Purgatorio · Canto VI ·
Purgatorio VI — The Couchant Lion
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 40 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto VI
Before reading
The cantica's most ferocious set-piece is in this canto. The opening half is still the slow patient catalogue of late-repentant souls who beg the pilgrim for prayers; the middle of the canto is a quiet meeting with a single proud shade who has been watching the others from a distance; and the second half is one of the great political diatribes in European poetry. The diatribe is the Comedy's fullest indictment of contemporary Italy, and it is set off by the smallest possible domestic detail — the word Mantua.
Where the canto sits
You are still on the lower slope, still in Ante-Purgatory. The cantica's slow progression through late-repentant categories continues — souls press around the pilgrim asking for prayers; Virgil patiently turns them away. But the canto pivots when the two travellers come upon a single seated shade who refuses to engage with anyone until he hears the name of the city Virgil came from. The pivot is the canto's structural masterstroke: it moves from the gentle Tuscan plain into a thunderous denunciation of Italy by way of a single nostalgic syllable.
What it helps to know
The shade who breaks the cantica's tone is Sordello da Goito (c. 1200–c. 1269), a Mantuan troubadour who wrote in Provençal — the lingua franca of medieval love poetry — at the courts of northern Italy, Provence, and Sicily. He is best known for his Lament for Blacatz, a poem that invited the kings and lords of Europe to eat the heart of the dead lord Blacatz so that they might inherit some of his courage. The poem was a savage political satire on the cowardice of contemporary monarchs. Dante does not name the lament in the canto, but the catalogue of failed princes that Sordello will deliver in canto VII is structurally a Lament for Blacatz in Dante's hand. Sordello is, for Dante, the model of the poet as political conscience — the model the diatribe of canto VI will activate.
The diatribe itself is occasioned by a doctrinal observation. Sordello has just embraced Virgil for being a fellow Mantuan; the embrace — one citizen instantly embracing another, on the strength of a shared birthplace — strikes the poet with such force that he interrupts the narrative to apostrophise his country. If a single word can produce that affection between strangers, what is wrong with a country whose living citizens are tearing each other apart? The diatribe runs in three movements: against Italy as a whole, against the Holy Roman Emperor for abandoning his Italian crown (Albert of Habsburg is the specific target), and against Florence in particular. The Florentine section, near the canto's end, is delivered in the bitterest sarcasm in the Commedia.
A small theological note matters. Earlier in the canto Virgil will be asked, by the pilgrim, whether the prayers of the living can really shorten the suffering of the dead, given that pagan philosophy (and a famous line from Virgil's own Aeneid) seems to deny it. Virgil's answer is precise: yes, but the question must be referred to Beatrice. Watch for this small handover. The cantica is beginning, very gently, to name the woman who will replace Virgil at the summit.
What to read for
Read the prayer-requesters at the canto's opening as a continuation of cantos III–V. They are the same category. The poem is not introducing them; it is reminding the reader they are everywhere on this slope.
Notice Sordello's posture. He is described as a couchant lion. He does not move. He looks. The whole register is the dignity of a man who has refused to participate in the indignity around him.
Listen for the word Mantua. Three syllables in Italian, two in English. Watch what they do.
When the diatribe begins, give it the full vocal weight. Read it aloud if you can. The cantica is taking off its courtly clothes and shouting in the marketplace. The shouting is, in the Comedy's ethics, exactly what a poet's love for his country requires.
Listen for the final apostrophe to Florence. The praise is so bitter that the first-time reader may, for a moment, miss that it is sarcasm. It is sarcasm.
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 delivered the Commedia's fullest single statement of political grief. It did so in three movements arranged around one structural pivot. The opening returned to the cantica's slow patient catalogue of late-repentant souls asking for prayer, gathered the doctrine into a single sentence, and let Virgil hand the harder theological question off — for the first time in the poem — to Beatrice. The middle staged the meeting with Sordello: the solitary Mantuan poet who watches the others as a couchant lion would, refuses to engage with the travellers' questions, and rises to embrace Virgil only when he hears the name of the city they share. The closing — the longest political diatribe in the whole Commedia — is set off by that embrace. Dante interrupts his own narrative to apostrophise his country. The diatribe runs from a general lament for Italy through a specific accusation against the Emperor to a final corrosive sarcasm against Florence. The canto, more than any other in Purgatorio, makes audible the voice of the exile.
Sordello, and the model of the poet
Sordello da Goito was Mantua's most famous medieval poet — a troubadour who wrote in Provençal, served at the courts of Provence, Castile, and Sicily, and was best remembered for the Lament for Blacatz (c. 1237), a savage political satire that invited the cowardly kings of Christendom to eat the heart of the dead lord Blacatz in order to inherit some of his courage. The poem catalogued the failures of named contemporary monarchs with merciless wit. Dante does not name the Lament in this canto, but he is about to. The catalogue of failed princes that Sordello will deliver in the next canto is, structurally, a Lament for Blacatz in Dante's hand — and the political diatribe Dante delivers in this canto is the same indictment in the poet's own voice. Sordello is, in this canto's logic, the model on which the Commedia's political role is built. The encounter is one poet meeting his predecessor in the practice of saying out loud what countries do not want to hear.
The Mantua syllable, and what nostalgia is for
The pivot of the canto is the word Mantua. Sordello has refused to answer the travellers' questions; Virgil has asked patiently and been ignored; Sordello has only asked, in turn, what country are you from. Virgil begins to reply — Mantua — and the proud shade does not let him finish. He rises and embraces him on the strength of one syllable. Mantovano, son Sordello / della tua terra! The doctrine the moment makes visible is twofold. First: love of country, in the proper register, is a passion as immediate and as redemptive as the love of God. Second: by contrast — and this is the diatribe's hinge — the country that should produce that love produces civil war instead. The diatribe begins because the embrace has reminded Dante what his country should feel like.
The diatribe, and what is being accused
The apostrophe runs in three identifiable accusations, each delivered with increasing specificity.
The first accuses Italy itself. Ah! servile Italy, grief's hostelry! / A ship without a pilot in great tempest! / No Lady thou of Provinces, but brothel! The figure is allegorical (Italy as woman degraded), maritime (Italy as pilot-less ship), and ethical (Italy as the inn at which grief stops over). The closing word — bordello — is one of the harshest lexical choices in the Commedia; Longfellow renders it directly. The accusation is that the peninsula has, by failing to be ruled, ceased to be itself.
The second accuses the Emperor. Albert of Habsburg (Albert I of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor 1298–1308) had famously declined to come south of the Alps to be crowned in Rome, leaving the imperial saddle empty. What boots it, that for thee Justinian / The bridle mend, if empty be the saddle? The figure is precise: Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis mended the bridle of law, but a bridle without a rider is useless. The accusation is one of imperial dereliction. Dante's Ghibelline politics are visible here in their clearest form: the Empire was meant to hold the secular order in balance, and its abdication has handed Italy to the factions. The Pope is accused obliquely a few lines later — Behold how fell this wild beast has become, / being no longer by the spur corrected, / since thou hast laid thy hand upon the bridle: the Church, the thou of the apostrophe, has taken political power and ruined what it touched.
The third accuses Florence. The Florentine apostrophe is the longest and the bitterest, and it is delivered as sarcasm so corrosive that the casual reader can miss the irony. My Florence! well mayst thou contented be / with this digression, which concerns thee not, / thanks to thy people who such forethought take! The sarcasm holds for fourteen lines. The actual accusation is one of constant institutional instability — Laws, money, offices, and usages / hast thou remodelled, and renewed thy members? — and ends with one of the cantica's most cutting images: Florence as a sick woman / who cannot find repose upon her down, / but by her tossing wardeth off her pain. The figure is medical (Florence as feverish), domestic (a woman in bed), and ethical (motion mistaken for cure). The exile is writing about the city that exiled him; the address is the address of a man who still calls it mine.
Virgil hands off to Beatrice
A small moment, easy to miss, is doing structural work for the rest of the cantica. The pilgrim asks Virgil whether the prayers of the living can really shorten the suffering of the dead, given that Virgil's own Aeneid (VI.376) appears to deny the principle when the Sibyl tells Palinurus that prayers cannot bend the gods' decree. Virgil's answer is precise: in his time, prayer was disjoined from God, and his verse was true; now, by Christ's coming, prayer reaches its end, and the verse is no longer the whole truth. But for the full account of how this works, he says, the pilgrim must wait for her, who will be the light between the truth and the understanding. She is not named in the canto. The cantica is beginning, very gently, the slow hand-off of authority from Virgil to Beatrice that will be complete at the summit. Watch for these handovers in every canto from here on; they accumulate.
Famous and meaningful passages
Sordello as couchant lion.
O Lombard soul, How lofty and disdainful thou didst bear thee, And grand and slow in moving of thine eyes! Nothing whatever did it say to us, But let us go our way, eying us only After the manner of a couchant lion. (Purg. VI.61–66, approx.)
The poet's posture rendered as a beast at rest. The dignity is the canto's first political statement.
The Mantuan recognition.
But of our native land and of our life It questioned us; and the sweet Guide began: Mantua — and the shade, all in itself recluse, Rose tow'rds him from the place where first it was, Saying: O Mantuan, I am Sordello Of thine own land! and one embraced the other. (Purg. VI.70–75, approx.)
The whole pivot of the canto. The proud shade rises at the sound of the place-name alone. The embrace requires no further word. The cantica's most economical scene of patria as redemption.
The opening of the Italy apostrophe.
Ah! servile Italy, grief's hostelry! A ship without a pilot in great tempest! No Lady thou of Provinces, but brothel! (Purg. VI.76–78, approx.)
Three lines, three figures, each more bitter than the last. Bordello is the cantica's hardest single word.
The empty saddle.
What boots it, that for thee Justinian The bridle mend, if empty be the saddle? Withouten this the shame would be the less. Ah! people, thou that oughtest to be devout, And to let Caesar sit upon the saddle, If well thou hearest what God teacheth thee, Behold how fell this wild beast has become, Being no longer by the spur corrected, Since thou hast laid thy hand upon the bridle. (Purg. VI.88–96, approx.)
The whole Ghibelline doctrine in three tercets. The Empire failed Italy by absence; the Papacy failed it by occupying the imperial saddle. The wild beast is Italy itself, ungoverned.
The Florence sarcasm.
My Florence! well mayst thou contented be With this digression, which concerns thee not, Thanks to thy people who such forethought take! (Purg. VI.127–129, approx.)
The opening of the most savage piece of irony in the Commedia. Che non tocca a te — which concerns thee not. It concerns nothing else.
The fevered sick-woman.
How oft, within the time of thy remembrance, Laws, money, offices, and usages Hast thou remodelled, and renewed thy members? And if thou mind thee well, and see the light, Thou shalt behold thyself like a sick woman, Who cannot find repose upon her down, But by her tossing wardeth off her pain. (Purg. VI.145–151, approx.)
The cantica's defining medical image of Florence. Motion mistaken for cure; reform mistaken for health. The diagnosis the exile delivers from outside the city he still calls home.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto. Sordello will lead Virgil into the Valley of Princes and recite, by name, a catalogue of failed European monarchs that is a structural Lament for Blacatz in Dante's hand. Canto VI's diatribe is the framing; canto VII is the indictment by name.
Watch the hand-off to Beatrice. The pilgrim's question on prayer was the first occasion in the Commedia where Virgil has had to defer to a higher authority by name. Almost every subsequent canto contains another such deferral. The slow demotion of Virgil that began with the missing shadow is gathering pace.
Watch Florence. The city will be the subject of bitter passages in canto X (Trajan's example of humility, set against Florentine pride), in canto XI (the meditation on fame, delivered by Oderisi), and at every subsequent canto in which a Florentine soul appears. The exile is keeping his account open.
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.