Dante’s Divine Valentine

“Love is the central theme of Dante’sVita NuovaandDivine Comedy. It is from love that new life begins. It is in love that life is sustained and made pleasant.”

Incipit vita nova. “New life begins.” So Dante declares from the treasury of his memory in Vita Nuova, his love poem to, and about, Beatrice. When “Midway along the journey of [his] life, [he] woke to find [himself] in a dark wood, for [he] had wandered off from the straight path,” the Roman poet Virgil appears and tells Dante that he has been sent by Beatrice to guide Dante through hell so that Dante can begin his ascent up the Mountain of Love and enter the eternal Abode of Love, the White Rose, to sing of “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Let us now pilgrimage with the man whom William Butler Yeats described as the greatest pilgrim of the imagination.

Love is the central theme of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy. It is from love that new life begins. It is in love that life is sustained and made pleasant. The course of Dante’s coming to understand the nature of love is what his restless mind and heart—much like his intellectual forebear, Saint Augustine—deals with. How can love, of a carnal and earthly creature, bring about salvation?

Dante never married Beatrice, but Beatrice was forever seared into the memory of his soul as Dante admits at the beginning of the Vita. A chance encounter on the streets of Florence when Dante was 18 years old, still madly in love with her, caused him to run to his bedroom like a lovesick puppy. Beatrice, of course, acts as his final guide in Paradiso and is the one who commissioned Virgil to pilgrimage with the poet-pilgrim through hell and purgatory. All throughout, then, Dante credits Beatrice with helping him get back on the straight and true path that he had wandered from.