Inferno · Canto II ·
Inferno II — Twilight Hesitation
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 2 of 100 · Inferno, Canto II
Before reading
This is the second canto, but the journey has not yet started. Canto I gave the architecture of the whole Commedia — three realms, two guides, the conditional offer of the climb — and ended with the pilgrim agreeing to go. Canto II is the night before the descent. Evening falls; the world settles; the only person not at rest is the man about to walk into Hell.
Where the canto sits
Inferno I is the prologue to the entire Commedia. Inferno II is the prologue to the Inferno. The journey proper begins in canto III. What this canto does, in a hundred and forty lines, is invent and defend the entire theological apparatus that makes the rest of the poem possible — the answer, before any of the questions get asked, to why is this allowed to happen at all. Read it as the poem's foundation argument.
What it helps to know
The canto turns on a chain of figures the reader meets only at second hand, through Virgil's retelling. Three of them matter, and a small note on each makes the canto land:
- Beatrice Portinari (c. 1265–1290) was a Florentine noblewoman Dante had loved from childhood; she died at twenty-four. His first book, the Vita Nuova, is a record of that love and a vow that he would one day write something worthier of her. The Commedia is the fulfilment of that vow. In the Comedy's scheme she is already in Heaven, blessed.
- Lucia is St Lucy of Syracuse — a fourth-century martyr who, by the time of Dante, was the patron saint of sight and eye-disease. Her appearance as the second link in a chain sent to a man who has lost his way is the poem's first quiet joke at its own expense.
- Mary, the Virgin, will be named only at the very end of Paradiso. Here she is unnamed, called simply a Lady gracious. Notice the withholding; the poem keeps her name in reserve for a thousand cantos.
Two literary precedents are also invoked, and they are precisely chosen. Aeneas descended living into the underworld in Aeneid VI to learn his destiny as founder of Rome. Paul was caught up living into the third heaven and heard things unspeakable, as he tells the Corinthians (2 Cor. 12). One is the pagan founder, one is the Christian apostle; one descends, one ascends. The pilgrim is about to combine both of them, and at the start of this canto he is not yet sure he is allowed to.
What to read for
Notice how small this canto is. Almost nothing happens externally — two men stand on a slope at twilight, one of them explains why they are about to start walking. The canto's drama is internal: a paralysis, a story told to break it, and a resolution. The whole Commedia will return again and again to scenes like this.
Notice the chain of who sent whom. It runs from Heaven downward through three women to one pagan poet to one frightened pilgrim. Watch what is not in the chain. Watch which institutions and which kinds of authority are bypassed.
Listen for one short line late in the canto in which Beatrice explains, to Virgil, why she has come. The line is three Italian words long and the poem's final tercet, a hundred cantos later in Paradiso, will use the same verb. You do not need to spot the echo now; let it land when it lands.
The canto closes on an image from a garden. Pay attention to who, or what, does the lifting.
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
Nothing visible. Two men stood on a slope at twilight, one of them confessed to fear, the other answered with a story, and by the close of the canto the fear had turned into walking. That is the whole external action. Internally, this small canto invented and defended the entire theological apparatus the rest of the poem will rest on: it explained why a living man may take this journey and who, at the deepest level, has sent him. The answer the poem gives is the chain of three women, and that chain — Mary → Lucia → Beatrice → Virgil → Dante — is the Comedy's answer to the question of grace. Notice what the chain does not contain. No pope, no bishop, no priest, no institutional Church. Salvation reaches the lost man through named human persons, chiefly women, with the pagan poet only at the lowest rung. One of the most quietly radical claims in medieval literature is encoded in the order of names.
What Aeneas and Paul are doing in the canto
When the pilgrim hesitates, he names exactly two precedents — Aeneas and Paul. The choice is surgical. Aeneas descended living into the underworld in Aeneid VI to learn his imperial destiny; Paul ascended living into the third heaven and heard things unspeakable. One is pagan, one is Christian; one descends, one ascends; together they bracket the entire vertical range the Comedy will traverse. The pilgrim's protest — I am not Aeneas, am not Paul — is not modesty. He is pointing out, precisely, the two figures the poem he is about to write will combine. Dante's denial is the poem's announcement of its ambition.
A subtle question worth carrying forward
When Beatrice tells Virgil that she comes to help Dante because he loved her so, two readings are possible. The straightforward one: she is honouring a worthy lover and giving him the help he has earned. The other: she is speaking to Virgil in Virgil's language — the language of the Aeneid, in which favours are won and obligations discharged and Dido is left on the pyre because pietas is a contract — because the language of God's actual love (free, unconditioned, prior to merit) is one Virgil cannot hear. On this second reading, Beatrice is gracious to Virgil rather than literal with him, and Virgil reports her words faithfully without registering that they have been translated downward for the limit of his listening. The canto does not force the reader to choose. But it leaves the seed: every speech Virgil reports from a higher source is, possibly, a speech simplified for him.
Famous and meaningful passages
The invocation.
O Muses, O high genius, now assist me! O memory, that didst write down what I saw, Here thy nobility shall be manifest! (Inf. II.7–9)
The third item invoked is memory. The Comedy claims throughout to be reportage rather than invention — and the claim is one of its persistent provocations.
The cowardice rebuke.
Thy soul attainted is with cowardice, Which many times a man encumbers so, It turns him back from honoured enterprise, As false sight doth a beast, when he is shy. (Inf. II.45–48)
The beast simile from the dark wood returns, applied now to Dante himself. The whole Commedia will be an education in the courage to keep going.
Beatrice in Virgil's account.
A friend of mine, and not the friend of fortune, Upon the desert slope is so impeded Upon his way, that he has turned through terror… (Inf. II.61–63)
A friend of mine, and not the friend of fortune — l'amico mio, e non de la ventura. One of the great compressed lines of the poem. Dante is a friend to Beatrice and not a friend of fortune: either not a fair-weather friend, or not the kind of person fortune favours, or both.
The line on which the whole poem rests.
Love moved me, which compelleth me to speak. (Inf. II.72)
Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare. Memorize this. Then read the last line of Paradiso: the Love which moves the sun and the other stars. The poem's first theological statement and its last use the same verb.
The chain.
There is in Heaven a Lady gracious so, That she condoles for this impediment, Whereto I send thee, so that stern decree Is broken in its course on high. This Lady Summoned to her Lucia in her request… Lucia, the foe of all that cruel is, Hastened away, and came unto the place Where I was sitting with the ancient Rachel. Beatrice, said she, the true praise of God, Why dost thou not succour him, who loved thee so… (Inf. II.94–104)
Mary is never named — she is a Lady gracious. The poem withholds her name until Paradiso. The small careful detail of the ancient Rachel — Old Testament emblem of the contemplative life — places Beatrice, while still descending, already among the elect.
The closing flower simile.
Even as the flowerets, by nocturnal chill, Bowed down and closed, when the sun whitens them, Uplift themselves all open on their stems; Such I became with my exhausted strength… Now go, for one sole will is in us both, Thou Leader, and thou Lord, and Master thou. Thus said I to him; and when he had moved, I entered on the deep and savage way. (Inf. II.127–130, 139–142)
The pilgrim does not lift himself; he is lifted, the way a flower is lifted by light — the first picture in the Comedy of how grace actually operates. And one sole will is in us both — un sol volere è d'ambedue — is the first instance of the Comedy's great refrain. Paradiso XXXIII will close the poem with Dante's will and the universe's fused into one.
What to watch for
Watch the word love. From Beatrice's love moved me onward, every use of amor is being calibrated. Francesca in canto V will use the word three times in three tercets and reveal how a soul can be moved by the same word in a fatal way.
Watch the flower image. It will return as the white rose of Paradiso, where Mary sits at the centre and the saints are her petals. The single flower of canto II becomes the whole garden of the redeemed at the poem's end.
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.