Beatrice 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 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.
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