Commentary
Introduction
This sonnet follows on its paired sonnet
“My lady looks
so gentle and so pure”
(see commentary for the
latter). DGR's “aesthetic” reading of his source text, marked
most clearly in the first sonnet by an echo of Shelley, here
comes forward, as so often with DGR, in a dramatic moment of
“mistranslation” at lines 7-8. DGR uses a pictorial—indeed,
an ekphrastic—figure to signal Beatrice's
“perfect. . .beauty” where Dante's is
vestmental.
DGR's source text was
“Vede perfettamente ogni salute” in the third volume of Fraticell's
Opere
Minori di Dante Alighieri
.
Textual History: Composition
An early work, probably late 1840s.
Textual History: Revision
Printing History
The translation was first published in 1861 in
The
Early Italian Poets
; it was reprinted in 1874 in
Dante
and his Circle
.
Bibliographic
“Introduction
to Part II” (in
Early Italian Poets)
189-193
Foster and Boyd,
Dante's Lyric Poetry
,
I.78-79 (II. 125-127)
.
De Robertis, ed., Vita Nuova, 185-187
.