After a Canzoni by Pound, After a Ballata by Dante

Ezra Pound might be stalking me from the past.

In yet another chance meeting between his Canzoni & Ripostes and my own readings and ramblings, here’s Pound, uh, expounding on Dante’s love affair with Beatrice just like Borges before him:

Ah little cloud that in Love’s shadow lief
Upon mine eyes so suddenly alightest,
Take some faint pity on the heart thou smitest
That hopes in thee, desires, dies, in brief.

Ah little cloud of more than human fashion
Thou settest a flame within my mind’s mid space
With thy deathly speech that grieveth;

Then as a fiery spirit in thy ways
Createst hope, in part a rightful passion,
Yet where thy sweet smile giveth
His grace, look not! For in Her my faith liveth.

Think on my high desire whose flame’s so great
That nigh a thousand who were come too late,
Have felt the torment of another’s grief.

That’s “La Nuvoletta,” which Pound credits to “Dante to an unknown lady, beseeching her not to interrupt his cult of the dead Beatrice. From ‘Il Canzoniere,’ Ballata II.” But as with his riff on Propertius, Pound is having a little Borgesian fun writing sequels to the classics: Dante’s La Vita Nuova contains only one ballata and four canzoni, one of which was left unfinished after the death of Dante’s divine love Beatrice Portinari.

Dante and the other early lyric poets invented a poetic love which joins Greek mythopoeia with Christian doctrine, grafting the flesh of chivalrous spirit to a Pagan skeleton and giving rise to a deified Love born of sanctification of the female spirit (a holdover of Catholic theology and worship of the Virgin) and a reverence for intellectual beauty. Purity and humility constitute the brightest graces in the beloved; loyalty and constancy to a single mistress, the noblest virtues in the lover.

Thus the poet’s unending praise of his lover’s eyes, smile, and lips: the eyes indicating an intelligent mind; the smile, goodness of heart; the lips the vehicle through which every adoring sentiment is conveyed. In the extravagance of figurative language even the golden hair of the fair one symbolize her mind: every hair becomes a thought, each feature representative of intellectual charm.

Another feature of note in the birth of poetic Love: the frequent reference to the passion as spiritual regeneration, a death to vice and ignoble sentiment, and the christening of a new life devoted to virtue. La Vita Nuova might be the most memorable example. Dante’s poems, whether concerned with love or moral virtue, blend a Catholic worldview with pre-Christian sources, particularly a single dialogue of Plato’s entitled “The Banquet,” detailing a feast at which each of the guests —among them Phædrus, Pausanias and our old friend Aristophanes, offering up his infamous doppelganger theory of love — is asked to discourse upon the subject of Love, which they proceed to dissect from every possible point of view until Socrates closes the discussion with the most holistic and logical breakdown of the theme, beginning with a genealogy of Love which outlines the spirit of Greek polytheism, ascribing to every part of nature a deity and an object of worship: Love is foremost a divinity, the offspring of Plenty and Want.

From another angle Socrates considers Love as a medium between the human and the divine, a mediator between the subject and object of desire, the lover and the beloved. Love, according to Socrates, is the longing after happiness which exists in every heart. In its most comprehensive sense it is the desire for good; limited, it is the desire of beauty, a desire for union with the beautiful, for possession of it it in perpetuity. But beauty and goodness are one, thus Love is the desire for virtue and vice its abhorrence.

The desire of perpetual possession necessarily associated tied to the wish for immortality; hence Socrates deduces (or reduces, if you prefer) the invention of all art and science to products of Love. When a soul has been well-cultivated and teems with the seeds of wisdom, Socrates says, the soul wishes to communicate and implant them; he meets with outward beauty, and is charmed away from spiritual deformity. In his search for the object of his desire he learns to appreciate the superior worth of mental endowments; and when he happily meets with the inward and hidden beauty of a well-natured and generous soul, though combined only with a moderate share of external beauty, and obtains its possession, his attachment to the beautiful compound in mind and body becomes indissoluble. A union of heart and soul, of affection and reason, takes place in such a pair. Virtue, its nature and its duties become the subject of their interchange of thought, and each strives to perfect the character of the other. An eloquence unknown before flows from their lips; and whether in the presence or absence of the beloved, the mind and memory are prompt and active, and the seeds of wisdom burst forth spontaneously and generate a beautiful progeny. The mortal nature seeks to be perpetuated, and as far as possible immortalized, desiring to leave behind it when it departs a new being bearing its resemblance: both parents join in cherishing and cultivating the fruits of their love and converse, and a friendship of the purest kind cements them, for they are held together by a bond of union stronger even than that of a corporeal offspring, having another common and joint offspring of themselves, more beautiful and more enduring.

Socrates concludes in a loftier realm of thought, possibly suggesting to Dante the sublime conceptions which terminates his Vision of Paradise. Socrates credits his most profound doctrines to the priestess Diotima, who had been imbued with more than human wisdom; doctrines which conduct the mind by gradual ascent to the contemplation of the unity and incomprehensibility of the First Cause, of that Being which is goodness and beauty itself; a union with whom is the end of human existence, the sole object of heavenly love, and which alone can confer immortal felicity. In like manner, the divine instructions delivered by Dante are imparted to him by Beatrice, the representative of Christian theology, as she soars with him from heaven to heaven through Paradise; she still rising in beauty and wisdom as they ascend, and he in admiration and intelligential power; until at last she conducts him to the Empyrean, where he contemplates the fountain of truth, and tastes the ineffable bliss of the beatific vision.

Where, then, does Pound’s impersonation of Dante fit in? I’ll be honest: as of now, both this single poem and my engagement with it are too short to draw many conclusions. Pound riffs on Dante, Dante riffs on Plato, Plato on Socrates, Socrates on Diotima… where does it end?

Per Socrates: to be led by another along the right way of love is to proceed from beauties of a lower order to those higher in a continual ascent, to the highest beauty as the end, and using the rest merely as so many steps; from the beauty of bodies to that of souls, from souls to arts, from arts to sciences; and if the soul be endowed with a genius of the higher kind, she rests not here, nor fixes her attachment on any one of these beauties in particular, but rises to the contemplation of universal, original, immanent beauty, from which all other beauty radiates. Whoever, then, is advanced thus far in the mysteries of Love, by a process of contemplation, approaching now to perfect intuition, will discover bursting into view a beauty astonishingly admirable; an unending beauty unsusceptible to growth or decay.

Tying Socrates’ transcendent beauty to Dante’s sanctification of Beatrice in the final vision of Paradise doesn’t take much stretching of the imagination. I have a feeling echoes may pop up whenever I make it through the Cantos… yeah, that’ll be the day.