Beatrice finally utters her first words in COMEDY (other than those reported by Virgil way back in INFERNO, Canto II). Virgil had promised the sweet consoling eyes of this lady. Instead, she is an imperious admiral, at the head of her ship, ready to name our pilgrim, Dante, and willing to call him out for all this faults.
Read MoreUnder a veil of flowers, clothed in the colors of the parade of revelation, Beatrice finally appears in COMEDY, some wild second coming, almost the advent of Christ, standing in the chariot, like the rising sun. Her arrival can only mean one thing: Virgil’s departure. He exits the poem in a moment of great sadness without a hint of sentimentality.
Read MoreThe parade of revelation has come to a stop. Everything is in great anticipation. Even the constellations seems to have stopped turning. A voice calls out, expecting the bride. A hundred angels appear, expecting the groom. It’s the ceremonial marriage of Christ to his church . . . or it would be, if a quotation from THE AENEID didn’t darken the whole scene.
Read MoreLet’s read through the next chunk of PURGATORIO: Cantos XXX and XXXI. In many ways, these cantos are the climax of the first part of COMEDY: Beatrice arrives and is nothing like what we might have expected.
Read MoreOur pilgrim has found the perfect perch to watch the scope and length of the great allegorical parade that happens at the top of Mount Purgatory. He sees seven merry women and seven somber men coming along behind the Roman victory chariot and its griffin, a fitting if open-ended conclusion to this grand spectacle of imaginative revelation.
Read MoreThe parade of revelation continues as a griffin pulls a Roman victory chariot between the four living creatures that beside it. Dante the poet is combining military history, Biblical allegory, and Roman mythology into a single passage that has a shocking absence right at its center.
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante, is standing at a great observation point as the parade of divine revelation passes by him across the river Lethe. After the twenty-four lords in white, he sees four animals with green fronds for crowns. But he doesn’t have much time to describe them. Just go out and read the Biblical text . . . especially the one I don’t agree with!
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante, turns back from Virgil to see more of the parade of revelation in the Garden of Eden . . . after the lady across Lethe reprimands him for paying way too much attention to the walking candlesticks. The poet heightens his craft to take in the tradition of apocalyptic literature while leaving lots of Easter eggs to his own text and altering Biblical imagery at will.
Read MoreThe pilgrim, Dante, stands on the shore of Lethe and witnesses the emergent revelation of the light in the forest. The air on fire? No, trees that walk? No, candelabra that walk. They emerge from the forest in a deft act of perception that brings a multiplicity of meanings into the open space of COMEDY.
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante, and the beautiful lady walk on, each on their own side of Lethe. They seem to leave the more open space and reenter the forest when a flash of light overwhelms the pilgrim. It’s the signal for the start of the great apocalyptic parade that will take up more of Canto XXIX. It’s also the catalyst for some very pernicious misogyny.
Read MoreThe beautiful lady concludes her discourse with a fusion of revelation of reason to offer a fulcrum to the classical world and see its loss of The Golden Age as the Christian promise of the return to innocence, the cul-de-sac of redemption.
Read MoreThe lady across the stream in Eden continues her answer to the pilgrim Dante’s questions about the breeze and the water. In so doing, she offers the botany of Eden and our world, an ecology of Eden, and even the hydrolics of the place, layering meaning over meaning until we enter a fully imagined landscape.
Read MoreThe lady in Eden has announced that she’s ready to answer the pilgrim Dante’s questions. And he’s got one. It’s just not perhaps the first question that would come to the reader’s mind. But it is a question that lets the poem justify its fiction by offering support from the poem itself to create the scientific fiction of wind on Purgatory . . . and faith in its pilgrim (as well as its reader).
Read MoreThe lady in the forest comes near our pilgrim, Dante, as well as Virgil and Statius. The pilgrim clearly feels some sort of mad overreach in his attraction toward her . . . and maybe the poet, Dante, as well. She, instead, says she’s there to provide answers . . . except her presence and conversation raise more questions that even she can answer.
Read MoreThe pilgrim, Dante, calls the solitary lady to the opposite bank of the stream that divides them. She obliges, first dancing in place, then moving toward him so that he can understand her song. But the poetry around her darkens as the pilgrim uses two examples of ill-fated, even tragic, profane love from Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES.
Read MoreOur pilgrim walks on into the old-growth forest until he’s stopped by two seemingly small things: a gentle brook that flows to his left and a solitary lady, strolling along and singing on the opposite bank. But the poet is already signaling to us that all may not be as simple as it seems.
Read MoreOur pilgrim is again loose in a dark wood, a forest that’s this time divine and alive. He’s been in places like this at least four times so far in COMEDY. But for now, we’re given naturalistic details from his point of view about the top of Mount Purgatory . . . before everything gets layered in sedimentary meaning that changes the purpose and focus of the poem as a whole.
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante, has climbed the last staircase of Mount Purgatory. He’s been crowned and mitered by Virgil and so is free to wander about this unprecedented landscape at the top of the world’s tallest mountain, the closest point humans will ever get to the heavens above.
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