The Portable Dante (5 page)

Among Dante’s other minor works we find his two pastoral odes in Latin, addressed to Giovanni del Virgilio, who was a professor of Latin at the University of Bologna, where Dante at one time had probably studied. The exchange of Latin hexameters between the two men took place when Dante was staying in Ravenna some two years before his death. In his verses Giovanni del Virgilio reprimands Dante for writing his great poem in Italian rather than Latin. The eclogues are interesting insofar as they reveal Dante’s mood toward the end of his life: he seems to be playful, happy, and at peace with himself. Also evident in these verses is the poet’s pathetic wish to return to his fair city to receive the laurel crown, as well as his feelings and hopes for the
Divine Comedy.

A brief mention should be made of
Il
fiore
(
The Flower
), the authenticity of which has been questioned by many scholars. It is a sequence of 232 sonnets based on the French
Roman de la Rose.
Those few who are sure that this allegorical story of a successful seduction was written by Dante give two reasons: first, the author is referred to as Durante, which is a form of Dante; second, it is much too well composed to have been written by anyone else but Dante.
Il
fiore,
which is worth reading in its own right, is to be found in one manuscript of the late thirteenth century (first published in 1881 in Paris by Ferdinand Castets).

There are approximately fifty-four (and a possible twenty-six more) short poems (not included in the
Vita nuova
or
Convivio)
that Dante did not group together or organize in any way, but that modern editors have collected and called the
Canzoniere
or
Rime
(
Songbook
or
Rhymes
). They consist of scattered lyrics written over a long period of the poet’s life, many of which he probably tried to, but could not, fit into the structure of the
Vita nuova
or
Convivio.
Many, of course, were inspired by Beatrice, but there are some written for other women; some done as exercises, as part of his correspondence with other poets; and some composed simply to please ladies and gentlemen who were fond of poetry.

Dante undoubtedly wrote many letters. Unfortunately, only ten letters considered authentic have come down to us; all ten are written in Latin, and none is of a personal or intimate nature. There are also three other letters that Dante may have written on behalf of the countess of Battifolle, but they do not reflect his own thoughts.

To the student of the
Divine Comedy
the most interesting of Dante’s letters is the one addressed to Can Grande della Scala in which the author sets forth his purpose and method in writing his poem. The letter is extant in six manuscripts, three of which (all sixteenth-century) con
tain the letter in its entirety. He talks about the different meanings contained in the
Divine Comedy:
the first is called literal, the second allegorical or mystical. We learn that on the literal level the poem is about the state of souls after death; on the allegorical level, “The subject is man, liable to the reward or punishment of Justice, according to the use he has made of his free will. ”

In his letter he also discusses why he has called his poem a “comedy. ” The word, he says, is derived from
comus
and
oda
and means a “rustic song. ” Unlike tragedy, which begins in tranquillity but comes to a sad end, comedy may begin under adverse circumstances, but it always comes to a happy end. The style or language of comedy is humble while that of tragedy is lofty. Therefore, because his poem begins in Hell and has a happy ending in Paradise, and because it is written in a most humble language, which is the Italian vernacular, it is called the
Commedia.
The letter goes on with a meticulous, almost word-by-word examination of the beginning verses of the opening canto of the
Paradiso
up to the invocation to Apollo. The letter is thought by many to be an important piece of literary criticism seen in the framework of Dante’s time and tradition, and as such it certainly is worth reading in its own right.

Dante’s masterpiece is, of course, the
Divine Comedy
(the word
divina
was added to
commedia
by posterity). It is to some degree a result of his determination to fulfill the promise he made at the close of the
Vita nuova:
“If it be the wish of Him in whom all things flourish that my life continue for a few years, I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any lady. ”

No one knows when Dante began composing his great poem; some say perhaps as early as 1307. In any case the
Inferno
was completed in 1314, and it is probable that the final touches to the
Paradiso
were, as Boccaccio states, not made until 1321, the year of Dante’s death. The purpose of the poem, which has moved readers through the centuries, is, as Dante reveals in his epistle to Can Grande, “to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity. ”

The poem is divided into three major sections:
Inferno
(Hell),
Purgatorio
(Purgatory), and
Paradiso
(Heaven). Each section contains thirty-three cantos, with the exception of Hell, which has thirty-four—the opening canto serving as an introduction to the work as a whole. For the
Commedia
Dante invented a rhyme scheme known as
terza rima
(tertiary rhyme:
aba bcb cdc
), thus continuing to display his fascination with the number three, which was so much on his mind when he was composing the
Vita nuova
many years earlier. And each canto is divided into three-line stanzas called
terzine,
or tercets, in which the first and third lines rhyme, while the middle or second lines rhyme with the first and third of the next
terzina.
The basic metrical unit of the verse is the hendecasyllabic line, quite common in Italian poetry: it is an eleven-syllable line in which the accent falls on the tenth syllable.

The drama or main action of the poem centers on one man’s journey to God. It tells how God through the agency of Beatrice drew the poet to salvation; and the moral that Dante wishes his reader to keep in mind is that what God has done for one man he will do for every man, if every man is willing to make this journey. The reader of the poem would do well to distinguish from the very beginning of the
Commedia
between the two uses of the first-person singular: one designates Dante the pilgrim, the other Dante the poet. The first is a character in a story invented by the second. The events in the narrative are represented as having taken place in the past; the writing of the poem and the memory of these events, however, are represented as taking place in the present. For example, we find references to both past and present, and to both pilgrim and poet, in line 10 of the introductory canto of the
Inferno:
“How
I
entered
there
I
cannot
truly say” (italics added).

There are times in the poem when the fictional pilgrim (Dante the pilgrim) embodies many of the characteristics of his inventor (Dante the poet); for the
Commedia,
though it is above all the journey of Everyman to God, is in many ways a personal, autobiographical journey. It is often difficult, most times impossible, to say whether what is happening in the poem belongs to the real-life biography of the poet or the fictional biography of the pilgrim. For instance, at the beginning of canto XIX of the
Inferno
the pilgrim alludes to having broken a baptismal font in the church of his “lovely San Giovanni” (line 17). Now, Dante the poet may well have broken the font to save someone who was drowning within, but it is highly unlikely (and most inartistic) that he would mention the incident for the sole purpose of clearing his name in connection
with an act that some of his contemporaries would have thought sinful. The breaking of the font is an event that took place in the life of the pilgrim, and the pilgrim is not trying to “clear his name, ” as critics have suggested. Rather the poet is giving an example to the reader of the true nature of the sin of simony (the sin punished in canto XIX), which “breaks” the holy purposes of the church by perverting them.

The poet is the poet, but he is not the pilgrim, and the story traced in the
Commedia
is the story of Dante the pilgrim, who is at once himself and Everyman. We must keep in mind the allegory of the opening verse of the poem: “
Nel
mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai
…” (“Midway along the journey of our life / I found myself …”). Dante begins to construct his allegory of the double journey: that is, his personal experience in the world beyond (“I found myself”), open to Everyman in his own journey through this life (“of our life”). The poet finds himself wandering in a dark wood (the worldly life). He tries to escape by climbing a mountain that is lit from behind by the rays of the sun (God). His journey upward is impeded by the sudden appearance of three beasts: a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf (the three major divisions of sin, signifying the three major divisions of Hell: fraud, violence, and concupiscence). The poet is about to be driven back when, just as suddenly, Virgil (reason or human understanding) appears. He has been sent by Beatrice (divine revelation) to aid Dante, to guide him on this journey that cannot fail. The only way to escape from the dark wood is to descend into Hell (man must first descend into humility before he can raise himself to salvation or God). The way up the mountain, then, is to go down: before man can hope to climb the mountain of salvation, he must first know what sin is. The purpose of Dante’s journey through Hell is precisely this: to learn all there is to know about sin as a necessary preparation for the ascent to God. In fact, from the opening canto of the
Inferno
to the closing one of the
Paradiso,
Dante the poet presents his pilgrim as continuously learning, his spiritual development being the main theme of the entire poem. His progress is slow, and there are even occasional backslidings.

In
Inferno
IV the pilgrim and his guide, Virgil, who are now in Limbo, see a hemisphere of light glowing in the distance, and as they move toward it they are met by four great pagan poets. Virgil explains to his ward:

“Observe the one who comes with sword in hand, leading the three as if he were their master.

It is the shade of Homer, sovereign poet, and coming second, Horace, the satirist; Ovid is the third, and last comes Lucan.

(86-90)

Together with Virgil these four non-Christians form the group of those classical poets whom Dante most admired and from whom he drew much of the material for his poem. It must be said, however, that while Homer was known in the Middle Ages as the first of the great epic poets, the author of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
few people—and Dante was not among them—could read Greek; thus Homer’s great epics were known almost entirely second-hand through the revised versions of Dares and Dictys, who told the tale of the Trojan war in a way that exalted the Trojans and often disparaged the Greeks. Dante admired Homer more for his reputation than for any intimate knowledge that he had of his works. The second of the four is Horace, whom Dante calls the “satirist” but whom he must have thought of mainly as a moralist since Dante was familiar only with the
Ars poetica.
Ovid, who comes next, was the most widely read Roman poet in the Middle Ages, and he was Dante’s main source of mythology in the
Commedia.
Dante, however, seems to have been acquainted with only the
Metamorphoses.
Coming last is Lucan, author of the
Pharsalia,
which deals with the Roman civil war between the legions of Pompey and those of Caesar. The book was one of Dante’s important historical sources.

When the pilgrim and his guide have seen all there is to see of sin (canto XXXIV) they find they must exit from Hell by climbing down Lucifer’s monstrous, hairy body. Only by grappling with sin itself, by knowing the foundation of all sin, which is pride, personified in the hideous figure of Lucifer frozen in the ice at the very center of the universe, can they hope to make their way out “to see again the stars. ”

The island-mountain of Purgatory, invented by Dante, is divided into three parts. At the very top is the Earthly Paradise; the upper part of the mountain is sealed off from the lower by a gate that a resplendent angel guards, equipped with St. Peter’s keys. This upper half, with its seven cornices corresponding to the seven deadly sins, is reserved for those who have been permitted to enter the gate from below in order to begin the self-willed torments of their purgation; after its accomplishment they pass to the Earthly Paradise, from which they ascend to Heaven. In the lower half, the “Antepurgatory, ” dwell those souls who are not yet ready to begin their purgation. As for the reason why certain
souls are forced to put off the experience they all desire, the pilgrim is told by a number of individuals he meets that, while alive, they had put off repentance until the end (thus their delay is in the nature of a
contrapasso,
or retribution); it is generally accepted that all of the inhabitants of the Antepurgatory are to be considered as “late repentants. ” (The Antepurgatory is dealt with in the first nine cantos.) This mountain (whose creation was the miraculous result of Lucifer’s fall) keeps not only those assigned to Purgatory but also those destined for immediate passage to Heaven.

The middle portion of the mountain of Purgatory is surrounded by seven concentric ledges, each separated from the other by a steep cliff. On each ledge, or terrace, one of the seven capital sins is purged: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice (and Prodigality), Gluttony, Lust. The setup of the First Terrace (cantos IX-XII), where souls are being punished for the sin of Pride, establishes the pattern of purgation that is followed throughout Purgatory proper.