We may also speculate on the presence of another linguistic program here.

This opening line thus presents us, first with a completed pattern and then, on further consideration, with a broken pattern: We expect Latin here, but do not find it. Bernard, but he does not use his customary Latin tongue (apparently no writing of Bernard in French survives), but the vernacular. Here we have another poetic voice, that of St.

505): “No Christian poet had ever been so daring.”įor the beginnings of the last cantos of the first two cantiche, see the note to Purgatorio XXXIII.1-3, which points out that each of the previous opening lines was in another poetic voice, first that of Venantius Fortunatus and second that of David, both of them speaking Latin. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone, p. Reacting to the entire canto, Güntert has said (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. The only answer to impossibility is miracle. This overriding of the logic of impossibility will culminate in the final simile of the poem, the geometer attempting to square the circle. “Virgin” and “mother” cannot logically be the shared properties of any woman nor can any woman be the daughter of her son. This verse establishes the basic modality of the entire canto, making two references to what will be a common theme of so many verses in it: harmonious resolution of impossibly related contraries. The tone of intimacy found in this prayer is emphasized by its extraordinary number of second-person-singular pronouns (tu, te, ti) and adjectives (tuo, tua), 17 of them in 39 verses (and that figure does not include second-person-singular endings of verbs). Gian Carlo Alessio, in a lecture he presented at Princeton University during the autumn semester of 1981, broke down the rhetorical divisions of Bernard's prayer as follows: And for the large extent to which Dante has borrowed from Bernard's own writings for the words of this prayer, see Mario Aversano ( Dante daccapo, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), pp.

This is not to suggest that it is in any way incongruous in its context (quite the opposite is true), only that it could be published (as surely it has been) in an anthology of devotional lyrics and be one of the most moving and commanding of the collection.įor a study of this passage, see Erich Auerbach (“Dante's Prayer to the Virgin and Earlier Eulogies,” Romance Philology 3 : 1-26), who aligns it with examples of classical and Christian praise. This much (and justly) celebrated passage, Bernard's prayer to the Virgin, has the authority and unity of a separate poem.

Cosi e la vita imobile