Commentary Purg XXVI 140-147

That Arnaut's speech forms a little Provençal poem eight lines in length may reflect, according to Nathaniel Smith (Smit.1980.1), pp. 101-2, the fact that this was generally a favored stanza length for Provençal poets and indeed of six of the eleven Provençal poems cited by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia.  Smith also demonstrates that Dante's pastiche of Provençal lyric is wider than an imitation of Arnaut, and reflects numerous other poems and poets in the lingua d'oc.  He also comments on the deliberate 'dumbing down' of Dante's version of Arnaut's language (recognized by its difficult and elliptical style) in which almost every word of this invented poem has an obvious Italian (or Latin) cognate (pp. 106-7).

      It is interesting to consider that both the first and last lines of Arnaut's poem contain fairly obvious imitations of lines of two other notable vernacular poets.  The first, as has been noted by commentators, first by Chimenz (DDP Chimenz.Purg.XXVI.140-147), is meant to recall the first line of a canzone of Folco di Marsilia, the last vernacular poet to appear in the poem and the most highly placed, the only one seen in paradise (he is named at [Par IX 94]).  Dante cites the opening line of one of his canzoni as being among the illustres (i.e., components of the 'illustrious vernacular' that his treatise champions) in De vulgari eloquentia (V.E.II.vi.6): 'Tan m'abellis l'amoros pensamen' (So pleases me the very thought of love).  Arnaut's opening line derives from Folco's.  And the same is true of his closing verse, derived, as Mario Marti indicates (Mart.1969.1, his note to verse 7 of Cino's poem numbered 64), from Cino da Pistoia: 'e sovverrebbe a voi del mio dolore' of which 'sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor' (remember, when the time is fit, my pain) is a fairly close Provençal translation.  If we are supposed to notice these redoings, are we also supposed to consider a new side to the daring and flashy Arnaut, now content to borrow from his fellows?  And they are particularly good ones, Folco, already in Heaven, and the Cino who has had, in De vulgari, Dante's imprimatur as fellow poet of Beatrice.  (For a speculative treatment of Cino's absence from the Commedia, based on the hypothesis that he was indeed originally intended to be the last modern poet included in the poem at the center of Paradiso, a plan that was discarded once Dante became aware that Cino had deserted the imperial cause and, surely worse, joined with his Florentine enemies sometime after the death of Henry VII in 1313, see Hollander [Holl.1992.2], pp. 215-19.)

      Arnaut, like Guido, is now more interested in salvation than in dazzling the world with verse.  These are penitential moments, not ones that encourage thoughts of emulous poetic striving.  Giacalone (DDP Giacalone.Purg.XXVI.139-147) says it this way: 'The poet of the trobar clus, who was ever at the ready to make his poems 'concealing,' now at the end conceals himself, but in the penitential fire.'  There seems no question but that Dante was staggered by Arnaut's virtuosity; and surely we were staggered, in turn, by Dante's perhaps most virtuosic versification, heavily indebted to Arnaut, found in the last cantos of Inferno.  But now there is no dwelling on the excellence of poetic technique, but rather on prayer and hopes for the joys of Heaven.  Guido's last words ([Purg XXVI 92-93]), which seem to imply that, unlike Dante, he came to God not in his poetry but even in spite of it, and Arnaut's Provençal stanza, which also speaks to life rather than to art, are matched by Dante's own 'sweet new style' here, singing of salvation, the subject it took this poet some time to find again after his first attempt in the concluding chapter of his Vita nuova.  In this sense Guido's words about prayer as poem and Arnaut's poem, which is a request for prayer, posthumously join these two poets to Dante's new style, a poetry in tune with God.