Examples Of Foreshadowing In Dante's Inferno

Never to be Unstuck, Always to be Eaten Away at “Midway along the journey of our life / I woke up find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path / How hard it is to tell what it was like, / this wood of wilderness, savage, and stubborn / (the thought of it brings back all my old fears) / a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitter” (1.1-6) In these very first lines of Inferno from the Divine Comedy by Dante, there is a foreshadowing of another dark wood to come ahead. When Dante and Virgil reach the second ring of the seventh circle of hell. They are met with the Woods of Suicides, where the souls that denied their bodies by committing suicide, and are now trees and bushes that are eaten away by half-beast, half-bird women who eat away at the trees and bushes leaves that cause them excoriating pain, because they still have all the feeling they would ask if they still had their physical body. When Dante finds himself in the dark wood, he is questions himself and choices in lift. Dante finding himself in a dark wood could be symbolic of a dark wood in a mental sense, which would make an even further connection to the Woods of Suicides. Also, in the Woods of Suicides, the soul are bound to the ground, and in the beginning of the epic poem, Dante refers to the wood he finds himself in “a wood of …show more content…
Since the suicides have “denied the God-given sanctity of their bodies on earth,’ (cite) they are deemed unfit for human form. At the gates of hell stands King Minos who judges to what level of hell the damned should be condemned. Since they tore themselves away from their body through violence, Minos discards their souls into the Forest of Suicides and the soul grows into an anguished and gnarled tree or bush. (Notice the placement of the soul is haphazard and disordered – “anywhere fortune tosses it” – analogous to how the Suicides treated their