nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria -- SEVERINO BOEZIO.

Speranza

‘For in alle adversities of fortune
the most unzeely kynde of contrarious
fortune is to han ben weleful’ (II, pr. 4 noted by Windeatt 1984, 331).

Windeatt, designating the notion ‘proverbial,’ notes another possible parallel, quoting lines from Dante Inferno V:

‘nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria’ (V, 121-3) (there is no greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery).


The full significance of this Dantean parallel can only be sensed if we recall that those are the words of Francesca, who tells how she committed adultery with her husband’s brother after reading with him about Lancelot and Guinevere’s first kiss.

That moment of physical passion and ‘bliss’ has brought them to everlasting torment.

Troilus, we might begin to suspect, is blinded by folly; he believes that he has reached ‘rest’ and permanence when he has in fact only reached the midpoint of his story (Kaylor).

The readers may recall better than the narrator that what follows is the movement ‘out of joie,’ (I, 4) announced in the very first stanza of the poem.