The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Dante Alighieri · a collection of lyric poems · the sonnets, canzoni, ballate and the sestina that stand outside the Vita Nuova, in the corpus fixed by Michele Barbi (1921) and commented by Gianfranco Contini · from the 1280s to the years of exile after 1302 · scored on Dante’s Italian, with Foster and Boyde’s prose versions (1967) for sense only; every English rendering on this page is the desk’s own
Mode
Lyric collection without an authorial book; love poetry, the hard style, comic abuse, moral and political argument in verse
Mythos
The lady as stone; love as a winter that will not thaw; Amor as a lord; Justice and her lineage in exile at Love’s door
Phase
A quarter century of composition, from the new style and the poets’ exchanges of the 1280s through the stony poems to the canzoni of exile
Presentation
Poems; sonnets, canzoni, ballate, one sestina and one canzone on five rhyme words, in an editor’s order; the three canzoni later commented in the Convivio included and read as lyrics
Register
From the sweetness of the new style to the harsh rhymes of the stony poems and the slashing diction of the abusive sonnet; the scholastic argument of the doctrinal canzone
Scale
One poet across one career; a frozen earth under the turning heavens; a city that has driven him out
Governing Proposition
A poet who had helped to make a new style of love poetry writes, over a quarter of a century and never as one book, the poems that fall outside it: sonnets to his friends and insults to one of them, four poems in which a lady is a stone and the lover wants to wound her, and canzoni that argue what nobility is and what exile does to Justice. The wager of the best of them is that a form can know what its maker cannot leave, and that the hardest style in the Romance lyric can carry the hardest want; the body as a whole makes no wager, because no one ordered it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
There is no book of Dante’s called the Rime. There are the poems he wrote outside the Vita Nuova, over about a quarter of a century, from the 1280s to the years of exile after 1302, and they survive as he left them: scattered across many manuscripts and early anthologies, with no order of his own and attributions contested at the margin. Michele Barbi fixed the corpus for the Società Dantesca edition of 1921, and Gianfranco Contini printed it with a commentary in 1939; Domenico De Robertis, in 2002, reordered it by the manuscripts. There are sonnets, canzoni, ballate, one sestina, and one canzone built on five rhyme words. Every order a reader meets is an editor’s. What is weighed here is that body, as it is read.
Much of it is the work of a young poet among other poets: sonnets sent and answered, compliments, early pieces in the manner of Guittone and then of Cavalcanti, Amor as a lord, a screen lady, the figures of a lyric he had inherited and was helping to remake. The best of these is a wish addressed to Guido Cavalcanti: “Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io”
“Guido, I would that you and Lapo and I”, and the sonnet carries the friends off on an enchanted voyage, the new style imagined as a fellowship. Most of this verse is graceful rather than high. It is competent, and it is convention; a reader of the whole meets a great deal of it.
Against the fellowship stands its opposite. Before Forese Donati died in 1296, he and Dante exchanged six sonnets of abuse, a tenzone in the low comic manner of the vituperative sonnet: hunger, debts, poverty, a wife and a cold marriage bed. The diction slashes, and it is as fully held as the sweetness of the praise poems. The same poet wrote both, and the distance between them is the first fact of the collection: a single intellect testing what a form and a register can do, and no book in which the tests are made to answer one another.
Movement II
“Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro”
“So in my speech I want to be harsh”. The line declares a poetics, and it is one of four poems, the rime petrose, the stony poems, that turn away from the style Dante had helped to make: Io son venuto al punto de la rota, Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra, Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna and Così nel mio parlar. Their model is the hardest manner in the Romance lyric, the trobar clus of the Occitan poet Arnaut Daniel: harsh consonantal rhymes, rare rhyme words, a syntax that has to drive through them. The harshness is not a surface. It is fitted to what the poems want.
What they want is not a ladder of the soul toward the good. The lady is a stone, petra as her name and as a word the rhyme brings back; she petrifies like Medusa, and the lover is turned to the same substance. Love is a winter that will not thaw. In Così nel mio parlar the want is bodily and unanswered and violent: the poem imagines seizing her by the hair, and its close fuses tenderness and cruelty in one fantasy of revenge. The love the new style praised, the love that ennobles, is shown here to be one possibility of love and not its truth. Whether the stone lady is a woman, a figure of philosophy, or both has been argued for a long time and is not settled; Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez read the four poems as a cosmological and alchemical sequence.
Io son venuto al punto de la rota (I have come to the point of the wheel) opens on the turning heavens. The sun’s position and the stars frame an earth in winter, and stanza by stanza the whole of nature is shown changed by the season, frozen, the winds, the birds, the waters. One thing alone does not change, stanza after stanza: the lover’s torment. The cosmic cold is set against a fixed passion, and the poem’s scale is the distance between them, the heavens on one side and a mind that cannot move on the other.
Movement III
“Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra”
“To the short day and the great circle of shade”. It is Arnaut’s form, the sestina, brought into Italian, and it holds the same chill as Io son venuto in a lower key. Six words end its lines and no others: ombra, colli, erba, verde, petra, donna, shade, hills, grass, green, stone, lady. In the short day and the great circle of shadow, the lady is a stone in green grass.
The rotation is the poem’s argument. Each stanza takes its end words from the stanza before in a fixed retrograde order, so that the same six return, every time in a new place, and the poem can say nothing but them. That is the form of an obsession: a mind that cannot leave six things, and knows its fixation by being unable to speak past it. Drop a stanza and the rotation breaks, and with it the argument. The strictness shows no sign of filling a slot. Each return is placed as if the sense had required it.
Then Dante took the form further than its inventor had. Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna (Love, you see well that this lady) is a canzone on five words, repeated across stanzas of twelve lines, sometimes called the double sestina: the cage tightened, and a feat no one before had tried in Italian. The stake was real. A technique this exact can collapse into display, and the stony poems put at risk the claim, Dante’s own among others’, that love ennobles. Petrarch’s Canzoniere would take up the sestina, its stony imagery and the double sestina, and through Petrarch the European sonnet and canzone; much of what these four poems began reached later poets by that ordered book.
Movement IV
The canzone, which Dante held in De vulgari eloquentia to be the noblest form of the lyric, becomes in his hands a form for argument. Its long stanza, divided by rules he set out in that treatise, the fronte, the sirma and the key line, gives an argument room to move. Three of these canzoni he later commented in the Convivio, Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona and Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i’ solia; they circulated first as poems standing alone, and they are read here so, as lyrics, without the commentary. Le dolci rime argues that nobility is a quality of the soul and not of lineage or wealth, against the definition it ascribes to an emperor. Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire turns on avarice.
“Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute”
“Three ladies have come around my heart”. The canzone of exile is a grave allegorical tableau: the virtues, Justice and her lineage, dispossessed and weeping at Love’s door. Each of the ladies is needed, because the genealogy of Justice is the case the poem makes. Exile is shown as an injury to Justice herself, and in the congedo the poet takes his own banishment as an honour. Love, justice and exile are joined in one poem, and a small myth is built, of the kind the Commedia would build on a far larger scale.
Beside the stony poems these canzoni make a third doctrine. The new style held that love ennobles; the stony poems that love petrifies and wants to wound; the moral canzoni turn from love to virtue and to justice. A single question runs through all three, what love and virtue are, and the moral poems argue over the same ground the love poems had held. But the three stand side by side and are not reconciled. Much of the doctrine is stated rather than found, and nothing in the body corrects one poem by another, because there is no book in which they meet.
Movement V
The Commedia hears these poems again. On the shore of Purgatory Casella sings one of Dante’s canzoni: “‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’ / cominciò elli allor sì dolcemente, / che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.”
“‘Love that discourses to me in my mind’ he then began, so sweetly that the sweetness still sounds within me” (Purg. II.112 to 114). It is the later poem’s own verdict on what one of these canzoni can do to those who hear it.
Twice more the Commedia cites Dante’s lyrics by their first lines. In Paradiso VIII Charles Martel quotes “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (you who by understanding move the third heaven, Par. VIII.37); in Purgatorio XXIV Bonagiunta names a canzone of the Vita Nuova and the “dolce stil novo” (sweet new style, Purg. XXIV.57). And among the gluttons the pilgrim meets his old adversary in verse, “e ravvisai la faccia di Forese” (and I knew again the face of Forese, Purg. XXIII.48), where the poem returns to the tenzone and rewrites the friendship it had mocked.
What the Commedia remembers are single poems, and that is right. Taken one by one, the stony poems and the canzoni of nobility and exile are among the most commanding verse of the Italian Middle Ages, and the making in them bears weight: the harshness is the meaning, the rotation is the obsession, the stanza is the argument. Taken together they are a career and not a work. They were written across changing doctrines and never set in order by their maker, and the coherence they have is the coherence of the man who wrote them. The Vita Nuova shows what a book of lyrics can be, and Petrarch would make one; the Rime are what remains when no one does.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test cuts two ways in a body no author ordered. Inside the great poems little can be removed: the six end words of Al poco giorno, ombra, colli, erba, verde, petra, donna, return in every stanza because the poem is about a mind that cannot leave them, and a stanza dropped would break the rotation that is its argument; Tre donne needs each of its exiled ladies, since the lineage of Justice is the case it makes. But much of the corpus is occasional: exchange sonnets, compliments, early pieces in the manner of Guittone and Cavalcanti, whose removal would cost the whole nothing a reader would miss. What holds the axis here, a tenth under the cap: the scale is permitted by survival, not compelled by an argument, and no editor’s order is required by what the poems say.
Score: 7.4 / 10
What the body brings into the open can be stated. The stony poems disclose desire as the new style had kept it hidden: not a ladder of the soul toward the good but a fixation that turns the lover to stone and wants to wound. “Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro” (so in my speech I want to be harsh) announces a poetics fitted to a want unanswered, bodily and violent, and the poem goes on to imagine seizing the lady by the hair: the love that ennobles is shown to be one possibility of love, not its truth. The moral canzoni disclose a second thing: that nobility is a quality of the soul, not of lineage or wealth (Le dolci rime), and that exile is an injury to Justice itself (Tre donne). Held below the bar because much of the doctrine is stated rather than found, and the minor poems disclose little beyond their convention.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The height is real, and frequency holds it. Io son venuto al punto de la rota opens on the turning heavens and a winter in which the whole of nature is frozen, the winds, the birds, the waters, while the lover’s torment alone does not change: cosmic cold set against a fixed passion, stanza after stanza. Al poco giorno holds the same chill in a lower key, the short day and the great circle of shade, in which the lady is a stone in green grass. The close of Così nel mio parlar, tenderness and cruelty fused in one fantasy of revenge, has a dreadful height; Tre donne rises in a graver register, dispossessed virtues weeping at Love’s door. Held where it is because the elevation lives in perhaps a dozen poems, and the rest of the body is graceful rather than high.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Some of the myth is built. The stony poems make the lady a stone, petra as her name and as a rhyme word the form compels to return, and the figure carries them: a beloved who petrifies, like Medusa, a lover turned to the same substance, love as a winter that will not thaw. Tre donne builds a small allegorical myth, Justice and her lineage in exile, of the kind the Commedia would build at a far larger scale; the sonnets exchanged with Forese use the comic underworld of hunger, debt and a cold marriage bed. But much of the body evokes rather than builds: Amor as a lord, the screen lady, the received figures of the courtly and stilnovist lyric, used as atmosphere. The constructed myth is local to a few poems, and the whole acquires no single archetypal structure.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The swerve is from a tradition Dante had helped to make. Having written canonical poems of the new style, he turned in the stony poems to the hardest manner in the Romance lyric, the trobar clus of Arnaut Daniel: harsh consonantal rhymes, rare rhyme words, Arnaut’s sestina brought into Italian, and then a form pushed further than its inventor had taken it, the canzone on five words repeated across stanzas of twelve lines. The stake was real: it put at risk the claim that love ennobles, and bound the poet to a technique that can collapse into display. The tenzone swerves the other way, into the low comic realism of the abusive sonnet, and the moral canzoni bring philosophy into the canzone as argument, not ornament. Held below the bar because the turns are dispersed across separate poems, and much of the body stays inside the inherited manners.
Score: 8.4 / 10
In the best poems the form is the knowledge. The sestina’s rotation of six words, each stanza taking its end words from the last in a fixed retrograde order, is the form of an obsession: the poem knows its fixation by being unable to say anything but those words in new order, and the canzone on five words tightens the cage. The canzone stanza, which Dante held in De vulgari eloquentia to be the noblest lyric form, gives Tre donne and Doglia mi reca the length and articulation an argument needs; a sonnet could not carry them. But the axis asks of the work scored, and the work has no authorial form: change the editors’ order and the book knows nothing different. The great poems would stand far higher alone; the absence of a book holds the body here.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Evidence first. The stony poems have sustained seven centuries of return and a modern criticism that keeps finding more: Gianfranco Contini’s commentary (1939, revised 1946), Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde’s Dante’s Lyric Poetry (1967), Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez’s Time and the Crystal (1990), which reads them as a cosmological and alchemical sequence, and a long debate on whether the stone lady is a woman, a figure of philosophy, or both. The questions stay open: what these poems mean for the Vita Nuova’s renunciation and the Commedia’s return to Beatrice; how the allegory of Tre donne maps onto Dante’s own exile; what the tenzone says of a friendship that Purgatorio rewrites. Held where it is because the return is mostly the specialists’, read in the light of the larger works, and much of the corpus is not reread at all.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the Italian vernacular lyric of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the Sicilians, Guittone, Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti and the stilnovisti, with the Occitan lyric behind them. The force: the canzone made capable of philosophy, the Occitan hard style naturalized in Italian, the sestina carried from Arnaut into the Italian tradition, and a form added, the canzone on five words. Discounted because much of the reach passes through Petrarch’s ordered book, and because Dante’s own redirection of the lyric is carried most by the Vita Nuova and the Commedia, which are not this unit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Petrarch’s Canzoniere takes up the sestina, its stony imagery and the double sestina, and through Petrarch the European sonnet and canzone follow; the sestina’s later life in English and in modern poetry runs through Dante’s and Petrarch’s Italian as much as through Arnaut’s Occitan.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Seven centuries would set the figure higher; two charges lower it. On form, the poems survive but the book does not exist as Dante’s: there was never an authorial collection, the poems are scattered across many manuscripts and early anthologies, attribution is contested at the margin, and the order every reader meets is an editor’s, Michele Barbi’s (1921) or Domenico De Robertis’s (2002). On presence, the poems are read mainly by Italianists and Dantists, with a few, the stony poems, Guido, i’ vorrei and Tre donne, in the anthologies and the schools. Against that, the great canzoni and sonnets have been copied, imitated and commented without a break since the fourteenth century, and the fabric of the text is sound where the poems are secure.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on Dante’s Italian; the music of the verse is heard only as far as this reading hears it. The command is the highest in the medieval Italian lyric. Così nel mio parlar manages rare and rough rhymes without losing syntax or drive; Al poco giorno keeps six end words in strict rotation with no sense of filling the slot; Amor, tu vedi ben sustains five words through stanza after stanza, a feat no one before had tried in Italian. The doctrinal canzoni build long stanzas divided by the rules Dante set out in De vulgari eloquentia, the fronte, the sirma and the key line, with an argument moving through them. The sonnets range from early sweetness to the slashing diction of the tenzone, each register fully held. Held at 9.0 because the floor of the corpus is competent convention, not the summit.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the ethereal praise sonnets of the stilnovist years and the tenzone’s jokes about Forese’s wife in a cold bed. Do they obey one law? Only loosely. A single intellect runs through them, always testing what a form and a register can do, and a single question, what love and virtue are, joins the praise poems to the stony poems and the stony poems to the moral canzoni, which argue over the same ground. What holds the axis here, level with the lowest of the twelve: the body has no governing physics. The doctrine that love ennobles, the stony doctrine that love petrifies and wants to wound, and the moral poems’ turn from love to justice stand side by side, uncorrected, because no book reconciles them. The range is wide, and it counts; the coherence is a career’s, not a work’s.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Judged on what a lyric collection holds. Consciousness, in the analysis of love’s effects that the new style practised and the stony poems darken. The body and desire, in the stony poems. The natural order and the cosmos, in the winter of Io son venuto, where the sun’s position and the stars frame a frozen earth. Friendship and the poets’ guild, in the sonnet to Cavalcanti and the exchanges. The household, poverty and appetite, in the tenzone with Forese. Society and ethics, in Le dolci rime on nobility and Doglia mi reca on avarice. The state and history, in the exile of Tre donne. The sacred only at the edge. Several are joined in single poems, love, justice and exile in Tre donne, cosmos and desire in Io son venuto; across the body they are listed more than integrated.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Sublime, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4. A command of verse that is load-bearing in the stony poems, where the harshness is the meaning; seven centuries of copying and commentary for poems that never had a book; a winter of the heavens set against a fixed passion; the turn from the new style to Arnaut’s hard manner and to the abusive sonnet; and the sestina carried into Italian and on, through Petrarch, into the European lyric.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Inner Law at 7.4, level at the foot of the twelve. Both are the charge of a body no author ordered: a large floor of occasional sonnets and early pieces whose loss the whole would not feel, an order that is an editor’s, and three doctrines of love and virtue, that it ennobles, that it petrifies, that it gives way to justice, set side by side and never reconciled. Next above them, The Encompassed at 7.6: many orders present, listed more than joined.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 7.8, The Inner Law at 7.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.4, and The Inner Law, 7.4, both a tenth below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1, from a sum of 97.4, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · Dante Alighieri’s lyric poems outside the Vita Nuova, written from the 1280s to the years of exile after 1302, scored as one collection as it is read: the authentic corpus fixed by Michele Barbi for the Società Dantesca edition (1921) and printed with Gianfranco Contini’s commentary (Einaudi, 1939; revised 1946), in Barbi’s numbering. Domenico De Robertis’s critical edition (2002), which reorders the corpus by its manuscript tradition, is not the text scored. The thirty-one poems of the Vita Nuova belong to that book and are excluded. The three canzoni Dante later commented in the Convivio are included and read as lyrics, as they first circulated; the Convivio, a prose book, is a separate work. Poems of doubtful attribution, which Barbi and Contini print apart, are excluded. The poems weighed most are the four rime petrose, Tre donne, Doglia mi reca, Le dolci rime, the canzone called the Montanina (Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia), the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti and the tenzone with Forese Donati; the many short occasional sonnets and ballate of the early years are weighed as a class. No text of the Rime is in hand, and nothing on this page was counted. Every axis is judged on Dante’s Italian. Translation · Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry (Oxford, 1967), Italian with a close prose version and commentary, used for sense; for the stony poems also Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez, Time and the Crystal (1990). Neither is quoted. The Italian on this page is limited to first lines and to the six end words of the sestina; the English beside it is the desk’s own literal rendering. The lines of the Commedia are quoted from the Italian, Project Gutenberg e-text #1012, checked against the file. Not given here, because they cannot be confirmed from what is in hand: the exact number of poems in the corpus, which differs by edition; the numbering of individual poems; the dating of the stony poems and of the Montanina; the occasion on which the Montanina was sent; and the first lines of the tenzone’s sonnets. The music of the verse as its first hearers heard it is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.