American Association of Teachers of Italian

A Reading of Dante's Rime petrose
Author(s): Donald Sheehan

Source: Italica, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jun., 1967), pp. 144-162
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Italian
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A READING OF DANTE'S RIME PETROSE
Dante's rime petrose offer initially one of the most confusing,

if not complex, problems in Dante criticism. The problem arises
primarily from a dilemma in critical approach. As Thomas G.
Bergin puts it in his recent book: " Are they [the petrose]
merely exercises in virtuosity... or are they verses written with
serious intent and real passion, addressing themselves to a
'real' Donna Petra?"' This dilemma between the petrose's
artifice and their " reality " is peculiarly vexing, for our
criticism is forced to select for discussion one term of the either/
or proposition, thereby compelling us to argue what must finally
come to seem a half-truth. C.S. Lewis sometime ago, in writing
of Troubadour poetic conventions, persuasively argued for the
dissolution of all such dilemmas:
If the feeling came first a literary convention would soon arise to

express it: if the convention came first it would soon teach those who
practised it a new feeling. It does not much matter what view we hold
provided we avoid that fatal dichotomy which makes every poem either
an autobiographical document or a literary exercise...-
Such a dichotomy is fatal in that, once we accept it, we are

committed to the unpleasant task of demonstrating either a
poem's " reality " or its dilettantism, on the assumption that
a poem's formal structure is an envelope or husk into which
" reality " is stuffed. If we attempt to discover an historical
reality for the petrose independent of form, we sooner or later
end in the pursuit of phantoms: is our Donna Petra a certain
Pietra degli Scrovegni or is she Pietra di Donato di Bruncaccio,
Dante's sister-in-law?3 Such questions are irrelevant in that,
even if we could finally answer them, the answers would in
themselves tell us little: we must still face the poems as poems
and not historical records.4
Yet, on the whole, this particular dilemma belongs to
another age, one trained in the rigorous fantasies of the 19th
century German scholarship that insisted upon the historical
identification of poetic images. Contemporary Italian and English
144
A READING OF DANTE'S RIME PETROSE 145
critics generally agree that the petrose employ in some form

myths-specifically, the now-dead Provencal myths of courtly
love. Yet Dante's use of such myths seems to us baffling and
somehow ironic, as though the petrose were willfully conceived
as thematically obscure, technically complicated yet weirdly
passionate commentaries on Provencal poetry in general and
Arnault Daniel's in particular. Our feeling is strengthened if
we accept the scholars' word that the petrose were written
around 1296, for this would place the poems after the Vita
Nuova--after, that is, Dante's discovery of the dolce stil nuovo
with which he transcended to
Provencal courtly-love myths
unify sensual and spiritual themes. The petrose, then, would
represent a return to an earlier subject; and for a poet such as
Dante, for whom (as Contini says) " a perpetual meditation on
technique " 5 was a constant, a return to a poetic subject could
not also be simply a return to an earlier style: there would
have to be a self-consciousness of technique and theme bordering
on irony. Thus, instead of the amatory praise of his earlier
rime, Dante in the petrose gives us alternately a language of
wrath and a language of fantasy, holding their separate energies
together by having a single subject for both: the Donna Petra;
and, instead of a thematic metaphysics for the praise, Dante
gives us a breathtaking mathematics of poetic form--che, he
blandly announces in one instance, non fu mai pensata in
alcun tempo. The anger, fantasy and poetics must have come,
by 1296, to seem more relevant than the youthful yet skilled
dabblings in century-old myth, and in this sense the petrose
point to the Commedia and especially the Inferno. Yet Arnault
Daniel haunts the petrose just as he had haunted the earlier
rime; as Michele Barbi says, non siamo ancora alla grande poe-
sia della Commedia, ma nell'ambito della provenzale e sopra-
tutto di Arnaldo Daniello, com'e stato ben dimostrato. For
Dante, Arnault's constant concern for and experiments with
poetic structures were abiding passions; and his supreme
achievement (in Al poco giorno) with Arnault's sestina form,
and his astonishing tour de force with his own sestina doppia
(in Amor, tu vedi), represent Dante's final extant attempt to
surpass Arnault at his own poetic. game. All that remained for
146 DONALD SHEEHAN
Dante was the ultimate praise: his hailing of Arnault Daniel

as the miglior fabbro del parlar materno (Purg., XXVI, 117).
Thus, the petrose, if they tell a " story," do so only in
relation to Dante's ironic recasting of Provencal myths and to
his deep commitment to Arnault's techniques of poetic structure.
The petrose poet is an older man, one who, in the winter of
his life, is ironically " green " (verde) with love; and he seeks
to possess a much younger girl who is ironically stone cold to
his passion. This situation, in a sense, reproduces the major
Provengal myth of courtly love: the rejected suitor scorned by
a distant lady. What is ironically reversed is the poet's response
to rejection: instead of praising the lady, the poet either verbally
lacerates her or channels his hate into thinly veiled sexual
fantasies. Torn between wrath and fantasy, the poet in each of the
petrose struggles with the contradictions of his condition, finally
arriving in each at the still peace of death. The death is either a
longed for actual death or a dream-fantasy;either way, the poet is
freed from the bitter, corrosive ironies of the relationship. The
tone of the four petrose varies from the other-worldy calm of Io
son venuto, through the obsessed fantasies of Al poco giorno and
Amor, tu vedi, to the violent rage of Cosi, nel mio parlar. What
binds the four is the power of the poet to realize the bitter
complexities of the relationship. And what the reader must
attend to in each poem is both the bitterness of the relationship
and the poetic technique of realization.
Io son venuto clearly illustrates Dante's careful attention
to the canzone form. Each stanza is made up of three parts:
two three-line pedes and a sirma. The pes is the basic stanzaic
unit, defined by rhyme and meter: 6
Io son venuto al punto de la rota

che l'orizzonte, quando il sol si corca,
ci partorisce il gemminato cielo... (1-3)
This pattern (rhyming a-b-c in eleven-syllable lines) is then

repeated exactly in the next three lines:
e la stella d'amor ci sta remota
per lo raggio lucente che la 'nforca
si di traverso, che le si fa velo... (4-6)
The sirma is the remainder of the stanza, which, unlike the

pedes, does not repeat a unit of rhyme and meter-though it
does, of course, use both. Further, each sirma is joined to its
immediately preceding pes by what Dante called a concatenatio
pulcra, which is simply the technique of rhyming the first line
of the sirma with the last line of the second pes (gelo with velo).
Also, the tenth line of each stanza is a short, seven-syllable line
that 'turns' each stanza's subject matter from objective
observations to the poet's subjective relation to the observations.
Finally, each stanza is closed by a couplet (called a combinatio)
that repeats sestina-fashion the same word (petra-petra). This
structure is then reproduced precisely throughout the poem's
five stanzas, and the canzone is closed with a commiato (or
congedo) which is patterned like the sirma (that is, with metrical
and rhyme requirements but without repetitions of patterned
units).
The primary fact about the canzone form is, of course, its
relative rigidity; the primary problem therefore is meeting its
demands with a gracefulness and an inevitability, giving the
effect that the poem would not only not get written any other
way but that it would be a far lesser poem if recast in another
form. It follows, then, that the poet must use the canzone's
complex and difficult structure to deepen and extend the poem's
meaning; that, in other words, he makes the form functional.
And it is precisely in this that Dante more or less succeeds in
the other three petrose and more or less fails in Io son venuto.
For where, in the other three, complex forms simultaneously
reflect and realize the poet's tortuous meditations, the form ip
Io son venuto is dangerously close to irrelevancy. The formal
configurations are not met by any corresponding complexity in
the poet; and, as a result, the poet's calm observations come
to seem oddly detached.
The poem works along straightforward lines. For the first
nine lines each stanza fixes upon a natural or astrological
process, sketching the motion of the process from one state to
its opposite state. In the second stanza, for instance, the vento
peregrin arises heated from the Ethiopian desert, cools as it
crosses the sea, then turns to snow that falls to earth. Similarly,
148 DONALD SHEEHAN
the leaves in the fourth stanza and the streams in the fifth
undergo radical changes in states of being. In each stanza, the
poet contrasts the processes of change with his own emotional
rigidity:
e per6 non disgombra
un sol pensar d'amore, ond'io son carco,
la mente mia... (1o-12)
Yet paralleling each contrast is a comparison. Each of the five

changes brings the thing changed closer to the poet's own
emotional state: the vento peregrin ends as fredda neve and
noiosa pioggia; the leaves passato hanno lor termine; the acqua
morta si converte in vetro-each conclusion being an image of
the poet's frozen, dead emotional state; and his only remaining
capabilities are pure observation and starkly simple juxtapo-
sition. The action of each stanza, then, is centripetal: the
conversion of vast objective processes into frozen subjective
states. Thus, the commiato moves in the only direction possible
by projecting an impossible future in which piove amore in
terra da tutti ii cieli. The irony is that, just as natural processes
move from one state to its opposite, so too the poet of love
becomes its own opposite: un uom di marmo. And he is
condemned to this fate (which is imagistically the loss of natural
life) by the very thing that creates his love: the pargoletta with
un core di marmo. Thus, the process of the poet's destruction
is not regenerative (as are natural processes) but final; and,
ironically, the poet becomes the very death that he loved in
life. Io son venuto therefore expresses one of the major motifs
of the rime petrose: the poets half-love of death.
Al poco giorno, the second of the petrose, is perhaps Dante's
undisputed triumph in the sequence. The sestina structure, with
its monumentally difficult pattern of word-repetition, is perfectly
wedded to the poem's subject; and the formal complexities
themselves come to bear a significant share of the poem's
meaning. A word or two on the sestina form is therefore in
order. For Romance-language poets, the abandoning of rhyme
is not a freer poetic technique but a more self-conscious and
difficult one: the trick is not to rhyme! The sestina replaces
phonetic recurrence (rhyme) with lexical recurrence; and,

instead of limiting the unit of recurrence to the couplet or the
stanza, the entire poem becomes a single unit by means of word
repetition. The pattern of lexical recurrence is fixed: the end-line
word of the first stanza's final line becomes the end-line word
of the second stanza's first line; the first stanza's first-line end-
word becomes the second stanza's second-line end-word; and so
forth, repeating this pattern (1-2-3-4-5-6>6-1-5-2-4-3>3-6-4-1-2-5,
etc.) throughout six stanzas until the mathematical possibilities
are exhausted (a seventh stanza would return to 1-2-3-4-5-6). The
sestina is closed with a commiato in which all six end-line words
must be used, three at the line-ends and three within the lines.
For Dante's sestina, this means that in the commiato four of
eleven syllables in each line are predetermined; and the com-
miato becomes little more than the discovery of an intelligible
syntax with which to bind together the six words.
The poetic implications--beyond the technical difficulties
-of the sestina form are clear. The six repeated words become
obsessive, as though the poet is almost helplessly drawn back
again and again to the same terms; and, at each repetition, the
words assume greater and more complex meanings, until they
suddenly fall in the commiato into what must appear to be
their fated relationship and there assume their deepest and
final meaning. For this reason, the sestina's obsessive narrative
flow is often gathered up and arrested in the commiato by an
image, as though the poem's sinuous motion has all been a
tortuous search for the one fully adequate symbol. Dante's Al
poco giorno is completely faithful to the implications of the
form. The poem repeats its six substantives so as to increase
their meanings, until the commiato gathers them into a single
image that exhausts the poem's complex and shifting paradoxes
and equations. Besides taking on subjective meanings, the
nouns also trade on stock associations. Ombra, for instance,
had by Dante's time come to be almost a cliche for death (the
Valley of the Shadow); and verde, while retaining its classical
associations with spring, had also in medieval symbolism come
to be associated with hope. The contrast between ombra-verde
(death and hope) thus parallels those between petra-donna and
150 DONALD SHEEHAN
colli-erba on the basis of cold, dead things versus warm, living

things. The older poet's ironic verde-donna-erba complex is in
the poem set against the young girl's ironic ombra-petra-colli,
and the action of the poem is a dialectic between the two.
The first two stanzas are linked by being simultaneously
terms of a comparison and of a contrast. The opening line sets
both a scenic and a human time in that the poco giorno and
the cerchio d'ombra describe both the poet's and the year's
approaching winter. Yet, despite the year's decline, the poet's
desire for the young girl is still verde since it is rooted (barbato)
in an emotional rigidity that is like dura petra. The pun, of
course, is that the giovane donna is herself the petra in which
his emotions are locked. The second stanza sets up the
comparison: just as the poet's desire is barbato, so is the young
girl unmoved and cold. The contrast is that, where the poet's
emotional rigidity is associated with winter and decay, her cold
indifference is linked to spring (il dolce tempo) and regeneration
(11-12). Here, the basic irony is that he is verde and she petra;
the deeper irony is that both are in shadows: he is in il gran
cerchio d'ombra and she si sta gelata come neve a l'ombra.
Death, in other words, is an underlying power in the poem.
The third and fourth stanzas operate independently. The
third presents what must have been, even in Dante's time, one
of the most threadbare of Provengal images: Love seated in
the lady's eyes, above which is the ghirlanda d'erba. The
Dantesque twist lies in the final two lines, which give a shocking
image of emotional imprisonment. The fourth stanza reverses
this order in opening with bizarre and original imagery:
La sua bellezza ha pi1 vertu che petra,

e '1 colpo suo non pub sanar per erba;
ch'io son fuggito per piani e per colli,
per potere scampar da cotal donna... (19-22)
The poet attempts to flee the very thing he has so long sought;
but flight has succeeded only in strengthening his emotional
attachments. The impact of these lines is to increase the
desperation of the poet's condition: just as in quicksand, his
very attempts at escape quicken his death.
From such barely controlled hysteria-as though this were

the point of maximum pressure-the fifth stanza switches to a
dream-fantasy. The poet, remembering a lovely sight of the
donna, recalls and projects his wish that she submit to him;
and, instead of his being serrato intra piccioli colli, he and the
young girl become in his fantasy chiuso intorno d'altissimi colli.
The syntax of these lines is extremely complex. The innamorata,
which modifies primarily the pronoun in l'ho chesta, is placed as
if to modify erba; and the effect is to blur the distinction between
donna and erba, thereby reinforcing syntactically the sense of
fantasy. The opening three lines of the sixth stanza reverse the
effect of the fantasy by equating it with an unnatural and
impossible phenomenon: Ma ben ritorneranno i fiumi a' colli.
The girl is now imaged as a legno that is both molle (" damp "
as well as " soft ") and verde (" green " now in the sense of
" uninflammable "). Just as rivers will never run uphill, the
poet says, so never will this young girl, as other women are, be
fired with love. Yet, despite the hopelessness, the poet would
choose dormire in petra and gir pascendo l'erba only, as he says,
per veder do' suoi panni fanno ombra. The verb construction
governing this decision is the conditional mi torrei, a verb
(torretogliersi) meaning literally " to free oneself," " to get
away;" and, in a sense, the poet finds in this final humiliation
his release from destructive love. For dormire in petra is clearly
intended as an image of death, echoing the same use of a similar
construction in Amor, tu vedi (coricare in poca petra). And
finally, as Leslie Fiedler claims, dormire in petra could
conceivably represent the poet's last lingering sense of fantasy
in that petra is also the petrose's Donna Petra.7 Yet this last
shred of fantasy, if present, is hopelessly and completely
swallowed up in the image of the poet as a grazing beast; and
the image's primary impact is to give the sense of a reduction
that is essentially a death.8 At this point, the poem reaches its
thematic depths: the poet discovers that only a humiliating,
unnatural death can fulfill his love.
The commiato moves from the poet to the donna, and
presents what at first seems a mysterious, impenetrable statement.
Its meaning begins to come clear when we realize that the piut
152 DONALD SHEEHAN
nera ombra represents death. Cast by the hills (the place of

imprisonment), the piiu nera ombra obliterates the ombra cast
by the girl's panni; yet the girl makes this blacker shadow
vanish (la fa sparer)-the final, triumphant praise, it would
seem, of the girl's bellezza: its triumph over death. Yet the
final simile-com'uom petra sott'erba-does not let the poem
end in simple praise, for the simile carries the implication of
a burial, the covering over of petra (both the poet's emotional
state and the donna herself) with erba. This final statement
turns the commiato back on itself, balancing the entire poem
between the paradoxes of desperate hope and deathly
resurrection. For the poet, there is nowhere further to go; his
ironic and rigid condition, destructive and bestializing unto
death, has become so rooted that not even death itself can
alter it.
Amor, tu vedi, Dante's so-called double sestina, enters a
radically different world, one that is, though, as rich and
complex-if not finally as suggestive-as Al poco giorno. The
primary difference is that, where in the preceding poem the
poet dealt with the complexities of the relationship, he here
uses only the barest part of the petrose relationship, making
his actual subject matter poetic form itself. Poetic form is now
for the poet not simply the method of realizing the bitter ironies
of his situation but becomes the very object of his search; and
if the petrose sequence offers for the poet any simple release
from destructive experience, it is only in the realm of poetics.
Such a resolution is not new in Dante's work; in fact, a major
theme of the Vita Nuova hinges largely on such a resolution.
There, when mockingly asked by lady friends after Beatrice's
rejection: " Noi ti preghiamo che tu dichi ove sta questa tua
beatitudine," the poet silences them with: " In quelle parole
che lodano la donna mia." " For Dante, poetic form was never
a trivial or extraneous concern but a decidedly central one. And
in Amor, tu vedi, Dante attained what is perhaps his most
complicated poetic victory, representing his triumph over
seemingly impossible technical obstacles. For Dante himself, the
poem came to be a sort of minor symbolic rubrica proclaiming
Incipit vita nova. In De Vulgari Eloquentia, after warning

aspiring poets against repetition of rhyme, Dante adds:
nisi forte novum aliquid atque intentatum artis hoc sibi preroget; ut
nascientis militie dies, qui cum nulla prerogativa suam indignatur
preterire dietam; hoc etenium nos facere nisi sumus ibi, Amor, tu vedi
ben che questa donna.10
(unless perhaps some untried novelty in art claim this right--just as
on the day a man is knighted, he cannot allow his period of preparation
to pass without some notable achievement-and this I have done in
Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna.)
The poem was for Dante the winning of his poetic knighthood;
and, in its way, is as astonishing and completely successful a
moment as one could wish in Dante's development toward his
monumental technical achievement: the Commedia's 14,233
lines of terza rima stanzas.
Amor, tu vedi has become known as a sestina doppia; this
needs some qualification. Strictly speaking, a double sestina
would be simply a twelve-line stanza whose pattern, repeated
sestina-fashion, would resolve itself in ten stanzas. Dante's
pattern resolves itself in five stanzas because the stanzas repeat
only five words; had they used six words, the pattern would
have been exhausted in six stanzas; and so forth. The stanzaic
structure combines the sestina principle with a canzone order.
Each stanza is divided into two three-line units (corresponding
to the canzone's pedes), followed by a four-line unit (" sirma "),
and closed with a couplet (" combinatio ") repeating the same
word for its rhyme. And, in canzone fashion, the poem closes
with a commiato in which the poem itself is addressed. Now,
to keep our bearings, let us assign numbers to the poem's five
repeated words in their order of initial occurrence: 1 =donna;
2= tempo; 3= luce; 4 =freddo; 5= petra. Using the numbers
to indicate lexical identity, we see that in the opening stanza
the first three-line " pes " rhymes 1-2-1; the second 1-3-1; the
" sirma " 1-4-4-1; and the " combinatio " 5-5. This means that
one-half of the rhymes are one word: donna. The second stanza
begins, as does a sestina's, taking the first's final word (5=petra)
for its first rhyme, and the first's first word (1 =donna) for its
second. The first stanza's pattern is then reproduced exactly,
154 DONALD SHEEHAN
using petra (5) as its dominant word: 5-1-5; 5-2-5; 5-3--3-5; 4-4.
The third stanza then again reproduces the pattern, selecting the
second's last (4=freddo) and first (5=petra) rhymes for its first
and second, with the result: 4-5-4; 4-1-4; 4-2-2-4; 3-3. The
principle is that the dominant word in a stanza serves to ' frame '
each " pes " as well as the" sirma," and the three 'frames'
are filled with the other four words repeated in their initial
sequence. The third stanza, for instance, uses 4 (freddo) as the
dominant and frame word; hence, the sequence for repeating
the other words is 5>1>2>3; the fourth stanza, using 3 (luce)
as dominant and frame word, repeats the others 4>5>1>2;
and the fifth stanza, using 2 (tempo), repeats 3>4>5>1.
Finally, the pattern of the commiato is derived by using in
order the first word of each stanza: 1-5-4-4-3-2, doubling for
emphasis one word.
Though this brief, somewhat random description barely
begins to exhaust the poem's formal patterns, we can see their
primary quality: symmetry. Each stanza represents, as Contini
says of the rime petrose as a whole, " the taking possession of
a restless reality; " "1 and, to repeat, the poem's primary meaning
lies not in the " restless reality " but in the " taking possession "
of it through form. The bitter, ironic complexities of the poet's
relationship to the Donna Petra are here harnessed to and
finally controlled by the creation of an intricate symmetry. Thus,
the poem is addressed to the allegorical God of Provence: Love,
and not to the poet's experiences of and responses to the Donna
Petra; for it is as though the poet were here struggling not
with a " real lady " but with the Provengal tradition itself-with
its most difficult poetic form, the sestina, raised to a higher
power; with its one theme of hopeless, unrequited love; and
with its God. The Donna Petra herself is converted to a
Provencal cipher, and the poet's complex relationship to her is
simplified through the intricate, but powerfully ordered
symmetries of the poem itself. Thus, the form serves to level
experience in order to create symmetry, exchanging complex
response for complex structure and thereby attaining victory
over destructive experience.
The poem's content scarcely submits to explication; the
meaning, as I've insisted, lies in the form. But a few comments

seem necessary. As noted above, each stanza of the poem is
dominated by one of the five words. If the poem is (as I've
argued) more than an elegant game, it would follow that such
hammer-heavy repetitions are functional; and such, indeed, is
the case. In the first stanza, the dominant word is donna
(meaning variously " woman," " mistress," and " queen "); and
it is to donna that the poet obsessively returns, attempting by
sheer repetition to give Love a sense of her domination over
him. But note: of the six repetitions, four occur in the first six
lines and only two in the second six (and these two are preceded
and followed by two different couplets). The effect of this
unequal distribution is to release the poet from the stanza's
particular verbal obsession and, almost associatively, to turn his
mind to another. Similarly, the second stanza repeats petra four
times in six lines-with this repetition reinforced by the echoes of
the first stanza's closing couplet (petra-petra). With petra (carryng
the added weight of the pun on Donna Petra), the poet attempts
to tell Love of the Donna's effect on him, shifting the meaning of
petra-in a series of wickedly complex puns-from Love's
a
weapon, to simile of himself, to a metaphor of his emotional
paralysis, all within a syntax at once smooth and involved. In
the same way, each stanza begins with one of the poet's verbal
obsessions and then, with a full stop at the sixth line, releases
him into another one, so progressing until the poet and the
poem simultaneously arrive at the end of stanza five where they
began: donna. Yet the end and the beginning radically differ,
for the poet has at the end imagined himself in the death (in
poca petra) wherein he would be able both to survey, God-like,
the bitter world he has left and to imagine a bella donna beyond
this acerba donna. Thus, in the commiato, the poet as poet
(and not sufferer) finds his final release in the novith of the
poem's symmetry and so bears with courage the donna of his
mind. And with this, the obsessive words, one by one, loose their
hold over him, becoming not ciphers for destructive experience
but symbols of creative energy; and tempo, which had been
either sick (mal) or denied him, becomes in the final line once
again his.
156 DONALD SHEEHAN
In Cosi, nel mio parlar, Dante's final and longest petrosa,

we seem to return to the desperate fantasies and bitter ironies
of Al poco giorno. Commentators have long referred to Cosi,
nel mio parlar, perhaps more than any of the petrose, hearing
in its violent language the towering wrath of passages in the
Inferno and drawing connective lines from the Provengal brau
lengage to Dante's oral mimesis of moral laceration in the
Inferno.12 Yet such connections, however provisionally valid,
seem to me to blur the basic fact about the poem: its roots lie
in the petrose sequence and its primary meaning thus cannot
exist apart from the sequence. Though it is undeniably true
that the rime petrose must be embedded in the Provengal
tradition in order ultimately to come clear, it is equally true
that they attain a relatively autonomous existence-if only by
virtue of their ironic relation to the tradition;'3 and there has
never yet existed a poet who has written a poem only to prefigure
a future poem-such a view derives from a fraudulent application
of an ex post facto teleology.'4
The form of the poem--compared, say, to Amor, tu vedi-
offers few difficulties. The poem is structurally a canzone,
following the patterns of Io son venuto. There are in each
thirteen-line stanza two four-line pedes rhyming a-b-b-c, and
mirroring one another metrically, followed by a five-line sirma
that is linked to the second pes by a c-rhyme concatenatio and
closed by a combinatio: c-d-d-e-e. An interesting technical point
is that the first four lines of the sirma reproduce exactly the
metrics of the pedes, thereby fusing the stanza into a single
metrical unit. The five-line commiato reproduces in its first four
lines the metrics and rhymes of a pes; then, instead of an a-
rhyme opening of a second pes, the commiato closes in the fifth
line with a c-rhyme. The primary effect of the poem's form,
then, is the structural unity it attains with a relative ease and
gracefulness of rhyme and meter.
This structural unity acts to focus the intense, searing
energy of the poet's verbal assault on the Donna Petra; and
the varying line lengths serve to increase the poet's mental
pressure by forcing his utterances to hug a shifting syntax.
Unlike his submission and destruction in Al poco giorno, the
poet in Cost, nel mio parlar violently lashes out against the
Donna's colpi mortali at the same time he suffers them; and
Love, the God, becomes esto perverso-an epithet
Provencal
Dante later uses in the Commedia for Satan himself (Par., XXVII,
27). The poem's general movement follows the petrose pattern:
for two and a half stanzas, the poet meditates-agonized, violent
-on the Donna's durezza; for a stanza and a half, he describes
Love's tortures; and finally, for two stanzas, he fantasizes a
revenge with which he alternately scourges and loves the Donna
into a pace con amore. The poem, in other words, begins in
agony and ends in release; and in the commiato the poem itself
becomes the murderous weapon with which he attains the
bell'onor of vendetta. This theme-the poem as weapon-roughly
parallels the theme of form as meaning in Amor, tu vedi. The
difference is that, where in Amor, tu vedi the poem's symmetry
served to free the poet from the Donna's scourge, here the poem
itself becomes the means by which he successfully engages the
bitter complexities of his relationship to her; and, rather than
transforming the pressures of emotional complexity into the
symmetries of intricate form, the poet instead converts com-
plexity to lucidity. Thus, we see in Cosi, nel mio parlar-more
clearly than in any of the rime petrose-the crushing psychic
weight (peso) the relationship exerts on the poet; and, because
he also clearly sees it, he is able to realize and hold in his art
its full fury, making aesthetic capture his final and total triumph
over the Donna Petra.
With the startling first line we are plunged into the poem's
theme: aspro parlar as weapon against the Donna's atti. Using
the imagery of war, the first stanza focuses on the Donna's
destructive power and the poet's helplessness before it; and any
ignuda saetta is consequently useless: art itself must become a
saetta. In the second stanza, the poet shifts into a swiftly
changing series of metaphors and similes, attempting to de-
scribe more fully the extent and complexity of the Donna's
effects: she is represented as a shatterer of shields, a flower,
a ship, and finally as a crushing weight. This disparate imagery
fuses in the stanza under the pressure of the poet's agony-an
agony, he tells us at this juncture, art cannot harness (20-21).
158 DONALD SHEEHAN
Then, as though at the breaking point, the poet suddenly finds

a bizarre yet fully adequate symbol for the Donna's forza: the
disputata lima che sordamente la mnia vita scemi. The lima
symbol finally captures the Donna's silent and inexorable
corrosive effects, and the very strangeness of it serves to increase
the psychic reality of the poet's condition. With the stanza's
final line, the poem shifts for six lines into the mechanics of
a Provengal convention: the necessary secrecy of love.
It is at this point that Contini's remark about the petrose's
contingency carries its greatest weight. Yet the remark tends
to convert Dante's subtle use of the convention into an
entrapment, as though the petrose represented an imaginative
failure. This, it seems to me, is scarcely the case, for Dante at
this point transforms the Provengal secrecy convention into a
psychologically valid image of the poet's near-shattered state.
Dante thus leaves nothing relevant to the convention hidden-
its mechanics, already fully elaborated with the scherma donna
of the Vita Nuova, are completely clear insofar as they are
functional to the poem; and the third stanza's opening five lines,
syntactically subordinating convention to psychological state,
are as autonomous as any five lines in Dante:
Che pifi mi triema il cor qualora io penso

di lei in parte ov'altri li occhi induca,
per tema non traluca
lo mio penser di fuor si che si scopra,
ch'io non fo de la morte... (27-31)
From this point, stanza three, fusing love and death, goes on
to create a picture of Love (esto perverso) as murderer. Extending
the picture into the whole of stanza four, the poet again turns
rigid convention into psychic reality, giving to the abstract
Provencal God a vibrant, terrifying immediacy. The stunning
clarity of stanza four is matched in the early work only by the
delirious nightmare in the Vita Nuova (XXIII). Thus, we see
Love not as a Provencal cipher but as a destroyer who mauls
the poet both psychologically (mi surgon ne la mente strida)
and physiologically (sangue... corre verso lo cor;... ond'io ri-
mango bianco). By mingling Love's objective actions (egli alza...
la mano) with both physical consequences (mi tiene in terra)

and emotional responses, the poet gives to Love a literal reality
equal in its effects to that of death itself (50-52). At this point,
with the psychic fusion of love and death, the poet touches an
imaginative depth beyond which lie only the imagined lands
of purgatory and paradise, for he discovers the source of
emotional and imaginative energies: the co-existence of pain
and pleasure.
In the final two stanzas, the poet objectifies this discovery
into a complex fantasy in which he alternately inflicts pain and
pleasure on the Donna Petra. The jarring alternation in stanza
five between the Donna's screams (59) and her pleasure (piacere)
plunge her into a burning abyss (caldo borro) that psychologically
corresponds to the poet's own emotional agony; and she thereby
becomes the exactly suitable object for the poet's deepest
emotional energies. Thus, in the final stanza, the poet scorns
the Donna's pleas for mercy and courtesy (an ironic reversal
of all Provenpal situation) and he becomes com'orso quando
scherza, first mauling her, then attaining imagistically the goal
of all Provengal yearnings: direct contact with the distant
Donna (ne ii occhi... guarderai presso e fiso). And with this
contact comes the poet's ultimate release: union with the
Donna (con amor pace). Yet the commiato refuses to leave
the poem so resolved; instead, it asserts the ultimate unreality
of fantasy by reasserting the reality of the poem itself. The
poet's address to the poem re-establishes him as poet, and
his command to the canzone that it dalle per lo cor d'una
saetta re-establishes the poem as a created object. In the end,
the poem is not itself a world but an entity in the world;
and though that entity may serve a thematically referential
function (bell'amor s'aquista in far vendetta), it cannot for the
medieval mind finally assume an independent status.15 Thus,
the poem serves to mirror the poet's agony, and the poet finally
captures in the reflective surfaces of his poem the fantasized
reflection of the Donna Petra. With this, the petrose poet gains
both his aesthetic and psychic triumph: she has become his by
becoming like him within the mirror of his art.
Having argued for the uniqueness of vision in the rime
160 DONALD SHEEHAN
petrose, one is finally forced to see them again in relation to

Dante's greater works. For if the petrose assert an aesthetic
independence they do so only for a single, violent instant before
they sink back into our critical structuring of Dante's
development. But to have seen them so once is to see more
clearly their proper place between the delicate but powerful
lyricism of the Vita Nuova and the complex, massive harmonics
of the Commedia. For if the Vita Nuova represents the lyrical
discovery of God's love, and the Inferno the impassioned anger
at His absence, the petrose represent the point at which God's
love is lost and anger misplaced. In the Vita Nuova, God is
found through a loss of self into a larger love; in the Inferno,
He is rediscovered through a moral outrage against the eternally
damned. But in the petrose, love of God is transferred back
to a human realm, becoming a destructive emotion that locks
the self into a bitter hate; and anger, rather than transcending
itself to affirm God, merely reinforces the terrifying sense of a
loveless universe. The pilgrim Dante's remark to Bonagiunta in
the Purgatorio (XXIV, 52-54)--
" I' mi son, che quando
Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo
ch'e' ditta dentro vo significando "
-echoes and re-echoes throughout all of Dante's work, and no

less so in the petrose; for nowhere else in Dante can we find
fused into a powerful and controlled poetry a passion that is
fed by both love and rage. In the Commedia, Dante was to
fulfill the hope of the Vita Nuova's penultimate sentence; but
to do it, he had first to discover the style of anger and despair
of the rime petrose.
DONALD SHEEHAN
University of Wisconsin
1 Dante (New York, 1965), p. 93.

2The Allegory of Love (New York, 1958), p. 22. Italics mine.
3 See Vittorio Imbriani, Studi danteschi (Firenze, 1891), pp. 427-528,
for the pros and cons of the Pietra degli Scrovegni identification; arguing
against Amadi's 1566 assertion (Annotationi sopra una canzone morale),
Imbriani offers his case for Pietra di Donato di Bruncaccio. C. H. Grand-

gent, in The Ladies of Dante's Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), pp. 67-
o07, rejects both Amadi's and Imbriani's arguments, and is equally dissatis-
fied with Boccaccio's curious identification of the Donna Petra as a young
girl from the Casentino with a goiter on her neck (Compendio, XVII). Yet
one might reasonably claim that since Boccaccio's identification of Beatrice
has been verified, so might this be true. If one were forced to accept any
identification, Boccaccio's would be as likely a candidate as any other;
however, it seems to me that the entire question is a pseudo-problem, one
quite extraneous to the real problems the petrose offer.
4 Cf. Michele Barbi,
" Introduzione," Rime della " Vita Nuova " e
della giovinezza, a cura di M. Barbi e F. Maggini (Firenze, 1956), p. xxii:
" ,4 noi non interessa... discutere se queste poesie cantino un amore reale
o un amore allegorico o se addirittura siano un puro esercizio d'artista; sol-
tanto confessiamo che il tono sensualmente appassionato non ci fa pensare
ad un'allegoria, e se non si tratta di veritt umana, si tratta di abilitt poe-
tica ammirabile." As in all things Dantesque, we are deeply indebted to
Michele Barbi's consumate good sense, pertinent scholarship, and informed
judgment; no less indebted is this essay, whose opening arguments derive
from the cited " Introduzione." My primary interest here, however, is to
demonstrate through explication the exact nature of the abilit& poetica
ammirabile which Barbi so rightly sees as the shaping force of the rime
petrose.
5 Gianfranco Contini, " Introduction to Dante's Rime," trans. Yvonne
Freccero, Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero (New
Jersey, 1965), p. 29.
6 My text for the rime petrose is Le Opere di Dante, seconda edizione,
a cura di M. Barbi et alia (Firenze, 1960), pp. 1oo-io6.
7Leslie Fiedler, " Dante: Green Thoughts in a Green Shade," re-
printed in No! In Thunder (Boston, 1960), p. 37. Fiedler's essay deals only
with Al poco giorno, and interprets it along interesting, if not finally
convincing lines: that the Donna Petra is herself the symbol of the Pro-
tradition. This has the sort of daringness and originality that
venial
characterizes Dante's poetry; but the interpretation is in the end unfaithful
to the sequence as a whole, in that the symbolic equation does not hold
for the other petrose poems. Along with the absence of any truly viable
and consistent historical perspective, the refusal to consider Al poco giorno
as a part of the petrose group mars Fiedler's otherwise perceptive essay.
8 For the medieval mind, the metamorphosis of man to beast repre-
sented a blasphemous attack on God's ordered universe; and the loss of the
ability to maintain physical identity represented the loss of the
soul. Dante later on, in the Inferno, reserved metamorphosis for one of the
most desplicable classes of sinners: the thieves (Inf., XXV).
9La Vita Nuova, in Le Opere di Dante (Firenze, 1960), p. 19.
10 De Vulgari Eloquentia, in Le Opere di Dante (Firenze, 196o),
p. 326.
" " Introduction to Dante's
Rime," p. 36.
"
2 See, for instance, Leo Spitzer's Speech and Language in Inferno
XIII," Italica XIX, 3 (Sept. 1942), pp. 84-104, esp. 92-99.
"3Contini's point (" Introduction to Dante's Rime," p. 36) about the
162 DONALD SHEEHAN
petrose's " essential contingence... [and] their lack of complete autonomy "
is a brilliant and persuasive insight-but not so his conclusion: " the
inspiration of the rime petrose themselves seems radically fragmentary."
Though there is a sense in which we may see the petrose simply as
elaborations of love-complaint convention, to do so exclusively is
to ignore their Provencal
astonishing energy and freshness. Further, to question the
" inspiration " of the sequence is to create a split between conventional and
original emotion in poetry-a split belonging to our post-Romantic culture
and not to medieval art.
1" The point is made by Northrop Frye in another context; see his
" Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," ELH (June, 1956), p. 144.
1' Charles S. Singleton's arguments on the theologically based symbo-
lism of Dante's poetry lie behind my statement; as Singleton says, in refe-
rence to Purgatorio II, 106-133: " Things are to be used, not rested in.
No object... may properly have terminal value in itself. This is the claim
of the medieval Christian conscience, and this claim is the whole basis of
medieval symbolism. The object may not be terminal, for God intended
that He alone should be so...." Dante Studies i-Commedia: Elements of
Structure (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 28-29. Singleton's views on medieval
poetics in his two volumes of Dante Studies have already overshadowed
much of the previous criticism of Dante's allegorical method; and one-to-
one allegorical equations, such as Luigi Valli's Donna Petra = Santa
Chiesa (Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei " Fedeli d'amore " [Rome,
1928], pp. 340-355) have come to seem inadequate and unfaithful to
Dante's art.

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A Reading of Dante's Rime petrose

Author(s): Donald Sheehan

Dante's rime petrose offer initially one of the most confusing,

If the feeling came first a literary convention would soon arise to

Such a dichotomy is fatal in that, once we accept it, we are

critics generally agree that the petrose employ in some form

Dante was the ultimate praise: his hailing of Arnault Daniel

Io son venuto al punto de la rota

This pattern (rhyming a-b-c in eleven-syllable lines) is then

The sirma is the remainder of the stanza, which, unlike the

Yet paralleling each contrast is a comparison. Each of the five

phonetic recurrence (rhyme) with lexical recurrence; and,

colli-erba on the basis of cold, dead things versus warm, living

La sua bellezza ha pi1 vertu che petra,

From such barely controlled hysteria-as though this were

nera ombra represents death. Cast by the hills (the place of

Incipit vita nova. In De Vulgari Eloquentia, after warning

meaning, as I've insisted, lies in the form. But a few comments

In Cosi, nel mio parlar, Dante's final and longest petrosa,

Then, as though at the breaking point, the poet suddenly finds

Che pifi mi triema il cor qualora io penso

la mano) with both physical consequences (mi tiene in terra)

petrose, one is finally forced to see them again in relation to

-echoes and re-echoes throughout all of Dante's work, and no

1 Dante (New York, 1965), p. 93.

Imbriani offers his case for Pietra di Donato di Bruncaccio. C. H. Grand-

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