La Vita Nuova Analysis

The Vita Nuova is a prosimeter (a work containing poetic compositions in verse with prose inserts) composed by Dante Alighieri between 1292 and 1294. It is Dante's only poetic collection and, as the title suggests, is one of the poet's early works. The work is intended to celebrate his love for Beatrice, the beloved woman whom Dante met, for the first time, when they were both 9 years old. The relationship is exclusively poetic; Beatrice marries Simone de' Bardi (a well-known Florentine character) and Dante marries Gemma Donati. The love for Beatrice is topical to Dante's entire production, inspiring even the Commedia. Precisely of the poem, in fact, the Vita Nuova is the foreshadowing; the poet, in fact, declares here that he wants to say of the beloved woman, Beatrice, what was never said of any other woman, and this purpose will be fulfilled in the Commedia, where we find Beatrice again as a spiritual guide. Beatrice, in death, becomes an intermediary between man and God. This change in the female figure is linked to the change in Love itself; at first, in fact, it is a childlike love, based on physical appearance and looks, but then it becomes a Love that ennobles (thanks to the gestures that the beloved woman addresses to the poet, including the greeting) and, finally, the noblest Love, the one that transcends earthly boundaries and is projected toward God, religion and is salvific. The compositions included in this collection are from different years; the first composition can be dated to 1283 (the year in which the second meeting between Dante and Beatrice, the woman loved and celebrated in the prosimeter, takes place), and the last one's date from 1293, three years after Beatrice's death. The work is divided into two sections: one during the period when Beatrice is alive, the other during the death of the beloved. This division justifies and motivates the change in the conception of love and the personification of Love, who is presented as an active character within the work. Amore is shown as ruthless, and unsettling, and the poet-character Dante is at the mercy of the dreams and visions that Amore unleashes, in which Beatrice is always the protagonist. Not surprisingly, Dante's attempts to overcome his feeling for Beatrice with other women (referred to as screen women) are in vain, because such a feeling cannot be overcome even by physical death. Dante, when he understands that he cannot forget and that he is struck by Love's arrows constantly, also understands that his feeling is noble and saving, as witnessed in some key scenes such as the one in which the poet finds himself drawing angels (whose name, etymologically, means precisely "messenger," thus God's vessel). The New Life then is the life renewed by Love and Beatrice, where the adjective "new" is to be understood in the sense of "original and unrepeatable experience" with a clear paradigmatic intent that will be, later, inherited by the Comedy.