Annother lovely assignment

Dante – The Divine Comedy: Hell

“Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, / I woke to find myself in a dark wood, / Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”
This expertly written book begins with the author, a character in the story, walking along a road. The time period is 1300 on the morning of Good Friday. A leopard, lion and she-wolf each prevent him from traveling the road any further. Virgil, who has been brought out of limbo at the request of Beatrice, meets Dante along the road. Virgil becomes his guide, and they begin the path on a different road toward Hell. This allegory says in part, that human reason can guide him back to faith – up to a point.

When they arrive at the gates of Hell, they read the inscription on its lintel. “Through me the road to the city of desolation, / Through me the road to sorrows diuturnal, / Through me the road among the lost creation. … Lay down all hope, you that go in by me.” This is, in short, a description of the whole of Hell. After the two poets pass through the first circle, they are now at the feet of Minos who sits as judge, sentencing each spirit to a different circle for their different sins. Once they are in the second circle, they are in Hell proper. As they continue through each of the nine circles in hell, they come across many people that Dante recognizes from Florence, his home.

Through out the whole of this masterpiece, Dante fills it with the minutest of details. Canto 13 is one of the most detailed and is thus a great example of the many facets of Dante’s work. In the midst of circle VII are those who acted violently against themselves, primarily in committing suicide. The spirits who “are turned to trees were human once,” but due to their violence to themselves, they are forever confined to grow as a tree in this forest. Virgil goes as far as to have Dante break off a small branch to get the tree to talk. The tree, which is much personified, tells Dante the story of how he came to be growing here. Each spirit is like a seed that “Minos dispatches … down to the seventh ditch.” “It falls in the wood; … and where it falls, it sprouts like a corn of wheat…” All spirits who are confined to the forest are “Borne on the thorn of its own self-slaughtering shade” and remains there forever.

Though I started reading this book with the idea that it would be boring, I have amazingly come to enjoy and learn from it. Dante was such a great writer, even though his life was over 700 years ago. His brilliant description of Hell was so enlightening that I now have the desire to read the rest of his Divine Comedy. Dante clearly had a wonderful insight into the topic of Hell. It is a mind-enlightening tale that I never would have read under normal circumstances. Once Dante and Virgil in their travel through Hell get to the center, “He first, I following; till my straining sense / Glimpsed the bright burden of the heavenly cars / Through a round hole; by this we climbed, and thence / Came forth, to look once more upon the stars.” They had reached the end of Hell and now began their ascent up towards Heaven.