by Dante
142. The precise meaning and reference of this concluding verse has been the subject of much discussion. The metaliterary sense that he has of the canto as a whole leads Picone (Pico.1987.2), pp. 400–401, to allegorize the crown and miter that Virgil awards Dante as (1) the triumphant laurel of the modern poet and (2) the Christian truth that he can add to Virgil’s store of pagan wisdom and poetic technique. As Fasani (Fasa.2001.1), p. 432, points out, although the modern discussion has tended to treat the terms as synonyms, as long ago as in the commentaries of the Ottimo (1333) and of Francesco da Buti (1385) they were understood as separate entities. To the Ottimo they signified “rector and shepherd”; to Francesco, laurel crown (“corono; di laurea, come poeta”) and bishop’s miter (“come vescovo e guidatore dell’anima tua a l’eterna salute” [as bishop and guide over your own soul, bound for eternal salvation]), two very different sorts of adornment for Dante’s head. Fasani opts for the crown as a sign of Dante’s active life, his temporal (and decidedly imperial) political mission, and sees the miter as an image of his contemplative life, the poet’s spiritual mission.
Virgil can make Dante neither an emperor nor a bishop (and surely not a pope). He is metaphorically crowning Dante for now having, in his will, the ability to rule himself morally, as the world, were it only better governed, would be ruled by two powers, emperor and pope. Dante is now said by Virgil to be in complete command of the powers of his will, a microcosmic image of the world made just (improbable as Dante would have thought such a happy state) under its two prime authorities. [return to English / Italian]
PURGATORIO XXVIII
1. We enter the third and final part of the cantica. These divisions, antipurgatorium (the first naming of “ante-purgatory” in the commentaries), purgatorium, and postpurgatorium, are found in Benvenuto da Imola (1380).
Dante’s first word, vago (eager) ties him to Ulysses, eager for adventure (for the word vago see note to Purg. XIX.22–24). Virgil had told him, in his final instruction (Purg. XXVII.138), that in the garden he will be free either to sit (thus imitating Rachel, the contemplative life) or to move about (thus imitating Leah, the active life). We should not be surprised that Dante makes the latter choice. Since, as we shall see, his contemplative faculties are at this point faulty at best, his choice will be reflected in his intellectual difficulties with understanding the nature of the love represented by the beautiful woman he will shortly meet (and who is eventually identified as Matelda).
Matelda will only be named at Purgatorio XXXIII.119. It may be helpful to the reader to deal with her identity and her role in the poem before then. However, the reader should not forget that Dante has presented this woman as nameless, perhaps, among other reasons, to make us pay attention to what she means rather than concentrating on who she is. For the question of her identity, see the note to vv. 40–42. [return to English / Italian]
2. This forest is sacred, in the words of Andreoli (1856), “because it was planted by the very hands of God.” Many discussants of the opening of this canto realize that the poet is drawing a line across the page between the last canto and this one. Dante has finished the first half of the journey and now he finds himself in a very different sort of forest from the dark wood in which he came to his senses at the opening of Inferno. That wood was “aspra e forte” (dense and harsh [Inf. I.5]) while this forest is “spessa e viva” (thick and verdant).
It is instructive and amusing to consider the opening remarks of Benvenuto da Imola (1380) as he addresses this canto: “Before I come to its literal meaning, I would like you first to note that this entire chapter is figurative and allegorical, for otherwise it would in large measure be fatuous and untrue.” Benvenuto is essentially denying the claim made by the poet that this is the actual garden of Eden. He goes on to assert that the garden signifies “the happy state of man in the perfection of his virtue, as much as is possible in this miserable life of ours.” Benvenuto’s commentary, which remains one of the most intelligent and helpful ever written, has a blind eye for many of Dante’s theological strategies. [return to English / Italian]
5. In this forest Dante the sightseer can move lento lento (very slowly), enjoying his surroundings. Here he will not be subject to the fear that afflicted him in the selva oscura. [return to English / Italian]
7–9. The gentle breeze, as we shall learn (vv. 85–87), surprises Dante, who had expected to find no meteorological disturbance of any kind in the garden. It strikes upon his brow, perhaps reminding us that that was where the seven P’s were inscribed on him by the warder of the purgatorial gate (Purg. IX.112). He is, as was Adam when he found himself in this place 6,499 years ago (see Par. XXVI.119–123), innocent. Unlike Adam, Dante will not fall in it. [return to English / Italian]
10–12. From the westward movement of the boughs of the trees we learn that the wind in the garden blows from the east, a propitious source, since it is associated with the rising sun and thus with Christ, often represented as the sun climbing the sky, resurrected from the darkness of death. [return to English / Italian]
13–18. The morning breeze does not disturb the birds plying their crafts (singing and nesting, according to John of Serravalle [1416], but surely flying as well). Lest the reader believe these birds are actually birds, Benvenuto (1380) reveals what they “really” represent: “wise and virtuous men, who rise to the heights of virtue and joyfully sing their praise of God.” An allegorical temper can steal the joy from any poem.
The harmony of birdsong and forest murmur, treble and bass, respectively, reveal the favorable conjunction of art (the birdsong) and nature (the wind in the trees) in Eden. [return to English / Italian]
19–21. The sound of the forest is compared to that made by the trees in the great pine forest near Ravenna when it is stirred by the strong wind from Africa, released, at least in myth, from Aeolus’s bag of the winds.
The image of wind making melody on a natural instrument, the Aeolian harp, became a staple of Romantic literature. [return to English / Italian]
22–24. Insisting again on the slowness, and thus the calm, of his progress (see verse 5), Dante implicitly contrasts his entrance into the world of sin in the first canto of the poem with his arrival in the garden. Here, just as there, he takes stock by looking back through a wood toward his point of entrance: “How I came there I cannot really tell, / I was so full of sleep / when I forsook the one true way” (Inf. I.10–12), but the differences between the two places overwhelm their similarities. [return to English / Italian]
25–27. This stream is Lethe, the river of oblivion in classical literature, in which Christians in Dante’s Eden leave the memory of their sins behind them for eternity, as Matelda will explain (vv. 127–128). [return to English / Italian]
32–33. Beginning with Tommaseo (1837), commentators have suggested a source in Ovid (Metam. V.388–391) for the shaded garden here, the Sicilian scene of Proserpina’s rape (see vv. 49–51), where the forests above the pools in the hills of Enna keep them protected from Apollo’s rays. [return to English / Italian]
40–42. The fascination of the character introduced anonymously here (we will not find out her name until Purgatorio XXXIII.119) has proven so great that in Dante studies there is practically a separate industry devoted to problems associated with her identity and her significance. The position taken in what follows is based on the following given: Matelda (that is the name that we eventually hear, and it is spelled with an “e” [and not an “i”] in all the manuscripts consulted by Petrocchi) is not “allegorical” but historical. Almost all the early commentators believe that she is Matilda of Tuscany (1046–1115). Their cases pleaded from ca. 1860 on, the two principal other historical claimants to the role are thirteenth-century German nuns, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Mechthild of Hackeborn, but they have both been mainly abandoned in recent and current discussions. Starting in the nineteenth century there was a reaction against all such historical figures and, led by Scartazzini, once he came over to this view, an a
ttempt to establish her identity as one of the other women in Dante’s Vita nuova, a position given support in our own era by so eminent a student of the Commedia as Contini (Cont.1976.1), pp. 173–74. A calmer and more sensible survey than Scartazzini’s is found in Moore (Moor.1903.1), pp. 210–16; he ends up cautiously maintaining the claim of Matilda of Tuscany. As opposed to the nuns, who are contemplatives, Matelda’s service to the Church is clearly related to the active life, based precisely on the Church’s own favorite mode of the laity’s involvement: financial support. None of the young women in the Vita nuova are easily understood in any such role.
Matilda of Tuscany, by mere virtue of having so much support in the early commentaries (the first real opposition to her occurs only in Venturi [1732]), is probably the most intelligent choice. For an attempt to restore her identity see Villa (Vill.1987.1). However, she is nonetheless problematic for at least three reasons. (1) She was fiercely supportive of the political claims of the Church against the emperor; (2) she is presented here as a beautiful young woman, which little accords with her descriptions in the chronicles, which make her seem little less than a virago, a female soldier, and surely less “romantic” than would accord with such a portrait as Dante’s; (3) since the function she performs in the garden seems to be universal (but there is debate about this, with some believing that she is only here for Dante’s visit [see note to Purg. XXXIII.128–135]), the fact that she could not have begun her task until 1115 is a bar to her candidacy. This, however, is true for all candidates, as it was not, for instance, for that other genius loci, Cato (presiding over purgatory as Matelda presides over Eden), who died before Christ harrowed hell, before there were any souls in purgatory, and who thus was able to take up his function only when there were those who required it.
Someone (it may have been Charles Singleton) once made the remark that if we did not know Matelda’s name we would know much more readily who she is. In her role in the garden of Eden she is, there can hardly be a doubt, a representation of unfallen Eve.
As the “new” (or “original old” or “perpetually new”) Eve, she makes sense. She represents the active life that Leah led us to expect in her (as Rachel associates Beatrice with the contemplative life) and she can have been here from the beginning of purgation. And it is also true that, in Genesis, unfallen Eve is never named; she is only named after the fall, when Adam calls his wife “Eve” (Genesis 3:20). Matelda, too, is named belatedly. [return to English / Italian]
43–51. Here the reader should probably be aware of a distinction between what the poet knows of Matelda’s significance and what the character makes of her. A strategic awareness of the evident difference in perspective between narrator and character as a general aspect of the poem is, surprisingly enough, a fairly recent development. See Spitzer (Spit.1946.1), pp. 414–22; Singleton (Sing.1949.1), p. 25; Contini (Cont.1976.1 [1958]), pp. 33–62; Montano (Mont.1962.1), pp. 367–76. [return to English / Italian]
43–48. Dante sees that Matelda is “in love” and wants to understand what she is singing. The response of Venturi (1732) indicates that the current debate was already in progress nearly three hundred years ago. He takes Matelda to be singing “of divine love and not, as some ignorant fools understand, of the bestial kind.” However, many commentators, aroused by the sensual tone of the protagonist’s responses, disagree.
The first major use of Guido Cavalcanti’s poem, “In un boschetto trova’ pasturella” (In a little wood I came upon a shepherd girl), to amplify the meaning of this scene was made by Charles Singleton (Sing.1958.1), pp. 214–16, even if he was not the first to call attention to its importance here (see Scartazzini [1900]). This ballata is in a genre worked previously by dozens of French and Provençal poets, a genre in which poets who more usually wrote songs about unattainable ladies had their “revenge,” as it were. The pastourelle or pastorella (the genre is named for the willing and socially unimportant shepherdess it celebrates) generally, as in Cavalcanti’s lyric, has a highborn protagonist ride into a clearing in a wood where he finds a lovely and willing young woman who gives him sexual pleasure at his merest request (indeed, in Cavalcanti’s poem, it is she who proposes the amorous encounter to him). Any study of this ballata makes it immediately clear that Dante had it on his mind as he composed this canto.
Once we see Guido’s poem behind Dante’s we can also discern an authorial strategy behind its presence. Matelda does not come as a shepherdess, but as the unfallen Eve, virginal, upright, completely uninterested in sex. It is the protagonist, his head full of Cavalcantian sexuality, who imagines she is in love with him, just like a pretty pastorella. It will take him some time to discover the wrongness of his view of her, and some of his readers still have not made that discovery. [return to English / Italian]
49–51. The protagonist first associates Matelda with Ovid’s Proserpina (Metam. v.391–401), seen, grasped, and carried off by Pluto. Dante, who has begun this scene believing that Matelda is in love with him, now lets his erotic misinterpretation show; he thinks he is in the role of Pluto to her Proserpina because he thinks she is a pastorella. [return to English / Italian]
52–58. Playing off Dante’s carnal appreciation of her meaning, Matelda comes closer so that he can hear the words of her song, thus acceding to his request. She is portrayed, in simile, as being as chaste as virginity itself. [return to English / Italian]
59–60. Dante’s wish, expressed at verse 48, to make out the words of Matelda’s song is here granted. Few texts in the poem have been as poorly treated by the commentators as this one. The protagonist’s wish made us want to know what Matelda was singing; and here we learn that Dante now can make out her words. However, the poet does not tell us what she sang. It is at least possible that he expected us to puzzle out the identity of her song. No one has. Perhaps it is the Psalm to which she refers at verse 80, perhaps it is another song altogether. Our teachers, with only one exception, are silent, merely saying the obvious, that Dante understood what she was singing, and, with only the exceptions of Isidoro Del Lungo (1926) and Charles Singleton (1973), not even bothering to point out that the poet refuses to share this information with us. About all that can safely be said is that she probably sings a song that is kindred in spirit to the Psalm to which she later refers (see note to vv. 80–81). [return to English / Italian]
64–66. Matelda’s gaze, the poet remembers, was like the amorous gaze of Venus, wounded by mistake by the arrow of her son, Cupid, and consequently madly in love with Adonis, in a second Ovidian reminiscence (Metam. X.525–532). [return to English / Italian]
67–69. Matelda, resuming her role as a latter-day Leah (and Eve as well), picks the self-seeding plants the nature of which she will disclose to Dante at vv. 109–120. [return to English / Italian]
70–75. The first reference is to the Persian king Xerxes, who found a way to cross the wide Hellespont in 480 B.C. by having his vast army build a bridge out of ships lashed together; defeated by the Greeks whom he was attacking, he had to sail home in ignominy in a small boat.
The sight of this lady moved the protagonist, the poet informs us, to lustful thoughts like those of Leander, unable to cross the rough seas of the Dardanelles from Abydos to make love to his girlfriend Hero at Sestos, the third Ovidian reference, this time to the Heroides (XVIII). Leander finally drowned in his attempt to swim to Hero.
These three classical allusions to destructive sexual passions, aligning Matelda, in the protagonist’s eyes, with Proserpina, Venus, and Hero, and himself with Pluto, Adonis, and Leander, function, as Hollander suggested (Holl.1969.1), pp. 154–58, much as did the associations with the dream in Purgatorio IX, in which three classical references, involving rape or other destructive behavior, were balanced and corrected by the Christian benevolence of St. Lucy. Here the protagonist’s sexualized vision of Matelda yields to a better understanding once she reveals the nature of her love: Christian charity. Once she does so, the protagonist, whose will came through his self-produce
d temptation well enough (he does not attempt to cross the narrow stream to be with her), finally has his understanding corrected and no longer thinks of Matelda in sexual terms for the rest of his six cantos in the garden. [return to English / Italian]
70. Some readers have found the three paces that must not yet be crossed allegories of the three “steps” of confession, contrition, and satisfaction that await Dante later when he must deal with Beatrice’s accusation in Cantos XXX and XXXI. Others think they are only indicative of a short distance and have no deeper meaning. [return to English / Italian]
76–80. Matelda, who has appeared at verse 40, finally speaks. Addressing all three poets (we have surely forgotten about the presence of Statius and of Virgil—as has Dante), she says things that at least Statius and Dante are able to understand. They are “new” (in the sense that they have never been here before but also in that they are “new men,” remade, sinless) and perhaps expect to hear a lament for the Fall, for the loss of this place by the human race because of original sin. Her message, however, is not the tragic message of the Fall but the comic one of recovery, of paradise regained. [return to English / Italian]
76. With regard to the word rido: Matelda is probably not laughing, as some hold, but smiling; see König (Koni.2001.1), p. 441, citing Convivio III.viii.8 for a smile as the shining forth of delight in the soul. [return to English / Italian]
80–81. Psalm 91 (92), “A Psalm or Song for the sabbath day,” begins as follows: “It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto your name, O most High.” The verse that Matelda refers to, 91:5 in the Vulgate, runs as follows in the English Bible: “For you, Lord, have made me glad (delectasti me) through your work: I will triumph in the work of your hands” (92:4). Matelda is expressing her Leah-like devotion to the active life, her delight in “dressing and keeping the garden” as Eve was enjoined to do (but did not, eating the forbidden fruit instead). She is once again joined in our understanding to the unfallen Eve, her constant typological referent in Dante’s garden of Eden. If we ever had any doubt about the nature of the love she feels, we do so no longer. She is “in love” with God, not with Dante except as she loves him in God, as we shall see all the saved loving one another (and Dante) in Paradiso.
