Face to face with Beatrice, the pilgrim Dante either thinks he’s ready for more revelation or is still caught in his old physical attraction for his beloved ten years after her death. But how can Dante be in the wrong after Lethe? And why does the parade of revelation, the embodiment of the church militant, seem to be in retreat? And what does that griffin symbolize?
Read MoreRather than a passage by passage analysis of the final two cantos of PURGATORIO, sit back and enjoy a read-through of my loose translation of the climax of this second canticle in Dante’s masterpiece, COMEDY. We come to the densest and most difficult passages yet in the poem. Let’s get ready for more analysis ahead.
Read MoreAt long last, Beatrice and Dante are face to face. We’ve anticipated this moment since INFERNO, Canto II, when Beatrice made her first appearance in COMEDY. They’re silent in this complicated scene as the women around the chariot urge them closer and press Beatrice to reveal her hidden beauty: her mouth.
Read MoreBeatrice and the griffin: they’re deeply connected, so much so that its true nature is only found in the reflection in her eyes. Yet both have a complex, even ambiguous symbolism that may make them both the allegories of more than one concept. They both are double-natured in their own ways.
Read MoreAwakened from his third fainting spell, Dante is pulled through the river Lethe by the young woman who welcomed him and his poets to the Garden of Eden. She forcefully dunks his head into the water, then places him among the four women dancing on the left side of the chariot around Beatrice.
Read MoreBeatrice has finished her work, laying out how the pilgrim Dante has failed in his poetic craft. He then is left to his final crack-up on the road to contrition—that is, his third fainting spell in COMEDY. He collapses with Beatrice much as he does with Francesca in INFERNO’s circle of lust . . . except Beatrice’s intent is far different from Francesca’s.
Read MoreBeatrice finishes her second salvo at Dante with a master class in a high, elevated style. She also carries on with her balancing act between literal and metaphoric speech. In all these ways, she is directing both the pilgrim to the journey ahead and the poet to the sort of poetry he will have to craft to explain the PARADISO experience.
Read MoreEver since INFERNO, Canto I, we’ve wondered exactly why Dante got lost in that dark wood. Here, at the top of Purgatory, Beatrice finally brings out his full confession. It was all about her. Or about what he wrote. Or about another woman. Or maybe all of them at once.
Read MoreWailing, Dante is silent in the face of Beatrice’s indictment. She is impatient to hear his confession. But she’s also done the unthinkable: she’s robbed a poet of his words. He’s left speechless in front of her . . . about the way he was in front of Francesca back in INFERNO.
Read MoreBeatrice concludes her first indictment of Dante, our pilgrim, by telling him that he has missed the proper subject matter for this talent all along: herself and the damned. In so doing, she brings him to the place where he, the artist, can begin to forgive his own failings in his craft.
Read MoreWhat happens when you don’t get the redemption you want? Beatrice is now fully in charge, standing in the chariot with the hundred angels. She’s able to tell those heavenly beings what they can’t know. And she’s able to detail Dante’s failings so that his guilt and his grief can come to some sort of equal measure.
Read MoreBeatrice has offered her first condemnation of Dante and even the angels who surround her in the chariot seem surprised at the level of her vitriol. They sing a psalm to comfort the pilgrim—but having already seen his own reflection and looked away, it instead melts the ice sheet that has so long encased his heart.
Read MoreBeatrice 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.
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