For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

From start to finish, these lines are pervaded by a sense of loss: cede, non riede, cessa, si aisigilla, si perdea. Words, vision, and memory all fail, and a dream that was once as vivid as life itself now de-materializes before our eyes. The imprint becomes a mere distillation of experience until evaporating into thin air. At the end of this meltdown, just after the snow has been "unsealed" by the sun, Dante turns to the Aeneid as if to acknowledge the master of such sadly poignant moments: "Cos! al vento ne le foglie levi / si perdea Ia sentenza di Sibilla," recalling the Sibyl in her drafty cave, the rush of scattered leaves, the sorrow of obliteration-and standing behind it all, Virgil, the consummate poet of human loss.

Yet the impasse before which Dante stands in this eleventh hour of the Com.me.aia is his difficulty in describing ineffable joy, not bella, horrida bella. His cup is full to overflowing, and the oltraggio that overwhelms him is the joy at the heart of things, not the lacrimae rerum. Turning to Virgil at this point is useful only in expressing the frustration of a poet before his ineffable subject. What Virgil cannot do, however, is offer Dante the model of the book that he himself would write. For this he must follow the lead of his vision and give himself to another volume and another maestro e aulore. And so he does: looking into the eternal light of the Empyrean, he has his first glimpse of God as a book:

In its depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume, that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe.

Dante may have been thinking here of Confessions 13.15, in which Augustine imagines the beatific vision as an act of reading: "The book they read shall not be closed. For them the scroll shall not be furled. For you yourself are their book and you forever are" ("non clauditur codex eorum nee plicatur liber eorum, quia tu ipse illis hoc es et es in aeternam"). For our purposes, however, the precursor who comes to mind is Virgil, whose scattering of leaves (/ogiie) in the Aeneid stands in contrast to the universal folio that is God himself-ingathered, collated, and edited by love.20 When Dante considers his inevitable poetic failure before his ineffable subject, he conjures Virgil; when he thinks of a volume that stands in aeternam, he thinks of God. Which precursor will he emulate? Between these two authors and two volumes, of course, there can be no contest. Dante deserts the loser and joins the winner. Who other than God, after all, could join with him in making that "sacred poem" (Paradiso 25.1-2) to which both heaven and earth have lent a hand?

Boston University

NOTES

1 All citations of Dante are from Singleton's translation. For Dante's complex response to Virgil, see Curtius 350-57, Barolini 201-55, Hollander, and the Virgil-related essays injacoff and Schnapp.