Guido Cavalcanti. “Canzone. A Song against Poverty.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

General Description

Date: 1848?; 1861
Rhyme: stanza, abbcaddcceeff; congedo, abbaaccdd
Meter: iambic trimeter and pentameter
Genre: canzone

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

This is a trecento work and is not by Cavalcanti, as DGR himself surmised (see his note to “Canzone. A Song of Fortune”. The actual author is unknown. DGR's source text in Cicciaporci (Rime Inedite, Canzone I, pages 42-44) is reasonably clean. It derives from a manuscript in the Biblioteca Municipale di Siena (1.ix.18), which was the source of two other of these inauthentic canzoni.

Textual History: Composition

Probably an early translation, late 1840s.

Printing History

The translation was first published in 1861 in The Early Italian Poets; it was reprinted in 1874 in Dante and his Circle.

Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: 113d-1861.raw.xml