Summary of the cantos
In these four cantos Hell strips the mask from the punishments. The hypocrites walk under gilded cloaks outside and leaden ones within; the thieves lose the body that was theirs, which passes from one to another among serpents; and the fraudulent counselors burn each in their own flame, so that none lets see the sinner it hides. In each ditch what is concealed, stolen, or wrapped up becomes the punishment. The rhythm of the poem changes with the matter: canto XXIII is still flight and farce, inherited from the escort of the demons, but ends with Virgil disproved by a friar; XXIV is climbing and fatigue, and leads to the shame of Vanni Fucci; XXV is the canto in which Dante challenges Lucan and Ovid; XXVI opens and closes with the poet himself, who curbs his wit before hearing the most ingenious of the condemned. The thread that binds the four is the relation between what is shown and what is done, with what one has: appearance, possession, intelligence. The question the last canto leaves, unanswered, is whether Ulysses' voyage was sin, punishment, or both, and what it says about the poem that tells it.
Canto XXIII: The Hypocrites in Leaden Cloaks
Summary of the canto
Silent, alone, and without company, Dante and Virgil walk one ahead of the other like Friars Minor. Dante thinks of Aesop's fable of the frog and the mouse because of the quarrel he has seen, and one thought is born from another and doubles his fear: the demons were mocked by them and, with anger added to ill will, will come crueler than a dog after a hare. His hair stands on end, and Dante asks the master to hide it. Virgil replies that he has read his thought from the same gesture and face, and that if the bank to the right is sloped enough for them to descend into the next ditch, they will escape the hunt imagined. He was still speaking when Dante sees the demons with wings spread, coming to seize them:
Analysis
Lo duca mio di sùbito mi prese, / come la madre ch’al romore è desta / e vede presso a sé le fiamme accese, / che prende il figlio e fugge e non s’arresta, / avendo più di lui che di sé cura, / tanto che solo una camiscia vesta
, my guide suddenly seized me, as the mother who, awakened by the noise and seeing the flames lit near her, takes up her son and flees without stopping, caring more for him than for herself, so that she wears only a single shift.
Virgil does not weigh or argue: he acts before the threat arrives, and the poem compares him to a mother who saves her son from the fire and forgets herself. The master who rebuked Dante's weeping in canto XX appears here as one who cares, and the close of the scene says what he is to Dante: he carries him to his breast as a son, not as a companion. The dependence is described without shame.
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Canto XXIV: Vanni Fucci and the Serpents
Summary of the canto
The canto opens with a comparison: at the start of the year, when frost briefly imitates snow, the peasant who sees the white field strikes his thigh, laments without knowing what to do, then returns, sees the world changed in a short time, takes up his staff and drives his sheep out to pasture. This is what Dante feels when he sees Virgil with a clouded brow at the end of the previous canto and, on reaching the broken bridge, again with the sweet look he knew at the foot of the mountain. Virgil opens his arms after examining the ruin and lifts him, choosing the next stone before climbing. It is no path for one wearing a cloak: he, light on his feet, and Dante, pushed along, climb from stone to stone, and the slope is shorter on this side, or Dante would have been defeated. At the top, breathless, he sits down, and the master calls him back:
Analysis
Canto XXV: The Metamorphoses of the Thieves
Summary of the canto
At the end of his words, the thief Vanni Fucci raises his hands with both fig gestures and cries out against God, and the canto goes on with Cacus and with the thieves who exchange their nature with the serpents:
Analysis
Canto XXVI: Ulysses and the Last Voyage
Summary of the canto
The canto opens with an invective: rejoice, Florence, for you are so great that you beat your wings over sea and land, and your name spreads through Hell. Dante found among the thieves five Florentines, which brings him shame, and the city gains no honor from it; if near morning one dreams the true, she will soon feel what Prato and others wish against her, and if it were not soon it would not be early: let it come soon, since it must, because it will weigh more the older he grows. About the place of this invective in the poem, Carpeaux adds:
Analysis
Reading of the Canto Block
Analysis