I.e., Dante's failure was in chasing after women who were not as beautiful as she was. The phrase 'sommo piacer' was traditionally interpreted as referring to Beatrice as the most beautiful of all mortals. The false beauty of Beatrice's rivals (verse 35) should have been countered by the highest beauty that he had found in her. 35, 50, 52), its densest presence in the Comedy.
The word is used three times in this canto (vv. It is often used to denote the highest beauty of all, that of God. XVIII.21), it then occurs thirty-four times in the second half, twenty-one of these in Paradiso. The verbal noun piacer is used only once in the first half of the poem (it describes Paolo's physical attractiveness at Inf. This is not because she was more beautiful in her fleshly being than they, but because she offered him what they did and could not, 'il sommo piacer' (the highest beauty). She tells Dante that her buried flesh should have led him elsewhere from where he elected to go (in this context, clearly other women ). 159-69.īeatrice's phrasing offers a good example of the cause of the difficulty many have in interpreting her role in this poem. II.xii.5).įor this writer's view of this complex matter see Hollander ( Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” ), pp. He had looked for consolation from this lady, he says, but he had instead found gold ( Conv. If, in the Vita nuova, he finally returns to his love for Beatrice and is rewarded with a vision of her in the Empyrean, in Convivio he is writing about the donna gentile again, now as having finally displaced Beatrice in his affections. He was turned by his love for the donna gentile, who, we may remember ( VN XXXV.2), was seated at her window and looked pityingly at Dante, who then 'parades' before her a pair of sonnets ( VN XXXV.15-18 XXXVI.14-15). In the first case, once he loses his Beatrice he no longer advances toward God in the second, he moves toward another and improper destination. In the first tercet he is like a soldier (or an army) cut off from his pursuit of his goal by the defensive ditches or chains deployed by an enemy in the second he is like a courting swain who parades before the house of the woman with whom he is infatuated. There we heard that after Beatrice's death (1) he gave himself to another (or 'to others' the Italian altrui is ambiguous and may be singular or plural) (2) he chose a wrong path, 'pursuing false images of good.' Now he is presented first as warrior and then as lover. XXX.124-132), now substituting a fresh set of metaphors for those we found there (see the note to Purg. Either of two answers would, therefore, on the basis of the evidence in the poem, be consistent.īeatrice, given Dante's muteness, rehashes the charges we had heard in the last canto ( Purg. XXXII.89-90) or, since their coming was so mysterious, that they simply vanish.
All we can say is that they either mount up with the rest of the Church Triumphant ( Purg. Further, their eventual removal from the scene is never dealt with, at least not directly (see the note to vv. (None does so more clearly than Singleton, who is at least clear in voicing this opinion. Most commentators quite naturally assume that they descended from the Empyrean. 16-18) is perhaps the only commentator to fret over these angels he cannot understand how they at first remained hidden from Dante and how so many of them could occupy so small a chariot (an unconscious resuscitation of the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin problem or, perhaps, of the crowded condition of that stateroom in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera). Now he finds her sword pointing straight at his heart.Ĭhimenz (comm. In this sense, then, the point of her 'sword' had seemed aimed at them, while she wounded Dante (if painfully enough, as we have seen) with only the edge of the blade. XXX.103-145) was in fact aimed squarely at him, using the angels as her apparent primary auditors in such a way as to publicize his sins and thus shame the protagonist. The lengthy speech that she had directed to the angels ( Purg. The metaphor of Beatrice's speech as a 'sword' picks up her earlier promise that Dante will weep for 'another sword' beside that of Virgil's departure ( Purg.
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