Apostrophe

The speaker addresses someone absent or dead, a thing, a place or an idea, as if they could hear.

In Inferno

justice moved my high maker; the divine power made me, the supreme wisdom and the primal love. Before me there were no created things, only eternal ones, and I, eternal, endure. Abandon all hope, you who enter.

In the last verse the inscription turns to whoever has not yet arrived: "you who enter". The order to abandon all hope is addressed directly to the reader and to the pilgrim, who become the recipients of the warning.

Cantos I to IV: The Forest and the Gate, The inscription at the top of the gate of Hell, which speaks in the first person

O you who have sound understanding, look at the teaching that is hidden beneath the veil of the strange verses.

Cantos IX to XII: The City of Dis, The poet, who interrupts the scene of the Furies and Medusa to speak to the reader

O blind greed and mad wrath, that so goad us in the short life and then soak us so badly in the eternal one!

Cantos IX to XII: The City of Dis, The poet, who interrupts the description of the river of blood to speak to the passions that fill it

O Capaneus, it is in not being quenched that your pride is more punished; no martyrdom, except your rage, would be complete pain for your fury.

Cantos XIII to XVII: The Violent, Virgil, to Capaneus, the blasphemer who defies Jove under the rain of fire

The new people and sudden gains have bred in you, Florence, pride and excess, so that you already weep for it.

Cantos XIII to XVII: The Violent, Dante, answering the three Florentines who ask whether courtesy and worth still dwell in Florence

O Simon Magus, O wretched followers, who adulterate with gold and silver the things of God, which ought to be the brides of goodness, you rapacious ones: now it is fitting that the trumpet sound for you, because you are in the third ditch.

Cantos XVIII to XXII: The First Five Ditches, The poet, who opens canto XIX with an invective against Simon Magus and his followers

You made a god of gold and silver; and what else separates you from idolaters, except that they worship one and you worship a hundred? Alas, Constantine, of how much evil was the mother not your conversion, but that dowry which the first rich father received from you!

Cantos XVIII to XXII: The First Five Ditches, Dante, speaking to the condemned whom tradition reads as Pope Nicholas III, in the ditch of the simoniacs

Let Lucan be silent, where he speaks of the wretched Sabellus and Nasidius, and attend to what is now fired off. Let Ovid be silent about Cadmus and Arethusa, because if that one turns into a serpent and this one into a fountain in his poetry, I do not envy him.

Cantos XXIII to XXVI: Hypocrites, Thieves, and Ulysses, The poet, challenging Lucan and Ovid before narrating the exchange of forms between two thieves

I did not die and I did not remain alive; think now for yourself, if you have the flower of wit, what I became, deprived of both.

Cantos XXXI to XXXIV: The Ice and Lucifer, Dante, seeing Lucifer, at the center of the universe