DANTE
1265
- 1321
PROF.
K. VISWANATHAM
Head
of the Department of English,
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
The
love that moves the sun and the stars
Hell,
purgatory and
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.