Purgatorio · Canto XXIV ·
Purgatorio XXIV — Bonagiunta and the Question
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 58 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XXIV
Before reading
Forese walks with Dante a little further along the sixth terrace, identifies several of the famished crowd by name, and then runs ahead to catch the rest of his band. A different shade — a poet, not a friend — turns back to talk. The conversation that follows is the most concentrated statement of Dante's own poetics anywhere in the Commedia. It is also short, and easily missed.
Where the canto sits
We are on the same terrace as XXIII, at the same time of day, with the same characters. The canto reads as the continuation of the previous one; the poem barely pauses between them. Then a second tree of the terrace appears, the angel of temperance, and the climb to the next cornice begins. The structure is meeting — literary argument — tree — angel — next stairway; the same shape recurs on every cornice of the mountain.
What it helps to know
The poet who turns back is Bonagiunta Orbicciani da Lucca (c. 1220–c. 1290), a generation older than Dante, a notary, and a competent versifier in the Sicilian-Tuscan manner that had ruled Italian love poetry before Dante was born. Bonagiunta belongs to what is called the Siculo-Tuscan school — the line that ran from the court of Frederick II in Sicily through Giacomo da Lentini (called here the Notary) and Guittone d'Arezzo. They wrote love poetry of a high formal kind but, in Dante's view, a love poetry that did not yet listen to what love itself was dictating.
In the 1280s and 90s a younger Florentine group around Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia and Dante developed a different practice — the dolce stil novo, the sweet new style. Its premise was that the poet writes by following an internal dictation rather than by working a learned form. Dante's Vita Nuova enshrined the manifesto poem Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore — Ladies, that have intelligence of love — as the first composition in which he had heard the dictation properly. Bonagiunta will quote that opening line as a question; Dante's answer is the canto's still centre.
A small further note: Bonagiunta also makes a prophecy about a Lucchese girl who will one day be kind to Dante in exile. The girl's name is Gentucca; nothing more is known about her. The detail is private to Dante and is left in the text as a single proper name without explanation. The poem permits, in this canto, a small piece of personal history that no commentator can dissolve.
Around the corner from Bonagiunta the canto names a procession of historical gluttons — a pope of Tours (Martin IV, who supposedly drowned eels in wine before eating them), a Forli lord, several other figures of recent memory. Do not slow down to track each one; the canto is naming them with the same speed Forese named the others, and the catalogue is doing volume rather than weight.
What to read for
Listen for the question Bonagiunta asks and the answer Dante gives. Both are short, and both have been read for seven centuries as the Commedia's self-portrait of its own method.
Notice the moment Bonagiunta replies. He does not argue; he hears the answer and concedes, naming his own school's limits. Compare this to the Inferno's great encounters with poets, where the conversations were elaborately respectful and the limits were never named aloud.
Notice the second tree. The voice from within it speaks not of Eve but of two Old Testament examples of intemperance — the half-horse Centaurs at the wedding-feast and the Israelites Gideon rejected for the way they drank at the river. The terrace is now using examples from outside Eden. The penance is being widened to the world.
Listen for the angel at the end. The beatitude he sings is a particular one — blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, edited so that the blessing lands only on the hungering. The terrace's lesson, said in a single line.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
Forese walked with the pilgrim a little further and identified the famished by name, including a pope, a Forli lord, and a Lucchese poet. The Lucchese turned back from the band to ask the question for which the canto is remembered. Dante answered him with the most concentrated piece of poetic self-portrait in the Commedia, and Bonagiunta — older poet, older school — heard the answer and conceded. Then Forese took his leave with a prophecy, a second tree appeared, an angel of temperance erased the next P from the pilgrim's brow, and the climb to the seventh cornice began. The canto's spine is its eight tercets of poetics. Everything else on the cornice is either preparation for them or relief from them.
The Gentucca and the politics of friendship
Forese names a sequence of his fellow-penitents — Buonagiunta of Lucca, Ubaldin dalla Pila, Boniface (Archbishop of Ravenna), the Marquis of Forli — and the cornice receives them by the canto in much the way a Florentine terza rima sonnet exchange might in the 1290s have named a circle of friends. Among the names is a small private moment: Bonagiunta murmurs to Dante that a maid is born in Lucca who will make the city pleasant to him in spite of its bad reputation, and her name is Gentucca. The detail is bare, the prophecy is fulfilled in real life only by Dante's later residence in Lucca, and no commentator has ever resolved what the girl was to him. The canto permits it to remain unresolved. One of the things the Commedia keeps doing in this terrace is what no biographer of Dante can do: it leaves the private record private even while writing it down.
Bonagiunta's question and Dante's answer
The exchange is twelve lines long and is the Commedia's clearest piece of self-portrait. Bonagiunta asks: say if him I here behold, who forth evoked the new-invented rhymes, beginning, Ladies, that have intelligence of love? He is asking whether the pilgrim is the man who wrote the canzone that opens Dante's Vita Nuova — the manifesto poem of the dolce stil novo. Dante answers: One am I, who, whenever Love doth inspire me, note, and in that measure which he within me dictates, singing go.
Read the answer one more time. I note what Love dictates. I sing as he dictates within me. The poetic method is not invention; it is dictation. The poet's work is to attend to an interior voice and to record what it says without alteration. This is not modesty — it is a metaphysics. Love, in this account, is not the subject of the poem; it is the author of the poem, and the poet is the scribe. The dolce stil novo poetics is on this view a kind of inspired transcription, with the test of the verse being not its formal accomplishment but its fidelity to what was dictated.
Bonagiunta concedes immediately. Now I see the knot which me, the Notary, and Guittone held short of the sweet new style that now I hear. He names the three poets of the previous generation — himself, Giacomo da Lentini the Sicilian Notario, and Guittone d'Arezzo the great Tuscan — and admits that their pens did not go closely following after him who dictates. The Siculo-Tuscan school worked on the verse from the outside, by craft; the stil novo works from the inside, by listening.
There is a quiet aggression in the structure of the exchange. Bonagiunta asks; Dante does not argue but states; Bonagiunta concedes; Dante does not reply to the concession. The new school does not need to debate the old. It only needs to be heard.
What the answer is not saying
The doctrine of inspired dictation has its own problem, and the Commedia is half-aware of it. If the poet is only a scribe, then nothing the poet writes is to be argued with — the dictation came from Love, and Love is its own warrant. Francesca in Inferno V was paraphrasing exactly this position when she made Love the subject of every sentence about her own damnation. Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona. The line is a perfect stil novo line, and it is the testimony of a damned woman. The Commedia is not unaware that the doctrine of inspired love-poetry is the same doctrine that condemned its first great speaker. The poem permits the contradiction to stand. Dante's answer to Bonagiunta names the method his Francesca used; the Commedia as a whole is the work of judging which dictations are to be trusted.
The second tree and the widening of the lesson
The first tree of the terrace (canto XXII) spoke of Eve. The second tree of the terrace (canto XXIV) speaks of two other examples — the cloud-rack Centaurs who got drunk at the wedding of Pirithous and battled Theseus, and the Israelites whom Gideon rejected for lapping at the river like dogs (Judges 7). The first example is classical; the second biblical; both are about intemperance in drink. The poem is widening the lesson of the cornice. Eden is the origin of gluttony; the Centaurs are the appetite without reason; Gideon's rejects are the common shape of intemperance that disqualifies even from holy war. The cornice is being instructed three times because the sin has three faces.
The angel of temperance
The canto closes on an angel so bright that the pilgrim cannot look at him — never in a furnace was there seen metals or glass so lucent and so red. The angel sings the beatitude of the terrace in an edited form. The original is Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled (Matthew 5:6). The angel sings only Blessed are they whom grace so much illumines, that the love of taste excites not in their breasts too great desire, hungering at all times so far as is just. The promise is dropped; only the discipline remains. The terrace's lesson, said as the pilgrim leaves it: hunger at all times so far as is just. The cure for gluttony is not abstinence but ordered desire.
Famous and meaningful passages
Bonagiunta's question.
But say if him I here behold, who forth Evoked the new-invented rhymes, beginning, Ladies, that have intelligence of love? (Purg. XXIV.49–51)
The opening line of Dante's own Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore from the Vita Nuova, quoted back at him by an older poet on the next-to-last cornice of the mountain. The poem stages its author being recognised.
The poetic credo.
And I to him: One am I, who, whenever Love doth inspire me, note, and in that measure Which he within me dictates, singing go. (Purg. XXIV.52–54)
The most-quoted self-description in the Commedia. Poetry as transcription. The poet attends; Love dictates; the verse is the record.
Bonagiunta's concession.
O brother, now I see, he said, the knot Which me, the Notary, and Guittone held Short of the sweet new style that now I hear. I do perceive full clearly how your pens Go closely following after him who dictates, Which with our own forsooth came not to pass. (Purg. XXIV.55–60)
The whole dolce stil novo defined in a negative — the older school did not follow the dictation. Lo dolce stil novo — the sweet new style — is named here for the first time in literary history.
Forese on his brother.
Now go, he said, for him most guilty of it At a beast's tail behold I dragged along Towards the valley where is no repentance. (Purg. XXIV.82–84)
The prophecy of the death of Corso Donati — Forese's brother, leader of the Black Guelfs, architect of Dante's exile — dragged at the tail of a horse to Hell. Forese does not name him; the dragging is the name.
The second tree's voices.
Be mindful, said he, of the accursed ones Formed of the cloud-rack, who inebriate Combated Theseus with their double breasts; And of the Jews who showed them soft in drinking, Whence Gideon would not have them for companions When he tow'rds Midian the hills descended. (Purg. XXIV.121–126)
Centaurs and the rejects of Gideon. The two examples by which the terrace widens its sin from Eve to the world.
The blinding angel.
And never in a furnace was there seen Metals or glass so lucent and so red As one I saw… (Purg. XXIV.137–139)
The angel of temperance, his face indistinguishable from the heat that surrounds him.
The edited beatitude.
Blessed are they whom grace So much illumines, that the love of taste Excites not in their breasts too great desire, Hungering at all times so far as is just. (Purg. XXIV.151–154)
Matthew 5:6 with the for they shall be filled removed. The discipline survives; the promise is held back.
What to watch for
Watch Statius. He has now stood silent through three cantos in the company of Virgil and Dante. The next canto will give him the longest single piece of doctrinal exposition in the entire Purgatorio, on a question Virgil cannot answer.
Watch the P. Five of the seven Ps carved on the pilgrim's brow at Purgatorio IX have now been wiped. Two remain — lust, and (read forward) the cornice the pilgrim is about to enter.
Watch the dolce stil novo names. Guido Guinizelli — the older Bolognese poet whom Dante had called the father of me and of my betters — has not yet appeared. He will appear on the next cornice, among the lustful, in canto XXVI, and Dante will repay him there in person what the stil novo owes him.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.