Dante

DANTE
1265 - 1321

PROF. K. VISWANATHAM
Head of the Department of English, Andhra University

Eliot in one of his essays states that the Gita, next to Dante’s Commedia, is the greatest religious poem in the world. And another English scholar, C. S. Lewis, agrees with this view. Dante’s Commedia (‘Divine’ is not in Dante’s title) is the crown and climax of the Middle Ages. It is the incarnation of all that is most splendid and wonderful in Mediaeval Catholicism; it is the quintessence of the philosophy, the theology and the chivalry of the Middle Ages. The nobility of its conception and the amazing variety of its characters, it is said, have no parallel in literature. In architectonics it is so marvellously and seemlessly dovetailed that every other long poem lies carelessly diffused. It is conceived as a whole, each part firmly, almost mathematically, related to the rest. It consists of 100 cantos divided into sections of 34, 33 and 33 respectively; all the cantos are of equal length and written in terza rima–used by Shelley in The West Wind, an ode which gallops like the west wind itself.

The Divine Comedy is not just a poem composed in the ‘vulgar’ tongue (vulgar means common) on the foundations of catholic theology. It belongs to Europe; it belongs to the world. Dante is not only Dante but every Christian sinner, every erring human being. Beatrice is not only Beatrice, the daughter of Portinary and the wife of Bardi, but Heavenly Grace:

The love that moves the sun and the stars

Hell, purgatory and Paradise are in Catholic theology, the places of the damned, the Redeemed and the Blessed respectively. And in the Divine Comedy Hell is the image of deepening possibility of in the soul. Purgatory deals with the purgation from the Seven Deadly Sins and Paradise is the ideograph of beatification and joy. Dante’s Hell is every body’s Hell. It tallies with our Naraka and his Paradise with our Swarga.

The Divine Comedy is the Biography of Dante, the History Italy, the Politics of Florence, a Satire against the Foes, Catholic theology, Christian Religion and Divine Grace. It is a great adventure story, the Allegory of Love, the Poetry of the Vulgar tongue and the Vision of Beatitude.

To read Dante in the right perspective we have to get rid of certain prejudices and to get acquainted with the literary climate of that period.

It is sarcastically remarked that Dante composed the Divine Comedy in the splenetic humour of an exile to put his political foes in Hell and his friends in Paradise. Bitter, Gloomy, Grin–are the adjectives usually mentioned about Dante as Sardonic, Competent, Cynical–are those used frequently about Maugham; it is not noticed that he is the poet of joy like Wordsworth. It is necessary to take the Christian and Catholic view of the world seriously. One critic says that all the theology, metaphysics and allegory should be swept aside into the dust bin and forgotten to appreciate the poetry of Dante. But to study the poetry freed from this rubbish is like studying centipedes freed from their irrelevant legs or studying Hamlet dismissing the code of revenge. Dante is condemned for dedicating the consuming fire of his passion to local politics (just as admirers of Milton regret his Latin Secretaryship or those of Burke quote tearfully:

He gave up to party what was ment for mankind)

for using the Italian vulgar tongue, for puns and conceits (the fatal Cleopatra of even Shakespeare according to Dr. Johnson) satirical humour and self mockery. But when he chooses to be sheerly beautiful, he writes not like a man but like an angel. We may forget Dante the moralist, Dante the politician, Dante the theologian and even Dante the most piercing intellect ever granted to the sons of men but we cannot Dante the poet who marches shoulder to shoulder with Homer and Shakespeare.

His wonderful similes are justly and deservedly admired. Ruskin admired the amazing picture of the Centaur dividing his beard before he spoke. Arnold liked the simile of the damned peering at Virgil and Dante like an old tailor at a needle’s eye. The whole of the Middle Ages moves vividly before the reader in Dante’s thumb nail sketches. That is because the poet made use of symbolic images which make his poem minute and precise like Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver’s Travels. It is important to note in this context the difference between Allegory and Symbol. Allegory uses the ‘unreal’ for the real. Anger is real but is represented as an abstraction in poetry symbol on the other hand uses the real for the ‘unreal’ or the unseen; that is, Rose is real and is used as a symbol of Courtly Love. Dante instead of personifying wisdom like any other poet brings in Virgil (who stands for wisdom) and quick and immediate is the leap of recognition. In the same way the late Maugham is said to have used the real persons he met in his novels. The seamless carpentry of the Divine Comedy, the vigour of the narrative impelled by the terza rima, the brilliant biting characterization, the brisk cut-and-thrust dialogue are part of the poetry but the poetry itself no one can explain. Dante was born in Florence in 1265 and died of fever at Ravenna in 1321 at the age of 56. In his ninth year he saw Beatrice then eight years old and his whole life changed. She was to him the God-bearing image. He hoped to write of her what never yet was written of any woman as Donne tried to do about Elizabeth Drury. She married Simone dei Bardi and died in 1290. To Dante the light went out of life and Florence was widowed.

For there is a kind of world remaining still
Though she which did inanimate and fill
The world, be gone…..

This is how he described Beatrice’s salutation (which in Italian means salvation too)

I say that when she appeared from any direction, then, in the hope of her wondrous salutation there was no enemy left to me; rather there smote into me a flame of charity, which made me forgive every person who had injured me; and if at that moment anybody had put a question to me about anything whatsoever, my answer would have been simply ‘Love’, with a countenance clothed in humility.

He married Gemma Donati, a woman of a noble family but violent temper (to which he is said to refer in the poem:

Me, my wife
Of savage temper more than aught beside
Hath to this evil brought);

he had four children by her. Florence at this time was torn dissensions of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the supporters of the Papacy and of the Emperor respectively. Dante as one who sympathized with the Ghibellines was banished by the victorious Guelphs. The rest of his life was the life of a vagrant, a mendicant and an exile:

How hard a path it is to go up and down
upon another’s stairs

He visited Verona and went to live at Ravenna with his banished sons and daughter named Beatrice. His works are:

The New Life 1292-1295
Song Book
The Banquet (a collection of lyrics)
Of writing in the vulgar tongue: 1307-1309
Of Monarchy: 1311
Letters and Eclogues in Latin
A Scientific Treatise and
The Commedia–the greatest and the last.

There is an interesting story that Dante appeared to his son in a dream and told him where the last 13 Cantos (for which they made an unavaling search) were secreted in a wall.

Dante inherited the climate of Courtly Love and Moral Allegory, Catholic Theology and Florentine Politics and fused all these in the furnace of his burning imagination and created this great poem–the Odessey of a lover in search of his lost Lady, a Christian in search of Divine Grace, every Man in search of Perfection in himself and the community. The poem is the saga of one who went into the murky depths of Hell in himself and others, voyaged, through the purgatorial fires of cleansing repentance and was rapt away in ecstacy at the blessed vision of Beatrice on a chariot clad In the mystical colours of red, white and green and crowned with a wreath. Whether she is Love Divine or Church Triumphant is irrelevant in the blaze of Paradisal Glory. What was perhaps a chronique scandaleuse for Dante’s age has become a universal Testament of Love to us, an Allegory of the way to God, the Burning Oracle of a great Artist; to Dante the Vale of Suffering was the Vale of Soul-making. Here is the honest speech in which even women could exchange ideas of one burnt in the fire of suffering:

Must thou char the wood
Ere thou canst limn with it?

Dante combined the Story of Religion and the Story of Love into a great Allegory of the soul’s search for God which raises a responsive echo in every common reader.