Inferno · Canto V ·
Inferno V — Minos at the Mouth
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 5 of 100 · Inferno, Canto V
Before reading
This is the second circle and the first canto in which a sinner speaks at length. Everything that has come before — the gate, the antechamber, the river, Limbo's silent hall — has been setting. This canto introduces what will be the Commedia's most powerful procedure: the encounter, the testimony, the listening. From here on the pilgrim does not only travel; he stops, and he hears.
Where the canto sits
The second circle is the first of the four upper circles of incontinence — sins of appetite uncontrolled by reason. It is the smallest of those circles by area, less space begirds it, and the wailing is the loudest. The canto's architecture is precise: a gatekeeper at its mouth (Minos), then a single sustained scene of a punishment described in motion (the hurricane), then a roll-call of famous lovers carried by the wind, then a halt, and then one long speech given to one woman that is the most beautiful poetry in the Inferno and the most morally difficult.
What it helps to know
The figure at the entrance is Minos, the legendary king of Crete who in Greek tradition became a judge of the dead. Dante turns him into a beast: he wraps his tail around himself a number of times equal to the circle to which each soul is consigned. He is comic and terrible at once.
The roll-call that follows is one of the Commedia's great catalogues: Semiramis, Cleopatra, Helen, Paris, Tristan, Achilles. Watch one name carefully: Dido, the Carthaginian queen Aeneas loved and abandoned. In Virgil's own Aeneid, Dido kills herself when Aeneas sails for Italy under divine command. The whole imperial mission of Aeneas — the mission Virgil exists to celebrate — was bought partly with Dido's death. Notice how the canto refers to her, and notice who refers to her.
The two souls who come forward at the canto's centre are real and contemporary. Francesca da Rimini was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna; in about 1275 she was married for political reasons to Gianciotto Malatesta of Rimini, a man both lame and unappealing. She and his younger brother Paolo became lovers. Gianciotto found them and killed them both. The story would have been recent and well-known to Dante's first readers — Francesca was perhaps fifteen or twenty years older than him; the daughter of her family, in fact, gave Dante shelter in the final years of his exile. The personal stakes for the writing are not trivial.
One literary detail matters. The Lancelot the lovers are reading is a French prose romance in which Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot's affair is set in motion when a go-between named Gallehault (in Italian Galeotto) urges Guinevere to kiss Lancelot. In Italian, galeotto came to mean a procurer, a pander, a book-as-pimp. The name does decisive work in the canto's last tercet.
What to read for
Notice that the canto is structured to make you sympathise. The wind, the doves, the gentleness of the voices, the courteous request the pilgrim makes, the way Francesca speaks. The whole formal apparatus of the canto invites pity. Then notice where the pilgrim is, and what the sentence is. The poem is teaching the reader something about its own seductions.
Listen for the word love. Francesca will use it three times in three successive tercets at the head of three consecutive sentences. Each use is theologically calibrated. Each is doing different work.
Listen also for what Francesca says about cause. She speaks as if love had agency and she had none. The grammar matters.
The canto closes with Dante's second faint of the Inferno. The first, at the end of canto III, was terror. This one is something else. Notice the difference.
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 canto invented the Commedia's most powerful single procedure: the encounter with a named soul who is given a long speech and who is allowed to be beautiful. It also taught the reader, in the same gesture, how dangerous that beauty is. Francesca's three tercets on love are some of the most cited lines in Italian literature; the canto's setting is the second circle of Hell, where the souls who reasoned by appetite are blown forever on a wind. The poem is doing two things at once, and the doing of both at once is the lesson. Francesca speaks; the pilgrim listens; the pilgrim faints. He has not fainted from terror — he fainted from terror at the gate. He has fainted from being moved by what is on trial. The reader is being trained, in this canto, to notice when the poem itself becomes the pander.
Minos and the formula returned
The judge of the second circle is comic and terrible. Minos snarls, examines, and assigns souls to their circles by wrapping his tail a corresponding number of times around his own body. He is the second of Hell's gatekeepers Virgil overrides, and the formula by which Virgil overrides him is — word for word — the same as the one used at Acheron in canto III: it is so willed there where is power to do that which is willed; and ask no further question. The poem is establishing, deliberately, that Charon and Minos are the only two officials Virgil silences with this exact phrase. Both are figures from classical underworld machinery; both have, in a real sense, been written by Virgil himself in the Aeneid. The architecture of Christian Hell is being built, in the upper circles, out of pagan furniture, and the architect is conscripted to silence his own creations.
Dido at the edge
The most famous absence in the canto is also one of its most famous presences. The roll-call Virgil reads out includes Semiramis, Cleopatra, Helen, Paris, Tristan, Achilles — and then the band where Dido is. Dido is named only as a location, the band where Dido is, not as one of the listed lovers. Virgil cannot quite point at her by name. In his own Aeneid she killed herself when Aeneas — under divine command — abandoned her for the imperial mission. Dante's Hell consigns her to the wind of the carnal sinners; his Virgil names her by silence. The whole moral cost of the Aeneid's plot is pressed into one half-line. The pattern from canto IV is intact: Virgil cannot name what most matters in his own story.
Francesca's three tercets
The lines on which Francesca's speech turns are three consecutive tercets each beginning with the word Amor — Love. They are doing precise theological work. Read in order:
Love, that on gentle heart doth swiftly seize, seized this man for the person beautiful that was ta'en from me, and still the mode offends me. — Love is the agent; Paolo is the patient; Francesca's body, taken from her by death, is the cause.
Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving, seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly, that, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me. — Love is again the agent; Francesca is now the patient; love itself is presented as a law, an obligation no one can resist.
Love has conducted us unto one death. Caïna waiteth him who quenched our life. — Love is the conductor; the lovers are conducted; the killer is consigned, in a single line, to the lowest pit of Hell reserved for those who betray kin (Caïna, named for Cain).
The grammar is the argument. In all three tercets, Amor is the active subject and the lovers are the objects on which love acts. Francesca has constructed a theology in which she is not a moral agent. The doctrine she is paraphrasing is the dolce stil novo — the sweet new style of love poetry that Dante himself had practised as a young man, and that this canto is in the process of repudiating from the inside. Francesca is speaking Dante's own youthful language, and using it to describe how she ended up in Hell. The repudiation is doubled: of a literary movement and of the writer's own past.
What the book did, and what the poem is doing about the book
The lovers fell, Francesca says, because they were reading. One day we reading were for our delight of Lancelot, how love did him enthrall. The French romance contained a scene in which a go-between named Gallehault (Italian Galeotto) urged Guinevere to kiss Lancelot; the kiss was the consummation of the affair. When Paolo, reading aloud to Francesca, came to that scene, he kissed her — and that day no farther did we read therein. Francesca's last word of testimony names the book: Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it. In Italian after Dante, galeotto came to mean a pander. The accusation is double — against the romance and against the romance's author.
But the poem in your hand is itself a book about love. Francesca's accusation against the Lancelot is, by extension, a question put to the Commedia — and to every reader of the Commedia. The book that makes you weep for damned lovers is the book that might be your Gallehault. Dante's faint at the end of the canto — I swooned away as if I had been dying, and fell, even as a dead body falls — is the poem's enactment of having been pandered to. The pilgrim has been seduced by the same beauty the reader is being seduced by. The canto is teaching the reader to read with this question in mind for the rest of Hell: which encounters in this poem am I in danger of?
Famous and meaningful passages
The second circle.
Thus I descended out of the first circle Down to the second, that less space begirds, And so much greater dole, that goads to wailing. (Inf. V.1–3)
The inverse-cone architecture stated mechanically: each circle smaller, each suffering greater.
Minos at the threshold.
There standeth Minos horribly, and snarls; Examines the transgressions at the entrance; Judges, and sends according as he girds him. (Inf. V.4–6)
The judge made beast. Girds him — wraps himself with his tail. Mechanism as judgment.
The formula returned.
Do not impede his journey fate-ordained; It is so willed there where is power to do That which is willed; and ask no further question. (Inf. V.22–24)
The same six Italian words that silenced Charon. Now silencing Minos. The two pagan officials Virgil overrides by formula.
The wind.
I came into a place mute of all light, Which bellows as the sea does in a tempest, If by opposing winds 'tis combated. The infernal hurricane that never rests Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine; Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. (Inf. V.28–33)
The whole punishment given as climate. The carnal who let themselves be moved by appetite are now moved by air.
The diagnosis.
I understood that unto such a torment The carnal malefactors were condemned, Who reason subjugate to appetite. (Inf. V.37–39)
The categorical statement of the upper-Hell scheme. Reason subjugated to appetite is the upper sin in all its forms.
The doves.
As turtle-doves, called onward by desire, With open and steady wings to the sweet nest Fly through the air by their volition borne, So came they from the band where Dido is, Approaching us athwart the air malign, So strong was the affectionate appeal. (Inf. V.82–87)
The most beautiful simile in the canto and one of its most exposing. The doves come by their volition — the same volition the canto's whole machinery has just denied them.
Love, first.
Love, that on gentle heart doth swiftly seize, Seized this man for the person beautiful That was ta'en from me, and still the mode offends me. (Inf. V.100–102)
The first of the three. Love as predator on the gentle heart — the doctrine of the sweet new style.
Love, second.
Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving, Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly, That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me; (Inf. V.103–105)
Love as obligation. Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona. The most famous line of the Inferno after the gate inscription.
Love, third.
Love has conducted us unto one death; Caïna waiteth him who quenched our life. (Inf. V.106–107)
The killer's address given before the killer is named. The lowest pit of Hell invoked in passing.
The grief of memory.
There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery, and that thy Teacher knows. (Inf. V.121–123)
Nessun maggior dolore. A line whose authority is universal — and whose final clause, and that thy Teacher knows, is a quiet glance at Virgil, whom Francesca has correctly identified as a fellow inhabitant of loss.
The book.
One day we reading were for our delight Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthrall. Alone we were and without any fear. (Inf. V.127–129)
Soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto. The most chilling small clause in the canto. They were alone and without suspicion. Of what?
The Gallehault.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it. That day no farther did we read therein. (Inf. V.137–138)
The book accused, and its author. The line every later reader of the Commedia must hold against the Commedia itself.
The faint.
And all the while one spirit uttered this, The other one did weep so, that, for pity, I swooned away as if I had been dying, And fell, even as a dead body falls. (Inf. V.139–142)
The pilgrim fainted with terror at the end of canto III. He faints here with pity. The poem is teaching, by physiology, the difference between the dangers of Hell.
What to watch for
Watch the next gatekeeper. Minos was overridden by the same formula as Charon; the next one (Cerberus, in canto VI) will be silenced by a different method. The pattern of bypass is being changed.
Watch the pilgrim's silences. Francesca speaks; Dante does not reply. In later cantos the pilgrim will sometimes argue, sometimes accuse, sometimes weep, sometimes refuse to give the soul the satisfaction of being remembered. The canto-by-canto register of his responses is one of the Comedy's slowest-burning arguments.
Watch the word gentile — gentle — in Francesca's first tercet. The whole dolce stil novo lives in that word. The Commedia will keep returning to it, sometimes affirming, sometimes correcting.
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.