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30 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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In the middle of the journey of our life I cam to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and desnse, the thought of which renews my fear! So bitter is it that death is hardly more. But to give account of the good which I found there I will tell of the other things noted there.
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life is a journey, symbolic language, dark forest is described in vague terms, indication of protagaonist's own disorientation (spiritual, physical, psychological, moral, political), encouraged to identify with Dante and understand knowledge to be a learning process, poem structured so that sometimes must read backwards from later events to gain fuller understanding of what happened
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I cannot rightly tell how I entered there, I was so full of sleep at that moment when I left the true way; but when I had reached the foot of a hill at the end of that valley which had peirced my heart with fear I looked up and saw its shoulders already clothed with the beams of the planet that leads men straight on every road. Then the fear was quieted a little which had continued in the lake of my heart during the night I had spent so piteously; and as he who with labouring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to the perilous waters and gazes, so my mind, which was still in flight turned back to look again at the pass which never yet let any go alive
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dark wood, beginning of hell
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After I had rested my wearied frame for a little I took my way again over the desert slope, keeping always the lower foot firm; a leopard light and very swift, covered with a spotted hide, and it did not go from before my face but so impeded my way back that I turned many times to go back.
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need guide, needs strength, courage, and hope to continue on through hell
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I was put in fear by the sight of a lion which appeared to me and seemed to be coming against me holding its head high and furious with hunger so that the air seemed in dread of it, and of a she wolf which appeared in its leanness to be charged with all cravings and which has already made many live in wretchedness
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uncertain symbolism contributes to shadowy atmosphere, symbols of 3 major divison of hell: consupiscene (immoderate desires), violence, and fraud, associated with envy, pride, and avarice
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When I was rushing down to the place below there appeared before my eyes one whose voice seemed weak from long silence, and when I saw him in the great wast, 'Have pity on me, whoever thou art,' I cried to him 'shade or real man!' He answered me: 'Not man; once I was man, and my parents were Lombards, both Mantuan by birth...I was a poet and sang of that just son of Anchises who cam from Troy after proud Ilium was burned
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Virgil, classical poet whom Dante admired, Dante uses parts of book 6 of the Aeneid to shape mythological monsters and rivers
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The day was departing and darkened air releasing the creatures on the earth from their labours, and I, alone was preparing to endure the conflict both of the way and of the pity of it
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declaring himself unworthy to take journey, compares himself to Aneas and Paul, Paul visits third realm of heave, Aneas visted underworld, linked through association with Rome, Roman empire prepared the way for Christianity
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At that moment I heard a voice: 'Honour the lofty poet! His shade returns that left us.' When the voice had paused and there was silence I saw four great shades coming to us; their looks were neither sad nor joyful. The good Master began: 'Mark him there with sword in hand who comes before the three as their lord; he is Homer, the sovereign poet. he that comes next is Horace the moralist, Ovid is the third, and the las Lucan. Since each shares with me in the name the one voice uttered they give me honourable welcome, and in this do well.'
and then they showed me still greater honour, for they made me one of their number so that I was the sixth among those high intelligences |
Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, distinguished classical poets, Homer is eader and author of epic poems, Ovid:Metamorphoses, Lucan:Parsalia (treating the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey), Horace: satires and infuential poem about making poetry, majority of character and allusion from classical mythology derive from the works of these writers
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I learned that to such torment are condemened the carnal sinners who subject reason to desire. As in the cold season their wings bear the starlings along in a broad, dense flock, so does that blase the wicked spirits. Hither, thither, downward, upward, it drives them; no hope ever comforts them, not to say of rest, but of less pain. And as the cranes go chanting their lays, making themselves a long line in the air, so I saw approach with long-drawn wailings shades borne on these battling winds
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from Aristotle
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When I heard my Teacher name the knights and ladies of old times, pity came upon me and I was as one bewildered
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Lancelont and Guinevere
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O wearied souls, come and speak with us, if One forbids it not. As doves, summoned by desire, come with tings poised and motionless to the sweet nest, borne by their will through the air, so these left the troop
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ambiguous
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O living creatures gracious and friendly, who goest through the murky air visiting us who stained the world with blood, if the King of the universe were our friend we would pray to Him for thy peace, since thou hast pity of our evil plight
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terrace of lust, Dante speaking to the inhabitants here
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Love, which is quickly kindled in the gently heart, seized this man for the fair form that was taken from me, and the manner afflicts me still. Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as thou seest, it does not leave me yet
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objective, gently heart to seizing emphasizeds speed and power, manner refers to the fair form that was take from me
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I bent my head and held it down so long that at last the Poet said to me: 'What are thy thoughts?' 'Alas, how many sweet thoughts, how great desire brought them to the woeful pass!' 'Francesca, thy torments make me weep for grief and pity, but tell me, in the time of your sweet sighing how and by what occasion did love grant you to know your uncertain desires?'
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Dante can't answer question
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'There is no greater pain that to recall the happy time in misery, and this thy teacher knows; but if thou hast so great desire to know our love's first root, I shall tell as one may that weeps in telling. We read one day for pastime of Lancelot, how love constrained him. We were alone and had no misgiving. Many times that reading drew our eyes together and changed the colour in our faces, but one point alone it was that mastered us; when we read that the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he who never shall be parted form me, all trembling, kissed my mouth. A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it; that day we read in it no farther.' While the one spirit said this the other wept so that for pity I swooned as if in death and dropped like a dead body.
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masacism, pornography, guilded Dante, Lancelot and Guinever catalyst for Francesca's affair with Paolo, Francesca died to save her lover
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Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart, Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving, Love brought us to one death
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Francesca sums up her story in these three lines
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In this part Epicurus and all his gollowers, who make the soul die with the body, have their burial place
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heretics who believe Epicurus, soul dies with body, 6th circle of Hell
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O Tuscan who makest thy way alive through the city of fire and speakest so modestly, may it please thee to stop at this point: thy tongue shows thee native of that noble fatherland to which I was perhaps too harsh. Suddenly this sound issued from one of the chests, so that in fear I drew a little closer to my Leader. Who were thy ancestors?
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Farinata, rises out of his tomb from the waist up having great contempt for hell, enemy to Dante's political party,
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If thou goest through this blind prison by height of genius, where is my son and why is he not with thee? I come not of myself; he that waits yonder is leading me through here, perhaps to her your Guido held in disdain
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Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's best friend, married off to Farinata's daughter, didn't believe in the spiritual importance of Beatrice
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If thou break off any little branch from one of these trees, all thy present thoughts will prove mistaken
I put out my hand a little and plucked a twig from a great thorn, and its trunk cried: 'Why dost thou tear me?' And when it had turned dark with blood it began again: Hast thou no spirit of pity? As a green brand that is burning at one end drips from the other and hisses with the escaping wind, so from the broken splinter cam forth words and blood together; at which I let fall the tip and stood as one afraid |
suicide, Dante had a more neutral view of suicide compared to Aquinas, inhabitants of the horrid forest,
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Thou so allurest me with thy gentle speech
I kept nearly every other man from his secrets; and I brought such faithfulness to the glorious office that I lost for it sleep and strength. The harlot that never turned her shameless eyes from Caesar's household, the common bane and the vice of courts, inflamed all minds against me, and those inflamed so inflamed Augustus that happy honours turned to dismal woes. My mind, in scornful temper thinking by dying to escape from scorn, made me, just, unjust to myself. By the new roots of this tree I swear to you, never did I break faith with my lord |
Pier dell Vigna, accomplished poet, falsely accused of betraying Frederick's trust by envious colleauges and political enemies, story recalls that of Boethius recounting the fall from power of another talented individual falsely accused of betraying his emperor, took his own life because he could not, Vigna means vineyard making his presence in this part of hell both acceptable to his crime and ironic because of his name, souls will not be reunited with bodies on judgement day but will have them hang on the trees instead
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What I was living, that am I dead. Though Jove wear out his smith from whom in rage he seized the keen bolt with which, the last day, I was smitten - though he wear out the rest by turns at the black smithy in Mongibello, shouting "Help, help good Vulcan!" as once on the field of Phlegra, and hurl his shafts at me with all his force, he should not so have the joy of vengeance
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Capaneus, warrior king, embodies defiance against highest god, exemplary blasphemer, pagan character, scornful account of Jove striking him down with a lightning bolt, arrogant
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we met a troop of souls who were coming alongside the bank, and each looked at us as men look at one another under a new moon at dusk, and they pucckered their brows on us like an old tailor on the eye of his needle.
Eyed thus by that company, I was recognized by one who took me by the hem and cried: 'How marvellous!' Add I when he reached out his arm to me, fixed my eyes on his baked looks so that the scorched features did not keep my mind from recognizing him and, bending my face to his, I answered: 'Are you here, Ser Brunetto?' And he: 'O my son, let it not displease thee if Brunetto Latini turn back with thee a little and let the train go on.' 'With all my heart I beg it of you, and if you wish me to sit with you I will, if it plese him here with whom I go.' 'O son, whoever of this flock stops one moment lies afterwards for a hundred years without shielding himself when thte fire strikes him. Go on, therefore; I shll ocme at thy skirt and later rejoin my band who go mourning their eternal loss.' |
Brunetto Latini, one of the most important figures in Dante's life, among the sodomites, show great affection and respect for one another, similar punishment as Dante is serving out, mentor to Dante in his education, symbolic sodomy rather than literal, rhetorical perversion, failed theory of knowledge, proto-humanist pursuit of immortality
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I stood there, like the friar that shrives the treacherous assasin who after being fixed calls him back so that he delays his death, and he cried: 'Standest thou there already, Boniface? By several years the writing lied to me. Art thou so soon sated with these gains for which thou didst fear to take by guile the Lady Beautiful and then to do her outrage?'
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Boniface, metaphor: like a panderer or seducer who was married to the church, personal and public enemy number 1, political ambitions disrupted church, Clement, mistakes Dante for Boniface, foreshadows the coming of Bertrand who can be compared to Jason in the Bible, bought his spot
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I saw behind us a black devil come running up the ridge. Ah, how savage was his aspect and how fierce he seemed to me in his action, with open wings and light onhis feet! His shoulder, which was sharp and high, was laden with both thighs of a sinner and he held him clutched by the tendons of his feet.
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grimly comic interlude
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The one went under and the other lifted his breast, flying upward. Just so the wild duck instantly plunges under on the approach of the falcon, which turns upward again, vexed and dispirited. Calcabrina went flying after him, furious at the trick but eager for the sinner to escape so as to have a scuffle, and as soonas the barrator had disappeared he turned his claws on his fellow and got to grips with him over the ditch; but the other was indeed a full grown hawk to claw him well and both fell into the middle of the boiling pond. The heat unclutched them in a moment; but yet there was no getting out
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eagerness to accuse Dante causes them to get caught by fraud and cook in their crust
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Within there are tormented Ulysses and Diomed, and thus together they go under vengeance as once under wrath, and within their flame they groan for the ambush of the horse that made the gateway by which the noble seed of the Romans went forth
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joint punishment reflects combined exploits, three offenses: devising and executing the stratagem of the wooden horse, luring Achilles into the war effort, stealing the Palladium
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The greater horn of the ancient flame began to toss and murmur just as if it were beaten by the wind, then, waving the point to and fro as if it were the tongue that spoke, it flung forth a voice and said: 'When I parted from Circe, who held me more than year near Gaeta before Aeneas so named it, not fondness for a son, nor duty to an aged father, nor the loveI owed Penelope which should have gladdened her, could conquer within me the passion I had to gain experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men
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Dante's version of Ulysses, quest for worth and knowledge, model for the love of wisdom, renunciation of all family obligations, highly effective us of eloquence to win the minds of his men, voyage is morally unacceptable, Dante prefaces the presentation of Ulysses with a self-relfective warning not to abuse his own talent
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Neither has death yet reached him nor does guilt bring him for torment, but to give him full experience I , who am dead, must bring him down here through Hell from circle to ceircle; and this is as true as that I speak to thee
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Virgil talking about guiding Dante through Hell,
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When I heard him speak to me in anger I turned to him with such ashame that still it haunts my memory. Like one that dreams of harm to himself and, dreaming, wishes it a dream, so that he longs for that which is as if it were not, I became such that, unable to speak, I wished to excuse myself and did exucse myself all the while, not thinking that I did
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?
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Thou art to know that I was Count Ugolino and this is the Archbischip Ruggieri. I shall tell thee now why I am such a neighbour to him. How by means of his evil devices, confiding in him, I was taken and then killed, there is no need to tell; but what thou canst not have learnt, that is, how cruel was my death, thou shalt hear and shalt know if he has done me wrong
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Ugolino, final story of capacity for humankinds evil, tells of how he and his children were killed, antenora: political traitors, betrayed Pisa,
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