Purgatorio · Canto II ·
Purgatorio II — The Angel Boat
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 36 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto II
Before reading
The pilgrim and Virgil have been washed and girded at the shore. The first morning of the second cantica is still in its first hour. The canto's question is small and very large: how do the saved get here — to this shore — in the first place? Purgatory has a port. Inferno had no port; the damned crossed by being ferried, snarling, by Charon. The Mount of Purgatory works differently. This canto shows you how.
Where the canto sits
You are still on the deserted beach at the foot of the mountain, in the southern hemisphere, at Easter dawn. Nothing has been climbed yet. The canto is, in a sense, the second of two threshold cantos — Purgatorio I was the threshold of the place, Purgatorio II is the threshold of the practice. The whole subsequent cantica will be a slow journey upward; before it begins, the poem pauses long enough to introduce one of the souls already arrived, to let him sing, and to teach the reader that even on the mountain of salvation it is possible to stand still in the wrong way.
What it helps to know
A boat will arrive from over the sea. It is piloted by an angel. The souls aboard are the souls of the saved, ferried in from the mouth of the Tiber — Dante's geography is that all souls bound for Purgatory gather at the river-mouth that drains Rome, and from there are taken across the world to this antipodal shore. The boat does not need rowing; the angel's wings drive it. The souls aboard sing as they arrive. They sing Psalm 113 in the Latin Vulgate numbering — In exitu Israel de Aegypto, When Israel went out of Egypt — the psalm of liberation from bondage. The choice of psalm is the poem's small theology of what Purgatory is for.
Among the new arrivals, one will recognise the pilgrim and step forward to embrace him. This is Casella, a Florentine musician — almost nothing is known about him outside this canto — who in life set Dante's own poems to music. The embrace will be the Commedia's first attempt in any cantica at a meeting between living and dead bodies, and the result will be a small physical comedy of grief.
Casella will sing. What he sings, at the pilgrim's request, is one of Dante's own canzoni — the opening of Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, Love that within my mind discourses with me. The choice is significant. The canzone in question is from Dante's Convivio, a philosophical work of his middle period in which love is addressed to Lady Philosophy rather than to Beatrice. The poem is going to allow the pilgrim, very briefly, to be transported back into his own pre-Comedy poetic mode — and then to interrupt the transport.
The interruption will come from the figure you met in the last canto. Watch what he says, and what the souls do when he says it.
What to read for
Read the arrival of the angel-boat for its speed. Hell's gatekeepers were old, slow, snarling, half-bestial. The first agent of salvation the poem shows you moves so fast across the sea that its motion by no flight of wing is equalled. The contrast is everything.
Notice the embrace. The pilgrim tries three times to fold his arms around Casella; three times they pass through air. The poem has been waiting since Inferno V to make this body joke and it makes it gently here, among the saved, rather than darkly among the damned.
Notice what the song does to the listeners. They stop. They forget they are at the foot of a mountain they must climb. The canto is teaching the reader, with the lightest possible touch, that even the most beautiful art can become a delay if it is not held in its proper place.
Listen for the rebuke. It is brief and severe, and it comes from the one figure on this shore who has the authority to deliver it.
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 introduced the Commedia's mechanism for arrival on the mountain — an angel-driven boat, swift beyond wings, gathering the saved from the mouth of the Tiber and depositing them on the antipodal shore at dawn — and used that arrival to stage the first quiet trap of the cantica of salvation. The trap is art. A musician steps off the boat, recognises the pilgrim, is asked to sing, and sings something so beautiful that the whole company forgets, briefly, that the mountain is waiting. The rebuke that breaks the song is severe; the canto is teaching, from the very first arrival, that on this mountain standing still is also a sin. The cantica's verb is climb. Anything that delays the climb is, in the strict grammar of Purgatory, a form of negligence — a category that will return again and again over the next four cantos.
The boat, the angel, and the chosen psalm
The contrast with Hell's threshold is exact. Charon was old, snarling, hoary with the hair of eld, and his boat had to be rowed across the dead water of Acheron. The Pilot here is celestial, his vessel skims the surface so lightly that the water swallowed naught thereof, and the souls he carries are not driven by the spur of celestial justice but borne as if the boat were already heaven. The boat is propelled by wings alone — no oars, no sail other than the angel's wings made vertical. Hell ran on coercion; Purgatory runs on flight.
The souls aboard are singing In exitu Israel de Aegypto — Psalm 113 in the Vulgate (114 in Protestant numbering), the psalm of the Exodus from Egypt. Dante's choice is theological compression. The psalm proposes the entire Old Testament passage from bondage as the prefiguring of the Christian soul's passage from sin to grace; it is also the psalm Dante himself used, in a famous letter to Cangrande, to exemplify the four-fold method of scriptural reading. The first thing the saved sing on the shore of the mountain is the canonical text on what it means to come out of slavery into liberty. Cato's word libertà from the previous canto is being immediately glossed in the singing of these new arrivals.
The embrace, and the body the poem cannot quite leave behind
The pilgrim recognises Casella and steps forward to embrace him. Three times behind it did I clasp my hands, as oft returned with them to my own breast. The threefold attempt and the failure are lifted, very deliberately, from Virgil's own Aeneid VI — Aeneas tries to embrace the shade of his father Anchises in the underworld, three times, three times the shade slips through his arms. Dante has spent the whole Inferno under Virgil's tutelage and now, in the opening cantos of his second cantica, is still rewriting the Aeneid's scenes one by one. The difference is that Aeneas's gesture in Aeneid VI is one of grief and futility; Dante's gesture is, almost, comic — I think with wonder I depicted me; whereat the shadow smiled and backward drew. The shade has the better grasp of physics than the pilgrim. The saved are courteous about the living's mistakes.
Casella's song, and the song's interruption
What Casella sings is Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, the opening of the second canzone of Dante's Convivio. The Convivio was Dante's unfinished philosophical prose work of c. 1304–1307, in which he reinterpreted his own love-poetry — including this canzone — as addressed not to a woman at all but to the allegorical Lady Philosophy. The choice of song is layered. The pilgrim asks Casella to sing one of Dante's own poems; Casella sings the one most associated with Dante's pre-Commedia philosophical phase, in which amor had been re-allegorised away from the actual Beatrice and toward a personification. The whole canto's small drama is in this re-allegorisation. The poem is allowing the pilgrim, briefly, to be transported back into the mode of his own Convivio — abstract, philosophical, addressed to amor in its impersonal aspect — and then it is interrupting.
The interruption is Cato's. What is this, ye laggard spirits? / What negligence, what standing still is this? / Run to the mountain to strip off the slough, / That lets not God be manifest to you. Two readings are possible, and the canto leaves both open. The orthodox reading: any delay on Purgatory's slope is by definition a relapse, and Cato is teaching the saved their first lesson in the cantica's economy of time. A more searching reading: the Commedia is dismissing, with Cato's mouth, the entire poetic and philosophical mode of the Convivio — the abstract personified Love, the philosophy-as-mistress conceit, the displacement of the actual Beatrice into allegory. The song Casella sings is one Dante had written and now, on his own mountain, must stop listening to. The cantica that ends with Dante meeting Beatrice in person cannot afford the song that turned her into Philosophy.
Famous and meaningful passages
The angel-boat seen far off.
And lo! as when, upon the approach of morning, Through the gross vapors Mars grows fiery red Down in the West upon the ocean floor, Appeared to me — may I again behold it! — A light along the sea so swiftly coming, Its motion by no flight of wing is equalled; From which when I a little had withdrawn Mine eyes, that I might question my Conductor, Again I saw it brighter grown and larger. Then on each side of it appeared to me I knew not what of white, and underneath it Little by little there came forth another. (Purg. II.13–24)
The salvation-machine described first as an unidentified light, then as a brightening, then as something with two wings, then as a vessel. The poem withholds the angel until the eye has had time to do the seeing.
The pilot and the psalm.
Upon the stern stood the Celestial Pilot; Beatitude seemed written in his face, And more than a hundred spirits sat within. In exitu Israel de Ægypto! They chanted all together in one voice, With whatso in that psalm is after written. Then made he sign of holy rood upon them, Whereat all cast themselves upon the shore, And he departed swiftly as he came. (Purg. II.43–51)
Beatitude as the angel's facial state; the psalm of liberation as the song; the sign of the cross as the dismissal; the angel's departure as swift as his arrival. The whole arrival is rendered as one continuous benediction.
The three-fold embrace.
One from among them saw I coming forward, As to embrace me, with such great affection, That it incited me to do the like. O empty shadows, save in aspect only! Three times behind it did I clasp my hands, As oft returned with them to my own breast! I think with wonder I depicted me; Whereat the shadow smiled and backward drew; And I, pursuing it, pressed farther forward. (Purg. II.76–84)
The Aeneid VI scene rewritten in a register of bewilderment rather than grief. The saved are patient with the living's grasp of physics.
The song asked for.
If some new law take not from thee Memory or practice of the song of love, Which used to quiet in me all my longings, Thee may it please to comfort therewithal Somewhat this soul of mine, that with its body Hitherward coming is so much distressed. Love, that within my mind discourses with me, Forthwith began he so melodiously, The melody within me still is sounding. (Purg. II.106–114)
The pilgrim asks for the canzone by name. The melody within me still is sounding — the song's effect persists, in the narrator's voice, even at the moment of recording the canto. The poem is admitting how powerful the spell was.
The rebuke.
We all of us were moveless and attentive Unto his notes; and lo! the grave old man, Exclaiming: What is this, ye laggard spirits? What negligence, what standing still is this? Run to the mountain to strip off the slough, That lets not God be manifest to you. (Purg. II.118–123)
Che negligenza, che stare è questo? The cantica's first naming of negligenza, the category that will define the late-repentants of cantos III through V. The slough is the husk of the still-mortal self that delays the soul's vision.
The doves disturbed.
Even as when, collecting grain or tares, The doves, together at their pasture met, Quiet, nor showing their accustomed pride, If aught appear of which they are afraid, Upon a sudden leave their food alone, Because they are assailed by greater care; So that fresh company did I behold The song relinquish, and go tow'rds the hill, As one who goes, and knows not whitherward; Nor was our own departure less in haste. (Purg. II.124–133)
The simile is the canto's closing image. Note its courtesy — the disturbed birds are doves, the birds of peace and of the Spirit, not crows or jackdaws. The interruption is corrective, not punitive. The saved scatter as one who goes, and knows not whitherward — they have been recalled to a climb they do not yet know the geography of. The canto ends in motion in the right direction without knowledge of the destination, which is, in the Commedia's ethics, exactly what penitence is.
What to watch for
Watch the verb to stand still. Stare is named here as a fault. In every subsequent canto of the early Purgatorio the pilgrim's standing still — to talk, to listen, to look — will be tested against the imperative to move. The cantica's whole education is in the difference between standing that is delay and standing that is attention.
Watch the slough. La scoglia — the snake-skin of the unredeemed self — is the cantica's first image of what the climb is going to do to the soul. By the gate of Purgatory in canto IX, the angel-gatekeeper will inscribe seven letters on the pilgrim's forehead. By the summit, all seven will have been wiped away. The slough begins to be shed here.
Watch Casella. He is not given a sin, not assigned a terrace, not seen again. He is a soul still at the threshold — and the canto offers no information about what part of the mountain he is climbing toward. The poem will leave him on the beach.
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.