In the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno, Dante and Virgil travel through the woods filled with old, gnarled trees devoid of any greenery. Dante hears screams surrounding him but does not see anybody, which leaves him confused. Virgil suggests to Dante to pluck a branch of a tree and when he does, the tree cries out in pain, asking him as it bleeds: “Why do you rip me?/Have you no sense of pity whatsoever?” (13.35-36). All the trees and bushes in this forest represents humans who have committed the sin of suicide and “once the soul/departs the body it has torn itself away from/ Minòs sends it down to the seventh hole/There like a grain of spelt, it germinates/soon springs into a sapling, then a wild tree” (13.94-100). These humans are described
