Dante dreams his way to the gate of Purgatory using three classical images about “unnatural” or “unrefined” love, while burning up with sexual ecstasy in the talons of the great eagle from Zeus and becomes Ganymede, the cupbearer to the gods. A wild (and troubling) ride for a Christian poet, to say the least.
Read MoreDante opens the incredibly important canto of the gate of Purgatory—that is, PURGATORIO, Canto IX—with a complete mess of classical imagery. This tangle has befuddled scholars and readers for centuries. There are proposed solutions, none of them quite adequate. Perhaps the difference here is that Dante is now free to play with classical imagery, rather than to be controlled by it.
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.
Read MoreThe cantos before the main gate of Purgatory end with a hymn to generosity—or specifically, the praise of the Malasprina family who will support Dante in exile and even hire him as a peace negotiator. Our wild diatribes against political strife and corruption finally come down to an ethic of care: the answer to the ills of this world is to take care of each other.
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 MoreAfter Dante shocks Judge Nino and the poet Sordello with his corporeality, Nino launches into a diatribe against his “unfaithful” wife who has married another man after Nino’s death. It’s a shocking bit of misogyny in a poem that so often steers clear of such things. What are we to make of a great poem with such a foul bit in it?
Read MoreDante steps down into the dale of the negligent rulers and finds a compatriot: noble judge Nino. They embrace and Dante is so glad to find this friend in Purgatory, the very person the poet himself put there, the very way he can bolster the reality claims in COMEDY: by being amazed at the people he finds exactly where he put them.
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.
Read MorePURGATORIO, Canto VIII, opens with six of the most beautiful lines in all of Dante’s COMEDY: full of yearning, sadness, death, sunset, sunrise, hope, and human emotion. It continues on to explore the yearning through the third hymn or antiphon of Purgatory, then moves to see the stars wheeling above—that is, the spheres we’re walking toward.
Read MoreWe’ve already glossed this long, difficult passage about the darkening vale of the negligent rulers in the last episode of WALKING WITH DANTE. In this episode, I ask ten interpretive questions of the passage: some with answers, some with tentative answers, and some with mere speculation as an answer. Dante is showing us his increasingly intellectual side. Let’s figure out what he’s up to.
Read MoreSordello runs through the roster of kings and rulers in the beautiful vale on the lower slopes of Mount Purgatory. They’re lamenting their very actionable lives. And in running the list, Sordello is giving someone (Virgil? Dante? the reader?) a crash course in the politics of central and southern Europe from the mid to the late 1200s.
Read MoreSordello, Virgil, and Dante the pilgrim walk on an easy path to the rim of a beautiful dale that will hold the valley of the kings. But along the way, Dante the poet, a master of terror, must figure out how to begin to write about beauty. And he must once again renegotiate his position toward Virgil’s masterpiece, THE AENEID.
Read MoreSordello tells Virgil they have to find a place to settle in for the night because sunset will mean they can’t move up anymore. The allegory is intense: the will, light, darkness, stasis, and descent. Maybe you should will yourself to stand still when you don’t have any light, rather than moving backwards and away from your goal.
Read MoreOn the slopes before the official gate of Purgatory, the poet Sordello doesn’t seem to be bothered by the eternal state of Virgil’s soul. Instead, he wants to know how the damned Virgil got to Purgatory. So Virgil offers a story that reiterates what we know about Limbo, redefines Limbo again, and leaves the pilgrim Dante out of this journey across the known universe.
Read MoreAfter Sordello and Virgil embrace, Dante the poet appears to want to return Virgil to the center of the narrative stage in his walk across the known universe. But can he? How does he renegotiate the damned Virgil’s presence in the sections of COMEDY devoted to the redeemed? And what of Cato, always lurking the theology’s narrative background?
Read MoreDante’s invective against political strife comes to an end in PURGATORIO, Canto VI, with two familiar moves: a reference back to the poet’s own experience (never letting the poem get too far from his body) and to an image that brilliantly sums up Florentine strife while also perhaps offering a glimpse of the poet’s dawning, new stance.
Read MoreDante the poet has finally lost control! In the middle of his invective about Italian strife in PURGATORIO, Canto VI, he seems to question God’s counsel, to limit God’s power to that of a human body, and to turn the Christian God into a pagan entity. What is going on in this most complex passage in PURGATORIO?
Read MoreThe split between Dante the pilgrim and Dante the poet that we make in COMEDY is a convenient fiction that helps us come to terms with a polyvalent, multivocal, multitemporal, and ultimately ironic work of literature.
Read MoreThe story of Dante’s walk across his known universe breaks in PURGATORIO, Canto VI, right after Virgil and Sordello embrace. The rest of the canto is dedicated to the poet’s rage at the constant warfare on the Italian peninsula and his hope for an iron fist to set things right. Along the way, many of us have to confront our expectations that COMEDY may not be the poem we want it to be.
Read MoreDante and Virgil encounter the second guide across the known universe: Sordello, a late troubadour poet from Italy who is deeply connected to characters across COMEDY and who practiced a sort of poetry that Dante himself wrote earlier in his career. Sordello is isolated and alone, a strange figure in this broken-in-half sixth canto of PURGATORIO.
Read More