Dante’s Blood Elegies

“Tragice, sive comice, sive elegiace sint canenda” (treat [poetic subjects] in tragic, comic, or elegiac style) writes a mid-career Dante in De vulgari eloquentia 2.4.5–6 (ca. 1303–4).¹ The poem challenges its readers’ notions of stylistic/genric categories quite explicitly, since Dante twice refers to his stylistically innovative work as “comedìa” (Inferno 16.128; Inf. 21.2) in clear contrast to the “alta . . . tragedia” (Inf. 20.113) of Virgil’s Aeneid Elegy, by contrast, is never named in the Commedia. Does this notable omission amount to a condemnation of the style? An assertion of its irrelevance to the project? Or is elegy simply too broad a category to bring to bear on a text where souls’ laments over death and loss are omnipresent? Readers have intuitively (and correctly, I believe) described some of the most sentimentally appealing speeches of the dead as “elegiac,” especially where the sweetness of memory sharpens the bitterness of present punishment.² One task of this essay is to look closely at the definitions and theories of elegy informing Dante’s late engagement with the style in the Commedia. A significant amount of scholarship has already traced the influence of classical and medieval concepts of elegy—especially that which laments erotic frustration—on Dante’s early lyric, as well as on his metaliterary considerations in De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio.³ I will suggest that he revisits erotic elegy in the Francesca episode of Inferno 5. Illustrative of the moral hazards of courtly romance and stilnovist lyric, Francesca’s speech features some formal and thematic markers of erotic elegy, implying Dante’s condemnation of this genre as well. But while his critique of erotic elegy can be traced back to the Vita nova, in the Commedia he takes up a broader conception of elegy that is not limited to lost love. I will argue that this more thorough and nuanced condemnation of elegy is one of Dante’s aims in presenting Pier della Vigna as a parody of Boethius, the elegist of record in Dante’s day.

The compelling elegiac passages of Francesca and Pier are connected by a filo rosso of bright red and expressive blood. Francesca recounts the way her shed blood stained the world, while Pier speaks through broken and bleeding branches. In this sense their rhetoric seems to reflect Boethius’s portrayal of the elegiac muses as lacerated and bloody; Jelena Todorović has recently argued that Dante understood this passage in the Consolatio Philosophiae (discussed at length below) as signaling a crisis of despair inherent in the genre of elegy.⁴ A second task of this essay will therefore be to explore Dante’s mediation on elegy through the aesthetic and symbolic properties of blood in the Commedia. While a complete portrait of blood’s rich and varied symbolism in Dante—resonating across theological, genealogical, political, juridical, literary, and scientific discourses⁵—exceeds what can be accomplished here, my discussion of blood’s metaliterary functions will naturally touch on these adjacent fields.⁶ I will ultimately argue that Dante uses the multivalent vitality of blood to underscore the fatal repercussions of indulging in either of the two traditions of elegy dramatized in Inferno 5 and 13. Finally, I will conclude with two examples from the realms of the saved that offer correctives to the stylistic and topical dead ends of elegy. First, the souls in Purgatorio 5 (vertically aligned with the Francesca episode) reject the aesthetics and aims of elegy as they recount their bloody deaths; Iacopo del Cassero in particular exemplifies how the contemplation of flowing blood should lead to conversion. Saint Peter’s bloody invective in Paradiso 27 recovers some formal markers of elegy, but shifts its focus from reliving the pain of personal loss to intervening against universal threats to Christendom. Blood in these passages proves freighted with symbolic and moral imperatives to which the elegiac tradition cannot adequately answer; the saved souls offer an aesthetic and teological alternative.

Scholarship on Dante’s early works suggests that he initially took elegy to be synonymous with amorous lament, and so the infernal circle of...