Inferno — Canto I

Halfway along the journey of our life,
I found myself lost in a dark forest —
I had wandered off the straight road. The most famous opening line in European literature. Notice that Dante does not say my life — he says our. From the very first word, the reader is being implicated. We are halfway through this journey too.

"Halfway" is also literal: medieval Christians read Psalm 90 as fixing the human lifespan at seventy years, so the midpoint is 35. Dante was born in 1265; the dramatic date of the poem is the spring of 1300, the year he turned 35. The crisis the poem describes is also a real autobiographical one — Dante would be politically destroyed and exiled from Florence within two years of that imagined Easter.

God — even now it's hard to put into words
what that wild, rough, unforgiving forest was like;
the fear comes back at the very thought.

It was so bitter that death itself is hardly worse.
But to get to the good I found there,
I'll have to describe the other things I saw first. The arc of the entire Comedy, in one sentence. Before he describes anything, Dante is signaling that the nightmare he is about to put us through has a destination. There is good at the end of it. The whole poem is the journey from this opening despair to that final good — from the dark wood to the vision of God. Hold this sentence in mind through Inferno; it is the only thing that lets you read past the horrors.

I can't really say how I got in there —
I was so heavy with sleep at the moment
I left the true road behind.

But once I reached the foot of a hill —
where the valley finally ended,
the valley that had been driving fear into my heart all night — The geography is moral. The dark wood is at the bottom of a valley — low ground, the place of death and despair. The mountain rises up out of it, toward the light. The whole opening landscape is a map of the soul: a man comes to consciousness at the bottom of his own life, and sees, in the distance, a way out. The poem will use this kind of physical-as-spiritual geography all the way through. Mount Purgatory itself is going to be a literal mountain that the soul climbs.

I looked up and saw the hill's shoulders
already wrapped in the light of the sun —
the planet that guides every traveler down the right road. "That planet" is the sun. In the Ptolemaic cosmos that Dante inherited, the sun was one of the seven planets — literally wanderers, the heavenly bodies that move against the fixed stars. Calling the sun a planet was not poetic license but ordinary medieval astronomy. The image is theological as well as physical: the sun is the natural world's own answer to disorientation. As long as you can see it, you know which way is up.

Then the fear quieted a little —
the fear that had been pooling in my heart's lake
through that long, wretched night I had just spent. "My heart's lake." A small but striking image. In Dante's medieval physiology the heart was a kind of cup — fear and the other passions literally pooled there, and could overflow. He has been holding a brimming cup of fear all night long, and only now, at first light, is some of it draining off.

And just like a man who, still gasping for breath,
has dragged himself out of the sea onto the beach
and turns back to stare at the dangerous water —

that's what my soul did — still in flight —
turning back to look at the passage
that no one alive has ever come out of. The first miraculous claim of the poem. Dante has survived the dark wood. No one else has. His escape is technically already a wonder — and the rest of the poem turns on whether he can survive what comes next. The line is also our first hint that this story is not about an ordinary man. He is being kept alive for a reason.

After my exhausted body had rested a moment,
I set off up the empty slope again —
always with the lower foot the steady one. "The firm foot ever the lower" — a famous puzzle. Read literally, the line says he is climbing slowly, leaning into the slope, his weight on the back (lower) foot. Read allegorically, this is one of the most-debated images in Dante criticism: some readers see in it the soul's halting climb out of sin — the will is willing, but the lower part of human nature drags. Whichever reading you take, the image of climbing-against-gravity is going to come back, in full, as the central physical fact of Mount Purgatory.

And then — almost as soon as I started climbing —
a panther appeared. Light, quick,
her body covered in spots. The first of three beasts. Dante never spells out the allegory and there is more than one tradition for reading it. The most common medieval scheme: the leopard / panther = lust (or fraud, or worldly pleasure); the lion (next) = pride, or violence; the she-wolf = greed (or envy, or incontinence). Whatever the precise scheme, the three together represent the sins that any human attempting moral self-rescue runs into. They are why you cannot climb out of the dark wood on your own. Dante's whole journey through Hell will be, at one level, a long anatomy of these three appetites.

She wouldn't get out of my way —
in fact she blocked me so completely
that I almost turned back several times.

It was the very beginning of the morning,
and the sun was climbing along with the same stars
that had been beside it when Divine Love

first set those beautiful bodies in motion —
so I had reason to hope. The spotted skin of that beast, The hopeful sign. Medieval Christian thought held that God created the world in spring — at the same season the sun is rising in now, with the same stars (in Aries) overhead that had been present at the moment of creation. Add to this that the dramatic date of the canto is Good Friday morning, 1300, and the sky becomes extraordinarily loaded: it is the dawn of the resurrection of the world. So the season, the hour, even the constellations are stacked in Dante's favor — and yet, as we are about to see, the panther is still in his way.

the hour of the day, the sweet season — all of it gave me hope.
But not enough to keep me from being afraid
when the figure of a lion suddenly appeared.

He looked like he was coming straight at me,
head high, ravenous —
so much so that the very air seemed afraid of him.

And then a she-wolf — emaciated, but seeming
to carry the whole weight of every craving in the world,
a beast who had already ruined the lives of many. The she-wolf. By Dante's reading the worst of the three beasts — and the one most clearly tied to his own contemporary Italy. He saw greed and political corruption as the ruin of his city, of the Papacy, and of the world's chance at peace. Watch for her to come back into the conversation in a few tercets, when Virgil will prophesy the coming of a Greyhound who will at last drive her back to Hell. The wolf is the canto's villain; the Greyhound is its dream of a savior.

She weighed on me so heavily,
with the dread coming off the very sight of her,
that I gave up all hope of reaching the summit.

And like a man who has been gladly piling something up
until the moment comes when he is going to lose it,
and every thought of his turns to weeping and despair —

that's what that restless beast did to me.
Step by step she came at me,
pushing me back to where the sun is silent. "Where the sun is silent." One of the most famous of Dante's many synesthetic images — a place where light and sound have collapsed into the same kind of absence. The dark forest is not just dark; it is somewhere the sun has gone quiet. The line will echo through the rest of Inferno: silence will keep showing up wherever the natural order is being undone.

As I was tumbling back down toward the lowland,
someone appeared in front of me —
he seemed hoarse from a long silence. This is Virgil. The greatest poet of Imperial Rome (70–19 BC), author of the Aeneid — the epic Dante had memorized in school, modeled his own ambitions on, and treated as the highest achievement of pre-Christian poetry. The "long silence" is a quietly devastating image: Virgil has been dead for thirteen centuries, his voice no longer truly heard in the world. To put him in this place, mute and waiting in a wood, is for Dante an act of love and of grief — and his arrival here is the beginning of every good thing the poem will give us.

When I saw him in that vast wilderness,
I cried out to him: "Have mercy on me —
whatever you are, shade or living man!"

He answered: "Not a man — though I was once.
Both of my parents were Lombards,
Mantuans by birth.

I was born under Julius Caesar — though late in his time —
and lived in Rome under the good Augustus,
in the age of the false and lying gods. Virgil's brief autobiography. Born 70 BC, in the last years of Julius Caesar's rise; lived through the entire reign of Augustus, the first Roman emperor (and his patron). The Aeneid, his masterpiece, was commissioned by Augustus in part to give Rome a founding myth equal to the Iliad. The phrase "false and lying gods" is Virgil — a pagan in life — speaking now from his post-mortem perspective, with the eyes of someone who has learned that the Olympians were not what he had thought. Hearing him use the phrase about his own former religion is startling, and grim. He has been told the truth, too late.

I was a poet, and I sang of the noble
son of Anchises, who fled Troy
after the proud city of Ilion was burned. The son of Anchises is Aeneas, hero of the Aeneid. Ilion = Troy. Aeneas escapes the burning city carrying his father Anchises on his back, then wanders the Mediterranean for years before founding the line of kings that will eventually establish Rome. Dante is letting Virgil identify himself by his great poem rather than by name — a subtle compliment, and a hint that the Comedy is going to imitate exactly that move: defining a man by the journey he is about to make.

But you — why are you heading back into trouble?
Why aren't you climbing this beautiful mountain,
which is the source and cause of every joy?"

"Are you really that Virgil — the fountain
out of which such a wide river of speech has flowed?"
I answered him, my face hot with shame.

"You who are the honor and the light of all the other poets —
let my long years of study, and the great love
that drove me into your book, pay off for me now. Dante and the Aeneid. Dante had read the Aeneid in Latin, by heart, since boyhood. Throughout the Comedy he treats Virgil not as a generic ancient poet but as his literary father — the writer he has been studying his whole life and is, in a real sense, trying to become. The Comedy is Dante's bid to write something equal to it, in his own language, in his own age. It is also why the canto's whole emotional charge depends on this meeting: the man is meeting the master.

You are my master and my author.
You alone are the one I learned the beautiful style from —
the style that has done me honor. "The beautiful style" (lo bello stilo). Dante is referring, in part, to his earlier lyric poetry — the Vita Nuova period — in which he had cultivated a high, noble tone he believed he had learned from reading Virgil. The acknowledgment is also a quiet bid: a young Italian poet, in vernacular, claiming his place in the line that descends from the great Roman.

Look at the beast that has driven me back down.
Protect me from her, famous sage —
she is making my blood and my pulse tremble."

"You'll have to take another road,"
he answered, when he saw me weeping,
"if you want to escape this wild place,

because this beast you're crying about
lets no one pass her —
she will harry him until she destroys him.

She has such a vicious, ruthless nature
that she can never satisfy her greed —
after eating she is hungrier than before.

She mates with many beasts,
and will mate with more, until the Greyhound
comes — and he will kill her in her own pain. The Greyhound (il Veltro). One of the most famous riddles in literature, and the first of Dante's political prophecies. Some kind of liberator is coming, who will drive greed back to Hell. Who? Some scholars read the figure as Dante's late-life patron Cangrande della Scala (whose name means literally "Big Dog"); others see a future emperor; others a future reforming pope; others Christ himself at the second coming. Dante never tells us. The line is a bet placed on a future Italy that, for him, never arrived.

He won't feed on land or on money,
but on wisdom, on love, and on virtue.
His homeland will lie between Feltro and Feltro. "Between Feltro and Feltro." Another piece of the Greyhound puzzle. The most common reading takes the two Feltros to be Feltre (a town in the Veneto) and Montefeltro (a region in the Romagna) — pointing to a future leader from somewhere in northern Italy. Some readers instead hear the same word twice as a pun on feltro, the cloth used in cardinals' hats — predicting a coming reformer pope. Whoever it is, Dante is being deliberately cryptic: prophecy works by being legible only after the fact.

He will be the savior of that humble Italy
for which the maiden Camilla died,
and Euryalus, Turnus, and Nisus died of their wounds. Four heroes from the Aeneid. All of them died in the wars over the founding of Italy that Aeneas's arrival sets off. Camilla, a fierce warrior maiden, dies leading the Italian resistance to the Trojans. Turnus, an Italian prince, is killed by Aeneas in single combat at the very end of the poem. Nisus and Euryalus are two close friends in Aeneas's camp who die together in a famous and beautiful night raid. By naming all four together, Dante is signaling that the Greyhound's mission will be the completion of the work Aeneas began — the unification and redemption of Italy, paid for in blood.

He will hunt her through every city
until he drives her back into Hell —
where Envy first let her loose into the world.

So I think — and I am certain of it —
the best thing you can do is follow me.
I will be your guide, and take you out of here through the eternal place,

where you will hear the desperate wailing,
and see the ancient souls in their grief,
each one crying out for the second death. "The second death" = annihilation. The damned in Hell are already dead in body. What they cry out for, hopelessly, is total nonexistence — the ending of even their souls. Dante's Hell is a place where you cannot stop being. The hope of oblivion has been removed. We will see this dynamic in raw form in the very next canto.

Then you will see the souls who are content
inside the fire — content because they hope,
eventually, to reach the people of the blessed. The souls in Purgatory. The structural innovation of Dante's universe (and of medieval Catholicism more broadly) is that there is a third place: souls who have died in friendship with God but with sins still to work off, suffering with hope. The fire of Purgatory is purifying, not punishing. The strange logic of the line: the souls there are content in their suffering, because they know what it is for and where it ends. They are the only place in the cosmos where pain comes with peace.

And if you want to climb higher than that,
there is a soul more worthy than I am for the task —
I will hand you over to her when I leave. Beatrice. Virgil cannot say her name yet — that comes in Canto II. As a virtuous pagan, he is barred from Heaven; only a soul who already belongs there can take Dante the rest of the way. Beatrice will arrive in person at the top of Mount Purgatory and become the guide of the entire Paradiso. The handoff between the two of them — pagan reason giving way to Christian grace — is one of the great structural moments of the poem, and it has just been quietly set up.

Because the Emperor who reigns above —
since I was a rebel against his law —
will not let anyone enter his city through me. Virgil's situation. He was not a sinner in any active sense; his only "fault" is that he was born too early to know Christ, and he died unbaptized. Like every other virtuous pagan, he lives in Limbo — the first circle of Hell, where there is no torment but no hope of Heaven either. To call himself a "rebel against the law" is gentle understatement: he is excluded by the calendar of his own birth. The pain of this is something the poem will return to repeatedly. It is one of Dante's deepest moral problems.

He rules everywhere — but it is there that he reigns.
That is where his city is, and his high throne.
Lucky the one he chooses for it!"

And I said to him: "Poet, I beg you —
by the very God you never had the chance to know —
so that I can escape this misery and worse:

take me where you said you would,
so I can see the gate of Saint Peter
and the souls you described as so wretched." "Saint Peter's gate." By medieval shorthand, the entrance to Purgatory — and through it, eventually, the threshold of Heaven. (Peter is the Christian keeper of the keys.) Dante has just been promised that the only road to that gate runs through the whole of Hell. The complete arc of the Comedy has been laid out in this single canto.

Then he started walking, and I followed him.