20. The Great Poets Of Limbo: INFERNO Canto IV, Lines 85 - 114
Such grandiose company!
Our pilgrim, Dante, sees the four great shades coming toward him in Limbo: Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. They welcome Virgil back and then do something shocking: They admit Dante into their company. Dante even gets a smile from Virgil.
But our poet has not written enough to be counted among this august cohort. He’s a middling Florentine poet . . . who, yes, is well on his way to becoming one of the greatest poets who ever lived. Still, this praise seems at best anticipatory, if not self-congratulatory.
Then things gets weirder still as the six poets walk on to a beautiful castle, green grass, fresh water . . . while still in hell!
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The segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[01:53] My English translation of INFERNO. Canto IV, lines 85 - 114. If you'd like to read along, find a more in-depth study guide, or even leave a comment for me so we can continue the conversation, scroll down this page.
[03:46] Is this hell? It seems kind of nice, especially after the wasps and maggots of the neutrals.
[04:39] Here come Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan.
[08:43] Interpreting the four poets. Or a little bit about my neo-rationalist, Anglo-American interpretive stance v. a more traditional Italian reading of this passage.
[13:26] Is Limbo a shining example of human achievement?
[14:03] Virgil's smile and the pilgrim's welcome into the circle of the great poets. He's sixth. That's not a great number in medieval numerology.
[21:05] A castle, seven towers, a little brook: It seems allegorical. It seems like the Elysian Fields. It seems strange in hell.
[22:52] The problem of corporeality in the afterlife (or at least in this part of Dante's notion of the afterlife). And the problem of hell's pleasant aspect.
[27:17] Limbo is a civic vision of the afterlife.
My English translation of INFERNO, Canto IV, 85 – 114:
My good master started to speak:
“Check out the one with the sword in his hand.
Leading the other three as their sire.
“That is Homer, the sovereign poet.
Next comes Horace, the satirist;
Ovid is third; and Lucan is last.
Because each of them shares with me
The title the lone voice called out,
They honor me and thus do well.”
And so I saw gathered the beautiful school
Of that lord of the highest song
That soars above all the others like an eagle.
After they had chatted among themselves for a bit,
They turned to me with welcoming gestures
And my master smiled at all this.
Then they gave me even more honor
In that they made me one of their company,
So that I was the sixth in this wise counsel.
This is how we went on toward the light,
Talking of things that should be left in silence now
Although it was good to speak of them when I was there.
We came to the pediment of a noble castle
Wrapped seven times by towering walls,
Which were themselves defended all around by a beautiful brook.
We crossed over this as on solid ground,
And I passed through the seven gates with these sages.
We even got to a meadow with fresh green grass
Where there were people with slow, grave eyes
And great authority in their appearance.
They didn’t speak much, only with soft voices.
FOR MORE STUDY
Two translation issues:
I brought up the problem of lines 94 - 96 in the episode. Here’s the crux of the matter. It starts in the second half of line 94: “la bella scola/ di quel segnor de l’altissimo canto . . .” (literally, “the beautiful school/ of this lord of the highest song”). “Segnor” (“lord”) is intriguing because it brings up feudal notions of allegiance and subservience, but it seems warranted, given that this is the “highest song” (so we should all bow down). But it’s line 96 that’s the rub: “che sovra li altri com’ aquila vola” (literally, “which soars over the others as an eagle”). What’s the “che”? It could be “which,” as I just translated it—thus, the song soars like an eagle. Or it could be “who”—which means “he who soars above the others. . . .” Most likely, Homer. The majority of scholars over the centuries believe it’s a “who” and refers to Homer, since epic poetry was seen as the “highest” form of poetry, even above Virgil’s “tragedy,” The Aeneid.
When Dante offers that cryptic line about what they don’t talk about (line 104), there’s an intriguing word that’s hard to place in modern English. Here’s the line: “parlando cose che ‘l tacere è bello . . . (literally, “speaking of that which to keep silent is beautiful”). “Bello”? Beauty was considered part of ethics in Dante’s day. It’s an ethical choice to keep silent about what they discussed? It would mar the aesthetics of the poem?
Three interpretive issues:
I mentioned the online Italian scholars who see these four poets as allegorical, but I didn’t fill you in on what that meant. Essentially, they were reading Homer as the spirit, the inner essence of a person; Horace as the intellect, the mind working rhetoric as well as it can; Ovid as the body, ever changeable in its aspects (cf. The Metamorphoses); and Lucan as the collective body—that is, political history with its aggregation of bodies in warring camps. Or to put it another way, Homer = spirit, Horace = mind, Ovid = body, Lucan = body in motion. Into this steps Virgil as the hither edge of divine revelation (we’ll get to why later in COMEDY—but suffice it to say for now that many medievals thought Virgil got very close to Christian revelation in his poetry); and our pilgrim Dante as the will, the set of choices one must make to harmonize (or “make comedic”) these competing factors to form a unified person.
There have been all sorts of allegorical interpretations of the castle, its walls, its brook, and its meadow. Charles Singleton refers to this castle as the “castle of fame.” Write well and you end up here. John Ciardi follows many of the early commentators to call this place the “castle of philosophy”—in other words, as much as humans can think without God’s help (as I said in the episode, the trivium and the quadrivium, the seven divisions of learning as Dante would understand them). Others have seen the castle as the best of human life without grace, without an understanding of salvation. And then that brook! Is it a barrier? Does it mean that some of those men, women, and babies we first saw in Limbo can’t cross over it? We do seem to be coming into a special place with its “prato di fresca verdura” (line 111—a “meadow of fresh grass”). Is this a place reserved for only the select few in Limbo, people with “grande autorità” (line 113—”great authority”)? And while we’re at it, who confers this authority? So many questions!
I mentioned Virgil’s Elysian Fields in the episode. In The Aeneid, this spot is where the heroic or virtuous dead reside. It’s a place of perpetual light and peace. Aeneas goes here to find his father. But there’s another resonance for this spot in Limbo: the Garden of Eden. Does that mean we’ve entered some place of innocence . . . or perhaps reclaimed innocence? After those nasty scenes with the neutrals and with Charon? There’s perhaps more reason to consider this place a sort of Eden. When we reach the top of Purgatory, we’ll find the “real” Garden of Eden. So does Eden then bracket the human experience: the start of hell, the ending of Purgatory? If so, how is this spot Edenic? Or what does Dante think of Eden? Is this what would have happened had Adam and Eve just refused the fruit?
One journaling prompt:
We’ve talked a lot about ambiguity, about trying to have it both ways at once. How does ambiguity operate in your life? Has it ever stymied you? Have you ever needed to make a decision and refused to do so?