Dante to Troubadour

In troubadour’s poetry, courtly love is the main theme and Dante’s work also contains its similar theme. The troubadours were highly effective at the height of the Middle Ages in southern France. Moreover, their songs of romantic love, with pleasing melodies and intricate verse forms, have inspired poets and songwriters ever since and Dante is one of them. As Bernart de Ventadorn expresses his feeling towards his beloved in the poem “The Skylark,” Dante has also written love poetry that was less centered on him yet more aimed at his beloved, Beatrice.

“Alas, I thought I’d grown so wise;

In love I had so much to learn:

I can’t control this heart that flies

To her who pays love no return.

Ay! Now she steals, through love’s sweet theft,

My heart, my self, my world entire;

She steals herself and I am left

Only this longing and desire.”

“The Skylark” written by Bernart de Ventadorn, he depicts the theme of courtly love that the poet regrets greatly that he cannot go any closer to his beloved. In the third line, “this heart” is connected to the skylark that also refers to his beloved. In the sixth line, Ventadorn constantly relates everything to her and says, “My heart; my self, my world entire.” He cannot live without her and the sequence of heart to self, self to world entire portrays his love towards her becoming larger and larger.

Interestingly, Dante also interprets courtly love into his poem. Many of his tropes and languages are correlated to his sacred love poetry. Although troubadour poetry presents courtly love through different poets, Dante solely writes upon Beatrice throughout the whole poem. “Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of love—transparent to the absolute, inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor.” In other words, he admires Beatrice from a far distance and characterizes the beloved as a divine figure that is perfect and incomparable to other women. Overall, both Dante and troubadour poems have similarity in writing about courtly love and throughout Dante’s narrative in Vita Nuova, he tries to move past the troubadours by breaking down his personal love story with more details.

Courtly Love for Dante and the Troubadours

For the troubadours, courtly love romanticizes a beloved who is unattainable because of distance, status, or virtue, but fills the other with erotic desire. Dante moves past that by focusing on the ideal of love along with including narrative.

Jaufre Rudel’s poem “A Love Afar” epitomizes courtly love by discussing the three aspects of it: romanticizing, distance, and erotic desire. Rudel claims “Above all worth her beauties shine,/Above all others, near and far.” Here, he is essentially describing her as the most beautiful woman in the world. He continues to say in stanza 6 that she has a “glorious face”. In stanza 4 he asks, “Yet how we’ll ever come to meet/I know not since her land’s so far”, which displays the aspect of distance. Rudel shows his erotic desire in stanza 3: “By God’s own love, what joys must lie/Within love’s citadel, afar./ If she’d consent, I’d lodge nearby/ Who now must lie alone afar.” “Love’s citadel” refers to the wall that she has around herself, and by “joys”, Rudel is referring to pleasures that he could have with her.

Dante moves past this by focusing on the ideal of love and also linking it with beauty and purity instead of distance or erotic desire. In Dante’s canzone in Chapter XIX of Vita Nuova, he demonstrates his focus on love when he says, “When I reflect upon her worthiness/a love so sweet makes itself felt in me…” (35). With these lines he emphasizes the link between her and love, which was not seen with the courtly love poetry of the troubadours. Love becomes personified as it ask his lady as “Love says of her: ‘How can flesh drawn from clay,/ achive such beauty and such purity” (36). Here, Dante moves farther by drawing a link be her, beauty and love, which moves the focus around but still maintains the ideal of love. Another important note is that Dante’s Vita Nuova includes narrative, so it is a mix of prose and poetry. This allows the reader to understand the meaning of the poetry more than if it was alone. From these, we can see how Dante has furthered and changed the work the troubadours started.

Dante and Courtly Love

            Dante’s poems in Vita Nuova demonstrate many similarities with the courtly love tradition of the troubadours. Like the troubadours, Dante writes about his love for an idealized and unattainable woman, using religious references to underscore his devotion to this beloved.  However, Dante expands upon this literary custom by personifying love as a divine figure in itself; whereas the troubadours often referred to God as the intermediary figure between the lover and the beloved, Dante gives this role to Love. This difference can be observed by comparing Dante’s works with those of Bernart de Ventadorn, a poet who exemplifies courtly love.

            Bernart de Ventadorn’s “You’ve Asked, My Lords, for Song” contains many standard elements of courtly love. In it, the poet expresses his desire for a woman who is at an unbridgeable distance from him and the pain he suffers as a result of this separation. Though he suggests the woman has the ability to decide to be with him—as he says he will grieve “Unless [his] Lady might / Receive [him] in that place / She lies in”—he seems to attribute ultimate control over their relationship to God. As he explains, God gave him both the joys and pains of his love, and it is up to Him to “give [him] heart and mind”, suggesting that only God has the power to determine the fate of his romantic relationship. Thus, he implies that God, rather than people themselves, has control over human emotions and relations.

            While many of these characteristics can also be observed in Dante’s poems in Vita Nuova, he expands upon this tradition by personifying Love as its own autonomous being who has the power to influence his relationships. As he describes in his sonnet in Chapter III, Love came to him in a dream, carrying his beloved, Beatrice. This figure was “holding/ [Dante’s] heart within his hands” and “trembling and obedient / [Beatrice] ate that burning heart”. This suggest that Love, rather than God directly, has control over both Dante and his beloved, and the ability to influence their behavior and emotions. While there are still distance, suffering, idealization, and divine elements in his poems, Dante’s introduction of this additional central figure brings a new element to the tradition of courtly love, as he seems to suggest that love is a powerful and distinct force on its own.

Troubadours and Dante

Dante’s work definitely has similarities with Troubadours’ poetry. Among many troubadours, Bernart de Ventadorn is one who displays a persistent and sincere love for his beloved lady. In his poem “The Skylark,” Bernart shows how he cannot control his heart and the love for her:

    Alas, I thought I’d grown so wise

    In love I had so much to learn:

    I can’t control this heart that flies

                To her who pays love no return.

                Ay! now she steals, through love’s sweet theft,

                My heart, my self, my world entire:

                She steals herself and I am left

                Only this longing and desire.

He says his heart flies to her and he cannot control that even though it is his own heart. He is doing so even when the lady does not respond to his love. The word “steals” emphasizes that the one who is in action/control is the lady, not him. The phrase “sweet theft” represent the duality of love that we have been seeing in many time in this course. Even though Bernart loses the control and she pays no favorable return to his love, he still describes this love as “sweet.” The last three lines of the poem emphasizes the huge effect of her on him. He says she influences his heart, self, and entire world.

Dante displays similar imagery in section III of his poem where he says, “Love looked to me while he was holding my heart within his hands.” The image of the outside source taking control over the poet’s heart is shown in both cases (love, in this case, and the beloved lady, in Bernart’s case)

Also, just like Bernart, Dante shows his longing and disappointment by the fact that the lady does not recognizes him: “after my blessed joy was denied me, I was so grief-stricken that withdrawing from all company, I went to a solitary place and bathed the earth with bitter tears.” Here, Dante is expressing his extreme despair because the lady ignore and didn’t greet him. His description is very exaggerative, using the phrases such as “bathed the earth with bitter tears.” It emphasizes that he is so deeply in love with her that for him, she is everything he desires. When this desire is rejected, he feels like all his life is deteriorated. This idea of devoting and connecting him entirely to the lady is commonly found in Troubadours poetry dealing with courtly love. Thus, Dante is certainly following the Troubadour’s footstep in terms of the devoting attitude toward a beloved lady.

Dante v Troubadour Lyric

The most prominent theme in troubadour lyric is courtly love. The authors of troubadour lyric focus on submitting to their loved one and praising their beloved by putting them on a pedestal. Dante’s writing has characteristics of courtly love in his writing but differs from troubadour lyric in that he personifies love as a divine figure instead of God.

            Bernart de Ventadorn writes in his poem,

            “I’ll not renounce my love,

            For troubles or love’s pains.

            When God who reigns above

            Gave much, I took my gains;

            Now when his gifts abate,

            I’ll suffer that as much,

            Seeing the times are such

            Those far apart must wait

            To overcome their fate” (Kehew 85).

Ventadorn acknowledges God as the divine power that has given him his lover. He is grateful to God for allowing him to love his lord’s wife. Ventadorn admires his lover from afar and can’t stop thinking about her until they can be reunited again. Now, he addresses God again saying that since He gave him joy, Ventadorn must dwell in the sorrows that result from his affair. Ventadorn must wait out time until he can be reunited with his loved one again.

Throughout Dante’s narrative, Vita Nuova he admires his lover Beatrice from a far and presents her as a goddess that is perfect and above everyone else. However, while his writing has traits of courtly love similar to the troubadors’, Dante moves beyond the troubadors by personifying love as a divine figure instead of God. Dante refers to love as having the ability to physically affect him and control him. Dante writes in his sonnet,

“Joyous Love looked to me while he was holding

my heart within his heads”

[…]

“He woke her then and trembling and obedient

she ate that burning heart out of his hands” (Musa 7).

Dante personifies Love as a figure that has the ability to control him and others. Love ripped Dante’s heart out of his body and proceeded to force his lover Beatrice to eat the heart out of Love’s hands. God is no longer the divine being but rather Love is. Love is a separate entity and as his narrative goes along, is seen as a mentor by Dante.

Blog Post 13 (Troubadour Poet & Dante)

By comparing “When the Sweet Air Goes Bitter (Descant on a Theme by Cercamon) by the troubadour poet, Cercamon, and the narration of Dante XVI in his work of Vita Nuova, I was able to find a similarity in terms of praising each poet’s beloved. As Cercamon states in his fourth stanza, “For in her is all my delight / And all that can save me”, he compares his beloved to a refugee-like figure that could “cure” him from his “ache”, which he mentions earlier and elaborates in the latter part of the poem. He also uses “delight” in order to describe his joy of loving. In Dante XVI, he writes the phrase, “I approach such abundant graciousness” to describe the overflowing charms of Beatrice, Dante’s beloved. Therefore, It is evident that Both Cercamon and Dante are able to find great pleasure of loving their beloveds.

            However, a more vivid parallel between Dante and Cercamon could be drawn in their descriptions of heartbreaking conditions. Cercamon writes, “If she won’t have me now, Death is my portion, / Would I had died that day I came into her sway” in order to display his desperate willingness to choose “death” if his beloved continues to be unattainable. In fact, Cercamon wishes the time of death to be when he first started to serve for his beloved, to show his desire to avoid such painful experiences by eliminating any possibility of falling in love.

            In the narratives of Dante XVI, similar descriptions of devastating stage of love are evident. Dante writes, “Love, many times without warning, attacked me so violently that no part of me remained alive except one thought that spoke of this lady” and “it ultimately annihilated my little remaining life” to display scarcity of life from loving Beatrice. Moreover, the only living portion of Dante is a thought of continuous praise of his beloved. Therefore, Dante describes the remainder of himself as “death”, which Cercamon also uses to portray his broken heart.

Dante vs Troubadours: Courtly Love

The works of Guillem de Peiteus are very much about courtly love especially his “The Nothing Song”.  It goes into details about a woman who “though [he’s] not seen her, [his] love’s strong”.  This is what courtly love is all about, being in love with someone who is unreachable.  Furthermore, although they haven’t met he assumes, she is going to break his heart because he is below her standards.  He says things like: “I’ll just pre grieve” because he knows that he will never be able to be with his beloved.  This is very similar to Dante’s narrative about his love for Beatrice.  He doesn’t know her very well but he is overcome with love for her.  He takes it a step further than the troubadours, however, because even being in her presence makes all of his senses stop working.  He also has dreams about Love coming to him and talking to him about Beatrice.  Like the Troubadours, Dante has no chance with his beloved and the relationship is very one sided.  Something that Dante’s story has that Peiteus’ and the other Troubadours doesn’t is that Dante sees Beatrice on a more consistent basis than Peiteus sees his beloved.  While Peiteus has never seen the woman he is madly in love with, Dante sees Beatrice quite often.  However with Dante there is still that sense of distance that courtly love often brings because he cannot even look at Beatrice without getting choked up, so she might as well be far away because it makes no difference.

Dante moving from courtly love

The troubadours write about courtly love in their poetry. The relationship focuses on the distance of the beloved and the mingling of eroticism and religion. Dante moves past this tradition by focusing less on the divinity of God, and more on the divinity of love itself.  

Bernart de Ventadorn’s poem “You’ve Asked, My Lords, for Song” exemplifies courtly love. It features erotic and divine language, and it depicts the beloved as far away. Ventadorn establishes the role of religion in the poem by stating,

When God who reigns above

Gave much, I took my gains;

Now when his gifts abate,

I’ll suffer that as much, (85) 

Ventadorn establishes the sovereignty of God and shows deference to him. God is depicted as the highest power that the lover appeals to in order to win his lady. Ventadorn reiterates this request when he writes, “May God give heart and mind / To Escudor and me” (85). Again in this passage, Ventadorn is asking God to grant his request and to bring his beloved to him. God is the highest authority the lover appeals to. Although the poem is meant to praise the beloved, religion is present and highly important to the lover’s suit of the beloved.

Dante differs from the troubadour lyric tradition because of the greater emphasis he places on the omnipotence of love, which he personifies and makes more god-like. The personification Love is his higher power, not God. Dante’s poem in Chapter III of Vita Nuova demonstrates his invocation of love when he states, “greetings I bring for their sweet lord’s sake, Love” and also when he writes, “Joyous Love looked to me while he was holding / my heart within his hands” (7). Dante depicts love as a being and an all powerful being able to control him.  He even uses the word, “lord” to establish the power of Love. Where the troubadours might have beseeched God, Dante claims that Love itself is his highest authority. The phrase, “heart within his hands” demonstrates how Love has total control over him. Even the beloved Beatrice is “obedient” to Love (7). Traditional religion is present in Vita Nuova, but the difference comes because Dante does not appeal to God to woo his beloved, but rather relies on the power of Love and attraction.

Lyrical Poetry and the Troubadours

Superficially, Troubadour poetry seems to contrast greatly to the lyrical poetry of the ancient Greeks. Both, however, are classified as Lyrical Poetry. Though perhaps the Troubadour’s poems perhaps weren’t intended to be sung specifically to a Lyre, but the musicality of the poetry remains integral to the reader’s understanding of the poems.  It is in the attention to word pattern and poetic rhythm where one finds the similarities between troubadour poetry and that of the ancient Greeks.

            The complex poem, “Le ferm voler qu’el cor m’entra”  by Arnaut Daniel exemplifies the complex word patterns that appear throughout the Troubadour poetry. Throughout the entire poem, each line ends with the words,"enter", "nail", "soul", "rod", "uncle", or "room". Furthermore, Daniel takes great pains so that the placement of the words in one stanza is always different from that of every other stanza. For example, “nail” appears in the second line of stanza one, but in the fourth, fifth, third, sixth, and first lines of the respective stanzas. The repetition of the end words gives the poem a structure and pattern, for the reader comes to expect these words in the following lines. Furthermore, Daniels connects each stanza to its predecessor by having the end word which appeared in the final lines of the previous stanza appear as the final word in the following stanza’s first line. By placing the common ending words in the end and beginning of the stanzas, Daniels creates continuity and flow. These common words create a rhythm which propel the reader forward.  

Although Daniels creates many patterns, he also encorporates some discord into his poetry. Though the same end words appear in each stanza, he varying the lines within which the words appear. In doing so, Daniels breaks up the monotony that patterns can sometimes bring. He does this, perhaps, to engage the listener. If the poem becomes too rhythmic, the reader can too easily predict what the next stanza will say, and thus lose interest in reading the entire poem. Therefore, though the repetition of common end words lends a sort of lyrical rhythm to the poetry, the variance of line placement breaks up the monotony that a “”sing songy” poem sometimes portrays. As a result, Daniels creates a lyrical poem, which is unique from those of the Ancient Greeks.