![]() ![]() ![]() Love, even as one who has already been present in the future and comprehended the fullness of its scope, weeps. Presenting it in Latin from the mouth of personified Love gives weight to the mysterious, ineffable, yet quantifiable presence of his love for Beatrice and the grace she fills him with. The young and impressionable Dante is here undergoing a long experience that he cannot understand but, in retrospect, the experience is psychologically accessible and anticipatory. An encouraged Dante asks Love why he is also weeping, to which Love responds, in Latin, “’I am like the center of a circle, equidistant from all points on the circumference, but you are not ’” (19). Love speaks in Latin, saying “’My son, it is time to do away with our pretences ’” (19). In XII, a weeping Dante returns to his room and encounters Love as a young man dressed in white clothes. He does so to breathe startling meaning into feelings, not to render his experiences of love as imaginary or fantastic events.ĭante’s use of Latin and his use of exaggerated metaphor in Vita Nuova constitute some of the many conceits that crystallize the unruly breadth of memory into a surprisingly understandable topic. Dante makes it clear that he uses personification and extended metaphor to speak to inanimate things-in his case, feelings and sensations-in order to allow real things to transcend to unreal, imagined planes. He further clarifies that any poet would suffer “great embarrassment” if, “having written things in the dress of an image or rhetorical colouring… would not be able to strip his words of such dress in order to give them their true meaning” (55). ![]() In XXV, he writes “if any image or colouring of words is conceded to the Latin poets, it should be conceded to the Italian poet” (54), and cites examples of Latin poets such as Virgil, Lucan, Horace, and Ovid, who have “spoken to inanimate objects as if they possessed sense and reason” and “did this not only real things but also with unreal things” (54). Throughout the text, notably at the beginning, middle, and end, Dante employs Latin in crucial moments to establish his work’s position within the tradition of Latin epic poetry and love poetry. Yet Vita Nuova’s opening chapter leads with a line in Latin: “Here begins a new life ” (3). In order to interpret love, truth, and memory, Dante gives physical form to the concept of love and tethers a rich array of literary devices to subjective moments and dreams.ĭante vigorously champions love poets’ use of the vernacular (Italian) in chapter XXV. As part of this effort, Dante periodically uses the Latin language to anchor his own language, Italian, to its literary heritage. Particularly important metaphors and images in Vita Nuova include the heart, the pilgrim, the eyes, and the mouth / the sigh. Metaphysical poetry is often described as poetry that asks questions, gives orders, and juxtaposes simplistic language with complex, drawn-out imagery and exaggerated metaphor. ![]() These characterizations of Love make it possible for Dante to arrange and present his love for Beatrice as a universal, received experience, and his use of extended metaphor frames remembered events and feelings within a larger, shared human context. Dante himself observes-and is sometimes utterly bewildered by-the effects love has on him, but he grants personal agency to Love and repeatedly characterizes him as a wandering spirit, or “pilgrim,” and as a young man and a master. In Vita Nuova, Dante’s primary aim, within his circular structure of prose and poetry, is to carefully examine the new life his encounters with Beatrice have afforded him. ![]()
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