense of it. It’s another involuntary experience, since a dream comes to us without our will, and Dante admits that the meaning of this sonnet was unclear for this reason.
At any rate, he writes the sonnet and sends it out to his fellow poets in Florence. He sends one copy to the person who’s going to become his best friend and to whom this book is dedicated. His name is Guido Cavalcanti, and we shall see him in Hell, since Dante suggests he will end up in the circle of his father in Inferno 10. Guido answers, because it was the fashion of the time to respond to a poem using the other poet’s rhyme scheme. And Cavalcanti tells him that he was right, that he really had the vision, which means that he cannot quite trust love, that he has to turn away. It’s a kind of admonition to Dante: move away from all of these figments of love and turn to philosophical studies. It’s only in the works of the mind that you can find some kind of truth and stability for yourself. A physician of the time, another Dante, Dante da Maiano, also decides to write to him about the sonnet. He says that Dante has humoral problems and that he should take cold baths and then everything will be okay. He just needs to rebalance the equilibrium of his humors. One man, the physician, reduces love to a question of bodies, as if it were just a disease, and the other reduces it to a question of love’s danger vis-à-vis the stability of the mind. Dante will listen to neither of them.
The rest of the Vita nuova will be an attempt to understand what this love really is. Several crucial chapters will address this question. For instance, in chapter 8 Dante describes going to a funeral, where he sees a dead woman. And the point, I think, of that scene is that there is a body and this body is inert and dead, and there is no possible connection between Dante and this dead body. Thus, love is not tied only to bodies. There must be some kind of animation, some kind of soul or life, that accompanies it. In chapter 12, Dante finally seems to be moving a little bit away from the Provençal way of describing love, in conventional terms that I will describe to you shortly, and he has another dream about the god of love who comes to him and says that it’s time for him to put aside all simulacra, all fictions, and all emptiness.
Let me now say a little bit about the history of describing love and the kind of questions that Dante raises in regard to this tradition. Whenever we think about love in modern times, the formulation of love as we understand it today is essentially medieval. The Greeks do not have the romantic idea of love the way we do. They understand love as an intellectual pursuit, as an ascent of the ladder of being. To them, it’s the work of philosophers, and minds can go through the various degrees of intellectual reality until one can finally grasp love. There is friendship, of course, but there’s not the idea of the love of a man for a woman, which is so crucial to the romantic understanding of love. The Romans had no understanding at all about either of these conceptions, what the Greeks knew, what we know. The most important Latin voice on love is, in my opinion, Catullus, who talks about love as something to be slightly embarrassed about. It’s a weakness, and a serious person does not involve himself or herself in this kind of pursuit, because you have to do the serious work of living: attending to political issues, going to the forum, negotiating, and so on.
But along comes the Provençal world in the south of France, the Provençal courts, and suddenly love changes, both its meaning and its contours. Now love is the love of a man for a woman, and it’s usually described, as you can see in Andreas Capellanus and The Art of Courtly Love, or in the texts of Chrétien de Troyes, as a clandestine, secret relationship. It need not be within marriage because marriages are usually business propositions. It is a kind of emotion that’s potentially violent and potentially problematic. What is the sociology of love? Can a nobleman fall in love with a plebeian woman, can a noblewoman fall love with a plebeian man? It’s a predicament, this question of what love can be, and yet the poets always describe it as an experience that causes insomnia, that results in a loss of appetite, that renders the lover pale and mute in the presence of the beloved. They constantly describe the physical properties of love.
And after the Provençal idea of love, the next great revolution regarding love is visible in what is contained in this text of Dante’s. But Dante is not the only one to shift the perception of love; Dante’s not the only one to have brought this revolution about. His teachers and peers, the likes of Cavalcanti and Guido Guinizelli, were headed in the same direction. Namely, they were all considering the notion that love has to be explored for the changes it brings to the mind. How can it be? This is the kind of problem that they raise. How can it be that I see a woman and the image of that woman obsesses me? What does this say about my mind? Why do I want to be better than I am? How am I going to be educated in the light of the love that I feel for this woman? In effect, this metaphysical aspect of love is the special burden of this text.
The first time that we see this revolution in the Vita nuova occurs in chapter 19. This is the turning point in Dante’s understanding of what love is: “Then it happened, that while walking down a path along which ran a very clear stream”—we can assume that it’s the Arno River, but Dante’s not interested in the outside world, he’s only interested in what love does to his inner self—“I suddenly felt a great desire to write a poem and I began to think how I would go about it.” What an extraordinary moment! Finally he’s not just jotting down words that come to him, but instead he begins to think! He continues, “I began to think how I would go about it. It seemed to me that to speak of my lady would not be becoming unless I were to address my words to ladies”—and not just to any ladies—“but only to those who are worthy, not merely to women. Then I must tell you my tongue”—he hasn’t totally abandoned the mask of passivity—“as if moved of its own accord, spoke and said: Ladies who have intelligence of love. With great delight I decided to keep these words in mind and to use them at the beginning of my poem. Later, after returning to the aforementioned city and reflecting for several days I began writing a canzone”—meaning a song, which for Dante is the noblest rhetorical form—“using this beginning and then constructed it in a way that will appear below in its divisions.” It begins:
Ladies who have intelligence of love
I wish to speak to you about my lady,
not thinking to complete her litany,
but to talk in order to relieve my heart.5
It’s a poem of praise, close to a certain kind of religious poem called laude, which has the same root as “laudatory” in English. To praise is Dante’s aim here, one that he would like us to distinguish from flattery. When praising, you really don’t expect anything in return because you are just yielding to the allure and the power of what is in front of you. Flattery always implies some kind of circuitousness, a desire to get something. Flattery always implies some degree of manipulation.
But the most important phrase here is “ladies who have intelligence of love,” because, finally, intellect and love are no longer two disjointed activities of the mind. It’s the opposite view of that of Guido Cavalcanti, who believes in a world in which one is sundered from the other—and we will come to that in Inferno 10. Cavalcanti thinks that time is split from itself anyway, that experiences are all fragmentary. He believes that if you have a passion like love, you can never quite come to understand anything. In fact, when you are in the throes of passion your mind ceases its operations. So, this poem is written against Dante’s best friend, the same man to whom the text is dedicated.
As a result, we are forced to think about the relationship between friendship and love. Is there anything better than friendship? Is there anything better than love? Dante—this is the radical element of Dante’s thinking—brings us to the point where you really have to distinguish between things that seem to be equally powerful virtues. What is friendship? The text is dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti, which means that friendship implies a conversation, a conversation of minds. The word “conversation” comes from the Latin for “things turning together.” Therefore, when we are conversing, minds are turning together harmoniously, looking for common agreements, and the condition for friendship is that you’ve got to like each other even more after you engage in discussion. You disagree, but you do so benevolently. In The Ethics Aristotle counts friendship as one of the major virtues, and so does Dante in his own rewriting of The Ethics, which is the Convivio.
But love is still more important than friendship for Dante because love forces you to think. Something happens to you that mobilizes your mind. You’ve got to go looking for the signs of love. The mind is engaged in an extended self, in a mode of self-reflection. A great text that I’m sure Dante read is the Metamorphoses of Ovid, including the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, lovers who can see the smallest chink in the wall through which to communicate and all the inventiveness that comes with even that minimal possibility. Love makes us think in ways that we could never really imagine because it is tied to the imagination. So, intellect and love are now rolled together, and that’s the revolution.
This is the beginning of the so-called “sweet new style,” the kind of poetry that Dante and his poet-friends write, which is a rethinking of what the Provençal poets were doing. The Provençal poets wrote their poetry in the mode of “I tremble, and I shake, and the image of the beloved I cannot even describe to others. I have to keep my passion away from the flatterers because they are going to violate my secret and so I have to always protect it.” There is a sense of singularity and uniqueness to their passion. These Tuscan poets—Dante, Cavalcanti, Guinizelli—come along and say that what really matters is that love—especially Cavalcanti’s sense of philosophy as love of wisdom—can become part of an intellectual ascent. Knowledge only favors love, and love mobilizes the mind to go on thinking.
I’ll delve into these concerns again and again as we proceed, but for now I’ll say that the great philosophical debates in the thirteenth century are always between the so-called voluntarists and the rationalists. A simple divide: the voluntarists are those who believe that if I want to know something, I have to love first, for love is crucial to my knowledge. The rationalists would say that you have to know first in order that you may love, and it’s a fierce debate. Dante is circumventing all of this. For him intellect and love are like the two feet that carry us along, where you move one and then you move the other, and only in this way can you walk without being hobbled. The sweet new style indicates, therefore, a highly philosophical, highly intellectual kind of poetry, a poetry where a woman or the love of a woman can take you up to the divinity, in the understanding that that which rules the world is not just an idea, but a kind of love, and therefore love is the only way of coming to it and pursuing it.
The Vita nuova continues in this vein, and then we arrive at a little sonnet immediately after chapter 19. Dante explains that “after the canzone”—that last poem about “ladies who have intelligence of love”—“had become rather well known, one of my friends who had heard it was moved asked me to write about the nature of Love.” Dante started like the Provençal poets, but he’s not refining their idea and instead wants to think about the philosophical conception of love, without losing sight of the immediacy of his passion for Beatrice. He continues, “Having perhaps from reading my poem acquired more confidence in me than I deserved, so thinking that after my treatment with the previous theme, it would be good to treat the theme of Love and feeling that I owed this to my friend, I decided to compose a poem dealing with Love.” This time Dante’s poetic impulse produces a sonnet, which begins:
Love and the gracious heart are a single thing,
as Guinizelli tells us in his poem:
one can no more be without the other
than can the reasoning mind without its reason.
Nature, when in a loving mood, creates them . . . 6
Here we see the shift to a full awareness of the need to learn about love.
This means that this whole text really is traversed by two interrelated themes. One is the story of Dante’s love for Beatrice and his understanding of what love is. Is it a physical impulse? Is it a demon? Is it a figure of speech? Is it a simulacrum, another fiction that we tell each other? The other thematic strain of this text has to do with learning to be a poet. Dante is also telling us the story of his poetic growth, of how he begins by imitating the Provençal poets, then imitates the poets of the sweet new style, and then finally finds his voice. These two themes also shed light on each other because only Dante can understand these things about love, and if he truly understands things about love that nobody else has understood, he can go on writing poems that nobody else can write, which is actually a famous hope that he expresses in chapter 42.
I could also mention the poem in chapter 21, “The power of Love borne in my lady’s eyes,” where it’s not only about the nature of love but how Dante tries to find love within Beatrice. It’s not the god of love that has been abandoned, it’s not the conceit of love, it’s not the strange and enigmatic words of love that have come to him from oracles and traditions; now love is love for the concreteness of Beatrice herself. The text also contains an impressive sonnet in chapter 26 about the apparition of Beatrice. She wanders through the streets, the world is silent, and she’s wrapped in a kind of mystery and an inapproachable light. There’s always some kind of distance. This is that poem:
Such sweet decorum and such gentle grace
attend my lady’s greeting as she moves
that lips can only tremble into silence,
and eyes dare not attempt to gaze at her.
Moving, benignly clothed in humility,
untouched by all the praise along her way,
she seems to be a creature come from Heaven
to earth, to manifest a miracle.7
Dante here has love, heaven, and earth mixed up in his head. Beatrice brings heaven down to earth and asks him to rise up to heaven.
How does Dante escape this tangled sense of constant wonder? Beatrice appears, and it’s a miracle, a wonder, and as soon as you believe that what you perceive is a wonder that you don’t quite understand, you want to try to understand it. So, there’s a sense of constant perplexity and great excitement at the idea of Beatrice, and Dante attempts to move past the wonder via poetic reflection.
But then Beatrice dies around chapter 29. How real can she be now that she’s dead? How can Dante relate to someone who is dead? Dante will do what perhaps some others would do: he tries to find a replacement. He goes looking for someone who reminds him of her and then finds, in chapters 35–39, this woman who fits the bill and who has so much mercy for him that he can’t help but be drawn to her. Yet, he understands that in his attempt to duplicate Beatrice, he renders the love for Beatrice no longer singular, which is problematic. Either he believes in the singularity of the figure he loves, or if he believes in the possibility of duplication, then he is undercutting his own poetic project.
Dante is caught up in all this drama, then, until finally he sees some pilgrims passing through his city, and this sighting offers him an important change in direction. Dante writes a critical poem in response to this vision, beginning by addressing the pilgrims directly. They don’t listen to him, they know nothing about him, but he addresses them all the same:
Ah, pilgrims moving pensively along,
thinking, perhaps, of things at home you miss,
could the land you come from be so far away
(as anyone might guess from your appearance)
that you show no signs of grief as you pass through
the middle of the desolated city . . .
This phrase is normally used to refer to Jerusalem, “the desolated city,” “the abandoned city,” but in this case it refers to Florence.
. . . like people who seem not to understand,
the grievous weight of woe it has to bear?
If you would stop to listen to me speak,
I know, from what my sighing heart tells me,
you would be weeping when you leave this place:
lost is the city’s source of blessedness,
and I know words that could be said of her
with power to humble any man to tears.8
This is truly a great shift in the movement of the Vita nuova. Dante realizes that he is not like these pilgrims: he’s not going anywhere; he’s moving in circles. Now he has been shaken from the circular self-absorption in which he had found himself. The second important occurrence here is that Dante understands that the mythology he has been constructing about Beatrice is an absolutely private mythology. It means nothing to anybody else. These pilgrims come from afar, and they are separated “pensively,” a word that implies suspension. The pilgrims are halfway: they are here now going through Florence, heading toward a destination, and nostalgically separated from the world they left behind. And Dante too is not going anywhere, but he doesn’t have Beatrice with him, and unlike the pilgrims, he has no idea where to go. The effort he has to make is to transform his private mythology into a public discourse.
This, then, is the transition from the Vita nuova to the Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy will be the text where Dante will finally literally stage his own passion through the passions of others, involving all others in his discourse and creating what I would call a public mythology. The text ends with a journey of the mind that will allow the next voyage to go
beyond the sphere that makes the widest round,
[as it] passes the sigh arisen from my heart;
a new intelligence that Love in tears
endowed it with is urging it on high.9
In the closing lines of the Vita nuova Dante sees Beatrice far away and decides to undertake a new journey, the journey of knowledge, the journey of exploration, the journey of life, the journey at the heart of the Divine Comedy.
This is really the kind of poetic experience that Dante needs at the outset of his career. He’s still a young man. He’s exploring a lot of possibilities; he’s gathering all the voices around him, internalizing them. The Vita nuova is not the same kind of encyclopedic text that the Divine Comedy will necessarily be, but Dante does use it to evolve all discourses, all whispers, all groans, all noises. The whole world has to speak through his poem. This is ultimately an effort to try to find himself as a poet with a project, one that will necessarily be future-oriented.
In fact, there is no poet that I know in the Western tradition who is so given to the idea of the future and who is more of a poet of hope than Dante is. I will call him a lot of things. I’ll call him the poet of exile, which he is. I’ll call him the poet of love, which he is. I’ll call him the poet of peace, which he is. But above all, and especially here, he is the poet of hope, in the knowledge that hope is the most realistic of virtues. Because he tells us that not even the past may be dead, that really despair is the most crucial sin that one could have in this universe. That’s the substance of this poem, and in that sense, it’s a preamble in preparation for the Divine Comedy.
What happens after the Vita nuova? Beatrice had died in 1289. Dante has married a woman he will never mention, a woman who belongs to a prominent family in Florence, the Donati, troublemakers that Dante doesn’t really like. And Dante will enter public life, until 1302, when he’s banned from Florence and forced to go into exile. Once he’s in exile, then his production will start again. He writes one of the first treatises on language in the Western world. He writes a text of philosophy and theology. And then he writes his Divine Comedy. That is where we will find him in the next chapter: in the middle of life’s journey in Canto 1 of Inferno.