Commentary Purg XXIX 1-3

Echoing Guido Cavalcanti (see C.Purg.XXVIII.43-48), the poet begins this canto by returning to the situation that we found early in the last one: Dante thinking that a beautiful young woman was in love with him.  Now the poet himself seems to confirm this.  We, nonetheless, probably realize that the song Matelda sings is once again utterly different from the sexually charged pastorella and is indeed once again a Psalm (31:1 [32:1]): 'Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.'  As Singleton (DDP Singleton.Purg.XXIX.3) points out, St. Paul (Romans 4:3-8) interprets this Psalm as indicating God's reward for just humans.  However, this is not, in short, to 'fuse' the 'theme of profane love' with that of 'charity, love of a higher order' (DDP Singleton.Purg.XXIX.1), but simultaneously to include and supersede it.  Matelda is a very different sort of 'shepherd girl' from the one we found in Cavalcanti; that seems to be Dante's main point.  She does indeed love the protagonist, but she is not in love with him, as he at first believed.  The word that describes her affective state, innamorata (touched by love), here appears for the first time in the poem.  It seems to collocate itself in the Cavalcantian world of sexual love.  However, as a graduate student at Princeton, Sheila Colwell, pointed out in the spring of 1984, the verb innamorare, in an inflected form or as a past participle, will be used eight more times in Paradiso, always to indicate, as we may realize either now or retrospectively, heavenly affection.  See [Par VII 143], [Par XIV 127], [Par XX 64], [Par XXIII 70], [Par XXV 44], [Par XXVII 88], [Par XXXI 5], [Par XXXII 105].