DANTE'S CANZONE ‘TRE DONNE’

Abstract

One result of studying Dante may be an increasing sense of the disparity between the Divine Comedy and the poet's minor works. The two-volume pattern—the masterpiece and the rest—is familiar enough, but neither the Aeneid, for example, nor Paradise Lost can seem so unexpected among the works of Virgil or Milton as the Comedy among those of Dante. If every poem is in one sense a surprise, it may appear, from another point of view, as a natural term of the poet's development. And the Divine Comedy no doubt may be regarded in this way; but this view of it must be vague and false unless tempered by a keen sense of its prodigious singularity. Its subject-matter is of course ‘strange’: a live man in the world of the dead sees God's judgment on a crowd of real people, most of them the poet's contemporaries; an odd subject even in the Middle Ages, which one may far too easily take for granted as though Dante, being Dante, had to choose it; whereas there is nothing in the poet's output prior to the Comedy, except perhaps two obscure lines in the Vita Nuova, to suggest it in particular. But I am thinking less of the theme of the Comedy than of its scale and grandeur as art; and in this respect it dwarfs the rest of Dante's output, it is a prodigious surprise. After the relatively slight and fragmentary prose and the abruptly discontinuous series of sonnets and canzoni—‘Dante's restless passing on from one experiment to another,’ as Contini puts it—after all that suddenly the superb assurance of the Comedy.