Dante the pilgrim begins his climb to the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory blinded and behind his two guides, Virgil and Statius. The drama of the pilgrim’s blindness is superseded by Virgil’s curiosity about Statius . . . complete with Virgil’s own misquotation of Francesca from INFERNO, Canto V.
Read MoreAwakened by the foul smell in his second Purgatorial dream, Dante the pilgrim finds himself out of tune with his surroundings: a bright new day, the sun at his back, and an angel who fans him on to the fifth terrace ahead. Most curious of all, those who mourn are promised “ladies of consolation,” which the pilgrim doesn’t seem to fully recognize.
Read MoreDante the poet is playing with light: physical/metaphysical, revelatory/imaginary, sunrise/sunset, illuminating/concealing, angelic/cosmic. All this as COMEDY finds its center and PURGATORIO itself divides on a beautiful moment with the stars.
Read MoreDante the poet begins the complex and brilliant process of helping us convert what seems into what is. But seeming and being are interconnected in so many ways that we can feel the ground shift under our feet as we begin our exit from the second terrace of Purgatory proper. And if all that were not enough, Virgil, Dante’s guide, undertakes a redefinition of “pleasure” or “delight.”
Read MoreDante and Virgil begin to leave the terrace of pride and all its art, but not before Virgil returns to form, becoming the guide to the afterlife with a penchant for quoting himself and not before an angel must guide them to the stairs, an angel who carries in his face an implicit reference to Lucifer (that is, Satan).
Read MoreDante and Virgil finally enter Purgatory proper in a passage that’s a strange amalgam of Lucan and Virgil, Roman history and Christian resolution, screeching and singing, warnings and blessings, the Bible and Ovid—and complete mash-up of all that makes our walk across the known universe with Dante so intriguing.
Read MoreDante arrives at the gate of Purgatory—but not without Virgil’s effort. Hauled up the steps, Dante then sees the angel more clearly, particularly the angel’s ashy robes. That angel has two jobs: to open the door with his two keys and to carve seven letters into Dante’s forehead. Like so much of COMEDY, this passage is remarkably murky and yet psychologically astute.
Read MoreDante and Virgil see the three steps to the entrance of Purgatory proper with an angel sitting on up at the very threshold to the next realm. But these steps have caused 700 years of interpretive fury. They’re allegorical, to be sure. But maybe there’s a way to scrape the critical apparatus off the steps and see these steps in a new way.
Read MoreDante had seemed so full of confidence when he found out his dream of fire and rape was not true but instead a representation of his being carried by Lucy up the mountain as he slept. But when Dante the pilgrim gets in front of the guardian of Purgatory’s gate, the angel proves so forbidding that the pilgrim falls silence. Fortunately, Virgil is ever ready to speak up.
Read MoreAs Dante the pilgrim stares up at the stars in PURGATORIO’s dale of negligent rulers and as the snake enters the redeemed landscape of the poem, we may finally be witnessing the setting of the infernal mindset of COMEDY as well as the setting of the poem’s classical “landscape.”
Read MoreStill on the cusp of the valley of the negligent rulers, Dante sees the first two angels descending from heaven in PURGATORIO. (The previous angel was a boatman who ran the route between a spot in Italy and the mountain.) It’s a deeply mystical passage that seems to get deflated at its end and as we learn this is a nightly bit of street theater.
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