ABSTRACT
The song Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, with which the third treatise of the Convivio opens, has its recognized place among the splendours of Dante’s lyric poetry. It is one of his supreme achievements in the canzone form. That it is the song which his musician-friend Casella chooses to sing for Dante on the shore of Purgatory, 1 casting a spell over him and Vergil and all the souls that had come in the angel’s ship, indicates how potent a place it held for Dante among his rime 2 In Amor che nella mente there is intellectual fullness, but also tautness and compression; a controlled excitement underlies the verses and impels them. There is likewise an expressive fullness, the language moving towards hymnody in the central strophes, then passing gently into witty reflection in the concluding one. The song conjoins, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order’. 3
