Every unit of poetic speech—be it a line, a stanza, or an entire composition—must be regarded as a single word. When we pronounce, for example, the word “sun,” we are not throwing out an already prepared meaning—that would be a semantic abortion—we are living through a peculiar cycle.
Every word is a bundle and the meaning sticks out of it in various directions, not striving toward any one official point. When we pronounce “sun” we are, as it were, making an immense journey which has become so familiar to us that we move along in our sleep. What distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us awake in the middle of a word. Then the word turns out to be far longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road.
The semantic cycles of Dante’s cantos are so constructed that what begins with mëd “honey,” for instance, ends with med’ “bronze,” and what begins with lai, “bark of a dog,” ends with lëd, “ice.”
Dante, when he has to, calls the eyelids “the lips of the eye.” That is when the icy crystals of frozen tears hang from the lashes and form a covering which prevents weeping.
li occhi lor, ch’eran pria pur dentro molli,
gocciar su per le labbra . . .15
(Inferno, XXXII, 46–47)
Thus, suffering crosses the organs of sense, creates hybrids, produces the labial eye.
There is not one form in Dante—there is a multitude of forms. One is driven out of another and it is only by convention that they can be inserted one into the other.
He himself says: “Io premerei di mio concetto il suco” (Inferno, XXXII, 4), “I would squeeze the juice out of my idea, out of my conception.” That is, form is conceived of by him as something wrung out, not as something that envelops. Thus, strange as it may be, form is pressed out of the content—the conception—which, as it were, envelops the form. Such is Dante’s clear thought.
But only if a sponge or rag is wet can anything, no matter what, be wrung from it. We may twist the conception into a veritable plait but we will not squeeze from it any form unless it is in itself a form. In other words, any process of creating a form in poetry presupposes lines, periods, or cycles of form on the level of sound, just as is the case with a unit of meaning that can be uttered separately.
A scientific description of Dante’s Comedy—taken as a flow, a current—would inevitably take on the aspect of a treatise on metamorphoses, and would strive to penetrate the multitudinous states of the poetic matter just as a physician making a diagnosis listens to the multitudinous unity of the organism. Literary criticism would approach the method of live medicine.
III.
Penetrating as best I can into the structure of the Divina Commedia, I come to the conclusion that the entire poem is one single unified and indivisible stanza. Or, to be more exact, not a stanza but a crystallographic shape, that is, a body. There is an unceasing drive toward the creation of form that penetrates the entire poem. The poem is a strictly stereometric body, one integral development of a crystallographic theme. It is unthinkable that one might encompass with the eye or visually imagine to oneself this shape of thirteen thousand facets with its monstrous exactitude. My lack of even the vaguest notion about crystallography—an ignorance in this field, as in many others, that is customary in my circle—deprives me of the pleasure of grasping the true structure of the Divina Commedia. But such is the astonishing, stimulating power of Dante that he has awakened in me a concrete interest in crystallography, and as a grateful reader—lettore—I shall endeavor to satisfy him.
The formation of this poem transcends our notions of invention and composition. It would be much more correct to acknowledge instinct as its guiding principle. The approximate definitions offered here have been intended as anything but a parade of my metaphoric inventiveness. This is a struggle to make the whole conceivable as an entity, to render in graphic terms what is conceivable. Only with the aid of metaphor is it possible to find a concrete sign for the forming instinct with which Dante accumulated his terza rima to the point of overflowing.
Thus, one has to imagine how it would be if bees had worked at the creation of this thirteen-thousand-faceted shape, bees endowed with instinctive stereometric genius, who attracted more and still more bees as they were needed. The work of these bees, who always keep an eye on the whole, is not equally difficult at the various stages of the process. Their cooperation broadens and becomes more complex as they proceed with the formation of the combs, by means of which space virtually arises out of itself.
The analogy with bees, by the way, is suggested by Dante himself. Here are the three lines which open Canto XVI of the Inferno:
Già era in loco, onde s’udia il rimbombo
dell’acqua che cadea nell’altro giro,
simile a quel che l’arnie fanno rombo.16
(Inferno, XVI, 1–3)
Dante’s similes are never descriptive, that is, purely representational. They always pursue the concrete goal of giving the inner image of the structure or the force. Let us take the very large group of bird similes—all those long caravans now of cranes, now of crows, and now the classical military phalanxes of swallows, now the anarchically disorderly ravens, unsuited to Latin military formations—this group of extended similes always corresponds to the instinct of pilgrimage, travel, colonization, migration. Or let us take, for example, the equally extensive group of river similes, portraying the rise in the Apennines of the river Arno, which irrigates the Tuscan plain, or the descent into the plain of Lombardy of its alpine wet nurse, the river Po. This group of similes, marked by an extraordinary liberality and a step-by-step descent from tercet to tercet, always leads to a complex of culture, homeland, and unsettled civic life, to a political and national complex, so conditioned by water boundaries and also by the power and direction of rivers.
The force of Dante’s simile, strange as it may seem, is directly proportional to our ability to get along without it. It is never dictated by some beggarly logical necessity. What, pray tell, could have been the logical necessity for comparing the poem as it neared its end to an article of attire—gonna, what we would today call “skirt” but in early Italian meant, rather, a “cloak” or “dress” in general—and himself to a tailor who, forgive the expression, had run out of stuff?
IV.
As Dante began to be more and more beyond the powers of readers in succeeding generations and even of artists themselves, he was more and more shrouded in mystery. The author himself was striving for clear and exact knowledge. For his contemporaries he was difficult, he was exhausting, but in return he bestowed the award of knowledge. Later on, things got much worse. There was the elaborate development of the ignorant cult of Dantean mysticism, devoid, like the very idea of mysticism, of any concrete substance. There appeared the “mysterious” Dante of the French etchings,17 consisting of a monk’s hood, an aquiline nose, and some sort of occupation among mountain crags. In Russia this voluptuous ignorance on the part of the ecstatic adepts of Dante, who did not read him, claimed as its victim none other than Alexander Blok:
The shade of Dante with his aquiline profile
Sings to me of the New Life . . .18
The inner illumination of Dante’s space by light—light derived from nothing more than the structural elements of his work—was of absolutely no interest to anyone.