Due Mar 18
Late Medieval Love Lyric
Reading: Dante, Vita Nova (Dante.pdf) Ch 1,2,5,7 (pp 3-8, 11-15, 16-18) .
Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:
- Dante often speaks of love in high-flown terms. Cite a phrase where he references philosophy or astronomy or divinity and note whether this happens in a verse or prose passage.
- Conversely, Dante occasionally speaks of love in a low or jocular tone. Cite a phrase where he does this and note whether this happens in a verse or prose passage.
- Dante embeds his love poems in a kind of autobiography. Cite a biographical phrase and note its focus: deeds, mistakes, personal growth, or something else.
- There are a host of lovely phrases in this reading. Cite a short passage and comment on what makes it beautiful.
Dante’s high-flown conception of love
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A phrase I noted in which Dante speaks of love with reference to divinity is, “At that time, truly, I say, the vital spirit, which dwells in the innermost chamber of my heart, started to tremble so powerfully that its disturbance reached all the way to the slightest of my pulses. And trembling it spoke these words: ‘Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.’ (‘here is a God stronger than I, who comes to rule me.’) At that time the animal spirit, which dwells in the high chamber to which all the spirits of sensation carry their perceptions, began to marvel, and speaking especially to the spirits of vision it said: ‘Apparuit iam beatitude vestra.’ (‘your bliss has now appeared.’) At that time the natural spirit, which dwells where our food is digested, started to cry, and crying it spoke these words: ‘Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps!’ (what misery, since from now on I will often be blocked [in my digestion]!’)” This passage is a prose passage. This passage is describing the feeling of love taking over Dante after first seeing Beatrice. Dante refers to several “spirits” of his body and how they were altered as a result of this love. The vital spirit says that love is, “a god stronger than I, who comes to rule over me,” meaning that Dante’s love for Beatrice rules his heart. Comparing love to the divine in this way makes love out to be a sort of all powerful force or being over humans, as it is able to transform their spirits. Furthermore, love also is described as having power over the, “natural spirit,” which rules digestion and bodily functions. This suggests that love is so powerful it is able to disrupt the natural needs of the body, again showcasing it’s god-like power.
I like your point about love being able to transform the human spirit! I think it definitely is an “all powerful force” in this story. As in the passage you found, Dante uses this force metaphorically, but it is also sometimes a very physical change within him. When Dante sees Beatrice at the party in Chapter 7 (in a prose section), his body is seized by a “marvelous trembling that started on the left side of [his] chest and spread rapidly throughout [his] entire body” (17). This occurs to the point where he is utterly helpless and weak. Love indeed does have a “god-like power”, both over Dante’s spirits and his physical body, and I like how Dante illustrates both sides of it’s divine power equally.
I agree with both of your points about love being a powerful spirit that has complete control over human emotion. Furthermore, in this story, love is not only a feeling but a personified being. We can see this when Beatrice denies Dante’s greeting. His bliss depends entirely on Beatrice acknowledging him, so when she denies his salutation, he is immediately overcome with a feeling of sorrow. He becomes so lost that he calls out “Love, help your faithful one!” (12). This is a prose passage. Dante is praying to love to help him, just as someone would do with a higher power or god they look up to. To him, love is what consumes every part of his life and controls all of his actions. This leads him to lean on love for guidance and take an authoritative place in his life. So while love functions as an all-powerful force that has physical and emotional control over Dante, it is also personified as a God-like figure that Dante looks to lead him.
I agree with you that this passage expresses the power that love has over the body and spirit. When Dante sees Beatrice, his physical body is being affected just from the mere sight of her. I also like how you pointed out that his digestion was affected by the power of love. It emphasizes how strong love can be in order to alter the body’s natural rhythms and needs. I find the part where he says, “which dwells where our food is digested,” to be very interesting though because I think it could also be interpreted in a more metaphorical sense. He could be describing the feeling of butterflies that occur when someone sees someone they have feelings for.
Dante’s jocularity regarding love
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In prose, Dante goes into detail how his “animal spirit” and “natural spirit” began “to cry: and crying it spoke these words: “Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps”. This bodily personification and characterization of love demonstrates how love even affects and impacts his digestion. It’s approached in a jocular fashion because Dante relates a serious concept to a comical, and self aware attribute, his digestive track.
I agree with you, Campbell, that Dante’s description acts almost as a bodily personification and characterization of love. It reminded me of the work of Sappho, where love acts some sort of physical ailment that affects your entire body and forces you to feel love in a deeply physical way.
I agree that the digestion detail takes on a jocular approach and it is especially comical when taken into consideration where Dante places the detail. He just finished describing Beatrice’s arrival in these sweeping cosmic terms, measuring time by the movement of heavens and fixed stars, before immediately cutting to a spirit complaining about its stomach. Dropping from that divine language to this is what makes the detail comical, but beyond the humor, this shift in tone speaks to something greater about love. It speaks to how love is not purely an elevated, spiritual experience but one that takes over an entire person. It can disrupt the mind but also the body in its most mundane functions. In this way, Dante is able to highlight how love is equally ridiculous as it is extraordinary.
“I said Love since my face showed so many signs of him that disguising it wasn’t possible. And when they asked me, “Over whom are you so wrecked by Love?” I would look at them smiling and tell them nothing.”
An example of this comes in Chapter 5 as Dante talks about how he pretends to be devoted to Beatrice to divert attention/suspicion from another woman. He uses love in a very strategic and funny way rather than it being purely straightforward and scared. He uses her as a screen for his feelings, but it is funny, childlike, and jester, he is for his love for the woman who makes him blush just by greeting him.
I agree with you, where I believe that he uses love in a strategic and funny way, rather than straightforwardly. I think that this is also shows when he talks about love commanding him, as Dante presents himself as obedient to Love in a way that borders on playful exaggeration.
Love poetry as autobiography
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Dante embeds his poems with autobiographical moments such as “I made such a show over it in a short amount of time that most people who talked about me thought they knew my secret..” This passage focuses on mistake and self-reflection, rather than heroic deeds. Dante is describing how he deliberately used another woman to hide his true love for Beatrice, but in doing so, unintentionally created rumors that misrepresented his feelings. What makes this autobiographical is not just the event itself, but his awareness in reflection. He recognizes that his actions contributed to misunderstanding and damaged his relationship with Beatrice. This moment also shows personal growth. By explaining the mistake, Dante demonstrates a shift from self-conciencous socially driven behavior toward a more honest elevated understanding of love. Dante’s use of autobiography is less about external action and more about internal evolution and reflection that show in his poems.
Dante’s use of autobiography further conveys the hold love has over him. In the first chapter, we are shown his feelings and thinking process through biographical phrases that explain his undying love for Beatrice like “I felt such bliss that I withdrew from people as if I were drunk, away to the solitude of my room, and settled down to think of this most graceful woman.” His language encapsulates his feelings towards Beatrice and how love has completely taken over him. His love for her is so strong that he cannot even keep his gaze away from her, causing him to make a careless mistake when people were around. Thankfully, there was another beautiful woman blocking his view, and everyone thought he was in love with her. He says, I felt relieved, confident my secret had not been betrayed that day by my appearance.” This mistake just shows how much his love for Beatrice has absolutely taken over him, affecting his ability to conceal this secret.
Beautiful poetic phrases
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The passage that caught my eye was from the very end of page 8. “‘O is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow’.” This quote is profoundly beautiful because of how it bridges the gap between the sacred and the personal. Dante uses the Prophet Jeremiah’s words to show how huge his personal sadness feels. It creates a powerful image of a lonely lover standing in a crowd, asking the world to stop and notice how much he is hurting inside.
After reading, I can confirm that the reading is indeed filled with many beautiful poetic phrases. One of the phrases that got me hooked was, “At that time, truly, I say, the vital spirit, which dwells in the innermost chamber of the heart, started to tremble so powerfully that its disturbance reached all the way to the slightest of my pulses,” (Alighieri, Frisardi 1). This passage was written as the author describes the enigmatic beauty of Beatrice. The sheer description of his feelings of love, and how it affects him not only emotionally, but spiritually and physically goes to show just the impact that Beatrice had on him. The author would then go on to ascribe these tremblings a voice that spoke to him transcendent words of love and wisdom. What makes this so beautiful to me is that the author was able to transform his attraction to Beatrice (a simple biological reaction) into something that completely surpasses logic and anatomy–a testament to the true nature and beauty of Beatrice.
I fully agree with your point about Dante and how he transforms ordinary attraction into something almost sacred. The line you chose clearly speaks to the intensely strong love that Dante feels for Beatrice with the words “vital spirit” showcasing how his love for Beatrice shakes him to his very core. It’s not that Beatrice is only beautiful to Dante in a physical sense exclusively, instead it awakens something inside him that can only be described as divine with Beatrice becoming a kind of spiritual elevation for Dante.
I find the sentence, “From then on, I swear that Love dominated my soul, which was wedded to him so early, and began to rule me with such confidence and power, by means of the force my imagination lent him, there was no choice but for me to do whatever he wanted,” to be very beautiful. Dante speaks of Love itself as a personified figure that itself acts like a lover who possesses his very soul; which I think makes his actual expressions of love for Beatrice to be more affecting. It conveys his incredibly passionate and love-oriented character, effectively establishing him as someone for whom it is natural and even expected to write such profuse declarations of love for the object of his affections. His extreme devotion to Beatrice springs from his devotion to supreme Love itself. I think he expresses this very beautifully, using visceral language that properly conveys that depth of feeling.
I really like the “scene”; however, I gravitated to a different point just down the line. “From then on, I swear that Love dominated my soul, which was wedded to him so early, and began to rule… there was no choice but for me to do whatever he wanted.” The imagery of this independent being, Love, being wed to him strikes me as beautiful. Yes, it can be understood the wedding establishes a master and slave relation between Love and the boy; however, a wedding is also a lovely union of two who have chosen each other and desire to stand by each other for life. While Love rules, this is seemingly with consent, it was chosen to rule in his (the boys) stead. In this manner, Love is a guide whose greatness is bound by the boy’s imagination. The brain makes Love and Love guides the brain. They each influence one another and sharpen each other. As any positive relation should. Therefore, I find the relation as more appealing than the traditional theory of natural slavery covered in Professor Marrs class.
One especially beautiful passage comes when Dante describes Beatrice’s greeting: “she greeted me with such power that then and there I seemed to see to the farthest reaches of beatitude.” What makes this so striking is how Dante turns a simple greeting into something almost overwhelming. He doesn’t just feel happy, it’s like his whole perception shifts, and he briefly touches something infinite. The word “beatitude” gives the moment a spiritual weight, making it feel close to divine bliss. Beatitude comes from the blessings recounted by Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount, giving it extra spiritual and religious weight and divinity within this sentence, emphasizing the grandiosity of her beauty. It’s beautiful because it captures something very human, a small interaction meaning everything, while also elevating it into something sacred.
When Dante writes “Love appeared before me without warning”, I think this is a lovely phrase because a person can fall in love when they least expect it. This symbolizes the unpredictability of love. Similarly, love can also disappear without warning. The attraction a person once had can also disappear.
I also found this section by Dante to be very powerful when speaking to the nature of love. Many say that “love comes when you least expect it” and for Dante, the presence of love constantly enters and exits his life without warning. I think this particular quote helps readers understand the unpredictable nature of love, as you mentioned, as well as how striking true love can be compared to the everyday world we are used to. Dante describes the feeling as a full-body experience that others can see from an outside perspective, which also speaks to the strength love can have over us.
I completely agree with you. Later on Dante says, “Love dominated my soul, which was wedded to him so early…” (Pg 4) I think it’s beautiful that Dante likens love to something that comes on to you and controls you. He further emphasizes that he was wedded to him (love) so early, meaning he fell in love so suddenly and without warning, and despite that love is still something that completely overpowers and transforms him.