SLEEP, WAKEFULNESS, AND SPACE: VIRGIL, PETRARCH, AND MONTEVERDI

2 7 R S L E E P , W A K E F U L N E S S , A N D S P A C E V I R G I L , P E T R A R C H , A N D M O N T E V E R D I J E F F E R S O N H U N T E R Repeatedly in nighttime scenes in the Aeneid, Virgil sets a sleeping natural world against the tumult of human emotions. ‘‘Deep slumber held all weary living things,’’ he writes in book 8, and then describes an Aeneas ‘‘heartsick at the woe’’ of the war which has just broken out between his Trojan band and the native Italians ; the hero finally lies down to sleep on the cold banks of the Tiber. Sleep is also said to hold ‘‘all living things’’ in Aeneas’s own narrative of book 3, where he speaks of the moonlight edging its way through his windows and illuminating his Phrygian hearth gods. They speak to the hero in a mantic dream, leaving him drenched from head to foot in a cold sweat. In book 9, while the earth’s creatures sleep away ‘‘forgetful of their toil,’’ Nisus and Euryalus make their way to an insomniac council of Trojan captains fretfully debating how to conduct the war. In the next book, at sea, the ‘‘mild moon’’ peacefully rides ‘‘her night-wandering car’’ – but Aeneas stands sleepless at the tiller of his ship, debating in his own mind the exigencies of duty. (In all these instances, and in those to follow, I quote Robert Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation.) These juxtapositions of rest and restlessness amount to a formula : something to be employed for its modest dramatic force; 2 8 H U N T E R Y something to be repeated from situation to situation, occasionally with exactly the same phrasing, in what might have seemed to Virgil an hommage to the oral-formulaic repetitions in Homer. In book 4 the formula is applied to Dido. Venus has made the queen fall violently in love with Aeneas, so that late at night in the hall where he told her the story of his wanderings, with the guests now gone and the moon dimmed and the setting stars weighing ‘‘weariness to sleep,’’ she finds no repose, but presses ‘‘her body on the couch he left.’’ This is an action from which one wants to turn away one’s eyes, and also an action anticipating Dido’s gruesomely theatrical (and erotic) suicide at the end of the book. There the bed she shared with Aeneas is placed atop her funeral pyre for her to kiss and lie down on before she stabs herself with Aeneas’s sword. In between Dido’s initial lovesickness and her death come Mercury ’s descent to the hero, warning him to leave Carthage for his greater destiny, Dido’s learning of her abandonment, her vituperation of Aeneas-the-cad – and also one more passage putting calm night next to sleepless misery. Here, however, the formula is extended into a much more considerable set piece, a Virgilian nocturne and soliloquy which, thirteen hundred years later, Petrarch would reshape into a notturno of his own; three hundred years after that, Claudio Monteverdi would set Petrarch’s poem to music . The three works constitute a little history of inheritance and transformation within the greater history of medieval and Renaissance Europe’s appropriation of antiquity. Considered in sequence, and considered in the sort of detail which their various complexities call for, the works show, as we might expect, a growing interest in subjectivity, in the mind which becomes more fascinating as it becomes more individual and expressive. But remarkably, what persists in Petrarch and Monteverdi is the situation as Virgil first understood it, psychologically and poetically: the individual situated in, unable to escape from, the larger world. How are confinement and perturbation best conveyed? Paradoxically, by way of spaciousness and calm. Here is the Aeneid passage: Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem corpora per terras, silvaeque et saeva quierant aequora, cum medio volvuntur sidera lapsu, S L E E P...