Dante's Celestial ‘Grammar’ of Metaphor

One fundamental characteristic of metaphor is that it brings together tenor and vehicle in such a way that we get not two ideas for one, as Dr Johnson suggested, but one new idea. 1 For this reason the way in which the words are combined is just as important as the criteria according to which they are selected. Horace, after all, had declared that a bold yoking together of familiar words, a ‘callida iunctura’, could make them new. 2 Dante’s selection of less common terms from within a particular field, we have seen, renews traditional metaphor by causing readers to take fresh note of what they might otherwise have been tempted to overlook. But the ‘grammar’ of his metaphors, the syntactic form in which the various elements are juxtaposed, is equally striking and plays no less a role in provoking such a response. 3