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.
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