Another instance is in the beautiful midwinter Ode, “Io son venuto al punto della rota.”[229] Each stanza pictures a feature of a severe winter—snow and rain, the absence of summer birds, bare trees and dead flowers, the favourite walk become a torrent; but the first describes the position of stars and planets. When the sun sets, the Twins appear on the eastern horizon, hence we know at once that the sun is in Sagittarius and the time is November or December. To confirm his melancholy, the poet adds that the Star of Love (Venus) is hidden from us by the sun’s rays which now shine athwart her, and that the planet which strengthens the cold (Saturn, the “frigida stella” of Virgil) displays himself in that arc of the sky in which all the seven planets cast the shortest shadow;[230] that is, either he is on the meridian at sunset, or he is in the most northerly part of the zodiac, in Gemini or Cancer. A planet in this place, as for instance the sun at midsummer, is visible longer, describes a longer arc, and casts shorter shadows, than in any other part of the zodiac. And as this is the part which rises over the eastern horizon as the sun sets, Saturn would also rise at that time and remain visible all night.
The opening lines of the Ode run thus:—
“Io son venuto al punto della rota, Che l’orizzonte, quando il Sol si corca, Ci parturisce il geminato cielo; E la stella d’amor ci sta rimota Per lo raggio lucente, che la ’nforca Sì di traverso, che le si fa velo; E quel pianeta che conforta il gelo Si mostra tutto a noi per lo grand’ arco, Nel qual ciascun de’ sette fa poca ombra.”[231]
It is astonishing that Giuliani should so completely miss the point of the “twinned sky,” that he substitutes “ingemmato” for “geminato,” and reads—
“ ... la rota, Ch’ all orizzonte, quando il Sol si corca, Ci parturisce l’ingemmato cielo.”[232]
He understands the hour of evening to be meant, when the Wheel of Day and Night brings a jewelled, i.e. starry sky on the horizon as the sun sets. But it is not only on the horizon that stars appear at sunset; and the mention of Gemini to indicate the time of year is thoroughly characteristic of Dante. The Wheel is the revolving year which has carried the sun into Sagittarius.
Angelitti remarks that the whole description was literally true for December 1296, since Venus was then in conjunction with the sun, and Saturn in Cancer;[233] and as this poem is a complaint of the hardness of his lady, to whom the poet is nevertheless wholly devoted, it may well have been written in that time when the lady Philosophy refused to smile upon her lover.[234]
Further on in the same poem the effects of the sun in spring, when he is in the sign of Aries, are alluded to as “the virtue of Aries”:—
“Passato hanno lor termine le fronde, Che trasse fuor la virtù d’Ariete, Per adornare il mondo, e morta è l’ erba.”[235]
Contrast with this the passage in the Paradiso where “nocturnal Aries” is used as a synonym for autumn.