The Commedia by Dante Alighieri
Canto I
A Dark Wood / The Dark Wood of Error
1 When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
2 I found myself within a shadowed forest,
3 for I had lost the path that does not stray.
4 Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
5 that savage forest, dense and difficult,
6 which even in recall renews my fear:
7 so bitter death is hardly more severe!
8 But to retell the good discovered there,
9 I’ll also tell the other things I saw.
10 I cannot clearly say how I had entered
11 the wood; I was so full of sleep just at
12 the point where I abandoned the true path.
13 But when I’d reached the bottom of a hill
14 it rose along the boundary of the valley
15 that had harassed my heart with so much fear
16 I looked on high and saw its shoulders clothed
17 already by the rays of that same planet
18 which serves to lead men straight along all roads.
19 At this my fear was somewhat quieted;
20 for through the night of sorrow I had spent,
21 the lake within my heart felt terror present.
22 And just as he who, with exhausted breath,
23 having escaped from sea to shore, turns back
24 to watch the dangerous waters he has quit,
25 so did my spirit, still a fugitive,
26 turn back to look intently at the pass
27 that never has let any man survive.
28 I let my tired body rest awhile.
29 Moving again, I tried the lonely slope
30 my firm foot always was the one below.
31 And almost where the hillside starts to rise
32 look there!-a leopard, very quick and lithe,
33 a leopard covered with a spotted hide.
34 He did not disappear from sight, but stayed;
35 indeed, he so impeded my ascent
36 that I had often to turn back again.
37 The time was the beginning of the morning;
38 the sun was rising now in fellowship
39 with the same stars that had escorted it
40 when Divine Love first moved those things of beauty;
41 so that the hour and the gentle season
42 gave me good cause for hopefulness on seeing
43 that beast before me with his speckled skin;
44 but hope was hardly able to prevent
45 the fear I felt when I beheld a lion.
46 His head held high and ravenous with hunger
47 even the air around him seemed to shudder
48 this lion seemed to make his way against me.
49 And then a she-wolf showed herself; she seemed
50 to carry every craving in her leanness;
51 she had already brought despair to many.
52 The very sight of her so weighted me
53 with fearfulness that I abandoned hope
54 of ever climbing up that mountain slope.
55 Even as he who glories while he gains
56 will, when the time has come to tally loss,
57 lament with every thought and turn despondent,
58 so was I when I faced that restless beast
59 which, even as she stalked me, step by step
60 had thrust me back to where the sun is speechless.
61 While I retreated down to lower ground,
62 before my eyes there suddenly appeared
63 one who seemed faint because of the long silence.
64 When I saw him in that vast wilderness,
65 Have pity on me, were the words I cried
66 whatever you may be a shade, a man.
67 He answered me: Not man; I once was man.
68 Both of my parents came from Lombardy,
69 and both claimed Mantua as native city.
70 And I was born, though late, sub Julio, and
71 lived in Rome under the good Augustus the
72 season of the false and lying gods.
73 I was a poet, and I sang the righteous
74 son of Anchises who had come from
75 Troy when flames destroyed the pride of Ilium.
76 But why do you return to wretchedness?
77 Why not climb up the mountain of delight,
78 the origin and cause of every joy?
79 And are you then that Virgil, you the fountain
80 that freely pours so rich a stream of speech?
81 answered him with shame upon my brow.
82 O light and honor of all other poets, may my
83 long study and the intense love that made me
84 search your volume serve me now.
85 You are my master and my author, you
86 the only one from whom my writing drew the
87 noble style for which I have been honored.
Where are we? What has happened?
At the age of thirty-five, on the night of Good Friday, the day that recalls the death of Jesus in the year 1300, Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood and full of fear . He sees a sun-drenched mountain in the distance, and he tries to climb it, but three beasts, a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf, stand in his way. Dante is forced to return to the forest where he meets the spirit of Virgil, the Roman poet, who promises to lead him on a journey downward into the earth, through Hell so that he may be able to enter heaven or Paradise. Dante agrees to the journey and follows Virgil through the gates of Hell.
Virgil (70-19 B.C.) – Dante’s guide through the first two journeys, lived under Julius Caesar and then Augustus during Rome’s growth from republic to empire. He wrote in Latin his famous Aeneid. This epic poem tells the journey of Aeneas from Troy (he is a Trojan prince)–following its destruction by the Greeks–eventually to Italy, where he founds the line of rulers that will lead to Caesar and the Roman empire of Virgil’s day. The poem is a magnificent piece of political propaganda aimed at honoring the emperor Augustus. Two episodes from Virgil’s epic were of particular interest to Dante.
Book 4 tells the tragic tale of Aeneas and Dido, the queen of Carthage who kills herself when Aeneas–her lover–abandons her to continue his journey and fulfill his destiny by founding a new civilization in Italy.
Book 6, in which Aeneas visits the underworld to meet the shade/ghost of his father (Anchises) and learn future events in his journey and in the history of Rome. This provides key ideas about the Greek & Roman concepts of the afterlife– mythological monsters and rivers of burning sulphur –that Dante uses to shape his own version of the afterlife – especially hell.
After hell – the underworld – where people suffer for the sins and evil they have done in life, Dante will visit two other realms – Purgatoria/Purgatory, a type of middle world between the punishments of hell and the joys of heaven. Here people have hope that once they have paid for the wrongs they have done through some minor sufferings or punishments, they might ascend to heaven. Heaven, in Dante’s third book is Paradiso/Paradise.
What do we need to know as readers to understand Dante’s masterpiece? One writer has called the Commedia a foundational work of European literature.
First, a comedy, in the medieval sense does not mean funny or humorous. In simple terms, a comedy is a story that ends happily. A tragedy is a story that ends sadly.
In China at this time, the Song Dynasty has ended and the Mongols are ruling. Kublai Khan rules over all of China as emperor of the Yuan dynasty. In the West many city-states are growing strong – Rome, Florence, Naples in Italy, Athens in Greece, Madrid in Spain.. The very first university in the world has been founded by Christian monks in Paris – the university of Paris. The second and third universities – Oxford and Cambridge – are been established in England, also by Christian monks, scholars and teachers.
Why is it important to mention that these first centers of advanced learning were founded by Christians? Because how one views the world – one’s world view – influences the literature. Remember that in the Middle Eastern culture of Asia at this time – the Persian and Arabic literatures were shaped by Islam, the beliefs handed down from the prophet Mohammed as contained in the Koran, the book of religious writings. In China, Confucianism, but also Buddhism and Taoism, and in India, Hinduism, provide answers to the big questions of life: Who Are We? Why Are We Here? What is the Meaning of Life? Where Do We Go When We Die?
The Christian worldview is a core idea in Dante’s writing. But before we continue with that or with the Comedy, who was Dante?
Dante was born in Florence in May 1265. His family was of an old family, of noble birth but no longer wealthy.
When he was only 12 years old, his marriage to the daughter of the famous Donati family was arranged, along with the amount of her dowry. These betrothals and marriages were family affairs, and Dante dutifully married her, some years later, at the proper time and had two sons and one daughter.
Dante studied at the University of Bologna, one of the most famous universities in the medieval world. There, he came under the influence of one of the most famous scholars of the time, Brunetto Latini, who never taught Dante but advised and encouraged him. Latini appears in Canto XV of the Inferno.
When Dante was still very young, 10 to 12 years old, he met a 9-year-old girl at a public event. She wore a bright red-crimson dress, and to Dante, she glowed with the innocent beauty of an angel. The girl was Beatrice, and there is no doubt that she was the great love of Dante’s life, and the greatest single influence on his work. Dante loved her from a distance, and she was probably unaware of Dante’s love for her. He wrote about his feelings for her in an early work Vita Nuova –A New Life. After Virgil, the poet, can guide Dante no higher in Purgatory, she becomes his guide.
As a young man, in his 20s, Dante gets caught up in the war of the ruling families to see who will control Florence. At first his side wins, and he is given a post as a type of diplomat to Rome. But while he is gone the power shifts to the other family and he suddenly becomes an exile, in 1302. He will never return to his beloved city of Florence.
In exile he begins to write his life’s work – the Comedy. Only several hundred years later will the word “Divine” be added to the full title.
The poem is 100 Cantos – or chapters. The first is an introduction. The next 33 Cantos make up hell. The next 33 Cantos are about Purgatory. The last 33 Cantos take Dante into the heavens and then a realm beyond space and time where God dwells. Each Cantos varies, but is usually between 100-200 lines. The lines are grouped into 3-line stanzas.
Dante created a a poetic form called the terza rima, a type of 3 line stanza with an interlocking rhyme – very like the Ruby-iat of Persian poetry.
The stanzas are aba – bcb – cdc – and so on. Here are the first three stanzas in Italian, the original language.
1 Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
2 mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
3 ché la diritta via era smarrita.
4 Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
5 esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
6 che nel pensier rinova la paura!
7 Tant’è amara che poco è più morte;
8 ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,
9 dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.
Why is The Divine Comedy so important to Western and World literature?
First, Dante’s work is masterfully organized – 3-lines of poetic beauty, into 33 cantos of 3 books that show the poet’s skill of language, image, sound and meaning. He is a great poet.
Second, Dante explores important ideas: what happens when bad people die? When good people die? When people who are 50 percent bad and 50 percent good die? What is eternal justice? So someone who is evil but grows rich and successful in this life will be punished when God, the judge of the universe, examines a person’s life after death. And good, but poor people, will be rewarded. A murderer who escapes punishment on earth will not escape after death. This world may not be just – evil people prosper – but after death, justice will rule.
The worldview that underlies Dante is the Western view, often known as the Judeo-Christian worldview. It dates from the time of the Holy Bible, first begun in 1500 B.C. – one of the very first recorded world literatures – and finished in about 100 A.D., during the Han Dynasty. This view says that one, living God, the great Dao, created the heavens and the earth and all of life on earth. His power sustains all life today. This power is what makes your heart beat, even when you sleep. This power allows us to breathe. What we breathe, our atmosphere, the complex mix of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, the life, breathing organism that is our world, with water, land, living, growing food, all of the 1.5 million living species of life are the result of God speaking this life into being.
And the highest creation, made last was man. Well, technically, woman was created after man, so she is probably superior.
The first parents of human beings, Adam and Eve, lived in a garden of earthly delights known as paradise. They did not wear clothes. They did not need to. They were as innocent as children. They had not sense of shame, no need to cover up. They had one rule to obey. God told them not to eat the fruit of one tree – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit looks delicious, but they have every other kind of fruit tree, every growing plant to eat. But they are tempted by the Serpent – known as Satan, or the devil – and they eat the fruit. They disobey God. They break his one law. They must be punished. They must leave the garden. Sin or disobedience has entered this perfect world. Death now has entered the world. All of creation is affected. Adam and Eve no longer have such a good relationship with their God.
This story explain why evil exits in the world – sickness, rape, theft, lying, war, death – because every human being is now born with a type of spiritual birth defect, a moral cancer – sin – a natural temptation to break God’s law.
According to Dante and everyone who would read and understand his poetry, human beings all sin – everyone breaks God’s laws. What are these laws? They are written on our hearts. Do we not know when we tell a lie that it is wrong? Do we not know when we steal something that does not belong to us that it is wrong? When we murder someone we know? When we engage in sexual sin or adultery, we know it is wrong. God has written his laws of right and wrong – his moral law – on people’s hearts.
Second, he has given all people a conscience – a type of inner voice that talks to us. Con is Latin for with and science is knowledge. So when someone breaks the moral law written on our hearts, we do so with knowledge.
Third, and most importantly, because God loves his special creation – human beings – He offers forgiveness to all men and women through the death of Jesus, the savior of the world. But many people will reject this forgiveness because the power of evil is so strong.
Thus, Dante and this worldview says no one is without an excuse – we are all guilty for our wrong doings and though we might not be punished in this life, we will be in the next. In our own minds we think we are pretty good people. We judge ourselves by our human standards, which are often very low. But when we leave this life, we must stand in the courtroom of eternal justice, before God, who is fair and just. All wrongs will be made right.
When Dante descends into hell he recognizes many evil people from Florence and from history who have not escaped the wrongs they have done. There is descending degree of punishment in the Inferno – a funnel shape with the very worst people at the very bottom.
Hell is a horrible place of darkness, smoke and fire, the smell of burning flesh, screams and crying. Demons torture people.
Who does he meet?
In the second circle he meets the lovers Paolo and Francesca in a place completely dark. There is noise worse than that of a storm at sea. Weeping, moaning, and shrieking, the spirits are whirled and swept by a wind storm. Dante learns that these are the spirits doomed by sexual lust. He asks the names of some that are blown past, and Virgil answers with their names and some knowledge of their stories.
Dante asks to speak to two sinners who seem stuck together in an embrace. Virgil tells him to call them in the name of love. They come, and the girl thanks Dante for his pity and wishes him peace, and she then tells their story. She reveals first that a lower circle of Hell waits for the man who murdered them. With bowed head, Dante tells Virgil he is thinking of the “sweet thoughts and desires” that brought the lovers to this place. Calling Francesca by name, he asks her to explain how she and her lover were lured into sin.
Francesca replies that a book of the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere – the knight and wife of King Arthur of England — caused their downfall. They were alone, reading it aloud, and so many parts of the book seemed to tell of their own forbidden love. They kissed, and the book was forgotten. “We read no more that day.”
During her story, the other spirit weeps bitterly, and Dante is so moved by pity that he also weeps—and then he faints.
Paolo & Francesca lived when Dante did. Francesca’s father lord of Ravenna had waged a long war with Malatesta, lord of Rimini. Finally peace was made and to make it more firm, they decided to cement it with a marriage. Guido would give his beautiful young daughter Francesca in marriage to Gianciotto, eldest son of Malatesta.
Though Gianciotto was very capable and expected to become ruler when his father died, he was ugly and deformed. Guido’s friends informed him that if Francesca sees Gianciotto before the marriage, she would never go through with it. So they sent Gianciotto’s younger brother Paolo to Ravenna with a full mandate to marry Francesca in Gianciotto’s name. Paolo was a handsome, pleasing, very courteous man, and Francesca fell in love the moment she saw him.
The deceptive marriage contract was made, and Francesca went to Rimini. She was not aware of the deception until the morning after the wedding day, when she saw Gianciotto getting up from beside her. When she realized she had been fooled, she became furious. In any case, the feelings of Paolo and Francesca for each other were still very much alive when Gianciotto went off to a nearby town on business.
With almost no fear of suspicion, they became intimate. Gianciotto’s servant found them out, and told his master all he knew. Gianciotto returned secretly to Rimini and went to Francesca’s room. Since it was bolted from within, he shouted to her and pushed against the door. Paolo and Francesca recognized his voice, and Paolo pointed to a trapdoor that led to a room below. He told Francesca to go open the door as he planned his escape. As he jumped through, a fold of his jacket got caught on a piece of iron attached to the wood. Francesca had already opened the door for Gianciotto, thinking she would be able to make excuses, now that Paolo was gone.
When Gianciotto entered and noticed Paolo caught by his jacket. He ran, rapier in hand, to kill him. Seeing this, Francesca quickly ran between them, to try to prevent it. But Gianciotto’s rapier was already on its way down. Before reaching Paolo, the blade passed through Francesca’s bosom. Gianciotto, completely beside himself because of this accident— for he loved the woman more than himself— withdrew the blade, struck Paolo again, and killed him.
Leaving them both dead, he left, and returned to his duties. The next morning, amidst much weeping, the two lovers were buried in the same tomb.
Farther down Dante meets two more people whose stories he knew well:
Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri were friends, planning together to overthrow their government. However, Ruggieri had other plans. He seized control of the city and imprisoned Ugolino with his sons and grandsons in the “tower of hunger.”There is only a slit in the wall for a window… and the solid door is nailed shut. Ugolino realizes that not only are they not ever leaving this cell, but their jailors have no intention of feeding them.The children, realizing the predicament, offer themselves as food for their father, saying “You gave us flesh… now take it from us!” After four days, the children die.By the sixth day, with nothing eaten, Count Ugolino has gone blind and emaciated from the hunger. His vision and senses blurred, he gropes over their dead bodies, unable to see them any longer. Though they were dead, he called their names out for two days.
and.. “Then hunger proved more powerful than grief.”
So, the journey Dante takes – for all of us to learn from– offers a warning to sinners to repent, to change one’s evil ways, but hope to those who seek to live good and holy lives by seeking God’s love.
It was a vision in poetry that set a very high standard for poetry – not short, cute song lyrics, not poetry that only described nature or human feelings, but a vast and grand poetry that imagined the life beyond this one.
Medieval Lyrics
Balade
If you wish to sell your kisses,
I will gladly buy some,
And in return you will have my heart as deposit.
To use them as inheritance,
By the dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
Don’t sell them to me at so high a price
As you would a total stranger
For you are receiving me as your friend.
If you wish to sell your kisses,
I will gladly busy some.
And in return you will have my heart as deposit.
My complete wish and desire
Are yours in spite of all suspicion;
Allow, as a faithful and wise woman,
That for my reward and share
I may be among the first served,
If you wish to sell your kisses.
Aubade
Deep in an orchard, under hawthorn leaves,
The lady holds her lover in her arms,
Until the watcher cries, he sees the dawn.
Dear God, the daybreak! Oh how soon it comes!
If only God let night stay without end,
And my beloved never left my side,
And never again the guard saw day or dawn—
Dear God, the daybreak! Oh how soon it comes!
Let us kiss, sweet beloved, you and I
Down in the meadows where the birds now sing—
Defy my jealous husband and do all!
Dear God, the daybreak! Oh how soon it comes!
Let us create new love-sports, sweet beloved,
Down in the meadows where the birds now sing –
Until the watcher plays his pipe again.
Dear God, the daybreak! Oh how soon it comes!
In the sweet wind that came to me from wthere
I drank a ray of my beloved’s breath,
My fair and joyous, gracious lover’s breath—
Dear God, the daybreak! Oh how soon it comes!
The lady is delightful, lovable,
Admired by many for her beauty’s sake,
And holds her heart most loyally in love.
Dear God, the daybreak! Oh how soon it comes!
A Lover’s Prize
(by Beatrice, Countess of Dia)
I have been in great distress
For a knight for whom I longed;
I want all future times to know
How I loved him to excess
Now I see I am betrayed—
By claims I did not give him love—
Such was the mistake I made,
Naked in bed, and dressed.
How I’d long to hold him pressed
Naked in my arms one night—
If I could be his pillow once,
Would he not know the height of bliss?
Floris was all to Blanchefleur,
Yet not so much as I am his:
I am giving my heart, my love,
My mind, my life, my eyes.
Fair, gentle lover, gracious knight,
If once I held you as my prize
And lay with you a single night
And gave you a love-laden kiss-
My greatest longing is for you
To lie there in my husband’s place,
But only if you promise this:
To do all I would want to do.
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