Sacred verses

Alongside the love poems and his many encomiastic poems, especially from his release in 1586, when he also started on his study of theology, Tasso’s lyric poetry reserves a space for more personal and intimate compositions and for the lofty religious register that was congenial to his last years. These poems often make use of the invocation in request for divine light to resolve doubts that he had already expressed during his most difficult years and that had been contained and transcended. This is the focus in the lines addressed to la santissima Croce in the splendid canzone 1634 (on the same theme see also Rime, 1643 and 1652), in his meditation on the fragility of the earthly dimension in the poems sent to Angelo Grillo and Panigarola, in the sonnets and canzoni on important moments in Christian history, with particular emphasis on the birth of Christ, the moment in which the divine is incarnated as human (Rime, 1663, 1666-67), and in the paraphrase of the Stabat Mater in Rime, 1704. In his editorial project of the 1580s, Tasso assigned the sacred verse to the third and final part of his poetic works. The group of poems corresponding to this part was identified in the investigation carried out by Luigi Poma (La Parte terza delle rime tassiane, in Studi tassiani, XXVII, 1979, 5-45) as those in manuscript Vat. lat. 10980. The texts were not published during Tasso’s lifetime, but assigned to the final part of his collected poems as a result first of Solerti’s philological studies, and later in Maier’s edition of Tasso’s lyrical poems.