The Rime petrose
Rime petrose (the “stony poems”) is the enduring label given by Vittorio Imbriani in the mid-nineteenth century to a group of four poems which can be dated with near-certainty to the years between 1296 and 1298. The group consists of a canzone known as Io son venuto al punto de la rota; a sestina, Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra; a so-called canzone sestina, Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna; and another canzone, Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro (in Michele Barbi’s arrangement). Besides their common theme of an extreme and obsessive passion for the insensitive and indifferent Petra, these four lyrical poem share the recourse to the senhal and rhyming word petra, as well as – with the exception of Così nel mio parlar - a winter landscape and nature, analogies suited to the cold-hearted Petra. While there has been no lack of more or less substantiated suggestions regarding the identity of the female protagonist of the cycle, the problem, as Contini, pointed out, is in fact marginal, since the Stone Lady is simply the unifying factor in Dante’s most technique-focused lyrical poems[1]. In clear emulation of the Provencal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, the stylistic marker of the stony poems is the poet’s clear linguistic and metrical experimentation, with highly concrete and realistic lexis, frequently used also for rhyming purposes, and the strong tension between metrical structure and syntax. This daring experimentation with style has its impact later on, in the Commedia, and held a fascination for many generations of readers from Francesco Petrarch onwards.
The manuscript history of the Rime (the sequence of the four texts as one group exists only in a couple of manuscripts) has lead to doubts concerning the actual contents of this group of poems. According to Domenico De Robertis, at least Così nel mio parlar should be excluded, since “the wintry condition is lacking”, and because of the embattled spirit of the whole portrayal[2].
[1] G. Contini, in D. Alighieri, Rime, a cura di G. C., Torino, Einaudi, 1946, p. 149.
[2] D. De Robertis, in D. Alighieri, Rime, a cura di D. D.R., Firenze, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2005, pp. 4-5.
