At 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 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 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 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.
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