The New Life (La Vita Nuova)

6. “Here is a deity stronger than I; who, coming, shall rule over me.”

7. “Your beatitude hath now been made manifest unto you.”

8. “Woe is me! for that often I shall be disturbed from this time forth!”

9.

Οὐδὲ ἐῴκει

Ἀνδρός γε θνητοῦ παῖς ἔμμεναι, ἀλλὰ θεοῖο.

(Iliad, xxiv. 258.)

10. “I am thy master.”

11. “Behold thy heart.”

12. The friend of whom Dante here speaks was Guido Cavalcanti.

13.i.e., in a church.

14. It will be observed that this poem is not what we now call a sonnet. Its structure, however, is analogous to that of the sonnet, being two sextetts followed by two quatrains, instead of two quatrains followed by two triplets. Dante applies the term sonnet to both these forms of composition, and to no other.

15. The commentators assert that the last two lines here do not allude to the dead lady, but to Beatrice. This would make the poem very clumsy in construction; yet there must be some covert allusion to Beatrice, as Dante himself intimates. The only form in which I can trace it consists in the implied assertion that such person as had enjoyed the dead lady’s society was worthy of heaven, and that person was Beatrice. Or indeed the allusion to Beatrice might be in the first poem, where he says that Love “in forma vera” (that is, Beatrice), mourned over the corpse: as he afterwards says of Beatrice, “Quella ha nome Amor.” Most probably both allusions are intended.

16. “My son, it is time for us to lay aside our counterfeiting.”

17. “I am as the centre of a circle, to the which all parts of the circumference bear an equal relation: but with thee it is not thus.” This phrase seems to have remained as obscure to commentators as Dante found it at the moment. No one, as far as I know, has even fairly tried to find a meaning for it. To me the following appears a not unlikely one. Love is weeping on Dante’s account, and not on his own. He says, “I am the centre of a circle (Amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle): therefore all lovable objects, whether in heaven or earth, or any part of the circle’s circumference, are equally near to me. Not so thou, who wilt one day lose Beatrice when she goes to heaven.” The phrase would thus contain an intimation of the death of Beatrice, accounting for Dante being next told not to inquire the meaning of the speech,—”Demand no more than may be useful to thee.”

18. “Names are the consequents of things.”

19. It is difficult not to connect Dante’s agony at this wedding-feast with our knowledge that in her twenty-first year Beatrice was wedded to Simone de’ Bardi. That she herself was the bride on this occasion might seem out of the question, from the fact of its not being in any way so stated: but on the other hand, Dante’s silence throughout the Vita Nuova as regards her marriage (which must have brought deep sorrow even to his ideal love) is so startling, that we might almost be led to conceive in this passage the only intimation of it which he thought fit to give.

20. Guido Guinicelli, in the canzone which begins, “Within the gentle heart Love shelters him.”

21. There is a play in the original upon the words Primavera (Spring) and prima verrà (she shall come first), to which I have given as near an equivalent as I could.

22. “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord.’”

23. That is (as I understand it), suppressing, from delicacy towards his friend, the words in which Love describes Joan as merely the forerunner of Beatrice. And perhaps in the latter part of this sentence a reproach is gently conveyed to the fickle Guido Cavalcanti, who may already have transferred his homage (though Dante had not then learned it) from Joan to Mandetta.

24. On reading Dante’s treatise De Vulgari Eloquio, it will be found that the distinction which he intends here is not between one language, or dialect, and another; but between “vulgar speech” (that is, the language handed down from mother to son without any conscious use of grammar or syntax), and language as regulated by grammarians and the laws of literary composition, and which Dante calls simply “Grammar.” A great deal might be said on the bearings of the present passage, but it is no part of my plan to enter on such questions.

25.i.e., the languages of Provence and Tuscany.

26. It strikes me that this curious passage furnishes a reason, hitherto (I believe) overlooked, why Dante put such of his lyrical poems as relate to philosophy into the form of love-poems. He liked writing in Italian rhyme rather than Latin metre; he thought Italian rhyme ought to be confined to love-poems: therefore whatever he wrote (at this age) had to take the form of a love-poem. Thus any poem by Dante not concerning love is later than his twenty-seventh year (1291-2), when he wrote the prose of the Vita Nuova; the poetry having been written earlier, at the time of the events referred to.

27. “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations!”—Lamentations of Jeremiah, i. I.

28. Beatrice Portinari will thus be found to have died during the first hour of the 9th of June, 1290. And from what Dante says at the commencement of this work, (viz., that she was younger than himself by eight or nine months,) it may also be gathered that her age, at the time of her death, was twenty-four years and three months. The “perfect number” mentioned in the present passage is the number ten.

29. Thus according to some texts. The majority, however, add the words, “And therefore was I in thought:” but the shorter speech is perhaps the more forcible and pathetic.

30. Boccaccio tells us that Dante was married to Gemma Donati about a year after the death of Beatrice. Can Gemma then be “the lady of the window,” his love for whom Dante so contemns? Such a passing conjecture (when considered together with the interpretation of this passage in Dante’s later work, the Convito) would of course imply an admission of what I believe to lie at the heart of all true Dantesque commentary; that is, the existence always of the actual events even where the allegorical superstructure has been raised by Dante himself.

31. The Veronica (Vera icon, or true image); that is, the napkin with which a woman was said to have wiped our Saviour’s face on His way to the cross, and which miraculously retained its likeness. Dante makes mention of it also in the Commedia (Parad. xxxi. 103" (Paradiso, Canto 31, line 103))., where he says:—

“Qual è colui che forse di Croazia

Viene a veder la Veronica nostra,

Che per l’antica fama non si sazia

Ma dice nel pensier fin che si mostra:

Signor mio Gesù Cristo, Iddio verace,

Or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?” etc.

32. This we may believe to have been the Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, which furnished the triple argument of the Divina Commedia. The Latin words ending the Vita Nuova are almost identical with those at the close of the letter in which Dante, on concluding the Paradise, and accomplishing the hope here expressed, dedicates his great work to Can Grande della Scala.

33. “Who is blessed throughout all ages.”