Il linguaggio delle passioni nella 'Liberata' di Tasso. L'episodio di Sofronia e Olindo

The essay analyzes and develops the rhetoric of the language of passions in the Christian poem by Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, in particular in the episode of the two young lovers, Sofronia and Olindo, protagonists of Liberata II. The story of the couple closely resembles that of two other lovers and martyrs of the faith whose poem will sing in the last song, Gildippe and Odoardo but also very closely recalls the tragic and rebirth fate of the Saracen heroine, Clorinda, baptized in point of death and then transformed into a high cypress. All played, in fact, on the rhetoric of metamorphosis, the episode of Sofronia and Olindo, passed from the stake to the wedding, preludes the elegiac funeral motif of the tree on the grave, thus binding itself to the tragic fate of Clorinda. The octaves of Sofronia and Olindo are therefore examples of the power of post-Tridentine ideology, the strength of the tragic language of the passions and, ultimately, the spectacular function of the poetic word.