Chapter 5 - Imagery in the Last Eleven Cantos of Dante’s Comedy
This study will doubly lack the charm of novelty: for the method is not my own and the subject is closely akin to one that I have treated before in the presence of this society. My previous study was on Dante’s similes. My present theme is narrower in so far as I confine myself to the last eleven cantos, but wider because it is not limited to similes. I use the word Imagery to cover Metaphor, even those metaphors which lurk in a single word and of which neither poet nor reader need always be explicitly conscious, and even some which may be suspected of being, in the philological sense, nearly ‘dead’. That is, we include every appeal to the imagined exercise of the five senses, always excepting those images which are directly represented as parts of Dante’s story and which would appear on the screen if anyone (which God forbid) made a film of it. Thus roratelo alquanto, ‘bedew him a little’, in XXIV, 8 is a specimen of the Imagery we shall be studying: but the Empyrean itself, or Beatrice herself, is not. The method is that which Dr Caroline Spurgeon has applied to Shakespeare. The aim is to surprise the imagination of the poet in its more secret workings, to disengage that incessant orchestration which accompanies his drama and which, though it may escape notice while our attention is fixed on the stage, probably contributes in the highest degree to the total effect.
From such an examination one might hope to gain in knowledge of two distinct but very closely connected subjects. On the one hand, one might hope to learn many things about Dante, and perhaps some which he did not know himself. We should discover to what ideas his mind most habitually recurred, his likes and dislikes, his semi-conscious associations. Our results would be psychological. On the other hand, we might hope to learn what these images, however they came into Dante’s mind, do to the mind of the reader while he reads the poem and how they contribute to its effect. This second knowledge would be aesthetic: we should be learning how poetry operates. In her work on Shakespeare Dr Spurgeon was primarily interested in Shakespeare’s psychology. In this paper I am primarily interested in Dante’s poetry.
Even if my interests did not lead me away from the psychological to the aesthetic, my ignorance would. One of the most important distinctions for the psychological student would be that between imagery new-minted by the poet and imagery that is traditional. When a man uses traditional imagery he reveals little (I do not say nothing) of his idiosyncrasy. That the Paradiso speaks of the Church as the Bride (sposa) does not tell us much about Dante. Thus, to take a less obvious instance, in XXIV, 102 we read of miracles as works
a che natura
Non scaldò ferro mai, nè battè incude.
Nature’s smithy will appear less important for the psychological student when he remembers that it had appeared in Alanus. But it will not be depreciated for the aesthetic student. Wherever the image came from, it has arrived in our minds, and acts upon us. I do not say that from this second point of view the distinction between traditional and novel loses all importance, and in what follows I shall point out (as far as my knowledge allows me) the traditional images. The more traditional they are, the less they affect us: but if we are sensitive readers their effect will never sink to zero. I shall of course often fail to recognize what is traditional. That error, which would be fatal in a psychological study, will, I trust, be merely an impoverishment in mine.
But inevitably in trying to distinguish my approach from Dr Spurgeon’s I seem to claim a neater distinction between them than really exists. How the psychological and the aesthetic, not to mention the traditional and the novel, are actually blended can be seen from an example. In XXV, 38 Dante is half way through a viva voce examination by three Apostles, when one of them, St James, addresses to him some words of encouragement. As a result
io levai gli occhi ai monti,
Che gl’incurvaron pria col troppo pondo.
There is here a double act of the imagination. First the Apostles are compared to mountains (probably with aid from a traditional allegorization of the psalm that Dante quotes). Then the majesty of the mountains (or of the Apostles, for they are momentarily one) which weighs upon the soul is equated with an actual weight which bends the bearer double. In most minds the aesthetic and the psychological conclusions will follow simultaneously. He makes us go through that imaginative transference whereby a mountain mass seems to crush us with its weight, and at the same moment we perceive that he was a man who looked at mountains in that way. Nor do I think that any reader of the Comedy will fail to ask ‘Where, in an earlier canto, did we meet the image of intolerable weight?’, and then to remember the Proud doubled beneath their loads on the first terrace of Purgatory: and how Dante continued to feel that weight in memory after he had left the first terrace (Purgatorio, XIII, 136 et seq.) and how he tells us that this was the punishment he feared for himself. That is, he judged Pride to be his besetting sin and therefore attached to its punishment sensations to which his imagination was very alive. But with that, we are fully embarked on psychology. For our study it is enough to notice how immensely venerable the Apostles have become first by the mountain image and then by the image of weight which, as it were, grows from it. No direct praise of their wisdom or sanctity could have made us respect them half so much.
Before beginning my analysis I should perhaps raise one problem. Some of the images which I shall mention are offered to us by a single word and that word comes at the end of a line: in other words the rhyme requires it. How far does that reduce its significance? It is true that Italian is a language rich in rhymes and Italian poets are less likely than English to be driven to an otherwise unsuitable word for the sake of its sound. It is also true that facility in rhyming, far from requiring the genius of Dante, is something which mere practice must infallibly bestow on anyone whatever who has made as many rhyming verses as Dante had done before he wrote the Paradiso. There is nothing mysterious about this. There are a certain number of rhyming words in the language as there are a certain number of books in a room: habituation will teach a man quickly to lay his hand on any rhyme as it will enable him to lay his hand on any book in his own library. On the other hand, the number of rhyming words in a language cannot be increased at will, except by comic coinages: and therefore, at a given moment the best poet may be as out of pocket as the worst. The word at the end of one line may be too good to give up, and yet there may be few rhymes to it. It may be worth keeping even at the cost of a slightly strained rhyme lower down. A place where some will suspect this is XXVII, 83–4
il lito
Nel qual si fece Europa dolce carco.
I myself do not think carco creaks: I leave it to the society. But clearly, the psychologist who was following out the significance in Dante’s sensibility of that idea of weight which we have just touched on, would have to decide whether the periphrasis in fece carco came in because Dante thought of Europa’s ride in terms of weight, or solely for the sake of rhyme, or for both reasons. For the aesthetic analyst the problem is different. What matters to him is not whether a given rhyme was in fact forced or not but whether it seems to the reader to be forced and therefore tends to be unconsciously discounted. For if so, it contributes less to the effect of the poem upon our minds.
The smallest class is images of Smell. Of these I find only two certain instances. I have excluded inebriate dagli odori at XXX, 67 because I am not sure whether it is imagery at all in our sense. The flowers are to be imagined as having real scent. Even if it were admitted we should still have only three, and one of them (odor di lode, XXX, 126) highly traditional. One might have expected that a poem about Heaven would be full of aromatic imagery. In fact it is there only by implication. There are flowers: and the angels, if I may use the expression, buzz like bees over the eternal Rose in canto XXXI. That makes us supply the olfactory images for ourselves. And what the reader is made to do for himself has a particular importance in literature. Hence the cynical dictum that chaste is the most erotically suggestive of all adjectives is not so wide of the mark, and cool evokes the idea of summer.
The Sea, in its own right, furnishes only two images. I say ‘in its own right’ because it is used in XXXI, 73–5
Da quella region, che più su tuona,
Occhio mortale alcun tanto non dista,
Qualunque in mare più giù s’abbandona
but only as a measure of distance, and is again implied in the image of Fortune turning the ship (XXVII, 145). In neither of these does it seem to be used for its own marine quality. In the two instances where it is so used it symbolizes evil: the mar dell’ amor torto (XXVI, 62) and the onde of cupidigia (XXVII, 121). Even when we remember the mar sì crudele of Purgatorio, 1, 3, it would be foolish to conclude that Dante habitually thought of the sea with dislike. The beautiful seascapes with which the Purgatorio opens would sufficiently prove the contrary. In the eleven cantos which I am studying it happens to appear only as something one has to be pulled out of and is in both places associated with the verb trarre. The core of the image is rescue from drowning, and this is no doubt a potent imagination for all humanity. It would not appear in a poem written by a fish.
Another class which contains only two items is that of images drawn from the Student’s life, and they will occur at once to everyone’s mind: the bachelor preparing for his disputation in XXIV, 46, and the forward pupil in XXV, 64. Both arise so directly out of the narrative that, however humorously and affectionately touched, they hardly amount to imagery in the sense that here concerns us.
Of images that might roughly be said to involve Landscape there are only three—the mountains to which the three Apostles are compared in a passage already mentioned, the sunlight coming through a rift in the clouds on to a flower-bed (XXIII, 79), and the elaborate simile of the cliff mirrored in water at XXX, 109. I must warn you that at this point my classification might be disputed. Garden images in general I have put under another heading because their emphasis is on the garden as such, the place of growth, the gardener’s work, not on what might be called ‘the view’. The flower-bed of XXIII, 79 comes here because in it the emphasis is on the thing seen, the thing that would interest a painter. So defined, landscapes are rare in our eleven cantos; nor does this surprise me. It is perhaps a characteristic of the Middle Ages rather than of Dante. Medieval poets are interested in trees, flowers, beasts, birds, and rivers: not often, I think, in landscape. When they are, they are usually of Germanic stock.
Four images I have classified as Psychological; by which I mean that in them Dante compares the state of mind which his celestial experiences arouse in him with some state of mind commonly known in our daily life. Three of these four are connected with sleep. In XXIII, 49 Dante compares himself to a man vainly trying to remember a dream; in XXVI, 70, to a man wakened by sudden light, and in XXXIII, 58–60, more interestingly, to one waking from a dream and retaining the emotion it has created but not the dream itself,
Qual è colui che somniando vede,
Chè dopo il sogno la passione impressa
Rimane, e l’altro alla mente non riede,
lines which strikingly anticipate Wordsworth’s
the soul
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not.
(Prelude, II, 315–17)
Nor of course is the resemblance accidental, for each poet is trying to describe what each thought ineffable.
The five images taken from Childhood show a remarkable uniformity. There is no reference, as we might have expected, to the innocence, the beauty, or the gaiety of children. Four out of the five present the same thing—the infant at the breast: one of these four, the fractious child turning away; three, the child feeding.
We now come to three classes each of which musters seven items. One of them calls, I think, for no comment—the class which I have headed Mythical and Historical, and which a medieval poet would, in English, have called simply ‘Historical’. The most striking of them are that in which Dante compares his stupor at the sight of the Heavenly City with the stupor felt by the Goths on entering Rome, and the unforgettable statement which follows the Beatific Vision,
Un punto solo m’è maggior letargo,
Che venticinque secoli alla impresa,
Che fe’ Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’Argo.
(XXXIII, 94–6)
Notice here the art. Mere numbers—venticinque secoli—do nothing in poetry. Even words like immeasurable do little. But the Argo puts us at once in the dawn of time, in the old untravelled world when the shadow of a ship was a wonder, and thence causes us to view the whole distance which separates it from the moment of Dante’s vision. The others in this class are, I think, such as we should expect to find in any medieval poet.
The second of the seven-membered classes is that of Erotic or Hymeneal imagery. I was at first surprised by the shortness of this list, and if we discount the traditional images in it—sposa in XXVII, 40, XXXI, 3, XXXII, 128, and nozze in XXX, 135—it reduces itself to three. Each of these is contained in a single word (donnea once, and innamora twice) and none of them is emphatic. It would seem that the close interconnexion of human with divine love which is the main explicit subject of all Dante’s poetry did not twine itself so closely about the stem of his imagination as we might suppose: the proportion between eroticism in the foreground and eroticism in the background is in fact the opposite of what the Freudians would teach us to anticipate. But one must always remember that Dante’s thought makes no fusion, much less confusion, of the two loves in the end. The whole ten cantos are climbing to that moment at which the human beloved
sorrise, e riguardommi;
Poi si tornò all’eterna fontana.
(XXXI, 92–3)
We have still to consider a third class which contains seven images of Weight. If seven seemed a small number of erotic images, seven seems a large number of ponderosities in a poem where we are steadily moving away from the Earth to the rim of the universe. And none of them can strictly be called traditional, though one may be a ‘dead’ metaphor—the punti lievi e gravi of XXIV, 37. The others all suggest weight in more or less painful aspects. His subject itself is
il ponderoso tema
(XXIII, 64)
and weighs on his òmero mortal: the mountainous Apostles, as we have seen, bow him with their imagined weight: because of his mortal pondo he must, having seen Heaven, return to Earth (XXVII, 64); he is reminded in the Ninth Sphere how, at the Centre, he had seen Satan da tutti i pesi del mondo costretto (XXIX, 57): Christ is described as
Carcar si volle della nostra salma.
(XXXII, 114)
I have always felt that no poet—least of all, any poet whose theme is so unearthly as Dante’s—has such an admirable solidity. Something of this may be due to these images of downward pressure. Perhaps we believe in his salita because we are not in such a world of irresponsible levitation as Shelley dreams of, but in a rigid Ptolemaic universe where all bodies draw to the centre, and only blessed souls and fire move upwards. For in poetry, if not necessarily in theology, Patmore may be right when he says
Spirit is heavy Nature’s wing
And is not truly anything
Without the weight.
We now come to four classes which contain nine images each. Two of these, the Astronomical and the Military, are quite ordinary and deserve no mention in a study on the small scale I intend. But the other two are very curious and unexpected and closely connected with each other. I call the first Clothes and Attire. Now in a poem about Heaven we might expect to hear a good deal about white robes and golden crowns: but that turns out not to be the sort of thing that Dante is thinking of. We have one image of a crown, a garland (XXXII, 70), but the point is the fitness of the particular crown to the colour of the wearer’s hair: allegorically, the fitness of each redeemed soul not only to Beatitude in general but to her unique Beatitude. Just before that, at line 57, we have a ring: but the point is that the ring exactly fits the finger. Adaptation, enclosure, fitting in, is the basic idea. The remaining images are based on a different, but related, idea. The whole cosmos is clothed in the Empyrean as in a real manto (XXIII, 112). Light travels into the eye di gonna in gonna (XXVI, 72), from gown to gown, through petticoat after petticoat. When St Peter circles round Beatrice, singing, his song is such that no verbal shading is adequate a cotai pieghe: the music has become the folds of a drapery (XXIV, 26). Adam calls God
il sommo bene,
Onde vien la letizia che mi fascia.
(XXVI, 134–5)
The joy wraps him up like a blanket or a bandage. In canto XXX, 50 Dante at the river of light finds himself fasciato in the velo of its refulgence. It is all, to me, quite unexpected. His mind (and therefore ours while we read) is apparently very sensitive to the experience of putting on, being enfolded, swathed, enveloped.
Closely connected with wrapping up is the idea of tying up, and therefore, inevitably, of untying: and these compose my next, for which I cannot find a better name than Cord images or images of Binding. In XXIV, 30 the prayer of Beatrice ‘unties’ St Peter from his sphere. The Blessed Virgin is prayed to ‘untie’ the cloud of mortality from Dante in XXXIII, 31. Dislegare is used in both passages. In XXXI, 90 Dante prays that his soul piacente a te, dal corpo si disnodi. In XXVI, 49 he is asked what other cords (altre corde) besides the intrinsic goodness of the Divine Essence draw him to God. In XXVIII, 11 he speaks of the fair eyes whence Love made the cord to take him. In the same canto (58) Beatrice speaks of the nature of the Hierarchies as a knot (nodo) which Dante cannot untie. In the next (XXIX, 36) the union of potentiality and actuality is tal vime, che giammai non si divima. In XXXII, 50 a hard problem is a legame. Finally, the supreme vision is expressed in the words La forma universal di questo nodo (XXXIII, 91). The world of Dante’s imagination, like that of Ptolemaic science, is a world of knots, cords, envelopes.
Next come images of Travel and images which may be called Physiological in so far as they refer to parts or operations of the human or animal body. Each category yields eleven examples. The images of travel are not very remarkable. Two of them present the writing of the poem as a journey: it is no voyage for a light craft in XXIII, 67, and in XXIV, 25 the pen has to take a jump like a traveller on a bad road. The Incarnation appears as il buon cammino in XXIII, 75: and again in the same canto (105) the Holy Womb is the inn or lodging (albergo) of the Saviour. Elsewhere, the travel images illustrate spiritual or intellectual progress. Of the physiological images, some are unremarkable, like the pelle bianca and pelle nera in XXVII, 136, or the sin of Adam as a wound (piaga) in XXXII, 4. Laughter, metaphorically used, comes three times. The strangest and most interesting of all in this class is
Con quanti denti questo amor ti morde.
(XXVI, 51)
We have already seen Love as an affair of cords that draw. It is now something that bites. And there is no question here of erotic love: it is love for the Unmoved Mover that has teeth. Nothing, perhaps, shows so clearly the difference between Dante’s mind and that of most of the men I know. It is true that corde and morde rhyme with one another: but on the lowest view of his metrical skill, one at least must have been chosen for its own sake—unless we are to suppose, madly, that both are makeshifts put in to rhyme with concorde.
We now come to a curiously large class (it numbers twelve) of what I call images of Emission. The name is unsatisfactory, but I trust I can make myself understood. They all concern letting out, or keeping in, opening, or shutting: both psychologically and aesthetically they are in close connexion with the wrappings up and tyings and untyings which are enumerated under clothes and cords: and they may also have a subconscious connexion with the physiological. When Dante speaks, he describes himself as releasing the waters of his interno fonte (XXIV, 57). Later in that canto (100) a proof uncloses (dischiude) the truth. Doves open (pande) their love to one another (XXV, 20). The young pupil is anxious that his knowledge ‘unconceal itself’ (si disasconda, XXV, 66). Images of distillation occur at XXV, 71 and XXXIII, 62. Hope is a fountain. God is the Eternal Fountain. In creation He ‘opens Himself’ (XXIX, 18). These images form a sort of link between the tyings and untyings and certain images of rain which we shall meet later.
Equal in number to the Emission images are the images from Eating and Drinking. Two of them are traditional; or three if pasciute di vento (XXIX, 107) is, as I suppose, proverbial. It is, I think, characteristic that what is generally compared to food is the satisfaction of spiritual or intellectual desire: if indeed we can, in Dante, distinguish the two. His joy at beholding the triumph of Christ in XXIII, 43 is quelle dape. He is pieno with the drops that distil from an Epistle of St James (XXV, 77). His curiosity about the River of Light in XXX, 74 is tanta sete.
The last of the smaller classes, with sixteen members, is the Zoological. Nine of the sixteen are connected with birds, usually by the mere suggestion of wings and feathers which symbolize spiritual movement. Of the beast images the most remarkable is the homely one of the animal coperto in XXVI, 97—presumably a pig in a cart or a duck in a basket on the way to market.
And now there is a sudden jump in the size of our lists. We come to the Meteorological and Social, each with twenty-four items. My meteorological class consists of images taken from the lower sky and thus distinguished from the Astronomical. Two facts emerge at once. Of the six passages in which the general appearance of the sky is suggested, four deal with early morning (the dolce stagione of Inferno) and one with either morning or evening. I suspect that this is not peculiar to the eleven cantos we are studying: my memory of the whole Commedia is full of sunrises and the early tremolar della marina. But balancing these we find a high percentage of images drawn from dew or rain. The rains which will at once occur to the mind of any who has read Dante will probably be either the rain which fell upon the gluttonous or the fiery rain under which Brunetto Latini walked. But in the Paradiso the characteristic associations of rain are good ones: La larga ploia Dello Spirito Santo (XXIV, 91–2): the drops from the Epistle of St James of which Dante is so full that he can now shed them upon others (XXV, 77): the virtù which the Divine Mind piove, rains down upon the spheres (XXVII, 111): the piover of allegrezza which pours over Mary in XXXII, 88. There is, indeed, only one exception: the incessant rain which destroys the budding promise of human will in XXVII, 125. I believe these images of good rain to be very important. The descent of the fructifying rain from heaven to earth is in a sense the symbol of the Ptolemaic universe in which power is always transmitted downwards. In a larger sense it symbolizes any Agape religion, any system in which man (and nature) is the patient, and Grace the agent. And more obviously it has its hymeneal associations as the visible act of the ἱερὸς γάμος of sky and soil: associations made explicit by Spenser when
angry Jove an hideous storme of raine
Did poure into his Lemans lap.
Under the heading of Social images I have included some which might rather be called Ecclesiastical or even Religious. The common bond is that they all concern either institutions or things seen in places where human beings are together. Thus the pilgrim in XXXI, 103 who gazes at the Veronica is for me a social image, because Dante is not thinking how he or we should feel in his place, but observing the stranger’s behaviour as if he had seen him in a crowd. The pilgrim has come ‘perhaps from Croazia’ to see ‘our Veronica’. The social images, thus defined, have one very remarkable characteristic. We know that Dante was an exile and an embittered politician: we might expect to find his social images full of satire. In reality they are without exception either happy and favourable or (more rarely) neutral. If these were our only evidence we should infer that we were reading the work of a man at complete harmony with his fellows. Many of them are concerned, as Charles Williams would have delighted to note, with the idea of the City or the Empire. Saints in bliss become Barons or patrici: God is the imperadore, Heaven His basilica or aula, sometimes a convento or consistorio, or a città. The poem is told that now it must dance (XXIII, 62). The blessed dance like a damsel who rises and enters the ball to do honour to a bride (XXV, 103). Beatrice, speaking of Papal corruption, works like a donna onesta who has heard of another’s fault. There are images from a masquerade (XXX, 91) and a charming picture of a master embracing a servant who has brought good news (XXIV, 148). There is a chessboard, a salutation, a bride tacita ed immota, and a temple. The images in themselves call for no comment: what strikes us is their frequency and cheerfulness. We have all read books which place philanthrophic and optimistic sentiments in the foreground, but betray, as it were in odd corners, how few people the author likes. In Dante the tension is reversed. Terrible denunciations are hurled at persons and abuses; but at the roots of his mind we discover an easy and unemphasized enjoyment of ‘towered cities’ and the ‘busy hum of men’. He is not an oddity or a misfit; hence springs some at least of the security and exhilaration with which we read his severe and in some ways appalling poem.
The images of Light and Heat number twenty-five, of which we may discount seven as traditional. They are mostly references to the ‘fire’ of love, so common in the poets that we do not strongly notice them. Another subsection in this class consists of what may be called variations on the scriptural theme that God is light. These, no doubt, could also be called traditional; but they are so close to the internal narrative, so frequent, and often so strongly imagined, that I think they affect us as if they were new. They are also inevitable in any monotheistic system, and especially in that of medieval Christendom. Thus when we read of the supreme Essenza
Che ciascun ben che fuor di lei si trova
Altro non è ch’un lume di suo raggio
(XXVI, 32–3)
we not only understand the doctrine but see the picture. The same is true, if I may judge by my own experience, of the many images from reflected light: as of the
verace speglio
Che fa di sè pareglio all’altre cose,
E nulla face lui di sè pareglio—
(XXVI, 106–8)
which makes equally good sense and good poetry whichever reading we adopt: in XXIX, 25 (E come in vetro etc.) the emphasis is on the speed of reflexion: in line 144 of the same canto, on the multiplicity of mirrors and, in contrast, the unity of the light which they all reflect. But I will not enumerate further, for the importance and relevance of these images, though great, is very obvious and will have escaped no reader of Dante.
What concerns us more is to notice that side by side with these twenty-five images of heat and light we have also twenty-five that may be called Horticultural or Agricultural. The poetry of the Paradiso is as full of roots and leaves and growth as it is of lights—and far fuller of both than of jewels or crowns. It is worth noticing that very few of these images are merely images of visible beauty. Dante looks at vegetation with the eyes of a gardener more often than with those of a tourist: he is interested in becoming, in process. The nearest we get to the merely visual is in XXIII, 70 where the assembly of the blessed is a fair garden; but then it is a garden ‘blossoming under the rays of Christ’—one feels that light drawing up those flowers. The Blessed Virgin is compared to roses and lilies: but lilies whose smell drew the Saviour on His buon cammino (ibid. 75). Leaves are not mentioned for their greenness. Once they illustrate serial progression when St Peter draws Dante di ramo in ramo to the ultime fronde—that is, takes him systematically through the subject of Faith (XXIV, 115). Elsewhere the saints come like leaves in the garden of the Eternal Gardener (XXVI, 64): or, with a faint suggestion of Homer, human customs succeed one another like leaves (XXVI, 136). Ripeness occurs thrice. Dante has to grow ripe for enduring the rays of the three great Apostles (XXV, 36): Adam, the man who had never been a child, is as Pomo che maturo solo prodotto fosti (XXVI, 91): it is explained in canto XXX that the river and the topazes that plunge into it and the laughter of the fields are only ombriferi prefazii of the truth—not that Dante is looking at unripe (acerbe) or preliminary things but that his vision is still immature. The whole life of the plant, seed, root, flower, and fruit comes in. Verbs like seminare, infiorare, germogliare, germinare provide an earthy ground-bass to the poetry of the higher heavens. The blessed are the
frutto
Ricolto del girar di queste spere.
(XXIII, 20–1)
Toser is surely wrong in his comment that Dante here refers to the activity of stellar and planetary influence in producing the characters and lives of men. Wholesale astrology was simply the current medieval and renaissance form of determinism: only a modified astrology was possible to a Christian poet, and Dante in Purgatorio, XVI had put into the mouth of Marco Lombardo the orthodox view that ‘constellation’ leaves room for free will and that if not sapiens yet certainly sanctus dominabitur astris—
A maggior forza ed a miglior natura
Liberi soggiacete, e quella cria
La mente in voi, che il ciel non ha in sua cura.
(Purgatorio, XVI, 79–81)
To describe the saints in glory as the ‘fruit’ of ‘constellation’ would be to attribute to the lower ‘nature’, the created universe, that which is the gift of the miglior natura or Grace, and which even the unfallen Adam could not have achieved in his mere nature. In what sense, then, can the heavenly harvest be attributed to the spheres? I think Dante is here regarding them primarily as the embodiments of Time, and indeed almost identifying them with Time itself, having read in Chalcidius’s version of the Timaeus (38B), tempus vero caelo aequaevum est ut una orta una dissolvantur. The gathering of the Church Triumphant in Heaven is the final cause of the whole historical process and may thus be called the fruit of Time, or of the Spheres. If so, this image is closely linked with another which I have reserved to the last because it seems to me to combine the grotesque and the sublime more triumphantly than any other poetical image I have met. At the end of canto XXVII (118) the Ninth Sphere is compared to a flower pot and Dante bidden to observe
come il tempo tenga in cotal testo
Le sue radici e negli altri le fronde.
I must confess that all the Miltonic sublimities seem to me heavy and superficial things compared with this astonishing vision which reveals our race crawling among the topmost (or, if you will, the lowest) leaves of the great time-tree that grows head-downward from the Ninth Heaven. Not even from that crystalline soil but from a vase.
Only one category now remains, and it, with its nine and twenty images, has an easy lead. It would be interesting to know how many have guessed it. My title for it is ‘Technical’: it is imagery drawn from the arts, crafts, manufactures, and skilled occupations of men: from painting, musical instruments, seals and sealing-wax, clocks, thread, money in a purse, hammer and anvil, rowing, riddling with a sieve, archery at the butts, the cares of the artist, the jeweller, the geometrician and the astronomer observing an eclipse, and finally (on the very eve of the ineffable vision) a prudent reminder that a good tailor cuts his coat according to his cloth. So closely does Dante observe on the poetical level the rule given for the spiritual life in the Imitation—summum non stat sine infimo (II, x, 4).
Apart from its other defects, this little analysis suffers from dealing with only eleven cantos. I have no idea how my statistics would be altered if I had time to extend them to the whole Comedy. Yet even from these cantos something seems to emerge. Images whose only claim is their beauty are conspicuously rare. What would seem at first sight to be the prosaic is neither wooed nor avoided. What runs through many of my lists is the suggestion of a curious intensity of sensibility in directions where modern sensibility is, I believe, much weaker: the intensity which compares the gratification of curiosity to an infant sucking at the breast, which can feel fasciato, muffled or wrapped up, in joy, or in light, which feels love pulling with ropes or biting with teeth, which can see spiritual or even local transitions as knots tied or untied. It is this strain which makes me uncertain of the growing belief that if a Dante speaks of a professedly allegorical lady in terms of violent passion we may conclude that she was not wholly allegorical. That would be so with most of us: with Dante, perhaps less. That is one aspect of his imagery: the curiousness, the almost sensuous intensity about things not sensuous. But side by side with that, we find other characteristics: Dante in the garden, and Dante in the streets, his feeling for the silent growing life, and his cheerful, spontaneous interest in the state and courtesies, the trades and skills, of men. It is, perhaps, this continual reference both to the quiet, moistened earth and to the resonant pavements, workshops, and floors, which support and make convincing his invention of a heaven which, in the obvious sense, makes very few concessions to the natural man.