On Some Aspects of the Poetic of ri in Dante’s Divine Comedy: Possibilities of Semantic Clustering

The purpose of this article is to examine aspects of the poetic of the syllable ri in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The textual unit ri, prevalent as a pure syllable, but in some cases modified by a preceding consonant or consonants or by a following vowel or consonant, appears approximately 2000 times in the texture of the entire work. However, this study will focus on cases where the occurrences of ri possess rhythmic and/or semantic relevance. First, a brief exploration of De vulgari eloquentia, Dante’s own treatise on language and poetry, will determine whether the poet theorises rhythm and sound semantics in this work, and whether he considers smaller textual units than the word. Next, examples will be presented of poetic research that examines the reiteration of seemingly asemantic linguistic elements related to a specific theme, name, or textual position, while considering how such repetitions, alongside rhythm, contribute to textual semantics. The examples of the poetic of ri will primarily be drawn from the frames of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy, as it is within these frames that the modelling codes of the entire work are provided.