Inferno · Canto XXXII ·
Inferno XXXII — The Frozen Lake
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 32 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XXXII
Before reading
This is the canto in which Hell freezes. From here to the bottom, the landscape is a single great sheet of ice — Cocytus, the lake at the centre of the earth, into which the heads of the traitors are fixed. The canto opens on the first two of its four concentric rings, named for traitors of the deepest kinds, and closes on the most quoted single image in the Inferno's last cantos: a man eternally gnawing on the skull of another.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim and Virgil have just been set down by Antaeus on the ice of Cocytus, the ninth and last circle of Hell. The ninth circle is a single frozen lake divided into four concentric rings, named after exemplary traitors:
- Caïna, for traitors to kin (named after Cain, the first murderer of his brother).
- Antenora, for traitors to political community (named after Antenor, the Trojan elder who, by some medieval traditions, betrayed Troy to the Greeks).
- Ptolomea, for traitors to guests (named after Ptolemy, governor of Jericho, who in 1 Maccabees 16 invited his father-in-law and brother-in-law to a banquet and murdered them).
- Judecca, for traitors to benefactors and lords (named after Judas).
This canto walks the first two rings. The next canto will give Ptolomea its named soul. The last canto will reach Judecca and Satan.
What it helps to know
The opening tercets are an authorial intervention rare in the Inferno: a confession of stylistic difficulty. Dante claims he would need rhymes both rough and stridulous to describe what he is about to describe — and asks the Muses (those Ladies who helped Amphion in enclosing Thebes) to give them to him. The reference is to the myth of Amphion, who built the walls of Thebes by playing his lyre so beautifully that the stones moved themselves into place. Dante is invoking the opposite power: not the music that builds cities, but the noise that suits a city of betrayal.
The named souls in this canto are Italian and political. Camicione de' Pazzi, the first soul who names another, is a member of the Pazzi family of Florence; he murdered his kinsman Ubertino, and he is here for kin-betrayal. He will gleefully point out a worse Pazzi to come (his cousin Carlino, whose treachery is so much greater than his own that Camicione feels excused by comparison). Bocca degli Abati is a Florentine of the Ghibelline party who, at the catastrophic Florentine defeat at the battle of Montaperti in 1260, was supposed to be holding the Florentine standard but turned at the critical moment and cut off the hand of the standard-bearer, throwing the army into the panic that lost the day. The treachery destroyed the Florentine Guelph cause for a generation. Dante's father had fought at Montaperti; the memory was domestic.
The two heads frozen together at the very end of the canto — one chewing the back of the other's skull — are not yet named. Their names are reserved for the opening of the next canto. But the upper figure is Count Ugolino della Gherardesca of Pisa, who in 1289 was sealed alive in a tower with his sons and grandsons by the Archbishop of Pisa, Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, and starved to death — the most famous starvation-in-a-tower in medieval European history. The lower head, on which Ugolino is feeding, is Ruggieri's. The canto sets up the image without explanation. The next canto will deliver Ugolino's long monologue and one of the most quoted lines in Italian literature.
What to read for
Notice that this is the first canto in the Inferno in which the pilgrim strikes a soul. He kicks a head in the ice and is asked, in fury, why dost thou trample me? He kicks it not by accident — the geography of the kick is precise — and his subsequent treatment of the head (yanking its hair, threatening it, eventually pulling it bald) is the most physically violent thing the pilgrim has done in the poem. Notice how the Commedia asks the reader to feel about this. There is no rebuke from Virgil; there is no shame in Dante. The traitors, the canto suggests, are beyond the courtesies the upper Hells observed.
Pay attention to the silence at the end. The canto stops just as the upper of the two frozen heads finishes a mouthful of skull. The pilgrim's question hangs in the air. The next canto opens with the answer.
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 opened with the Inferno's most direct admission of stylistic difficulty — Dante asking for rhymes both rough and stridulous — and then put the pilgrim on the ice of Cocytus and walked him through the first two of its four concentric rings. Caïna, the traitors to kin. Antenora, the traitors to political community. The pilgrim met three named souls in these rings — a Pazzi, a Florentine, a Florentine — and at the end of the canto he stumbled into the closing image of the entire Inferno's middle distance: two heads frozen in one hole, the upper eternally gnawing the back of the lower's skull. The next canto will name them. This canto's task was to bring the reader to that image without yet explaining it.
The invocation of difficulty
The first twelve lines are an unusual address to the Muses — unusual because the Commedia normally reserves its invocations for the beginnings of cantiche, and unusual because the help Dante asks for is technical:
If I had rhymes both rough and stridulous As were appropriate to the dismal hole Down upon which thrust all the other rocks, I would press out the juice of my conception More fully; but because I have them not, Not without fear I bring myself to speak; For 'tis no enterprise to take in jest, To sketch the bottom of all the universe, Nor for a tongue that cries Mamma and Babbo. But may those Ladies help this verse of mine, Who helped Amphion in enclosing Thebes, That from the fact the word be not diverse. (Inf. XXXII.1–12)
To sketch the bottom of all the universe is not a job for a tongue that cries Mamma and Babbo. The line is the most precise small statement in the Commedia of what Dante thought he was doing — a poem in the modern Italian language that needed, here, a register the modern Italian language did not yet have. The reference to Amphion (who built the walls of Thebes by playing the lyre, so that the stones moved themselves into place) is sly: Dante is asking the Muses for words that will move not stones into walls but readers into recognition that what they are about to read is the verbal equivalent of the bottom of the world. The bottom of the universe deserves the harshest available rhymes; Italian, as a literary language only forty years old in 1300, did not have them ready.
The ice itself
The image of the lake is given in one of the Commedia's most precise small comparisons:
Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me And underfoot a lake, that from the frost The semblance had of glass, and not of water. So thick a veil ne'er made upon its current In winter-time Danube in Austria, Nor there beneath the frigid sky the Don, As there was here; so that if Tambernich Had fallen upon it, or Pietrapana, E'en at the edge 't would not have given a creak. (Inf. XXXII.22–30)
The Danube and the Don — the great freezing rivers at the northern and eastern edges of Europe — are named to establish a baseline, and the ice of Cocytus is said to exceed them. The hyperbole of the two named mountains (Tambernich, location now lost to scholarship; Pietrapana, the modern Pania della Croce in the Apuan Alps) crashing onto the ice without producing a creak is the canto's most exact pre-modern measurement of immensity. The ice is glass and the ice is stone — but glass is fragile and stone breaks. Cocytus is neither. It is a solid that nothing acts on.
Caïna and the Pazzi
The first ring, Caïna, holds the traitors to kin — those who killed brothers, fathers, sons. The named soul is Camicione de' Pazzi, who killed his own kinsman Ubertino. His function in the canto is to point ahead, with savage relish, to a worse member of his own family — his cousin Carlino, who in Dante's near future (the canto is set in 1300; Carlino's treachery occurred in 1302) would betray the Florentine White Guelphs by selling the castle of Piantravigne to the Blacks for thirty thousand florins. Carlino's sin will be political; he therefore belongs in the next ring, Antenora, not in Caïna where Camicione is. The detail is the canto's first establishment of a moral hierarchy among the traitors. To betray a brother is bad; to betray a city is worse.
Antenora and Bocca degli Abati
Antenora, the second ring, holds traitors to political community. The named soul is Bocca degli Abati, the Florentine Ghibelline whose treachery at the battle of Montaperti (1260) lost the day for the Florentine Guelphs. Dante's father had fought at Montaperti, on the losing side. The memory was therefore both political and domestic.
The encounter with Bocca is the canto's most physically violent passage. The pilgrim trips over his head, kicks it, refuses to name him, grabs his hair, threatens to pull it out, eventually does pull some out, and only stops when another shade in the ice calls out what's wrong, Bocca? and so identifies him by accident:
Whether 't were will, or destiny, or chance, I know not; but in walking 'mong the heads I struck my foot hard in the face of one. Weeping he growled: Why dost thou trample me? Unless thou comest to increase the vengeance Of Montaperti, why dost thou molest me? (Inf. XXXII.76–81)
The violence is shocking by the standard the upper Inferno has set. The pilgrim has never struck a soul before; Virgil does not intervene; no shame follows. The traitors, the Commedia is suggesting, are beyond the courtesy the upper Hells observed. The poem's careful gradation of pity is here exhausted. The reader is being asked to accept, with the pilgrim, that the violence is appropriate — and the moral discomfort that proposition generates is part of the canto's intended pressure.
The closing image
The canto's last six tercets are the Commedia's most famous transition from one canto to another:
When I beheld two frozen in one hole, So that one head a hood was to the other; And even as bread through hunger is devoured, The uppermost on the other set his teeth, There where the brain is to the nape united. Not in another fashion Tydeus gnawed The temples of Menalippus in disdain, Than that one did the skull and the other things. (Inf. XXXII.124–131)
One head a hood was to the other — che l'un capo a l'altro era cappello. The image is given as architecture: two heads stacked vertically in one hole in the ice, the upper bent forward over the lower so closely that, from above, the second is barely visible. The act of biting is matched, with classical decorum, to Tydeus — the Theban warrior of the Thebaid who, dying of a head wound, asked for the head of his killer Menalippus and gnawed it. The classical reference is the canto's small piece of literary protection: what is about to be told is not unprecedented; it has a Greek epic shape.
The closing question Dante puts to the upper figure is the question every reader carries into the next canto:
O thou, who showest by such bestial sign Thy hatred against him whom thou art eating, Tell me the wherefore, said I, with this compact, That if thou rightfully of him complain, In knowing who ye are, and his transgression, I in the world above repay thee for it, If that wherewith I speak be not dried up. (Inf. XXXII.132–138)
Tell me the wherefore. The canto ends here, in a held breath. The next canto opens on the answer.
Famous and meaningful passages
The invocation of difficulty.
If I had rhymes both rough and stridulous As were appropriate to the dismal hole Down upon which thrust all the other rocks, I would press out the juice of my conception More fully… (Inf. XXXII.1–5)
The Commedia's most concise statement of the gap between subject and available language. The whole of canto XXXII is written in the rhymes Italian had; the canto is honest about the rhymes Italian did not.
The ice.
Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me And underfoot a lake, that from the frost The semblance had of glass, and not of water. So thick a veil ne'er made upon its current In winter-time Danube in Austria… (Inf. XXXII.22–26)
The Danube comparison. Hell's deepest landscape measured against the coldest known European river — and exceeding it.
Bocca's outburst.
Weeping he growled: Why dost thou trample me? Unless thou comest to increase the vengeance Of Montaperti, why dost thou molest me? (Inf. XXXII.79–81)
The treachery the soul cannot stop returning to. Montaperti — Montaperti — the place-name as accusation. Bocca cannot conceive that a Florentine would be in Hell on any business other than revenge.
The two heads.
When I beheld two frozen in one hole, So that one head a hood was to the other; And even as bread through hunger is devoured, The uppermost on the other set his teeth, There where the brain is to the nape united. (Inf. XXXII.124–128)
The most famous canto-to-canto cliff in the Inferno. The image is set down without explanation. The next canto will spend a hundred lines explaining it.
What to watch for
Watch the bite. The image of the upper head consuming the lower will be answered, in the next canto, by Ugolino's story of the tower in which his own children — Dante is careful to leave the suggestion ambiguous — offered him their flesh for nourishment. The canto-to-canto image is the canto-to-canto theme: starvation, hatred, the body that consumes another body in extremis.
Watch the architecture. Antenora gives way to Ptolomea in the next canto; Ptolomea gives way to Judecca in the last. The four rings are concentric, and the cold deepens at each step. By canto XXXIV the souls will be entirely submerged in the ice, fixed in postures none of them chose.
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.