As Dante the pilgrim and Virgil begin to walk away from the envious penitents on the second terrace of Purgatory proper, Virgil, silent for a long while, suddenly pipes up to refocus and reinterpret our entire experience in cantos XII and XIV, transforming the linearity espoused by Sapia and Guido del Duca into the comedic circularity of Dante’s poem.
Read MoreWith Guido del Duca lost to his tears, Dante the pilgrim and Virgil begin to walk on to find a way up to the third terrace of Purgatory. Before they go very many steps, two more voices on the wind strike them head-on: Cain, after his fratridice and banishment; and Aglauros, laded with the sickness of envy from Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES.
Read MoreGuido del Duca continues his diatribe about the descent of his culture, finally ending with a long passage bemoaning the end of the glory days, the fine families and courts of Romagna, now long gone. Here’s the big question: Is this Dante the poet’s lament or is his a function of Guido del Duca’s character?
Read MoreDante finally finds out who these two penitent souls are on the terrace of envy: Guido del Duca and Rinier (or Rinieri) da Calboli. Knowing who they are forces back up to the top of PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, to reassess what’s the political strife underlying its theology and to reinterpret their relation to each other and to Dante.
Read MoreDante has been quite cagey in saying where he’s from. His coy game has led him to use periphrasis, one of his favorite poetic techniques. He’s about to learn his lessons. One of the envious penitents is going to beat him at his periphrastic game and bring the entire prophetic denunciation of Tuscany into incredibly complicated metaphoric space.
Read MoreThe two envious penitent souls of PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, make a mess out of Dante’s fancy rhetorical skills and one of them sets into a typical Dantean diatribe against Tuscany . . . all the while making hash out of the very theology of Purgatory itself.
Read MoreTwo envious penitents interrupt the action of PURGATORIO at the opening of Canto XIV. They seem to be gossiping about Dante the pilgrim, then they turn to him and use some of his own words to get what they want, all the while dividing his soul from his body. Dante replies with one of his favorite rhetorical techniques: periphrasis. And he engages in modesty . . . or maybe reticence . . . or maybe truth-telling.
Read MoreA read-through of the second terrace of Purgatory proper, the terrace of envy, in the second canticle of Dante’s masterwork COMEDY. We’ll cover the ground from PURGATORIO, Canto XIII, Line 1, though Canto XV, Line 84, walking among the ranks of the envious and asking some initial questions before we dig into it passage by passage in our slow walk across Dante’s known universe.
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