[In the following excerpt, Singleton examines the relationship between the Vita Nuova and Provençal love poetry, discerning that Dante's use of medieval mysticism in his book's conception of love distinguishes it from the Proven, cal tradition.]

The three visions foretelling the death of Beatrice all bear the mark of a number nine and point thus to special meaning in that number. They would seem also, by being three, to stress the presence of some special meaning for the root of nine as well. The poet's gloss on the death of Beatrice and on the number nine (chapter XXIX) does much to confirm this: three is the "factor" by itself of nine, three is the sign of the "factor" of miracles which is the Holy Trinity.

Furthermore, it is precisely in terms of a number three that the center of the Vita Nuova may be located. The middle of the work is plainly marked by the second of three canzoni, the poem in which the death of Beatrice (her unreal death) shows a certain resemblance to the death of Christ.

Nor is this all in the way of a symmetrical arrangement of the poems to be noted in the Book of Memory. In all there are thirty-one poems in the Vita Nuova. Here again must not an eye alert to the meanings in numbers see the sign of the Trinity which is Three and One?

Moreover, in contrast with the three canzoni, all of the other poems in the book are shorter poems, minor forms or fragments: most are sonnets, but there are three exceptions: one ballata, one stanza of an unfinished canzone, and another poem made up of two stanzas only of a canzone. Among such as these, therefore, the three longer poems can have prominence by a length alone and acan be used as markers to divide the others into groups. That they are used as such becomes evident with the first canzone, for that poem is explicitly said to mark the end of the poet's first subject matter and beginning of his second. This canzone thus leaves behind itself a certain number of shorter poems which thereby become a group to themselves. One notices, too, that these poems are ten in number and that all but one are sonnets.

Such clear signs of a deliberate design at the beginning can well prompt us to look at the end. There we are not surprised, I imagine, by what we discover: the end balances exactly the beginning; the last canzone is followed by ten poems jsut as the first is preceded by ten; and in this final group the poems are all sonnets but one. Hence, the first and the third of the three canzoni stand at equal distance respectively from beginning and end, marking off the shorter poems into a first group and a third.

What of the center? There the pattern is clearly confirmed. For between the first and the third canzoni there are nine poems. And, in this group of nine, the poem which is at the exact center is the second of the three canzoni, which thus becomes necessarily the central poem in respect to a number nine as well as to a number three.

It is all undeniably part of a conscious design in the arrangement of the poems of the Vita Nuova, amounting to a sort of external architecture, a kind of facade which, for all its evidence, appears to have escaped the notice of readers of the book until around the middle of the last century. It had, at any rate, to be rediscovered then. By now, the introductions to most editions of the Vita Nuova make oa point of it, usually seeing the whole design as one to be represented by the figures 10; i; 4-II-4; m, 10 (Roman numerals being the canzoni). But, given the exceptional importance of the number nine in this work, it would seem much more significant to consider the first and the last groups of the shorter poems as made up of nine plus one. This would require that we count the first poem of the Vita Nuova as an introductory one, much as we count the first canto of Inferno; and that we consider the last poem of the book as a kind of epilogue which, given its nature, it may well be. Such a pattern seems more meaningful for the Vita Nuova in that it can be stated in terms of nine and three and one: 1, 9; i; 4-H-4; m; 9, 1. Or more simply, and with perhaps even greater suggestiveness, as 1;9;1;9;1;9;1, since in this way the mysterious number nine is more clearly seen to occur three times.

This is more than a matter of extrinsic ornament. Here on the surface are ripples and eddies which are all so many signs of what we know already to lie deeper in the current of the action. As such signs, they make their own contribution to what is the principal intention of the whole form of the Book of Memory: the revealing through signs that Beatrice is a miracle, that she is herself a number nine which, like miracles, is the product of three times three.

By looking intently at such a miraculous object of love, we were able to trace a line of progression from love to charity. Now, if we begin once more at these surface signs of miracle and proceed to sound the deeper currents of the action, we shall see, by keeping our eyes this time on the subject of love, that there is yet another line of progression to be followed out. It too, like the other, is a line reaching upward. The subject of love is no miracle. The subject of love is the poet. The Book of Memory is his, his is the new life in love.

The progression which we must now follow out is that of this new life itself. In it, we may note at once, the number three is revealed again. For before the end is reached, the poet has found three subject matters for his poems. And these subject matters, marked off as three even in the surface design, are revealed, in their turn, to be stages in the new life, three stages.

In this manuscript Book of Memory the poems are, after all, the primary text; the rest is either a gloss to the poems or a gloss on that gloss. Hence, if there are three stages in the poet's love, that fact ought to be visible first in the poems. And so it is, although were there no gloss in prose to point out that fact, we might easily fail to see it.

But it is much easier to see that there are three subject matters for the poems than it is to give them names. The "gloss" in the Book of Memory does not tell specifically what their names might be. It makes, however, a rather clear suggestion of them. For instance, in the prose of chapter XVII we are told that when the poet had finished the last three of the first group of poems, he felt that these had been the "narrators" of all that he needed to say of his own "state" in love; and that the time, therefore, had come for him to find a new subject matter for his poems so that, as the Book of Memory has recorded it, the change comes first in respect to the poems. And this is as near as the prose ever comes to supplying a name for what has been the first subject matter of the poems: it is, we see, the state of the poet.

But do we expect lyric poems to be about anything else? Does a lyric poet actually ever write about anything other than his own inner state?

It would seem that he does, and the following chapter tells us as much. For something happened, something which made the poet realize that his poems must be no longer about himself. It takes the whole of that chapter XVIII to tell the "reason" of this, a chapter containing no poem of its own, but presenting what is surely one of the most charming episodes of the whole story: …

Inasmuch as from my aspect many persons had understood my heart's secret, certain ladies, who had come together, finding pleasure in each other's company, knew my heart very well, since every one of them had been present at many of my defeats; and 1, passing near them as one led by fortune, was called by one of these gentle ladies. The lady who had called me was a lady of very gracious speech; so that when I was come before them and saw well that my most gentle lady was not with them, reassuring myself I greeted them and asked them what might be their pleasure. The ladies were many, among whom were some who were laughing among themselves. Others there were who were watching me, expecting me to speak. There were others who spoke among themselves. Of these one, turning her eyes toward me and calling me by name, spoke these words: "To what end do you love this your lady, since you cannot endure her presence? Tell us this, for certainly the end of such a love must be most strange." And when she had spoken these words to me, not only she but all the others began visibly to await my reply. Then I said these words to them: "My ladies, the end of my love was once the greeting of this lady, whom perchance you have in mind, and in that dwelt beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires. But when it pleased her to deny it to me, my lord Love, through his grace, put all my beatitude in that which cannot fail me." Then these ladies began to speak among themselves; and as sometimes we see rain fall mingled with beautiful snow, so it seemed to me to hear their words issue mingled with sighs. And when they had spoken among themselves a while, that same lady who had first spoken to me said these words to me: "We pray you that you tell us wherein resides this your beatitude." And 1, replying to her, said thus: "In those words which praise my lady." Then she who was speaking to me replied to me: "If you were telling us the truth, those words which you spoke to us in setting forth your condition you would have used with another intention." Whereupon, thinking on these words, I left them as one ashamed, and came away saying to myself: "Since there is so much beatitude in those words which praise my lady, why have my words been of anything else?" And therefore I proposed henceforth to take as the subject of my words whatever might be in praise of this most gentle lady; and thinking much on this, it seemed to me that I had undertaken too lofty a subject for me, so that I did not dare to begin; and thus I remained some days desiring to write and afraid to begin.

This then, is the "reason" for the first canzone, for its subject matter, and for the second group of poems in the Vita Nuova which follows it. And this is, at the same time, also the reason for bringing the first group of poems to an end. The poet had come to see that he ought to write no more poems about himself. That subject, he felt, was exhausted. From now on he would write only in praise of his lady. It is a change in inspiration, the discovery of a new direction for his attention as poet. No longer will the eye of the poet focus upon himself and the effects of love on him. It will now turn to "madonna" and sing in praise of her and of her alone.

We know that, beginning especially with Guinicelli, two themes became predominant in the Italian love lyric, and we have seen what these were. Dante, like the others, had used them in poems. Now, in view of what we shall see to be the particular grouping of the poems according to subject in the Vita Nuova, we shall hardly fail to wonder if those same two themes have not become precisely the first two "subject matters" of the book. If they have, then we ought to observe that the Vita Nuova was, for one thing, a way of using poems probably already written on established themes before it was conceived as a whole made up of poems and prose.

The possibility of those two themes being the first two "subjects" of the poems in the Vita Nuova can at least serve to sharpen our view of what the first two subjects of the poems are. The two themes in the tradition were of the nature of two focuses, as we have seen. One theme turned the light of attention on the poet and the state of the poet, finding him done almost to death by the miraculous virtu of the object of love. Now is this theme not exactly the subject of the first group of poems in the Vita Nuova? We see that it is, and most clearly in the last three of those ten poems. The first of these is that sonnet written on the occasion of the wedding feast where, when Beatrice had walked into the room, the poet (as he afterwards told the friend who took him there) had suddenly stood on the verge of death. And the other two of the three poems are also on this same theme: the threat of death to the lover. The second is fairly representative of all three:

  Ciò che m'incontra, ne la mente more,
quand'i' vegno a veder voi, bella gioia;
e quand'io vi son presso, i'sento Amore
che dice: "Fuggi, se'l perir t'e noia."
Lo viso mostra lo color del core,
che, tramortendo, ovunque pò s'appoia;
e per la ebrieta del gran tremore
le pietre par che gridin: Moia, moia.
   Peccato face chi allora mi vide,
se l'alma sbigottita non conforta,
sol dimostrando che di me li doglia,
per la pietà che'l vostro gabbo ancide,
la qual si cria ne la vista morta
de li occhi, ch'hanno di lor morte voglia.

What befalls me dies in my mind when I come to see you, beautiful joy; and when I am near you, I fed Love who says: "Flee, if to perish is irksome to you." My face shows the hue of my heart, which, fainting, leans for support wherever it may; and in the drunkenness of the great trembling the very stones seem to cry out: "Die, die." Then whoever beholds me sins if he does not comfort my frightened soul, showing that at least he feels sorry for me because of the pity which your mockery kills, and which is begotten in the dead light of my eyes which have desire of their own death.

And as for the new "matter" which the poet found after finishing these three sonnets, what is it if not precisely that other of the two established themes, that theme in praise of the lady of which we have seen outstanding examples already in the poems of Guinicelli and Cavalcanti? It seems indeed probable that, before the Vita Nuova as a whole was conceived, Dante would already have written a number of sonnets on just this matter, sonnets such as that in chapter XXVI of the Vita Nuova:

   Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare
la donna mia quand'ella altrui saluta,
ch'ogne lingua deven tremando muta,
e li occhi no l'ardiscon di guardare.
Ella si va, sentendosi laudare,
benignamente d'umilta vestuta;
e par che sia una cosa venuta
da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.
   Mostrasi si piacente a chi la mira,
che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core,
che'ntender no la può chi no la prova:
e par che de la sua labbia si mova
un spirito soave pien d'amore,
che va dicendo a l'anima: Sospira

So gentle and so modest my lady seems when she greets another that every tongue trembles and grows mute and eyes do not dare to look at her. She goes along, hearing herself praised, benignly clothed in humility; and she seems a thing come from heaven to earth to show a miracle. She is a sight so pleasant to anyone who sees her that through the eyes she sends a sweetness to the heart which cannot be understood by one who does not experience it; and from her face there seems to move a gentle spirit full of love that keeps saying to the soul: "Sigh."

Better than any other of the second group, that sonnet represents the second "matter" found by the poet, a matter which is also a manner.

But when poems are no longer single scattered things but have a place in a Book of Memory, then the very order of their occurrence in such a book can give them a new significance, especially if grouping is also a part of that order. For in that case (as a gloss in prose can make clear) the mere fact that one group follows another may also have special meaning. Poems become groups of poems for having a common subject matter.

As subject matters emerge, a second can be new merely by leaving another behind. And change in matter is change in manner: the full implications of which fact we shall not understand without examining the kinds of love from which manners may arise.

The balance in outward arrangement noted between the first and third canzone is maintained at the deeper level of subject matters. For just as the first canzone is the beginning of the second subject matter and the end of the first, so now is the third canzone the end of the second matter and the beginning of the third.

But what is this third matter? Actually, the sign of entrance into it are the words from Jeremiah announcing the widowhood of the city, as the prose of chapter XXX (is this number, made up of three tens, another sign at this critical point?), which reconsiders those words and gives their reason, tells us: …

When she had departed from this world, all the aforesaid city remained as a widow bereft of all dignity; wherefore, still weeping in this desolate city, I wrote to the princes of the earth somewhat of its condition, taking that beginning of Jeremiah the prophet which says: Quomodo sedet sola civitas [How doth the city sit solitary]. And I say this so that no one will wonder that I have cited it above as an entrance to the new subject matter which follows.

Our name for this third matter ought not to be simply "The Death of Beatrice," but rather, "After the Death of Beatrice." For the poems in it do not continue to look exclusively at the object of love, and any fitting label for the new matter ought to allow for a certain return to the focusing of the poems on the poet himself. This third matter does begin with the cruel proclamation of Beatrice's death; but as it is developed by the poems of the third group we realize that, like the first matter, this third is again concerned with the lover and with the effects of love on him. Once more the poems tend to be narratori of the state of the poet. Not that the theme of praise is really abandoned, but it is no longer the exclusive focus. The third matter is a blending of the other two themes into a new one which includes them both and which, by doing so, transcends them. It is as a synthesis following on a thesis and an antithesis. It becomes the two themes in one, showing the poet at first thrown back upon himself and able to see only himself now that Beatrice is gone; and, then, ending in forgetfulness of self, in the triumph of a love which has found the way to a transcendental place of rest, ending in a poet's resolve to praise his lady as no lady was ever praised by poet.

Thus, for the three subject matters for poems in the Vita Nuova, one might propose the following names:

1. The effects of love on the poet.
2. In praise of his lady.
3. After the death of his lady.

But these, in any case, are only names for the subject matters of poems, not for stages in love. As their causes, however, the stages come first. For it is not, after all, the writing of poems which makes a New Life, but the actual and very real upward progression of the way of love in the poet who is the lover. However, that our attention should first have fallen upon poems and subject matters of poems is just as the Book of Memory would have it. The poems are the first text. Then, from the gloss to the poems, we learn that before the three subjects for poems were found, there were three changes in the way of love which made for three stages in love. Can the stages be named?

There are some fairly evident markers to guide us in the quest of the answer. It is not hard, for instance, to say where the first stage in love begins to end. That stage as such does not have, as does the first subject, any precise signpost like a canzone to mark its end; but that end can only be somewhere near the end of the corresponding subject matter for poems; and in this regard the denial of Beatrice's greeting appears to be the capital event. The fact is evident enough from what the poet says to the ladies who are so curious over the end of his love: …

My ladies, the end of my love was once the greeting of this lady, whom perchance you have in mind, and in that dwelt beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires. But when it pleased her to deny it to me, my lord Love, through his grace, put all my beatitude in that which cannot fail me.

It is clear from these words how much a part of the change from one stage of love to another the denial of Beatrice's greeting is.

The poet, we recall, had brought this cruel moment upon himself. He had been far too assiduous in his efforts to make of the second "screen-lady" a cover for his love of Beatrice, and his attentions had resulted in much gossip on the part of malevolent people throughout the city. Whereupon, Beatrice, who was ever the queen of all virtues and the enemy of all evil things (of which this kind of gossip is one), one day refused the beatitude of her greeting to him who had brought about this unseemly talk.

Then we read in chapter XII that on the advice of the God of Love the poet wrote a ballata to his lady explaining how all this had come about, how it was all a mistake, how he had really been hers all the while. Nor are we given any reason to believe that Beatrice did not receive this poem. But if she did receive it, was there no jot of mercy in her? Why did she not forgive her lover? Why do we not read in the following chapter that Beatrice restored the greeting which it cost her so little to give and in which dwelt her lover's beatitude?

Merely to raise the question is to feel at once how irrelevant it is. There is only one reason why Beatrice's greeting was not restored, and this reason is not envisaged by such questions as those. It is simply that the denial of her greeting is a step in the upward way of love. It is because the lover must learn to do without that greeting that, in spite of all his explanations, it is never restored to him. He is being taught that the beatitude and end of love is not really to be sought in such things as this, that true salute ("well-being, salvation") does not reside there. If love is to ascend, these things must be left behind for other things.

This is precisely a lesson which the poet seems to have learned by the time the ladies ask him about the end of his love. At just what moment between the refusal of her greeting and this meeting with those inquisitive ladies he had understood that, in spite of all apologies, the greeting was not to be restored to him, we do not know. But when we hear his reply to those ladies, it is evident that he already knows that this will be so. And, in knowing this, he has already stepped from the first stage of love to the second.

Moreover, we can see, from that same reply to the ladies, that this step from one to the other stage means primarily a change in his love (and of course an awareness of change) with respect to the place of the end of love. At first, the place of that end had been in the greeting of Beatrice. The greeting in itself we may take to be more than just an end for his love. It is a good symbol of any love which is turned toward satisfactions from without, any love which is interested in some return from the beloved, interested in reward. Such a love as this looking for some return from the beloved is one which the ladies who question the poet would not find at all unusual; nor, indeed, would it be unusual in the whole tradition of courtly love of which these questioning ladies are, in this instance, the mouthpiece. In troubadour love, the lover might always hope for reward from his lady, for some sign of "mercy" on her part, were this no more than a passing smile or a greeting. In fact, in that degree of refinement to which the conception of courtly love had by this time attained in Italy, some such sign of merce was quite all in the way of reward that the lover might dare to expect.

The question which the ladies address to the poet assumes in fact that love will seek some reward from the beloved. That is why they are puzzled about the poet's love now, because they have all been present on occasions when it was evident that he was unable to endure even the presence of Beatrice. What can the end of love be, if the lover is never in a condition to receive a reward from the beloved? …

To what end do you love this your lady, since you cannot endure her presence? Tell us this, for certainly the end of such a love must be most strange.

The ladies are thus bound to be all the more puzzled by the poet's answer to their question, which declares that the end and happiness of love is no longer in any reward which might come from Beatrice. Now, he says, thanks to the God of Love, the end and happiness of his love is put where it cannot fail him. Neither the ladies nor the tradition of troubadour love had ever heard of any such love as this. Where can the end of such a love as this be? "In those words which praise my lady," the poet replies.

It is the place of the end of love that counts. For the poet, now, the place of the end of his love could not have suffered a more radical transfer than this. And change there, moreover, must necessarily mean a change in the direction from which love's happiness comes, because the end of love is happiness. We must look at the matter in terms of direction, then, and it should now be clear that as long as all happiness came from the greeting of Beatrice, the direction of happiness was from the outside in. But now, if the happiness which is the end of love is in words which praise the beloved, the direction of the happiness of love must be the direction of just those words which arise in the poet and flow out toward the beloved. This is a complete reversal. Happiness now comes from within and flows from the inside out. What kind of love is this?

If we will turn for a moment to listen to Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), a mystic whose work was well known to Dante, on the degrees of that love which is properly called caritas, we shall discover, I think, the right name for this second degree of love which the poet has reached in the Vita Nuova. Richard writes of what charity is (and is not) in terms of the direction of love:…

For how shall one who does not love, who does not feel the power of love, speak of love? Now of other subjects abundant matter appears in books; but of this one, it is either entirely within or it is nowhere, because it does not transpose its hidden sweetness from the outside to the inside, but transmits it from the inside out. He alone, therefore, speaks of that subject worthily who, as his heart dictates, so composes his words.

Here let us remember that already in the line of progression from love to charity followed with regard to the object of love we had come to a point in the ascent where love was seen to become charity: where a God of Love was removed from the action, where all the authority of love was transfered to Beatrice, and Love itself was redefined.

Now, in the changes in a New Life in love as seen in the subject of love, we have come to a point at which we again see love becoming charity: where the new direction of love, in fact, is no longer to be distinguished from that of charity, if we may allow Richard's distinctions in terms of the direction of love to define that new direction for us. This we may surely do, for the happiness of love which may not fail the poet is a happiness arising within him and flowing outward, even as charity.

As is well known, love which is charity is a disinterested love having its final perfection in Heaven. Charity seeks no reward but, at the same time, charity is never without reward. The love of the blessed in Heaven finds its happiness in the contemplation of God and in praise of Him. In Heaven happiness arises within the soul and flows out to the Beloved. Evidently love of Beatrice in the new direction has reached a stage analogous to that.

Once more let us remember that, in that other line of progression from love to charity which was followed with respect to the object of love, charity was reached when the God of Love (who was the symbol of troubadour love) was removed from the action. Now in that parallel progression of the New Life as seen in the subject of love, we may observe in turn that when the greeting of Beatrice (which is likewise a sign of troubadour love) is removed from the action, a kind of love which may be called charity is reached. For a greeting as the end of love is the unmistakable symbol of a love which had never attained to disinterestedness, of a love ever hopeful of some merce from the beloved. And that, precisely, is a predominant feature of troubadour love. However refined that love became, it continued to look for reward, some reward, from without. Now when the happiness of the poet's love has become a happiness arising freely within himself and flowing out from within, his love has ascended to a level above troubadour love—above because it is toward the perfection of love as love will be in Heaven—even though it is here still a love in this life.

A new direction in love means a new subject matter for poems of love. And this, if style be faithful to inspiration, means a new style in poetry.

Later on, in Purgatory XXIV, Dante will tell us as much and will give to this matter a dramatic cast, causing a poet of the older generation met there, a certain Bonagiunta from Lucca, to recognize in that first poem written to give expression to this new direction in love in the Vita Nuova (and to recognize in a redefinition of that direction) a style which is both new and sweet: dolce stil nuovo.

"Tell me," says Bonagiunta to Dante, who is standing before him on the terrace of the gluttons, "do I here behold him who produced the new rhymes beginning "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore?" This, as we know, is the first verse of the first canzone in the Vita Nuova, that first expression in verse of the second stage in the New Life in love as the Book of Memory has recorded it.

Dante replies to Bonagiunta's question with a definition in striking agreement with the one we heard Richard of St. Victor give of charity:

E io a lui: "I' mi son un che quando
   Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo
   ch'e' ditta dentro vo significando."

And I to him: "I am one who, when Love inspires me, take note and, in the manner in which he dictates within, I proceed to signify."

To which the older poet replies:

"O frate, issa vegg'io," diss'elli, "il nodo
 che'l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne
 di qua dal dolce stil novo ch'i'odo!

lo veggio ben come le vostre penne
  di retro al dittator sen vanno strette,
  che de le nostre certo non avvenne."

"O friend, now I see," he said, "the knot which kept the Notary and Guittone and me short of that sweet new style which I hear. I see well how your pens follow closely after the dictator, which certainly did not happen to ours."

Now (now that he is in Purgatory where all souls are being schooled in the true nature of love which is charity), Bonagiunta understands what that knot was that kept him and the others he has named from attaining to that style (and understanding) of poetry which the first of the longer poems of the Vita Nuova represents. One even suspects that Bonagiunta is aware of the place of that poem in the Book of Memory. For only there is it the first of the poems on a new matter, only in its special place there does it represent a new style, because only there is it the expression of a changed direction in love. What the changed direction was we have seen, and we have found a definition and a name for it in Richard of St. Victor. The redefinition of it here in Purgatory only confirms our understanding. All of which means, if it means anything, that the first poem of the second group of poems in the Vita Nuova is the expression of a love which has found the direction of charity. And all this Bonagiunta seems now to understand too.

We, in turn, may be expected to realize that the author of the poems of the Vita Nuova was himself at one time also "on the other side of the knot," had also kept company at one time with the poets of another generation. In fact, as long as he had written of a love which depended for its happiness on some return from without (on a beloved's greeting), he had written in the "old" style.

Thus we see that the order of the poems themselves in the Book of Memory, being the direct consequence of the order of the poet's love, makes a judgment on the relative merits of two styles. For since, as the Book of Memory has it, the order of love is an ascending one, any new matter for poems, merely by succeeding another, is of necessity more lofty than the preceding. If the ascent is toward perfection of love, then a second step must be nearer to the goal than the first. It must be more noble. And this the gloss in prose in the Book affirms it to be, telling us in chapter xvii that love at the second stage is a more noble matter for poems than at the first: …

When I had composed these three sonnets in which I had spoken of this lady, since they were the narrators of nearly all my condition, thinking to be silent and write no more because it seemed to me that I had manifested enough of myself even though I should henceforth refrain from writing to her, it behooved me to take up a new and more noble subject matter than the last had been.

But it did not prove to be true that the poet's happiness had been put where it might not fail him. A second stage of love was not to be the last. He could not know that his love had not yet reached the place of its rest, which is the place of its greatest perfection, that his happiness had not yet attained to that place beyond change where it might endure.

The poet, in the first stage of the new life in love, had found all the happiness of his love to be in the greeting from his lady. Then, through the painful privation of that greeting, he had found the happiness to be within himself, welling up there and overflowing in praise of his lady. He had thought that such happiness as this might never be taken from him. How might it be, if he now bore its source within himself, if his love now resembled the love of the blessed in Heaven, being all contemplation of the Beloved and all praise of her? Is not self-sufficiency an inalienable attribute of such love as this?

But he could not then know that he had another even more painful lesson to learn. In the exultation of a new love which was already incipient charity, the poet had forgotten what must not be forgotten when the object of love is a mortal creature. For what if contemplation should be deprived of its object? Can the praise continue? Then will the happiness of love continue to arise within? What if Beatrice should die?

Apparently the motive force of a love which ascends, and which is transformed by changes in the place of its end, is privation itself. First it was the greeting which was taken from the poet, and this loss had brought him to the second stage of love. Then the loss became infinitely more: the loss was Beatrice herself. True, love in the second stage had no longer looked to the outside for any reward. But in contemplation of the Beloved it had, nevertheless, continued to look to the outside, to depend on an object of sensual contemplation, on the miraculous beauty of a living woman. However, when the poet had thought that such a happiness could not fail him, he had forgotten one thing: that death exists in the world. Then one day certain terrible words from Jeremiah took their place in the Book of Memory, and the poet knew that Beatrice was dead. Can even a disinterested love survive such privation as this?

The third matter for poems in the Vita Nuova is not, like the first and second, a theme already established in the tradition. Neither Guinicelli nor Cavalcanti had written poems on the death of the beloved. Of death in love they had written, but that was rather of the death which constantly menaced the lover in the overwhelming brightness of his lady's presence.

But the last subject matter of the poems in the Vita Nuova is the death of the Beloved. One should therefore know that, in the order given by a Book of Memory, not only is an evaluation made of two traditional themes for poetry, but these themes are surmounted there by a third which is not traditional and which gives a new significance to the other two as steps toward it.

Our modern mind is little given to considering events in terms of a final cause; of a cause, that is, which lies at the end of an event. We are much more inclined to think of a cause as preceding what is caused, as being at the beginning rather than at the end. But the structure of a work of art (perhaps of any work of art) may still bring us to think in terms of that end cause to which medieval thought so readily turned. In the Vita Nuova, for instance, we must see the death of Beatrice, the last of three subject matters, as the cause of the other two. Actually, one feels little difficulty in allowing this in a sense, since it amounts only to saying something like this: if the last step in a flight of three steps reaches that point in space for which a stairway is intended, that point and hence that last step may be said to be the cause of the other two. This is, strictly speaking, not only a matter of order, but of their nature. The first would not only not be first, it would not even be the same step, if it were the only one; and even a first and a second step are different steps for having a step beyond them.

In the third stage, where is the place of the end of love? If the third subject matter is to be called "After the death of Beatrice," what shall the name of the third stage be, if that name, as in the case of the other two, is to be determined with regard to the place of the end of love?

In the third, the end is above. The final, the most noble resting place, and the last stage of the poet's new life in love is in Heaven. When we know the whole course of that new life (in so far as it is recorded in the Book of Memory) and can look back down over the ascending way, we feel certain that the only way in which that final place could have been attained was through the death of Beatrice.