[17.] “I am as the centre of a circle, to the which all parts of the circumference bear an equal relation: but with thee it is not thus.” This phrase seems to have remained as obscure to commentators as Dante found it at the moment. No one, as far as I know, has even fairly tried to find a meaning for it. To me the following appears a not unlikely one. Love is weeping on Dante’s account, and not on his own. He says, “I am the centre of a circle (Amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle): therefore all lovable objects, whether in heaven or earth, or any part of the circle’s circumference, are equally near to me. Not so thou, who wilt one day lose Beatrice when she goes to heaven.” The phrase would thus contain an intimation of the death of Beatrice, accounting for Dante being next told not to inquire the meaning of the speech,—”Demand no more than may be useful to thee.”
[18.] “Names are the consequents of things.”
[19.] It is difficult not to connect Dante’s agony at this wedding-feast with our knowledge that in her twenty-first year Beatrice was wedded to Simone de’ Bardi. That she herself was the bride on this occasion might seem out of the question, from the fact of its not being in any way so stated: but on the other hand, Dante’s silence throughout the Vita Nuova as regards her marriage (which must have brought deep sorrow even to his ideal love) is so startling, that we might almost be led to conceive in this passage the only intimation of it which he thought fit to give.
[20.] Guido Guinicelli, in the canzone which begins, “Within the gentle heart Love shelters him.”
[21.] There is a play in the original upon the words Primavera (Spring) and prima verrà (she shall come first), to which I have given as near an equivalent as I could.
[22.] “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord.’”
[23.] That is (as I understand it), suppressing, from delicacy towards his friend, the words in which Love describes Joan as merely the forerunner of Beatrice. And perhaps in the latter part of this sentence a reproach is gently conveyed to the fickle Guido Cavalcanti, who may already have transferred his homage (though Dante had not then learned it) from Joan to Mandetta.
[24.] On reading Dante’s treatise De Vulgari Eloquio, it will be found that the distinction which he intends here is not between one language, or dialect, and another; but between “vulgar speech” (that is, the language handed down from mother to son without any conscious use of grammar or syntax), and language as regulated by grammarians and the laws of literary composition, and which Dante calls simply “Grammar.” A great deal might be said on the bearings of the present passage, but it is no part of my plan to enter on such questions.
[25.] i.e., the languages of Provence and Tuscany.
[26.] It strikes me that this curious passage furnishes a reason, hitherto (I believe) overlooked, why Dante put such of his lyrical poems as relate to philosophy into the form of love-poems. He liked writing in Italian rhyme rather than Latin metre; he thought Italian rhyme ought to be confined to love-poems: therefore whatever he wrote (at this age) had to take the form of a love-poem. Thus any poem by Dante not concerning love is later than his twenty-seventh year (1291-2), when he wrote the prose of the Vita Nuova; the poetry having been written earlier, at the time of the events referred to.