What It Is
In the second round of the seventh circle, Dante and Virgil enter a wood without a path, of dark leaves, knotted and twisted branches, in which, instead of fruit, there are thorns of poison, and where the Harpies make their nests, the ones who drove the Trojans from the Strophades with a prophecy of disaster. Dante hears laments from everywhere and sees no one. It is Virgil who tells him to break off a small twig from a thornbush, so that his thought may be undone: the trunk cries out, darkens with blood, and the trees are souls. The soul that tears itself from its own body, the trunk explains, is sent by Minos to the seventh mouth, falls where Fortune casts it, sprouts like a grain of spelt and becomes a shoot and a wild plant; the Harpies, grazing on the leaves, give it pain and an outlet for the pain.
Where It Appears
Everything happens in Canto XIII of Inferno. The wood's first speech is a question about pity, and the poem makes the visitor repeat by mistake the wound that is the punishment:
ricominciò a dir: «Perché mi scerpi? / non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno? / Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi: / ben dovrebb’ esser la tua man più pia, / se state fossimo anime di serpi»., it began again to say: why do you tear me? Have you no spirit of pity at all? We were men, and now we have become stumps: your hand should indeed be more merciful, even if we had been souls of serpents.
The rule of the wood is stated at the end of the trunk's explanation, and applies to the resurrection what the punishment did to the act:
Come l’altre verrem per nostre spoglie, / ma non però ch’alcuna sen rivesta, / ché non è giusto aver ciò ch’om si toglie. / Qui le strascineremo, e per la mesta / selva saranno i nostri corpi appesi, / ciascuno al prun de l’ombra sua molesta», like the others we shall come for our spoils, but not so that any of them may clothe itself again, for it is not just to have what one has taken away. Here we will drag them, and through the sad wood our bodies will be hung, each on the thorn of its own troubling shade.
The noise of two naked, torn men, pursued by black bitches, interrupts the conversation, and the bush that the bitches tear to pieces complains and tells, without giving its name, which city it came from:
e se non fosse che ’n sul passo d’Arno / rimane ancor di lui alcuna vista, / que’ cittadin che poi la rifondarno / sovra ’l cener che d’Attila rimase, / avrebber fatto lavorare indarno. / Io fei gibetto a me de le mie case»., and if it were not that over the passage of the Arno some trace of it still remains, the citizens who later rebuilt it upon the ashes that Attila left would have labored in vain. I made a gibbet of my own house.
At the beginning of Canto XIV of Inferno, out of love for his homeland, Dante gathers the scattered leaves and returns them to the trunk, and the two poets reach the next heath. The trunk that speaks, according to tradition, is Pier delle Vigne.
What It Means
The wood is the punishment of the suicide carried to its end: whoever took his body from himself is left without it, and the bodies hung on the thornbushes will not be reclaimed at the resurrection, because it is not just to have what one has taken away. The punishment is not a penalty added to the act, it is its exact consequence. The tree that speaks and bleeds when wounded gives the suicide a voice that is heard only when someone breaks a branch.
The episode is built so that the pilgrim commits, without knowing it, the act that hurts, and it is Virgil who sends him to do it. The text supports two readings: the lesson is about faith, because the incredible is accepted only through experience, as Virgil says when he apologizes, or it is about pity, because whoever wounds without knowing learns what it is to wound.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Sin, Justice and law.
- Themes of the work: Sin, Justice and law.
- Characters: Pier delle Vigne, Dante, Virgil, Minos.
- Neighboring symbols: the ice of Cocytus, the other landscape of Hell that holds the person in the place where they put themselves.