Love is what made poetry famous. Everyone from Shakespeare with his sonnets to children with their red roses use poetry to express love. Love is the filling in poetry’s pie, the melody in its symphony, and the pregnancy scare in its soap-opera. In Dante's opinion, not only poetry, but everything is composed of love:
Not the Creator nor a single creature,
as you know, ever existed without love,
the soul's love or the love that comes by nature. (Alighieri 185)
The human race has difficulty expressing an emotion as complex as love in regular prose or speech; we need to add another dimension of beauty or meaning for it to be worthy of our most treasured emotion. In Purgatory, Dante capitalizes on this almost archetypal relationship between verse and romance to make a point. Purgatory is a love poem...about God, and Dante doesn't miss any chance to make this completely clear.
The very structure of Purgatory begins to form the base of Dante's theme. Even today Italian is the language of love. Maybe this notion stems from an entire generation who, in their childhood, watched the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp one too many times, but the same view was held in the middle ages. Latin was the language of the learned; Italian was not. Everything with any intellectual clout was written in Latin, yet Dante composed his masterpiece in his vernacular, which, at that time, was seen as only suitable for less than astute material. This is the reader's first clue into Dante's purpose. To a medieval readership this apparent discrepancy between intellectual content and plebeian delivery would have been glaring and most certainly would have sparked interest.
Beyond the form and construction of the poetry, Dante utilize...
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... the passionately swooning eulogies with which his audiences were more familiar. Having completed all the levels of Purgatory, Virgil explains, one's will and desires are synonymous with God's (Alighieri 297). Here we see a comparison to earthly couples who are often (possibly more so in times past) described as having one will.
Throughout his work, Dante labored at length to transpose the strong feelings of earthly love into divine love. He attempted to cultivate the same ardor of romantic love between his reader and deity, even enlisting the aid of Venus in the introduction, “The radiant planet fostering love like rain made all the orient heavens laugh with light, veiling the starry Fishes in her train” (Alighieri 5). He emphasized that, although the love of others is commendable, if anything is truly worth loving, it is God.
... a deep change. He is now hardened towards the sins of others and understands the meaning and presence of God's grace. He has overcome the perils of hell on his path towards paradise, and is well-adjusted for the next step of his journey. By gaining a new knowledge of God's methods of justice and punishment, Dante will be able to enter purgatory with a stronger, harder heart and an increased will to find God and His love. Inferno does well to teach Dante the pilgrim the importance of separating yourself from sin and entering into God's grace. The message of the piece can be applied to all mankind as well; that the ultimate goal of every man should be to overcome sin and to find God's love.
Descending from the first to the second level of Hell, Dante witnesses the transition to greater agony and greater punishment for the damned. Overwhelmed by the sinner’s harrowing cries and the extensive list of seemingly innocent souls given to him by Virgil, Dante beckons for two lovers to approach him, desperate for some sense of comfort. The souls are known to be the historical figures Francesca de Rimini and her lover Paolo, forever trapped in the circle of lust due to their sinful adultery. Through her words spoken to Dante, Francesca shows how she feels she has been unjustly punished and is deserving of others’ sorrow, and Dante, despite his awareness that she is a sinner, pities her. A close reading of this passage is necessary to better understand Dante’s internal battle with showing compassion where it is not deserved and Francesca’s incessant denial of her sins.
Thesis- Dante and Virgil have an interesting relationship that changes throughout Dante’s Inferno. They started off very different and Virgil didn’t care much for Dante. Dante looked at Virgil differently after he had heard Beatrice sent him to guide him. Throughout their travels, their relationship changed as they went through every layer of hell. Something happened in each one that changed their relationship either drastically, or barely at all. Their travels are very intriguing and their relationship is very complex. They become very close, so much that Dante acquires a deep trust in Virgil. They are no longer “just friends.” They are both poets and can communicate very well through words and Literature.
Dante’s Inferno is the narration told of the life of Dante Alighieri. The narration is done by Dante himself where he explains his life and various encounters. Dante is known for writing various stories and poems which he did after he was exiled from Florence where he was an ambassador. He had lived a life among the middle class, loved and lost his love to death, and gotten into leadership in Florence. His various experiences in life had caused him to have a distorted view of the purity of the Catholic Church in its indulgence in politics. The terms of the exile demanded that his return would be punishable by death.
Can a simple emotion such as love be regarded as one of the greatest weapons to create or attain power? It’s a renowned fact that human beings are by nature designed to need, crave, and even require love as part of their survival mechanisms. It comes to no surprise that one of the first accounts of antique poetry maintains love and the craving for it as its main theme; thereby, reinforcing the deep importance that it upholds in the lives of many individuals. Sappho’s “Deathless Aphrodite” clearly epitomizes the suffering and bitterness that arises from an unrequited love. In Sappho’s case, which portrays the case of many, she constantly finds herself in loneliness and despair for though she tries repeatedly, she is only let down recurrently as no one reciprocates the love she gives. It is only the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who holds
Contrary to love being the joining factor of relationships, fear is what usually bring Dante and Virgil together. Moments of insecurities and fear allows their relationship to grow. Whenever Dante is afraid, he looks to Virgil for support and guidance both mentally and physically. Virgil on the other hand relates to Dante by physically protecting him and nourishing him mentally by telling Dante everything he knows. They show that they are subject to emotions and feelings of real human beings even though they are in hell. This confirms that their impractical environment in no way undermines their very interdependent relationship.
An aspect of poesy that one can omit is the poet's intended message to the reader. In the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri depicts his journey from hell to heaven. On a literal sense that is all that the Divine Comedy is; one man’s incredible odyssey. Figuratively,however; Dante is travelling in order to fathom the human condition. The journey is meant to symbolize how to live one’s life by seeing how others lived theirs. Dante travels to hell, purgatory, and heaven in order to teach us how to live our lives. The most interesting facet of Dante’s journey is when he visits hell. Dante travels through hell to understand the wicked and the justice that exists in the abyss. The justice that exists there consists of eternal punishments handed down by God. God sentences the unrepented to different circles of hell due to the severity of the sin they committed. God also correlates the punishments of each sinner to the individual sin. Man can see justice in the punishments of each crime and one can see that Dante portrays an image of a just God because the image Dante presents represents the essence of true justice.
On the other hand, the Inferno centers on those who turned their back to their “creator” and “source of life” in the fulfilling of earthly desires, and are thus damned for eternity. In between these two extremes is Purgatorio, which deals with the knowledge and teaching of love, as Beatrice and others help outline love for Dante so he can make the climb to paradise and be worthy. For the reader to understand the idea of Dante’s love, one must understand the influence of Aristotle, Plato, and Dante’s “love at first sight” Beatrice in transforming his concept of will and of love in life. In his Divine Comedy, Dante gains salvation through the transformation of his will to love, and hopes that the reader will also take away the knowledge and concept of love he uses to revert to the right path of
middle of paper ... ... Dante showed the true meaning of courtly love and was a gentleman throughout his life. Dante Alighieri met the love of his life when he was only nine years old, but never stopped loving her. She passed away when he was about 25 and Dante was never the same as before. After 16 years, his love for her never faded, even though both had married.
At the outset of Dante’s “Inferno,” he is introduced as a man lost in a sinful forest of his own creation. He is, by all accounts, beyond saving. Even Beatrice, in conversation with Virgil, states that, “[Dante] is, I fear, already so astray / that I have come to help him much too late” (ii.65-66). It is only through the compassion and the divine pity of Beatrice, and the more active role taken on by Virgil—who is also shown to have “felt compassion for [Dante’s] pain", that Dante is provided an opportunity to regain a pious sense of self, and in doing so increase his odds of salvation (ii.50). This basic human conception of pity and empathy dominates a great deal of Dante’s interactions in the underworld. He begins his descent consistently overwhelmed, at first weeping in response to the “sighs and lamentations and loud cries […] echoing across the starless air” (iii.22-23).
For the ancient Greek doctor and philosopher, Eryximachus, Love’s potential for health and destruction were rooted in its divine origins. Good love “stems from the Muse Celestia” and “Common Love,” from “Polymnia” (Symposium 22). He saw these two loves as at the center of human/divine communication: “all the ways in which gods and men communicate with one another—are solely concerned with the perpetuation or the cure of love” (Symposium 23). Love provided the link, then, between the mortal and immortal beings. It was a common project that both humans and gods could work on. Eryximachus further articulated, “It is (Love) who makes it possible for us to interact on good terms with one another and with our divine masters” (Symposium 23-4). It is the element of life that transcends the human realm, giving the people a taste of the divine in their own lives.
In Dante’s Inferno, the relationship between Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil the Guide is an ever-evolving one. By analyzing the transformation of this relationship as the two sojourn through the circles of hell, one is able to learn more about the mindset of Dante the Poet. At the outset, Dante is clearly subservient to Virgil, whom he holds in high esteem for his literary genius. However, as the work progresses, Virgil facilitates Dante’s spiritual enlightenment, so that by the end, Dante has ascended to Virgil’s spiritual level and has in many respects surpassed him. In Dante’s journey with respect to Virgil, one can see man’s spiritual journey towards understanding God. While God loves man regardless of his faults, His greatest desire is to see man attain greater spirituality, in that man, already created in God’s image, may truly become divine, and in doing so, attain eternality.
The Symposium, The Aeneid, and Confessions help demonstrate how the nature of love can be found in several places, whether it is in the mind, the body or the soul. These texts also provide with eye-opening views of love as they adjust our understanding of what love really is. By giving us reformed spectrum of love, one is able to engage in introspective thinking and determine if the things we love are truly worthy of our sentiment.
Dante’s Inferno presents the reader with many questions and thought provoking dialogue to interpret. These crossroads provide points of contemplation and thought. Dante’s graphic depiction of hell and its eternal punishment is filled with imagery and allegorical meanings. Examining one of these cruxes of why there is a rift in the pits of hell, can lead the reader to interpret why Dante used the language he did to relate the Idea of a Just and perfect punishment by God.
Dante's "Inferno" is full of themes. But the most frequent is that of the weakness of human nature. Dante's descent into hell is initially so that Dante can see how he can better live his life, free of weaknesses that may ultimately be his ticket to hell. Through the first ten cantos, Dante portrays how each level of his hell is a manifestation of human weakness and a loss of hope, which ultimately Dante uses to purge and learn from. Dante, himself, is about to fall into the weaknesses of humans, before there is some divine intervention on the part of his love Beatrice, who is in heaven. He is sent on a journey to hell in order for Dante to see, smell, and hear hell. As we see this experience brings out Dante's weakness' of cowardice, wrath and unworthiness. He is lead by Virgil, who is a representation of intellect. Through Dante's experiences he will purge his sins.