The 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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