What It Is
In the second circle, Dante enters a place mute of all light, which roars like the sea in a tempest when contrary winds battle it. It is the infernal windstorm, which never rests: it carries the spirits in its rapine, turning them and beating them, and before the ruin, the point where the wind breaks, there remain the cries, the weeping and the blasphemy against the divine power. The poet compares the souls to starlings that their wings carry in the cold season, in a broad and full flock, and to cranes that sing their laments in a long line through the air, and he says that the breath carries them from here, from there, from below, from above, with no hope of rest nor even of a lesser pain.
Where It Appears
In Canto V of Inferno, after Minos, Dante comes upon the tempest, and the narrator says what it is, through the sin it punishes:
Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento / enno dannati i peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento, I understood that to such a torment are condemned the carnal sinners, who submit reason to appetite.
When Francesca da Rimini answers Dante's call, she says that they will hear and speak with him while the wind, as it does, falls silent for them. It is the only pause of the windstorm in the canto, and it is within that pause that Francesca tells who she was. In Canto VI of Inferno the image passes from wind to rain: in the third circle an eternal rain falls, cold and heavy, of thick hail, dirty water and snow, and the earth that receives it stinks; it is beneath it that Cerberus flays the gluttons and that Ciacco rises to ask Dante to remember him. The change of element, from air to mire, accompanies the change of sin: the desire that carries, in the second circle, becomes in the third the desire that sinks.
What It Means
The tempest is the figure of reason subjected to appetite, as Canto V of Inferno states in full: whoever was dragged in life by an unbridled passion remains dragged forever, unable to stop or to choose the direction. The punishment repeats the sin from within, and the image closes what the scene of Francesca opens, love as a force that comes from outside.
The wind that falls silent so that Francesca may speak is the only indulgence of the place, and the poem grants it to whoever asks for it courteously. Two readings: it is the sign that the punishment respects the conversation, or it is the proof that courtesy relieves nothing, because the wind returns when she finishes. The text supports both.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Desire, Sin.
- Themes of the work: Desire, Sin.
- Characters: Francesca da Rimini, Dante, Virgil, Minos.
- Neighboring symbols: the ice of Cocytus, the other punishment of element, at the bottom of Hell.