European Love Literature

In Dante, the relationship of man and woman is transformed radically by the exclusion ofsexual possession as the goal of desire. Instead, the sight of the beloved becomes a form ofPlatonic contemplation of Absolute Living Beauty, an image of God. Beatrice's death becamefor Dante the starting- point of a life of action. He began to study the philosophy of Aristotle,he became active in Italian politics, finally he fulfilled the promise made at the end of theVita Nuova and wrote again of Beatrice. She is his guide through the heights of Paradise inthe Divine Comedy, until at last she withdraws and Dante is left face to face with the WomanHerself, the Blessed Mary in the highest Glory. What had started as a poetry of tragicfrustration and destructive lust becomes, in Dante, the way of eternal life.PetrarchThe parallels between Dante and Petrarch are so striking that many critics, from the earliesttimes, have doubted whether Petrarch's Laura really existed. Yet he wrote the most detailedinformation about her on the page of his Virgil manuscript where he only recorded the deathsof his closest and dearest: 'Laura... first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of ourLord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St Clare in Avignon, at matins; and inthe same city, also on the sixth of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the lightof her life was withdrawn from the light of day...'. Petrarch's Rime sparse contain 267 lovepoems composed before Laura died and 100 written after her death, culminating in the lastgreat hymn to the Virgin. In both poets the same fundamental idea is found: the maleobsession with the image of the Lady is potentially fatal. The only hope is either a rejectionor a metamorphosis, a transformation linked in both cases to the death of the Lady.The main topic in the Rime sparse is not Laura, but the mind of the lover. Petrarch isthe centre of his own poetic interest, and the celebration of the female in his poems is in theend designed to enable us to explore the male; The male lover effaces the female, in the act ofevoking her:Petrarch: Rime sparse 132S'amor non e, che dunque equel ch'io sento?ma s'egli eamor, per Dio, che cosa et quale?se bona, ond'e l'effetto aspro mortale?se ria, ond'e si dolce ogni tormento?S'a mia voglia ardo, ond'e'l pianto e lamento?s'a mal mio grado, il lamentar che vale?O viva morte, o dilettoso male,come puoi tanto in me s'io nol consento?Et s'io'l consento, a gran torto mi doglio.Fra si contrari venti in frale barcami trovo in alto mar senza governo,si lieve di saver, d'error si carcach'i'medesmo no so quel ch'io mi voglio,e tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno.Translation