A word, phrase or image that returns several times throughout the work, tied to a character or an idea, and gains meaning with each return.
In Paradise
therefore the pen leaps and I do not write it: for our imagination, not only speech, is a color too vivid for such folds
The confession that the poem does not reach what it saw is the same as in the previous canto, where it was fitting for the pen to "leap". The gesture of leaping returns and fixes Paradise as a poem that shows its limits at every step.
Cantos XXI to XXIV: Saturn and the fixed stars, Dante, narrator, not writing the canto of Peter