SOURCE: “Dante's Purgatorio as Elegy” in The Rarer Action: Essays in Honor of Francis Fergusson, edited by Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler, Rutgers University Press, 1970, pp. 161-78.

[In the following essay, Blodgett contends that two types of elegy are present in the Purgatorio, a work that mourns the loss of Vergil and the inadequacies he represents.]

Forse in Parnaso …

Purgatory is where no one stays forever. Its fire, unlike the fire of Hell, is temporary. It is a fire that makes its joyful victims acutely aware of transience and suspension between different temporal conditions. This is one of the reasons why the figure of a mountain rising both from Hell and from an indeterminate sea and reaching toward the transparencies of Heaven is so eminently suitable to the various movements of Purgatory. The mountain itself is a figure for time and, once the climb is undertaken, it seems to lead almost unerringly to two great temporal climaxes. The first in the farewell to Vergil and the second is the final act of spiritual renewal, anticipated by Statius, in which the poet is changed

                    come piante novelle
rinovellate di novella fronda.

(33. 143-144)

Vergil returns to the ancient shades and Dante rises to the shores of light. This is the frame within which we sense that Purgatory is a kind of vast drawing apart of things and, like many situations in which we are confronted with a widening gyre, making choices and distinctions becomes an act of overwhelming poignancy. Dante, of course, is unquestionably skillful at playing with such an emotional fact. Within an almost excessively doctrinal structure, the desire, we might say, to become transient gives the poetry its peculiar elegiac cast.

Dante's play, however, is also a form of discipline. The reader is lured by transience the same as Dante the pilgrim. The fact of the reader's weakness is what gives such a universal character to Beatrice's reproval of Dante when he first meets her again in the Paradiso Terrestre. Beatrice berates Dante because he yielded to time:

          Alcun tempo il sostenni col mio volto:
mostrando gli occhi giovanetti a lui,
meco il menava in dritta parte vòlto.
          Sì tosto come in su la soglia fui
di mia seconda etade e mutai vita,
questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui.
          Quando di carne a spirto era salita,
e bellezza e virtù cresciuta m’era,
fu’ io a lui men cara e men gradita;
          e volse i passi suoi per via non vera,
imagini di ben seguendo false,
che nulla promession rendono intera.

(30. 121-132)

Because of Dante's failure to see beyond the mortal and transitory, he moved away from true bellezza e virtù, preferring the world of flesh to the world of the spirit. Thus Vergil is sent to draw him from a transient joy to show him how to see the spirit. The magnificence of Dante's notion of such a purgatorial process is that he knows that the search for liberty depends upon giving things up. It is a search which runs head-long into the solitude and second thoughts one might have reaching an unknown shore upon an uncharted sea. It may be intellectually true that freedom is salvation, but it does not always seem so to the pilgrim trying to get his first bearings:

          Io mi volsi dal lato con paura
d’essere abbandonato, quand’io vidi
solo dinanzi a me la terra oscura …

(3. 19-21)

Without the pilgrim's fear of being abandoned, the Purgatorio would have been merely didactic. Without the canticle's doctrine, the middle state of the Commedia could have become merely sentimental. As the poet, however, draws the pilgrim more steadily to himself, as Rome drew Statius, elegy is pervaded with joy and assumes a special meaning.

I have suggested that Dante plays with his persona of pilgrim in such a way as to point an elegiac contrast. His dramatization of place as well as his use of characters is equally elegiac. The farewell to Vergil, however, is the most obvious example of the kind of loss which is among the enduring characteristics of elegy.¹ His departure, in fact, is more than a farewell. It is a kind of failure, a testimony to the insufficiency of a particular way of life. If the insufficiency were not radical, it might be possible to compare his yielding of his role as a guide to other famous separations in Western literature. We think of Hector and Andromache, of Dido and Aeneas, of Roland and his sword, not to speak of all of Ovid's abandoned heroines. But Vergil's return to the fire

ch’emisperio di tenebre vincia

(Inf. 4. 69)

is symbolic of the ultimate failure of reason's uses once it has been employed to the greatest avail.²

Vergil's departure is mentioned in two places in the poem. The first is in the course of Canto 27; the second is the brief and poignant complaint that occurs in Canto 30. The latter dramatizes the fact of absence as it impinges upon the pilgrim's consciousness. It is enough to eclipse the greater loss of Eden:

          Ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemi
di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,
Virgilio; a cui per mia salute die’mi
          né quantunque perdeo l’antica matre,
valse a le guance nette di rugiada
che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre.

(30. 49-54)

Dante's action here anticipates by analogy what Beatrice later accuses him of. He fails to distinguish significant process from loss. Just as he prefers to weep for Vergil rather than for Eve's loss at this point in his ethical education, so as a youth he failed to follow the transformation of Beatrice to spirit and followed the fleeting passage of another lady.³ The awareness of absence on the part of the pilgrim is used to illuminate his acute appetite for transience and the passing away of human things. The process of Purgatory is the response to the process of loss, but one of the characteristics of purgation is to create conditions which impress upon us varieties of absence so that we learn to distinguish their values. It is in this manner and for this purpose that Dante's memory confronts Eden and Vergil, both symbols of loss, both aspects of gain.

The canto in which Vergil actually departs is punctuated by a number of remarks and allusions that cast suggestions of elegy. While the reader is carefully reminded of the times of day on earth, the setting of the canto is toward evening. Day was on the point of departure in Purgatory, but we are told that it was dawn over Jerusalem where the sun's Creator shed His blood. The imagery of time with which the canto opens points to a specific hour for the pilgrim who is about to lose Vergil, as well as to the other hour of darkness in which Christ died. Thus absence is woven into a temporal context. But what are signals to us are not yet seen by the pilgrim. Christ's blood was redemptive in a manner analogous to Vergil's failure as an illuminator. What faces the pilgrim is more painful than the memory of Christ's crucifixion. Vergil's immediate role is to turn Dante to other afflictions:

          Ricordati, ricordati! E se io
sovresso Gerïon ti guidai salvo,
che farò ora presso più a Dio?

(27. 22-24)

Not only is Dante urged to remember in a manner at once hortatory and elegiac, but Vergil is also thrown into the ambiguous situation that may be noted in the canto's opening lines. What, indeed, will Vergil do now that he is nearer to God but begin to withdraw? This is the fire that will eventually sunder father from son, guide from pilgrim, teacher from student. But to encourage Dante, he freshens his charge's memory with the name of his youthful love and suggests, by calling the fire a wall, an older fairy tale of youthful heroism. As Dante notes in his brief simile, no wall prevented Pyramus from venturing to embrace death to reach his love, and thus the pilgrim overcame his scruples of conscience. But while the focus of the reference to Pyramus concerns how he could wake to love, the fact of how he died broods through the stanza: he committed suicide from a failure in perception. Love made him believe that Thisbe was dead. Thus the presence of Pyramus in the canto participates in the types of ambiguity already noted. The wall of fire makes everybody acutely aware of before and after.

Once through the fire, the poets arrive in the country of pastoral and its timeless evenings. By poetic suggestion, Dante evokes Vergil's youth at the same time as he is about to meet the Lady of his own early poetry. But the timeless aspects of the passages are merely the environment for a very gradual movement forward to sleep and the illumination of the third dream. Thus the reminiscence of many of the endings of the eclogues is ironic, for the pilgrim merely withdraws to new perceptions, and the reader is not urged to see evening as a sign of a little drama coming to close at a moment when

maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

Thus the final evening of Purgatory continues to shape a sense of transience by the modulations of recollection, imagery, and sound-shift:

          Sì ruminando e sì mirando in
quelle,
mi prese il sonno; il sonno che sovente,
anzi che ’l fatto sia, sa le novelle.

(27. 91-93)

Still a pilgrim, Dante continues to be suspended between a before and after of temporal fire in a way that recalls the ambiguity of the canto's opening lines. The dream, however, gives ambiguity a symbolic meaning by presenting the dreamer with a vision of Leah and Rachel. The dream and all the flow that prepares it brings the pilgrim to a kind of interior climax that marks by anticipation the larger transition of the whole canticle which is the movement from Vergil to Beatrice. And with the close of that dream

le tenebre fuggian da tutti i lati …

(27. 112)

Such is the dawn of the most glorious day in Purgatory: darkness and flight. The contrast between this morning and the morning of the First Day (1. 13 ff.) could not be more sharply drawn. Here, then, is the threshold of Vergil's falling away to shade. It is the moment, we are led to believe, that all the albas of Provençal poetry point to. Here is the loss of shade as well as the loss of all earthly light. Here Dante is ready for fulfillment at a time when he can be no more fully alone.

Purgatory might be described, in fact, as the loss of Vergil, inasmuch as it makes Dante essentially alone. It is a process that began with Cato, whom Vergil addresses when explaining Dante's journey:

libertà va cercando, ch’è sì cara,
come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta.

(1. 71-72)

What is marvelous, however, about Dante's conception of Purgatory is that he knows that it is a kind of refusal of earthly life, which is something not yielded with ease. Thus Cato is implicated in the beginning of the journey, for Purgatory, no matter how tender and joyful, is a kind of suicide. Like suicide, Purgatory is an existential crossroad that perceives events temporally in a framework of before and after. This kind of perception is most apparent in the speeches made by those suffering from particular sins. It is also part of the structure of the broad base of the mountain, the Ante-Purgatory.

The morning of the First Day, when Vergil and Dante stand confused upon the new shore, is marked by a peculiar ambivalence which is suffused through all the objects and characters at the mountain's foot. As Dante notes,

          Noi eravam lunghesso mare ancora,
come gente che pensa a suo cammino,
che va col cuore e col corpo dimora.

(2. 10-12)

The shore is there to underscore the sense of division and separation that the poet's anabasis with Vergil dramatizes. While it is true, as Professor Fergusson has observed, that Dante the pilgrim in the Ante-Purgatory “is always aware of the same ‘distant’ or homesick scene,”⁴ I would hesitate to agree with him by characterizing Dante's homesickness as lyrical. The Ante-Purgatory defines an elegiac situation which involves distance in the manner in which it looks behind. The look behind is struck in the initial invocation to the Muse when he bids la morta poesia to rise again (1. 7). We are reminded of a more immediate past when the pilgrim remarks that he has just issued from Hell, l’aura morta (1. 17). A variation on the pilgrim's relief occurs in Cato's surprise that someone has risen from Hell, a surprise that suggests that God's laws have been violated in such a way that the old and enduring order has been changed (1. 43-48). Thus elegy is turned to an ironic vantage: the laws indeed endure while Vergil and Dante are allowed to wander without being esperti d’esto loco (2. 62). Events and encounters for the pilgrims become modes of recession and loss. As Dante reaches for Casella, he fails to grasp anything:

          Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto!
tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi,
e tante mi tornai con esse al petto.
          Di maraviglia, credo, mi dipinsi;
per che l’ombra sorrise, e si ritrasse;
e io, seguendo lei, oltre mi pinsi.

(2. 79-84)

What occurs in fact occurs as well in rhyme. As the suffix falls in the coupling of pinsi with dipinsi, a similar suggestion of loss occurs between aspetto and petto. Thus we might speak grammatically of the failure of first encounters in Purgatory, and the failure to grasp only anticipates the sudden departure of the masnada fresca at the end of the canto.

Of the many other types of loss and separation that characterize this region, I shall call attention to the two which most clearly illustrate my topic. One is the meeting with Manfred; the other is the encounter with Sordello. The Manfred episode is used to create a sense of both spatial and temporal recession. The meeting begins from a search for a way through la terra oscura, for the certainty of some quia that will take them to the steps of Purgatory. They see a new crowd of spirits and begin to move toward them, and the pilgrim notes:

          Ancora era quel popol di lontano,
i’ dico dopo nostri mille passi,
quanto un buon gittator trarria con mano …

(3. 67-69)

The same crowd had already tried to move toward Dante and Vergil—

e non pareva, sì venïan lente.

(3. 60)

Thus Dante's uncertainty is reflected by the crowd chi va dubbiando, not only creating vast openings of space but also slowing down time. It is precisely time's loss, figured in the hyperbole of the thousand steps across the shore, that defines the special poignancy of the excommunicated and the more general pathos of all that precedes Purgatory. Purgation depends upon time in order to reach God's time by the renunciation of earthly time. And so, not knowing what to look forward to, the souls of the shore can only look back and wait. It is a region filled with the mood and pace of Richard II's speech as he awaits the arrival of Bolingbroke and exclaims:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings—
How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos’d,
Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d,
All murthur’d.

(3. 2. 155-160)

Here, before Purgatory, doing nothing is not sweet,

ché perder tempo a chi più sa più spiace.

(3. 78)

Manfred's particular speech is very brief and focussed upon two major points: his body, disinterred by the archbishop of Cosenza, and God's love, which cannot be put out by papal malediction. It is a speech deliberately designed to avoid explaining lo perchè and, thus, rising from the simplicity of the narration, is the striking solidity of his body's bones that the rain washes and the wind moves. Manfred does not yet conceive of himself as a spirit but as a body behind him, still enmeshed in process and decay. It is a body, furthermore, that symbolizes the random weariness of the long wait that the souls in the Ante-Purgatory have before them. For them, time has stretched thin. For them, time seems merely to go by without meaning, for these are souls who are literally stranded between earth's time and God's time. What seems most important to Manfred is the message he wishes Dante to take back to his bella figlia. While the speech is hardly nostalgic, it is concerned with the past and with the things of earth. To that extent it participates in the mood of the opening lines of the eighth canto. Manfred's is the voice of one whose ear is still attuned to

                                                           squilla di lontano,
che paia il giorno pianger che si more.

(8. 5-6)

Dante the pilgrim is also entranced, it would seem, by the same distant sound, for in the time that he took listening and gazing with wonder upon Manfred the sun rose fifty degrees from the horizon. Over such a stretch of time, even Manfred's bones would become ethereal. The speech, then, within the framework of the slow walk that precedes their meeting and the discussion on perception that begins the fourth canto seems to make earthly time dissolve:

vassene ’l tempo e l’uom se n’avvede …

(4. 9)

The encounter tends to break down the outlines of events and make the past recede to where the prior time appears, as one of the Old English elegists says, swa bit no wære,⁵ as if it never were.

The encounter with Sordello is of a different order. It is at once more intimate and more political, springing from the almost magic mention of Vergil's birthplace. For the moment I should like to concentrate upon the seventh canto, in which Vergil identifies himself. It is remarkable self-description, for Vergil does not reveal himself as the author of the Aeneid, but rather as

          Virgilio; e per null’ altro rio
lo ciel perdei che per non aver fé.

(7. 7-8)

It is upon such an accent of loss that the canto begins and proceeds. And the statement is particularly appropriate as an anticipation of the pilgrims' sojourn in the valley of the rulers, who neglected their duty and thus jeopardized their heritage. It is a canto of protracted lament which, in contrast to the Manfred episode, recedes into the future. It is an elegy of men whose failure ruined what they should have protected.

What I have spoken of as division or separation—the suspended state that may conduce to an idea of elegy—is suggested in this canto both thematically and rhetorically. When Sordello is told he has been speaking to Vergil, he acts as one

che crede e non, dicendo “Ella è … non è …”

(7. 12)

Sordello's implied doubt becomes a very painful echo of the short sounds of grief that harmonize Vergil's statement,

lo ciel perdei che per non aver fé.

In a sense, this might be called the original speech of elegy, to say è è. Here, however, the dialectic of loss and gain is both the intellectual environment of the Ante-Purgatory and Vergil's own situation. Vergil has lost the sight of the high Sun:

Non per far, ma per non fare …

(7. 25)

Thus the sound of elegy is used to initiate a dramatization both of Vergil's loss and of the loss of the negligent kings.

The same kind of spatial and temporal vagueness that is apparent in the Manfred episode may also be noted here: it provides the background against which one is undone by not doing. As Sordello remarks,

Loco certo non c’è posto …

(7. 40)

It is a landscape whose uncertainty is reflected by the uncertainty of rulers who fail their duty. It is a place, finally, that calls for Sordello's pessimism when he states that

          Rade volte risurge per li rami
l’umana probitate …

(7. 121-122)

The valley suggests a receding future of failing heritage, a future which is seen as dimly as the kings seated at random in the twilight—

là dove più ch’a mezzo muore il lembo.

(7. 72)

Vergil participates in the failure of light and failure of doing, and it is this participation that gives the scene its pathos. For him as much as for the kings it may be said that

del retaggio miglior nessun possiede.

(7. 120)

This scene is analogous then with the later canto in which Dante is conscious of his loss of Vergil. It is part of the whole rhythm of the canticle, which forces characters and reader to look behind, to become attuned to different kinds of losses and withdrawals. It is a structural and thematic rhythm that is succinctly figured in Dante's early appeal to Vergil as they start to climb the mountain:

O dolce padre, volgiti, e rimira
com’ io rimango sol, se non restai.

(4. 44-45)

Not only is the liberty Dante seeks fearful, but also the things behind constantly remain attractive. Reaching one of the first “viewpoints,” the poet tells the reader,

          A ceder ci ponemmo ivi ambedui
vòlti a levante ond’ eravam saliti,
che suole a riguardar giovare altrui.

(4. 52-54)

As a consequence, one of the poetic pleasures of the Purgatory is the fact that looking back is not entirely painful. In fact, remorse of conscience seems effectively ambivalent as Vergil implies in his suggestion to Dante:

                                                            Volgi li occhi in giùe:
buon ti sarà, per tranquillar la via,
veder lo letto de le piante tue.

(12. 13-15)

But, as I indicated earlier, it is in such a manner that Dante uses poetry for theological effect. It is as if the reader were meant to enjoy the wrong thing, to follow Dante the pilgrim when he prefers to weep for the loss of Vergil rather than for the loss of Eden. As Dante the poet plays with the persona of the pilgrim, so he plays upon the misplaced sentiment of the reader. In this way, as the pilgrim's experience approaches the poet's wisdom, so, it is hoped, the reader's experience will undergo the same process.

The rhetoric with which Dante shapes contrition is employed precisely to give the reader a false theological pleasure and permit him to enjoy the wrong thing. To what other end are the anaphora and exclamatio directed when the pilgrim addresses the exempla of the punishments of the proud? Pride assumes an elegiac mask:

          O Nïobè, con che occhi dolenti
vedea io te segnata in su la strada,
tra sette e sette tuoi figliuoli spenti!
          O Saùl, come in su la propria spada
quivi parevi morto in Gelboè,
che poi non sentì pioggia né rugiada!

(12. 37-42)

If the reader does not wish to linger upon such portraits to the extent that the pilgrim does, then Vergil's admonition not to lose time has little effect. The point of presenting so attractively the many varieties of pathos is to force a kind of satiation of grief, in other words, to purge pathos, for a heaven where past and present do not seize the soul across an elegiac space. This is done by employing, if such a phrase is permitted, a rhetoric of purgation. It is rhetoric that urges the pilgrim, not to speak of the reader, to look back according to la punctura della rimembranza.

The same technique is used in Guido del Duca's appeal to the failure of Romagna:

          Ov’ è ’l buon Lizio ed
Arrigo Mainardi,
Pier Traversaro e Guido di Carpigna?
Oh Romagnuoli tornati in bastardi!
          Quando in Bologna un Fabbro si ralligna?
quando in Faenza un Bernadin di Fosco,
verga gentil di picciola gramigna?
          Non ti maravigliar s’io piango, Tosco,
quando rimembro, con Guido da Prata,
Ugolin d’Azzo che vivette nosco,
          Federico Tignoso e sua brigata,
la casa Traversara e li Anastagi
(e l’una gente e l’altra è diretata),
          le donne e’ cavalier, li affanni e li agi
che ne ’nvogliava amore e cortesia
là dove i cuor son fatti sì malvagi.

(14. 97-111)

The reason that passages like these are so moving is not so much because of their structure, because of their questions and exclamations, because of the skill with which future and past are made to be psychologically the same thing, or because so much talent is used to attack the Romagnuoli turned to bastards. On the contrary, Guido's outburst is a cry of sadness, and the reader, as much as Dante, marvels at the grief. For against the prick of memory, the fact that hearts have become wicked only makes more pathetic those who felt that è mestier di consorto divieto. In spite of the sin for which the loss of so many is invoked, the character of the invocation runs contrapuntally against sin and gives the tirade a tone the same as that of Villon in his more famous ballades. The accent of the appeal falls upon its rhetoric, upon the nostalgia of memory, and, finally, upon the reader's memory of his own pain, brooding upon those who have gone before. It is the same kind of plaintive note that resides in Statius' query of Vergil:

          dimmi dov’ è Terrenzio nostro
antico,
Cecilio e Plauto e Varro, se lo sai:
dimmi se son dannati, e in qual vico.

(22. 97-99)

It participates, finally, in the same moto spiritale that urges Dante to weep over the loss of Vergil despite Eve's greater loss. It is a sorrow similar to that which punctuates the examples of anger when the pilgrim sees Lavina:

          surse in mia visïone una fanciulla
piangendo forte, e dicea: “O regina,
perché per ira hai voluto esser nulla?
          Ancisa t’hai per non perder Lavina;
or m’hai perduta! Io son essa che lutto,
madre, a la tua pria ch’a l’altrui ruina.”

(17. 34-39)

Such an image seems to capture in microcosm what we have been examining as the elegiac aspect of Purgatory. It is loss implicated in other loss, in the process of which relationships are changed for the worse. The rhetorical skill is obvious to the point where it borders upon deliberate sentimentality, which eventually, like a form of homeopathic therapy, carries both pilgrim and patient reader to an awareness of order beyond personal loss.⁶ Lavina's first word is regina, which is not only answered by Lavina and ruina, but also by another vocative that consummately defines domesticated tragedy:

madre, alla tua pria ch’al l’altrui ruina.

Loss as a kind of heritage is made rhetorically intimate in the change from perder to perduta, and it is not hard to sense an allusion here to the sons of the negligent rulers. Lavina, finally, underscores the elegiac character of the vision by sharing the sorrow of Amata's fate but at a distance, so that her grief becomes distilled and vaguely ironic. A similar technique may be seen in Ovid's version of Dido's epistle to Aeneas:

Facta fugis, facienda petis; quaerenda per orbem
          Altera, quaesita est altera terra tibi.
Ut terram invenias, quis eam tibi tradet habendam?
          Quis sua non notis arva tenenda dabit?
Alter amor tibi restat habendus et altera Dido:
          Quamque iterum fallas, alter danda fides.

(Heroides 7. 13-18)

Although the skill with which Hellenistic rhetoric is employed in this passage is obvious and forced, it throws into relief the same qualities I have been indicating in Dante. As the last line makes bitterly clear, separation continues to occur like a tragic curse. It is a sense of loss that seems to penetrate Vergil's poetry almost inevitably, and Orpheus' successive failure gives it an archetypal stamp. As Vergil tells us, after Orpheus looked back, Eurydice

                    fugit diversa, neque illum
prensantem nequiquam umbras et multa volentem
dicere praeterea vidit …

(Georgic 4. 500-502)

It is the sentiment that penetrates profoundly Forese Donati's question to Dante,⁷

Quando fia ch’io ti riveggia?

(14. 75)

I have purposefully devoted most of the space of this paper to the Purgatorio as a poem of loss inasmuch as its didactic structure and tone are more widely appreciated. But all elegy is not flebilis, even though it seems committed to change and process. The question, then, that we might ask, is whether only the kinds of things I have pointed to are elegiac. Is it possible to consider the rest of the canticle as elegy? Paradoxically, it can be, but in a manner that creates from the counterpoint of two kinds of elegy a genre of greater value than those which went into its composition.

The other kind of elegy which the didactic elements of the Purgatorio resemble is early Greek elegy, particularly the poetry of Tyrtaeus and Solon. What characterizes their poetry is an essentially ethical intent which encourages a young man to compete for the highest prize. For Tyrtaeus, the prize was valor in battle:

Hoûtos anèr agathòs gígnetai en polémoi
(This man becomes good in battle.)

(Diehl, fr. 9. 20)

For Solon, life was not merely a matter of community defense, but rather a contest that involved more complicated aspects of ethics. The city, as he observes in one of his central poems, is not a Spartan camp but a social organization beset by the ills of pride and surfeit (Diehl, fr. 3). From these psychological conditions develop sociological and political break-downs. The hope of the city lies in the concept of Eunomía, or Good Order. The poet's role is political; his style is analytical; his tone is hortatory. All of these characteristics are reflected in the didactic elements of Dante's poem, with certain significant differences. Dante's politics are of course subsumed under theology. Nevertheless, Good Order—even if more profound than Solon's idea of it—is the hope which sends Beatrice after Dante. The exhortation to virtue is shared by both Dante and the Greek elegists of the seventh and sixth centuries b.c. Adjuration, in fact, is signaled by Eric Auerbach as one of the “three hallmarks of Dante's style,”⁸ and adjuration, as Jaeger remarks, is, if nothing else, “the one constant element in elegiac poetry.”⁹

The major difference, however, between Dante's use of parainetic elegy and the Greeks' is the fact that Dante employs process and development when he teaches. Instead of the static moral exhortation of the type cited above from Tyrtaeus, Dante's whole notion of ethics as it is exposed in the Purgatorio depends upon love as a moto spiritale. It is with such a notion that Dante unifies ethics and poetry.¹⁰ But to see the teaching of ethics, to understand paraineses to virtue as dependent upon process is the mark of Dante's understanding of Purgatory. The result of Dante's perception is that he never forsakes the sense of movement and process upon which Alexandrian elegy depends. But against the notion of things slowly receding from loss to loss, Dante poses another kind of movement that carries the renewed soul, like Statius (not to speak of Dante the pilgrim), closer to new gains. Thus, the didactic element of Purgatorio not only recalls the early Greek elegy, but also seems to spring directly from the later elegy of lament. The process of parainesis, then, connects both types of elegy in intellectual and poetic counterpoint. Their dual effect, as poetic movements, serve to carry out Cato's command

          a spogliarvi lo scoglio
ch’esser non lascia a voi Dio manifesto.

(2. 122-123)

An example of both kinds of elegy working toward such an end may be seen in Dante's brilliant cry of adjuration and despair beginning “Ahi serva Italia …” (6. 76 ff.). It is also what resides in the inversion of Statius' line, “a sè mi trasse Roma” (21. 89): as the poet returns to the source of his language, he approaches, unwittingly, what will be the new Rome of his conversion. Going backward, in the case of Statius, turns out to be a movement forward. The phrase in nuce seems to fix the effect of the double movement of the Purgatorio. While it seems as if much of the movement of the canticle is toward loss, the movement is a paradox. It suggests the drawing back of a bowstring whose purpose is to propel an arrow suddenly in an opposing direction.

It would be unwise to assert that Dante had a firsthand knowledge of the early Greek elegy. We might conjecture that his understanding of its effects developed from his knowledge of Aristotle's Ethics and the Provençal sirventes. The combined effect, however, of the kinds of elegy I have been examining seems to be his own discovery. One of its aspects is its similarity to Old English elegy. Space does not permit even the slightest analysis of this small body of poetry. Suffice it to say, however, that while it shares with Hellenistic elegy a sense of irremediable separation and loss, it is also characterized by an effort to come to grips with a new situation by doing more than lamenting. While not carrying parainesis to the point of invective, it often suggests an acceptance of new values by a subtle interplay of shifting perspectives.¹¹ The role of shift and contrast is to achieve some measure of understanding of the fact and implications of loss. As Leonard H. Frey has put it, “the likely movement is toward a general understanding of the nature of the world, beginning with contemplation of one's own situation.”¹² And the situation is inevitably the problem of transience, which conduces to reflection upon things more permanent than what was. What makes the Old English elegies particularly persuasive is the use of the first person as a dramatic speaker. The lament is not for someone else but for the poem's speaker and through him all who are alienated or exiled. We might claim the same for Catullus 68 (Quod mihi fortuna casuque oppressus acerbo …) except for the fact that the design of loss in that great elegy protects the speaker from participating in loss. For Dante and Old English elegy, loss means in a very profound sense self-loss and self-re-evaluation. It is a purgatorial act.

No one, of course, need ask whether Dante had read or needed to read Old English elegy. It was an expression of medieval poetic consciousness and, to the extent that Dante participated in the “medieval spirit” (the studies of Karl Vossler and E. R. Curtius make this abundantly clear), a discovery of the effects of Old English elegy was possible. Thus Dante may be said to have completed the vision of these anonymous elegists in the process by which he adapted Hellenistic and, unwittingly, early Greek elegy.

Notes

1. As a working description of the kind of elegy the bulk of this paper discusses, Northrop Frye's is sufficient: “the elegiac is often accompanied by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one.” See Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 36-37.

2. See Francis Fergusson, Dante's Drama of the Mind (Princeton, 1953), p. 166.

3. Whether there was “another woman” is in historical doubt. What counts, nevertheless, is the fact of “falling-away,” which Erich Auerbach has already discussed in Dante: Poet of the Secular World, ed. Theodore Silverstein, tr. R. Manheim (Chicago, 1961), p. 115.

4. Dante's Drama, p. 23.

5. “The Wife's Lament,” 24. Cp. “The Wanderer,” 95-96.

6. Although it would be imprudent to claim extremely early influences of Dante upon Chaucer, a similar use and understanding of sentimentality as necessary to purgation may be observed in the Book of the Duchess.

7. The dramatic context within which this question is uttered is one that establishes a rhythm of appeal without response. Here are souls che pregano, e ’l pregato non risponde … (109). Such an ambivalent situation is highly suggestive of Leo Spitzer's discussion of Jaufré Rudel's paradoxical amor de lonh in L’amour lointain de Jaufré Rudel (North Carolina Studies, 1944), repr. in Romanische Literaturstudien 1936-1956 (Tübingen, 1959), pp. 363-417. Although Spitzer wishes to emphasize “le thème foncièrement chrétien ‘possession-non-possession’ de cette poésie séculière” (p. 404), I am inclined to doubt him. The same theme can be found in ancient poetry. It is one of Ovid's favorite rhetorical devices. Vergil was equally fond of it. It was hardly Christian in Dante's sense. It might be more accurate to say that Dante uses such a theme to overcome the pathos it engenders.

8. Dante, p. 59.

9. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture, tr. G. Highet, 3 vols. (New York, 1943-1945), 1. 89.

10. Fergusson, Dante's Drama, p. 92.

11. See Neil D. Isaacs, “Image, Metaphor, Irony, Allusion, and Moral: the Shifting Perspective of ‘The Seafarer,’” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, LXVII (1966), 266-282.

12. “Exile and Elegy in Anglo-Saxon Epic Poetry,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXII (1963), 294.