Vita Nuova
Vita Nuova - meaning Summary
Redemption Through Sudden Vision
The speaker stands beside a stormy, uncultivated sea, lamenting a life of hardship and futile labor symbolized by torn nets and barren fields. As day dies and gulls flee, despair deepens until a sudden, luminous apparition—"argent splendour of white limbs"—rises from the water. This unexpected vision transforms the speaker’s anguish into joy and erases the remembered suffering, suggesting a moment of spiritual or aesthetic renewal.
Read Complete AnalysesI STOOD by the unvintageable sea Till the wet waves drenched face and hair with spray, The long red fires of the dying day Burned in the west; the wind piped drearily; And to the land the clamorous gulls did flee: "Alas!" I cried, "my life is full of pain, And who can garner fruit or golden grain, From these waste fields which travail ceaselessly!" My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw Nathless I threw them as my final cast Into the sea, and waited for the end. When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw The argent splendour of white limbs ascend, And in that joy forgot my tortured past.
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