The sorrow of young Dante

About Vita Nuova __reflections on Divine Comedy (II)

The Vita Nuova, a diary of young Dante, led us into Dante's earlier years, when he was in his 20s, the puberty period to fall into loves and learn from experiences to mature. From his poems, we can obviously see what we ourselves experience in our adolescent time: we are enchanted by some beauty from the opposite sex; we have all kinds of imaginations about her/him; we are afraid to break the beautiful dreams we have, and dare not to speak out and only watched secretly far away. We keep it to ourselves, or to a few good friends. We write poems for her/him, but secretly without showing them to the love, accompanied with pain and sorrow most of the time.

The ironic thing for Dante is that although he loves Beatrice, he always avoids facing her directly, or he will blanch to death. Yet, after her death, in the end of the poem, he finally gets released from the burden. We may say that what Dante loves is not Beatrice herself as a human being, but an idealized goddess, who has no fault ever. This is true for every adolescent too. So after recoding all his feelings in his diary "the sorrow of young Dante", Dante's solution is to write a poem for the goddess lady when he matures with more human experiences, and this is how the divine comedy comes into true years later.