Dante moves on to the third intaglio (or carving) in the marble of the first terrace of Purgatory proper. This time, he finds a scene (allegedly) from the life of the Roman emperor Trajan, a scene so real that the marble apparently comes to life and offers a dramatic dialogue between Trajan and a bereaved mother, as (carved) eagles soar overhead and knights tramp the ground.
Read MoreDante moves beyond his guide Virgil (or is prodded to move beyond him for curious reasons) to see the second intaglio or carving in the marble on the terrace of pride in PURGATORIO. Here, Dante continues his dangerous game, enhancing the realism of the art on the wall of Mount Purgatory with imagined details that offer the best “realism” in the scene.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim and (shockingly) Virgil arrive on the first deserted terrace of Purgatory proper to discover marvelous carvings in the white marble (although still no souls in sight). These first images of artistic production allow the poet to begin to develop his theory of art, one of the major achievements of his time on the terraces of Mount Purgatory.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim and Virgil, his guide, make it through the dramatic gate of Purgatory proper only to be met with silence: a hard climb to a deserted open spot that edges out toward the void. This passage from PURGATORIO, Canto X is an amazing bit of emotional drama: a Purgatorial letdown after we’ve finally gotten inside the world of the redeemed penitents.
Read MoreA read-through of PURGATORIO, Cantos X - XII, using my rough English translation. Dante the pilgrim and Virgil have come through the wildly dramatic gate of Purgatory and climbed to the first terrace of Purgatory proper, where those who are guilty of the sin of pride must unburden themselves in a most ironic fashion. Sit back and enjoy the plot of this first locale in Purgatory itself.
Read MoreDante and Virgil finally enter Purgatory proper in a passage that’s a strange amalgam of Lucan and Virgil, Roman history and Christian resolution, screeching and singing, warnings and blessings, the Bible and Ovid—and complete mash-up of all that makes our walk across the known universe with Dante so intriguing.
Read MoreDante arrives at the gate of Purgatory—but not without Virgil’s effort. Hauled up the steps, Dante then sees the angel more clearly, particularly the angel’s ashy robes. That angel has two jobs: to open the door with his two keys and to carve seven letters into Dante’s forehead. Like so much of COMEDY, this passage is remarkably murky and yet psychologically astute.
Read MoreDante and Virgil see the three steps to the entrance of Purgatory proper with an angel sitting on up at the very threshold to the next realm. But these steps have caused 700 years of interpretive fury. They’re allegorical, to be sure. But maybe there’s a way to scrape the critical apparatus off the steps and see these steps in a new way.
Read MoreDante had seemed so full of confidence when he found out his dream of fire and rape was not true but instead a representation of his being carried by Lucy up the mountain as he slept. But when Dante the pilgrim gets in front of the guardian of Purgatory’s gate, the angel proves so forbidding that the pilgrim falls silence. Fortunately, Virgil is ever ready to speak up.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim changes fundamentally from fear to confidence—in COMEDY’s poetic discourse! His internal states are offered in a simile, the very technique poetry employs to create its texture. Then Dante goes on to ask his reader for a similar change. Charge fearlessly into the harder material ahead.
Read MoreLucy arrives to carry the sleeping Dante up to the gate of Purgatory itself. And perhaps most shocking of all, she keeps Virgil in tow to this very Christian part of the mountain. In fact, classical imagery may well be the texture that underlies Dante’s Christian truth: the rough threads that make the tapestry more beautiful.
Read MoreDante dreams his way to the gate of Purgatory using three classical images about “unnatural” or “unrefined” love, while burning up with sexual ecstasy in the talons of the great eagle from Zeus and becomes Ganymede, the cupbearer to the gods. A wild (and troubling) ride for a Christian poet, to say the least.
Read MoreDante opens the incredibly important canto of the gate of Purgatory—that is, PURGATORIO, Canto IX—with a complete mess of classical imagery. This tangle has befuddled scholars and readers for centuries. There are proposed solutions, none of them quite adequate. Perhaps the difference here is that Dante is now free to play with classical imagery, rather than to be controlled by it.
Read MoreWe’ve finally reached the gate of Purgatory itself with Dante and Virgil. PURGATORIO, Canto IX, is a dense, tough canto, full of interpretive questions and allegorical cloudiness. Let’s read through it before we begin to take it apart and study it in the way Dante intended.
Read MoreThe cantos before the main gate of Purgatory end with a hymn to generosity—or specifically, the praise of the Malasprina family who will support Dante in exile and even hire him as a peace negotiator. Our wild diatribes against political strife and corruption finally come down to an ethic of care: the answer to the ills of this world is to take care of each other.
Read MoreAs Dante the pilgrim stares up at the stars in PURGATORIO’s dale of negligent rulers and as the snake enters the redeemed landscape of the poem, we may finally be witnessing the setting of the infernal mindset of COMEDY as well as the setting of the poem’s classical “landscape.”
Read MoreAfter Dante shocks Judge Nino and the poet Sordello with his corporeality, Nino launches into a diatribe against his “unfaithful” wife who has married another man after Nino’s death. It’s a shocking bit of misogyny in a poem that so often steers clear of such things. What are we to make of a great poem with such a foul bit in it?
Read MoreDante steps down into the dale of the negligent rulers and finds a compatriot: noble judge Nino. They embrace and Dante is so glad to find this friend in Purgatory, the very person the poet himself put there, the very way he can bolster the reality claims in COMEDY: by being amazed at the people he finds exactly where he put them.
Read MoreStill on the cusp of the valley of the negligent rulers, Dante sees the first two angels descending from heaven in PURGATORIO. (The previous angel was a boatman who ran the route between a spot in Italy and the mountain.) It’s a deeply mystical passage that seems to get deflated at its end and as we learn this is a nightly bit of street theater.
Read MorePURGATORIO, Canto VIII, opens with six of the most beautiful lines in all of Dante’s COMEDY: full of yearning, sadness, death, sunset, sunrise, hope, and human emotion. It continues on to explore the yearning through the third hymn or antiphon of Purgatory, then moves to see the stars wheeling above—that is, the spheres we’re walking toward.
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