THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Hilde Dietsgen Charlton 
 in memory of her Mother. 
 
 - - " 

 
 THE 
 
 LADIES 
 
 OF 
 
 DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 BY 
 CHARLES H. GRANDGENT, A.B., L.H.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES 
 IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE McBRIDE LECTURE FUND 
 WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1917
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1917 
 HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IN 1914 the sum of fifty thousand dollars was given to 
 Western Reserve University to establish The McBride 
 Lecture Fund, as a memorial of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. 
 McBride and their eldest son, Herbert McBride, by 
 Malcolm McBride, Donald McBride, Edith McBride 
 Sherman, and Grace McBride Crile, children of Mr. 
 and Mrs. McBride, and by Ethel Tod McBride, widow 
 of Herbert McBride, all of Cleveland. The purpose of 
 the Fund was thus stated in the deed of gift: " We 
 desire to have this memorial accomplish as much useful 
 educational service to this entire community as its 
 means make possible. The method of expressing this 
 service now appearing best and most useful to us is by 
 lectures given in whatever part of the city of Cleveland 
 and with whatever manner of presentation may seem 
 most convenient and best adapted for the kind of audi- 
 ence desired to be reached. We desire that the range 
 of subjects should be as broad as possible covering so 
 far as practicable all fields of human knowledge and 
 activity, whether cultural, scientific, civic or political. 
 We also desire that whenever deemed advisable the in- 
 come of the memorial should be used to defray not only 
 all expenses incidental to the delivery of the lecture, but 
 also such publication of the contents of the lecture 
 subsequently as may seem best."
 
 IV PREFACE 
 
 The administration of this Fund has been in the hands 
 of a committee made up of one member of the Faculty 
 of Adelbert College, of the Medical School, and of the 
 Law School, and the President of the University in an 
 advisory capacity, and lectures upon a variety of topics 
 have been given during the past three years. The lec- 
 tures contained in this volume, delivered in February 
 of 1917 by Professor C. H. Grandgent of Harvard Uni- 
 versity, are the first to be published by the Fund.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. VIOLETTA 3 
 
 H. MATELDA 40 
 
 m. PIETRA 67 
 
 IV. BEATRICE 107 
 
 V. LISETTA
 
 THE 
 LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS
 
 THE 
 LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 I. VIOLETTA 
 
 IT is springtime, perhaps the first of May. A com- 
 pany of young ladies, garlanded with flowers, hand in 
 hand are dancing together in a round, singing the while. 
 Not a fantastic picture, this, but an image of something 
 that happened year by year one of the pretty medi- 
 eval customs we have lost. Let us hope it may some- 
 time be revived! The tune these ladies sang was called 
 a " ballad," a word which originally meant a bit of 
 dance music. The piece consisted of a refrain, in which 
 all joined, and at least one strophe sung by a single 
 voice. First was the dancing chorus, next a pause for the 
 solo, then the chorus and dance again. On this partic- 
 ular occasion the ladies are performing a ballad by a 
 youth named Dante Alighieri : that is to say, he wrote 
 the text; whether or not he composed the tune, we shall 
 probably never know. It is likely enough that he did 
 not; for poet and composer, in earlier days regularly one 
 and the same, had begun to be differentiated; and we 
 have no evidence that Dante ever wrote music, although 
 he loved it. Here is the song:
 
 4 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Chorus 
 
 Ah ! Violet, which once didst meet mine eyes, 
 Shadowed by Love, appearing suddenly, 
 Pity the heart which wounded was by thee, 
 
 Which hopes in thee, and, yearning for thee, dies. 
 
 Solo 
 
 Thou, Violet, in beauty past belief, 
 With fatal words didst kindle in my mind 
 
 A furious fire, the while 
 Thou, like a blazing spirit swift and kind, 
 Didst fashion hope, which partly cures my grief, 
 
 Whene'er I see thee smile. 
 
 Ah ! scorn me not, tho' I myself beguile ! 
 
 Think of the longings which within me burn ! 
 
 For many a bygone maid, tho' slow to turn, 
 Hath felt at last the pain she did despise. 
 
 Chorus 
 
 Ah! Violet, which once didst meet mine eyes, 
 Shadowed by Love, appearing suddenly, 
 Pity the heart which wounded was by thee, 
 
 Which hopes in thee, and, yearning for thee, dies. 
 
 A scene faint as it is fair, which fades as we approach 
 
 - all the fairer for the cloud of remoteness that veils it, 
 
 and, if we look too curiously, conceals it altogether. 
 
 Nameless are those Florentine ladies who, in the latter 
 
 years of the thirteenth century, danced together in the
 
 VIOLETTA 5 
 
 new season, singing the verses of their young fellow- 
 townsman, who was destined to be so illustrious. Who 
 was Violet ? Was she a damsel of flesh and blood ? Was 
 she the creature of a spring poet's fancy ? Was she a 
 literary commonplace ? Doubtless our enjoyment is 
 enhanced by ignorance, for mystery is more alluring 
 than precise but insignificant fact; yet our indiscretion 
 is forever itching to penetrate the mist. Let us yield to 
 it for an hour, trusting, at the bottom of our hearts, that 
 our efforts will be vain. 
 
 To follow any trail, however vague and vanishing, 
 through Dante's poems is a quest that brings its own 
 reward. Our hunting ground to-day shall be the earlier 
 chapters of the Vita Nuova, and also the unattached 
 sonnets and ballads that have been transmitted to us in 
 various lyric miscellanies. Since in these collections the 
 attributions of authorship are often contradictory or 
 altogether lacking, there is uncertainty concerning many 
 poems to which Dante's name has at one time or another 
 been attached ; but with regard to others there need be 
 no doubt, because they are designated as his by Dante 
 himself in one of his surely authentic works, or men- 
 tioned as his by contemporaries who were in a position 
 to learn the truth, or ascribed to him by a great number 
 of good manuscripts. Of internal evidence there is little, 
 save the beauty of the verse and the character of the 
 thought both untrustworthy criteria ; for other ex- 
 cellent poets of his day shared his ideas. As to the time
 
 6 THE LADIES OP DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 and circumstances of composition, next to nothing is 
 known. 
 
 For the Vita Nuova, or New Life, the case is quite 
 different. No one questions its authorship, and its date 
 is fixed with tolerable precision. The little book 
 spiritual autobiography or autobiographical romance, 
 however one choose to call it was put together when 
 the poet was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years 
 old, some three or four years after the death of his 
 Beatrice. It consists of a series of poems, selected from 
 those written and published by the author during the 
 past ten years, and embedded in a prose commentary 
 which forms a more or less connected narrative. Inti- 
 mate as it is in its confession of sentiment, it is equally 
 discreet, and reveals surprisingly little in the way of 
 tangible fact. Our other sources of information, too, 
 are almost barren for the first stages of Dante's life. 
 This much we can tell, that, born in the busy, gossipy 
 little city of Florence, and left an orphan while still a 
 boy, with a brother and a couple of sisters, all younger 
 than himself, he was well bred, and won early distinc- 
 tion as a poet; belonging to a genteel but not wealthy 
 stock, he associated with the best families of the town, 
 and was in childhood affianced to a daughter of the 
 aristocratic Donati clan, whom he married when he 
 was not far from thirty. That is virtually all. Some of 
 his friends, to be sure, we can name: first of all, the 
 distinguished and well-to-do Guido Cavalcanti, a poet,
 
 VIOLETTA 7 
 
 scholar, and man of public affairs, older than Dante; 
 next, a brother of Beatrice, otherwise unknown; then 
 Dante's contemporary, Lapo Gianni, and his junior, Cino 
 da Pistoia, both poets, the latter also an eminent jurist; 
 finally the artist, Giotto, and the musician, Casella. To 
 these may be added the elderly statesman and author, 
 Brunetto Latini, sage counselor of Dante's boyhood. 
 
 But what is to be said of his female friends, the object 
 of our search ? Aside from his wife, Gemma, whom he 
 never mentions, four ladies, even to us not entirely 
 devoid of individuality, seem to have influenced his life 
 - the four whom we call, after him, Beatrice, Matelda, 
 Lisetta, Pietra: to these my remaining lectures shall 
 be devoted. To-day we are ostensibly on the hunt for 
 sundry dim, elusive figures, probably but not certainly 
 different from the more distinct four. We shall not 
 catch them; but, like many an unsuccessful huntsman, 
 we may enjoy the sport. They are the ghosts of 
 damsels admired and sung by Dante in his early 
 youth. He surely knew many ladies by name. There 
 are the bands that danced to his ballads, the " passing 
 troop of ladies gentle-bred " whom he encountered on 
 All Saints' Day and immortalized in a sonnet, the fem- 
 inine circle that criticized his amatory style, the com- 
 panions of Beatrice who made sport of him at a wedding 
 banquet; above all, the " sixty most beautiful ladies " 
 of Florence, whom he enumerated in a long poem, 
 unfortunately lost, but described in the New Life.
 
 8 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 A sonnet written by Dante in answer to a query, 
 also in sonnet form, from his friend and fellow-poet, 
 Cino da Pistoia, seems to reveal a degree of inconstancy 
 which the author, in other moments, would have dis- 
 avowed. Here is the curious little poem: 
 
 Not since my solar years have numbered nine 
 
 Love's company have I a single moment quit; 
 
 His busy spur I know, I know his bit, 
 And how he makes us laugh and then repine. 
 Against him, reason human or divine 
 
 Is weak as music when the thunders split: 
 
 Think you with lute, when skies are lightning-lit, 
 To make the strife of elements decline ? 
 Within the reach of his relentless dart 
 
 Free will is never truly free nor bold, 
 And vain is all defence of wit and art. 
 
 New spurs, indeed, may take the place of old; 
 And whatsoever fresh delight they start, 
 
 We must pursue it, if the other's cold. 
 
 For this sentiment the author was rebuked by another 
 poet, Cecco d'Ascoli. It was probably some other kind 
 of shortcoming that elicited the stern criticism of 
 Dante's closest friend, Guido Cavalcanti, one of whose 
 sonnets begins: 
 
 I come to see thee countless times a day 
 And find thee all too vulgarly inclined. 
 
 Oddly enough, doubtless at a different period of his 
 life (if we only knew when!), Dante reproached Cino 
 for the same kind of fickleness condoned above :
 
 VIOLETTA 9 
 
 O Master Cino, these your trivial rimes 
 I thought that I had once for all forsook, 
 Since quite another course my Argo took 
 
 My ship that steers away to distant climes. 
 
 But, having heard it said full many times 
 That you are quickly caught by every hook, 
 Once more a little while I backward look, 
 
 Once mere this pen my weary hand begrimes. 
 
 Whoso, like you, forever fresh in love, 
 
 By every charm is bound, then breaks away, 
 From Cupid's wound can scarcely suffer long. 
 
 Now if your heart is always prone to stray, 
 
 Correct it, I beseech by God above, 
 
 Until your actions match your gentle song. 
 
 How are we to interpret such utterances as these ? 
 How much of the authors' actual lives do they con- 
 tain ? Do they refer to shifting but real affections, 
 natural enough in young men; or to social attentions 
 politely tinged with tenderness; or to purely literary 
 attachments ? Every one of these hypotheses is so 
 plausible that lacking, as we do, convincing evidence 
 of any kind we hardly feel justified in rejecting it in 
 favor of either of the others. 
 
 It stands to reason that medieval youths, even as 
 those of our own day, were inclined to fall into an am- 
 orous state, and sometimes, no doubt, in love with love, 
 they remained faithful to it, while changing its bodily 
 symbol. An immortal example is Romeo. On the other 
 hand, in the recently developed society of the late
 
 10 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 middle ages, gallantry of gentleman to lady, even serv- 
 ice of vassal to mistress, readily took on the forms of 
 passionate devotion; and courteous conversation was 
 largely based on the assumption of irresistible beauty 
 on the feminine side and a responsive heart on the mas- 
 culine. Such a convention is likely to guide converse 
 in a community whose good breeding is considerably 
 in excess of its fund of topics adapted to cultivated 
 discourse. Some specimens of such polished dialogue 
 are extant in the old romances, and a few in the manu- 
 als of conduct composed for young ladies. Occasionally, 
 of course, the man and woman really were in love, and 
 then we may have, as at the end of the Provengal ro- 
 mance of Jaufre, a scene not unlike the closing chapter 
 of a Victorian novel. 
 
 In most amatory conversations, however, we may be 
 fairly sure that the inflamed heart was a genteel fiction, 
 and was so understood by both parties. At any rate, 
 this must have been usually the case in medieval ama- 
 tory poetry, which, for the most part, seems to have 
 been addressed by a household dependent or a paid 
 entertainer to the mistress of the mansion, whom the 
 author complimented by feigning a melancholy passion 
 for her. Hence it came about that the main business of 
 a troubadour was to advertise, under the thin veil of a 
 pretended name, the superhuman charms of a selected 
 lady and his own suffering and fidelity. This style was 
 adopted even by the exceptional poets who were of
 
 VIOLETTA 11 
 
 high rank; and when one of these actually did love his 
 lady, he could scarcely find a mode of expression dif- 
 ferent from that established by the professional song- 
 sters. We are therefore continually balked when, lured 
 by a note of apparently vibrant emotion, we try to 
 guess whether behind the impassioned verse there lurks 
 a genuine affection. 
 
 With the spread of French literary culture to neigh- 
 boring and even to distant lands, the fashion of con- 
 ventional love-poems was carried from southern France 
 to Italy, where, in the early thirteenth century, it came 
 to be followed by Italian writers in an Italian vernacu- 
 lar. A considerable amount of this verse has come down 
 to us in old songbooks. Here is the close, or envoy, of 
 an ode by Pier della Vigna, chancellor of the great 
 emperor, Frederick II: 
 
 My little song, go, carry this lament 
 
 To her who safely holds my heart in keep, 
 And tell her all my ills, if she consent, 
 
 And tell her how she maketh me to weep. 
 And let her send reply to him who loves, 
 
 How love shall well rewarded be ere long; 
 
 And if he ever did her any wrong, 
 He will accept what penance she approves. 
 
 It is difficult to believe that the imperial chancellor is 
 here doing more than try his hand at an intellectual 
 pastime recently come into vogue. We receive a similar
 
 12 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 impression from the following poetic effort of Percivalle 
 Doria, member of a princely house of Genoa: 
 
 Cupid hath captured me 
 And put me in the keeping 
 
 Of this insensate love, 
 Which holds me wrongfully 
 And turns my joy to weeping. 
 
 I curse the power above 
 That maketh me revere 
 Some one who will not hear 
 Nor look upon her slave, 
 Whom she alone can save. 
 I suffer so that, if I longer stay, 
 In fruitless yearning I shall pine away. 
 
 In the desert of our ignorance there is one oasis of 
 knowledge, or at least of probability. Whoever this 
 " some one " may have been, we may safely conjecture 
 that she was wedded. For according to the rules of 
 courtly verse the object of adoration must be a married 
 woman; and there should properly be a romantic ele- 
 ment of danger from the fury of a jealous husband, 
 whose suspicions may be aroused by spiteful tale- 
 bearers. That is the situation in these lines by Com- 
 pagnetto da Prato, in which the woman speaks : 
 
 Pray succor me, my lover true! 
 A hag, my neighbor, spoils my peace; 
 She has divined my love for you, 
 And now her slanders never cease.
 
 VIOLETTA 13 
 
 Again, the same author puts the following lines into the 
 mouth of a woman: 
 
 My husband's cruelty 
 
 Let love into my breast, 
 
 And now my heart's at rest. 
 When he tormented me, 
 
 Love came, my pain to cure 
 (I 'd no such thought before) . 
 
 A lover, good and sure, 
 Consoles me ever more 
 
 For all that I endure. 
 
 foolish, jealous man, 
 
 I care not how you strike: 
 
 Belabor as you like, 
 Destroy love if you can ! 
 
 I knew not what it meant 
 Till you did first accuse; 
 
 The love you did invent 
 
 1 could not well refuse. 
 
 Yours be the punishment! 
 
 One of the best among the early Italian poets, Giaco- 
 mino Pugliese, makes a woman excuse herself thus, to 
 her impatient lover, for not allowing him to see her, 
 ascribing her retirement to the watchfulness of her 
 cruel husband: 
 
 My lord, I am compelled 
 
 To crouch and hide my head, 
 So closely am I held 
 
 Bv one whom God strike dead !
 
 14 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 And I must shun the door, 
 As, to my shame, you know. 
 
 I grieve forever more, 
 And you no mercy show. 
 
 Now, the fashion of lyric verse originally grew up in 
 France, a feudal land, where the first development of 
 cultivated society took place, not in cities, but in the 
 isolated castles of the aristocracy; that is, in little, 
 select communities, hierarchically stratified, and ruled 
 by the lord and lady of the manor. It was a society 
 bent on enjoying its newly acquired and always pre- 
 carious wealth and ease, conscious of its growing dis- 
 tinction, and prone to cherish conventions that should 
 widen the gulf between its own elegance and the gross- 
 ness of the inhabitants of fields and towns. Peasants 
 were the butt of its ridicule, burghers became the object 
 of its destestation and ultimately the cause of its down- 
 fall. The influence of this uncompromisingly aristo- 
 cratic spirit, and of the social customs that went with 
 it, extended far beyond the region of its birth. 
 
 In so far as the ideals of this society were embodied 
 in verse, they were generally copied by the earliest 
 school of Italian poets, a group of eminent men of law 
 and men of arms, collected at the magnificent court of 
 the emperor. Some of the Provencal themes, to be sure, 
 they neglected, while others were carried by them fur- 
 ther than they had evolved in southern France. After 
 this first band of singers, whose music ceased with the
 
 VIOLETTA 15 
 
 death of Frederick in 1250, appeared for a little while 
 a school of miscellaneous Tuscan and Bolognese versi- 
 fiers, who followed, in the main, the same conventions, 
 and blindly imitated the Provencal troubadours of the 
 period of decline. To call them blind is not unjust, for 
 the conditions in which they lived were remote from 
 those under which their adopted system had come into 
 being. In Italy, especially in the north and the centre, 
 civilization was essentially urban: it was the towns- 
 people, the clerks, the guilds, the manufacturers and 
 tradesmen, rather than a rustic nobility, that culti- 
 vated the arts. They were a sober, thrifty, earnest, " 
 
 T~ 
 God-fearing set of men, to whom the esoteric elegance 
 
 - and immorality of Provence were foreign. 
 
 It is, therefore, not surprising that Italian poetry, 
 first in Bologna, then in Florence, should have refash- 
 ioned itself into better accord with its environment, 
 becoming simpler, clearer, prettier, fresher in form and 
 at the same time deeper in thought. To the subjection 
 of the lover and the feudal superiority oFTiTs beloved 
 was given, under the influence of Christian philosophy, 
 a. new significance, more in keeping with Italian practi- 
 cal and religious habits. 
 
 That new meaning seems very strange to us, an out- 
 growth of a time far removed. It was the age of sym- 
 bolism, of allegory, which pervaded not only Biblical 
 interpretation and church offices and architecture, but 
 also the whole conception of literature and science.
 
 16 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Just as, in scholastic exegesis, every important incident 
 in the Old Testament, though literally true, fore- 
 shadows some event in the New, so almost anything 
 in the world of fact or the world of fiction might be 
 understood as a mystic figure of something else. The 
 worshipped lady, then, who was no longer of neces- 
 sity a married woman and a social superior, became, 
 without abdicating her reality, a symbol of something 
 unquestionably venerable: to wit, the heavenly intelli- 
 gence, which is another name for the angels, readers of 
 God's mind and executors of his design. Both woman 
 and angel she now was, an object of love and of rev- 
 erence. The love was a respectful one, and might be 
 innocent even in thought; the reverence was paid to 
 something higher than earthly rank. With this novel 
 conception of the lady came an ethical definition of 
 nobility, which was described as the result, not of an 
 accident of birth, but of a special grace of God, mani- 
 festing itself in lofty moral character. Furthermore, 
 love, according to the new doctrine, is an attribute of 
 the noble heart alone: no vulgar nature can feel or 
 understand it. In the gentle heart, however, love exists 
 potentially from birth, lying dormant until stirred to 
 activity by the sight of a worthy object; and, after 
 its awakening, it becomes the absolute but beneficent 
 tyrant of life. Thus the lover, while still, like his Gallic 
 prototype, a subject, is henceforth subject only to a 
 divine power.
 
 VIOLETTA 17 
 
 These ideas were put forth by a learned and artistic 
 poet of Bologna, Guido Guinizelli, whom Dante called 
 " my master, and master of all those, my betters, who 
 ever wrote sweet rimes of love." We find them for the 
 first time explicitly phrased in Guide's famous poem, 
 Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore, "Love repairs always 
 to the noble heart," a work to which Dante more than 
 once refers. Here it is, as translated by Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti, in his volume entitled Dante and his Circle: 
 
 Within the gentle heart Love shelters him, 
 
 As birds within the green shade of the grove. 
 Before the gentle heart, in Nature's scheme, 
 Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love. 
 
 For with the sun, at once, 
 So sprang the light immediately; nor was 
 
 Its birth before the sun's. 
 And Love hath his effect in gentleness 
 
 Of very self; even as 
 Within the middle fire the heat's excess. 
 
 The fire of Love comes to the gentle heart 
 
 Like as its virtue to a precious stone; 
 
 To which no star its influence can impart 
 
 Till it is made a pure thing by the sun: 
 
 For when the sun hath smit 
 From out its essence that which there was vile, 
 
 The star endoweth it. 
 And so the heart created by God's breath 
 
 Pure, true, and free from guile, 
 A woman, like a star, enamoureth.
 
 18 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 In gentle heart Love for like reason is 
 
 For which the lamp's high flame is fanned and bowed : 
 Clear, piercing bright, it shines for its own bliss; 
 Nor would not burn there else, it is so proud. 
 
 For evil natures meet 
 With Love as it were water met with fire, 
 
 As cold abhorring heat. 
 Through gentle heart Love doth a track divine, 
 
 Like knowing like; the same 
 As diamond runs through iron in a mine. 
 
 The sun strikes full upon the mud all day: 
 
 It remains vile, nor is the sun's worth less. 
 " By race I am gentle," the proud man doth say: 
 He is the mud, the sun is gentleness. 
 
 Let no man predicate 
 That aught the name of gentleness should have, 
 
 Even in a king's estate, 
 Except the heart there be a gentle man's. 
 
 The star-beam lights the wave, 
 Heaven holds the star and the star's radiance. 
 
 God, in the understanding of high Heaven, 
 
 Burns more than in our sight the living sun : 
 There to behold His Face unveiled is given; 
 
 And Heaven, whose will is homage paid to One, 
 
 Fulfils the things which live 
 In God, from the beginning excellent. 
 
 So should my lady give 
 That truth which in her eyes is glorified, 
 
 On which her heart is bent, 
 To me whose service waiteth at her side.
 
 VIOLETTA 19 
 
 My lady, God shall ask, " What darest thou ? " 
 
 (When my soul stands with all her acts review'd) 
 " Thou passedst Heaven, into My sight, as now, 
 To make Me of vain love similitude. 
 
 To Me doth praise belong, 
 And to the Queen of all the realm of grace 
 
 Who slayeth fraud and wrong." 
 Then may I plead : " As though from Thee he came, 
 
 Love wore an angel's face : 
 Lord, if I loved her, count it not my shame." 
 
 Guinizelli's view of nobility was developed by Dante 
 in scholastic style in the third ode of his Banquet. His 
 idea of love we find, rephrased and slightly altered, in 
 a sonnet of Dante's New Life: 
 
 The gentle heart and love are all the same, 
 
 As in his verse the knowing Bard hath writ; 
 And neither one can independence claim, 
 
 E'en as the witting soul depends on wit. 
 Nature creates, when lovingly aflame, 
 
 Love, to command, the heart, to harbor it; 
 Wherein it slumbering rests, alive but tame, 
 
 While passing seasons, few or many, flit. 
 Now comes a lady beauteous and pure, 
 
 Who so delights the eyes that in the heart 
 
 Desire arises for her beauty then, 
 And oft within the breast doth so endure 
 
 That love at last awakens with a start. 
 No less are ladies won by worthy men.
 
 20 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 The love theories of Guinizelli were put into literary 
 practice, in the next generation, by a small group of 
 poets, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, Gianni 
 Alfani, Dino Frescobaldi, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia, 
 - who shaped the novel manner known as the dolce 
 stil nuovo, or " sweet new style," a name bestowed upon 
 it by Dante himself, in a passage of his Purgatory. 
 However, by no means all the verse even of these few 
 poets follows the new pattern, and after their death 
 the style soon went out of vogue; but while it lasted, 
 it gave rise to some of the finest love poetry ever com- 
 posed poetry which attracts us still, by its soft 
 beauty, by its spiritual tone, and by the air of mystery 
 that pervades it. Here is a sonnet, probably by Dante, 
 which illustrates its lighter, daintier vein: 
 
 This last All Saints' I saw a pretty sight, 
 
 A passing troop of ladies gentle-bred; 
 And, leading Love beside her on the right, 
 
 One special lady seemed to walk ahead. 
 Aglow, as 't were a fire-envelopt sprite, 
 
 A radiance from beneath her eyelids sped. 
 Seeking her face, as boldly as I might, 
 
 I saw therein an angel pictured. 
 A greeting she to all the worthy gave, 
 
 The kind and modest lady, with her eyes, 
 And made the hearts of all she greeted, brave. 
 
 This queen was surely born beyond the skies, 
 And came to earth our sinful souls to save. 
 
 Then blest the maid to follow her who tries!
 
 VIOLETTA 21 
 
 The following sonnet from the New Life, though very 
 similar, is in a somewhat more solemn mood: 
 
 My Lady carries Love within her eyes, 
 
 And thus ennobles all she looks upon. 
 
 All turn to watch her, while she passes on; 
 The one she greets, with heart a-quiver, sighs 
 And, bending down his visage, nearly dies, 
 
 So full of shame for all the wrong he 's done. 
 
 As she advances, pride and wrath are gone. 
 (How, ladies, can I honor her ? Advise !) 
 All sweetness, every lowly thought and true 
 
 Invade the heart of him who hears her speak, 
 And he who once beholds her, fareth well. 
 Her beauty, when she faintly smiles, to tell, 
 
 Both speech and memory are far too weak, 
 'Tis such a noble miracle, and new. 
 
 In the third strophe of the ode Donne ch'avete intelletto 
 d'amore, " Ladies who have understanding of love," we 
 find the same spirit and the same ideas: 
 
 My lady 's longed for in the heavens above. 
 Now let me tell you of her wondrous might. 
 Whatever lady would be " gentle " hight 
 
 Should walk with her; for when she goes her way, 
 A chill is cast on vulgar hearts by Love, 
 
 And all their thoughts are cold and dead with fright. 
 Whoe'er should stand his ground to see the sight 
 Would be ennobled or would turn to clay. 
 When she discerns a worthy man who may
 
 22 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Rightly behold her, he must own her power; 
 
 For blessedness she gives, a mystic dower, 
 
 So humbling him, no spite can with him stay. 
 God granteth her a grace that's greater still : 
 Who speaks to her, escapes eternal ill. 
 
 In like style Cavalcanti sang in Gli occhi di quella: 
 
 She shows herself 
 
 So gentle, I the thought can never brook 
 That any mortal man should dare to look 
 
 And not be set a-quiver, should he try. 
 
 If I should gaze upon her, I should die. 
 
 Before him, Guinizelli, father of the sweet new style, 
 composed his Voglio del ver la mia donna laudare: 
 
 She walks her way so gentle and so sweet, 
 She levels pride in him she doth address, 
 
 And makes him Christian, were he not before. 
 No vulgar man may venture her to greet. 
 She hath, I swear, a greater blessedness: 
 Who looks at her, can think no evil more. 
 
 We have strayed a long way from Violet and her 
 pretty ballad. In that, we saw no trace of superwoman 
 nor of mysticism, and the same thing is true of much 
 of Dante's verse; but it is not always easy to tell where 
 allegory begins. Between the extremes of manifest sim- 
 plicity and manifest symbolism there lies a considerable 
 region of more or less uncertain character. Luckily we 
 have one clue. The New Life contains a curious passage
 
 VIOLETTA 23 
 
 which plainly indicates a conscious change of style, a 
 conversion to the mode of Guinizelli at least, in all 
 poetry that shall be concerned with Beatrice. " After I 
 had written these three sonnets addressed to this lady, 
 resolving (inasmuch as they had narrated nearly all my 
 condition) to hold my peace, since it seemed to me I had 
 disclosed enough of myself, I was constrained, while re- 
 fraining henceforth from directing my speech to her, to 
 find a new theme more worthy than my former one. And 
 inasmuch as the occasion of my new theme is pleasant 
 to hear, I shall tell it as briefly as I can. Forasmuch as 
 many people had from my looks guessed my heart's 
 secret, certain ladies, who had gathered together for the 
 pleasure of one another's company, were well acquainted 
 with my heart, every one of them having been present 
 at many of my discomfitures. And as I passed near 
 them, guided, as it were, by fortune, I was called by 
 one of these gentle ladies; and she who had called me 
 was possessed of very charming speech. Therefore, 
 when I had come before them, and had plainly seen 
 that my most gentle lady was not among them, taking 
 heart, I greeted them and asked what was their pleasure. 
 The ladies were many, and among them were some who 
 were laughing together. Others there were who were 
 watching for me to speak. Others there were conversing 
 together, one of whom, turning her eyes toward me and 
 calling me by name, spake these words : ' To what pur- 
 pose lovest thou this lady of thine, since thou canst not
 
 24 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 endure her presence ? Tell us, for the purpose of such 
 a love must needs be strange indeed.' And when she 
 had spoken these words to me, not only she but all the 
 others began visibly to await my reply. Then I spake 
 to them these words: ' My ladies, the purpose of my 
 love was once the greeting of this lady perhaps the 
 person whom you mean; and in that dwelt the happi- 
 ness which was the goal of all my desires. But since it 
 hath been her pleasure to deny it to me, my lord Love, 
 in his mercy, hath placed all my happiness in something 
 that cannot fail me.' Thereupon these ladies began to 
 converse together; and, as sometimes we see water 
 falling mixed with pretty snow, so it seemed to me I 
 heard their words issue forth mixed with sighs. And 
 when they had conversed a little together, that same 
 lady who had first spoken to me said these words : * We 
 beg thee to tell us in what this happiness of thine con- 
 sists.' And I, replying, spake thus: ' In those words 
 which praise my lady.' And she answered: 'If thy 
 speech were true, thou wouldst have wrought with a 
 different design those words which thou hast written, 
 proclaiming thy condition.' Whereat I, considering 
 these words, departed from the ladies as one ashamed; 
 and I kept saying to myself: ' Since there is so much 
 happiness in those words which praise my lady, why 
 have I spoken aught else ? ' And therefore I determined 
 always to take as subject of my speech henceforth that 
 which should be in praise of that most gentle lady. And,
 
 VIOLETTA 25 
 
 as I reflected much upon it, I seemed to have undertaken 
 a theme too exalted for me, so that I dared not begin; 
 and thus I remained some days, eager to write and afraid 
 to begin." 
 
 When, after arduous meditation, he did begin, he 
 composed his first ode in the new style, Donne ch'avete 
 intelletto d'amore, which he appears ever afterward to 
 have regarded as a landmark in his literary career. It 
 evidently testifies to the transition from his first to his 
 second manner. One of its stanzas we have just seen. 
 With Dante's subsequent work we need not further 
 occupy ourselves as yet, our present concern being his 
 poetic and amorous fancy before this change. 
 
 In the earlier period, his poems, even those addressed 
 to Beatrice, generally give, by comparison, the impres- 
 sion of old-fashioned love-songs, in kind not unlike 
 those made for other ladies by other poets. When we 
 look at the lyrics outside the New Life, that is, those 
 poems whose subject and address are not specified by 
 the author, we are often unable to say whether they 
 are meant for Beatrice or for some lady unknown to us; 
 indeed, the attribution of authorship in the manuscripts 
 is frequently our only indication that Dante wrote 
 them at all. We have no means of identifying the fair 
 invalid who figures in the ode Morte, poich'io non truovo 
 a cui mi doglia, " O Death, since I find no one to listen 
 to my plaint; " nor the distant love in La dispietata 
 mente, che pur mira:
 
 26 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 The memory, which constantly doth look, 
 All pitiless, at seasons past away, 
 
 Attacketh here my desolated heart; 
 And tender longing for the land forsook, 
 
 Which draws me sweetly whence I had to stray, 
 Attacks it there, and Love is taking part. 
 
 The very Violet for whose sake we began our fruitless 
 quest, may, for aught we positively know, have been 
 Beatrice herself. 
 
 On the other hand, critics have not failed to suggest 
 that some of the lyrics devoted in the New Life to 
 Beatrice were perhaps originally intended for somebody 
 else. Such a poem as the following, indeed, might have 
 been written under the inspiration of almost any one 
 who could suggest so much as a thought of love: 
 
 Of Love within me speaketh every thought; 
 
 And yet they show so much variety 
 That one doth make me crave his tyranny, 
 
 Another reckons all his power as naught, 
 Another, hopeful, sweetness may have brought, 
 Another makes me weep full frequently. 
 Only agreed in asking sympathy, 
 They quake with fear, by which the heart is caught. 
 And therefore, doubting which my theme shall be, 
 I fain would write, but know not what to say, 
 And thus in Love's bewildering maze am lost. 
 Would I agreement have, at any cost, 
 Mine enemy I needs must call and pray: 
 " My lady Pity, come and comfort me! "
 
 VIOLETTA 27 
 
 Another discussion of love, in the same early part of 
 the New Life, is a bit less impersonal and far more 
 tragically conceived: 
 
 Come flocking fast into my mind alway 
 
 The sadnesses that Love imparts to me, 
 And pity comes so sharp, it makes me say 
 
 And say again: " Alas! can such things be! " 
 For Love attacks me with so sudden fray 
 
 That nearly all my life he makes to flee; 
 One single living spirit still doth stay, 
 
 And it abides because it speaks of thee. 
 Then I arouse me, for I will not die, 
 
 And pallid, void of vigor, forth I start 
 
 To look on thee, and think to heal my pain. 
 But if I lift mine eyes, my hope to spy, 
 
 An earthquake rumbles in my frightened heart, 
 And makes my soul depart from every vein. 
 
 With these, perhaps, belongs the sonnet, not included 
 in the New Life, entitled Deh, ragioniamo un poco, 
 Amore. Again, the first sonnet of the little book, the 
 famous allegorical dream of Love, contains nothing to 
 attach it to one woman rather than another. With 
 regard to the original purpose of such poems as these, 
 we must take the author's word, which we really have 
 no sufficient reason to doubt. 
 
 A few, however, of the early poems to Beatrice are 
 slightly more concrete, evidently containing reference 
 to some specific incident, an account of which is in each
 
 28 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 case furnished by the prose narrative, and this explana- 
 tion is satisfactory enough, provided we once admit the 
 
 / vaguely biographical character of the whole work. As 
 we shall presently see, Dante, by his insistent atten- 
 tions to another lady, so incurred the displeasure of 
 Beatrice that she refused thereafter to recognize him 
 when they met. Hence the following ballad, which 
 
 I probably first reached the ears of the offended one at 
 a dance, where it was sung by feminine companions. 
 Unlike our first ballad, which had only one stanza 
 for a single voice, this one has four strophes for a solo 
 singer. Here is the chorus, which precedes the first 
 stanza and follows each : 
 
 Ballad, I bid thee summon Love for me, 
 And then with him before my Lady fare, 
 That Love, my Lord, may freely argue there 
 
 The very thing which thou shalt sing: my plea. 
 
 In each strophe the last line rimes with the first and 
 fourth lines of the chorus. The poet addresses himself, 
 not to his lady, but to his poem, which he sends to 
 Beatrice accompanied by Love; and Love is to defend 
 him with the words of the ballad. 
 
 So courteous, Ballad, doth thy flight appear 
 
 That unaccompanied 
 
 Full boldly shouldst thou go on any quest; 
 But if thou fain wouldst be devoid of fear, 
 
 Find out where Love is hid,
 
 VIOLETTA 29 
 
 For journeying with him perhaps is best; 
 
 Since she to whom thy song's addrest, 
 If, as I think, she holds me in despite 
 And thou shouldst not be sheltered by his might, 
 Right easily would turn her back to thee. 
 
 Safe at the side of Love, with music sweet 
 
 Begin such words as these 
 (But first beseech her not to wish me ill) : 
 " My Lady, he who sends me, you to greet, 
 
 Entreats you, when you please, 
 If he have any case, to hear it still. 
 For here is Love, who maketh him at will 
 Turn red and white before your loveliness. 
 Now, why Love bade him gaze on others, guess! 
 His heart was never changed by Love's decree." 
 
 " My Lady," say to her, " his faithful heart 
 
 Hath been so sure and stout, 
 His every thought doth service unto you. 
 Yours from the first, he never wisht to part." 
 
 And, if she harbor doubt, 
 Tell her to question Love whether 't is true. 
 And, having spoke this message, humbly sue, 
 If she should find it irksome to forgive, 
 That she command me now to cease to live: 
 A trusty slave's obedience she shall see. 
 
 Before the moment come, thy leave to take, 
 
 Tell pity's gatekeeper, 
 Who knoweth how my righteous cause to speed:
 
 SO THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 " I pray thee, for my gentle music's sake 
 
 Do thou stay here with her; 
 For this, thy servant, choose thy words and plead. 
 And if to thine entreaty she give heed, 
 A kindly glance be signal of his peace." 
 Set forth, sweet Ballad, fix thine own release 
 At such a time that thou shalt honored be. 
 
 Dante's bad reputation and the disfavor of Beatrice 
 had a consequence even more disastrous than the denial 
 of her salutation. According to the Florentine ordi- 
 nances, a common citizen invited to a marriage was 
 allowed to take with him one companion. This privilege 
 was used, by a well-meaning friend, to introduce Dante 
 at a wedding banquet where many beautiful ladies were 
 gathered to accompany the bride. ' Wherefore I," 
 says the poet, " thinking to do the pleasure of this 
 friend, resolved to stay and wait on the ladies with him. 
 And when I had come to this decision, I seemed to feel 
 a wondrous quiver begin in my breast, on the left side, 
 and quickly spread through all parts of my body. Then, 
 I declare, I leaned my person, dissembling, against a 
 painting which ran around this apartment; and, fearing 
 that some one had observed my tremor, I raised my 
 eyes, and, gazing at the ladies, I saw among them the 
 most gentle Beatrice." After a description of the strange 
 effects of this sudden encounter, he continues: " I de- 
 clare that many of these ladies, perceiving my trans- 
 figuration, began to marvel; and, chatting, they mocked
 
 VIOLETTA 31 
 
 at me with this most gentle one. Whereat my honestly 
 deceived friend took me by the hand, and, leading me 
 forth from the sight of these ladies, asked me what ailed 
 me. Then, having composed myself a little . . . , I 
 spake to this my friend these words : ' I had set foot 
 on that part of life beyond which no one can go with 
 expectation of return.' And, parting from him, I re- 
 turned to my chamber of tears, in which, weeping and 
 ashamed, I said to myself: ' If this lady knew my state, 
 I do not think she would thus mock at my person; rather 
 do I believe that she would greatly pity it.' And, thus 
 weeping, I resolved to write words in which, addressing 
 her, I should make known the cause of my transfigura- 
 tion, declaring that I am quite sure it is not known, and 
 that, were it known, I believe it would move people to 
 pity; and I resolved to write them, hoping they might 
 by chance come to her hearing. And then I wrote this 
 sonnet." Note that Dante says " come to her hearing." 
 The word sonnet primarily meant a " little tune; " and 
 the poem bearing that name was still, it would seem, 
 sometimes sung. The sonnet in question begins thus : 
 
 With other ladies mocking at my face, 
 
 You care not, Lady, whence it comes that I 
 With such a strange appearance come anigh 
 
 Whene'er I gaze upon your lovely grace. 
 
 Were these ladies, I wonder, the same as those who, 
 having been present at many of Dante's discomfitures, 
 subsequently criticized his love-making, showing him
 
 32 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 that his theoretical purpose was not the purpose mani- 
 fest in his poems ? 
 
 This mockery, which rankled in the poet's heart, 
 forms the theme of another poem. " After my strange 
 transfiguration," he says, " there came to me a potent 
 thought, which scarcely left me, but rebuked me again 
 and again, speaking to me as follows: ' Inasmuch as 
 thou dost cut such a sorry figure when thou art near 
 this lady, why dost thou still try to see her ? Lo, 
 shouldst thou be questioned by her, what wouldst thou 
 have to reply, supposing all thy faculties were so free 
 that thou couldst make answer to her ? ' And to this 
 thought responded another, a meek one, saying: 'If 
 I did not lose my faculties, and were so free that I could 
 make answer to her, I should say that no sooner do I 
 picture to myself her marvelous beauty than there 
 comes upon me a desire to see her, which is of such power 
 that it kills and destroys in my memory whatsoever 
 might arise against it; and therefore my past sufferings 
 do not prevent me from seeking to see her.' ' Here is 
 the sonnet that follows : 
 
 All things that memory cites to hinder me, 
 Whene'er I seek you, beauteous jewel, die. 
 
 As I approach you, Love is calling: " Flee, 
 If death be irksome! Save thyself, O try! " 
 
 My heart hath lent my face his livery 
 
 My swooning heart, which leans on aught that 's nigh. 
 
 When they my reeling, drunken tremor see,
 
 VIOLETTA 33 
 
 The stones " O let him perish! " seem to cry. 
 Full sinful he who sees me deathly ill 
 
 And gives no comfort to my soul affright, 
 
 With just a show of sympathetic care, 
 For sake of pity which your mockeries kill ! 
 For pity is engendered by the sight 
 
 Of ghastly eyes, a death-imploring pair! 
 
 To this same period we may tentatively assign two 
 unincluded sonnets, lo son si vago delta bella luce and 
 dolci rime che parlando andate, the first a poem of 
 reproach, the second one of self-defence. 
 
 The disapproval of Beatrice was due, in the first 
 place, to Dante's excessive attention to another lady. 
 In fact, we find, in Chapters V to X of the New Life, 
 three feminine figures other than " the most gentle 
 one." The second of the three, a friend of Beatrice, is 
 mourned as dead by the poet, who devotes to her two 
 pretty little elegies in sonnet form; to her we shall re- 
 turn later, when considering Matilda. Let us see what 
 Dante has to say of the other two. 
 
 " One day it came to pass that this most gentle one 
 [Beatrice] was sitting in a place where were heard words 
 of the Queen of glory, and I was in a place whence I 
 could see my blessedness. And midway between her 
 and me, in a straight line, sat a gentle lady of right 
 pleasing appearance, who looked at me many times, 
 wondering at my gaze, which seemed to end on her; 
 wherefore many people took notice of her looking. And
 
 34 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 so much heed was given to it that, as I went away from 
 the spot, I heard behind me: ' See how such and such 
 a lady wastes the flesh of this man ? And, as they 
 named her, I understood that they were speaking of 
 her who had been between in the straight line which 
 started from the most gentle Beatrice and ended in my 
 eyes. Then was I greatly heartened, being assured 
 that on that day my secret had not been betrayed by 
 my looks. And forthwith I determined to make of this 
 gentle lady a screen of the truth; and of this I gave, 
 in a little while, such evidence that most people who 
 spake of me thought they knew my secret. With this 
 lady did I conceal myself some months and years; and, 
 to make others believe, I composed for her certain little 
 things in rime, which it is not my intention to write 
 down here." In this passage we find, explicitly avowed, 
 an apparent attachment, of more than one year's dura- 
 tion, which was probably more real than Dante would 
 have us believe, and which was the occasion of " certain 
 little things in rime," surely known to the first readers 
 of the New Life. Possibly the ballad of Violet was one 
 of these; perhaps the sonnet, Non mi poriano mai far 
 amenda, or Nelle man vostre, gentil donna mia. However 
 that may be, Dante proceeds next to tell us of the lost 
 poem which names " the sixty most beautiful ladies of 
 the city." Among these ladies, he declares, Beatrice is 
 ninth; and we may surmise that the screen lady was 
 first.
 
 VIOLETTA 35 
 
 " The lady," he continues, " with whom I had so 
 long hidden my wish, was obliged to depart from the 
 aforesaid city and go to a very distant place. Whereat 
 I, dismayed, as it were, over the fair protection that 
 had failed me, was far more downcast than I myself 
 should have believed beforehand. And reflecting that, 
 if I did not speak somewhat sorrowfully of her depar- 
 ture, people would the more quickly discover my con- 
 cealment, I determined to make some kind of lament 
 over it in a sonnet, which I shall write down, inasmuch 
 as my lady [Beatrice] was the immediate cause of certain 
 words in the sonnet, as is manifest to one who under- 
 stands. Then I wrote this sonnet." The poem is of a 
 type, long since gone out of use, called sonetto rinterzato, 
 because it is lengthened by the insertion of six short 
 lines. The middle part of it, telling of his blissfully 
 
 amorous state, was composed, he presently avers, " with 
 
 i 
 
 a different meaning from that which the two ends of 
 the sonnet indicate: " that is, he wishes us to believe 
 that he really had Beatrice in mind while writing these 
 verses ostensibly declaring his love for another. The 
 sonnet runs as follows: 
 
 O ye who walk along the lovers' way, 
 Ah look, give heed, and stay! 
 
 Is any grief as great as mine, or sad ? 
 Just bear to hear my tale, 't is all I pray; 
 Then judge, yourselves, and say 
 
 My fate 's the sole abode of all that 's bad.
 
 36 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 'T was not my despicable merit, nay, 
 'T was Love's own gentle ray 
 
 That made my life so bright and sweet and glad, 
 I often heard men whisper: " Look," said they, 
 " What worthiness to-day 
 
 Gives him the lightest heart he ever had ? " 
 But now my cheerfulness is sunken low, 
 
 Which Love's abundance once bestowed on me; 
 
 I dwell in poverty 
 So dire, my words are all afraid to flow. 
 
 I fain would imitate some men I see, 
 W T ho, moved by shame, dissimulate their woe: 
 With joyous face I go, 
 
 While in my heart I melt with misery. 
 
 The next episode is the decease of the youthful friend 
 of Beatrice. Close upon it ensues a new love. 
 
 Riding along one day, with burdened breast, 
 Upon a road that cost me many a frown, 
 I met with Love, who journeyed toward the town, 
 
 In habit like a pilgrim lightly drest. 
 
 His look was that of some one sore distrest; 
 He seemed a monarch who had lost his crown, 
 As sighing mournfully he came adown, 
 
 With face, to shun remark, netherward prest. 
 
 Beholding me, he called to me by name. 
 " I come," he said, " afar from over there, 
 Where dwelt thy heart, as once I bade it do. 
 Now here I bring it, new delight to woo." 
 Then I absorbed of him so great a share, 
 
 He disappeared. God knows what he became!
 
 VIOLETTA 37 
 
 Now comes the climax. " After my return I began 
 to hunt for this lady whom my Lord had named to me 
 on the road of sighs. To make a long story short, I 
 declare that within a little while I had made her my 
 screen to such a degree that exceeding many people 
 talked thereof beyond the bounds of courtesy. And for 
 this reason (that is, because of the exaggerated report 
 which seemed to accuse me of vice) that most gentle 
 one, destroyer of all vices and queen of virtues, passing 
 through a certain place, denied me her very sweet salu- 
 tation, in which consisted all my happiness." 
 
 To this second protective lady Dante surely must 
 have sent poems. For the first screen lady he himself 
 tells us he wrote " certain little things in rime," one of 
 which is included in the New Life. To the youthful 
 friend of Beatrice, for whom he composed two elegies 
 after her death, he may very well have addressed a song 
 or two while she was alive. Here, then, is a little group 
 at least one degree nearer than the inaccessible " sixty : " 
 here, nameless and shadowy, to be sure, are three young 
 persons who may with some plausibility claim stray 
 bits of lyric homage from Dante's pen. 
 
 Among such creations, ascribed to Dante and pre- 
 sumably authentic, we find one more flower-ballad, 
 Per una ghirlandetta, a song with a chorus and three 
 strophes, with which we may end our search, as we 
 began it with the ballad of Violet. It does not mean 
 much, but it fascinates with its strange daintiness and,
 
 38 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 above all, with its mystery. If we really knew all about 
 it, I dare say half its charm would be gone. 
 
 Chorus 
 
 The memory of a garland 
 Shall always make me sigh 
 Whene'er I see a flower. 
 
 I 
 
 One day I saw thee, Lady, wearing 
 A tiny garland, fresh from Maying; 
 And over it a fay was faring, 
 A modest little love-sprite, swaying, 
 
 With cunning music saying: 
 
 " Whoso shall me espy 
 
 Shall praise my Master's power." 
 
 The memory of a garland 
 
 Shall always make me sigh 
 
 Whene'er I see a flower. 
 
 II 
 
 If I, O floweret sweet and fairest, 
 Come close enough to see thee twining, 
 " My Lady," I shall say, " thou bearest 
 My sighs upon thy head reclining." 
 
 But then, to prick my pining, 
 
 My Lady shall come nigh 
 
 New-crowned from Cupid's bower. 
 
 The memory of a garland 
 
 Shall always make me sigh 
 
 Whene'er I see a flower.
 
 VIOLETTA 39 
 
 III 
 
 My curious little words to fashion 
 A ballad out of flowers have striven, 
 Stealing, to decorate their passion, 
 A garment once to others given. 
 
 I beg thee, then, by Heaven : 
 What man the song shall try, 
 Give him thy richest dower. 
 The memory of a garland 
 Shall always make me sigh 
 Whene'er I see a flower.
 
 II. MATELDA 
 
 WE are invited to enter, in company with Dante, 
 Virgil, and Statius, into the Earthly Paradise, 
 which, as many know, is situated at the top of an enor- 
 mous mountain the mountain of Purgatory on a 
 lonely island in the middle of the great ocean, at that 
 point of the earth's surface which is directly opposite 
 Jerusalem. Christ's atonement was therefore at the 
 antipodes of Adam's sin. It may surprise some to hear 
 that the medieval earth was round; for people nowa- 
 days generally imagine that the men of old conceived of 
 their habitation as flat. That is an error: the scholar- 
 ship of the Middle Ages, following the lead of not a few 
 Greek and Latin authorities, regarded the earth as a 
 perfect sphere, solid and motionless at the centre of a 
 spherical revolving universe. Most of our globe being 
 covered by water, the land (it was believed) was col- 
 lected together in a three-lobed continent on one quar- 
 ter of the surface, where it had been pulled up above the 
 aqueous level, at the time of creation, by the united 
 attraction of many stars. Just in the middle of this 
 continent stands Jerusalem ; and midway between Jeru- 
 salem and the western extremity is Rome, centre of the 
 Occident, which stretches from the Holy Land to the 
 Strait of Gibraltar. At the eastern end, on the furthest 
 
 40
 
 MATELDA 41 
 
 shore of the Orient, the Ganges empties into the sea. 
 Somewhere inside our mundane sphere is the huge 
 cavern of Hell; there, too, was Purgatory, until Dante 
 drew it forth and gave it a more appropriate location on 
 the upper slopes of a sky-scraping peak, fit symbol of the 
 state of the still earthly but heavenward striving soul. 
 Dante it was, moreover, who fixed the position of the 
 Earthly Paradise on the summit of this mountain; but 
 this geographical innovation did not involve a complete 
 break with tradition, as did his displacement of Purga- 
 tory. The locality of the Garden of Eden had always 
 been indefinite: it was vaguely in the East, sometimes 
 on a remote island, sometimes on a well-nigh inaccessible 
 mountain-top. Pious travelers had, however, occasion- 
 ally succeeded in reaching it. St. Brendan, the hardy 
 navigator, with his monastic crew, had discovered the 
 Isle of the Blest in the Atlantic. Others had espied the 
 sea-girt Eden at the opposite side of the earth, on the 
 island of Ceylon. Some had found the delectable Gar- 
 den on a distant highland of Asia three monks, for 
 instance, who, following up a stream on which they had 
 seen floating a branch from a miraculous tree, scaled an 
 eminence a hundred miles high, and were admitted by 
 an angel with a flaming sword to the Earthly Paradise, 
 where, lulled by the music of the spheres and the song of 
 marvelous birds, rapt in contemplation of the Fountain 
 of Youth, the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Immor- 
 tality, the Four Springs, a host of wondrous trees and
 
 42 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 flowers, a lake full of singing fishes, they spent seven 
 hundred years which seemed to them less than seven 
 days. The beautiful birds, flowers, trees, and waters are 
 constant features of the Garden of Delight, to which 
 they belong by Biblical authority. Equally Scriptural 
 is the flaming sword, which, nevertheless, is sometimes 
 replaced by a wall of fire. On the other hand, the Bible 
 affords no explicit warrant for the presence of two in- 
 habitants whom medieval legend habitually assigned to 
 Eden: namely, the patriarchs Enoch and Elijah. These 
 godly men, who had been caught up in the flesh, were 
 supposed to be dwelling in the Earthly Paradise, whence, 
 on the Judgment Day, they shall issue forth to combat 
 the Antichrist. Their venerable figures regularly meet 
 the eyes of visitors to the mysterious garden. 
 
 To the explorers of Dante's Earthly Paradise, how- 
 ever, they do not appear. Here, again, the poet is an 
 innovator. His Eden of perpetual springtime is a sym- 
 bol of youthful innocence, the primal state of humanity, 
 a state which the individual man can and should regain 
 by penance. Hence the position of the garden at the 
 summit of the mountain of Purgatory, which represents 
 penitential discipline. Every detail in Dante's Eden 
 being intended to enhance the impression of pure youth, 
 it is evident that the elderly Enoch and Elijah, sinless 
 though they be, would there be out of place; and we 
 hear nothing about them. In their stead we have a new 
 figure, a lovely and loving girl, Matilda, whose closest
 
 MATELDA 43 
 
 analogue in previous legend is a young man who greets 
 the voyagers in St. Brendan's narrative. This maiden, 
 the genius of the spot, is the embodiment of youthful- 
 ness and innocent love and mirth; she typifies the joy 
 of living when life is without sin. 
 
 Evidently she is both associated with Beatrice and in 
 a way contrasted with her. As, in Christian exegetical 
 tradition, Leah and Rachel, the daughters of Laban the 
 Syrian, are interpreted respectively as the active and 
 the contemplative life, so Matilda stands for the prin- 
 ciple of blameless existence here below, while Beatrice 
 symbolizes divine guidance to the life above. The anal- 
 ogy is clearly enough indicated by the poet himself at 
 the point where, just before entering Eden, he has an 
 allegorical dream of a very Matilda-like Leah, who com- 
 pares her own activity with the introspective repose of 
 her sister. " Two goals," says Dante in his treatise on 
 Monarchy, " hath our mysterious Providence set for 
 man's pursuit: namely, the happiness of this life, which 
 consists in the exercise of human virtue, and is repre- 
 sented by the Earthly Paradise; and the happiness of 
 life eternal, which consists in the enjoyment of the 
 divine aspect, whereto human virtue cannot attain with- 
 out the help of divine light, and which is meant by the 
 Heavenly Paradise. Now, to these happinesses, as to 
 different ends, man must come by different means. For 
 we come to the first by philosophical teachings, when we 
 follow them, acting in accordance with the moral and
 
 44 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 intellectual virtues. But to the second we come by 
 spiritual teachings, which transcend human reason, 
 when we follow them, acting in accordance with the 
 theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Love." Regarded 
 from the standpoint of this passage, however, the alle- 
 gorical functions of Matilda and Beatrice are not pre- 
 cisely parallel; for the former corresponds to " the 
 happiness of this life," while the latter corresponds, not 
 to " the happiness of life eternal, which consists in the 
 enjoyment of the divine aspect," but to the " spiritual 
 teachings " that lead us to it. Beatrice is certainly the 
 symbol of revelation, of heavenly guidance; like the 
 angels, she is an intermediary between God and man. 
 The " happiness of life eternal," to which she finally 
 conducts Dante, is figured by St. Bernard, the type of 
 intuition, or " enjoyment of the divine aspect." Inas- 
 much as this joy in the immediate presence of the Lord 
 is the culmination of the poet's spiritual experience, St. 
 Bernard does not appear until the close of the narrative; 
 and that, no doubt, is why Rachel, his exact counter- 
 part, is only mentioned, not seen, in Dante's prophetic 
 dream. 
 
 It might be imagined that, as Beatrice stands for the 
 " spiritual teachings " which lead to happiness eternal, 
 so Matilda represents the " philosophical teachings " 
 which guide us to earthly happiness. In that case she 
 would be identical with the lady who, in the Banquet 
 and in a number of the unattached lyrics, symbolizes
 
 MATELDA 45 
 
 philosophy the same lady who weaned Dante's affec- 
 tion away from the departed Beatrice, in the latter 
 chapters of the New Life. But, aside from the name 
 Matilda (which in any case is an obstacle), there are 
 several objections to such an identification. In the first 
 place, it is not this maiden, but Virgil, type of reason, 
 who conducts Dante to the Earthly Paradise; not until 
 after he had entered the abode of " the happiness of this 
 life " does he behold her. She does, indeed, conduct him 
 to meet the allegorical procession of the Church, at the 
 centre of which is Beatrice; but that, in the passage of 
 the Monarchy above quoted, is not philosophy's office, 
 which is guidance to mundane happiness. The episode 
 probably signifies that religion comes to receive the 
 sinner, who having cleansed himself by discipline, goes, 
 accompanied by purity, to seek for it. One other duty 
 is entrusted to Matilda: she it is who, under the direc- 
 tion of Beatrice, makes Dante and other souls drink first 
 of the river Lethe, which gives forgetfulness of past sin, 
 then of the river Eunoe, which awakens remembrance 
 of past good deeds. It is fairly clear that these two 
 draughts constitute absolution, or restoration of moral 
 cleanness. They follow an extended colloquy which 
 seems to represent the administration, by Beatrice to 
 Dante, of the sacrament of penance, with its three stages 
 of contrition, confession, and satisfaction. Now, it must 
 be remembered that at the basis of the argument is a 
 strict distinction between philosophy and religion; and,
 
 46 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 this being the case, it is obvious that philosophy can 
 have no hand in the purely religious rite of absolution; 
 whereas there is no inappropriateness in a revival of the 
 state of innocence by the instrumentality of a figure 
 representing that state. 
 
 It is only fair to admit that in the account of the 
 second part of this purification there is a passage which 
 seems to lend itself to the other interpretation. In the 
 middle of the garden is a miraculous perpetual fountain, 
 from which flow, on opposite sides, the two streams, 
 Lethe and Eunoe, just as the Tigris and Euphrates were 
 supposed to start from a single spring. Although this 
 phenomenon has already been described to Dante by 
 Matilda, he is struck with amazement on beholding it, 
 and asks Beatrice for an explanation. 
 
 " O light and glory of the human race, 
 What flood is this, which floweth from a same 
 And single source, and self from self doth chase ? " 
 
 " Now ask," this answer to my question came, 
 " Matilda to explain." And then replied, 
 As one who shrinks from undeserved blame, 
 
 The beauteous lady: " This and more beside 
 Have I already told; and well I wis, 
 Such things can Lethe's waters never hide." 
 
 " A greater care, perhaps," said Beatrice, 
 " His mental eyes hath darkly clouded o'er; 
 For care doth memory often make remiss. 
 
 But yonder look, where Eunoe doth pour; 
 Conduct him there, and, as thy habit is, 
 His half-exhausted faculties restore."
 
 MATELDA 47 
 
 Matilda's sentence, " this and more beside have I 
 already told," might be taken to refer to the earlier 
 teachings of philosophy, blameless in themselves, but 
 now forgotten in the new light of revelation. It can, 
 however, be understood as referring simply to the pre- 
 vious explanation given by the " beauteous lady," a 
 few cantos before; and Dante's forgetfulness may be 
 due to the inability of his distracted memory to recall 
 things that are good and hopeful a defect which is 
 about to be remedied by a draught of Eunoe. The 
 occasion of the incident would seem to be a desire to 
 illustrate the doctrine that the obliteration of sad recol- 
 lections is not sufficient for true happiness, without the 
 restoration of cheerful ones. There remains the phrase, 
 " as thy habit is," which might be interpreted as an 
 indication of foregoing long-continued ministrations of 
 the lady to Dante; but it is just as susceptible of the 
 meaning, " as thou art accustomed to do with all the 
 souls that pass through Eden on their way to Heaven "; 
 and, in fact, Matilda does administer the water of good 
 memory to Statius as well as to Dante. 
 
 One more argument, and then we may dismiss the 
 subject. There would be a peculiar fitness in the con- 
 ception of the poet led back to Beatrice by the selfsame 
 young person who, perhaps unwittingly, had drawn him 
 away from her or (if it be preferable to deal with the 
 allegorical attributes of these ladies) led back to 
 " spiritual teachings " by those " philosophical teach-
 
 48 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 ings " whose charm had lured him away from complete 
 absorption in the spiritual. It is noteworthy that the 
 name Matelda, or Matilda, occurs, for the first, last, and 
 only time, in the short speech of Beatrice recently cited : 
 " Now ask Matilda to explain." Probably this use of 
 the name points to a certain intimacy between the two 
 real ladies; and in the narrative of the later love in the 
 New Life we have some evidence of at least an acquaint- 
 ance between Beatrice and the lady who came to sym- 
 bolize philosophy. It may be added, in passing, that in 
 the whole Divine Comedy the only mention of Dante's 
 own name is made by Beatrice, a few cantos earlier. 
 Now, whatever comfort the theory under discussion may 
 derive from this consideration is dispelled by the severe 
 reproaches addressed to the poet by Beatrice, in the pres- 
 ence of Matilda, for his infatuation with the philosophi- 
 cal lady. It is hardly conceivable that " the most gentle 
 one," who is evidently in perfect accord with the "beau- 
 teous lady," should, to her face, disparage the latter. 
 Here is her first reference to the alienating influence: 
 
 " When I from flesh to spirit rose above, 
 
 And comeliness and virtue in me grew, 
 
 Less dear was I to him, cooler his love; 
 His steps he turned upon a road untrue, 
 
 And chased deceptive images of good, 
 
 Which promise much, but never pay their due." 
 
 Once more referring to her own death, and this time 
 addressing Dante, she touches again on the same theme:
 
 MATELDA 49 
 
 " When wounded first by life's inconstancy, 
 
 Seeing that I was constant evermore, 
 
 Thou shouldst have spread thy pinions after me, 
 Thou shouldst have suffered naught thy wings to lower 
 
 To wait for further hurt nor little maid 
 
 Nor other vanity so quickly o'er." 
 
 " Little maid," or pargoletta, is an epithet bestowed 
 more than once by Dante on the philosophical lady, and 
 its use here by Beatrice is evidently intended to be 
 specific. Scarcely could we picture her speaking thus, if 
 the " little maid " were the helpful lady at Dante's side. 
 Having convinced ourselves that Matilda does not 
 signify philosophy, and consequently does signify what 
 she seems to mean, youthful innocence or the fresh life 
 of blameless activity, we may pass from her allegorical 
 purpose to the lady herself, as she comes to meet us in 
 the Garden of Eden. Dante, Virgil, and Statius, who 
 have spent the night on the stairway between Purgatory 
 and the Earthly Paradise, enter shortly after sunrise 
 this realm of delight. I quote now from Longfellow's 
 unrimed translation of the Divine Comedy: 
 
 Eager already to search in and round 
 
 The heavenly forest, dense and living-green, 
 Which tempered to the eyes the new-born day, 
 
 Withouten more delay I left the bank, 
 Taking the level country slowly, slowly 
 Over the soil that everywhere breathes fragrance. 
 
 A softly-breathing air, that no mutation
 
 50 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Had in itself, upon the forehead smote me 
 No heavier blow than of a gentle wind, 
 
 Whereat the branches, lightly tremulous, 
 
 Did all of them bow downward toward that side 
 Where its first shadow casts the Holy Mountain; 
 
 Yet not from their upright position swayed 
 So that the little birds upon their tops 
 Should leave the practice of each art of theirs; 
 
 But with full ravishment the hours of prime, 
 Singing, received they in the midst of leaves, 
 That ever bore a burden to their rhymes, 
 
 Such as from branch to branch goes gathering on 
 Through the pine forest on the shore of Chiassi, 
 When Eolus unlooses the Sirocco. 
 
 Already my slow steps had carried me 
 Into the ancient wood so far that I 
 Could not perceive where I had entered it. 
 
 And lo! my further course a stream cut off, 
 
 Which tow'rd the left hand with its little waves 
 Bent down the grass that on its margin sprang. 
 
 All waters that on earth most limpid are 
 
 Would seem to have within themselves some mixture 
 Compared with that, which nothing doth conceal, 
 
 Although it moves on with a brown, brown current 
 Under the shade perpetual, that never 
 Ray of the sun lets in, nor of the moon. 
 
 With feet I stayed, and with mine eyes I passed 
 Beyond the rivulet, to look upon 
 The great variety of the fresh May. 
 
 And there appeared to me (even as appears
 
 MATELDA 51 
 
 Suddenly something that doth turn aside 
 Through very wonder every other thought) 
 
 A lady all alone, who went along 
 
 Singing and culling floweret after floweret, 
 With which her pathway was all painted over. 
 
 " Ah, beauteous lady, who in rays of love 
 Dost warm thyself, if I may trust to looks, 
 Which the heart's witnesses are wont to be, 
 
 May the desire come unto thee to draw 
 Near to this river's bank," I said to her, 
 " So much that I may hear what thou art singing. 
 
 Thou makest me remember where and what 
 Proserpina that moment was when lost 
 Her mother her, and she herself the Spring." 
 
 As turns herself, with feet together pressed 
 And to the ground, a lady who is dancing, 
 And hardly puts one foot before the other, 
 
 On the vermilion and the yellow flowerets 
 She turned towards me, not in other wise 
 Than maiden who her modest eyes casts down; 
 
 And my entreaties made to be content, 
 
 So near approaching, that the dulcet sound 
 Came unto me together with its meaning. 
 
 As soon as she was where the grasses are 
 
 Bathed by the waters of the beauteous river, 
 To lift her eyes she granted me the boon. 
 
 I do not think there shone so great a light 
 Under the lids of Venus, when transfixed 
 By her own son, beyond his usual custom! 
 
 Erect upon the other bank she smiled,
 
 52 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Bearing full many colours in her hands, 
 Which that high land produces without seed. 
 
 Apart three paces did the river make us; 
 But Hellespont, where Xerxes passed across, 
 (A curb still to all human arrogance,) 
 
 More hatred from Leander did not suffer 
 For rolling between Sestos and Abydos, 
 Than that from me, because it oped not then. 
 
 After describing to them the wonders of Eden, she 
 resumes her song and leads the poets beside the stream. 
 
 Singing like unto an enamoured lady, 
 
 She, with the ending of her words, continued: 
 
 " Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata" 
 And even as Nymphs, that wandered all alone 
 
 Among the sylvan shadows, sedulous 
 
 One to avoid and one to see the sun, 
 She then against the stream moved onward, going 
 
 Along the banks, and I abreast of her, 
 
 Her little steps with little steps attending. 
 Between her steps and mine were not a hundred, 
 
 When equally the margins gave a turn, 
 
 In such a way that to the East I faced. 
 Nor even thus our way continued far 
 
 Before the lady wholly turned herself 
 
 Unto me, saying, " Brother, look and listen! " 
 
 Then it is that the pageant of the Church approaches. 
 What strikes one most in all this passage is the vernal 
 atmosphere, the merging of the lady into the springtime,
 
 MATELDA 53 
 
 or rather, perhaps, the embodiment of springtime in the 
 lady. Does this give us any clue to her identity ? No 
 doubt she is a real person: Dante's allegorical figures 
 are habitually drawn from reality. Is there, among the 
 damsels sung in our poet's lyric verse, any one endowed 
 with such springlike attributes ? Our minds turn at 
 once to the flower-ballads previously cited, to Violet 
 and the maiden of the garland. However, in the list of 
 poems sometimes ascribed to Dante there is another 
 ballad still more suggestive of our " beauteous lady." 
 Here are the refrain and the first of the three strophes : 
 
 Chorus 
 
 O rosebud fresh and new, 
 
 O springtime full of charm, 
 
 On river-bank and farm 
 In ever joyous song 
 Thy praise I pass along 
 To all the wood. 
 
 I 
 
 O be thy perfect praise 
 Gladly renewed by all, 
 By singers great and small, 
 O'er all the country ways! 
 May birds thy fame recall, 
 Each in his special tongue 
 (Let day be old or young) 
 On tree-tops green and tall!
 
 54 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Since now the time is come, 
 The fitting time of spring, 
 Let everybody sing 
 
 The glory of thy throne; 
 For thou art Heaven's own, 
 So sweet and good. 
 
 This rather mediocre poem is doubtless not by Dante, 
 but it is probably connected with him, nevertheless. It 
 may be observed that in the second line the lady is called 
 " Springtime," Primavera. Now, among Dante's female 
 acquaintances, as we happen to know, there was one who 
 bore that nickname; she was, for a while, the sweetheart 
 of his first friend, Guido Cavalcanti, and her real name 
 was Giovanna or Vanna, which is our Joan. For this 
 reason it has been conjectured that Cavalcanti wrote the 
 ballad a conjecture plausible enough, though far from 
 sure. "Springtime" may, indeed, in this verse, be merely 
 an epithet of general application, like the " rosebud " of 
 the first line. " Rose " is always a favorite name for one's 
 beloved, both in literary and in popular song. It occurs, 
 for instance, in a famous and much-discussed poem, one 
 of the early examples of Italian versification, the Rosa 
 fresca aulentissima, which consists of a burlesque dia- 
 logue, perhaps a student's parody of the fashionable 
 amatory colloquy: 
 
 Rose, fresh and odoriferous, that quick in spring appearest, 
 The married and the single folk all people hold thee 
 
 dearest.
 
 MATELDA 55 
 
 From raging flames now rescue me, if humble prayer thou 
 
 nearest ! 
 
 For thee by day and night I sadly pine, 
 Thinking of thee alone, O lady mine! 
 
 The vernal note is inherent in the dance-song from the 
 beginning, as dances are especially connected with 
 spring. It is not, however, peculiar to this type of verse, 
 but is apt to pervade love-poetry of all kinds. There is, 
 of course, not only a traditional, but also a natural, 
 spontaneous bond between love and springtide, the 
 mating season. In the extant poetry of southern France, 
 this association, which has already become a literary 
 convention, usually confines itself, in the courtly love- 
 lyric, to a more or less perfunctory mention of flowers 
 and birds in the opening stanza. Here is a pretty 
 example from the Provencal poet Arnaut de Maruelh, 
 translated by Justin H. Smith: 
 
 Fair to me is April, bearing 
 
 Winds that o'er me softly blow, 
 Nightingales their music airing 
 
 While the stars serenely glow; 
 All the birds, as they have power, 
 
 While the dews of morning wait, 
 Sing of joy in sky or bower, 
 
 Each consorting with his mate. 
 
 The early Italian poets, continuing the French tradition, 
 sometimes developed the spring theme with consider- 
 able freedom. For instance, Rinaldo d' Aquino, one of
 
 56 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 the songsters of Emperor Frederick's group, paid 
 tribute to the new season thus: 
 
 When woods rejoice 
 And banks are seen 
 
 Fresh flowering, 
 The birds give voice 
 Within the green, 
 Their song to sing 
 To greet the spring, 
 Which cometh now 
 With beaming brow 
 Fresh garlanded: 
 Now grief is sped 
 And care takes wing. 
 
 The breath of lawns, 
 The voice of birds 
 
 Move me to love. 
 W T hen daylight dawns, 
 I hear soft words, 
 New airs, above, 
 From thrush and dove; 
 And welcoming 
 The joyous spring, 
 They still prolong 
 The strife of song 
 
 Through all the grove. 
 
 In the following lines, his colleague, Giacomino Pugliese, 
 beginning in the same joyous tone, ends in a plaintive 
 key:
 
 MATELDA 57 
 
 When flowers once more are seen 
 
 In meadows, by the stream, 
 And, chirping in the green, 
 
 The merry birdlets seem 
 To greet the spring with glee, 
 
 Then I, with joyous mien, 
 Carol right cheerily, 
 
 The woes of love to screen; 
 For lovers still do languish piteously. 
 
 Returning to Cavalcanti's Primavera, let us recall 
 Dante's exquisite sonnet often called, after Rossetti, the 
 " Boat of Love," a poetic fancy that seems to perpetuate 
 the evanescent spring dreams of amorous youth: 
 
 Guido, I w r ish that Lapo, thou, and I 
 Were put aboard a boat by magic art, 
 Which wafted by the winds, without a chart, 
 
 Obedient to our wish, should seaward fly; 
 
 And ne'er a storm nor unpropitious sky 
 Should tear our little company apart, 
 But, living always with a single heart, 
 
 Our joy in one another should not die. 
 
 To us I wish the wizard kind w r ould add 
 My Lady Vanna, Lady Lagia, too, 
 
 And her who doth on number thirty dwell, 
 With love the only tale we had to tell! 
 I wish that they should ne'er their coming rue, 
 
 As I believe that we should ne'er be sad ! 
 
 The mysterious " number thirty," under which is hid- 
 den the identity of Dante's own sweetheart, we shall
 
 58 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 have to investigate later on. In the list of ladies, Vanna 
 (surnamed Primavera) comes first, as is natural enough, 
 since the author is addressing her lover. But there is 
 another poem in which Vanna precedes Beatrice with- 
 out quite the same reason, Guido not being mentioned 
 in the verses. The sonnet in question is in the New Life, 
 preceded by a curious introduction, to which the study 
 of Beatrice will ere long compel us to revert. For the 
 present, let it suffice to note Dante's strange insistence 
 on the conceit that this lady was foreordained to walk 
 before Beatrice, even as John the Baptist came before 
 Christ, and that this predestination is indicated by her 
 very nickname, Primavera, which suggests prima verra, 
 " she shall come first." The sonnet, Dante tells us, was 
 addressed to Guido, which would appear to be a suffi- 
 cient explanation of Giovanna's precedence; but the 
 poet preferred to give it a mystic significance. Of the 
 personality of this lady we know nothing except that 
 perhaps her father's name was Philip. 
 
 I felt awakening within my breast 
 
 A loving spirit that was slumbering, 
 And Love I saw arrive from distant quest, 
 
 So joyous that he seemed another thing. 
 " In praise of me," he cried, " now do thy best! " 
 
 And every word he spake did laugh and sing. 
 Now when my Lord so gayly me addrest, 
 
 I lookt to see whence he had taken wing: 
 Vanna with Bice coming did I see
 
 MATELDA 59 
 
 Toward the spot where I expectant stood, 
 
 One miracle the other close behind; 
 And as my memory reports to me, 
 
 " Springtime is this," declared my Master good, 
 " The other, Love, who 's like to me in kind." 
 
 In this Vanna we seem to find the characteristics 
 required for a possible identification with the " beau- 
 teous lady " of the Earthly Paradise. I say " possible," 
 because our ignorance is such that all evidence is of 
 necessity tenuous, and we have no better guide than 
 varying shades of likelihood. Vanna was associated, 
 both in life and in the poet's fancy, with Beatrice. He 
 thought of her as preceding the " most gentle one," as 
 John the Baptist prepared the way of the Lord, and as 
 the lady of Eden appeared to Dante in the garden before 
 Beatrice and led the way to her. Moreover, she em- 
 bodies in her person and expresses in her name the ver- 
 nal quality that the " beauteous lady " personifies. To 
 be sure, this lady is certainly a departed spirit, and we 
 do not know that Vanna was dead in 1300, the year of 
 the mystic journey described in the Divine Comedy; but, 
 on the other hand, we are not sure that she was not. 
 And, as I have said, we are merely guessing. 
 
 There is, however, one element of implausibility in 
 our guess, a flaw that would have been immediately 
 apparent, had I, in the preceding argument, mentioned 
 the " beauteous lady " by name. She is called Matelda, 
 not Vanna nor Primavera. Her name occurs, indeed,
 
 60 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 only once; but once is enough. The name is there, and 
 we cannot escape from it. And as yet no ingenuity has 
 succeeded in tracing any connection between Matelda 
 and either of the names of Cavalcanti's sweetheart. 
 Moreover, Dante apparently knew Giovanna so well 
 that he should have recognized her, even in the Earthly 
 Paradise; whereas, in his account of his meeting with 
 the " beauteous lady," there is no trace of recognition. 
 We must, therefore, reluctantly give up this trail and 
 look elsewhere. Unhappily we shall discover no other 
 clue that promises so well. 
 
 The early commentators on the Divine Comedy, bas- 
 ing their identification of the keeper of Eden on her 
 name alone, declared that she is a certain Grand Coun- 
 tess Matilda, an important figure in the earlier annals of 
 Tuscany; and a few modern interpreters follow their 
 course. But the Countess, an august, almost masculine 
 personage, whose mature years rather than her youth 
 were stamped on tradition, has nothing but her name in 
 common with our lady; and the name, while it may 
 suffice to exclude a candidate, should count for little or 
 nothing in admitting one, unless supported by manifest 
 fitness. For Dante presumably knew many a Matilda 
 totally unknown to us, while some medieval Matildas 
 with whom W T C are acquainted were surely outside his 
 ken. This objection applies, but not in the same meas- 
 ure, to the attempt made, by several eminent scholars 
 of our day, to find Dante's Matilda in the person of one
 
 MATELDA 61 
 
 or another nun of that name. One pious lady in partic- 
 ular, St. Mechteldis of Hackeborn, has recently claimed 
 much attention, because of a recorded vision of hers, 
 which at some points reminds one of Dante's portrayal 
 of Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise. No such resem- 
 blance, however, and no similarity of name should blind 
 us to the evident impropriety of picturing a nun as our 
 poet pictures his Matilda: 
 
 Ah, beauteous lady, who in rays of love 
 
 Dost warm thyself . . . 
 I do not think there shone so great a light 
 
 Under the lids of Venus . . . 
 
 Furthermore, Dante's lady is evidently a creature of the 
 active life, of which Leah is the recognized type; and a 
 nun could appropriately symbolize no other life than 
 that of contemplation. One gathers, too, from an un- 
 prejudiced reading of the poem, the impression that 
 Matilda is a contemporary and probably a companion 
 of Beatrice, rather than some remote character taken 
 from a book. Singing, picking flowers beside a stream, 
 dancing as she turns, she suggests the ballad ladies we 
 have met, far more than a Grand Countess or a nun. 
 
 Who knows whether there may not have been a Ma- 
 tilda, or several Matildas, in Dante's lost poem which 
 enumerated " the sixty most beautiful ladies of the 
 city," the serventese he wrote when he was paying hom- 
 age to the lady who sat in church midway between him- 
 self and Beatrice ? It is with that youthful phase of his
 
 62 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 life, not with his more serious and bookish years, that we 
 instinctively associate the blithesome maiden of the 
 delectable garden. In a half dozen of the earlier chapters 
 of the New Life we have already found three young 
 ladies, other than Beatrice, to whom Dante did poetic 
 service. Now, one of the three the second possesses 
 at least one qualification for the office of prototype of 
 the " beauteous lady ": she was certainly dead before 
 1300. Besides, she sometimes consorted with Beatrice. 
 Fortunately, perhaps, for our hypothesis, we are igno- 
 rant of her name; but her character, as described by 
 Dante, is not different from that of his Matilda. On the 
 other hand, one of the objections urged against Gio- 
 vanna is valid also in her case: it is not apparent why 
 Dante should not have recognized her in the Garden of 
 Eden, as he would seem to have known her fairly well. 
 To be sure, she had died some fifteen years before that 
 encounter on the mystic journey, her death having 
 occurred just before the meeting with Love which led to 
 the transfer of Dante's heart from the first screen lady 
 to the second, and not long after the departure of the 
 first from Florence. 
 
 " After the departure of this gentle lady, it was the 
 pleasure of the Lord of angels to call to his glory a 
 youthful lady of right gentle aspect, who was very 
 gracious in the aforesaid city. Her body did I see lying 
 without the soul, in the midst of many ladies, who were 
 weeping very piteously. Then, remembering that
 
 MATELDA 63 
 
 formerly I had seen her in company with that most 
 gentle one [Beatrice], I could not restrain some tears; 
 but rather, weeping, I resolved to write some words con- 
 cerning her death in compensation for my having some- 
 times seen her with my lady. And to this I made some 
 allusion in the last part of the words I wrote of her, as is 
 clearly apparent to one who understands. And then I 
 wrote these two sonnets, the first of which begins 
 * Piangete amanti '; the second, ' Morte villana.' ' 
 
 Let us consider first the latter poem, which, the author 
 has notified us, contains at the end a covert reference to 
 the companionship of this lady with Beatrice. This can 
 signify only that some of the closing lines have a double 
 meaning, for which we must look with particular care. 
 Here is the poem, a sonetto rinterzato: 
 
 O mean, ungentle Death, sweet pity's foe, 
 Old ancestor of woe, 
 
 Inevitable sentence, and malign! 
 
 Since thou hast stricken so this heart of mine 
 
 That I must ever pine, 
 
 Blame thee I must, till tongue shall weary grow. 
 Would I make thee for mercy begging go, 
 To all the world I'd show 
 
 That one supremely sinful sin of thine; 
 
 Not that the world hath seen thereof no sign, 
 
 But rather to incline 
 
 To wrath all those the food of Love who know. 
 By thee our life is robbed of courtesy
 
 64 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 And all the goodness we to woman trace; 
 
 Youth's joyous face 
 
 Hath lost its loving charm because of thee. 
 I will not tell who may this lady be, 
 
 Save by her virtues known in every place. 
 
 Unless one merit grace, 
 One never must expect such company. 
 
 The phrases " joyous youth," gaia gioventute, and " lov- 
 ing charm," amorosa leggiadria, are exactly those one 
 would choose to describe Dante's Matilda. As to the 
 mysterious " allusion in the last part of the words," we 
 who have been forewarned can see that while the last 
 two lines, 
 
 Unless one merit grace, 
 One never must expect such company, 
 
 obviously mean " one who deserves not salvation must 
 never hope to see this maiden again," they are suscep- 
 tible also of the interpretation, " one who is undeserving 
 of grace from a lady must not expect to have such 
 company as this damsel enjoyed " namely, the com- 
 pany of Beatrice. The Italian word salute, which I have 
 translated "grace," means both "salvation" and "salu- 
 tation "; and Dante's chief happiness, as he tells us, 
 consisted in the salutation of Beatrice, w r hich he pres- 
 ently forfeited by his indiscreet attentions to another 
 lady. " Such company " is, in the original, sua com- 
 pagnia, which means " her company ": that is, either
 
 MATELDA 65 
 
 " the companionship of her " or " the companionship 
 which she had." 
 
 Now, I do not believe that this elaborate play on 
 words was in the author's mind when he composed the 
 verses. It was one of the many afterthoughts which the 
 maturer Dante, collecting and explaining his youthful 
 productions, read into them. As originally conceived, 
 the poem was probably a simple elegy on the passing of 
 a young favorite of Florentine society. Such mourning 
 verse constituted a distinct type, called in Italian com- 
 pianto, " complaint," in Provengal planh, " plaint." 
 The loss lamented was usually that of one's beloved or 
 of a patron or sovereign. Dante's friend, Cino da 
 Pistoia, wrote compianti on the death of Beatrice and of 
 Emperor Henry VII. In Provengal we find more than 
 one touching elegy on the death of Richard I of Eng- 
 land. The early Italian school offers several good speci- 
 mens of the genre for instance, this bit of Giacomino 
 Pugliese, one of the so-called Sicilian group: 
 
 Death, why dost thou afflict me with such pain, 
 Stealing my love, and with her all my mirth ? 
 
 The flower of earthly beauty hast thou slain; 
 Now have I naught to live for, here on earth. 
 
 Discourteous Death, to treat my pleading so! 
 
 Thou'st parted lovers, frozen pleasure's glow, 
 Till all is sad. 
 
 My former gayety is turned to woe, 
 
 For thou hast killed all comfort here below, 
 Which once I had.
 
 66 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Pleasure and sport and laughter once I knew 
 Better by far than any other knight; 
 
 But when my lady forth to Heaven flew, 
 
 Sweet hope went with her, and forsook me quite. 
 
 Grief have I still, and endless tears and sighs; 
 
 Society and sport and song and prize 
 Are all forbid. 
 
 No more I see her at my coming rise, 
 
 No more she turns upon me her sweet eyes, 
 As once she did. 
 
 Going back to the " youthful lady of right gentle 
 aspect, who was very gracious in the aforesaid city," let 
 us now hear the first of the two elegies which Dante 
 composed on her death. And on taking leave of this 
 maiden, so full of " joyous youth " and " loving charm," 
 let us venture, for once, to call her Matilda. 
 
 Ye lovers, sigh! for Love, our Master, sighs. 
 
 Now learn what grief hath banisht all his glee: 
 
 Love heareth ladies calling piteously, 
 Their bitter pain revealing thro' their eyes. 
 Discourteous Death has set in cruel wise 
 
 Upon a noble heart his stern decree, 
 
 Destroying what in noble ladies we, 
 Beside their good repute, on earth do prize. 
 What honor Love bestowed on her, now guess! 
 
 I saw his very self lamenting there 
 
 Over the charming form that lifeless lay, 
 Lifting his mournful gaze to Heaven alway, 
 
 Which had become the gentle soul's repair 
 That once was queen of all in joyousness.
 
 III. PIETRA 
 
 IN discussing the problem of Dante's Matilda, the 
 " beauteous lady " of the Earthly Paradise, we were 
 obliged to begin our investigation by determining her 
 allegorical significance, which, for the understanding 
 and appreciation of the poem, is vastly more important 
 than her literal but obscure self. Very much the same 
 thing may be said of the other leading figures in the 
 Divine Comedy. Of the flesh-and-blood Beatrice we 
 know next to nothing; in fact, we are somewhat in 
 doubt whether Boccaccio was right in identifying her 
 with Beatrice Portinari, and we are not quite certain 
 even that her name was really Beatrice. What we do 
 know is that in the poet's mystic journey she symbol- 
 izes revelation, or " spiritual teachings," an indispen- 
 sable guide to Heaven. For this purpose any other good 
 and beautiful lady, sufficiently idealized, would have 
 served as well. Cato of Utica and St. Bernard of Clair- 
 vaux are well-known characters and excellent examples, 
 respectively, of free will and intuition; but it is easily 
 conceivable that Dante should, without changing the 
 tenor of his story, have chosen different representatives 
 of these qualities; whereas the narrative would not have 
 been what it is if free will and intuition had not been 
 figured in some fashion. For his Virgil, the poet imag- 
 
 67
 
 68 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 ined a distinct and living personality, quite different 
 from the Augustan author as we know him, but in 
 accord with the medieval conception of the great sage of 
 antiquity. If, however, Dante had chosen to substitute 
 Aristotle for Virgil as the type of reason or human 
 understanding, the Divine Comedy, though at some 
 points less attractive, would have been essentially the 
 same; while it could not have proceeded at all without 
 some appropriate embodiment of reason, to conduct the 
 traveler through Hell and Purgatory. 
 
 In expounding one of his own odes in his Banquet, 
 Dante, following St. Thomas Aquinas, defines four 
 modes of interpretation, the literal, the allegorical, the 
 moral, and the anagogical. With the two latter we need 
 not concern ourselves, but it will be interesting to hear 
 what he has to say of allegory. " I declare that, as was 
 told in the first chapter, this exposition should be literal 
 and allegorical. And to make this intelligible, it must 
 be known that writings can be understood and must be 
 explained, for the most part, in four senses. One is 
 called literal, and this is the one that does not extend 
 beyond the letter itself. The next is called allegorical, 
 and this is the one that is concealed beneath the mantle 
 of these fables, being a truth hidden under pretty fiction; 
 as when Ovid says that Orpheus with his lyre tamed 
 wild beasts and made trees and stones come to him: 
 which means that the wise man, with the instrument of 
 his voice, makes cruel hearts tame and humble, and
 
 PIETRA 69 
 
 draws to his will those who have no life of knowledge 
 and of art, since those who have no rational life are as 
 stones. And why this concealment was invented by the 
 sages, shall be shown in the next-to-last book. To be 
 sure, the theologians take this sense differently from the 
 poets; but inasmuch as it is my intention to follow the 
 method of the poets, I shall take the allegorical sense as 
 the poets use it." In poetry, then, the literal sense may 
 be, and often is, pure fiction; whereas the allegorical 
 meaning, which is the essential one, must be true. So 
 it is also, centuries later, in the prose of Bunyan's Pil- 
 grim's Progress. So, in the Middle Ages, Ovid's poem of 
 the Metamorphoses was interpreted. 
 
 In the literature of our day, allegory has gone out of 
 style. Symbolism still lingers in sculpture, especially in 
 cemeteries and in public monuments; it is frequent in 
 cartoons and posters: in painting it has an occasional 
 belated devotee. It remains, of course, in religious 
 service and, to a considerable extent, in ecclesiastical 
 architecture; and it has recently taken a new lease of 
 life in the pageant and the morality play. In other 
 forms of writing, however, if attempted on any but the 
 smallest scale, it usually fails to please; and few authors 
 care to make the trial. Furthermore, we think of it as 
 something extremely artificial, a mere technical device. 
 It was not thus in Dante's time. Then allegory ap- 
 peared spontaneous, because symbolism was a funda- 
 mental mode of thought, forming the basis of man's
 
 70 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 conception of the world. The universe was full of mystic 
 correspondences, which disclosed themselves in astron- 
 omy, in zoology, in history, in names and numbers. 
 
 Of numbers and names we shall have occasion to dis- 
 course in treating of Beatrice. For a specimen of alle- 
 gorical interpretation of secular history, we may turn 
 to another passage of Dante's Banquet, where the author 
 reveals the inner significance of the life of Martia, wife 
 of Cato. " By which Martia," says Dante, " is meant 
 the noble Soul; and we may thus reduce the figure to 
 truth. Martia was a maiden, and in that state signifies 
 Adolescence; then she came to Cato, and in that state 
 signifies Youth. At that time she bore children, by 
 whom are signified the virtues which I have already 
 declared to befit the young. And she parted from Cato 
 and wedded Hortensius, whereby is meant that Youth 
 departed and Maturity came. She bore children also 
 unto him; by whom are signified the virtues which I 
 have already declared to suit Maturity. Hortensius 
 died, whereby is meant the end of Maturity; and 
 Martia having become a widow (by which widowhood is 
 signified Age) went back at the beginning of her widow- 
 hood to Cato, whereby is meant that the noble Soul at 
 the beginning of old age returns to God. . . . And 
 Martia saith : ' Two reasons move me .... One is that 
 after me it may be said that I died the wife of Cato. 
 The other is that after me it may be said that thou didst 
 not drive me forth, but didst give me in marriage
 
 PIETRA 71 
 
 kindly/ By these two reasons the noble Soul is moved: 
 it wishes to depart from this life as the bride of God, and 
 it wishes to show that God was pleased at its creation. 
 ill-starred and ill-born creatures, who wish rather to 
 depart from this life under the name of Hortensius than 
 under that of Cato! " 
 
 Still another part of the Banquet offers an illustration 
 of astronomical symbolism. '* We must," affirms the 
 author, " take into consideration a comparison which 
 exists between the order of the heavens and that of the 
 sciences. Now, as has been told above, the seven skies 
 nearest to us are those of the planets; then there are two 
 movable heavens above these and one quiet heaven 
 above all. To the first seven correspond the seven 
 sciences of the Trivium and of the Quadrivium; to wit, 
 Grammar, Dialectics, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, 
 Geometry, and Astrology. To the eighth sphere, namely 
 the starry one, correspond Natural Science, which is 
 called Physics, and the primal science, which is called 
 Metaphysics; to the ninth corresponds Moral Science; 
 and to the still heaven corresponds Divine Science, 
 which is known as Theology. And the reason why this 
 is so must be briefly looked into. I say that the heaven 
 of the Moon is likened to Grammar, because it is com- 
 parable to it. For, if we rightly look at the Moon, we see 
 that two things are peculiar to it, not being seen in the 
 other stars : one is the shade that is in it, which is nothing 
 but rarity in its body, which rarity cannot stop and
 
 72 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 refract the sun's rays as the other parts do; the other 
 is the variation of its luminousness, for now it shines on 
 one side, now on the other, according as the Sun faces 
 it. And these same two properties hath Grammar; for, 
 because of its immensity, the rays of reason are not 
 stopped by it altogether, especially in the matter of 
 words; and it shines now here, now there, in so far as 
 certain words, certain declensions, certain constructions 
 are in use, which formerly did not exist, and many once 
 existed which shall exist again, as Horace saith at the 
 beginning of his Poetics, when he saith: ' Many words 
 shall be born again, which once have fallen.' " And so 
 on, at some length, for the other heavens and the other 
 sciences. 
 
 With nature and life so full of mysterious relations, 
 it was not strange that art should be filled with symbols; 
 and so it came to be. Allegorical creation, in the main, 
 followed allegorical interpretation, and that (as far 
 as literature is concerned) went back to the ancient 
 Greeks and Hebrews, the former explaining the myths 
 of Homer, the latter expounding their own religious writ- 
 ings. Christian theology, under both Greek and Jewish 
 influence, developed a threefold, then a fourfold system 
 of Biblical exegesis, the most important feature of which 
 was the elaborate exposition of the Old Testament as a 
 detailed allegorical prophecy of the New. That was not 
 all. Imitating the later Greek rationalization of Homeric 
 mythology, Latin commentators applied a similar
 
 PIETRA 73 
 
 method to Virgil and Ovid, who came in the Middle 
 Ages to be regarded as the great pagan masters of al- 
 legory. Naturally enough, under such inspiration a 
 symbolic style of writing was adopted, first in religious 
 compositions, later in secular literature. In the course 
 of the thirteenth century poetic allegory was given an 
 enormous vogue by the unrivaled success of the Old 
 French Romance of the Rose, which was translated into 
 various languages. An English version of it was made 
 by Chaucer. An extremely clever Italian adaptation, 
 called // Fiore, in the form of a sonnet sequence, is the 
 work of a certain Durante, whom a few scholars would 
 identify with Dante Alighieri. 
 
 Incontestably, Dante was the greatest of all creators 
 of allegory. Next to him we may, perhaps, put John 
 Bunyan. When we compare attentively the work of 
 these two masters, we perceive that their habitual 
 methods are diverse: for Bunyan starts with a general 
 concept, which he invests with a bodily form and an 
 obviously descriptive name, such as Prudence or Giant 
 Despair; whereas Dante selects a notable example of 
 the quality he wishes to symbolize, and makes that 
 individual stand for the quality itself. In other words, 
 Bunyan proceeds from the abstract to the concrete, 
 Dante from the concrete to the abstract. Although the 
 former mode is the commoner among allegorists, the 
 latter is more capable of lending reality to the narration. 
 We have seen how, to personify reason, Dante uses the
 
 74 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 familiar figure of Virgil, whom every schoolboy knew, 
 and whom medieval scholarship looked upon as the 
 wisest man among the ancients. As a symbol of revela- 
 tion, he employs the character of Beatrice, long con- 
 ceived and celebrated by him as a miracle on earth, a 
 heavenly creature, a representative of the divine intel- 
 ligence. Cato, who slew himself rather than submit to 
 the usurping Caesar, is transformed into the type of free 
 will. Intuition, or direct perception of God, is figured 
 by St. Bernard, the famous mystic, who discoursed on 
 the joys of contemplation. Minos, pagan judge of the 
 lower world, apparently embodies the guilty conscience. 
 Despair takes corporeal form in Medusa. The ill- 
 begotten Minotaur, part man and part bull, serves as 
 the epitome of bestial violence. Cerberus, with his three 
 mouths, becomes a symbol of gluttony. By pursuing 
 this course, Dante is able to take advantage of all our 
 previous associations with the personages he presents, 
 and thus to abridge description while gaining in distinct- 
 ness and vitality. We must remember what his habit is, 
 when trying to work out some problems which he has 
 left us without a visible clue. 
 
 In the foregoing remarks, the words allegory and sym- 
 bol have occurred repeatedly side by side. In fact, 
 symbolism and allegory are often regarded as the same 
 thing; or, at least, the two terms are frequently used 
 indiscriminately. Nevertheless, one vaguely feels a 
 shade of diversity; and reflection convinces us that,
 
 PIETRA 75 
 
 even if no tangible distinction exists, it would be con- 
 venient to make one. How shall the two words, or the 
 two things, be differentiated ? Allegory is always sym- 
 bolical ; but it is possible to use symbols as one does, 
 for instance, in a metaphor without creating an 
 allegory. My colleague, Professor Neilson, has solved 
 the difficulty by means of an ingenious definition: 
 allegory, according to him, is " sustained " or " organ- 
 ized " or " patterned " symbolism: it is the consecutive, 
 systematic use of fixed symbols. The more we consider 
 this definition, the more serviceable and satisfactory we 
 find it. Let us understand symbolism, then, as the 
 broader term, which includes allegory on the one hand, 
 and, on the other, the employment of incidental figures 
 of speech or changing symbols. Holding to this distinc- 
 tion, we shall call, for example, Maeterlinck's Pelleas et 
 Melisande a piece of symbolistic art, while the Divina 
 Commedia shall be accepted as a true allegory. 
 
 Among Dante's lyric poems we shall perhaps find 
 occasion to apply this principle of differentiation. 
 Many of these, to be sure, are neither allegorical nor 
 symbolical or they are symbolical only in a moderate 
 use of metaphor and in their frequent personification of 
 Love: such are a couple of moral disquisitions in rime, 
 certain verses addressed to male friends, a few elegies, 
 and some early sonnets and ballads in praise of young 
 Beatrice and other maidens. There are, however, two 
 groups of lyrics which invite a " mystical " interpreta-
 
 76 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 tion: the first consists of poems written apparently for 
 a " gentle lady," but truly, as the author assures us in 
 his Banquet, composed in honor of philosophy; the 
 second comprises those having to do with a youthful 
 but unresponsive person whom the poet calls Pietra, or 
 " Stone," to indicate her hardness. The former group, 
 which I shall discuss later, is, I think, in the main really 
 allegorical; by which I mean that the odes which com- 
 pose it, taken together, show a development of two or 
 three constant symbols, Love representing study and 
 the beloved standing for philosophy. 
 
 The second group, made up of a few superbly artistic 
 lyrics, most of them full of passion and of mystery, is 
 excessively hard to interpret. In the first place, we do 
 not know exactly how many pieces should be included 
 in it. Let us look first at those which are sure. For two 
 poems, which contain at fixed places in every stanza the 
 word pietra, there is no question : these form the nucleus 
 of the series, and furnish a basis of classification. They 
 are Dante's first and second sestine, Al poco giorno ed al 
 gran cerchio d' ombra and Amor tu vedi ben che questa 
 donna. To these may be confidently added a third, the 
 canzone, lo son venuto al punto della rota, which has the 
 word pietra in rime with itself at the end of the first 
 strophe. This canzone, like the first sestina and prob- 
 ably the second, draws its inspiration from the winter 
 season, and suggests the contrast between the outer 
 cold and the fire of passion within.
 
 PIETRA 77 
 
 This theme, which is much more fully developed in 
 the canzone than in either sestina, was not entirely new. 
 It had been touched upon by at least four Provengal 
 troubadours; and among them is the writer whom 
 Dante esteemed highest of all poets in the vulgar tongue, 
 Arnaut Daniel, the inventor of the sestina. Concerning 
 Arnaut, he puts into the mouth of Guido Guinizelli, 
 whom he meets in Purgatory, these words: " O brother, 
 the spirit I am pointing out to thee with my finger was a 
 better forger than I of the mother speech. Everything 
 he surpassed verses of love and prose of romances ; 
 so let fools chatter, who think the bard of Limousin 
 [Giraut de Bornelh] excels him. To report rather than 
 to truth they turn their faces, and thus fix their opinion 
 before they listen to art or to reason." This Arnaut, 
 who is cited four times by Dante in his treatise on com- 
 position in the vernacular, offers repeated examples of 
 the contrast of love and winter; but never does he in the 
 least approach the masterly treatment exhibited in the 
 work of his admirer. 
 
 The second sestina, Amor tu vedi ben che questa donna, 
 though undoubtedly a " Pietra " poem, is quite differ- 
 ent from the other two. Made up of miscellaneous 
 amatory conceits, it seems more like a clever metrical 
 exercise than the working out of an idea. Its name, 
 though indicative enough of complexity, is misleading: 
 for while the song always goes under the title of " ses- 
 tina " or " double sestina," it is not really a sestina at all,
 
 78 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 but rather an example of the type known in Provence 
 as a dictatz capcaudatz, or " head-tailed composition," 
 so called because the tail of one stanza becomes the 
 head of the next. With the sestina, however, Dante's 
 poem has in common the total absence of rimes and the 
 repetition of end-words according to a fixed and intri- 
 cate pattern. Each stanza consists of twelve lines; and 
 in these twelve lines, in all five stanzas and the envoy, 
 there are only five end-words, three of which are re- 
 peated within the strophe, one of them (a different one 
 for each strophe) occurring in it six times. As we pass 
 from stanza to stanza, the last end-word of the preced- 
 ing strophe becomes the first of the next strophe, and 
 all the others are pushed down one place. It is obvious 
 that, with such an elaborate medium as this, even 
 Dante's genius could say but little. Although all three 
 of the Pietra poems I have mentioned are constructed 
 on uncommonly difficult plans, and show the highest 
 degree of technical skill, this composition, which has 
 the hardest scheme of all, is the only one in which the 
 difficulty is obvious to the reader. For that reason, no 
 doubt, the author's ingenuity is more immediately 
 manifest. The poem runs something like this: 
 
 I 
 
 O Love, thou plainly canst perceive, this queen 
 Cares nothing for thy power at any time 
 
 Thy power, which other fair ones call their queen! 
 And when this lady saw she was my queen,
 
 PIETRA 79 
 
 Beholding in my face thine amorous light, 
 She made herself of cruelty the queen. 
 No longer doth her heart befit a queen, 
 
 But some wild beast, whose heart to love is cold; 
 
 For always, be the season hot or cold, 
 She governs me as if she were a queen 
 
 Not flesh and blood, but carved in beauteous stone 
 
 By one whose hand is best at carving stone. 
 
 II 
 
 And I, in faith to thee more firm than stone 
 For beauty's sake (the beauty of a queen), 
 
 Conceal the wound inflicted by a stone 
 
 With which thou struckest me, as 't were a stone 
 Which had thy way encumbered many a time. 
 
 The blow hath reached my heart, which now is stone; 
 
 And ne'er hath mortal found a magic stone 
 Which from the solar power or solar light 
 Had got such wondrous property or light 
 
 That it could aught avail against this stone 
 Which bringeth me, with its inhuman cold, 
 To such a pass that death will turn me cold. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Thou knowest, Lord, that in the freezing cold 
 The hardening water turns to crystal stone 
 
 Yonder to northward, where the world is cold, 
 
 And atmosphere becomes a thing of cold 
 And so descends that water rules as queen 
 
 (In yonder land), congealing with the cold. 
 
 E'en thus, confronted with that visage cold,
 
 80 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 My blood is icy frozen all the time. 
 That thought which shortens most my earthly time 
 Is turned within my eyes to humor cold, 
 
 And there by beauty's ray is brought to light, 
 Where entered first that beauty's cruel light. 
 
 IV 
 
 Of every charm there shines in her the light; 
 Yet every cruelty doth send its cold 
 
 Into her heart, which never knew thy light. 
 Her beauty, when I see her, so doth light 
 Mine eyes that I behold her in a stone, 
 In everything on which I turn my light. 
 There cometh from her eyes so fair a light 
 
 That I can look upon no other queen. 
 
 Ah ! would that she might be a clement queen 
 To me, who pray, in darkness and in light, 
 
 For time to do her service place and time ! 
 
 For that alone would I live out my time. 
 
 Therefore, O Power, which older art than time, 
 Older than motion, older eke than light, 
 O pity me, who spend so sad a time! 
 Now penetrate her heart (indeed 't is time) 
 And banish thence the homicidal cold 
 
 Which cutteth short my life's allotted time. 
 For if, in such a state, thy winter time 
 Shall overtake me, then my pretty Stone 
 Shall see me stretcht within a little stone,
 
 PIETRA 81 
 
 Never to rise until the end of time. 
 
 Then I shall see if earth has had a queen 
 As beautiful as this unfeeling queen. 
 
 Envoy 
 
 O Song, I carry in my mind a queen 
 So beautiful, for all she be of stone, 
 
 She gives me courage, tho' mankind be cold, 
 To dare to write, despite the season's cold, 
 
 A thing so strange that (by thy constant light!) 
 
 It never was conceived at any time. 
 
 Both this poem and the first sestina, Al poco giorno ed 
 al gran cerchio d' ombra, are cited by Dante as his own 
 in his treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia. In the first sestina 
 we find a form strangely artificial and intricate, to be 
 sure, but so masterfully handled that the author's effort 
 is almost concealed. Al poco giorno is a real sestina, fol- 
 lowing the type invented, as I have said, by Arnaut 
 Daniel, and by him used several times. A few other 
 troubadours tried their hand at it, among them one of 
 Italian birth. Then Dante took it up, and in this poem 
 carried it to its highest perfection. Two other sestine, 
 manifest imitations of this one, are sometimes printed 
 under Dante's name, though not ascribed to him in any 
 manuscript, and certainly not by him. As far as we 
 know, Al poco giorno is the only genuine sestina that 
 Dante wrote. Several excellent sestine were composed 
 by Petrarch, who in one of them contrasted love and
 
 82 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 snow. Since his day, the form has been occasionally but 
 sparingly attempted. 
 
 The sestina has six stanzas, each of six lines, and a 
 three-line envoy. For the six lines there are six end- 
 words, which are repeated from strophe to strophe in an 
 order that changes according to a set formula. If we 
 represent the arrangement, in a given stanza, as 123456, 
 the sequence in the next stanza will be 615243. The 
 number of words being equal to the number of lines, 
 there is no repetition within the strophe. All six words 
 are incorporated into the three lines of the envoy. The 
 music, we are told, consists of a continuous air running 
 through the stanza, without the repetitions customary 
 in the strophe of the canzone, or ode. Our poem starts 
 out with a picture of the winter solstice, the time of 
 short days and long nights. The opening words, 
 
 To dwindling day and vast encircling shade 
 I now have come, 
 
 recall a similar beginning by Peire d' Alvernhe, 
 Anigh short days and evenings long, 
 
 and, still more, a wintry introduction by another Pro- 
 vengal poet, Gavaudan: 
 
 The longest night and smallest day 
 Of all the year, we now have reacht. 
 
 Here is a translation of Dante's sestina. The word 
 donna, which in my version of the preceding poem I
 
 PIETRA 83 
 
 rendered by " queen," I have here turned into " lass," 
 donna being a term of various meanings " possessor," 
 " mistress," " lady," and " woman." 
 
 I 
 
 To dwindling day and vast encircling shade 
 I now have come, alas! and whitening hills, 
 When color hath forsook the meadow leaves; 
 And yet my longing loseth not its green, 
 So rooted is it in the stubborn stone 
 Which sentient is and speechful as a lass. 
 
 II 
 
 Forever chilly stands this curious lass, 
 As snow unchanging bideth in the shade; 
 She stirs no more than everlasting stone, 
 When balmy spring returns and heats the hills 
 And makes them change their hue from white to green, 
 Decking them o'er with little flowers and leaves. 
 
 in 
 
 When that her head is garlanded with leaves, 
 One cannot think of any other lass; 
 For golden curls so mingle with the green 
 That Love is lured to nestle in the shade. 
 'T is Love that locks me here 'mid little hills 
 Firmer by far than mortar locketh stone. 
 
 IV 
 
 Her charms more potent are than magic stone; 
 She deals a wound incurable by leaves. 
 Lo! I have fled thro' plains and over hills,
 
 84 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Attempting to escape from such a lass; 
 
 But still her light is never screened with shade 
 
 By hillock cast, or wall, or foliage green. 
 
 V 
 
 I once beheld this damsel garbed in green, 
 So fair, she would have kindled in a stone 
 The love I bear unto her very shade. 
 Ah! were I with her now 'mid grassy leaves, 
 And would that she were fond as any lass, 
 Within a field enclosed by lofty hills! 
 
 VI 
 
 But sooner shall the brooks run up the hills 
 Than ever vernal wood so moist and green 
 Shall burn (as oft befalls a pretty lass) 
 For me, who willingly would sleep in stone 
 For all my days, and feed upon the leaves, 
 Merely to see the ground her garments shade. 
 
 Envoy 
 
 Whene'er the hills project their blackest shade, 
 Beneath a hopeful green the little lass 
 Covers it o'er, as stone is hid by leaves. 
 
 The third poem that indisputably belongs to the set is 
 the canzone, lo son venuto al punto delta rota, in which 
 the last two lines of the first stanza end in pietra. In 
 every strophe of this ode the last verse closes with the 
 same word as the next-to-last; but this word, though 
 identical in form, is in each case slightly differentiated
 
 PIETRA 85 
 
 in sense. Otherwise the stanzas have a normal rime- 
 scheme abc abc c deedff. One can hardly discuss the 
 Pietra poems without giving special attention to their 
 structure, because in them technical artistry has so 
 conspicuous a share. In this ode, the first nine lines of 
 each strophe contain a beautiful little sketch of some 
 aspect of wintertime: the opening stanza pictures the 
 winter stars; the second describes the clouds, snow, and 
 rain; the third tells of birds and beasts in the cold sea- 
 son, the fourth discourses of vegetable life; the fifth, of 
 the frozen soil. Each of these nine-line sketches is fol- 
 lowed by a contrasting four-line glimpse into the poet's 
 heart, unchanging amid the changes of the elements; 
 and this theme receives its final development in the 
 envoy. Petrarch has one canzone, Ne la stagion che il del 
 rapido inchina, built on a similar plan, except that his 
 little pictures represent, not winter, but evening, and 
 the contrast is between dying day and undying love. 
 In the beginning of Dante's ode, as in that of his first 
 sestina, the winter solstice is indicated : the time of year 
 when the setting sun, in Capricorn, is face to face with 
 the constellation of Gemini, rising on the eastern hori- 
 zon; when Venus, at her apogee, is in opposition with 
 the earth and therefore hidden by the sun; when Saturn, 
 the chilly planet, describing its broadest revolution, 
 rises highest overhead a position in which any one of 
 the seven planets casts but little shadow, because its 
 light descends almost vertically.
 
 86 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Now have I reacht that point upon the wheel 
 When round horizon, which the sun doth hide, 
 
 A Geminated heaven doth unfold. 
 The amorous star her light cannot reveal; 
 For glaring rays her orbit so bestride, 
 She seems before her face a veil to hold. 
 The distant star that fortifies the cold 
 Shines fully forth on that extended bow 
 Which lets the seven little shadow cast. 
 Yet memory clutcheth fast 
 Each single thought of love that laid me low 
 My cruel memory, harder far than stone 
 In keeping fixt the effigy of Stone. 
 
 II 
 
 There rises up from Ethiopia's sand 
 
 A foreign wind, which makes the air to weep, 
 
 Because the sun is yonder shining bright. 
 Crossing the sea, it brings a misty band 
 
 Of clouds so thick, if naught the sky doth sweep, 
 They fill this hemisphere and close it tight; 
 And then they melt, and fall in flakelets white 
 Of frozen snow, or else in hateful rain, 
 
 Whereby the saddened air is moved to tears. 
 And Love, who greatly fears 
 The rising wind, takes up his nets again; 
 
 But me he quits not, such a beauteous queen 
 Was given me to be my cruel queen.
 
 PIETRA 87 
 
 III 
 
 Now every bird that followeth the heat 
 
 Is fled from Europe's shores, which never lack 
 The seven chilly stars that make the Wain. 
 All other birds have stilled their voices sweet, 
 To sing no more until the green come back, 
 Unless it be to give a cry of pain. 
 And all those creatures which cannot refrain 
 From joy in summer, now from love are free, 
 Because the icy cold their heart has chilled. 
 But mine with love is filled; 
 For tender thoughts are not inspired in me, 
 Nor taken from me, by the turn of years, 
 But by a queen who knows not many years. 
 
 IV 
 
 The leaves have past their time and had their day, 
 Which first to life the breath of spring did stir, 
 
 To deck the world; no living grass is seen, 
 And every verdant twig is hid away, 
 Except on pine, on bay, or else on fir, 
 
 Or on some other tree that keeps its green. 
 The season is so savage and so keen, 
 The little flowers on the bank it dulls, 
 
 Which frost will not endure the earth above. 
 And yet unfeeling Love 
 His thorn from out my bosom never pulls: 
 
 Wherefore am I condemned to wear it ever 
 While I shall live, tho' I should live forever.
 
 88 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 The springs pour out their waters mistily, 
 Pusht forth by vapors hidden down below, 
 
 Which mother earth's abysses upward thrust. 
 The path, on pleasant days so sweet to me, 
 Is now a running stream, and long shall flow; 
 For while the winter warreth, flow it must. 
 Enamel-like the ground puts on a crust; 
 And stagnant water quickly turns to glass, 
 Lockt out of doors by petrifying frost. 
 Yet I, so battle-tost, 
 Have not gone back a single step, alas! 
 Nor will I go! If martyrdom is joy, 
 Then death must be the best that men enjoy. 
 
 Envoy 
 
 O Song, what shall become of me when spring 
 
 Shall come renewed and sweet, when Love shall fall 
 
 Like rain from all the skies to hearts untold, 
 
 If now, despite the cold, 
 Love dwells in me, and nowhere else at all ? 
 
 I know my fate: to be a man of rock, 
 
 If Little Maid shall have for heart a rock. 
 
 Here, then, we have a group of three poems, all play- 
 ing on the word pietra, all displaying the most extraor- 
 dinary artistic invention and mastery of technique, 
 one of them ingenious rather than lovely, the other two 
 strangely and hauntingly beautiful. What would we
 
 PIETRA 89 
 
 not give to penetrate the mystery of these verses, so 
 passionate and yet so discreet ! Like Violet and Matilda, 
 this Little Maid is a figure so elusive that at times we 
 wonder whether she ever was real. Who she was, and 
 what she was to Dante, no one, perhaps, save the poet 
 himself, has ever known. And yet her charm is such 
 that we perpetually and gladly allow ourselves to be 
 lured by hopes manifestly foredoomed. 
 
 Ere we go further in pursuit of this Will o' the Wisp, 
 let us see whether other poems can be added to the 
 series, and whether any of these if such be found - 
 can afford us an additional clue. Among Dante's son- 
 nets there is one, E' non e legno di si forti nocchi, which 
 once has in the rime the word pietra, used not as an 
 epithet to designate the heartless lady, but as a means 
 of describing her power. Its tone is bitter; the person 
 wooed is very young : shall we include it in the group ? 
 
 The knottiest wood that hath existed yet, 
 The hardest, most impenetrable stone, 
 This cruel maid, who seeks to lay me prone, 
 
 With one sweet look, aflame with love would set. 
 
 When turns to gaze a man that she hath met, 
 Unless he flee, she maketh him atone 
 And die of broken heart; no grace is shown, 
 
 No earnest ever rendered of her debt. 
 
 Why is it, God such sovereignty grants 
 To such a young, unfeeling lady's eyes, 
 Who life to every faithful swain denies ?
 
 90 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 So deaf to pity, when a lover dies, 
 She turns away and looks at him askance, 
 And even hides her beauties from his glance. 
 
 This is of much the same tenor as the two sestine pas- 
 sion on the one side, youthful hardness on the other. It 
 is not in the least like the poems to Beatrice or those to 
 the persons I have called Matilda and Violet. One 
 might readily enough decide to assign it to the Pietra 
 series, were it not still more akin to another set, which 
 we have not yet considered, a group of lyrics devoted to 
 Lady Philosophy. When we come to examine these, we 
 shall find in them, as in the sonnet, the idea that the 
 lady's power comes from on high, the extension of her 
 cruelty to mankind in general, and her desire to hide her 
 beauty from view. The extreme youth of the lady is 
 found in them also. I am therefore inclined, despite the 
 word " stone," to put this sonnet into the class of the 
 philosophical poems, rather than into the Pietra 
 category. 
 
 One might properly, it seems to me, make the same 
 disposal of another sonnet, probably by Dante, which 
 shows likeness both to the Pietra and to the Philosophy 
 type, but somewhat more to the latter. 
 
 I curse the day when first I saw a while 
 
 The light which in your treacherous eyes you bore; 
 
 The hour when you descended, full of guile, 
 To draw my soul from out my bosom's core. 
 
 Also I curse the loved and loving file,
 
 PIETRA 91 
 
 The polisher of word and metaphor, 
 Which I have wrought for you in riming style, 
 
 That you may honored be forevermore. 
 Also I curse my memory obstinate, 
 
 Which firmly holds whate'er shall fatal be 
 Namely, your figure fair and obdurate, 
 Because of which is Love exposed to hate, 
 
 And everybody laughs at him and me, 
 Who think Fortuna's wheel to confiscate. 
 
 While the " polishing of word and metaphor " would 
 appear especially to befit the Pietra songs, which are the 
 most elaborate of Dante's lyrics, the phrase suits well 
 enough the poems dealing with Lady Philosophy; for 
 these, too, are full of conscious artistry. To Lady Phi- 
 losophy, rather than to Pietra, belongs the imputation 
 of deceitful intention, as well as the vague indication of 
 universal cruelty. The last two lines, also, 
 
 And everybody laughs at him and me, 
 Who think Fortuna's wheel to confiscate, 
 
 with their suggestion of mad aspiration and public dis- 
 comfiture, point to the philosophical series. The sonnet 
 Deh! piangi meco, tu dogliosa pietra, with its apparent 
 political allegory, would merit a conspicuous place, were 
 it really Dante's; but there seems to be no sufficient 
 reason for accepting it. 
 
 We come now to an ode, the most passionate and the 
 most extravagant of all Dante's poems, Cosl nel mio
 
 92 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 parlar voglio esser aspro, which, containing as it does the 
 epithet pietra applied to the lady, must in all probability 
 be considered as a member of our group. If so, it would 
 seem to mark the frenzied climax of the lover's infatua- 
 tion. The poem begins with an avowal of the author's 
 purpose to discard the " sweet style " which becomes 
 amatory verse, and to adopt a language as harsh as the 
 conduct of Pietra. Such a change of vocabulary, con- 
 trary to his principles, was surely not made without 
 cause. In his treatise on writing in the vulgar tongue, 
 De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante gives careful rules with 
 regard to the choice of words; " for," says he, " if you 
 study the elegant mother speech, which, as I have said 
 before, should be used in tragic composition by vernac- 
 ular poets, whom it is our purpose to instruct, you will 
 be careful to keep in your sieve only the most dignified 
 terms." Now, in this furious ode, the poet is about to 
 throw dignity and sweetness to the winds, and warns his 
 readers accordingly. And this is not the only time. At 
 the outset of one other poem he gives a similar warning. 
 The third ode of the Banquet, a versified disquisition on 
 the true nature of nobility, begins thus: 
 
 The dulcet words of love, which I of old 
 
 In meditation sought, 
 
 I now must leave, tho' not without a thought 
 Of going back sometime. 
 
 Such dire, disdainful deeds have just been wrought 
 By this, my Lady bold
 
 PIETRA 93 
 
 That fear of them the thoroughfare doth hold 
 Of mine accustomed rime. 
 Since I must bide a more propitious clime, 
 
 The honeyed style in which I did rehearse 
 The charms of love, away from me I fling : 
 Of goodness I w T ill sing, 
 
 Of genuine nobility's true nurse; 
 With harsh and cunning verse 
 Showing how false the judgment is, and worse, 
 Of those who would assert that gentle worth 
 In riches hath its birth. 
 First I invoke that Lord of everything 
 
 Who dwells so patent in my Lady's eyes 
 That she her own sweet self doth idolize. 
 
 The Lady of this strophe is without question Lady Phi- 
 losophy, who is shown, in one of Dante's ballads, enrap- 
 tured with the image of Love in her own eyes. 
 
 Returning to our " harsh " Pietra poem, we shall note 
 that, although the figures rather suggest out-of-doors, 
 there is no plain indication of locality, as there was in the 
 hilly first sestina, nor of season, such as we found in the 
 two sestine and in the wintry ode. 
 
 I 
 
 So harsh shall be my speech, so harsh and rough, 
 
 As is the conduct of a pretty Stone 
 
 \Vho daily makes her own 
 Increasing cruelty and insolence. 
 She clothes herself in jasper plate so tough
 
 94 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 That, thanks to it, or thanks to flight alone, 
 No shaft from sheaf hath flown 
 That e'er hath caught her heart without defence. 
 She kills her foe, for all he hie him thence, 
 Or hide, or flee the deadly darts she flings, 
 Which, borne by unseen wings, 
 
 Descend on him and shatter every mail. 
 Against her might, my strength and reason fail. 
 
 II 
 
 No shield can screen me from her shattering blow, 
 From her pursuing gaze I vainly flee. 
 As flower on stem, so she 
 
 Perches upon my mind with conquering smile. 
 She seems as heedful of my bitter woe 
 
 As ship seems heedful of a waveless sea. 
 The weight that crushes me 
 Is far beyond the scope of any style. 
 O pitiless and agonizing file, 
 Which silently dost wear my life away, 
 Art not ashamed to stay 
 
 And gnaw my heart to dust from peel to peel, 
 As I 'm ashamed to tell whence comes thy zeal ? 
 
 Ill 
 
 Whene'er I find myself in others' view 
 
 Thinking of her, lest men my thought may see 
 Transpiring outwardly, 
 My heart is more afraid and trembles more 
 
 Than I 'm afraid of Death, which now doth chew
 
 PIETRA 95 
 
 With Love's own teeth my every faculty; 
 Which so consumeth me 
 That intellect stands still, enfeebled sore. 
 Love striketh me to earth, and standeth o'er 
 My prostrate form, with Dido's deadly steel; 
 Then I to him appeal, 
 
 Pleading for grace, and piteously I cry, 
 But mercy Love doth stubbornly deny. 
 
 IV 
 
 He, lifting now and then his hand, defies 
 My sickly life this tyrant overbold, 
 Who close to earth doth hold 
 My body flat outstretcht, too tired to fight. 
 Then surge into my brain despairing cries. 
 
 The blood which all the scattered veins enfold, 
 Knowing the heart is cold, 
 Comes rushing to its call, and leaves me white. 
 My left arm raising, he my side doth smite 
 So hard, the pain comes throbbing to my heart. 
 Then I: " If he should start 
 
 To strike again, Death will have taken me 
 Or e'er the murderous blow completed be." 
 
 Would I could see him split the cruel jade 
 
 Right through her icy heart, who mine doth crack! 
 Then Death would not be black, 
 Which, chasing after beauty, I pursue. 
 She gives no more in sunshine than in shade,
 
 96 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 This outlaw thievish, deadly in attack. 
 Why barketh she not back 
 For me, as I for her, in boiling brew ? 
 " Quickly," I'd cry, " I come to succor you! " 
 That would I gladly do, and laying hold 
 Of ringlets blond as gold, 
 
 Which Love, to torture me, hath curled and dyed, 
 My hands would clutch till I was satisfied. 
 
 VI 
 
 If I could seize those golden locks and pull 
 
 (Those curls, for me a scourge, my heart to flay!), 
 From early in the day 
 
 I'd hold them tight till vespers and the dark; 
 And I should not be kind or pitiful, 
 
 But rather like a bear, when he's at play. 
 A thousand should repay 
 
 Love's lashings, which on me have left their mark. 
 Into those handsome eyes, whence flies the spark 
 To fire my heart, now dead within, I'd stare 
 With close, unchanging glare, 
 
 In retribution for her flight from me, 
 
 And then in peace and love I'd set her free. 
 
 Envoy 
 
 Now, Song, go straight unto that lawless one 
 
 Who robbed and murdered me, and never gave 
 The thing that most I crave, 
 And shoot an arrow thro' her cruel breast; 
 For fair renown is won by wrong redrest.
 
 PIETRA 97 
 
 A weird, uncomfortable poem, with a note of desperate 
 wickedness, such as one might expect from a middle- 
 aged man violently in love with a very young girl! 
 
 One more ode claims our attention, a beautiful and 
 passionate one, less vehement than the " harsh " poem 
 just quoted. Whether or not it belongs to our series, is 
 a vexed and doubtless insoluble problem; for while its 
 general tone suggests pietra, it does not contain that 
 word. Probably connected with this composition, and 
 intended to introduce it, is a short Latin letter, ad- 
 dressed to Marquis Moroello Malaspina, of the Luni- 
 giana in northwestern Italy, who was Dante's host in 
 1306. After a brief introductory declaration of devo- 
 tion and gratitude, the author, who has just left with 
 regret the free, friendly court of the Malaspina family, 
 goes on to relate: " No sooner had I set foot, heedless 
 and unafraid, upon the Arno's bank, than lo! a woman, 
 falling like a thunderbolt, suddenly appeared, I know 
 not how, in character and person quite in keeping with 
 my lot. Oh! how bewildered I was at her appearance! 
 But my bewilderment came to an end in the terror of the 
 following thunder-clap. For as thunders immediately 
 follow lightnings by day, so, when I had beheld the 
 flash of her beauty, love took possession of me, fearful 
 and masterful. And, fierce as an exiled lord returning 
 after long banishment to his very own, he either slew or 
 expelled or bound whatever in me had been opposed to 
 him. He killed, therefore, that praiseworthy resolution
 
 98 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 of mine, to beware of women and their songs; he im- 
 piously cast out, as objects of suspicion, the constant 
 meditations in which I was contemplating both heavenly 
 and earthly things; and finally, lest my soul should rebel 
 further against him, he so bound my free will that I am 
 constrained to turn, not whither I wish, but whither he 
 directs. Love, then, rules within me, with no strength 
 to resist him; and how he rules me, you must learn 
 outside the contents of this document." 
 
 Although the authenticity of this odd epistle has been 
 contested, it is regarded by most scholars as probably 
 genuine; if not authentic, it is of course a deliberate 
 forgery. Accepting it provisionally, we must infer that 
 the ode in question was written about 1307, beside the 
 Arno; and, further, that, if the poem really is connected 
 with Pietra, it is the first of the series, since it has to do 
 with the first appearance of the woman in question. 
 From the verses themselves we learn that the scene is on 
 the Arno, among mountains, therefore in the Casentino, 
 the wild and Alpine upper Arno valley; from the same 
 source we learn also that the poem was written during 
 Dante's exile. 
 
 The fantastic style of the letter constitutes a real 
 stumbling-block. Several suppositions are possible: (1) 
 that the work is a stupid fabrication, patched together 
 from the poem; (2) that it was intended by Dante to 
 suggest an allegorical interpretation of the lady and the 
 verse; (3) that Dante purposely couched it in a mock-
 
 PIETRA 99 
 
 heroic vein; (4) that he wrote it solemnly, describing a 
 genuine passion. I am inclined to believe either that the 
 epistle is forged (in which case it naturally would have 
 no importance) or that it was intended to be mock- 
 heroic, slightly deprecating an infatuation of which the 
 author was ashamed. And well he might be, if it was the 
 infatuation of a married man of forty-two or so for a 
 young country girl. Still another hypothesis, recently 
 put forward, would explain letter and poem as an ex- 
 travagant compliment to a hostess. To the question 
 of allegory I shall be obliged presently to return. First 
 let us consider the poem. 
 
 O Love, since I must sing a sad appeal 
 
 To make the people hear 
 And me bereft of all my strength to show, 
 Now give me skill to tell the grief I feel, 
 
 That words may let appear 
 The pangs that pricking from my bosom go. 
 Thou 'dst have me die, and I would have it so. 
 But who will sorrow, if I cannot say 
 What thou dost make me pay ? 
 
 Who will believe that such a load I bear ? 
 But if thou grantest speech to match my woe, 
 Let not the culprit, ere I pass away, 
 Hear aught from me! For this, my Lord, I pray! 
 For should she catch my inner voice of care, 
 Pity would make her fairest face less fair.
 
 100 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 II 
 
 I cannot flee from her, nor yet prevent 
 
 Her coming to my mind; 
 
 Nor yet from thought, which brings her there, refrain. 
 My crazy soul, on self-destruction bent, 
 
 Still pictures her, unkind 
 
 And beauteous as she is, and thus repeats its pain ; 
 Then looks on her once more, and full again 
 Of boundless longing, drawn from witching eyes, 
 Against itself it cries, 
 
 Which lit the fire that burneth it to death. 
 All reason's checks and arguments are vain 
 When raging whirlwinds in my bosom rise! 
 My anguish, loath to bide within me, flies 
 
 Forth from my lips so plain, men hear its breath, 
 And eyes to pay their tribute summoneth. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The hostile image, which remaineth so 
 
 Victorious and fell 
 
 Within my mind, and chains my will with fear, 
 Enamored of itself, doth make me go 
 
 W T here it in flesh doth dwell, 
 As like to like its course will ever steer. 
 Sunshine, I know, makes snow to disappear; 
 But what of that ? a prisoner am I, 
 Whom, howsoe'er I try, 
 
 My own unwilling feet to scaffold bear. 
 W T hen I have come anigh, I seem to hear
 
 PIETRA 101 
 
 A voice: " Come, come, wilt see this fellow die ? " 
 
 Seeking to whom I pleading may reply, 
 
 I turn about! so maddened by the stare 
 Of eyes unwilling guiltless life to spare. 
 
 IV 
 
 What I shall do, thus wounded by thy dart, 
 
 Thou knowest, Love, not I, 
 Who stay'st to gaze my lifeless form upon. 
 And if my soul returneth to the heart, 
 
 Forgetfulness was nigh 
 And ignorance was there while it was gone. 
 When I arise again, my wound to con, 
 Which so undid me when I felt the blow, 
 I cannot rally so 
 
 As not to quake in all my limbs for fright. 
 Reveals full clear enough my visage wan 
 What was the thunderbolt that laid me low. 
 Tho' pretty smiles those lightning-strokes bestow, 
 My face must long remain devoid of light, 
 Because my timid spirit fears to fight. 
 
 V 
 
 'Mid mountains, thus, O Love, hast wrought me ill, 
 
 Far up along the stream 
 Beside whose bank thou always rulest me. 
 Here, quick or dead, thou handiest me at will, 
 
 Thanks to a cruel gleam 
 
 Which lights the way to death, flashing for thee. 
 No ladies here, no gentle folk I see,
 
 102 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 To mourn, alas! for my distressful lot; 
 
 If she still heeds me not, 
 
 None else to guess my sorrow hath the wit; 
 And she, from thy domain compelled to flee, 
 
 Defies, O Lord, thy sharpest arrow's shot. 
 
 Of hardened pride, before her heart, a clot 
 
 Turns back the point of all the shafts that hit, 
 And thus her armored breast by none is bit. 
 
 Envoy 
 
 Now go, my little mountain Song, thy way ! 
 Florence, my city, haply shalt thou see, 
 Who locks her gates to me, 
 
 Empty of pity, seeming love to spurn. 
 To her, if thou shouldst be admitted, say: 
 " My maker nevermore can war with thee! 
 Up yonder, he is chained so mightily 
 That, even were thy cruelty less stern, 
 No longer hath he freedom to return." 
 
 The question whether this poem belongs to our group 
 is of the utmost importance: for, if it does, the date of 
 the Pietra episode is determined beyond doubt (what- 
 ever we may think of the Latin letter) as belonging to 
 the period of Dante's exile, and the place is fixed some- 
 where in the Casentino, a locality dimly indicated by the 
 " hills " of the first sestina; furthermore, inasmuch as 
 the cruel lady and Florence appear as opposing powers, 
 this lady cannot, as some have suggested, symbolize the 
 city. The word pietra being absent, we have no definite
 
 PIETRA 103 
 
 evidence; but the Pietra-like temper of the poem, com- 
 bined with the lack of resemblance to any other group, 
 inclines me to the belief that we have in this ode a mem- 
 ber of our set, which would then comprise five pieces 
 two sestine and three canzoni. It may be that the use of 
 the symbol of stone did not occur to Dante until he 
 came to write the second of the series. 
 
 In all these poems Love is personified, appearing as an 
 irresistible god; and in four of them we have the addi- 
 tional image of the stone, to represent the insensible 
 young beloved. To this limited extent, the verses are 
 symbolistic. Now we must ask ourselves : are they also 
 allegorical ? In other words, have we to do here with a 
 real person or with a feminine form standing for some- 
 thing else, as, in the Divine Comedy, Matilda stands for 
 innocence and Beatrice for revelation ? Allegory, in 
 Dante's writings, is not confined to the great Comedy: 
 we find it also, as I have said before, in a number of 
 lyrics devoted to Lady Philosophy and expounded in 
 part by the author himself in his Banquet. In stating his 
 reasons for publishing this book, Dante declares, among 
 other things, that he was moved by the fear of infamy. 
 " I fear," he says, " the infamy of having followed such 
 a passion as the reader of the aforesaid odes conceives 
 to have dominated me; which infamy is removed by my 
 present full account of myself, which shows that not 
 passion but virtue was the moving cause. I intend also 
 to reveal the real meaning of those poems, which by
 
 104 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 some cannot be seen unless I tell it, being hidden under 
 the figure of allegory." 
 
 We know from himself that he purposed thus to ex- 
 plain certain poems whose first inspiration came from 
 a compassionate young lady figuring in the latter part 
 of the New Life. This comforter, he tells us, was made 
 by him a symbol of philosophy; and he apparently 
 would have us believe that all the amatory verse seem- 
 ingly addressed to this lady was made with an allegori- 
 cal intention as some of it certainly was. Now, we 
 should like to know whether this group of poems is the 
 only one that he meant to interpret allegorically. The 
 Banquet, far from completed, contains only three of the 
 fourteen odes it was planned to elucidate. What we are 
 especially curious to learn is whether Dante had it in 
 mind to subject the Pietra lyrics to the same process. 
 We can only guess; and we have no particular facilities 
 even for guessing. 
 
 At this point we must decide whether the Pietra 
 poems and the philosophical poems really do form two 
 separate groups; for it has been assumed by some 
 scholars that Pietra and the personifier of philosophy 
 are one. In favor of this hypothesis is the use of the 
 word Pargoletta, or " Little Maid," in one undoubted 
 Pietra poem and in two that almost surely belong to 
 Lady Philosophy. In both series the loved object is 
 very youthful. Moreover, there are a few pieces of 
 verse that seem to fit almost equally well into both
 
 PIETRA 105 
 
 categories. But if we take each set as a whole, we shall 
 find that it is tolerably distinct from the other. The 
 poems to Pietra, intensely passionate and always hope- 
 less, are associated with mountains and winter; those 
 presumably dedicated to Lady Philosophy are char- 
 acterized by a suggestion of the supernatural, by a 
 conflict between an old love and a new, and by varia- 
 tions in the attitude of the lady. Not every member of 
 either class contains all the features of its own category; 
 but none, as I have divided them, contains features of 
 the other. There seems, then, to be a sufficient principle 
 of differentiation. 
 
 This differentiation, however, does not dispose of the 
 question whether the lyrics dealing with Pietra have an 
 allegorical intent. For even though their lady do not 
 represent philosophy, she may symbolize something 
 else for instance, poetic art, a suitable object, if we 
 consider their workmanship. Florence, too, would be 
 appropriate as the hard-hearted mistress, if we excluded 
 one of the five pieces; otherwise, as I have shown, it 
 would be impossible. But really, aside from Dante's 
 statement in the Banquet, which may not have to do 
 with these poems at all, we have no cause to regard them 
 as allegorical. There is no hint of mystic significance 
 in the verses themselves; in fact, their tenor makes a 
 symbolic purpose seem almost incongruous. 
 
 If, our Pietra being reduced to a creature of flesh and 
 blood, the object (supposedly) of a transient and be-
 
 106 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 lated infatuation, we inquire who she was, we receive no 
 answer. Tempting as it is, we must reject as unproven 
 the hypothesis of a modern critic (V. Imbriani, Suite 
 canzoni pietrose di Dante, in Studi danteschi, 1891), that 
 she was Pietra di Donato di Brunaccio, wife of the poet's 
 brother Francesco, a theory which, if we could accept it, 
 would account for the note of wickedness previously 
 observed. Quite unsupported is the identification, by a 
 Renaissance writer (A. M. Amadi, Annotationi sopra 
 una canzone morale, 1565), of our Pietra with Pietra 
 degli Scrovegni, an aristocratic and cultivated lady of 
 Padua. Equally unlikely going back to Dante's own 
 century is the hearsay affirmation by Boccaccio 
 (Compendio, xvii) that Dante fell in love, while visiting 
 the Casentino, with a certain woman attractive in face 
 but afflicted with a goitre. Summing up the little we 
 know and all we can lawfully infer, the most explicit 
 statement we can make, even tentatively, is that the 
 poems we have examined express a bitter and unre- 
 quited passion of the poet for a young mountain girl.
 
 IV. BEATRICE 
 
 DANTE'S New Life opens in this wise: "In that 
 part of the book of my memory before which little 
 is legible, is found a rubric, Incipit Vita Nova [' Begin- 
 ning of the New Life '] ; under which rubric I find the 
 words which it is my purpose to copy down in this little 
 book, and, if not all of them, at least their substance." 
 The author's plan, therefore, is to record the psychic 
 experiences of his " new life," the life which begins with 
 his rebirth under the influence of " the most gentle 
 Beatrice." And these experiences extend almost as far 
 back into his childhood as distinct memory can go. The 
 first of them, which occurs in his ninth year, is narrated 
 as follows: "Nine times already, after my birth, the 
 heaven of light [the sphere of the sun] had returned 
 almost to the same point, in its own [annual] revolution, 
 when first appeared to my eyes the glorious queen of my 
 mind, who was called Beatrice by many who knew not 
 what they were calling." The last clause may mean 
 also, " who knew not what to call ": in the one case the 
 significance would be that her acquaintances, who used 
 her real name, Beatrices-were unaware of the mystic 
 appropriateness of that appellation, which means 
 Bestower of Blessings^/ in the other case we should 
 understand that strangers, not knowing her name, 
 instinctively called her Beatrice because of her benign 
 
 107
 
 108 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 influence. I believe Dante intentionally made the phrase 
 mysteriously ambiguous, in order, at least ostensibly, 
 to leave his readers in doubt whether JBeatrice_was his 
 lady's actual name or a poetic epithet, like Primavera 
 or Pietra. 
 
 The episode continues thus: " She had already been 
 so long in this life that in her time the starry heaven 
 [the sphere of the fixed stars, which revolves one degree 
 in a hundred years] had moved toward the eastern 
 quarter one of the twelve parts of a degree." She had, 
 therefore, lived one-twelfth of one hundred years, or 
 eight and one-third years. " It was, then, almost at the 
 beginning of her ninth year that she appeared to me, 
 and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth. She 
 appeared to me clad in a very noble color, modest and 
 dignified, a color blood-red [the symbol of love], girdled 
 and adorned after the fashion that befitted her very 
 youthful age." Now we come to the description of his 
 transformation, couched in the psychological terminol- 
 ogy of the day. " At that moment I declare verily that 
 the spirit of life, which dwells in the most secret cham- 
 ber of the heart, began to tremble so hard that it was 
 horribly evident in the smallest pulses; and, trembling, 
 it spake these words: ' Lo! a God stronger than I, who 
 shall come and rule over me.' ' The spirit of life, in 
 Dante, is in the future to be governed by the God of 
 Love. " At that moment the animal spirit, which dwells 
 in the high chamber [the brain] to which all the spirits
 
 BEATRICE 109 
 
 of sense [which we call nerves] carry their perceptions, 
 began to wonder greatly, and, addressing in particular 
 the spirits of sight, it spake these words : * Your happi- 
 ness hath now appeared.' ' From now on, Dante's 
 senses, and especially the sense of sight, shall have their 
 joy in Beatrice alone^ " At that point the naturafspirTE, 
 which dwells in that place where our nourishment is 
 administered [the liver], began to weep, and, weeping, 
 spake these words: ' Woe is me! for often I shall be 
 obstructed henceforth ! ' ' Under the influence of Love, 
 the natural operations of the body are liable to inter- 
 ruption by palpitations and swoons. 
 
 The strange, overmastering effect of love on the phys- 
 ical and mental faculties is described by the poet in an 
 ode, not included in the New Life, called E' m' incresce di 
 me si malamente, which begins: 
 
 I feel such cruel pity for myself 
 
 That sympathy awakes 
 A pain as keen as that of my distress. 
 
 After a vivid portrayal of the agonies of love, the poem 
 goes on to tell how they began, carrying their origin 
 considerably further back than it is carried in the more 
 rational account given by the New Life. 
 
 V 
 
 The day this lady came into the world, 
 
 As still is clearly shown 
 In memory's book, which fadeth fast away,
 
 110 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Into my tiny, helpless form was hurled 
 
 A passion all unknown, 
 
 Which kept me filled with quivering dismay. 
 A check was put on all my powers that day 
 So suddenly that straight to earth I fell, 
 
 Hearing a voice, which fearful smote my breast. 
 If truth the book do tell, 
 
 My greatest spirit quaked, with shortened breath, 
 So hard, 't was plain that death 
 
 Had come to earth to be that spirit's guest. 
 Now Love, who did it all, is sore distrest. 
 
 VI 
 
 Then, later, when I saw her beauteous face, 
 
 The source of all my harm, 
 (Fair listening ladies, who avoid me not!) 
 That faculty which hath the highest place, 
 
 Considering her charm, 
 Clearly perceived its miserable lot 
 And recognized the longing that was got 
 By one sweet lingering look her eyes did cast; 
 
 And thus addrest the other faculties : 
 " Who once was here, is past! 
 Henceforth that lovely figure shall I see 
 Which now doth frighten me; 
 
 And over all of us, when it shall please 
 
 Her queenly eyes, the sceptre she shall seize." 
 
 " From that time forth," the New Life goes on, " I 
 declare that Love ruled my soul, which was so quickly
 
 BEATRICE 111 
 
 wedded to him, and began to assume over me such assur- 
 ance and such mastery, thanks to the power given him 
 by my imagination, that I was constrained to do all his 
 pleasures completely. Many times did he command me 
 to go in search of this very youthful angel; wherefore 
 did I often in my boyhood set forth to seek her, and I 
 would see her of such noble and praiseworthy bearing 
 that surely one might say of her that phrase of the poet 
 Homer, ' She seemed not the child of mortal man, but 
 of God.' ' If, as Boccaccio tells us, this maiden was 
 Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a neighbor, it is 
 likely that Dante saw her frequently. Not until nine 
 years after the first meeting, however, when the young 
 people were seventeen, did Beatrice speak to her admirer 
 - if we are to believe the account in the Vita Nuova. 
 This first greeting was the occasion of the first poem 
 included in the " little book," the dream-sonnet, which 
 he sent to various literary men of his day, several of 
 whom replied in verse to the new poet. To this sonnet 
 we shall presently return. 
 
 In the stanzas above quoted, one is particularly struck 
 by these lines: 
 
 " Who once was here, is past! 
 
 Henceforth that lovely figure shall I see 
 Which now doth frighten me," 
 
 which would seem to point to a previous interest, before 
 the coming of Beatrice. One calls to mind the screen 
 ladies, whom I mentioned in the discussion of Violet
 
 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 those young persons for whom, according to the New 
 Life, the poet professed an admiration, in order to con- 
 ceal his love for Beatrice. They appear at this stage of 
 the story; and we may, without undue skepticism, 
 suspect that, in the budding emotions of a lad of seven- 
 teen to twenty, no sharp distinction was made between 
 " the most gentle " and sundry other gentle lasses. It 
 may be that we have a glimpse of that fluctuating period 
 in an unattached sonnet, probably Dante's, Due donne 
 in cima delta mente mia: 
 
 Upon the summit of my mind I see 
 
 Two ladies, who of love are come to speak. 
 
 The one possesseth grace and merit meek, 
 Mated with prudence and with modesty. 
 Beauty the other hath, and charm, in fee; 
 
 Sweet gentleness her company doth seek. 
 
 Thanks to my kindly master, I, all weak, 
 Stand here, obedient to their sovereignty. 
 Beauty and worth their case to judgment state : 
 
 " How can a heart divided stand," they plead, 
 " Between two maids, with love immaculate ? " 
 
 The Font of gentle speech declares his creed: 
 " One may love beauty, which doth captivate, 
 
 And virtue may be loved for noble deed." 
 
 In consequence of some real or pretended captivation, 
 Beatrice denies Dante her greeting. Then comes the 
 episode of her mockery, at the wedding banquet; and 
 that is followed by the criticism of Dante's verses by a
 
 BEATRICE 113 
 
 group of lady friends, and the poet's conversion to the 
 " dolce stil nuovo" The immediate fruit of this change 
 of manner is the first canzone, Donne ch' avete intelletto 
 d'amore. Of these things I have already spoken in de- 
 tail, and I have cited (p. 21) a stanza of the ode, which 
 discourses of the angelic character of Beatrice, her 
 fitness for Heaven, and her miraculous influence on 
 earth. 
 
 After a couple of little poems in the " new style " 
 comes the death of the " most noble " lady's father, 
 who, if he really was Folco, of the distinguished old 
 Ghibelline family of the Portinari, passed away on 
 December 31, 1289, having been four times Prior of 
 Florence, and having founded the hospital of Santa 
 Maria Novella. We still have his will, dated January 
 15, 1288, bequeathing his property to five sons and six 
 daughters, among them " Bice, wife of Master Simone 
 dei Bardi." If, then, Boccaccio's identification is cor- 
 rect, Bice, or Beatrice, was by 1288 wedded to this 
 Simone, a banker and philanthropist well known in 
 Florence. Dante nowhere speaks of a marriage of 
 Beatrice; but possibly his change of style was not 
 unconnected with such an event. 
 
 " Not many days later, as it pleased the glorious Lord 
 (who did not deny death unto himself), he who had been 
 the father of that great miracle which the most noble 
 Beatrice was seen to be, issuing from this life, went 
 forth verily to eternal glory. Wherefore, inasmuch as
 
 114 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 such a departure is painful to those who are left and 
 have been friends of him who parteth, and inasmuch as 
 there is no such close friendship as that from a good 
 father to a good child and from a good child to a good 
 father, and inasmuch as the goodness of this lady was of 
 very high degree, and her father (as many believe, and 
 rightly) was good to a high degree, it is clear that this 
 lady was most bitterly filled with pain. And inasmuch 
 as, according to the custom of the aforesaid city, ladies 
 gather together with ladies, and men with men, for such 
 mourning, many ladies gathered there where this Bea- 
 trice was weeping piteously; wherefore I, as I watched 
 some ladies returning from her, heard them speak words 
 of this most gentle one, how she was grieving. Among 
 which words I heard some that said: ' Surely she 
 weepeth so that whosoever should see her would have 
 to die of pity.' Then these ladies passed on; and I was 
 left in such sadness that from time to time a tear wet my 
 face, wherefore I concealed myself by often putting my 
 hands to my eyes. And if it were not that I expected to 
 hear more of her, being in a place where passed the 
 greater part of those ladies who went forth from her, I 
 should have hidden myself the moment the tears had 
 beset me. Therefore, as I was still remaining in the 
 same place, more ladies passed near me, who went 
 speaking among them these words: ' Which of us shall 
 ever be happy, since we have heard this lady speak so 
 piteously ? ' After these, others went by, who came
 
 BEATRICE 115 
 
 saying: ' This man, who is here, weepeth neither more 
 nor less than if he had seen her, as we have.' Wherefore 
 I, reflecting, determined to write words, since I had fit 
 cause to write, in which words I should include all that 
 I had heard from these ladies. And inasmuch as I 
 gladly would have questioned them, had it not been 
 reprehensible, I set about composing as if I had ques- 
 tioned them and they had answered me. And I made 
 two sonnets, in the first of which I question after the 
 fashion that I felt a desire to ask, and in the other I tell 
 their reply, taking what I heard from them as if they 
 had said it to me by way of answer." 
 
 The two sonnets, then, together form a dialogue, the 
 first being spoken by the author, the second by the 
 ladies. The same subject recurs in two other poems by 
 Dante, Onde venite voi cosi pensose and Voi donne che 
 pietoso alto mostrate, not included in the New Life; but 
 in the first of these we have only the poet's speech, 
 without the ladies' reply, while in the second the ques- 
 tion and the answer are included in a single poem. Here 
 are the two sonnets from the Vita Nuova, whose origin 
 the writer has just narrated: 
 
 Dante to Ladies 
 
 O ye who walk with self-forgetful mien, 
 With lowered eyes betraying hidden rue, 
 Whence come ye, wearing pity's very hue 
 
 And very look ? Ah! tell, where have ye been ? 
 
 Have ye perchance our gentle Lady seen,
 
 116 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 With Love upon her face all bathed in dew ? 
 
 Ladies, reply! My heart declares 't is true, 
 Because ye walk majestic, like a queen. 
 And if ye come from such a piteousness, 
 
 I pray you here a bit with me to bide 
 And how it fares with her, to me confess. 
 
 Your eyes cannot conceal that they have cried. 
 I see you come, such pictures of distress, 
 
 I dare not think of what is prophesied. 
 
 Ladies to Dante 
 
 Art thou the man who oft hath been inclined 
 
 To sing of Her, addressing us alone ? 
 
 His voice and thine, indeed, are like in tone, 
 And yet thy visage seems of different kind. 
 Alas! why weepest thou, so unresigned 
 
 That thou wouldst kindle pity in a stone ? 
 
 Oh ! hast thou listened to her piteous moan, 
 Who canst not now conceal thy sorrowing mind ? 
 
 Leave tears to us, and sad funereal pace! 
 
 'T is sin to wish that we be comforted, 
 Since we have heard her speak with mournful grace. 
 
 Such sadness hovers plainly o'er her head 
 That who should try to look upon her face, 
 
 Weeping would sink to earth before her, dead. 
 
 We have now reached the central incident of the Vita 
 Nuova: an illness of the author, during which he has a 
 feverish dream, foreboding the death of his beloved. 
 This delirious vision forms the theme of the second
 
 BEATRICE 117 
 
 canzone. Here is Dante's prose paraphrase of it: " Some 
 days after this, it came to pass that in a certain part of 
 my person there fell upon me a painful illness, where- 
 from I continually suffered for nine days very bitter 
 pain, which brought me to such weakness that I had to 
 stay as those who cannot move. I declare that on the 
 ninth day, feeling almost unbearable pain, I had a 
 thought, which was of my lady. And when I had 
 thought of her a little, I returned in meditation to my 
 enfeebled life; and, seeing how slight was its duration, 
 even had it been sound, I began to weep to myself at 
 such misery. Wherefore, sighing heavily, I said to my- 
 self: ' It must needs be that the most gentle Beatrice 
 at some time die.' And at that such violent distraction 
 came upon me that I closed my eyes and began to 
 change like a frantic person, and to imagine in this wise. 
 At the outset of my fancy's wandering, certain faces of 
 disheveled women appeared to me, saying: * Thou, too, 
 shalt die! ' And after these women, there appeared to 
 me certain faces strange and horrible to see, which said 
 unto me : ' Thou art dead ! ' My fancy thus beginning to 
 stray, I came to such a pass that I knew not where I was; 
 and I seemed to see women walking disheveled on the 
 street, weeping, marvelously sad; and I seemed to see 
 the sun darkened so that the stars showed themselves, 
 of such a color as to lead me to think that they were 
 weeping; and it seemed to me that the birds flying 
 through the air dropped dead, and that there were very
 
 118 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 great earthquakes. And, as I marveled in this fancy, 
 sore afraid, I imagined a certain friend coming and say- 
 ing: ' Now knowest thou not ? Thy wondrous lady 
 hath parted from this world ! ' Then began I to weep 
 right piteously; and not only did I weep in imagination, 
 but I wept with my eyes, wetting them with real tears. 
 I thought I looked toward heaven, and I seemed to see a 
 host of angels returning upward with a very white little 
 cloud before them; and these angels seemed to be sing- 
 ing gloriously, and it seemed to me their song was 
 * Hosanna in excelsis,' and I seemed to hear naught else. 
 Then it seemed to me that my heart, where was so much 
 love, said to me: ' True it is that our lady lieth dead.' 
 And therefore I seemed to go to see the body in which 
 had been that most noble and blessed soul. And so 
 strong was my errant fancy that it showed me this lady 
 dead; and I thought ladies were covering her head with 
 a white veil; and I thought her face had such a look of 
 meekness that it seemed to say: * I am beholding the 
 source of peace.' " After the funeral rites, Dante seems 
 to return to his chamber, and there to call on Beatrice 
 and death; then, waking with the name of Beatrice on 
 his lips, he finds that his sobs have aroused consternation 
 in a very young and sympathetic relative (probably a 
 sister) who was watching over him, and that her weep- 
 ing has startled other ladies in the sick room. Let me 
 cite one stanza from the middle of the poem, which is 
 called Donna pietosa e di novella etate:
 
 BEATRICE 119 
 
 IV 
 
 Then I beheld full many a fearful thing 
 
 In that delirium which encompast me. 
 I seemed to be in some unheard-of spot 
 Where women all unkempt were wandering, 
 
 Some shedding tears, some wailing piteously, 
 Whose cries a pelting fire of sadness shot. 
 Then slowly darkness seems the sun to blot 
 Till finally the smallest star appears 
 Both stars and sun in tears. 
 
 The soaring birdlets seem to drop in flocks; 
 The earth (I see it!) rocks; 
 
 And, weak and pale, a man: " Knowest thou not ? 
 Hast thou not heard the story ? Dost not care ? 
 Dead is thy lady, she that was so fair! " 
 
 Next in order is the incident of Monna Vanna and 
 Monna Bice, the former, who is surnamed " Primavera," 
 walking ahead of Dante's lady (see p. 58). Then, after 
 a discourse on personification, come two " new style " 
 sonnets of peculiar serenity and sweetness, placed here, 
 no doubt, to furnish a contrast to the impending catas- 
 trophe. Here is the first, Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare: 
 
 So dignified my lady looks always, 
 
 And dear, when she a greeting doth bestow, 
 
 That every trembling tongue doth speechless grow, 
 
 And eyes are all afraid on her to gaze. 
 
 In meekness clad, tho' hearing naught but praise, 
 Her modest, kindly way she still doth go.
 
 120 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 A thing she seems from Heaven sent below, 
 A miracle, our spirits to amaze. 
 Her countenance so charms the seeing eye 
 
 That sweetness swells the heart, from up above, 
 Which he who sees not, cannot comprehend; 
 Forth from her face there seems its way to wend 
 A sprite replete with gentleness and love, 
 Which beareth to the soul this message: " Sigh! " 
 
 The second is called Vede perfettamente ogni salute: 
 
 All happiness he fully doth behold 
 
 With other ladies who my lady sees; 
 And those who walk with her should not withhold 
 
 Their gratitude to God for his decrees. 
 Her beauty hath such majesty untold, 
 
 No jealousy its sight accompanies; 
 But her companions it doth all enfold 
 
 In faith and love and gentle qualities. 
 Her presence turns to meekness every thing, 
 
 And gives such dignity to womankind 
 
 That men not her alone, but others, bless. 
 And all her doings are so comforting 
 
 That not a man can bring her back to mind 
 Who shall not sigh with loving tenderness. 
 
 While the poet is in this mood, and just in the act of 
 composing an ode expressive of calm and almost super- 
 human contentment, the blow suddenly falls. No poem 
 marks the arrival of the news of the most gentle lady's 
 death. An abrupt pause, a quotation from the Lamen-
 
 BEATRICE 121 
 
 tations of Jeremiah, a terse statement of the event and 
 of the reasons which prevent the afflicted lover from 
 singing his grief : that is all save a disquisition on the 
 meaning of the number nine. Only after this discourse, 
 and after mention of a mourning composition (unknown 
 to us) that the author has excluded from the New Life 
 because it was written in Latin, do we come upon the 
 poem of bereavement which we have been expecting, 
 Gli occhi dolenti per pieta del core. Let us be satisfied 
 with one stanza of this third long canzone, the strophe 
 which tells how Beatrice died neither of fever heat nor 
 of mortal chill, as is the normal death of mankind, but of 
 her celestial goodness and fitness for Heaven. Here we 
 find the earliest occurrence, in Dante's poetry, of the 
 full name, Beatrice; in the verses written before her 
 death she was either unnamed or, in one merely com- 
 plimentary sonnet, called by the common, abbreviated 
 form of the name, Bice. 
 
 II 
 
 Gone forth is Beatrice to deepest Heaven, 
 Where angels ever dwell in peace on high; 
 
 To live with them, you, ladies, hath she left. 
 No quality of cold this grief hath given, 
 Nor yet of heat, as other women die : 
 
 Her goodness only hath the world bereft; 
 The light of her humility hath cleft 
 The circling skies with all the power of love, 
 And wakened wonder in th' eternal Sire,
 
 122 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 And then a sweet desire 
 To call that queen of blessedness above 
 
 And bid her heavenward from the earth retire; 
 Because he saw our sad existence here 
 Was far from worthy of a thing so dear. 
 
 Thereupon ensues a curious episode, which we had 
 better hear in Dante's words: "After this ode was 
 written, there came unto me one who, in the degrees of 
 friendship, is my friend immediately after the first 
 [Guido Cavalcanti] ; and he was so close in kinship to 
 this glorious lady that no one was more so." He must 
 have been one of her brothers, possibly always 
 assuming that she was really a Portinari the one 
 called Manetto. " And when he had entered into 
 speech with me, he besought me to write something for 
 a lady who had died; and he covered over his words, 
 that it might seem he spake of another woman, who 
 in fact had passed away. Wherefore I, understanding 
 that he spake only in behalf of the blessed one, promised 
 to do what his prayer requested. Then, pondering over 
 it, I determined to write a sonnet, in which I should 
 express some grief, and give it to this friend of mine, in 
 order that I might appear to have made it for him." 
 Not only a sonnet, but also a short canzone was com- 
 posed, it would seem, in this strange fashion, osten- 
 sibly in mourning for the lady chosen by Beatrice's 
 brother, but really inspired by the death of Beatrice 
 herself. The poems, which must have circulated as
 
 BEATRICE 123 
 
 elegies for the other lady, and perhaps under the name 
 of the friend, are apparently inserted and explained in 
 the New Life for the double purpose of attaching them 
 to Beatrice and of dispelling any possible mistake 
 concerning their authorship. 
 
 Familiar to all is the picture of the poet, on the anni- 
 versary of his lady's death, drawing figures of angels on 
 tablets, unaware of the presence of visitors who have 
 entered while he was absorbed in his work and his 
 memories. " They," he relates, " were looking at that 
 which I did; and, as I was told afterwards, they had 
 been there some time before I perceived them. When I 
 saw them, I arose and, greeting them, said : * Another 
 was with me just now, and therefore was I thoughtful.' ' 
 On this theme he wrote a sonnet, with two beginnings, 
 Era venuta nella mente mia, to which I shall presently 
 revert. 
 
 At a later time, seeing a band of pilgrims traverse 
 Florence on their way to Rome, he was moved to this 
 reflection : ' ' These pilgrims seem to me to come from 
 afar, 'and I do not believe they ever heard of this lady, 
 and they know nothing of her, rather are their thoughts 
 bent on other things than these here, for perhaps they 
 are thinking of their distant friends, whom we know 
 not." And he wrote the following sonnet: 
 
 Ah ! pilgrims, who so thoughtful walk and slow, 
 Intent perhaps on nothing near at hand, 
 Come ye indeed from such a distant strand
 
 124 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 As your impassive faces seem to show, 
 Which are not wet with tears, the while ye go 
 
 Right through the saddest city of the land 
 
 Like foreign men, who seem to understand 
 Nothing whatever of the city's woe ? 
 In sooth my sighing heart is sure of this: 
 
 That if, to hear, your journey ye defer, 
 
 Ye shall not then depart without a tear. 
 Our mourning town hath lost its Beatrice! 
 
 And every word which men may speak of her 
 Hath power to turn to sorrow those who hear. 
 
 Between these two songs of placid grief lies a troubled 
 experience, which shall form the subject of our last 
 chapter the compassionate glances of a youthful per- 
 son seen at a window, and the growth and eventual 
 subjugation of Dante's affection for her. The New Life 
 ends with the final triumph of Beatrice after death, as 
 it^ began with her first victory on earth. The last poem 
 of the book tells how Dante's thought, piercing the nine v 
 
 {material skies, even the outermost and greatest, 
 vhich surrounds all the others, rises into the Heaven 
 >f spirit, the true Paradise, where it beholds Beatrice 
 n glory. 
 
 Beyond the sphere which loftiest doth aspire 
 Passes the sigh that issues from my breast; 
 A new intelligence which Love, distrest, 
 
 Confers upon it, drives it ever higher. 
 
 When it has reacht the goal of its desire,
 
 BEATRICE 125 
 
 It sees a lady, honored by the blest, 
 And shining so that, blindingly imprest, 
 The pilgrim spirit lingers to admire. 
 It sees her such that I its meaning miss 
 
 When it describes, it speaks a sound so faint 
 Unto the grieving heart, which bids it tell; 
 I know it speaketh of that gentle saint, 
 Because it often nameth Beatrice; 
 
 And that, dear ladies mine, I hear full well. 
 
 " After this sonnet," Dante continues," appeared to 
 me a wondrous vision, in which I beheld things which 
 made me resolve to say nothing more of this blessed one, 
 until such time as I should be more worthy to treat of 
 her. And to this end am I striving with all my might, 
 even as she verily doth know. Wherefore, if it shall be 
 the pleasure of Him by whom all things live, that my 
 life last a few years, I hope to say of her that which 
 never was said of any woman." Xhe_monument thus 
 lovingly conceived, so profoundly planned, and erected 
 with such toil and such incomparable skill the Divina 
 Commedia remains to this day unapproached by any 
 otjier w r ork of art dedicated to woman. 
 
 In Dante's Comedy the " blessed one," as we have 
 seen, plays the part of divine revelation, guide to beati- 
 tude. But it is not W1 th t.hp Tlpa/trW nf the ffreat mas- 
 terpiece that we have to deal just now: our concern js 
 with_the " most gentle " lady of the New Life and of the 
 lyrics not comprised in that " little book." Is Beatrice
 
 126 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 already a symbolic figure in these ? Is she merely a 
 woman, idealized and angelic, or is she the impersona- 
 tion of something abstract ? A similar problem con- 
 f rented us with regard to Pietra; and in her case, while 
 we were undecided, the absence of any indication of 
 mystic intent inclined us to the negative. 
 
 To a certain extent the Vita Nuova is evidently sym- 
 bolistic, with its personification of love, its doctrine of 
 the occult significance of names and numbers, and, after 
 the author's change of style, its attribution of super- 
 natural qualities to the beloved. So far, all are agreed. 
 Beyond this point, however, opinions are very diverse. 
 According to some, the " little book " is simply an 
 autobiography, discreet, veiled, made up of details 
 selected in view of a preconceived plan, a plan devised 
 to give the impression of unity; yet fundamentally true. 
 In the opinion of others, the New Life is a sentimental 
 novel, containing, no doubt, some real experiences, but 
 essentially idealistic, invented by the author to illus- 
 trate his idea of feminine grace and platonic love. 
 Others still are convinced that this same work is not 
 only a novel but an allegorical novel, in which neither 
 persons nor events have literal reality; as to the mean- 
 ing of this allegory, however, they can hardly deny that 
 it is somewhat vague and rather faintly suggested by the 
 text. Finally, some maintain that the incidents related 
 by the poet are true, but that, when he composed his 
 book, he wished to allegorize them or give them a
 
 BEATRICE 127 
 
 mystic sense, and that he arranged and more or less 
 transformed them, to make them fit into the frame pre- 
 pared for them. This opinion is strikingly set forth by 
 Professor J. B. Fletcher in his volume on Dante and 
 elsewhere. 
 
 Which of these hypotheses is the right one ? Is it pos- 
 sible to find an explanation that shall combine two 
 methods of interpretation for instance, the first and 
 the last, the literal and the literal-mystical ? Let us 
 examine more closely the work itself. We find in it, to 
 start with, a series of thirty-one poems, which form, so 
 to speak, its skeleton, the bits of prose being fitted about 
 them. Furthermore, these poems are more or less sys- 
 tematically arranged ; for the twenty-eight sonnets and 
 other short pieces cluster about the three long canzoni 
 which dominate the central part of the book. The plan 
 of the Vita Nuova is, then, very definitely and artisti- 
 cally designed. But there is another principle of dis- 
 position. The author plainly implies (and we have no 
 adequate reason to question the correctness of his impli- 
 cation) that the sequence of the poems is in accord with 
 their chronological order. What Dante professes to 
 offer us, in this book, is a series of poems selected from 
 the verses written by him between the ages of seventeen 
 and twenty-seven or twenty-eight. These poems, we 
 may safely infer, were already in circulation, known and 
 discussed by his friends and by the little literary public 
 of Florence. It was probably towards 1293 or 1294,
 
 128 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 some three or four years after the death of Beatrice, 
 that the chosen pieces were gathered together by their 
 author and surrounded with a prose commentary. 
 
 For a work of this sort Dante found a model in the 
 Provengal song-books, in which are given biographical 
 details concerning the writers of the texts. In particular, 
 it has been convincingly argued by Professor P. Rajna 
 (Lo schema della Vita Nuova, 1890) that the suggestion 
 came from a manuscript of the works of Bertran de 
 Born, which presents the warrior-poet's songs embedded 
 in explanatory matter that forms a continuous narra- 
 tive. We have reason to believe that such a manuscript 
 was kept in Florence in the thirteenth century, and we 
 know that Dante was familiar with Bertran de Born. 
 The mingling of prose and poetry is found also in 
 Boethius's famous treatise On the Consolation of Phi- 
 losophy, the first book of secular philosophy studied by 
 Dante, as he tells us in the Banquet; in this work, how- 
 ever, composed in prison while the author was awaiting 
 death, the prose and the verse are presumably due to one 
 continuous inspiration. 
 
 At the time when Alighieri conceived the plan of the 
 New Life, he had read not only Boethius, but some of the 
 philosophy of Cicero, and he had followed courses in 
 theology; moreover, he had been matured by suffering 
 and meditation. The Dante who wrote the autobio- 
 graphical prose is, then, a very different Dante from the 
 one who composed the poems (especially the earlier
 
 BEATRICE 129 
 
 ones) which this prose expounds. An erudite Dante is 
 this commentator, serious, careful of his reputation, 
 steeped in mysticism, full of Biblical images and of phil- 
 osophical doctrine. What he desires above all is to 
 justify his life before others and before his own con- 
 science, to read into his juvenile verses a depth and 
 unity which they were far from possessing, to bring all 
 the emotions of his youth into harmony with the super- 
 natural influence ultimately ascribed to Beatrice, to 
 transform this gentle Florentine into an angel, to dis- 
 cover in all his relations with her the sign of heavenly 
 predestination. 
 
 This purpose is responsible not only for some incon- 
 sistencies and obscurities, but also for a system of 
 exegesis which discovers in each of the poems what the 
 author would have put into it if he had written it at the 
 same time as the prose. The vague presentiment of 
 grief, expressed at the close of the first sonnet, becomes 
 a foreboding of the death of Beatrice. The gallant verses 
 addressed to other young damsels are attributed to 
 fictitious attachments, invented to conceal his one true 
 love. As we have just seen, two elegies on the death of 
 an unnamed lady are explained as having been com- 
 posed ostensibly for the mistress of a brother of Beatrice, 
 but really for Beatrice herself. The new affection which, 
 if we are to believe a group of four sonnets in the latter 
 part of the New Life, began to usurp the place of the old 
 love, is quickly vanquished and cast out according to
 
 130 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 the prose commentary; whereas the evidence of the Ban- 
 quet and the Divine Comedy would seem to indicate a 
 long duration. 
 
 The most curious example of this method occurs in 
 the introduction to a little poem cited in the chapter on 
 Matilda (p. 58), a sonnet which is manifestly nothing 
 but a graceful compliment offered to two ladies, the 
 second of these being his own Bice or Beatrice, the first 
 a certain Vanna or Giovanna (that is, Joan), surnamed 
 " Springtime," formerly dear to his friend, Guido 
 Cavalcanti. In these pretty verses, which, in all likeli- 
 hood, were widely known and therefore could not be 
 overlooked in the Vita Nuova, the poet had to explain 
 why the name of Beatrice is second and not first an 
 order originally due, no doubt, to the dedication of the 
 sonnet to Guido. Here is Dante's explanation : "After 
 this empty vision of mine [the feverish dream of the 
 death of Beatrice], it came to pass that, as I was some- 
 where sitting thoughtful, I felt a quiver begin in my 
 heart, as if I had been in the presence of this lady. Then, 
 I declare, there came upon me a vision of Love; for I 
 seemed to see him coming from the quarter where my 
 lady dw r elt, and it seemed to me that he spake to me 
 joyously in my heart: ' Forget not to bless the day I 
 took thee, for it is thy duty to do so.' And verily I 
 seemed to have a heart so joyous that it did not seem to 
 be mine, so strange was its condition. And a little after 
 these words which my heart had said to me with the
 
 BEATRICE 131 
 
 tongue of Love, I saw coming toward me a gentle lady 
 who was of famous beauty, and was once much loved by 
 this first friend of mine. And the name of this lady was 
 Joan, save that for her beauty's sake, so 't is thought, 
 the name Primavera [Springtime] was bestowed upon 
 her, and so she was called. Then, looking after her, I 
 saw coming the wondrous Beatrice. These ladies passed 
 near me thus, one after the other; and it seemed to me 
 that Love spake in my heart, saying: ' That first one 
 was named Primavera merely because of this coming 
 to-day; for I inspired the giver of the name to call her 
 Primavera, that is, prima verra [she shall come before] 
 on the first day on which Beatrice shall show herself 
 after her liegeman's vision. And, shouldst thou care 
 also to consider her first name, it is equivalent to Prima- 
 vera; for her name, Joan, is from that John who pre- 
 ceded the true light, saying: " I am the voice of one 
 crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the 
 Lord." ' Furthermore, it seemed to me that, after these 
 words, he said : ' Whosoever should wish to consider 
 closely, would call this Beatrice, Love, because of the 
 great likeness she hath to me.' Wherefore I, reflecting 
 afterwards, determined to write thereof in rime to my 
 first friend, withholding certain words which it 
 seemed fit to withhold, believing that his heart still 
 contemplated the beauty of this gentle Primavera." 
 
 The more closely we examine the text of the New Life, 
 the more clearly we perceive what extraordinary trouble
 
 132 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Dante has taken to adapt to his later mode of thought 
 the poems and the events that gave rise to them. And 
 that very effort, or rather the difficulty that necessitates 
 it, is a proof that the events are real, not invented for 
 this book; for, had they been fictitious, there would 
 have been no difficulties, no contradictions, no incon- 
 gruities, there would have been nothing to accommodate 
 or to explain away, since all would have been conceived 
 to suit the poet's idea. 
 
 If this conclusion is justified, it permits us to attempt 
 to reconstruct sundry little episodes which the author 
 has lightly sketched. Dante's habitual reticence makes 
 us very eager for knowledge and very reluctant to let go 
 any bit of information that he has allowed to escape. 
 From time to time the New Life opens a perspective, all 
 the more enticing for being veiled, and discreetly reveals 
 some scene from the poet's inner life. "After this 
 vision," we read, the vision being the inspiration of the 
 very first sonnet, " my natural spirit began to be 
 obstructed in its operation, because my mind was all 
 given over to thought of this most gentle one ; wherefore 
 I became in a little while of such frail and weak condi- 
 tion that many friends were grieved by my looks, and 
 many people, full of envy, already were trying to learn 
 from me that which I desired wholly to hide from others. 
 And I, understanding the mischievous questions they 
 put to me, replied to them (at the bidding of Love, who 
 commanded me in accord with the counsel of reason)
 
 BEATRICE 133 
 
 that Love was the one who had thus treated me. I 
 spake of Love, because I bore in my face so many of his 
 marks that this could not be concealed. And when they 
 asked of me: ' For whom hath this Love so wasted 
 thee ? ' then I looked at them and smiled, but said 
 nothing to them." 
 
 Presently comes the scene of the church (p. 33) and 
 the gentle lady who sits between Dante and Beatrice, 
 an episode introduced to account for a series of amorous 
 poems addressed to a young person otherwise unknown 
 to us. After some time this lady had to leave Florence 
 and go to dwell far from the city. A little later, " a thing 
 came to pass which constrained me to depart from the 
 aforesaid city and go toward those parts where was the 
 gentle lady who had been my protection, although the 
 goal of my journey was not so far away as she was. And 
 albeit I was outwardly in the company of many [the 
 occasion was probably a small military excursion against 
 the Aretines], the journey displeased me so that my sighs 
 could scarcely relieve the anguish which my heart felt, 
 because I was withdrawing from my blessedness [from 
 Beatrice, who remained in Florence]. Wherefore that 
 very sweet Lord who governed me by the authority of 
 the very gentle lady, appeared in my fancy, like a pil- 
 grim lightly clad, and in mean garments. He seemed to 
 me downcast, gazing at the ground, save that from time 
 to time I thought his eyes strayed to a beautiful river, 
 swift and very clear, which flowed along beside the road
 
 134 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 where I was. Love seemed to call me, speaking these 
 words: ' I come from that lady who hath been thy 
 protection, and I know that her return will never be; 
 and therefore I have with me the heart which I made 
 thee keep with her, and I am taking it to a lady who 
 shall be thy shelter, as the other was.' And he named 
 her to me, so that I knew well who she was. * But 
 nevertheless, shouldst thou say aught of these words 
 which I have spoken to thee, say it in such wise that 
 naught through them be disclosed of the pretended love 
 which thou hast shown to this woman and must needs 
 show to another.' ' In fact, the sonnet (p. 36) on 
 which this commentary is written contains not a syllable 
 of Beatrice, of beautiful Arno, nor of concealment or 
 pretence. " And, having spoken these words, this form 
 of my fancy vanished all at once, because of the very 
 great share of himself which Love imparted to me. And 
 with face almost transformed I rode that day right 
 thoughtful and accompanied by many sighs." Here we 
 have Dante's later version of a shift of interest to 
 still another lady, to whom his attentions were so per- 
 sistent as to injure her reputation; wherefore Beatrice, 
 as he tells us, " that most gentle one, destroyer of all 
 vices and queen of virtues, passing through a certain 
 place, denied me her very sweet salutation, in which 
 consisted all my happiness." 
 
 We have been present at that wedding banquet at 
 which Dante, coming unexpectedly into the company of 
 Beatrice, is so violently excited that he trembles and
 
 BEATRICE 135 
 
 almost swoons, whereat the ladies, with his beloved, 
 laugh at his plight; and we have listened to his tuneful 
 expostulations. We have overheard the conversation 
 of a group of ladies (perhaps these same mocking ones) 
 who, familiar with Dante's experiences and verses, criti- 
 cize the tone of his poetry, and thus bring about his 
 conversion to the " new style." Passing on to the latter 
 part of the story, we have caught a glimpse of the poet 
 " on that day on which was completed the year that 
 this lady had become a citizen of life eternal." " I was 
 sitting," he says, " in a place in which, recalling her, I 
 was drawing an angel on certain tablets; and while I 
 was drawing, I turned my eyes and saw beside me men 
 to whom it was fitting to do honor." And thus did the 
 poet address them: 
 
 That gentle one had come my thoughts amid 
 (That lady dear who maketh Love to mourn) 
 The very hour when your desire was borne 
 
 By thought of her to watch the work I did. 
 
 Love, finding her within my memory hid, 
 Awakened in my heart so anguish-worn, 
 And said unto my sighs: " Go forth forlorn! " 
 
 And each one sadly went as it was bid. 
 
 Then, weeping sore, they fluttered from my breast; 
 And still their doleful voice doth often bring 
 
 The tears of pain into my joyless eyes. 
 But those which came with greatest suffering 
 
 Cried ceaselessly: " O noble spirit blest, 
 
 'T is now a year since thou to Heaven didst rise."
 
 136 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 All these little incidents seem natural enough in 
 themselves, and even more lifelike is another, of which 
 we have caught as yet but a passing shadow the 
 scene of the sympathetic young person at the window. 
 Yet something in the way of telling seems to shroud 
 them in mystery, and we are left with an impression of 
 unreality, wondering whether we aie listen ing to factor 
 to fancy. This~tmpression is, I think, due to two factors : 
 to the author's discreet vagueness, which avoids precise" 
 indication of person, time, and place; and to~Eis~owh 
 underlying conviction of a mystic significance ill every- 
 thing that concerns Beatrice, a conviction that colors' 
 his language and leads him to emphasize coincidences 
 and hidden meanings. It is this feature of his~style that 
 continually lures the reader in pursuTF~oT~~an ever 
 vanishingallegory. ~~~ 
 
 Symbolistic the work is, in any case, as I have already 
 said. And its most perplexing symbol the most 
 important, too, next to the God of Love is the num- 
 ber nine, a mysterious token constantly attached to 
 Beatrice. More than anything else, this insistence on 
 the nine has tended to give the little autobiography a 
 frankly allegorical, even a fantastic air. Let us examine 
 the passages where this phenomenon occurs. 
 
 " Nine times already after my birth," we have read 
 at the beginning of the New Life, " the heaven of light 
 had returned almost to the same point, in its own revolu- 
 tion, when first appeared to my eyes the glorious queen
 
 BEATRICE 137 
 
 of my mind .... It was, then, almost at the beginning 
 of her ninth year that she appeared to me; and I saw 
 her almost at the end of my ninth." We pass to the first 
 greeting: '' When so many days had gone by that 
 exactly nine years were completed since the aforesaid 
 appearance of this most gentle one, on the last of those 
 days it came to pass that this wondrous lady appeared 
 to me, clad in a pure white color, between two ladies who 
 were of more advanced age; and, passing along a street, 
 she turned her eyes toward that spot where I stood very 
 timid; and in her ineffable courtesy, which is now 
 rewarded in the great world, she greeted me so wonder- 
 fully that I seemed then to behold all the bounds of 
 blessedness. The hour on which her sweetest salutation 
 reached me was surely the ninth of that day; and inas- 
 much as that was the first time that her words had set 
 forth to come to my ears, I received such sweetness that 
 drunken-like I parted from men and took refuge in the 
 solitude of a room of mine, and began to meditate on 
 this most courteous one." 
 
 It was after this greeting that Dante composed his 
 first sonnet, the one that he sent to various literary men, 
 asking for their interpretation of his dream : 
 
 On every captive soul and gentle heart 
 
 Before whose eyes the present screed may go, 
 Greetings from Love, their Master, I bestow, 
 
 And beg, their judgment they to me impart. 
 
 Of all the time when stars display their art
 
 138 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 The hours bethirded were, or nearly so, 
 
 When Love appeared before me, nothing slow. 
 At thought of him I still with horror start! 
 Joyous to see was Love, and he did keep 
 
 My heart within his hand, and in his arms 
 My Lady, lightly wrapt, in slumber deep. 
 Then on this burning heart, aroused from sleep, 
 
 He poorly fed her, deaf to her alarms. 
 And as he went away, I saw him weep. 
 
 The commentary adds several features not contained in 
 the poem. For instance, the last line becomes: " After 
 this, it was but a little while before his joyousness was 
 turned to most bitter tears, and, thus weeping, he 
 gathered up this lady in his arms, and with her seemed 
 to me to depart toward Heaven " - with a plain sug- 
 gestion of the lady's death. Now the curious and rather 
 ambiguous phrase, ' The hours bethirded were, or 
 nearly so," meaning " the hours [of night] were reduced 
 by nearly a third," is expanded thus: " And forthwith I 
 began to think, and I found that the hour on which this 
 vision had appeared to me had been the fourth of the 
 night; wherefore it is clearly evident that it was the 
 first hour of the nine last hours of the night." Unmis- 
 takable here is the ingenious effort of the author to 
 introduce the number nine in a passage where this 
 number was not in his mind when he wrote the sonnet. 
 In the three following cases the nine turns up in the 
 prose without the slightest suggestion in the verses
 
 BEATRICE 139 
 
 which the prose expounds. In the first, Dante is relating 
 a second vision and a colloquy with Love: " And having 
 pronounced these words, he disappeared, and my sleep 
 was broken. Then, recollecting, I found that this vision 
 had appeared to me at the ninth hour of the day; and 
 before leaving the aforesaid room, I resolved to write a 
 ballad." Again, in a passage, already cited, preceding 
 the dream of the death of Beatrice: " Some days after 
 this, it came to pass that in a certain part of my person 
 there fell upon me a painful illness, wherefrom I con- 
 tinually suffered for nine days very bitter pain "; and 
 " on the ninth day " the delirious vision occurs. After 
 her death, having yielded for some time to a growing 
 love for the lady of the window, the poet is recalled to 
 constancy by another dream of Beatrice: " Against this 
 adversary of reason arose one day, almost at the ninth 
 hour, a strong imagination within me; for I seemed to 
 see this glorious Beatrice with those red garments in 
 which she had first appeared to my eyes." Always the 
 same story : no nine in the verses, appearance of this 
 mysterious number in the prose, written considerably 
 later. 
 
 The prose it is, too, which eventually explains to us 
 the mystic significance of the curious obstinacy with 
 which this number pursues Beatrice, from her first 
 meeting with Dante until her death, and even later. 
 This explanation is given immediately after the an- 
 nouncement of the passing of the " most gentle one,"
 
 140 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 which comes while the poet is composing an ode in her 
 honor: " I was still planning this canzone, and had com- 
 pleted the foregoing stanza of it, when the Lord of 
 justice called this most gentle one to glory under the 
 banner of that blessed Mary, whose name was in very 
 great reverence in the words of this beatified Beatrice. 
 And although it would perhaps befit the occasion to 
 treat somewhat of her parting from us, it is not my 
 intention to treat of it here, for three reasons." We may 
 pass over the three reasons, which I have discussed else- 
 where. " Nevertheless, inasmuch as the number nine 
 hath many times had a place in the preceding words, 
 seemingly not without reason, and in her parting this 
 number appears to have had a great place, it is needful 
 here to say something, for it seems to belong to the sub- 
 ject. Wherefore I shall first tell how it had a place in her 
 parting, and then I shall assign some reason why this 
 number was so friendly to her." 
 
 At last, then, we are to have a clue to the mystery. 
 First let me say that the death of Beatrice occurred, as 
 the following passage somewhat enigmatically tells us, 
 on the evening of June 8, 1290; and the author sets him- 
 self the task of introducing the number nine as many 
 times as possible into this date, where, to the uniniti- 
 ated, it seems to " have a place " but once. From his 
 handbook of astronomy presumably the Elementa 
 Astronomica of the Arab, Alfraganus Dante learned 
 that in the Syrian calendar June is the ninth month;
 
 BEATRICE 141 
 
 and that in Arabia the day begins at sunset, the close of 
 the European June 8 thus becoming the start of the 
 Arabian June 9. By utilizing this information he turned 
 the one occurrence of nine into three. 
 
 " I declare," he says, " that according to the usage of 
 Araby her most noble soul departed in the first hour of 
 the ninth day of the month; and according to the usage 
 of Syria she departed in the ninth month of the year, 
 for the first month is there Tisrin First, which is our 
 October. And according to our usage she departed in 
 that year of our indiction (that is, of the years of our 
 Lord) in which the perfect number [ten] was nine times 
 completed in that century in which she was placed in 
 this world; and she was one of the Christians of the 
 thirteenth century [in other words, she died in the nine- 
 times-tenth year of the thirteenth century of our era]. 
 Why this number was so friendly to her, the following 
 might be a reason : forasmuch as, according to Ptolemy 
 and according to Christian truth, nine are the heavens 
 that move, and, according to common astrological 
 opinion, the aforesaid heavens operate here below in 
 accordance with their relation to one another, this num- 
 ber was friendly to her to show that in her generation all 
 nine moving heavens were in perfect harmony together. 
 This is one reason for it; but, considering more subtly 
 and in accordance with infallible truth, this number was 
 she herself I mean figuratively, and I understand it 
 thus: the number three is the root of nine, because,
 
 142 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 without any other number, by itself it makes nine, as 
 we plainly see that three times three is nine. Therefore 
 if three is by itself the maker of nine, and the Maker of 
 miracles by himself is three (to wit, Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost, which are three and one), this lady was 
 accompanied by the number nine to show that she was 
 a nine, that is, a miracle, whose root is the wondrous 
 Trinity alone. Perhaps by a subtler person could be 
 found in this a still subtler reason; but this is the one 
 that I see and like best." 
 
 We are finally enlightened concerning the function of 
 nine; that is, we know what Dante meant by this num- 
 ber when he was writing the prose of the New Life. We 
 must admit that this passage is not one of the most 
 successful in the work and that it leaves us somewhat 
 disappointed. Why has the author taken such elaborate 
 pains to dwell on a symbol that seems to us both obscure 
 and superfluous ? Let us not forget that the New Life is 
 not only a eulogy but, at the same time, an apology: 
 while it is a collection of versified praise of Beatrice by 
 Dante, with a prose commentary intended to heighten 
 its effect, it is also an attempt to give a favorable sense 
 to all the author's previous poems which might have 
 seemed disloyal, whether these poems were or were not 
 contained in the book. Furthermore, let us remember 
 that in the explanation of a certain sonnet in which the 
 name of Giovanna, Cavalcanti's former sweetheart, 
 precedes the name of Beatrice, Dante attributes this
 
 BEATRICE 143 
 
 priority to the etymological meaning of the first name. 
 Suppose, for a moment, that he had not had at his dis- 
 posal this fantastic etymology : what could he have said 
 to excuse himself ? Perhaps he would have maintained 
 that the second place is in some respects more honorable 
 than the first rather a difficult contention, in view of 
 the great importance of one in scholastic philosophy and 
 the lesser insistence on two. If, instead of two, the poet 
 had had to do with a three or a nine, his argument would 
 have been notably easier and stronger. 
 
 It is in this direction, I believe, that we must look for 
 the origin of the numerical intruder, of this nine which is 
 justified by nothing in the verses collected by the author. 
 We must find in Dante's poems or experiences an occa- 
 sion on which Beatrice, later to be elevated to absolute 
 sovereignty, occupies temporarily an inferior position. 
 If her place should by chance turn out to be the ninth, it 
 would be a token that we were on the right path. For 
 the best method of reconciling an apparent momentary 
 inferiority with the real primacy of the beloved would be 
 to prove: (1) that nine, the symbol of divine wonder, is 
 the logical representative of the wondrous Beatrice^ 
 and (2) that the mysterious affinity between this num- 
 ber and the lady is shown by the continual intervention 
 of^the nine in her affairs. 
 
 Now, this supposititious condition is realised in one of 
 the chapters of the New Life, a short, unobtrusive 
 chapter, which apparently has nothing to do with the
 
 144 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 rest. It tells of a serventese written by the youthful poet, 
 a work which unfortunately has not come down to us, 
 having perhaps been suppressed by the author. In pass- 
 ing, we may observe that the term serventese is applied 
 in Italian to a certain metrical form, instead of designat- 
 ing, as in Provencal, the contents of the composition. 
 Here is the chapter in question, a passage upon which I 
 touched in speaking of the flower-ladies: "I declare 
 that at the time when this lady [the lady of the church] 
 was the screen of such great love on my side, a desire 
 came upon me to try to record the name of this most 
 gentle one, and to accompany it with many ladies' 
 names, and especially with the name of this gentle lady. 
 And, taking the names of the sixty most beautiful ladies 
 of the city where my lady was placed by the Most High, 
 I composed an epistle in serventese form, which I shall 
 not copy ; nor should I have made mention of it, except 
 to tell the marvelous thing that happened when I was 
 writing it, namely, that my lady's name would consent 
 to stand in no other place than the ninth among the 
 names of these ladies." 
 
 According to the hypothesis which I venture to pre- 
 sent, the epistle containing this list was written by 
 Dante before the supremacy of Beatrice, at a time when 
 she shared with divers other damsels the young poet's 
 admiration. This poem, being fairly well known in 
 Florence and much discussed by the society which the 
 author frequented, proved to be a serious obstacle when
 
 BEATRICE 145 
 
 Dante tried to convince himself and to persuade others 
 that he had always lived under the influence of Beatrice. 
 Hence the supernatural explanation of the ninth place 
 accorded to her in the serventese, an explanation which 
 eventually entailed all the mystic development of the 
 nine. If I am right, it was, then, a real and trifling 
 incident that led to this puzzling piece of exalted 
 symbolism. 
 
 Recent criticism has perhaps discovered in one of 
 Dante's famous sonnets, not comprised in the New Life, 
 an allusion to the lost epistle. The poem is one already 
 cited (p. 57), the so-called " Boat of Love," addressed 
 to Guido Cavalcanti. There we find three female figures : 
 Vanna, cherished by Guido; Lagia, presumably the 
 sweetheart of Lapo Gianni; and a third, unnamed, who 
 is "on number thirty " which may mean that she is 
 thirtieth among the sixty fair ladies of Florence. This 
 third, then, who would seem to have been the maiden of 
 Dante's choice when the sonnet was written, cannot be 
 Beatrice, who was number nine.
 
 V. LISETTA 
 
 IN treating of Beatrice we had to discuss the question 
 whether the Vita Nuova is an allegory or a superfi- 
 cially symbolistic piece of writing a problem which 
 the author leaves us to solve for ourselves as best we 
 may. It is not the same with the Convivio, or Banquet, 
 an unfinished didactic work, whose allegorical intention 
 is explicitly stated. The Banquet was to have consisted 
 of fifteen parts: to wit, an introduction, and fourteen 
 treatises made up of discursive comment on fourteen of 
 the author's canzoni, poems which, already published, 
 had been misinterpreted by his friends. It is apparent 
 that the fundamental conception of this work has some 
 likeness to that of the Vita Nuova; but the Convivio, 
 probably written between 1304 and 1308, when Dante, 
 from thirty-nine to forty-three years old, had acquired 
 nearly all the knowledge accessible to his generation, is 
 composed in a thoroughly utilitarian spirit, for the pur- 
 pose of instructing mankind in the principles of phi- 
 losophy, politics, and most of the sciences. This great 
 composition, presumably broken off by the coronation 
 of the emperor Henry VII and his descent into Italy, 
 contains in fact only the introduction and the commen- 
 tary on three poems that is, four out of the fifteen 
 books planned. What we have makes us wish for more. 
 
 146
 
 LISETTA 147 
 
 In the introduction we find a very curious and occasion- 
 ally eloquent discourse in praise of the vulgar tongue. 
 Extremely interesting is also the glowing defence of the 
 Empire, which forms the most conspicuous feature of 
 the fourth book. Equally precious to the specialist are 
 the lessons in astronomy and in metaphysics that throw 
 so much light on the Divine Comedy and on all the 
 psychology of the Middle Ages. 
 
 These things we must pass over. We cannot, how- 
 ever, leave unnoticed a touching personal cry, one of the 
 exceedingly rare passages in which Dante complains of 
 his own misfortunes. " Alas! " he exclaims, " would it 
 had pleased the Director of the universe that the occa- 
 sion for my apology had never existed ! For, in that case, 
 neither would others have sinned against me nor should 
 I have unjustly suffered punishment I mean the 
 punishment of exile and poverty. Ever since it was the 
 pleasure of the citizens of Florence, the very beautiful 
 and very famous daughter of Rome, to cast me out of 
 her sweetest bosom, in which I was born and bred up to 
 the middle point of life, and in which, with their good 
 will, I long with all my heart to rest my weary mind and 
 end the time allotted me, ever since then I have 
 wandered as a stranger, almost as a beggar, through 
 nearly all the regions over which this language extends, 
 revealing against my will fortune's wound, for which the 
 blame ofttimes unjustly falls upon the wounded one. 
 Verily have I been a ship without sail or helm, carried to
 
 148 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 divers harbors and river mouths and shores by the dry 
 wind that rises from painful poverty." We find the 
 same lament put by the author into the mouth of his 
 ancestor, Cacciaguida, who, in the midst of the elect in 
 the heaven of Mars, predicts the poet's exile: 
 
 " As once Hippolytus from Athens fled, 
 By cruel Phaedra's mean devices caught, 
 Thus, far from Florence thou shalt make thy bed. 
 
 This is desired, already this is sought, 
 And shortly by the schemer shall be done 
 Who plots where Christ is daily sold and bought. 
 
 The blame shall fall upon the injured one, 
 As ever here below, till truth be shown 
 By punishment which truth itself hath spun. 
 
 Whatever thing thou callest all thine own, 
 
 Most dearly loved, must thou forsake and spurn: 
 First arrow this from exile's crossbow flown! 
 
 How salty is the savor, thou shalt learn, 
 
 Of others' bread, and tramping up and down 
 Another's stairs, how hard a track to turn." 
 
 The Banquet is a book of exile, the work of a man who 
 seeks in study and philosophy some consolation for the 
 outrages of fortune and the slanders of men, who returns 
 good for evil by enlightening his fellows. What are the 
 poems he chose as the texts of his lessons ? We know 
 only the three actually included. The first and second 
 canzoni, Voi che intendendo il terzo del movete and Amor 
 che nella mente mi ragiona, are love-songs, the first
 
 LISETTA 149 
 
 describing the struggle between the old affection for 
 Beatrice and a new interest that is finally victorious, the 
 second singing the triumph of the latter; they seem to 
 continue that series of sonnets, in the New Life, which 
 has to do with the compassionate lady of the window. 
 The third canzone, Le dolci rime d'amor, absolutely dif- 
 ferent from the other two, though outwardly connected 
 with them, is the versified disquisition on nobility 
 previously mentioned (p. 92). Unhappily we have no 
 clue to the remaining eleven poems selected by the 
 author for elucidation; we do not even know whether 
 they are among Dante's extant works. On the other 
 hand, some observations he lets fall justify the belief 
 that his choice was already made and that the general 
 plan of the work was outlined. Moreover, we learn that 
 the author had plotted out his Latin treatise De Vulgari 
 Eloquentia, likewise unfinished; for he tells us, toward 
 the beginning of the Banquet, in speaking of the swift 
 transformation of dialects: "This subject will be 
 treated more fully elsewhere, in a book that I intend to 
 write, with God's permission, on vernacular composi- 
 tion." The Convivio mentions also the Vita Nuova, its 
 elder by some ten years. " If," says the author, " in the 
 present work, which is called Banquet (and I hope it may 
 prove to be one) the style appears more virile than that 
 of the New Life, I nevertheless have no intention of dis- 
 crediting the latter in any way, but rather of supporting 
 it; inasmuch as it is reasonable that the one should be
 
 150 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 hot and passionate, the other temperate and manly." 
 Let us remember, then, that the author of the Banquet 
 does not discard the ideas of the New Life, but proposes 
 to lend them new dignity by adapting them to the phi- 
 losophy of his maturity. As to the title, Convivio, it 
 means a banquet of knowledge to which Dante invites 
 his readers, the poems being served as meats, the 
 commentary as bread. 
 
 Although the Banquet was composed with the phil- 
 anthropic intention of sharing with the public the intel- 
 lectual food stored up by the author, the book has also 
 another purpose, a strictly personal one, which is 
 carefully explained. After having discussed at length 
 the conditions under which it is proper to praise one's 
 self, Dante adds these words, some of which I have cited 
 before (p. 103): "My motive [in discussing my own 
 work] is fear of infamy, and also desire to give instruc- 
 tion which verily no one else can give. I fear the infamy 
 of having followed such a passion as the reader of the 
 aforesaid odes conceives to have ruled over me; which 
 infamy is removed by my present complete account of 
 myself, which proves that not passion but virtue was 
 the moving cause. I intend also to show the true mean- 
 ing of these songs, which cannot be seen by some unless 
 I tell it, because it is hidden under the figure of allegory. 
 And this will give not only good pleasure to hear, but 
 subtle teaching both in this style of composition and in 
 this style of interpreting the writings of others." We
 
 LISETTA 151 
 
 have already considered Dante's explanation of the 
 allegorical method (p. 68). 
 
 Was it Dante's intention to apply this method to the 
 Pietra songs ? What would we not give to find out ? 
 Unhappily we are condemned to ignorance. The only 
 poems that we know to have been chosen for this treat- 
 ment belong to the series of the lady of the window, a 
 series which comprises four sonnets in the New Life, two 
 odes in the Banquet, and apparently some other bits of 
 verse not included in either of these works. 
 
 That is the group of poems which we are now to 
 examine. It is a little more than a year after the death 
 of Beatrice that the sympathetic young person in ques- 
 tion appears for the first time. " Somewhat later," says 
 the author, " being in a spot where I was recalling the 
 past, I was very thoughtful, and with such painful 
 thoughts that they made me outwardly show a look of 
 fearful dejection. Wherefore I, observing my trans- 
 formation, raised my eyes to see whether any one beheld 
 me. Then I saw a gentle lady, very young and beauti- 
 ful, who from a window appeared to be looking at me 
 right compassionately, so that all compassion seemed to 
 be collected in her. Wherefore, inasmuch as the un- 
 happy, on seeing others sorrow for them, are the more 
 readily moved to tears, as if pitying themselves, I felt 
 m y eyes then begin to desire to weep; and therefore, 
 fearing to disclose my weakness, I withdrew from before 
 the eyes of this gentle one. And then I said to myself:
 
 152 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 * It cannot be that most noble love abide not with that 
 compassionate lady.' And therefore I resolved to write 
 a sonnet, in which I should speak to her and should 
 include all that has been told in this explanation." 
 Here is the sonnet: 
 
 My eyes beheld compassionate distress 
 Unstinted in thy gentle face appear 
 When thou didst watch my acts and bearing here, 
 
 Which oftentimes my anguish did confess. 
 
 Then saw I clear enough that thou couldst guess 
 The darkness of my whole existence drear, 
 And in my heart there rose a sudden fear 
 
 Of showing through my eyes my feebleness. 
 
 Forthwith I fled from thee, for tears did leap: 
 I felt them gushing upwards from my heart, 
 Which, seeing thee, was so disquieted. 
 And then within my grieving soul I said : 
 " Surely from her that love doth never part 
 
 Which thus compelleth me to walk and weep." 
 
 " Afterwards," continues Dante, " it came to pass 
 that this lady, wherever she saw me, took on a com- 
 passionate expression and a pallid hue, like that of love, 
 and therefore did often remind me of my most noble 
 lady, who always showed herself of similar color. And 
 verily, ofttimes, not being able to weep nor relieve my 
 sadness, I would go to see this compassionate lady, who 
 seemed to draw the tears out of my eyes by her presence. 
 And therefore I had once more a desire to write words 
 addressed to her." The words were these:
 
 LISETTA 153 
 
 Love's color never did possession take 
 
 Nor sweet compassion's look so wondrously 
 
 Of any lady's face (who oft did see 
 Of gentle eyes and doleful tears the ache) 
 As they have thine possessed, and pallid make, 
 
 Whene'er my cheerless self appears to thee. 
 
 By thee inspired, a thought disturbeth me, 
 So violent, I fear my heart will break. 
 My deathly stricken eyes I cannot stay 
 
 From gazing at thee time and time again; 
 For they would weep, and constantly do try. 
 
 Of their desire thou dost increase the pain, 
 And they, for longing, wholly waste away, 
 
 But cannot shed a tear when thou art nigh. 
 
 " I came to such a pass for seeing this lady that my 
 eyes began to take too much delight in beholding her; 
 whereat was I ofttimes enraged at heart, and held 
 myself as weak indeed. And many times I cursed the 
 fickleness of mine eyes, and said to them in my thought: 
 ' Lo ! ye were wont to bring tears to those who saw your 
 grievous state; and now ye seem to wish to forget it for 
 the sake of this lady who gazes on you, and who gazes on 
 you only because she mourns for the glorious lady for 
 whom ye used to weep. But do what ye may, I shall 
 recall her to you very often, accursed eyes; for never, 
 save after death, should your tears have ceased.' And 
 when I had thus spoken within me to my eyes, the sighs 
 would assail me, deep and agonizing. And lest this 
 battle which I had with myself should remain unknown
 
 154 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 to all but the wretch who experienced it, I resolved to 
 write a sonnet, and to include therein this horrible 
 condition." 
 
 " The bitter tears that ye were wont to shed 
 For such a weary season, O mine eyes, 
 Made pitying tears to other eyelids rise, 
 
 As ye have seen and I to you have said. 
 
 But now methinks ye would forget, instead, 
 If I my recreant self should so despise 
 As not to spur you on in every wise, 
 
 Reminding you for whom ye sorrowed. 
 
 It saddens me, the frailty ye display, 
 
 And shakes me so that greatly frighteneth 
 
 A lady's face, who you doth oft espy. 
 For never, never should ye, save for death, 
 
 Forget our lady, who hath passed away." 
 
 Thus speaks my heart, and then it heaves a sigh. 
 
 ' The sight of this lady brought me into such a 
 strange condition that many times I thought of her as 
 one whom I liked too well. And I thought of her thus: 
 ' This is a gentle lady, beautiful, young, and discreet, 
 appearing perhaps at Love's behest, that my life may 
 be at peace.' And many times I thought more lovingly, 
 until my heart yielded to him, or to his argument. And 
 when it had thus consented, I would bethink myself, as 
 if moved by reason, and say to myself: ' Ah! what a 
 thought is this, which seeks to comfort me in such mean 
 fashion, and scarcely permits me to think of aught
 
 LISETTA 155 
 
 else ? ' Then another thought would arise, saying: 
 * Now that thou hast been in such tribulation, why wilt 
 thou not escape from all this bitterness ? Thou seest 
 that this is an inspiration, brought before us by Love's 
 desires, and coming from such a gentle quarter as the 
 eyes of the lady who hath shown herself so compas- 
 sionate to us.' Wherefore I, having thus more than once 
 striven within me, wished again to write some words 
 thereof; and inasmuch as the battle of the sighs was 
 won by those which spake for her, it seemed to me fitting 
 to speak to her. And I wrote this sonnet, which begins 
 ' A gentle thought ' ; and I say ' gentle ' in so far as it 
 spake to a gentle lady, for otherwise it was very mean." 
 
 A gentle thought, which whispereth of thee, 
 Comes hither oftentimes with me to dwell, 
 And doth of love so sweet a story tell, 
 
 It makes my heart surrender utterly. 
 
 Then speaketh soul to heart: " Pray, who is he 
 That comes and cheers our stricken mind so well, 
 And hath a magic power so strong and fell 
 
 That not another thought may bide with me ? " 
 
 " O timid soul," the heart to her replies, 
 ;< This is a child of Love, a newborn sprite, 
 Who unto me his young affection brings. 
 And his existence here and all his might 
 
 Proceeded from a pitying lady's eyes, 
 
 Whose face was troubled by our sufferings." 
 
 " Against this adversary of reason there arose one 
 day, almost at the ninth hour, a strong imagination
 
 156 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 within me; for I thought I saw this glorious Beatrice 
 with those blood-red garments in which she first ap- 
 peared to my eyes, and she seemed to me young, of an 
 age like to that at which first I saw her. Then I began 
 to think of her; and, as I brought her back to mind, 
 according to the order of past time, my heart began 
 painfully to repent of the desire by which thus weakly it 
 had allowed itself to be possessed for a few days, con- 
 trary to the constancy of reason; and, banishing this 
 evil desire, all my thoughts turned again to their most 
 gentle Beatrice. And I declare that from then on I 
 began with all my shamed heart to think of her so that 
 sighs often revealed it, since almost all of them, as they 
 went forth, said what was spoken in the heart, to wit, 
 the name of this most gentle one and how she parted 
 from us. And ofttimes it came to pass that some 
 thought had such pain within it that I forgot both the 
 thought and the place where I was. By this rekindling 
 of sighs was rekindled my suspended weeping in such 
 wise that my eyes seemed like two things which should 
 desire only to weep; and often it came to pass that with 
 the long duration of weeping there came around them a 
 purple color, which is wont to appear for some agony 
 that one suffers. Thus is it evident that they were aptly 
 repaid for their fickleness, since henceforth they could 
 look on no one who should so gaze at them as to lead 
 them into like attachment. Wherefore, wishing that 
 this evil desire and vain temptation should be shown so
 
 LISETTA 157 
 
 destroyed that no doubt could be induced by the rimed 
 words which I had written before, I resolved to make a 
 sonnet in which I should include the substance of this 
 explanation." In the sonnet, Lasso! per forza de' molti 
 sospiri, there is no mention of the lady of the window, 
 and we hear no more of her in the Vita Nuova. 
 
 In all this there is nothing to suggest an allegorical 
 personage. On the contrary, one would say that this is 
 the most realistic part of the New Life. The detail of 
 the window, for instance, does not look like an invention 
 and scarcely admits of a symbolistic interpretation. 
 Then, too, the psychological development : the despair- 
 ing poet's interest aroused by a young girl's sympathy, 
 the longing to see her again and the comfort derived 
 from expectation of the meeting, the fear of seeming 
 faithless to his dead beloved, his self-reproach, his 
 efforts not to fall in love, with the usual outcome of 
 such a struggle, the consciousness that resistance is 
 vain, the joy of this new affection which attaches him 
 once more to life (a harmless enough affection, no doubt, 
 guilty as it appeared to him), finally the sudden facing 
 about, the triumph of the ideal, the return to Beatrice 
 all this surely gives the impression of a real experience, 
 a bit of actual life. 
 
 In fact, there are some critics who go so far as to con- 
 jecture that the compassionate girl was not only a real 
 person, but one known to us no other than Gemma 
 Donati, who, some four or five years after the incident
 
 158 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 of the window, became Dante's wife. To this interesting 
 hypothesis there are several objections. In the first 
 place, we possess evidence which appears to show that 
 Dante had been affianced to Gemma from childhood; 
 in which case it is difficult to believe that he would 
 have been forming a romantic attachment for her at 
 such a late day. Moreover, we may infer, from his 
 general practice, that he would have deemed it incon- 
 gruous, if not improper, to introduce a semi-conjugal 
 affection into this daintily idealistic tale of his love for 
 Beatrice. His family affairs he always kept in the back- 
 ground. Nowhere, in all his works, does he mention his 
 wife or his children. Of his parents he says nothing, save 
 that they spoke Italian. According to the taste of his 
 time, one's own ordinary family emotions are too 
 personal to figure in a work of art. 
 
 Nevertheless I am convinced that the perplexing 
 creature is a genuine woman. There is, indeed, a bare 
 possibility that we have discovered how she was called : 
 Lisetta. At least, this name occurs in a sonnet by 
 Dante, not included in the New Life, but apparently 
 connected with the group just examined. A charming 
 lady, it tells us, passes through the road that beauty 
 travels to awaken love namely, through the eyes; 
 but, on reaching the tower of the will, she hears a voice 
 that sends her away the voice of the real queen of 
 Dante's heart.
 
 LISETTA 159 
 
 Along the double path where beauties flow 
 
 When, waking Love, into the mind they press, 
 Lisetta marches, all misgivingless, 
 
 And thinks to capture me without a blow. 
 
 As soon as she has come the tower below 
 
 Which opens when the soul within says " yes," 
 A sudden voice that damsel doth address: 
 
 " No seat is here for thee, fair lady. Go! " 
 
 For she who now so queenly sits above, 
 Once to obtain the wand of empire tried, 
 
 And quickly got it from the hand of Love. 
 
 Seeing herself sent back to whence she came, 
 Excluded from the place w r here Love doth bide, 
 
 Lisetta runs away, all red with shame. 
 
 Although the tone of these verses is entirely different 
 from that of the sonnets in the New Life, the situation 
 is identical. The playful, somewhat mocking style of 
 the poem explains clearly enough why we do not find it 
 admitted to the collection. Moreover, the mention of 
 the woman's name would surely have sufficed to con- 
 demn it; and, in fact, there exists another version in 
 which Lisetta is replaced by una donna, " a lady." The 
 whimsicality which so absolutely differentiates this 
 sonnet from the preceding ones will be observed again 
 in a later poem of the series. 
 
 Up to this point there is nothing to make us suspect 
 an allegorical intention. And yet the author of the 
 Banquet gives us to understand that the poems of this
 
 160 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 group have a hidden sense, and that his public is mis- 
 taken in thinking that their motive is passion rather 
 than virtue. Now let us consider the first ode of the 
 Banquet, the earliest poem for which Dante actually 
 does furnish an allegorical interpretation. It is ad- 
 dressed, not, like the first ode of the New Life, to " ladies 
 who have understanding of love," but to the angels who 
 preside over the revolution of the third heaven, the 
 sphere of Venus to the celestial beings themselves, 
 whose earthly symbols are these same ladies of the Vita 
 Nuova. 
 
 Ye who by thought the sphere of Venus turn, 
 Now listen to the discourse in my heart, 
 Too strange to tell to anyone but you. 
 The sky which follows your celestial art 
 Since all material instruments ye spurn 
 
 Hath brought me to a state I never knew; 
 Therefore, when I my altered life review, 
 My story seems to suit but you alone. 
 I beg you, gentle creatures, listen well! 
 The strange adventure of my heart I '11 tell, 
 How sadly doth the soul within it moan, 
 And how a spirit takes the other side, 
 Which seems adown your stellar rays to glide. 
 
 The life which made my doleful heart rejoice 
 Was once a kindly thought that often went 
 To sit beside your heavenly Master's feet, 
 Where it beheld a lady eminent,
 
 LISETTA 161 
 
 Whose glory it described with dulcet voice 
 
 And made the soul exclaim: " To go were sweet! " 
 Now cometh one who maketh it retreat, 
 And ruleth o'er me with so high a hand, 
 My palpitating heart its fear betrays; 
 He bids me on another lady gaze. 
 " Who wishes blessedness to understand 
 
 Must look," he says, " upon this lady's eyes, 
 Unless he fear the agony of sighs." 
 
 A foeman he hath found who strikes him dead 
 That humble thought that used my soul to fill 
 With praises of an angel crowned in Heaven. 
 My soul laments, her pain so smarteth still, 
 Crying: " Ah! woe is me! how he is fled, 
 
 That pitying one, who solace oft hath given! 
 Those eyes of mine! " she sobs, all anguish-driven, 
 " Unlucky hour, when they by her were seen, 
 And listened not to what I did reveal! 
 I said to them: ' Surely her eyes conceal 
 The one who slays my sister-souls, I ween.' 
 
 For all my foresight, they have lookt on one 
 So murderous that I to death am done." 
 
 " Thou art not dead, but only sore alarmed, 
 O soul of ours, whose words are full of woe! " 
 
 A gentle little sprite of Love doth speak. 
 " For this fair Lady, whom thou dreadest so, 
 With such transforming power thy life hath charmed, 
 Thou canst not bear it, being grown so weak. 
 Just see how pitiful she is, and meek,
 
 162 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Discreet and kind, despite her high estate! 
 Now yield thee wholly to her sovereignty; 
 For, if thyself thou blind not, thou shalt see 
 The majesty of miracles so great 
 
 That thou shalt say : ' O Love, true Master mine, 
 Do what thou wilt, for all I am is thine! ' 
 
 My song, there shall be few enough, I know, 
 Who, guessing at thy meaning, do not err, 
 So wearisome and hard thou speakest it. 
 If, then, by any chance it should occur 
 That thou before such men and women go 
 As do not seem to understand thy wit, 
 I beg thee, lose thy courage not a bit, 
 But say to them, my latest, dearest air: 
 " Ye must have seen at least that I am fair." 
 
 In the words of the envoy, 
 
 My song, there shall be few enough, I know, 
 Who, guessing at thy meaning, do not err, 
 
 we find a plain suggestion of a hidden significance. The 
 double meaning, which but few unaided readers can 
 guess, is amply unfolded by the author in his prose com- 
 mentary. After having defined the three varieties of 
 mystic interpretation, he proceeds to give us first the 
 literal, then the allegorical explanation of the poem. 
 The literal runs as follows: " After the passing of that 
 beautiful Beatrice, who liveth in Heaven with the 
 angels and on earth with my soul, the planet of Venus 
 had twice revolved in its own circle, which, according
 
 LISETTA 163 
 
 to the two different periods, maketh it appear as even- 
 ing and morning star, when that gentle lady, of whom 
 I made mention at the close of the New Life, first came 
 before my eyes accompanied by Love, and took some 
 place in my mind. And, as hath been explained by me 
 in the aforesaid little book, rather by her gentleness 
 than by my choice it came to pass that I consented to be 
 hers; for she showed herself so stirred by pity for my 
 widowed life that the spirits of my eyes became her fast 
 friends. And, having become thus friendly, they then 
 so wrought within me that my will was satisfied to wed 
 itself to her image. But inasmuch as love doth not come 
 forth and grow and attain perfection in a moment, but 
 requireth some time and food of thoughts, especially if 
 there be contrary thoughts that obstruct it, there had 
 to be, ere this new love should be complete, a long 
 battle between the thought that fed it and the one that 
 opposed it, which latter still held, in behalf of the glori- 
 ous Beatrice, the fortress of my mind; for the one was 
 continually reinforced from the front, the other, by the 
 memory, from the rear. And the succor from the front, 
 unlike the other, increased every day, preventing in 
 some measure the sight from turning backward. All 
 this seemed to me so wonderful, and at the same time 
 so hard to endure, that I could not bear it, and crying 
 aloud, as it were, to excuse myself for my strange con- 
 dition, in which I appeared to be lacking in constancy, 
 I directed my voice in that quarter whence proceeded
 
 164 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 the victory of the new thought, which was victorious 
 indeed, like a celestial power; and I began to sing : 'Ye 
 who by thought the sphere of Venus turn.' ' Then fol- 
 lows a detailed analysis of the canzone. For the dis- 
 crepancy in dates between this narrative and that in the 
 Vita Nuova an ingenious explanation has been offered 
 by Professor J. E. Shaw (Dante's ' Gentile Donna,'' in the 
 Modern Language Review, x, 129 and 320). 
 
 We pass to the symbolistic interpretation . ' ' Inasmuch 
 as the literal sense hath been sufficiently shown, I must 
 proceed to the allegorical and true exposition. Begin- 
 ning, then, once more, I declare that when the first joy 
 of my soul was lost, whereof mention hath been made 
 above, I was left wounded with such woe that no con- 
 solation did help me. Nevertheless, after some time, my 
 mind, which was striving to be well, bethought itself, 
 since neither my own comforting nor another's availed, 
 of returning to the method of self-consolation followed 
 by some disconsolate ones in the past; and I began to 
 read that book of Boethius, unknown to many, in which, 
 outcast and imprisoned, he had comforted himself; and 
 learning, furthermore, that Tully had written another 
 book in which, treating of Friendship, he had uttered 
 words for the consolation of Lselius, a most excellent 
 man, for the death of his friend Scipio, I began to read 
 that. And although it was hard for me at first to enter 
 into their meaning, I finally penetrated it as far as the 
 art of grammar which I possessed, and a little under-
 
 LISETTA 165 
 
 standing of my own, could go; by means of which 
 understanding I already had discerned, as it were in a 
 dream, many things, as may be seen in the New Life, 
 And, as it often happens that a man goeth in search of 
 silver and beyond his expectation findeth gold, pre- 
 sented by some hidden cause, perhaps not without 
 divine command, so I, seeking to console myself, found 
 not only remedy for my tears, but words of authorities 
 and sciences and books, pondering on which I was 
 assured that philosophy, mistress of these authorities, 
 sciences, and books, was a thing supreme. And I 
 imagined her fashioned as a gentle lady; nor could I 
 picture her in any act save one of mercy. Wherefore did 
 my sense contemplate her verily with such satisfaction 
 that I scarcely could turn it from her. And from this 
 imagining I began to go where she did show herself in 
 very truth, namely, to the schools of the churchmen 
 and the disputations of philosophers; so that in a short 
 time, perhaps in thirty months, I began so to feel her 
 sweetness that love of her drove forth and destroyed 
 every other thought. Wherefore I, feeling myself taken 
 from the thought of the first love to the power of this, 
 opened, as in wonder, my lips to the discourse of the 
 foregoing song, revealing my state under the figure of 
 other things. For of the lady with whom I was falling in 
 love no rime of any vernacular was worthy to speak 
 openly, nor were my hearers sufficiently well prepared 
 to have so easily understood my undisguised speech, nor
 
 166 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 would their credence have been given to the true mean- 
 ing as to the fictitious; for it was truly and fully believed 
 that I was inclined to the one love, which was not 
 believed of the other. I began, therefore, to sing: * Ye 
 who by thought the sphere of Venus turn.' ' 
 
 What are we to think of this apparent contradiction ? 
 Have we been mistaken about the reality of the woman 
 whom we have somewhat fancifully named Lisetta ? 
 Or did Dante himself attempt to deceive us when he 
 made her a symbol of philosophy ? Let us run over 
 rapidly the other poems that look as if they might 
 belong to the same group. The following ballad, which 
 rather seems to attach itself to the four sonnets in the 
 New Life, suggests no allegorical conceit: 
 
 Chorus 
 
 Ballad, attired as prudent messenger, 
 Go forth, without unduly lingering, 
 To that fair maid to whom I bid thee sing. 
 
 How feeble is my life, then tell to her. 
 
 Solo 
 
 First say to her: my eyes, which heretofore, 
 From gazing at her image angel-bright, 
 
 A wreath of fond desire were wont to wear, 
 Unable now to look upon her more, 
 
 Are so destroyed by Death with sudden fright, 
 They ring themselves with garlands of despair. 
 Alas! to gladden them, I know not where
 
 LISETTA 167 
 
 To turn them. Thou shalt find me nearly dead, 
 If I by her shall not be comforted, 
 So speak beseeching words, her heart to stir. 
 
 The figure of wreaths around the eyes occurs, in the 
 New Life, in a sonnet on Beatrice, immediately follow- 
 ing and continuing the four that are inspired by the 
 compassionate lady (p. 156). 
 
 The sonnets, Dagli occhi della mia Donna si muove 
 and Chi guarderd mai senza paura, may be provisionally 
 comprised in our group; and, if thus classified, may be 
 understood as referring either to a real woman or to 
 Lady Philosophy. In the first, there comes from a cer- 
 tain woman's eyes a light which reveals things too 
 strange and too divine to describe; the dazzled poet, 
 intimidated, resolves never to see her more; but soon, 
 forgetting his promises, sets forth again to seek her. 
 The second tells how the terrifying eyes of a " little 
 maid," or pargoletta, have wounded the lover unto 
 death, he having been chosen, from all mankind, as an 
 example and warning to others. These two poems may 
 perhaps be taken as marking the beginning of an 
 allegorical vein in the series; a vein which appears to 
 continue in the pretty ballad, lo mi son pargoletta bella e 
 nuova. This speaks of an irresistible " little maid," who, 
 appearing to the author as a miraculous tiny angel from 
 on high, declares that she has descended to reveal to 
 humanity the things of Heaven, her beauties being new 
 to men and unintelligible to all save those " in whom
 
 168 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Love takes his place to give pleasure to other "; but in 
 the depths of her eyes there lurks some one who has 
 dealt the poet a mortal wound. Two other sonnets, 
 E y non e legno dl slforti nocchi and lo maledico il dl cti io 
 vidi im prima, which were translated in the chapter on 
 Pietra (pp. 89, 90), seem, as I then said, to be most aptly 
 referred to Lady Philosophy, and to belong to a later 
 stage of her supremacy. 
 
 On the other hand, two odes, Amor che muovi tua virtu 
 dal cielo and Io sento si d'amor la gran possanza, convey 
 such a direct impression of passion and despair that, if 
 they stood alone, no one would ever suspect them of a 
 secondary meaning. Taken in connection with the 
 other verses, however, they present one doubtful fea- 
 ture: both of them attribute the insensibility of the 
 lady to her extreme youth, a trait conspicuous in a 
 couple of " Pargoletta " poems which, as we have just 
 seen, are probably allegorical, the youthfulness of the 
 beloved being apparently a symbol of the poet's inex- 
 perience in philosophy. Moreover, in the first of the 
 aforesaid odes, Amor che muovi, a prayer to the God 
 of Love, the young person is endowed with super- 
 natural qualities; and the second, Io sento si, which is 
 a protest of utter devotion, contains in its envoy this 
 peculiar instruction to the " beauteous song ": "If any 
 gentleman invite or stop thee, before putting thyself in 
 his power, examine whether thou canst make him of thy 
 sect; and, if not, quickly forsake him." A third canzone,
 
 LISETTA 169 
 
 Ai fals ris, of the type called in Provengal descort, or 
 " discord," may possibly be classed with these two; but 
 it has little importance, being more than anything else 
 a metrical and linguistic feat, written as it is in three 
 languages. 
 
 We come now to a ballad whose allegorical purpose is 
 well-nigh unmistakable, Voi che sapete ragionar d' amore, 
 the most curious poem of the group. It tells of a cruel 
 and beautiful lady who, conscious that Love dwells in 
 her eyes, keeps them for her own contemplation in her 
 mirror, and will not permit others to gaze into them. 
 Thus Philosophy hides her deep, alluring truths from 
 the discouraged student. 
 
 Chorus 
 
 O ye who understand the speech of love, 
 Pray listen to a ballad full of pain, 
 Which telleth of the Lady of Disdain, 
 
 Who holds my heart with power from above. 
 
 She so despises him who looks on her, 
 
 She makes him bend his eyes to earth for dread; 
 For round about her own doth ever stir 
 
 Of cruelty the image pictured. 
 
 Within, they show a kindly shape, instead, 
 Which makes the gentle soul cry: " Pity me! " 
 A shape so wonderful and fair to see, 
 
 It pricks the heart and bids the sighs to move.
 
 170 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 II 
 
 She seems to say: " I never shall be meek 
 To anyone who looks into mine eyes. 
 
 In them I bear the noble Lord they seek, 
 That archer who o'er me doth tyrannize." 
 I vow she hoards them as a precious prize, 
 
 That she alone may contemplate the two; 
 
 As I have heard that honest ladies do, 
 
 Who gaze upon themselves, their charms to prove. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I have no hope that she in mercy e'er 
 
 Shall deign to look on those whom she doth kill; 
 For she is cruel e'en as she is fair, 
 
 Who Love within her eyes caresseth still. 
 
 But let her keep and hide them as she will! 
 Some day I yet shall catch that saving sight; 
 For infinite desire shall give me might 
 
 To overcome the cold contempt of Love. 
 
 Surely this strange poem can be nothing but a whim- 
 sical allegory setting forth the pains and obstacles 
 encountered by the impatient explorer of scholastic 
 philosophy. At any rate, it is to this same ballad that 
 reference is evidently made in the envoy of the second 
 canzone of the Banquet, entitled Amor che nella mente mi 
 ragiona. 
 
 My song, how different thy words appear 
 From those a sister thine presumes to speak! 
 This Lady, whom thou picturest so meek,
 
 LISETTA 171 
 
 Thy sister " haughty " calls, in accents loud. 
 Thou know'st, the sky is ever bright and clear 
 And in itself is never dark or bleak; 
 But oft our eyes, for reasons near to seek, 
 Declare the sun is covered by a cloud. 
 Thus, when thy sister called the Lady " proud," 
 It saw her only as she seemed to be, 
 
 Because the truth was not uncovered whole; 
 For timid was my soul, 
 And still so timid is, whate'er I see 
 
 Where she is watching, filleth me with dread. 
 Now thus defend, if needful, thee and me! 
 
 And when thou canst, before her bow thy head 
 And say: " With thy permission, Lady fair, 
 I go to sing thy praises everywhere." 
 
 The ode which ends thus is an ecstatic hymn celebrating 
 the triumph of the new love and the divine glory of her 
 who inspires it. Even without Dante's warning, its tone 
 and language are such as to suggest a mystic signifi- 
 cance. It is the crowning poem of the series, and reg- 
 isters the highest point of exaltation in the poet's 
 enthusiastic pursuit of philosophy. Here is the first 
 strophe : 
 
 Love, who discourseth ever in my mind 
 
 About my dearest Lady longingly, 
 
 Doth often say such things of her to me, 
 
 My understanding cannot make them clear. 
 His dulcet song with such a spell doth bind 
 
 The listening soul that drinks his melody,
 
 172 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 It cries: " Alas! Would I were strong and free 
 To tell about my Lady what I hear! " 
 If I would speak of what is said, I fear 
 I must abandon, at the very start, 
 
 What mine intelligence cannot conceive, 
 And of the rest must leave, 
 As far beyond my speech, too great a part. 
 
 If, therefore, these my rimes be halt and lame, 
 Which, praising her, shall use their utmost art, 
 
 Our feeble human wit must bear the blame, 
 And human language, which hath not the strength 
 What Love declares of her to tell at length. 
 
 The Banquet, you remember, was left very far from 
 finished. Some strong revulsion of feeling, some funda- 
 mental change of interest forced Dante to give up the 
 undertaking on which he had spent so much labor and 
 which he had begun with such zest. One manuscript of 
 this great fragmentary work contains at the end, as it 
 were an envoy, the following sonnet, composed in a key 
 quite different from the exultant tone of the ode just 
 cited. 
 
 O words, which thro' the world your way do learn, 
 
 My latest born, since I began to sing, 
 
 In praise of her who led me wandering, 
 ' Ye who by thought the sphere of Venus turn," 
 Go straight to her for whom I used to yearn, 
 
 And let your cries proclaim your sorrowing; 
 
 Then tell her: " We are thine! but not a thing 
 Shalt get henceforth from one whom thou dost spurn."
 
 LISETTA 173 
 
 Stay not with her, for Love abides not there, 
 
 But go about in mournful garb, as sweet 
 And piteous as your elder sisters were. 
 When ye shall find a lady good and fair, 
 
 Then cast yourselves right humbly at her feet, 
 And say: " We owe thee service everywhere." 
 
 A striking poem, which seems to show the weary and 
 disillusioned student renouncing his quest of philosophic 
 truth, and ready to dedicate to a worthier mistress, 
 whoever she may be, the verses composed for that cruel 
 lady. It was perhaps at that moment, in a crisis of dis- 
 couragement, that Dante laid aside, never to take it up 
 again, the ambitious enterprise of the Banquet. 
 
 Summing up the results of our search, we seem to 
 have collected some eighteen poems which fit well 
 enough into our group, although we have for only six 
 of them the author's own assignment. The verses, as 
 far as we can determine their order, arrange themselves 
 in a series which, simple and literal at the start, soon 
 betrays a symbolistic tendency, and ultimately turns to 
 out and out allegory. If we consider in the mass all of 
 Dante's poetry that is devoted to Beatrice, we shall see 
 that it follows a similar course. This development 
 appears, then, to have been in accord with the author's 
 natural bent. First Dante's fancy is stirred by a real 
 person; then, having come to regard this person as a 
 symbol of something abstract, he little by little loses 
 consciousness of the reality and consecrates himself to
 
 174 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 the cult of the symbol. Having reached this last stage, 
 he believes, or tries to persuade himself, that his whole 
 experience has been an allegory. Thus the sympathetic 
 little creature who, looking down from a window, in- 
 spired in the afflicted poet a sentimental affection, was 
 transformed into Lady Philosophy, " daughter of God, 
 queen of the universe." Lest such a metamorphosis 
 seem to pass understanding, one must remember that 
 Boethius, in his Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's first 
 text-book of philosophic lore, personifies the consoling 
 science as a marvelous woman. One must remember, 
 also, that our poet, reduced to despair by the loss of 
 Beatrice, was comforted at the same time by the study 
 of philosophy and by the commiseration of a young 
 girl. 
 
 We may conclude, then, that the author of the Ban- 
 quet was right in attributing to the odes in that work an 
 allegorical sense, and that his friends were equally 
 justified in believing in the reality of the emotion which 
 had inspired the sonnets in the New Life. The friends 
 were mistaken, however, it would seem, in extending 
 the realistic meaning to the whole series; and Dante, 
 perhaps, was deceiving himself when he carried back the 
 allegory to the episode described in the Vita Nuova. For, 
 despite all efforts to reconcile the earlier and the later 
 narrative, the statement in the Convivio still seems mani- 
 festly to imply that the incident is allegorical from the 
 beginning, that the element of material love never en-
 
 LISETTA 175 
 
 tered into it, and that the " gentle lady " is a symbolistic 
 invention. 
 
 Was the author wholly sincere ? Had he quite con- 
 vinced himself ? If so, we are somewhat at a loss to 
 understand the reproaches addressed to him by the dis- 
 embodied Beatrice, whom, on his mystic journey, he 
 meets again in the Earthly Paradise, at the summit of 
 the mountain of Purgatory. Here is the scene, as 
 Longfellow translates it: 
 
 " Look at me well; in sooth I 'm Beatrice! 
 
 How didst thou deign to come unto the Mountain ? 
 
 Didst thou not know that man is happy here ? " 
 Mine eyes fell downward into the clear fountain, 
 
 But, seeing myself therein, I sought the grass, 
 
 So great a shame did weigh my forehead down. 
 As to the son the mother seems superb, 
 
 So she appeared to me; for somewhat bitter 
 
 Tasteth the savour of severe compassion. 
 Silent became she, and the Angels sang 
 
 Suddenly, " In te, Domlne, speravi: " 
 
 But beyond pedes meos did not pass. 
 Even as the snow among the living rafters 
 
 Upon the back of Italy congeals, 
 
 Blown on and drifted by Sclavonian winds, 
 And then, dissolving, trickles through itself 
 
 Whene'er the land that loses shadow breathes, 
 
 So that it seems a fire that melts a taper; 
 E'en thus was I without a tear or sigh, 
 
 Before the song of those who sing for ever
 
 176 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 After the music of eternal spheres. 
 
 But when I heard in their sweet melodies 
 Compassion for me, more than had they said 
 " O wherefore, lady, dost thou thus upbraid him ? " 
 
 The ice, that was about my heart congealed, 
 To air and water changed, and in my anguish 
 Through mouth and eyes came gushing from my breast. 
 
 She, on the right-hand border of the car 
 Still firmly standing, to those holy beings 
 Thus her discourse directed afterwards: 
 ' Ye keep your watch in the eternal day, 
 
 So that nor night nor sleep can steal from you 
 One step the ages make upon their path; 
 
 Therefore my answer is with greater care 
 
 That he may hear me who is weeping yonder, 
 So that the sin and dole be of one measure. 
 
 Not only by the work of those great wheels, 
 That destine every seed unto some end, 
 According as the stars are in conjunction, 
 
 But by the largess of celestial graces, 
 
 Which have such lofty vapours for their rain 
 That near to them our sight approaches not, 
 
 Such had this man become in his new life 
 Potentially, that every righteous habit 
 Would have made admirable proof in him; 
 
 But so much more malignant and more savage 
 Becomes the land untilled and with bad seed, 
 The more good earthly vigour it possesses. 
 
 Some time did I sustain him with my look; 
 Revealing unto him my youthful eyes,
 
 LISETTA 177 
 
 I led him with me turned in the right way. 
 
 As soon as ever of my second age 
 
 I was upon the threshold and changed life, 
 Himself from me he took and gave to others. 
 
 When from the flesh to spirit I ascended, 
 And beauty and virtue were in me increased, 
 I was to him less dear and less delightful; 
 
 And into ways untrue he turned his steps, 
 Pursuing the false images of good, 
 That never any promises fulfil; 
 
 Nor prayer for inspiration me availed, 
 
 By means of which in dreams and otherwise 
 I called him back, so little did he heed them. 
 
 So low he fell, that all appliances 
 For his salvation were already short, 
 Save showing him the people of perdition. 
 
 For this I visited the gates of death, 
 
 And unto him, who so far up has led him, 
 My intercessions were with weeping borne. 
 
 God's lofty fiat would be violated, 
 
 If Lethe should be passed, and if such viands 
 Should tasted be, withouten any scot 
 
 Of penitence, that gushes forth in tears." 
 
 What is the fault that deserves such reproof ? Surely 
 not the poet's devotion to philosophy, handmaid of 
 theology: that is no sin; else were St. Thomas Aquinas 
 an archsinner. Dante's guilt, in the eyes of Beatrice, 
 consists, first, in his weakly yielding to a love a real 
 love which his conscience did not approve; and,
 
 178 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 secondly, in harboring a mundane spirit, a worldly pride 
 that attempted to hide a shortcoming under the cloak 
 of allegory. Let us again turn to Longfellow's version : 
 
 " O thou who art beyond the sacred river," 
 Turning to me the point of her discourse, 
 That edgewise even had seemed to me so keen, 
 
 She recommenced, continuing without pause, 
 " Say, say if this be true; to such a charge 
 Thy own confession needs must be conjoined." 
 
 My faculties were in such great confusion 
 
 That the voice moved, but sooner was extinct 
 Than by its organs it was set at large. 
 
 Awhile she waited; then she said: " What thinkest ? 
 Answer me; for the mournful memories 
 In thee not yet are by the waters injured." 
 
 Confusion and dismay together mingled 
 
 Forced such a Yes ! from out my mouth, that sight 
 Was needful to the understanding of it. 
 
 Even as a crossbow breaks, when 't is discharged 
 Too tensely drawn, the bowstring and the bow, 
 And with less force the arrow hits the mark, 
 
 So I gave way beneath that heavy burden, 
 Outpouring in a torrent tears and sighs, 
 And the voice flagged upon its passage forth. 
 
 Whence she to me: " In those desires of mine 
 Which led thee to the loving of that good 
 Beyond which there is nothing to aspire to, 
 
 What trenches lying traverse or what chains 
 Didst thou discover, that of passing onward
 
 LISETTA 179 
 
 Thou shouldst have thus despoiled thee of the hope ? 
 And what allurements or what vantages 
 
 Upon the forehead of the others showed, 
 
 That thou shouldst turn thy footsteps unto them ? " 
 After the heaving of a bitter sigh, 
 
 Hardly had I the voice to make response, 
 
 And with fatigue my lips did fashion it. 
 Weeping I said: " The things that present were 
 
 With their false pleasure turned aside my steps, 
 
 Soon as your countenance concealed itself." 
 
 Concealment of guilt, Beatrice declares, would have 
 been vain, since God sees all; but when confession is 
 free and full, justice is tempered with mercy. Never- 
 theless she adds a warning: 
 
 To make thee more ashamed of going wrong 
 And, if again the Sirens thou shouldst hear, 
 To make thy soul a second time more strong, 
 
 I bid thee list, and cease to sow the tear: 
 Learn why my body buried underground 
 Should have impelled thee wordly joys to fear. 
 
 In art or nature never charm was found 
 To match my former lovely covering, 
 Which now in earth is scattered all around. 
 
 When I was dead and gone, what mortal thing 
 (Life's fairest charm having eluded thee) 
 Should e'er have drawn to it thy chasing wing ? 
 
 When wounded first by life's inconstancy, 
 Seeing that I was constant evermore, 
 Thou shouldst have spread thy pinions after me.
 
 180 THE LADIES OF DANTE'S LYRICS 
 
 Thou shouldst have suffered naught thy plumes to lower 
 To wait for further hurt nor little maid 
 Nor other vanity so quickly o'er. 
 
 Or, in Dante's own words: 
 
 Non ti dovea gravar le penne in giuso, 
 Ad aspettar piu colpi, o pargoletta 
 altra vanitd di si breve uso. 
 
 Pargoletta, " little maid," is a word which we have 
 found more than once applied by the poet, in his lyric 
 verse, to the damsel who represents philosophy; and 
 the repetition of the term in this solemn passage of the 
 Divine Comedy is evidently not without special inten- 
 tion. It is likely enough that in Dante's literary circle 
 the whole discussion over the meaning of the group of 
 poems in question had turned on this " Pargoletta," on 
 the reality or non-reality of the person designated by it. 
 By calling this maiden a " vanity so quickly o'er," 
 Beatrice appears to take her stand with Dante's critics 
 and against the Dante of the Banquet. Like the critics, 
 she interprets the " little maid," not as philosophy, 
 " queen of the universe, most noble and most beautiful 
 daughter of God," but as a creature of flesh and blood. 
 Vainly has the poet striven to assure himself of the 
 innocence of his devotion to her: he is compelled at last 
 to admit that in his love for the " gentle lady " there was 
 something guilty. Let us, in conclusion, cite an incident 
 of the colloquy in Eden, a detail which, in the new light
 
 LISETTA 181 
 
 just acquired, takes on a deep significance. After hav- 
 ing drunk of Lethe, which effaces the memory of sin, 
 and of sin alone, Dante suddenly asks Beatrice why she 
 speaks a language so difficult to comprehend. 
 
 " In order," thus she said, " thyself to teach 
 What fashion thou has followed, how doth plod 
 Its futile teaching far behind my speech; 
 
 To show your human way from that of God 
 As distant as the highest canopy, 
 The swiftest heaven, is far from earthly clod." 
 
 Then I replied: " I have no memory 
 That ever I from your control did stray. 
 I have no conscience that rebuketh me." 
 
 " Now, canst thou not recall thine altered way," 
 She smiling said, " the consequence admire: 
 Reflect, of Lethe thou hast drunk to-day; 
 
 And if from seeing smoke we argue fire, 
 Thy new forgetfulness is evidence 
 That guilty was the change in thy desire."
 
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