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Updated: May 27, 2025
They meet a citto that is a bambino in Sienese dialect who proves to be none other than Cupid himself, and rewards them according to their deserts, Euridice obtaining the love of the courtly shepherd Orindio, while Diversa is condemned to follow the rude and loveless Fantasia. The piece is written in a mixture of ottava and terza rima, with a variety of lyrics introduced.
Its illustrious author, the creator of the national poetry of his country, died in 1321, leaving behind him Petrarch, who was crowned in the Capitol in 1341, and Boccaccio, who though, as Byron said of Scott, he spoiled his poetry by writing better prose was nevertheless a poet of no mean merit, and the probable inventor of the ottava rima.
The piece is likewise important from a metrical point of view, since it not only contains a free intermixture of ottava and terza rima, and hendecasyllables with rimalmezzo, a favourite verse form in certain kinds of composition , but likewise foreshadows, in its mingling of freely riming hendecasyllables with settenarî, the peculiar measures of the pastoral drama proper.
Doubtless there is a certain general fitness, in various stanza forms, for this or that poetic purpose: the stanzas employed by English or Scotch balladry are admittedly excellent for story-telling; Spenser's favorite stanza is unrivalled for painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less available for pure narration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so delicately balanced upon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too; Byron's ottava rima has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it is true, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron's own mood; the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his antitheses, and the couplets of Dryden have their "resonance like a great bronze coin thrown down on marble"; each great artist in English verse, in short, chooses by instinct the general stanza form best suited to his particular purpose, and then moulds its details with whatever cunning he may possess.
That the ottava rima is out of place in consistently pathetic poetry, may be seen from its obvious misuse in Keats's Pot of Basil.
He wrote also two romantic poems, in which he first introduced the ottava rima, or the stanza composed of six lines, which rhyme interchangeably with each other, and are followed by a couplet. In these he strove to revive ancient mythology, and to identify it with modern literature. His Latin compositions are voluminous, and materially contributed to the advancement of letters.
But the fourteenth-century school of Petrarch had not been entirely without its representative in Italian. At least one poem included by Boccaccio in his Ameto is a strict eclogue, composed throughout in terza rima, which was destined to become the standard verse-form for 'pastoral, as ottava rima for 'rustic, composition.
The last book of the kind written before Don Quixote, according to Clemencin, was Policisne de Boecia, published in 1602; but La Toledana Discreta, which is a romantic poem in ottava rima, was published in 1604, and a few chap-books and religious romances, of the slighter kind, afterward.
It is composed in ottava and terza rima, with the introduction of a canzonet, and marks an important advance on previous work, not only in the nature of the plot, but in being divided into acts and scenes. Sixteen years elapsed between the publication of Amaranta and the appearance of the regular pastoral drama in Beccari's Sacrifizio.
After being written in a number of meters it finally adhered to the ottava rima, the stanza generally used in the popular poetry of the fifteenth century. It was the custom to sing these dramatic lauds or "Divozioni" in the oratories. Every fraternity had a collection of such lauds and that they were performed with much detail is easily ascertained.
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