Dante 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 MoreDante the pilgrim changes fundamentally from fear to confidence—in COMEDY’s poetic discourse! His internal states are offered in a simile, the very technique poetry employs to create its texture. Then Dante goes on to ask his reader for a similar change. Charge fearlessly into the harder material ahead.
Read MoreWe’ve finally reached the gate of Purgatory itself with Dante and Virgil. PURGATORIO, Canto IX, is a dense, tough canto, full of interpretive questions and allegorical cloudiness. Let’s read through it before we begin to take it apart and study it in the way Dante intended.
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