In praising Nella for her devotion, Forese takes occasion to deliver a rather salty INVECTIVE AGAINST THE WOMEN OF FLORENCE for their immodest dress and behavior.
In answer to Forese’s plea (for the souls have all seen Dante’s shadow), Dante explains how he has mounted into Purgatory and with whom he is traveling.
In hope of seeing who had cried those words
I drew near and peered up at the green boughs
like one who wastes his lifetime stalking birds.
At that, my more-than-father said: “My son,
come now, for we must portion out more wisely
the time allotted us.” And he moved on.
I looked down and turned round to join those sages
in the same instant. And their talk was such
that every step I took paid double wages.
Then suddenly at my back I heard the strain
of Labia mea, Domine, so sung
that it was both a hymn and cry of pain.
“Father,” I said, “what is this sound?” And he:
“Spirits who, circling so, loosen perhaps
the knot of debt they owe Eternity.”
As pilgrims wrapped in holy meditation,
when they encounter strangers on the way,
look, but do not pause for conversation;
so from behind us, turning half about
to stare as they went by, a band of souls
came up and passed us, silent and devout.
The sockets of their eyes were caves agape;
their faces death-pale, and their skin so wasted
that nothing but the gnarled bones gave it shape.
I doubt that even Erysichthon’s skin,
even when he most feared that he would starve,
had drawn so tight to bone, or worn so thin.
“Behold,” I thought, although I did not speak,
“the face of those who lost Jerusalem
when Miriam ripped her son with her own beak.”
Their eye pits looked like gem-rims minus gem.
Those who read OMO in the face of man
would easily have recognized the M.
Who could imagine, without knowing how,
craving could waste souls so at the mere smell
of water and of fruit upon the bough?
I was still wondering how they could have grown
so thin and scabby (since what famished them
had not yet been made clear to me), when one
turning his eyes from deep inside his skull,
stared at me fixedly, then cried aloud:
“How have I earned a grace so bountiful?”
I never would have recognized his face,
but in his voice I found that which his features
had eaten from themselves without a trace.
That spark relit my memory and, in awe,
I understood beneath those altered features
it was Forese’s very self I saw.
“Ah, do not stare,” he pleaded, “at my hide,
bleached like a leper’s by these flaming scabs,
nor at the fleshless bones I bear inside;
but tell me all about yourself, and who
these two souls are that bear you company;
and tell me with all haste, I beg of you.”
“I wept to see your face once when it lay
in death,” I said, “and I weep no less now
to see what pain has wasted it away;
in God’s name tell me how. Do not demand
I speak while still bemused, for he speaks badly
whose mind is too full to be at command.”
And he: “From the Eternal Counsel flow
the powers whereby the water and the tree
we have just passed, emaciate us so.
All those who sing while weeping in their pain
once loved their stomach-sacs beyond all measure.
Here, thirst and hunger wring them clean again.
Hunger and thirst that nothing can assuage
grow in us from the fragrance of the fruit
and of the spray upon the foliage.
And not once only as we round this place
do we endure renewal of our pain.
—Did I say ‘pain’? I should say ‘gift of grace.’
For the same will that drives us to the Tree
drove Christ on gladly to cry ‘Eli! Eli!’
when he paid with his blood to set us free.”
And I to him: “Forese, from the day
in which you changed worlds for the better life,
less than five years, as yet, have passed away.
If your ability to sin had fled
before the hour of that sublime sweet sorrow
that weds us back to God, among his blessèd,
how have you reached so high in the great climb?
I thought to find you still below, with those
who sit and wait, repaying time for time.”
“My Nella’s flood of tears,” he answered me,
“Have borne me up so soon to let me drink
the blessed wormwood of my agony.
Her sighs and prayers were heard where Love abounds:
they raised me from the slope where I lay waiting
and set me free of all the other Rounds.
The dearer and more pleasing in God’s sight
is the poor widow of my love, as she
is most alone in doing what is right.
For the Barbagia of Sardinia breeds
chaste women as compared to that Barbagia
in which I left her to her widow’s weeds.
O my dear brother, what is there to say?
In vision I already see a time—
and it is not far distant from this day—
in which the pulpit shall denounce by writ
the shameless jades that Florentines call ladies,
who go about with breasts bare to the tit.
What Moslem woman ever has required
a priestly discipline, or any other,
before she would go decently attired?
But if the chippies only could foresee
swift Heaven’s punishment, they’d have their mouths
already open to howl misery.
For if what we foresee here does not lie,
they shall be sad before those sons grow beards
who can be soothed now with a lullaby.
Now, brother, answer in your turn. You see
your shadow there, and how these other souls
are staring at the spot along with me.”
I then: “If you call back to mind from here
my past life in your company, yours in mine,
memory will seem too great a load to bear.
I was recalled from such ways by that one
who leads me here, and just the other day
when that one’s sister (pointing to the Sun)
was at the full. Through the profoundest night
of final death he led me in this flesh
which follows him to find the final Right.
From there with many a sweet encouragement
he led me upward and around the mountain
which straightens in you what the world has bent.
And he has pledged himself to go with me
until I stand by Beatrice, above.
Then I must do without his company.
The one who pledges this (and as I spoke
I pointed to him standing there) is Virgil.
The other is the shade of him who woke
to blessedness just now when every rim,
the mountain round, shook in releasing him.”
NOTES
11. Labia mea, Domine: “O Lord, open Thou my Lips, and my mouth shall pour forth Thy praise.” From the Fifty-first Psalm of the Vulgate. The psalm is part of the service of Lauds for Tuesdays, and the time is now Easter Tuesday. A second aptness is in
the mention of lips being opened for praise, rather than for eating and drinking.
21. silent and devout: Virgil (lines 14-15) seems to have implied that the souls go circling the ledge endlessly uttering their mixed hymn and lament. Here they are presented as silent and devout. The only possible inference seems to be that they circle the ledge in devout and silent meditation until they reach the tree, and then cry aloud.
25. Erysichthon: Erysichthon mocked the goddess Ceres by felling an oak in her sacred grove, and Ceres visited an insatiable hunger upon him. He ate up all his own substance, sold his daughter in order to buy more food, consumed that, and finally devoured his own limbs. (Metamorphoses, VIII, 726-881.) He does admirably as the archetype of gluttony, for the glutton consumes his soul just as Erysichthon consumed his body.
29-30. who lost Jerusalem . . . Miriam: Josephus (Jewish Wars, VI, 3) relates that when Titus was besieging Jerusalem in A.D. 70 (see XXI, 82, note), the people were so reduced by hunger that a woman named Mary or Miriam, the daughter of Eleazar, killed her son, cooked him, and ate half his body. with her own beak: As if she were a bird of prey, a creature reduced from all humanity. So gluttony reduces the soul.
32. Those who read OMO in the face of man: A medieval notion held that the Creator had signed His creation (thoughtfully anticipating the Latin alphabet) OMO DEI, “Man [is] of God”; the eyes forming the two O’s, the brows, nose, and cheekbones forming the M, the ears the D, the nostrils the E, and the mouth the I. Dante mentions only the OMO, making the point that these souls were so emaciated that one could readily see the M.
34. without knowing how: Dante’s wonderment here concerns the nature of souls. How can insubstantial spirits become so hideously wasted by the craving aroused by the mere smell of food and water? (One need only inhale the moist air near a fountain or waterfall to know what Dante means by the “smell” of water.) In XXV the question arises again and is answered in detail.
42. How have I earned a grace so bountiful: The grace of seeing Dante again.
46. That spark: The soul’s voice.
48. Forese: Forese Donati (For-RAY-zeh) died 28 July 1296. Gemma Donati, Dante’s wife, was Forese’s kinswoman. Forese was the brother of Corso Donati, head of the Black Guelphs, and Dante was a passionate White, but before politics separated them they had been warm friends. Forese had been something of a poet, and he and Dante had exchanged rhymed lampoons in one of which Dante had accused him of Gluttony; and of Pride and Prodigality as well.
70. And not once only: Dante may mean that the pain is renewed over and over as the souls circle past the one tree, or that there are more trees on the Cornice, each of them sharpening the hunger and thirst of these souls. Dante’s phrasing of line 73 seems, despite the disagreement of many commentators, to suggest that only one tree so functions. The idea of the renewal of pain upon the completion of each full circle was well established in ancient writings, and has already been made use of in the Inferno in the bolgia of the Sowers of Discord.
74. drove Christ on gladly to cry ‘Eli! Eli!’: At the ninth hour of his agony Christ cried, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew, xxvii, 46). Dante does not mean that Christ rejoiced in his final despair but, rather, that foreseeing it, he still went gladly toward it. The desire of these sinners to endure their terrible suffering is thus compared to Christ’s eagerness to endure the pain that would redeem the souls of men.
76-84. DANTE’S QUESTION. Dante’s phrasing is difficult here. It must be understood to be Dante’s personal knowledge that Forese did not give up gluttony until he was too weak to eat any more, i.e., in his final hour. Then only did he achieve the sweet sublime sorrow of repentance. But since he died in 1295, only five years before the present meeting, Dante would have expected to find him outside The Gate, his purifying pains delayed for as long as he made God wait. So line 84, “repaying time for time.”
85. Nella: Forese’s wife Giovanna, a name whose affectionate diminutive is Giovanella, whence Nella. Dante clearly offers her as the type of the good Christian wife. Her virtue puts all the more to shame the decadence of the other women of Florence.
90. set me free of all the other Rounds: Nella’s prayers have not only moved Forese out of Ante-Purgatory, but have freed him of all the pains of the Rounds below, on which he might have suffered (if Dante’s charge in his rhymed lampoons had any substance) for Pride and Prodigality.
94. the Barbagia of Sardinia: Barbagia, a wild region in the Sardinian mountains, was dominated by the Barbacini, a bandit clan said to have been landed by the Vandals. They were reputed to be savages and idolaters. St. Gregory speaks of them as living like animals. Other medieval sources report their women as going half-naked; and inevitably some later sources (Dante’s son Pietro among them) drop the “half” and report the Barbagian women to be naked savages. Thus, Forese is saying that the naked savages of the Sardinian Barbagia are chaste as compared to the women of that other Barbagia, i.e., Florence, Barbagia-on-the-Arno.
109. For if what we foresee here does not lie: As usual, it does not, the calamities here foreseen, as of 1300, having already befallen Florence by the time Dante wrote this prophecy. In November of 1301 (see XX, 70-78) Charles de Valois entered Florence and sowed disaster. In 1302 Fulcieri da Calboli introduced his reign of terror (XIV, 58 ff.), and a great famine occurred in the same year. In 1303 Florence was interdicted, and shortly thereafter a bridge collapsed, killing many people. (See also Inferno, XXVI, 7-12.) It would take about fifteen years for male children to progress from lullabies to beards, and by 1315 Florence had more than enough to mourn.
120. that one’s sister (pointing to the Sun): The Moon. As Diana, she was said to be the sister of Apollo, the Sun. (See note to XX, 130-132.) Dante is, of course, referring to the moon of the night of Holy Thursday when he was in the Dark Wood of Error (Inferno, I).
121-122. the profoundest night of final death: Hell.
Canto XXIV
THE SIXTH CORNICE
The Gluttons
The Tree of Knowledge
The Rein of Gluttony
The Poets move on as Dante continues his talk with Forese, who identifies many of the souls of the Gluttons, among them BONAGIUNTA OF LUCCA. Bonagiunta mutters a prophecy concerning Dante’s future meeting with GENTUCCA. He then questions Dante about THE SWEET NEW STYLE and ends by concluding that had he and the others of his school of poetry grasped the principle of natural expression, they would have written as well as do the poets of Dante’s school.
All the other souls speed ahead, but Forese remains to prophesy the death of his brother, CORSO DONATI, leader of the Black Guelphs. Then he speeds away and soon disappears.
The Poets move on and come to THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE from which a voice cries THE REIN OF GLUTTONY, citing EVE, THE CENTAURS, and THE ARMY OF GIDEON. Having skirted the tree carefully, warned away by the voice, the Poets move ahead and meet THE ANGEL OF ABSTINENCE, who shows them to the ascent.
Talk did not slow our steps, nor they in turn
our talk, but still conversing we moved on
like ships at sea with a brisk wind astern.
And all those shades, looking like things twice dead,
were drinking in through their sepulchral eyes
the awe of seeing me as I had been bred.
And I, continuing as I had begun,
said: “His ascent, I think, is somewhat slower
than it would be but for that other one.
—But where now is Piccarda? Do you know?
And is there anyone of special note
among these people who stare at me so?”
“My sister, who was good as she was fair,
and fair as good, sits crowned on High Olympus,
rejoicing in eternal triumph there.”
Thus he began. Then: “To identify
anyone here is certainly permitted,
for abstinence has milked our features dry.
This” (and
he pointed to him) “dearest brother,
was Bonagiunta of Lucca. That behind him,
his face more sunken in than any other,
once fathered Holy Church. Of Tours his line;
and here in the long fast he expiates
Bolsena’s eels and the Vernaccia wine.”
Then he named many others, one by one,
at which I saw not one black look among them,
The Divine Comedy Page 58
