Cantos I to IV: The shore and Ante-Purgatory
And I will sing of that second kingdom where the human spirit purges itself and becomes worthy to rise to heaven.
Explanation and analysis
The cantica opens by changing seas. Dante has left behind Inferno, which he calls a cruel sea, and now sails better waters, and soon he says what he will sing. The line comes before any character, before the shore, the old guardian and the mountain: it is the definition of the place, given all at once, in a few lines, to someone who has just arrived from a kingdom where punishment was the subject.
The line does not define Purgatory by a place or by a punishment in itself. It defines it by two actions of the spirit: purging oneself and becoming worthy to rise. The second action weighs as much as the first, because it says that purgation has an end and that the end is a climb. In Inferno the souls are what they did; here they are ceasing to be it, and that is why, in this cantica, one sings. The change comes before the climb and is its condition.
The line also leaves a question that the mountain will answer: how long does this change take? The poet does not say here. The cantos that follow measure it in the souls' waiting, in spans counted in multiples of the life lived, and show that purging is a work of the will, which the rest of the cantica will see being straightened. In a few words, the line states the thesis that the poem takes thirty-three cantos to demonstrate.
But if a lady from heaven moves and governs you, as you say, no flattery is needed: it is enough that you ask me in her name.
Explanation and analysis
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Ah, empty shades, except in appearance! Three times I clasped my hands behind it, and as many times I brought them back to my breast.
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Horrible were my sins, but infinite goodness has arms so wide that it takes in all that turns to it.
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This mountain is such that always, when one starts from below, it is hard; and the higher one climbs, the less harm it does. So, when it seems so gentle to you that climbing is as light as going down in a boat with the current.
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First the heavens must turn outside it as much as they turned in life, because I put off my good sighs until the end, unless a prayer rising from a heart that lives in grace helps me first; and the other prayer, what good is it, if it is not heard in heaven?
Explanation and analysis
Cantos V to VIII: Those who repented late
We were all killed by violence, and sinners until the last hour; there a light from heaven made us come to our senses, so that, repentant and forgiving, we left life at peace with God, who afflicts us with the desire to see him.
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My body, cold, at the mouth, found the impetuous Archiano; and this one pushed it toward the Arno, and loosed on my breast the cross I made of myself when pain overcame me.
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Mantua..., and the shade, all gathered into itself, rose toward him from the place where it had been, saying: O Mantuan, I am Sordello of your land! and each embraced the other.
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What good is it that Justinian mended your bridle, if the saddle is empty? Without it, the shame would be less.
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Not by doing, but by not doing, I lost the power to see the high Sun that you desire, and which was known to me late.
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Sharpen your eyes here, reader, for the truth, since the veil is now so thin that passing through it is certainly easy.
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Cantos IX to XII: The gate and pride
I have them from Peter; and he told me that I should err by opening rather than by keeping shut, provided that one prostrates oneself at my feet. Then he pushed the leaf of the sacred gate, saying: Enter; but I warn you that whoever looks back goes back out.
Explanation and analysis
And she said: What good of others will it be for you, if you forget your own? And he answered: Now be comforted, for it is fitting that I fulfill my duty before I leave: justice wants it and piety holds me back.
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O proud Christians, wretched and weary, who, sick in the sight of the mind, trust in backward steps, do you not realize that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly, which flies to justice without shields?
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O empty glory of human powers! How little the green lasts at the top, if it is not followed by coarse ages! Cimabue thought he held the field in painting, and now Giotto has the cry, so that the fame of the first is dimmed.
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Now be proud, go with lofty faces, sons of Eve, and do not lower your faces, so that you do not see your evil path!
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With the fingers of my right hand spread, I found only six of the letters that he with the keys had carved on my temples; seeing this, my guide smiled.
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Cantos XIII to XVI: Envy and wrath
Because a wire of iron pierces the eyelids of all of them and sews them shut, as is done to the wild hawk because it does not keep still. It seemed to me, as I walked, an outrage to see others without being seen, so I turned to my wise counselor.
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My blood was so burning with envy that, had I seen a man rejoice, you would have seen me filled with livid pallor. From my own seed I reap such straw. O human kind, why do you set your hearts where the company must be forbidden?
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That infinite and ineffable good which is up above runs to love just as a ray comes to a shining body. It gives itself as much as it finds of ardor, so that, however far charity extends, the eternal value grows above it.
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and I saw him bend toward the earth under the death that already weighed on him, yet always making doors of his eyes toward heaven, praying to the high Lord, amid such war, that he forgive his persecutors, with that look that opens pity.
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Heaven initiates your movements; I do not say all of them, but, even supposing I said so, light is given to you for good and for evil, and free will, which, if it suffers fatigue in the first battles with heaven, afterward conquers everything, if it is well nourished.
Explanation and analysis
Rome, which made the good world, used to have two suns, which let one see both paths, that of the world and that of God. One extinguished the other, and the sword joined the crozier, and with one another, together, by living force, they necessarily go badly.
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Cantos XVII to XXI: Love, Sloth, and Avarice
Natural love is always without error, but the other can err, through a wrong object or through too much or too little intensity.
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Because, if love is offered to us from outside, and the soul walks on no other foot, then walking straight or crooked is not its merit.
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As far as reason sees here, I can tell you; from there on, wait only for Beatrice, for that is a work of faith.
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For a month and a little more I tested how heavy the great cloak is for the one who guards it from the mud, so that all other burdens seem like feathers.
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Cursed be you, ancient she-wolf, who have more prey than all the other beasts, because of your hunger without end and without bottom!
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and I, who lay in this pain for five hundred years and more, only now felt free will toward a better threshold: that is why you felt the earthquake, and the pious spirits all over the mountain raise praise to that Lord, which soon sends them upward.
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of the Aeneid I speak, which was a mother to me and a nurse in writing poetry: without it I would not have fixed the weight of a single dram. And for having lived there when Virgil lived, I would accept one more sun than I owe for my departure from exile.
Explanation and analysis
Cantos XXII to XXV: Gluttony and the Generation of the Soul
you did as one who walks at night, who carries the lamp behind and does not benefit himself, but makes learned those who come after, when you said: the age is renewed; justice returns and the first human time, and a new progeny descends from heaven.
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their sockets were like rings without gems; whoever could read omo in the faces of men would have recognized the eme there.
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and not only once, circling this space, is our pain refreshed: I say pain, and should say comfort, because that will leads us to the trees, the same one that led Christ, joyfully, to say Eli, when he freed us with his blood.
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so soon did my Nella, with her broken weeping, lead me to drink the sweet wormwood of sufferings. With her devout prayers and her sighs she drew me from the slope where one waits, and freed me from the other terraces.
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Cantos XXVI to XXIX: The fire and Eden
he was the better craftsman of the mother tongue. In verses of love and prose romances he surpassed them all; and let the fools say what they like, who believe the one from Limoges surpasses him.
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see now, son: between Beatrice and you stands this wall.
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do not wait any longer for my word or my sign; free, upright, and whole is your will, and it would be an error not to act according to its desire: therefore I crown and miter you over yourself.
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on this side it descends with the virtue of taking from someone the memory of sin; on the other, it gives back the memory of every good deed done. From here it is Lethe; thus, on the other side, it is called Eunoe, and it does not work unless it has been tasted on both sides.
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Cantos XXX to XXXIII: Beatrice
but Virgil had left us deprived of himself, Virgil my sweet father, Virgil to whom I gave myself for my salvation.
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the ice that had been tight around my heart turned to spirit and water, and with anguish it came out of my chest through my mouth and eyes.
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the present things, with their false pleasure, turned my steps as soon as your face was hidden.
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Here you will be a silvan only a short time, and with me you will be, without end, a citizen of that Rome of which Christ is a Roman. Therefore, for the good of the world that lives badly, keep your eyes now on the chariot, and what you see, when you return there, make sure you write it down.
Explanation and analysis
and if you cannot remember, she answered, smiling, remember now how today you drank from Lethe; and if from smoke fire is inferred, this forgetting clearly proves guilt in your will, attentive to another part.