Eclogues

The Eclogae are two Latin pastoral poems that Dante Alighieri wrote at Ravenna in the last years of his life, in the exchange of verse epistles with the Bolognese scholar Giovanni del Virgilio. Giovanni, who taught poetry at the University of Bologna, had written to Dante in Latin hexameters, urging him to abandon the vernacular of the Comedy and to compose a learned poem in Latin on contemporary events, promising him the laurel crown at Bologna if he did. Dante answered in kind, and Giovanni replied in kind again. The two surviving poems by Dante belong to this exchange, which can be dated to roughly 1319 and 1320, shortly before his death in 1321. The occasion was a quarrel over language and poetic vocation, conducted in the disguised idiom of Virgil's bucolic tradition, in which poets appear as shepherds and their cities and patrons as pastures and flocks.

The first eclogue is Dante's reply to Giovanni's invitation. Under the shepherd Tityrus he declines the offer of Bologna and the laurel, and he explains, in terms Giovanni's own Latin could not easily answer, that he will receive the crown only in his native city, Florence, at the baptismal font where he was christened, and only when the Paradiso is complete. The poem thus becomes a statement about what the vernacular masterpiece is for and where its author hopes to be vindicated. The second eclogue answers Giovanni's second poem, which had invited Dante to visit Bologna. Dante, again as Tityrus, politely refuses, citing his fear of the hostility he expects there. Throughout, the pastoral disguise allows him to speak of exile, of unfinished work, and of a poetic calling he regards as given rather than chosen, while also displaying a command of classical Latin that quietly refutes any suggestion that he wrote in Italian from lack of ability.

The poems have continued to matter because they are the only place where Dante speaks directly, near the end of his life, about the completion of the Comedy and his hope of returning to Florence. They show the poet of the great Christian epic of conversion and judgment as an old man in exile, still bound to his city and to the unfinished third canticle. They also bear on a question that shaped Western literature: whether sacred and serious subjects belong to Latin alone, or whether the vernacular can carry them.

Who should read this: Readers already familiar with the Divine Comedy, especially those who want to understand how Dante saw his own vocation and the language he chose for it. These poems are dense, allusive, and written for a learned correspondent, so they will frustrate anyone looking for devotional reading or an introduction to Dante. They are not for the reader who has not yet met the Comedy itself, and they reward a good commentary far more than a casual encounter.