Friday, April 27, 2007

"Wherever he names the time (la bonne heure) in La Vita Nuova, Dante finds it in
terms of the number nine: “Nine times already since my birth had the heaven of light
returned,” “so that almost from the beginning of her ninth year she appeared to me and
I beheld her almost at the end of my ninth;” again, Beatrice appears to Dante nine years
later in the ninth hour of the day. The theme of the beginning in the end, of the first and
the last is repeated in the design of nines, where in the first vision of Amor Dante finds
the hour of the dream to have been “the first of the last nine hours of the night.” The
second vision of Amor is in the ninth hour of the day. A third comes on the ninth day of
a painful illness. Hours, days, years—months along, the nine months of gestation, seem
missing. Then, in accounting for the time of Beatrice’s death Dante tells us, “because
many times the number nine hath found place among the preceding words, whereby it
appeareth that it is not without reason,” he will discuss the meaning of the number.
First, he must show how the number nine appears in her death: “I say that according to
the Arabian style her most noble soul departed in the first hour of the ninth day of the
month; and according to the Syrian style, it departed on the ninth month of the year—
and according to our style, she departed in that year of our era, namely of the years of
our Lord, wherein the perfect number was completed nine times in that century wherein
she was placed.”

Robert Duncan, 'The H.D. Book'