The Divine Comedy

Overview

The poem has a hundred cantos in three parts, and the arithmetic is deliberate: one introductory canto, then thirty-three each for Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The verse form, invented for this poem, chains three-line stanzas together by rhyme so that the second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third of the next, which means no stanza can be lifted out without breaking two others. Threes are everywhere, because the poem is about a triune God and because Dante liked his structures to say something.

Dante called it a comedy for the medieval reason that it begins badly and ends well, and because it is written in a middle style rather than the high style of Latin epic. The “divine” was added by admirers later.

Three things to settle before you start. It is a first-person narrative, and the narrator is the author under his own name, walking through the afterlife in 1300 while still alive. It is populated almost entirely by real people, many of them recently dead, some of them Dante’s personal enemies, and the reader is expected to care who they were. And it has a politics: Dante was a Florentine who took the losing side in a factional war, was exiled for life in 1302 and never went home, and the poem’s fury about corrupt popes, absent emperors and grasping cities is the fury of a man with a grievance.

What happens

Inferno. Dante wakes lost, cannot climb toward the light past three beasts, and meets Virgil, sent at Beatrice’s request. They pass the gate and the neutrals, cross Acheron, and descend through circles ordered by increasing gravity of sin: the virtuous pagans in Limbo, then the lustful, gluttonous, avaricious and prodigal, the wrathful, the heretics in burning tombs. Beyond the walls of the city of Dis the sins of violence appear, against others, self and God, and then the ten ditches of fraud, holding seducers, flatterers, simoniac popes upside down in rock, diviners with their heads on backward, corrupt officials in boiling pitch, hypocrites in leaden copes, thieves exchanging shape with serpents, and counsellors of fraud in tongues of flame, among them Ulysses telling how he sailed past the known world and drowned. At the bottom is ice, not fire, holding traitors, with Count Ugolino gnawing the skull of the man who starved him and his children, and Satan frozen at the centre chewing Judas, Brutus and Cassius. Dante and Virgil climb down his body and out.

Purgatorio. They emerge on an island mountain in the southern ocean at dawn on Easter morning, and the change of tone is immediate: music, courtesy, dawn light, souls with time and hope. On the lower slopes wait the late-repentant and the excommunicated. Then seven terraces, one for each capital vice, where the proud walk bent under stones, the envious have their eyes sewn shut, and the lustful pass through fire. Virgil explains in the middle cantos that every sin is a distortion of love, and that love is what moves everything. At the top, in the earthly paradise, Virgil crowns Dante lord of himself and disappears without a farewell. Beatrice arrives in a pageant, rebukes Dante for his life since her death, and makes him confess and weep before he can drink of Lethe and Eunoe.

Paradiso. They rise through the spheres of moon, Mercury, Venus, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the fixed stars, meeting souls who appear in each sphere to show the reader a degree of blessedness rather than because they live there. Aquinas praises Francis and a Franciscan praises Dominic; Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida foretells the exile that has already happened; Peter, James and John examine him on faith, hope and love. Beatrice hands him to Bernard, and the poem ends with the pilgrim trying to hold three circles of light in his mind and failing, then finding his will turned by the love that moves the stars.

How to read it

Get an edition with notes and use them, but read each canto through once before touching them. Cantos are three to five pages, and one a day for a hundred days is a better plan than a heroic week.

Do not stop after the Inferno. It is the most quoted third and the least interesting philosophically, and readers who stop there come away thinking the poem is a revenge fantasy with scenery. Purgatorio is where the moral argument is made and where the human warmth is, and Paradiso is where Dante attempts what he says cannot be done.

Read the Aeneid first if you have a chance, at least books I to VI. Virgil’s presence is not decorative and the descent to the underworld in Aeneid VI is the model Dante is competing with.

Watch the pilgrim change. Early on he pities Francesca to the point of fainting; later he is harsh to the damned, and later still he is rebuked by Beatrice for a hardness he thought was virtue. The character and the author are not the same person, and the gap between them is where the poem does its thinking.

Two misreadings. First, contrapasso is not petty irony: the punishments are meant to be what the sin is, seen clearly, which is why the souls accept them. Second, Virgil is not excluded from heaven because Dante thinks him bad. He is the figure for what reason can reach unaided, and his loss is the most painful thing in the poem.

Mandelbaum for a clean single volume, Hollander for notes, Sayers if you want the rhyme scheme and do not mind the liberties.

Questions it raises

• The damned mostly agree their punishments fit. Is that consent part of the justice, or the last thing Hell takes from them?
• Dante puts named contemporaries in Hell, including popes. What authority is he claiming, and does the poem worry about it?
• If sin is disordered love, is anyone punished for what they wanted rather than for how much?
• Virgil is lost for want of something he could not have had. Can that be just?
• Beatrice replaces Virgil as guide. What can she show the pilgrim that reason could not?
• Why does the poem insist, canto after canto, that the vision exceeds what language can carry, and then keep writing?