STYLE AND STRUCTURE IN DANTE'S CANZONE ‘DOGLIA MI RECA’

Abstract

It is not known exactly when Dante wrote his longest canzone, Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire, but it seems highly probable that it was between 1302 and 1304. It is mentioned in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, which has a likely terminus ad quem in 1305. The congedo indicates (lines 148–9) that the poem was written while Dante was absent from Florence, and everything suggests that this absence was due to his banishment from the city early in 1302. Its associated themes of a general lament at the viciousness of the times and a particular attack on avarice were of course commonplace in medieval Latin satire and in troubadour poetry, but they are quite new in Dante. And although the poem is not overtly autobiographical in the manner of Tre donne, there seems little doubt that it sprang directly from Dante's personal experiences in 1302–04:the torments of exile, exacerbated by a burning sense of the injustice done to him by the neri veltri, and also by the material hardships and the indignity of his existence now that he was living in enforced dependence on the liberality of aristocratic patrons. The inspiration of this canzone seems identical with that of the famous outcry in Convivio I, iii: Ahi, piaciuto fosse al dispensatore de l'universo che la cagione de la mia scttsa mai non fosse stata! ché né altri contra me avria fallato, né io sofferto avria pena ingiustamente, pena, dico, d'essilio e di povertate.