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Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime petrose

University of California Press

The so-called rime petrose are a group of four canzoni all written, as it seems, within a fairly short period of timeperhaps several months. They celebrate Dante's frustrated love for an unnamed and unidentified lady who is compared in each of them to a stone: sometimes a precious stone because of her beauty and her power over him, sometimes an ordinary stone because of her coldness toward him. After the often faltering sweetness of the Vita nuova and the excessive abstractness of the canzoni later to be collected in the Convivio (at least one of them can be dated 1294, "Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete",1 in the petrose we find a new power and an approach to poetic form that represents an importantwe believe, the decisivedeparture from his earlier poems.

The critical tradition has been puzzled by these poems and often embarrassed by their overt expression of sexual desire and violent feeling. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this embarrassment took the form of a tendency to interpret the poems allegorically; the lady was most frequently identified as Philosophy, along the lines of Dante's allegories in the Convivio. 2 Michele Barbi and Gianfranco Contini led a salutary reaction against the allegorical tendency; Contini in particular strove to free the reading of the poems from the excessive biographical literalism that resulted in endless debates as to the identity or difference of the donna pietra and the donna gentile of the Vita nuova, the "pargoletta," and other real or imagined ladies referred to in Dante's poems. Contini went to another extreme, however: although he insisted on the earthly realism of the petrose, he regarded their importance as almost exclusively stylisticthe lady was for him essentially a pretext for technical experimentation.3 This view has become the dominant one, and most recent critics have tended to minimize the thematic seriousness of the petrose; while they see them as an important moment of preparation for the stylistic effects of the Commedia, 4 they generally accept Contini's dictum that the inspiration of the petrose is "radically fragmentary."5 On the other hand, several recent critics have rightly insisted on this the-

matic seriousness, but in a negative sense. For instance, Bruce Comens (1986) sees a theological condemnation of the poet's love as implicit in the poems themselves, which thus become dramatic monologues, a kind of case study in the psychology of sin. We believe that a balanced reading of the petrose requires qualification of both these viewsof the first, because the poems are quite serious thematically and are much more than mere stylistic experiments;6 of the second, because it cannot as it stands account for the positive side of the struggle with negativity in the poems or for the precision of their autobiographical references.

The date of the petrose can be plausibly determined. The first poem of the series, "Io son venuto al punto de la rota," opens with an astronomical description that is sufficiently detailed to be dated: it describes the configuration of planets in December 1296, near the winter solstice. Though possible, it is unlikely that the reference was invented retrospectively, and therefore the generally accepted view, which we also adopt, is that the poems date from the winter of 129697.7

Not a great deal is known about Dante's life in the last years of the thirteenth century, though our information for this period is greater than for the later ones. In 1296 he was thirty-one years old, having been born, probably toward the end of May, in 1265.8 He had been married for some time to Gemma di Manetto de' Donati,9 was presumably living with her, and the couple must by now have had several of their children.10 There is evidence that Dante had financial difficulties in these years: we know that at some time during this period he became a member of the Arte dei medici e degli speziali, one of the powerful Florentine guilds, which he seems to have joined in order to qualify for political office. Between November 1295 and June 1300 we see him advancing through a series of minor political offices that was to culminate in his election to a normal two-month term (early June-early August 1300) as one of the six priori, the executive council of the city.11

As a public figure Dante must have been much respected, since he was later chosen to be part of a delegation to Pope Boniface VIII seeking help in settling the violent factionalism between the Whites (Dante's party) and the Blacks.12 But Boniface had secretly favored the Blacks, and, whether from Florence or from Rome or perhaps while returning from the 1301 mission, Dante was forced to flee the armed coup in Flor-

ence, fostered and countenanced by the pope, which was to mean that he would never see his home again: he was prominent enough among the Whites to be repeatedly singled out for sentencing in absentia and was far too proud and conscious of his worth to accept amnesty at the price of doing public penance.

Thus the petrose mark an extremely interesting moment in Dante's career as a writer, when he was visibly casting about for new directions, and before the unforeseen shipwreck of all his expectations that was to yield its ultimate result in the Commedia. In this book we argue that the moment represented by the petrose is that of the first full emergence in Dante's work of what we will call his microcosmic poetics, a poetics that, as we shall see, points directly toward the poetics of the Commedia both in its positive/constructive aspects and in what, for want of a better term, we must call its problematicity. Some time after 1305, Dante decided to abandon the ambitious project of the Convivio, which he seems to have begun soon after going into exile, in favor of what was to be the Commedia. Although the Convivio remains a puzzling and perhaps misunderstood work, one thing is certainly clear: in comparison with the Commedia, it was not Dante's true poetic vocation. It was an aberration stemming in large part, as we can see from its first book, from the new exile's sense of intense wrong and from his desire to testify explicitly before men both his innocence and the sense of his earlier work. These will be powerful motives in the Commedia as well, but the Commedia represents a return to the principles that govern the petrose, though of course in terms of a much fuller project and a much more extensive knowledge of the philosophy and theology of his time.

The Vita nuova is far more permeated with microcosmic thinking than has been recognized, as we try to demonstrate in Chapter 1, but Dante's grasp of the problematic inherent in his emerging approach to poetry is still preliminary in comparison with the petrose, which set forth a much fuller conception of the possibilities of a microcosmic poetics, as well as of the difficulties and ambiguities of the role of the poet.

It may be helpful to list some of the striking ways in which the petrose represent a new departure for Dante:

For the first time, Dante makes the natural world an...