Summary of the cantos
Paradise is the third canticle of the Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, in 33 cantos of interlocking tercets, the same meter as the other two. The narrator is the same Dante, who leaves the summit of the mountain of Purgatory and climbs through the heavens guided by Beatrice, in place of Virgil, who stayed behind. The matter of the canto becomes light: the pilgrim is carried without perceiving the movement, the souls appear as flashes in each heaven, and each of his doubts becomes a lesson from her. The first heaven is that of the Moon, the lowest, where are the souls who did not keep a vow. From Canto II the poet warns that the sea ahead is deep for the reader, and Cantos III and IV show why: in place of plot, a question (how can a soul be happy on the lowest step?) and an answer that stretches into argument.
Canto I: The invocation and the ascent
Summary of the canto
The canto opens with a thesis in three verses: the glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines more in one part, less in another. Dante was in the heaven that receives the most of that light and saw what whoever comes down from there does not know nor can tell, because the intellect, as it draws near what it desires, sinks so deep that memory cannot follow it; only what he managed to keep of the holy kingdom will be the matter of the canto. For this reason he invokes Apollo: up to here one of the peaks of Parnassus, the one of the Muses, has been enough, and now he needs both. He asks the god to enter his breast and breathe as when he drew Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs, and promises, if he is helped to show the shadow of the blessed kingdom marked on his head, to come to the foot of the beloved tree and crown himself with the leaves of which the subject and the god will make him worthy.
Analysis
The opening of the poem already states the thesis (Canto I).La gloria di colui che tutto move / per l’universo penetra, e risplende / in una parte più e meno altrove.The glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines more in one part, less in another, and it is this inequality of light, not an absence of it, that the ascent through the nine heavens will measure and explain canto by canto.
The poem does not open with a hero or a scene; it opens with a thesis about light, and the inequality it affirms lies in the one who receives: the same glory appears more here, less there. The verb "move" (v. 1) returns in the last verse of the canticle, and the opening already points to where the ascent will end.
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Canto II: The little boat and the spots on the Moon
Summary of the canto
The canto opens with a warning to the reader, before any scene: whoever follows in a small boat behind the poet's ship should turn back to the shores they know, because on the high sea one may get lost. The water that Dante takes has never been traversed, and three helps govern it: Minerva breathes, Apollo guides, and the nine Muses show him the Bears. The invitation goes only to the few who raised their necks early to the bread of the angels, of which one lives without ever being sated, and to them Dante promises a wonder greater than that of the Argonauts when they saw Jason become a plowman.
Analysis
Canto III: Piccarda and the peace of the will
Summary of the canto
The sun that first warmed his breast with love, Beatrice, had revealed the sweet aspect of the beautiful truth by proving and disproving, and Dante raised his head to confess himself corrected and certain, but a vision held him so much that he forgot the confession. He saw faces ready to speak, faint like the reflection in clean glass or in calm and shallow water, and for that reason he fell into the error opposite to that of one who fell in love with the fountain.
Analysis
Canto IV: Dante's two doubts
Summary of the canto
Dante has two doubts and falls silent, and Beatrice, who reads the desire in his face as Daniel read the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, names them: why another's violence diminishes the merit of one who wanted the good, and whether souls return to the stars, as Plato says in the Timaeus. The canto begins with the defense of that silence:
Analysis
Reading of the block of cantos
Analysis