11 (pp. 176-177) be three of them tormented thus ... is Cassius: The three arch-sinners tortured by the arch-monster in the deepest pit of Hell all sinned against the divinely inspired Church and the Roman Republic, which eventually, under the Empire, inherited God’s favor and protected the Church. Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ; his back is flayed, as was Christ’s on the way to the Crucifixion, and his head is inside of one of Lucifer’s mouths. Brutus and Cassius conspired against Rome’s first emperor, Julius Caesar; they hang by their legs with their heads down (a somewhat lesser punishment).
12 (p. 177) night is reascending, and ‘tis time: Virgil continues to tell time in Hell by reference to astronomy. It is now Easter Saturday and approximately twenty-four hours have passed since the journey began, roughly 6:00 P.M.
13 (p. 178) where he had had his legs: Some scholars have made a convincing argument that the “he” in this sentence refers not to Virgil but to Lucifer. To understand why this might be the case, it must be remembered that the middle of Lucifer’s body would correspond to the absolute center of the earth, of earthly gravity, and of the Ptolemaic universe. Dante is confused when he thinks Virgil is turning around and going back upward the way they came down before. Virgil first sets out climbing down the legs of Lucifer as if on a ladder, and when he reaches Lucifer’s shanks (Longfellow employs the more general word “legs”), Virgil and Dante must turn in the other direction as if they were now climbing up a ladder: When reaching the center of the Ptolemaic universe, in other words, “down” suddenly becomes “up.” Clutching Virgil’s back and with his arms clasped around his guide’s head, Dante is naturally confused and frightened by this apparent shift of direction. In 1. 90, the Pilgrim quite understandably sees Lucifer’s legs upside down.
14 (p. 178) What the point is beyond which I had passed: This is the center of gravity and of the earth.
15 (p. 178) “the sun to middle-tierce returns”: Mysteriously telling time by the reference to the sun (which is not visible in Hell), Virgil informs the Pilgrim that it is halfway between the canonical hours of Prime (6:00 A.M.) and Terce (9:00 A.M.)—or 7:30 A.M. In 1. 68 Dante informed us that it was about 6:00 P.M. (see note 12). The sudden shift in time may be explained by the hint we are given in this line that the time is being calculated by the sun, not the moon. We are now past Earth’s center and have moved into the Southern Hemisphere on our way to Purgatory. There the time is twelve hours ahead of the time in the Northern Hemisphere.
16 (p. 178) “Where is the ice? ... Has the sun made his transit?”: Like the reader of these passages about the final geography of Hell, the confused Pilgrim wants answers to three questions: (1) where is the ice?; (2) how did he come to turn around?; and (3) how did the time jump ahead 12 hours? Virgil responds to his queries in 11. 106-120.
17 (p. 178) “the fell worm”: Virgil compares Lucifer’s position in the center of Earth to that of a worm in the core of a piece of fruit.
18 (p. 179) judecca: The fourth and last section of Cocytus is finally named. The Italian term for this region (la Giudecca) is also the name of a quarter in Venice, inhabited at one time by the Jews of the city.
19 (p. 179) “Upon this side ... and back recoiled”: Virgil now explains that Lucifer’s body fell through the Southern Hemisphere into the earth’s core. The land that was once there fell under the surface of the sea (“made of the sea a veil”), causing the land in the Northern Hemisphere to rise higher above the waters. The land where Lucifer made impact rushed upward (“and back recoiled”) to form the mountain we shall eventually see in Purgatory, the next canticle of The Divine Comedy.
20 (p. 179) Beelzebub: This is another name for Lucifer.
21 (p. 179) Of a small rivulet ... into that hidden road now entered: This small stream is never identified, but many scholars believe it to be the River Lethe. This stream apparently washed away a space (“Through chasm within the stone, which it has gnawed”) below the land that rushed upward to form the Mount of Purgatory, and it is through this opening that the travelers climb from Lucifer’s “tomb” to Earth’s surface.
22 (p. 179) to rebehold the stars: The Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise all conclude with the word “stars” (stelle), the direction man’s journey toward God must take. The sight of these stars has been denied to the Pilgrim during his journey through Hell, and there is a palpable sense of relief when the celestial bodies finally come back into view. Although the Inferno represents the most violent, disagreeable, and despicable place in the world of the afterlife, the fact that the Pilgrim encounters the stars once again ends his journey happily. Dante’s definition of a comedy, it must always be remembered, stressed a happy ending.
Six Sonnets on Dante’s The Divine Comedy
BY
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
(1807-1882)
I
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o‘er; Far off the noises of the world retreat; The loud vociferations of the street Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day, And leave my burden at this minster gate, Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate To inarticulate murmurs dies away, While the eternal ages watch and wait.
II
How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers! But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves, And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain, What exultations trampling on despair, What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, Uprose this poem of the earth and air, This mediaeval miracle of song!
III
I enter, and I see thee in the gloom Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine! And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine. The air is filled with some unknown perfume;
The congregation of the dead make room For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine; Like rooks that haunt Ravenna’s groves of pine The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb.
From the confessionals I hear arise Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies, And lamentations from the crypts below;
And then a voice celestial that begins With the pathetic words, “Although your sins As scarlet be,” and ends with “as the snow.”
IV
With snow-white veil and garments as of flame, She stands before thee, who so long ago Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe From which thy song in all its splendors came;
And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name, The ice about thy heart melts as the snow On mountain heights, and in swift overflow Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame.
Thou makest full confession; and a gleam, As of the dawn on some dark forest cast, Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase;
Lethe and Eunoe—the remembered dream And the forgotten sorrow—bring at last That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.
V
I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze With forms of saints and holy men who died, Here martyred and hereafter glorified; And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ’s Triumph, and the angelic roundelays, With splendor upon splendor multiplied; And Beatrice again at Dante’s side No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires O‘er all the house-tops and through heaven above Proclaim the elevation of the Host!
VI
O star of morning and of liberty! O bringer of the light, whose sp
lendor shines Above the darkness of the Apennines, Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea, The voices of the mountains and the pines, Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights, Through all the nations; and a sound is heard, As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes, In their own language hear thy wondrous word, And many are amazed and many doubt.
Inspired by the Inferno
Gustave Doré, whose haunting illustrations of The Divine Comedy are included in this volume, and Michelangelo, who portrays Minos and Charon being dragged down to Hell in his famous fresco The Last Judgment, are just two of the many artists and illustrators who have used their talents to visualize the extraordinary landscape of Dante’s epic.
It is said that Dante once broke the baptismal font in the church of San Giovanni in Florence to save a drowning child. Today the baptistery houses one of the great monuments of the Italian Renaissance, the Mosaic of the Cupola, completed in the thirteenth century by a collective of the day’s premier mosaic artists. Closely following Dante’s text, the mosaic depicts a many-mouthed Lucifer, perched among human carnage. The devil, five times the size of his victims, is crowned with two great horns, and snakes protrude from his long ears; numerous demons scattered around the huge Lucifer continually load mortals into his gaping maws.
In the 1480s Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici commissioned the Italian artist Sandro Botticelli to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy. Botticelli enveloped the onlookers and Dante and Virgil in robes of royal red and blue, and rendered the condemned, who writhe in torment, a pasty white. Botticelli never finished his illustrations, and the sheets, in varying stages of completion, were scattered across Europe. In September 2000 a collection of ninety-two surviving Botticelli drawings illustrating The Divine Comedy were assembled as a cycle again for the first time in five centuries and shown in museums around the world.
The celebrated English poet William Blake (1757-1827) was also a gifted painter and illustrator. His works include 102 illustrations based on The Divine Comedy. Because most of the drawings are unfinished, large portions, which were meant to be colored, remain blank, lending an almost celestial brightness to Blake’s depictions of Hell.
The major work of Italian illustrator Amos Nattini are considered to be the hundred lithographs dedicated to Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed between 1923 and 1941. Nattini’s dreamlike Inferno images present writhing seas of sinners, gnarled branches, winged devils, and almost sentimental portraits of the condemned.
To celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth (1265), Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí produced a series of wood engravings based on The Divine Comedy. (The Italian government withdrew a commission that had started the work, but the artist completed it anyway.) In the colorful images, Dalí employs the elongated limbs, crutches, and melting colors that are typical of his work to create serpentine demons and cannibalizing sinners whose faces drape over surfaces.
For his Inferno series (1959 and 1960), Expressionist artist Robert Rauschenberg produced thirty-four drawings, one for each canto. The scratchy quality of Rauschenberg’s work, which has buried within it figures and impressions that the viewer must unearth, makes for an apt translation of Dante’s Inferno, as do his textured browns and blacks, punctuated by the red and orange of hellfire. Rauschenberg’s Lucifer—triple-mouthed, lion-headed, and wearing a pair of bloody wings—is one of the most frightening devils ever depicted.
Illustrator Barry Moser achieves a ghostly and ghastly feeling in his stark, black-and-white drawings of Dante’s Inferno, completed in 1980. He brings a clinical, anatomical approach to images of physical torment—from the spikes of a crucifixion to an eyeless soul spreading open his chest with his fingers to reveal the bones underneath—that resonate with fear and horror.
Painter and printmaker Michael Mazur completed his series of forty-one etchings for Dante’s Inferno in 2000; thirty-five of the works had appeared alongside poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s translation of the Inferno, published in 1993. His black-and-white etchings, brood ingly dark, feature searing, unforgettable imagery: disembodied heads raining down from the sky; souls with their heads twisted backward; thrashing, winged demons; a hideous, multifaced Lucifer enshrouded in shadow; and a redemptive closing panel of the stars splashed with a brilliant blue.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Dante’s Inferno through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
REV. HENRY STEBBING
The distinguishing characteristic of Dante’s poetry, though far from wanting in occasional passages of exquisite tenderness and beauty, is its sublimity, and hence by general consent the Inferno is placed at an almost immeasurable distance above the other two parts of the Commedia, which required a milder and more brilliant fancy. In respect to sublimity, Dante has but one superior, our own Milton. The scenes he depicts have the terrible distinctness of places beheld in a vivid dream; the language of his personages makes an equally powerful impression on the mind—it is short, pointed, and abrupt, and such as we might expect to hear from miserable beings dreading the fiery lash of pursuing demons, but retaining their sense of human sympathy.
—from Lives of the Italian Poets (1831)
ROBERT BROWNING
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno, Wrote one song—and in my brain I sing it, Drew one angel—borne, see, on my bosom!
—from One Word More (1855)
THEODORE W. KOCH
Although the early American students of Dante were not without their influence in creating a local and limited interest in their author, yet they left but little lasting incitement to the study of him. They did not succeed in bringing Dante before the American reading public, or in giving him the audience he merited. To Longfellow this honor chiefly belongs. No one in America has done so much in the service of this master. The homage paid by the first of our poets to Italy’s chiefest singer of rhymes is a significant bond of union.
—from Dante in America (1896)
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
Many persons, and among them wise ones, ask some such question as this: Inasmuch as Dante was a most distinguished man of learning, why did he choose to compose so lofty a subject as that of his Commedia, in the Florentine idiom, and why not rather in Latin verse, as preceding poets had done? To this question I reply that two principal reasons, among many, occur to me. The first is that he did it in order to be of the most general use to his fellow-citizens and to other Italians. For he knew that if he wrote in Latin metre, as previous poets had done, he would have been useful only to the learned, while by writing in the vernacular he would accomplish something that had never been done before, without preventing his being understood by men of letters. While showing the beauty of our idiom and his own excellent art therein, he gave both delight and understanding of himself to the unlearned, who formerly had been neglected by every one.
The second reason that moved him to employ the vernacular was this. When he saw that liberal studies had been forsaken by all, and especially by princes and other great men to whom poetic works are commonly dedicated, and that, as a result, the divine works of Virgil and of other lofty poets not only were come to be held in light regard, but were almost despised by the majority, he actually began, as his lofty subject demanded, in this manner:
Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo, Spiritibus que lata patent, que premia solvunt Pro meritis cuicumque
suis, etc.
There, however, he let it stand, for he believed that in vain would crusts of bread be put in the mouths of those who were still sucking milk. He therefore began his work anew in a style suited to modem feelings, and continued it in the vulgar tongue.
—from Life of Dante, translated by James Robinson Smith (1901)
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Divine Comedy is not strictly an allegorical poem in the sense in which the Faerie Queene is; and yet it is full of allegorical symbols and figurative meanings. In a letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante writes: “It is to be remarked, that the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary one may say manifold. For one sense is that which is derived from the letter, and another is that which is derived from the things signified by the letter. The first is called literal, the second allegorical or moral.... The subject, then, of the whole work, taken literally, is the condition of souls after death, simply considered. For on this and around this the whole action of the work turns. But if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, how by actions of merit or demerit, through freedom of the will he justly deserves reward or punishment.”
It may not be amiss here to refer to what are sometimes called the sources of the Divine Comedy. Foremost among them must be placed the Eleventh Book of the Odyssey, and the Sixth of the Æneid; and to the latter Dante seems to point significantly in choosing Virgil for his Guide, his Master, his Author, from whom he took “the beautiful style that did him honor.”
The Inferno (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 30