Summary of the cantos
The bottom of Hell is cold and ends in silence. After thirty cantos of fire, blood and quarrel, the poet descends to a lake of ice where the punishment is to remain motionless, and the matter is betrayal in four degrees, according to the usual reading: against kin (Caina), against homeland or party (Antenora), against guests (Ptolomea), and against benefactors (Judecca). Before that, the giants who stand guard on the rim of the well warn of what is coming: force and intelligence put in the service of ill will, a combination against which, the poet says, people have no defense. The part contains one scene of great pity, that of Count Ugolino and his sons in the tower, and two of great harshness, that of Dante pulling Bocca's hair and that of Dante refusing Friar Alberigo what he had promised. It ends with the only way out, which passes through the body of Lucifer himself, head down, to the round hole through which the stars can be seen. The question that runs through the four cantos is what the poem means by placing, in the same ice, the pity that Ugolino arouses and the harshness that Dante shows.
Canto XXXI: The Giants and Antaeus
Summary of the canto
Dante opens the canto with an image for the tongue of Virgil: the same tongue that first bit him, to the point of staining both his cheeks with shame, and then gave him back the remedy, like the spear of Achilles and of his father, which first wounded and then healed. The two turn their backs on the miserable valley and cross without speaking the bank that surrounds it. It is neither night nor day, sight reaches little, and Dante hears a horn sound so loud that it would make any thunder seem faint, and it forces him to fix his eyes on a single point: not even Roland, after the painful defeat in which Charlemagne lost the holy enterprise, sounded so terribly. Soon he sees many tall towers and asks what land that is. Virgil says that, looking through the darkness from too far away, he is deceived in his imagination, and that when he comes near he will see how the sense errs from afar; but, so that the fact seem less strange to him, he says they are not towers but giants, set in the well around its rim, from the navel downward.
Analysis
As when the mist dissolves and the sight gradually recognizes what the vapor hid, so, piercing the thick, dark air and drawing near the edge, Dante sees the error flee and the fear grow; for just as Montereggioni is crowned with towers around the circle of its walls, so the bank that surrounds the well was crowned with towers, halfway up, by the horrible giants, at whom Jupiter still threatens from the sky when he thunders. Nature, says the poet, did very well to give up creating such animals, taking such executioners from Mars; and if one does not regret the elephants and the whales, whoever looks at it subtly judges it more just and discreet, because:
ché dove l’argomento de la mente / s’aggiugne al mal volere e a la possa, / nessun riparo vi può far la gente
, for where the instrument of the mind is joined to ill will and to power, no defense can be made by people.
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Canto XXXII: Caina and Antenora
Summary of the canto
The canto begins with a confession of craft. To describe the bottom of the whole universe, the poet says he would need harsh and hoarse rhymes, and he does not have them:
Analysis
Canto XXXIII: Ugolino and the Tower of Hunger
Summary of the canto
The sinner lifts his mouth from the fierce pasture and wipes it on the hair of the head he ruined from behind. He tells Dante that he wants him to renew a desperate grief, which tightens his heart merely to think of, even before he speaks; but if the words are to be seed that brings infamy to the traitor who gnaws, he will speak and weep at the same time. He does not know who Dante is or how he came to be there, but from his way of speaking he seems Florentine to him. He declares himself to be Count Ugolino, and says that the other is the archbishop Ruggieri: he will tell why he is such a neighbor. That, through the archbishop's evil schemes, having trusted him, he was taken prisoner and then killed, need not be told; what Dante could not have heard, how cruel his death was, he will hear now, and then he will know whether the archbishop wronged him.
Analysis
Canto XXXIV: Lucifer and the Way Out
Summary of the canto
Virgil opens the canto with a Latin verse turned inside out: the banners of the king advance, he says, but the king now is the one of Hell, and the first verse of the hymn sung to the Cross during Holy Week gains a complement (inferni). Let him look ahead, if he can make it out. Dante sees a building like a mill that the wind turns, seen from afar through thick mist or when our hemisphere grows dark, and, because of the wind, he retreats behind the guide, for there was no other shelter. He had already arrived there, and he writes it with fear, where the shades were all covered and showed through like straw in glass: some lie, others stand, one with his head up, another with his feet up, another, bent like a bow, with his face turned to his feet. When they came so close that it pleased the master to show him the creature who had the beautiful semblance, Virgil stepped aside and made him stop: here is Dis, and here is the place where you must arm yourself with fortitude.
Analysis
Reading of the Canto Block
Analysis