Red cars everywhere?
You know how, when your friend buys a new car, you suddenly see that make and model everywhere? That’s a kind of selective attention process called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, which you can read more about in this 2023 post linked here.
This phenomenon is typically discussed as a form of bias and also called a frequency illusion. You have the illusion that more red cars are suddenly on the street, but nothing happened to change the number of red cars. What changed was that your attention selected them from the many not-red cars. Suddenly you thought red cars were everywhere.
Same thing goes for poetic forms, such as terza rima, apparently.
The Divine Comedy
I’ve been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in the English translation by Allen Mandelbaum. You can find his version in Penguin hardcover here.
The text is also available online, free, at this link to Columbia University’s Digital Dante effort. At their Digital Dante site there are also multiple translations and many other resources. Resources you might need, because reading Dante, 700-or-so years after he wrote, is not for the faint of heart.
It isn’t because the language is too difficult. It’s the names, relationships, allusions to recent and then-current history, ancient Green and Latin myths and stories, other poets of Dante’s time and before–all wrapped up in a very tightly conceived, highly developed notion of the relationships, geography, and content of hell, purgatory, and paradise, which make reading the Divine Comedy a little more difficult than reading a post on Instagram. I’ve got one eye on the text, one on the notes in the back of the book, one on a second English translation, one on Google Translate, one on Wikipedia…. well, you see that “reading” is a bit of an effort because I get sucked into the well of wonderment that comes with having access to information on demand.
The Well of Wonderment
And a very interesting well it is, too, whether we are talking about language use or concepts. Dante wrote in the vernacular Italian, a radical move at the time. He sometimes used phrases we still use today. An example: one foot in the grave.
When I ran into this description in Canto 18, line 121 of Purgatorio, I came to a halt. I wondered if the phrase was a literal translation, or a paraphrase. Sometimes (often) translators can’t use an exact translation. Literal translation might not have parallel meaning in the translated language. Or an exact correspondence doesn’t exist. So, I wondered if the translator had to take some liberties to render the line. Luckily, I had the Italian original at hand. Google Translate to the rescue. I typed in the original text, and Google returned “one foot in the grave”.
Now, I am used to the idea that we are still using phrases from the Bible (or its translations) or from Shakespeare. But those are texts still read/used in high frequency by millions of people. Dante, however, doesn’t have much of a summer theater following as compared to Shakespeare.
I was surprised to find a modern phrase connected to a poem from seven centuries ago. But what if Dante was using a phrase already common in his life? What if he wasn’t the originator? I mean, he was writing in the vernacular, and some common phraseology is bound to sneak in over the course of a novel length poem.
Plutarch got there first
Turns out, Dante isn’t the first to use the phrase in writing. The earliest available reference seems to be from Plutarch’s Morals. It is in the section about raising children and keeping them from the dangers of being taken in by flatterers and the promise of (illicit) pleasures. The line I am referring to is Plutarch’s representation of young men’s attitudes:
For they say, “‘Our life’s but a span; we can only live once; why should you heed your father’s threats? he’s an old twaddler, he has one foot in the grave; we shall soon hoist him up and carry him off to burial.”
—-Plutarch’s Morals, translated by Arthur Richard Shilleto, 1888, available on Project Gutenberg
Putarch is the Greek philosopher who lived approximately 46 BC-120 AD. The Morals were written probably around AD 100. I will never hear someone use the phrase “one foot in the grave” again without thinking “they are using a two thousand year old metaphor”. We all think that our ideas, concepts and thoughts of today, are new and different. Perhaps some of them are–but so much is predicated on the past.
Dante would have known and read Plutarch, in Latin translation probably. He would have been aware of the phrase “one foot in the grave” whether it was used in common speech or not.
Where am I going with this? It’s a long aside, I know. I just want to point out that there are many interesting things that happen once you start reading some of the classical works — not limited to Dante’s Divine Comedy — and they’re not all the stodgy sorts of things that you might have in your mind from dry school classwork.
Stodgy classwork idea: the Divine Comedy is some archaic poem written in some archaic rhyme scheme.
You may have had to learn about the form of the Divine Comedy, terza rima, in a literature class. What you may not have realized is that the reason the scheme is not so common in English is because English doesn’t have the large choice of rhymes that Italian does. So terza rima can be made to sound flowing, fitting in with common-speech Italian, naturally. That’s a harder hurdle to cross in English. In a similar vein, iambic meters, especially iambic pentameter is the top dog of English prosody because iambs fit the natural, common speech patterns of English.
So, terza rima. The building block of the Comedy. (Which is what Dante called it, the “Divine” was added later). Not found so much in English.
Which is why I was surprised yesterday. I popped over to my feed (on the Well of Wonderment) and saw a post regarding Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. I began scanning the poem text and didn’t get but a few lines in before the lightbulb went off: terza rima! In an English language poem from 1819. To be fair, formal poetry was more the done thing then, and it has always been a matter of poetic display to master a daunting form. Still, I didn’t expect to randomly see terza rima anytime soon, let alone when I had just finished “Purgatorio”.
Ode to the West Wind
One thing that I don’t recall Lehman & Siskind mentioning (but I didn’t re-listen to confirm) is that when Shelley wrote this poem he was actually near Florence, Dante’s home city. Shelley was in (self-imposed) exile near Florence, the city Dante was exiled from, writing in the form Dante popularized if did not invent. It would be hard to believe that Shelley wasn’t aware of this circularity of connection.
And, ironically, Shelley was an ardent Atheist whereas Dante was a strong Catholic. Dante envisioned hell so vividly that many of our stereotypes of hell and its denizens come from his work.
Terza Rima All Around
I imagine that nearly every English language poet has taken a stab or two or ten at terza rima. A recent example, in a post in which the poet also mentions a failed earlier attempt at terza rima form, was published a couple months ago. The poem is Louise Walker’s “The Swing,” published November 2024 on Form in Formless Times’ site.
I especially like her ending couplet: “You never reproached me, but even so / I still bear the scar of that reckless throw.” Times change, but some things remain. They can’t be undone.
Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” ends: “The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Things haven’t changed, but there’s change in the air, and as a poet advocating for change on many fronts, this is a fitting Shelley sentiment.
We’re nearing the end of January now, and Winter quite literally has come to northeast Ohio, seemingly to stay for a good long visit. The new year is full of change – good, bad, maybe some of the too-soon-to-say variety.
And the Baader-Meinhof Phenomena seems to have ensured that I see terza rima everywhere I go. Which means it was there all along, I just needed to notice.
The connections I make, reading classics and considering the connection to the broader world, continue to amaze me. Dante may have expressed this sentiment best. I’ll leave you with his end to Canto 18, from Mandelbaum’s translation:
Dante ends Canto 18 of “Purgatorio” with:
a new thought rose inside of me and, from
that thought, still others—many and diverse—
were born: I was so drawn from random thought
to thought that, wandering in mind, I shutmy eyes, transforming thought on thought to dream.
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