Summary of the cantos
In these four cantos no one speaks without wanting something. Guido da Montefeltro answers only because he reckons that whatever he says will die at the bottom of Hell; Mahomet and Pier da Medicina send word to the world, and Mosca wants to be remembered; Master Adam and Sinon punch each other like two brawlers in a bar, and Dante listens to them with such attention that Virgil nearly loses patience. The matter is fraud in three forms: the counsel that uses intelligence to deceive, the discord sown among those who were united, the falsification of what had value (metal, person, coin, word). In each the punishment draws the sin: the counselor burns hidden in a flame, the schismatic is split in two, the forger rots with the disease of what he counterfeited. The pilgrim too is put to the test: he feels pity for Geri del Bello, adds a curse to what Mosca says, listens to a quarrel with too much relish and is reprimanded, and it is shame that the poem uses to measure how far he has already gone. The question the part leaves is the one the narrator himself raises in canto XXVIII, when he says that only conscience assures him of telling what he saw: what guarantees, in a poem full of forgers, the word of the one who writes it?
Canto XXVII: Guido and the Promised Absolution
Summary of the canto
The flame of Ulysses and Diomedes grows quiet and moves away with Virgil's leave, when another, which came behind, makes Dante turn his eyes to its summit: from it comes a confused sound, like that of the bronze bull that bellowed with the weeping of its own inventor, the first to be burned inside it. With no way out of the fire, the voice turns into words as the tip of the flame shakes them loose. It is Guido da Montefeltro, who heard Virgil dismiss Ulysses in Lombard and asks the poet to stay a little: he wants to know whether Romagna, the land between the mountains of Urbino and the sources of the Tiber, where he comes from, is at peace or at war. Virgil nudges Dante and tells him to speak, because that one is "Latin," Italian like Dante, and the question concerns the present.
Analysis
Virgil speaks to the ancients (Ulysses was one of his own) and leaves to the living what belongs to today: only someone who has walked through Romagna recently can answer. The gesture also places Dante in the position of one who informs and is informed by a condemned man, and that is why the whole canto depends on a conversation between two Italians.
Dante had the answer ready. He says that Romagna was never without war in the hearts of its tyrants, but that none was open when he left it, and he runs through the cities from top to bottom: Ravenna, under the eagle of the Polenta; Forlì, under the green claws of whoever governs it; Rimini, under the two mastiffs of Verrucchio; Faenza and Imola, under the little lion of the white nest, which changes sides from summer to winter; Cesena, between tyranny and liberty. He ends by asking him to say who he is. Guido agrees to answer only after a calculation, which the poem leaves in plain view:
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Canto XXVIII: The Sowers of Discord
Summary of the canto
Dante opens the canto by saying that no one, not even in loose prose, could recount in full the blood and wounds he has just seen, not even if all who bled in the wars of Apulia were gathered together (the Romans', descendants of the Trojans, the long war that left so many rings, those of Robert Guiscard, of Ceperano and of Tagliacozzo) and showed every limb pierced or cut: nothing would equal the foul manner of the ninth ditch. There a man is split open from the chin down to where the wind is released, with his guts hanging between his legs, and, seeing that Dante is looking at him, he tears open his chest with his hands to show him what he is:
Analysis
Canto XXIX: Geri del Bello and the Alchemists
Summary of the canto
Dante's eyes, drunk on the crowd and the wounds, want to stay there weeping. Virgil reproves him: why look still at the sad, mutilated shades, if he did not do so in the other ditches? Let him think, if he thinks he will count them, that the valley is twenty-two miles around; the moon is already beneath the feet of the two of them, the time granted them is short, and there is more to see than Dante sees. Dante answers that if the guide had attended to the cause of his gaze, perhaps he would let him stay: he believes that a spirit of his own blood weeps there for the guilt that cost so much. Virgil says he saw him at the foot of the little bridge, pointing at Dante and threatening him with his finger, and heard him called Geri del Bello; but Dante was so caught up with Bertran de Born, lord of Altaforte, that he did not look that way. Dante then says what he understands:
Analysis
Canto XXX: Master Adam, Sinon, and Dante's Shame
Summary of the canto
The canto opens with two mythological madnesses to measure what is to come. Athamas, at the time when Juno raged against the blood of Thebes because of Semele, saw his wife with a son in each hand, shouted that they should spread the nets to catch the lioness and her cubs, smashed Learchus against a rock, and the wife drowned with the other; Hecuba, after seeing Polyxena dead and Polydorus on the shore, went mad and barked like a dog. No fury of Thebes or of Troy was as cruel, says the poet, as two naked, livid shades who run biting like a pig let loose from its sty: one catches up with Capocchio and sinks its fangs into his neck, dragging his belly along the hard ground. The Aretine who remained, trembling, explains: that goblin is Gianni Schicchi, who runs furiously like that, mangling the others, and the other is the old soul of Myrrha, who was fond of her father beyond lawful love, disguised in another's form, just as the other disguised himself as Buoso Donati, making a will and giving the testament its form, to win the mistress of the herd (the finest mare in the herd, say the commentators).
Analysis
Reading of the Canto Block
Analysis