Inferno · Canto XIII ·
Inferno XIII — The Thorn Wood
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 13 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XIII
Before reading
After the centaurs of canto XII guarded the river of blood — those who did violence to others — the journey crosses, almost without ceremony, into the second ring of the seventh circle. The reader steps from one zone of violence into another. This is the wood of those who did violence to themselves.
Where the canto sits
The seventh circle has three rings, organised by the object of the violence. The first ring, just behind us, punished violence against the neighbour: tyrants and murderers boiling in Phlegethon. The second ring is the one the canto enters: violence against the self — the suicides — and against one's own goods — the squanderers. The third ring, just ahead, will punish violence against God: blasphemers, sodomites, usurers. The architecture is methodical, and reading the seventh circle is partly a matter of feeling how Dante's late-medieval moral geometry organises what a modern reader experiences as a sequence of human disasters.
What it helps to know
The canto's central figure is Pier delle Vigne (Piero della Vigna, c. 1190–1249), chancellor and chief minister to Emperor Frederick II of Sicily — Stupor Mundi, the most brilliant and most contested ruler of the thirteenth century. Pier was the architect of Frederick's centralised administration and the master of his Latin chancery; his rhetorical prose was studied as a model for two centuries. Around 1248 he fell from favour, accused of treason; he was blinded, imprisoned, and is reported to have killed himself by dashing his head against the wall of his cell. Dante regarded the accusation as false. The canto rests on that conviction.
The historical detail matters because Pier's speech, when he gives it, is performed in the same hyper-elaborate chancery style he wrote in life. Dante is not just citing a man; he is citing a prose style. Notice the symmetries, the chiasmus, the obsessive repetition of inflame and just. The damned soul is still speaking in the voice that destroyed him.
You should also know what theology this canto picks a fight with. Catholic doctrine held suicide a mortal sin, but the Comedy goes further: it claims that the suicides, alone among the damned, will not on the day of resurrection receive their bodies back. They threw the body away; the body will be denied them eternally. The grim small image at the end of the canto — bodies hanging from one's own thorn-tree — is Dante's invention of what that doctrine would look like.
The squanderers run through the same wood as a second class of self-destroyers. The Italian Middle Ages saw the wilful dissipation of patrimony as a kind of violence against one's own goods, parallel to suicide as violence against one's own person. They are punished by being hunted to pieces by hounds — an image the canto's first audience would have read directly onto the caccia, the noble Italian hunt.
What to read for
Listen for the style of Pier's speech. Few souls in Hell get to give their own apology in their own characteristic voice; Pier is one of them. The canto is partly an essay on what becomes of a beautiful prose style after its author is destroyed by it.
Notice how the pilgrim acts in this canto. He plucks a sprig from a tree, and a voice answers from the wound. The encounter between the living hand and the bleeding wood is one of the Inferno's most physical scenes. The hand has to learn what kind of place this is.
And notice what is withheld. The second damned soul, a Florentine, will not give his name. The canto closes on the city of Florence and on a personal calamity, and it leaves the speaker anonymous — a withholding the poem will repeat for the rest of Inferno.
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 crossed without a transitional scene from the first ring of the seventh circle to the second, and at once turned the space of Hell into something more disturbing than anything in the upper cantos. The damned here are not visible as bodies. They are trees. The pilgrim hears voices and cannot find their speakers, and Virgil's solution to the puzzle is to instruct him to break a piece off one of them — that is, to wound a soul in order to make it speak. The encounter with Pier delle Vigne is given through that wound, in a long speech delivered out of a bleeding stub. The squanderers then tear past the camera at full speed, naked and torn, hunted by black mastiffs, and one of them collapses into a thorn-bush that turns out to be a Florentine suicide. The canto ends on Florence itself — on the city's patron-switch from Mars to the Baptist, and on a man hanged from his own roof-beam, unnamed. Almost every signature of Dante's mature method is at full strength here: the externalisation of an interior state as a place, the political detail folded under the theology, the deliberate withholding of a name.
What Pier delle Vigne reveals
Pier was the man through whom Frederick II's empire spoke. As protonotarius and logothete of the Sicilian court, he drafted the letters and the legal proclamations on which the most ambitious centralised monarchy in thirteenth-century Europe rested. His Latin prose — taut, antithetical, rhetorically symmetrical — was studied as a model of style for two centuries after his death. Dante knew the prose intimately. The speech he writes for Pier in this canto is built in Pier's own manner: the chiasmus of both keys had in keeping / Of Frederick's heart, and turned them to and fro, the obsessive repetition of inflame (against me, the other minds, inflamed Augustus), the ostentatious paradox Made me unjust against myself, the just. A modern reader hears it as overdone; Dante's first readers heard it as forensic — the chancellor still pleading his case, with the very style that condemned him in court still working out of the wound.
The defence Pier gives is the defence. He swears, by the roots unwonted of this wood, that he never broke faith with his lord. Dante believes him. The damnation is not for treason; it is for the despair that responded to the false charge. To kill yourself in protest against injustice is still to kill yourself, and the Commedia's ethics will not bend on that point. But the poem also lets the falsely accused man clear his name eternally in the only court left to him. The grimness and the courtesy operate at once.
The geography of the seventh circle and the strange doctrine of the resurrection
The structural reason the suicides are trees is given inside the canto itself, in the only piece of explicit Dante-invented theology in the Inferno. When the soul abandons the body, Minos sends it to the seventh abyss. It falls into the wood and germinates wherever Fortune drops it. The Harpies feed on its leaves; the pain has nowhere to go except into a voice. And — this is the canto's most radical claim — on the day of the general resurrection the suicides will not receive their bodies back. They threw the body away; they will retrieve it only to drag it here and hang it from their own thorn. For 't is not just to have what one casts off.
This is heresy on the literal level. Catholic doctrine taught the resurrection of all bodies, blessed and damned alike, on the last day. The Commedia makes one quiet exception, and assigns it to the souls of the suicides. The canto is willing to revise the resurrection of the dead to make its picture work. That is the depth of Dante's commitment to the physical logic of his Hell: the punishment must fit the sin so exactly that even a foundational doctrine of the Church will be adjusted to accommodate the fit.
The squanderers and the noble hunt
The squanderers do not speak. They are not even named until the second one collapses into the bush and the bush itself, the Florentine, calls out the name Jacopo of Sant' Andrea. Lano of Siena (the runner in front) and Jacopo da Sant'Andrea (the one caught) were both noblemen famous for wilful dissipation of their patrimonies — the kind of conspicuous self-destruction that medieval Italian moralists treated as a parallel form of violence against the self. The hunt that pursues them is iconographically the caccia, the aristocratic chase, with its hounds and its noise and its broken branches. Dante turns the most prestigious entertainment of his class into the eternal punishment of two of its sons. The image's bite is partly social.
The unnamed Florentine
The canto closes on a third soul — the bush in which Jacopo collapsed — who is given the longest single utterance after Pier and is not named. The withholding is Dante's, and it is a piece of his Florentine politics. The man identifies himself only by saying that his city changed its patron from Mars (its first protector) to John the Baptist when it became Christian — and that Mars, slighted, has made the city sad ever since. The reference is to a fragment of a Roman statue of Mars said to have stood at the head of the Ponte Vecchio. Dante believed that Florence's chronic factional violence was the surviving curse of its rejected first patron. The personal calamity of the unnamed suicide — Of my own house I made myself a gibbet — is delivered with the city's collective curse layered behind it. The single private grief expands, in the last line, into a civic one.
Famous and meaningful passages
The wood itself, named by what it is not.
Not foliage green, but of a dusky color, Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled, Not apple-trees were there, but thorns with poison. (Inf. XIII.4–6)
Three lines of pure negation. The wood is described entirely by the absence of every quality a wood is supposed to have — a small grammatical preview of what its inhabitants are: souls described by what has been taken from them.
The first cry from the broken branch.
Then stretched I forth my hand a little forward, And plucked a branchlet off from a great thorn; And the trunk cried, Why dost thou mangle me? (Inf. XIII.31–33)
The encounter is staged as a small, almost domestic violence. The hand reaches out; the wood speaks back. This is the canto's central image and one of the Inferno's most physical moments.
The trunk's grief.
Hast thou no spirit of pity whatsoever? Men once we were, and now are changed to trees; Indeed, thy hand should be more pitiful, Even if the souls of serpents we had been. (Inf. XIII.36–39)
Men once we were. The compressed lament of every soul in this wood, delivered through one of them.
Pier's chancery style intact at the grave.
I am the one who both keys had in keeping Of Frederick's heart, and turned them to and fro So softly in unlocking and in locking, That from his secrets most men I withheld. (Inf. XIII.58–61)
The chiasmus, the courtly verb softly, the metaphor of the two keys that became Pier's personal emblem in life — all the rhetorical signatures still working. The style is the soul.
The famous paradox of the just self-injury.
My spirit, in disdainful exultation, Thinking by dying to escape disdain, Made me unjust against myself, the just. (Inf. XIII.70–72)
Ingiusto fece me contra me giusto. The whole defence in nine syllables: the act was unjust, the victim was just, the victim and the perpetrator were the same person.
Pier's oath.
I, by the roots unwonted of this wood, Do swear to you that never broke I faith Unto my lord, who was so worthy of honor. (Inf. XIII.73–75)
A soul in Hell swearing on the roots of his own punishment that he never committed the crime he was punished for. The poem accepts the oath without comment.
The doctrine of the wood.
When the exasperated soul abandons The body whence it rent itself away, Minos consigns it to the seventh abyss. It falls into the forest, and no part Is chosen for it; but where Fortune hurls it, There like a grain of spelt it germinates. (Inf. XIII.94–99)
The suicide is sown like a seed by Fortune herself. The image is agricultural, almost gentle; the violence is in the absence of choice — even of place.
The denied resurrection.
Like others for our spoils shall we return; But not that any one may them revest, For 't is not just to have what one casts off. Here we shall drag them, and along the dismal Forest our bodies shall suspended be, Each to the thorn of his molested shade. (Inf. XIII.103–108)
The single most striking small heresy in the Inferno. The general resurrection of the body is silently revised to make the punishment work.
The squanderers run past.
And two behold! upon our left-hand side, Naked and scratched, fleeing so furiously, That of the forest every fan they broke. (Inf. XIII.115–117)
The cinema of it: two figures hurtling across the field of view from one side to the other, the camera pinned in place.
The Florentine on his city's lost patron.
I of that city was which to the Baptist Changed its first patron, wherefore he for this Forever with his art will make it sad. (Inf. XIII.143–145)
A whole theory of Florence's chronic civic violence smuggled into a dying man's introduction.
The last line of the canto.
Of my own house I made myself a gibbet. (Inf. XIII.151)
The suicide is named only by his act — the body and the rope and the rafter compressed into nine words. No name; only the gesture.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto's burning sand. The wood ends abruptly; the third ring begins as a desert. Hell's vegetation is being systematically reduced.
Watch the figure of Capaneus, just ahead. Pier's blasphemy was against himself; Capaneus's is against the gods. The seventh circle is teaching the reader to distinguish kinds of violence by direction.
Watch the unnamed dead. Dante will withhold names again — at the centre of Florentine politics, and at the lowest pit of Hell. Pier was named; the Florentine was not. The poem is teaching the reader to listen for what is not said.
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.