Introduction
The Wordsworth allusion in line 4 is
at once deft and shocking: deft because
of the clear parallel between Wordsworth's Lucy figure and Dante's Beatrice;
shocking because, as Byron would later say of Haidee and Aurora Raby, their
beauties differ as “between a flower and gem”. DGR's implicit
argument here distinctly forecasts his famous declaration: “Thy
soul I know
not from thy body” (
“Heart's Hope”
line 7).
In a Dantean perspective the sonnet looks forward to the
<hi rend="i">Commedia</hi>
, as DGR's prose note to Chapter
XLII indicates: Dante's “sospiro” (line 2) conceals his guiding
“peregrino spirito” (line 8), an understanding hidden within a
longing desire (lines 9-10, 14). The forecast
<hi rend="i">Paradiso</hi>
thus becomes
here a kind of figure for this climacic
moment in Dante's autobiography, where he
seems poised in an exquisite vision of the relation of the text and
journey he is just finishing and the text and journey he
has yet to take. This sonnet incarnates that
moment of poised awareness. In the sonnet's Rossettian perspective,
that entire
Dantean dynamic is recuperated in the
“lady round whom splendours move/
In homage”, i.e., the Ideal lady of every idealizing poet's imagination,
Wordsworth's natural one as well as Dante's supernatural one. In DGR's later
famous (and consciously Dantean) words: “This is that Lady Beauty, in
whose praise/ Thy voice and hand shake still (
“Soul's Beauty”
lines 9-10). DGR's final
sonnet—not Dante's—is a poetic splendour
risen to do homage to that figure.
DGR's source text was
“Oltre la spera, che pił larga gira” in the third volume of
Fraticelli's
<hi rend="i">
<xref doc="a.pq4308.a24.vol3.rad" from="357" to="358" workcode="17d-1861orig">Opere
Minori di Dante Alighieri</xref>
</hi>
.
Bibliographic
“Introduction
to Part II” (in
Early Italian Poets),
189-193
Foster and Boyd,
<xref doc="a.pq4309.a1.1967.rad" link="dead" from="96" to="97">
<hi rend="i">Dante's Lyric Poetry</hi>
</xref>
,
I.96-97 (II. 155-157)
.
De Robertis, ed., Vita Nuova, 245-246
.