Inferno · Canto I ·
Inferno I — The Dark Wood
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 1 of 100 · Inferno, Canto I
Before reading
This is the first canto of the Inferno, and the prologue to the whole Commedia. There are a hundred cantos ahead; this one is structurally different from the ninety-nine that follow it. It sets the stage for the entire journey — through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, and into Heaven — before the journey has begun. You can read it knowing that everything announced here will be paid off, sometimes a hundred cantos later.
Where the canto sits
The poem opens in the spring of 1300 — Easter week, by most readings — when Dante was thirty-five years old. The Italian Middle Ages held the threescore-and-ten of Psalm 90 as the human span, so thirty-five is the midpoint: a man standing at the exact balance of a life. This is the only canto in the poem in which Dante writes from inside that present. Everything else is set as a journey through the otherworld in that same spring — but written, of course, years later, in exile.
What it helps to know
The man you meet at the start of the canto is lost in a way the poem will spend a hundred cantos defining. He has not committed a single specific sin you can name; he has simply lost his bearings, and the canto is interested in that condition as its own kind of crisis. Do not look for a precipitating event. The poem will not give you one.
The shade who appears later is the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC), author of the Aeneid — the most authoritative poem in Latin Christendom, read for over a thousand years as a kind of half-Christian scripture. Dante revered him absolutely. For Dante's first audience, the appearance of Virgil in a Florentine wood at Easter would have been roughly as startling as Shakespeare turning up in a modern novel to walk the protagonist through a crisis. Keep an ear, as you read, on the register of Virgil's speech — Dante is signalling something about his authority through it.
Three animals will appear on the slope. You do not need to know what they "mean" before you read; let them be the threatening creatures they are. Their meanings will become clearer over the next thirty cantos.
Near the end of the canto, Virgil will deliver a brief prophecy about a coming figure called a Greyhound. Seven hundred years of commentators have argued over who or what is meant. Treat the prophecy as deliberately open — it is one of the puzzles the poem leaves you to carry.
What to read for
Notice the very first word of the poem (in any translation that respects it): the journey belongs not to me but to us. Dante is writing a private spiritual autobiography that insists, from its first syllable, on being read as a universal one.
Notice the role of fear. The pilgrim is not yet capable of doing anything except being afraid; how he gets past that will be the work of the next canto and, in slower form, of the whole poem.
Notice the shape of the journey Virgil proposes. It is laid out in a handful of lines near the end, and it is the architecture of the entire Commedia in miniature — down, then up, then with a different guide, up further. Try to feel that shape as a physical description of three places before you read it as a theological one.
The canto is short. Go gently. The hardest reading is still ahead.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The poem opened at the exact midpoint of a life and refused to tell you how its narrator got there. I cannot well repeat how there I entered, so full was I of slumber: confession will require the whole Commedia. The pilgrim then attempted what any sensible person attempts when they realise they are lost — he tried to walk directly toward the light. He failed. Three beasts blocked him. The structural premise of the entire poem is hidden in this small refusal: you cannot climb the hill from the valley you woke up in. You have to go down before you can go up. The journey Virgil offers near the end is the architecture of all hundred cantos in eleven lines, and it is offered conditionally — if thou wilt ascend. The pilgrim's will is the engine the poem requires.
What the three beasts were
The traditional reading aligns them with Dante's three large categories of sin — leopard for incontinence (the upper Hell, where appetite overruns reason), lion for violence (the middle Hell, where will turns weapon), she-wolf for fraud and avarice (the lower Hell, where reason itself is corrupted). Many readers also map them politically — the leopard for the factional ferocity of Florence, the lion for the imperial ambition of the French crown, the she-wolf for the avarice of the Papal Curia. Both readings work simultaneously, and the poem keeps both open. The she-wolf gets the most ink because she will return, in the Greyhound prophecy, as the figure the coming saviour is sent to dispatch.
What Virgil is — and is not
The shade is the most authoritative voice in Latin Christendom outside scripture itself. Dante calls him maestro, autore, the one from whom I took the beautiful style that has done me honour. The reverence is total, and it is also a setup. Virgil will lead the pilgrim through Hell because he understands it from the inside, and out of it as far as the summit of Purgatory; he cannot lead him into Heaven because he never glimpsed it. Notice that when Virgil sketches the three realms near the end of the canto, he names the cries of Hell and the patient fire of Purgatory but cannot use the word Heaven — only the blessed people. The limit of his guidance is announced in line 122. Keep an ear out, in every later canto, for what Virgil leaves unsaid.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening tercet. The most quoted three lines in Italian literature.
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. (Inf. I.1–3)
The first word — nel mezzo / "midway" — locates the poem temporally, spatially, morally, and structurally in a single gesture. The plural our is in the Italian and Longfellow preserves it.
The diagnosis the pilgrim cannot make.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered, So full was I of slumber at the moment In which I had abandoned the true way. (Inf. I.10–12)
The condition of being lost includes the loss of the memory of being lost.
The she-wolf.
And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings Seemed to be laden in her meagreness, And many folk has caused to live forlorn! (Inf. I.49–51)
The other beasts are described in muscle; the wolf is described in appetite. The Comedy's first picture of the sin that consumes itself.
Virgil names himself.
Not man; man once I was… A poet was I, and I sang that just Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy, After that Ilion the superb was burned. (Inf. I.67, 73–75)
Four coordinates: not man, Mantuan, Augustan, poet of Aeneas. He served the empire and saw no further; that is exactly the limit the poem will explore.
Dante's tribute — the fullest one poet has ever paid another.
Thou art my master, and my author thou, Thou art alone the one from whom I took The beautiful style that has done me honour. (Inf. I.85–87)
Read it now as the worship it is. Reread it at the end of Purgatorio, when Virgil silently disappears, and see what the poem does with worship.
The Greyhound.
Many the animals with whom she weds, And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain. He shall not feed on either earth or pelf, But upon wisdom, and on love and virtue; 'Twixt Feltro and Feltro shall his nation be… (Inf. I.100–105)
Seven centuries of debate over the Greyhound's identity. What matters: wisdom, love and virtue is the same triad the inscription on the gate of Hell will assign to the Trinity. The political saviour is built from the same components as God.
The journey laid out.
Therefore I think and judge it for thy best Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide, And lead thee hence through the eternal place, Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations… And thou shalt see those who contented are Within the fire, because they hope to come, Whene'er it may be, to the blessed people; To whom, then, if thou wishest to ascend, A soul shall be for that than I more worthy. (Inf. I.112–122)
Hell, Purgatory, Paradise — and the careful if thou wishest. The pilgrim is never compelled.
What to watch for
Watch the word paura / fear. It opened this canto and will return at the start of canto II as the obstacle that must be overcome before the journey can begin. The whole of Inferno is the conversion of fear into knowledge.
Watch the Aeneid lurking under the text. The journey from wood to underworld to redeemed city is Aeneas's journey — Aeneas, whose pietas sent Dido to the pyre. The Comedy will spend a hundred cantos rewriting the Aeneid from inside, and from the very first canto its author is at the pilgrim's elbow.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.