Summary of the cantos
These four cantos ask the same question on two scales: who sees what is coming, and what is done with what is seen. On the scale of one man, Cacciaguida reads in eternal sight the life of his grandson and tells him that he will leave Florence, that another's bread will taste of salt, and that his first shelter will come from a house that bears a holy bird over a ladder. Then he gives him an order: to tell everything, sparing no one, even if the voice is unpleasant at first taste. On the scale of the world, the souls of the just form in Jupiter a sentence of warning to those who judge the earth, and gather into an eagle that speaks for all of them in the first person singular, and this Eagle teaches what seems the opposite: the human eye does not reach the bottom of God's justice, and whoever sits to judge from afar, with the short sight of a palm, judges badly. The part does not reconcile the two voices. It leaves side by side the order to speak and the warning that the last word on who is saved does not belong to the one who speaks. One thread links the prophecy to the Eagle: in Canto XVII the known name is what gives the example its value, and in Canto XX the heaven shows two souls that the world would not expect there, Rhipeus and, in the common reading, Trajan.
Canto XVII: Cacciaguida and Exile
Summary of the canto
Dante stands before Cacciaguida, in the heaven of Mars, and feels like Phaethon when he went to Clymene, his mother, to be certain of what he had heard against himself. What troubles him are the grave words he was told, along the journey, about his future life, like those of Farinata in Canto X of the Inferno and those of Brunetto in Canto XV. He wants to know what blow is coming to him, because the arrow foreseen arrives more slowly. Beatrice tells him to put his thirst outside, not so that she may know more, but so that he may accustom himself to say "thirst" and have someone serve him the drink. Dante calls Cacciaguida dear root, who sees the contingent at the point where all times are present, and asks him for the fortune that awaits him. The great-great-grandfather answers without the ambiguities in which mad people were entangled before the Lamb was slain, in clear words and in precise Latin, and begins with what the future is before saying what it brings:
Analysis
«La contingenza, che fuor del quaderno / de la vostra matera non si stende, / tutta è dipinta nel cospetto etterno; / necessità però quindi non prende / se non come dal viso in che si specchia / nave che per torrente giù discende.
, the contingency, which does not extend beyond the notebook of your matter, is all painted in the eternal sight; yet from there it takes no necessity, except as a ship that descends the current takes from the eye in which it is mirrored.
Cacciaguida first answers the doubt that the prophecy will awaken: if it is painted in eternal sight, is it decided? No, because seeing does not oblige, as the eye in which the ship is mirrored does not make it descend the current. The answer lets the prophecy tell the truth without removing the guilt of whoever expels Dante, nor the responsibility for what Dante will do with the news. The poem builds the defense before the blow.
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Canto XVIII: The Letters of Jupiter
Summary of the canto
Cacciaguida enjoys his own word alone, and Dante savors his, tempering the bitter with the sweet. Beatrice interrupts the rumination with a sentence:
Analysis
Canto XIX: The Eagle and the Man of the Indus
Summary of the canto
The image made by the souls appears before Dante with its wings open, each soul a ruby in which a ray of sun burns and is refracted in his eyes. What he is going to tell, he says, no voice carried, no ink wrote, no fantasy comprehended: he saw and heard the beak speak:
Analysis
Canto XX: The Eyes of the Eagle
Summary of the canto
When the sun sets and the sky reappears with many lights, in which a single one shines, Dante recalls this act of heaven as he sees the Eagle fall silent. All the lights sing, and those songs escape his memory. After the precious stones of the sixth heaven silence the angelic chimes, he hears the murmur of a clear river that descends from stone to stone:
Analysis
Reading of the block of cantos
Analysis