The New Life was a celebration of Dante’s love for Beatrice. This work was a medley of lyrical verse and poetic prose, also known as prosimetrum. It is the first of two collections of verse that Dante would make in his lifetime (the other is The Banquet). In each collection, the prose form is a device for binding together poems composed over a 10-year period. The New Life brought together Dante’s poetic efforts from before 1283 to roughly 1292-93; The Banquet contains his most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The Divine Comedy (begun in ca. 1308).
Dante referred to The New Life as his libello (small book). It contains 42 chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, 1 ballad, and 4 canzones; a fifth canzone is left interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary provides the story of the collection, which tells of the first time Dante saw Beatrice (when they were nine), the measures he took to conceal his love for her, his anguish at the possibility that she might ignore him, his determination to rise above this anguish and sing only of Beatrice’s virtues, and finally his mourning over her death. In the last chapter, Dante expresses his desire to write about her “that which has never been written of any woman”—the writing he is referring to will become his Paradiso, in which Beatrice is the ultimate symbol of salvation in The Divine Comedy.
The New Life contains many of Dante’s love poems in Italian. One of the most famous poems in The New Life is “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare”:
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare La donna mia quand’ella altrui saluta, Ch’ogni lingua divien tremando muta
E gli occhi non ardiscon di guardare. Ella sen va, sentendosi laudare Benignamente d’umilta'vestuta,
E par che sia una cosa venuta Di cielo in terra a miracol mostrare. Mostrasi si’ piacente a chi la mira, Che da’ per gli occhi una dolcezza al core,
Che intender non la puo’ chi non la prova.
E par che della sua labbia si muova Uno spirto soave e pien d’amore,
Che va dicendo all’anima: sospira
So winsome and so worthy seems to me my lady,
When she greets a passer-by, that every tongue can only babble shy
And eager glances lose temerity. Sweetly and dressed in all humility, away she walks from all she’s praised
By,
And truly seems a thing come from the sky
To show on earth what miracles can be.
So much she pleases every gazing eye, she gives a sweetness through it to the heart,
Which he who does not feel it fails to guess.
A spirit full of love and tenderness seems from her features ever to depart,
That, reaching for the soul, says softly “Sigh.”
Dante’s commentary on his own work is also in Italian—both in The New Life and in The Banquet—instead of the Latin that was almost universally used at the time.
Il Convivio fThe Banquet; ca. 1304-7)
The Banquet is a collection of allegorical commentaries in prose on several of Dante’s own poems. While he projected 15 treatises, the work contains only 4—an introduction and three commentaries. These treatises tell how Dante became a lover of Philosophy, personified as a mystical woman whose soul is love and whose body is wisdom, she “whose true abode is in the most secret place of the Divine Mind.”
In the introduction, Dante represents this work as a metaphorical banquet made of wisdom, in which the poems are the meat and the commentaries the bread. The guests to this banquet are primarily all who are eager for philosophical knowledge but who may be too consumed by political life.
World History
