The New Life by Dante Alighieri

First transcribed:La vita nuova, c. 1292 (English translation, 1861)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Dante’s The New Life, a celebration in prose and poetry of the great poet’s love for Beatrice Portinari, begins with the following words:

In that part of the book of my mind before which there would be little to read is found a chapter heading which says: “Here begins the new life.” It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written there; if not all of them, at least their essential doctrine.

Perhaps it is revealing to realize that this love was a poet’s love; that is, Dante’s love was not ordinary and practical, leading to forthright pursuit, engagement, marriage, and children. When Dante first saw Beatrice he was nine years and she was eight years old. He was so affected by the sight of her that his “vital spirit” trembled, his “animal spirit” was amazed, and his “natural spirit” wept. At least, this is how it was if readers accept The New Life literally.

Dante realized that, whatever a poet’s passion, such early love could hardly be convincing to anyone save the victim. After a few more sentences of praise, The New Life describes an encounter nine years after the first, when Beatrice stood between two ladies and greeted Dante. It was the ninth hour of the day, and nine had already become a symbol of their love. Readers will not discover what Beatrice said, and it probably does not matter; the important thing is that her greeting inspired Dante’s first poem of love for Beatrice. Readers are told that in a dream after being greeted by Beatrice, Dante had a vision of Love holding Beatrice in his arms “nude except for a scanty, crimson cloth.” Holding forth a fiery object, Love said, “Behold your heart,” and shortly thereafter persuaded Beatrice to eat the heart. Then Love wept and ascended toward the heavens with the lady in his arms. This dream is the subject of the poem.

It is known from other sources that the poem, a sonnet, was sent to Guido Cavalcanti, who wrote a sonnet in return, initiating a strong friendship between the poets. In The New Life, Dante merely refers to “my first friend” and quotes the beginning of a sonnet by Cavalcanti.

Dante reports that love so weakened him that everyone noticed that he was not himself. When his glances at Beatrice were misinterpreted as being directed at another lady, Dante, seizing upon the opportunity to disguise the true object of his love, pretended that the other lady was his love, and he wrote several “trifles” for her. When the lady who served as his screen left Florence on a journey, Dante knew that he should pretend to be dismayed. In fact, he was, but not from love; he was upset because his lover’s scheming had been frustrated. Despite the complications, the resultant sonnet satisfied Dante, and it is included in the collection. The beginning of the sonnet reads

O voi che per la via d’Amor passate,Attendete e guardateS’elli e dolore alcun, quanto ’l mio, grave;E prego sol ch’audir mi sofferiate,E poi imaginateS’io son d’ogni tormento ostale e chiave.

A comparison of this first part of the sonnet with the translation by Mark Musa will give even those who do not read Italian a sense of Dante’s poetic genius.

O you who travel on the road of Love,Pause here and look aboutFor any man whose grief surpasses mine.I ask this only; hear me out, then judgeIf I am not indeedOf every torment keeper and shade.

Despite the attraction of Dante’s poetry, it would be a mistake to take The New Life as primarily a collection of poems, leaving the prose passages for those interested in biography and the poet’s comments on style and intent. The prose passages are charming in themselves, and they reveal an intelligent, sensitive man who is always a poet. Perhaps it is truer to say that Beatrice was for the poems, rather than the poems were for Beatrice. Readers cannot say the same of the prose; it is not merely an instrument to provide a setting for the poetry, but together with the poetry it forms an organic work of art. Dante’s account of his love is so clear and ingenuous in style that it is only the cold analysts looking back on what they have read who can say that the entire affair was largely a matter of the poet’s imagination extravagantly at work. Although it may have been the imagination or the animal spirit that stirred Dante, the effect created convinces that the passion was genuine (as it probably was, however engendered) and under poetic control.

Upon observing the body of a young lady who had died and was being mourned by weeping ladies, Dante suddenly realized that he had seen her in the company of the lady whom he pretended to love to hide his love for Beatrice. Although this knowledge means that the departed lady is two times removed from Beatrice, Dante is moved to write two sonnets about death. The first begins, “If Love himself weep, shall not lovers weep,/ Hearing for what sad cause he pours his tears?” and the second begins, “Brute death, the enemy of tenderness,/ Timeless mother of grief . . . My tongue consumes itself with cursing you.”

Since the lady who had served as Dante’s screen had left the city, Dante imagined that Love directed him to another lady in order that, pretending to love her, he might hide his love for Beatrice. This device, celebrated in a sonnet, was so effective that Beatrice herself must have believed the stories concerning him—rumors that he himself initiated—and one day she refuses to greet him as he passes. In the middle of Dante’s grief, described in long prose passages, Love again appears to him and tells him to write a poem explaining that it is Love’s idea, not Dante’s, that he pretend to love someone other than Beatrice.

Several poems that follow work out the implications of Beatrice’s refusal to greet him. He explains in a sonnet that Love is both good and evil—the poet’s way of saying that the lover, especially a poetic one like Dante, has difficulty in staying out of trouble.

A long canzone, directed to ladies “refined and sensitive in Love,” contains some of Dante’s most effective passages. Even Love says of Beatrice, “How can flesh drawn from clay,/ Achieve such purity?” and Dante adds, “She is the highest nature can achieve/ And by her mold all beauty tests itself.”

After a canzone on the nature of Love (“Love and the gracious heart are but one thing . . .”), Dante includes a sonnet explaining that the power of Love is awakened by Beatrice. This comparatively pleasant and romantic interlude was interrupted by the death of Beatrice’s father. Two sonnets recount, with fine poetic elaboration, how Dante wept for her sorrow; but it was only after these poetic tasks and after a serious illness during which Dante realized how frail his own existence was that he finally thought, “Some day the most gracious Beatrice will surely have to die.” In his delirium he imagined that Beatrice had died and that he called upon Death to take him; then the ladies at his bedside woke him. The result is a long, dramatic canzone in which the events of the dream are told.

One of the most entertaining of the prose sections of The New Life is section 25, in which Dante defends his speaking of Love as if it were a thing in itself, a bodily substance. The defense is as charming as it is sophistical. He explains that as a poet writing in the vernacular, not in Latin, it is his duty to make what he writes understandable to ladies. Since the vernacular was invented to talk about love, poets using the vernacular to write about love enjoy the same privileges granted to the Latin poets. Also, because Latin poets often spoke of inanimate objects as if they were beings—and Dante gives examples from Vergil, Lucan, Horace, and Ovid—Dante, as a vernacular poet writing of love, has the same right to speak of Love as if it were a human being.

In subsequent poems and prose passages Dante celebrates Beatrice’s capacity to delight all persons by her presence; he explains how a word from her revives his spirit when it is overcome by Love; and he argues that her power is such that even remembering her is enough to make one feel her influence.

In section 28, Dante reveals that Beatrice has died. He explains that it would not be proper in this book to discuss the canzone he was writing at the time, and he then devotes section 29 to a rather involved discussion of the significance of the number nine in connection with Beatrice. Scholars know that Beatrice—who in 1285 married Simone de’ Bardi—died on June 8, 1290. How, then, can Dante read the number nine into the time of her death? He argues that, counting in the Arabian fashion, she departed “during the first hour of the ninth day of the month,” and using the Syrian calendar which has a first month corresponding to the Western October, she departed in the ninth month. Other ingenious calculations are used to argue that Beatrice was a miracle since nine was her number and three is its root and the Trinity is the sole factor of all miracles.

A lengthy canzone tells of Dante’s grief, after which he presents a sonnet cleverly devised to express a brother’s sorrow in the first half—for Dante later sent the poem to Beatrice’s brother—and the poet’s own sorrow in the second half. As he explains in the remarks prefacing the sonnet, only a person examining the sonnet carefully can tell that the dramatic speaker changes.

Dante writes that he was observed while weeping and that the young woman who observed him did so with such compassion that he wrote a sonnet to her. The sonnet was followed by another, and the second by a third, the third a self-chastisement for taking such pleasure in writing poetry for the compassionate lady.

After a few more sonnets Dante decided that he had better cease writing about Beatrice until he could honor her in his writing as no other lady had ever been honored. Readers know that this hope was not mere sentiment or poetic falsehood, for Beatrice appears again as one of the most favored of Heaven, guiding Dante through paradise in La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802).

The New Life leaves the reader with an impression of Dante the poetic artist, constructing in his walks about Florence the ideas and lines so charmingly used in his book. Although one may be convinced that much of Dante’s love was created by the artist for the sake of his poetry, there is so much skill and poetic grace in his work that the distinction between nonartist and artist is not important.

Bibliography

Dante. Dante’s Lyric Poetry. Edited and translated by Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde. 2 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1967. Includes the poems, but not the prose, of The New Life, accurate English prose translations, and extensive commentary on grammatical, syntactical, thematic, and philosophical points in the poems.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Vita Nuova. Translated by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Excellent translation. Musa’s essay traces themes and patterns in The New Life. Discusses Dante’s various roles as narrator, editor, and protagonist in the work.

Harrison, Robert Pogue. “Approaching the Vita Nuova.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Provides an analysis of The New Life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Body of Beatrice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Interprets The New Life without recourse to the narrative glosses and interpretive guidelines that Dante embedded in the prose portions of his work. Rejects Charles Singleton’s theologized reading of The New Life for an approach focusing on the tensions inherent in the mixture of poetry and prose that constitutes Dante’s work.

Mazzaro, Jerome. The Figure of Dante: An Essay on the“Vita Nuova.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. Focuses less on the literary content of The New Life and more on the degree to which Dante’s poetry and prose reflect the poet’s self-image and the changing society for which he wrote.

Scott, John A. Understanding Dante. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. A critical overview of Dante’s work. Chapter 1 analyzes The New Life, including a discussion of the poem’s style, personification allegory, and vernacular love poetry and the character of Beatrice.

Singleton, Charles S. An Essay on the “Vita Nuova.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. The most influential American study of The New Life written in the twentieth century. Interprets Dante’s work allegorically and as a prelude to his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.