Cantos I to IV: The Forest and the Gate
you are my master and my author, you are the only one from whom I took the fine style that brought me honor.
Explanation and analysis
Dante recoils from the she-wolf at the foot of the hill, when a figure with a faint voice appears before him, like one who has been silent a long time. The figure says he was once a man, born in Mantua under Julius and raised in Rome under Augustus, and that he sang of the son of Anchises who came from Troy. Dante recognizes him and, ashamed, answers with this speech, which is at once an introduction and a plea for help.
The line has the form of an acknowledgment of a debt. Dante does not simply say that he admires Virgil: he affirms that from him, and only from him, he took the fine style that brought him honor. The poem the reader begins to read thus declares where it comes from, and the author of the Comedy presents himself as a pupil of the author of the Aeneid. Soon after, he calls in the long study and the great love with which he read the master, like someone putting his credentials on the table at the very moment he needs them most.
The praise is also the argument for the plea: whoever taught him style is the one who can teach him how to pass the beast. Virgil, however, does not accept the role of savior. He explains that he cannot lead him to the heights, because he was rebellious to the law of the emperor there, and that he will hand Dante over to a worthier soul. Dante's speech already announces this limit: a pagan poet, however great, leads only as far as his condition allows.
I am Beatrice, the one who makes you go; I come from the place where I long to return; love moved me, which makes me speak.
Explanation and analysis
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justice moved my lofty maker; I was made by divine power, supreme wisdom, and primal love. Before me nothing was created, save eternal things, and I, eternal, endure. Abandon all hope, you who enter.
Explanation and analysis
I saw and recognized the shade of him who through cowardice made the great refusal.
Explanation and analysis
for such defects, not for any other fault, we are lost, and offended only in this: that we live without hope, in desire.
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Cantos V to VIII: The Incontinent
love, which seizes the gentle heart at once, seized this one for the fair person who was taken from me, and the manner still offends me; love, which spares no beloved from loving, seized me so strongly with his pleasure that, as you see, it still does not leave me.
Explanation and analysis
no greater pain than to remember the happy time in misery; and your teacher knows this.
Explanation and analysis
Galeotto was the book and the one who wrote it: that day we read no further.
Explanation and analysis
but when you return to the sweet world, I ask that you bring me to the memory of others: I say no more to you and answer you no more.
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master, I would very much like to see him plunge into this soup before we leave the lake.
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Cantos IX to XII: The City of Dis
O you who have sound understanding, look to the teaching hidden beneath the veil of these strange verses.
Explanation and analysis
There you see Farinata, who has risen to his feet: from the waist up you will see him whole. I had already fixed my face on his; and he rose with chest and brow, as if he held Hell in great disdain.
Explanation and analysis
suddenly upright, he cried out: What? Did you say "he had"? Is he not still alive? Does the sweet light not strike his eyes?
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of all the malice that draws hatred in heaven, the end is injustice, and every such end harms another either by force or by fraud. But because fraud is man's own evil, it displeases God more; and that is why the fraudulent stay below, and more pain assails them.
Explanation and analysis
O blind greed and mad wrath, that so goad us in our brief life, and then drench us so badly in the eternal one!
Explanation and analysis
Cantos XIII to XVII: The Violent
it began again to speak: why do you tear at me? Have you no spirit of pity? We were men, and now we are stumps: your hand ought to have been more merciful, even if we had been souls of serpents.
Explanation and analysis
O Capaneus, you are punished most in that your pride is not extinguished; no torment, other than your rage, would be complete pain for your fury.
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let my Tesoro be commended to you, in which I still live, and I ask nothing more. Then he turned, and he seemed like those who run at Verona for the green cloth across the field; and among them he seemed the one who wins, not the one who loses.
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newcomers and sudden gains have bred in you, Florence, pride and excess, so that you already weep for it.
Explanation and analysis
his face was the face of a just man, so benign was the skin outside, and the rest of the body that of a serpent.
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Cantos XVIII to XXII: The First Five Ditches
O Simon Magus, O wretched followers, who commit adultery with gold and silver against the things of God, which ought to be the brides of goodness: now the trumpet must sound for you, because you are in the third ditch.
Explanation and analysis
you have made a god of gold and silver; and what else separates you from the idolaters, except that they worship one and you worship a hundred? Ah, Constantine, of how much evil was the mother not your conversion, but that dowry which the first rich father received from you!
Explanation and analysis
here pity lives only when it is well dead; who is more wicked than he who grieves over God's judgment?
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look how he has made chest of his back; because he wanted to see too far ahead, he looks behind and walks backward.
Explanation and analysis
Cagnazzo, at this speech, raised his snout and, shaking his head, said: listen to the malice he thought up to throw himself down there! To which he, who had plenty of snares, replied: I am too cunning, when I seek the greatest sorrow of my own.
Explanation and analysis
Cantos XXIII to XXVI: Hypocrites, Thieves, and Ulysses
on the outside they are gilded, so much that they dazzle; but within they are all of lead, and so heavy that Frederick's, beside them, were of straw.
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for sitting on down one does not reach fame, nor under a blanket; without it, whoever spends life leaves on earth the trace that smoke has in the air and foam in the water.
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let Lucan be silent where he speaks of wretched Sabellus and Nasidius, and attend to what is now launched. Let Ovid be silent about Cadmus and Arethusa, for if he turns the one into a serpent and the other into a fountain by poetry, I do not envy him.
Explanation and analysis
neither the sweetness of a son, nor the pity for an aged father [...] the ardor I had to become knowing of the world, of human vices and of worth.
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three times it made it spin with all the waters; on the fourth it raised the stern and sent the prow down, as Another pleased, until the sea closed over us.
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Cantos XXVII to XXX: Guido, Mahomet, the Forgers
while I was the form of bones and flesh that my mother gave me, my works were not those of the lion, but of the fox.
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let not your heart suspect; from now on I absolve you, and you teach me how to bring Penestrino down to the ground. Heaven I can shut and open.
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for one cannot absolve someone who does not repent, nor repent and at the same time will the sin, because contradiction does not allow it.
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see how I rend myself! see how Mahomet is mangled! Before me goes weeping Ali, with his face split from chin to forelock.
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and the severed head held by its hair, hanging from the hand like a lantern; and it looked at us and said: woe is me! Of itself it made a lamp for itself, and they were two in one and one in two; how this can be, he knows who thus governs.
Explanation and analysis
Cantos XXXI to XXXIV: The Ice and Lucifer
I did not weep, so deep within had I turned to stone: they wept; and my Anselmuccio said: you look like that, father! what is wrong?
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already blind, groping over each one, and for two days I called them, after they were dead. Then, stronger than the pain, fasting prevailed.
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but now stretch out your hand this way; open my eyes. And I did not open them; and it was courtesy to be a villain with him.
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I did not die and did not remain alive; think now for yourself, if you have a flower of wit, what I became, deprived of both.
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so that three winds stirred from it: from there all Cocytus froze. With six eyes it wept, and from three chins dripped tears and bloody slaver.
Explanation and analysis
we climbed, he first and I second, until I saw through a round opening some of the fair things that heaven bears.