Summary of the cantos
The thread of these five cantos is the will. In two of them, Virgil explains that every act, good or bad, springs from love, that natural love never errs, and that the love of the mind errs through a bad object, or through too little or too much vigor. This undoes the idea that vices are separate species and makes the mountain a work of straightening desire. In the three following cantos each scene is a proof of this: the siren of the dream, whom Dante's gaze makes beautiful and whom divine lure undoes, the pope who reached the summit of power and found his heart without rest, the founder of a dynasty who accuses his own descendants, and a soul that, after five centuries, feels the will to climb and makes the mountain tremble. Avarice, which in Hell had its beast, the she-wolf, appears here as the appetite no one satisfies, and it is in Purgatory that it can be cured. The close is double: Virgil, who explains only as far as reason sees and hands the rest to Beatrice, and Statius, the poet who owes to the Aeneid what he knows of poetry.
Canto XVII: Love, the Center of the Poem
Summary of the canto
Leaving the smoke of wrath, Dante and Virgil reach the sun, which is already setting, and Dante, carried away by imagination, sees three examples of punished wrath: the mother who killed her son out of vengeance and was changed into a bird (the tradition identifies Procne), a crucified man (the common reading takes him for Haman), with Ahasuerus, Esther and the just Mordecai around him, and Lavinia lamenting that her mother, the queen, killed herself out of wrath and so lost her. The vision breaks like a bubble when a light greater than the common one strikes his face, and a voice says that one climbs there. It is an angel, so luminous that it blinds, and Virgil explains that he shows the way without being asked, because whoever waits for the request, seeing the need, already puts himself in refusal. The two accept the invitation and climb before dusk, for after sunset one cannot climb. On the first step, Dante feels a beating of wings on his face and hears the beatitude of the peacemakers, those who have no evil wrath, and when the sun vanishes and the stars appear his legs fail him. They reach the top of the stair and stop, like a ship that comes to shore. Dante, waiting for some sound, asks Virgil what offense is purged in that circle, and the master uses the pause for the lesson of disordered love, which explains the whole mountain:
Analysis
L’amor del bene, scemo / del suo dover, quiritta si ristora; / qui si ribatte il mal tardato remo
, the love of good, lacking its due measure, is restored here; here the oar that was delayed in ill time is struck again.
Dante asks what offense is purged there, and Virgil answers with the name of a love, not of a sin. Sloth appears as an oar struck late, that is, as lack of zeal, and the master uses the night that immobilizes them to give more than the disciple asked, promising him some good fruit of the delay.
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Canto XVIII: Free Will and the Zealous
Summary of the canto
Virgil finishes the lesson and looks at Dante's face to see whether he is content. Dante, still thirsty, keeps silent out of shyness, fearing to weigh on the guide with so many questions, and the master, who perceives the desire that does not open, gives him courage to speak. Dante then asks him to show him love, to which all good action and its opposite are reduced. Virgil tells him to fix on it the eyes of the intellect, so that he sees the error of the blind who make themselves guides, and explains how love is born: the soul, created ready to love, moves toward whatever pleases it as soon as pleasure awakens it; the faculty that apprehends draws an intention from the thing and opens it within us, and it is toward that that the mind turns.
Analysis
Canto XIX: The Siren and the Pope
Summary of the canto
At the hour when the day's heat no longer warms the cold of the moon, before dawn, Dante dreams of a stammering woman, cross-eyed, crooked, with crippled hands and the color of wax. He looks at her, and his gaze straightens her: her tongue is loosed, her pale face gains color, as love wishes, and she sings:
Analysis
Canto XX: Hugh Capet and the Earthquake
Summary of the canto
Dante wanted to hear more from the spirit he was speaking with, but yields to the better will of the other, who had already said enough, and draws from the water the sponge still thirsty. Virgil walks close to the rock, like one who passes along a narrow wall between battlements, because on the other side the people who drip from their eyes the evil that occupies the whole world come too close to the edge. Dante, in protest, interrupts the narration:
Analysis
Canto XXI: Statius and the Trembling Mountain
Summary of the canto
The canto begins with the desire the previous one ended with, the thirst to know, and soon a shade overtakes the poets, explains why the mountain trembles, and reveals himself as Statius:
Analysis
Reading of the block of cantos
Analysis