Purgatorio VII — Virgil Names Himself

Before reading

The diatribe is over. The canto resumes the cantica's domestic register and returns to the scene the previous canto interrupted: Virgil and Sordello, just embraced as fellow Mantuans, now standing together on the slope. Sordello asks who his fellow citizen is — and Virgil's reply is one of the most quietly devastating self-introductions in the Commedia. Then Sordello will lead the travellers a little aside and down, into a small flowered valley where seven famous European monarchs sit together at evening, and will name them one by one.

Where the canto sits

You are still in Ante-Purgatory; the gate proper is still a canto or two away. The Valley of Princes is its own peculiar zone within the lower slope, a kind of garden recessed below the main path. The souls in it are the negligent rulers — kings and emperors who, distracted by the duties of rule (or by their failures of rule), delayed their conversion. The category is exactly the political mirror of Belacqua's individual indolence and of the late-repentant cohorts of cantos III and V; the cantica is, by canto VII, presenting a complete typology of the late-repentant. The Valley of Princes is its royal wing.

What it helps to know

Sordello's catalogue follows a model. His most famous Provençal poem, the Lament for Blacatz, was a savage satire that invited the kings of Christendom to eat the heart of the dead lord Blacatz so that they might inherit some of his courage. The poem catalogued the failings of named contemporary monarchs in turn. Sordello's catalogue here, with Dante's pen, does the same — names the kings, names their dynastic failings, often names the unworthy son who inherited. It is the Lament repeated in the afterlife.

A short note on the principal monarchs you will meet:

Rudolph I of Habsburg (1218–1291), Holy Roman Emperor 1273–1291. The first Habsburg emperor. He never came to Italy to be crowned and never engaged with the Italian crisis — the same dereliction the previous canto laid at the door of his successor Albert. Dante places him highest in the Valley, on a raised seat, alone.
Ottocar II of Bohemia (c. 1233–1278), king of Bohemia, killed in battle against Rudolph at Marchfeld. Dante sets him beside Rudolph, the two enemies now seated companionably. His son Wenceslaus II is dismissed as worthless.
Philip III of France (1245–1285), the snub-nosed king. His son Philip IV (the Fair) will be Dante's bitter target throughout the Comedy.
Henry I of Navarre (1244–1274), father of Joan of Navarre, whose marriage to Philip IV made France and Navarre one — Dante reads this as the dynastic catastrophe of the age.
Peter III of Aragon (1239–1285) and Charles I of Anjou (1226–1285), bitter enemies in life — Aragon and Anjou had fought a long war over Sicily — now seated together singing the same hymn.
Henry III of England (1207–1272), the king of the simple life, sitting alone, the father of Edward I.
William VII Marquis of Monferrato (d. 1292), an Italian Ghibelline lord whose dynasty was effectively destroyed by his death.

The pattern is unmistakable. Almost every soul Sordello names is paired with a son or successor who failed them. The cantica's political vision is dynastic and pessimistic: even worthy rulers produce unworthy heirs. Dante will name this principle directly near the canto's end.

The setting matters. The valley is famous in the Commedia for being the only piece of landscape in Purgatorio that approaches the Earthly Paradise in beauty before the summit. Gold and fine silver, and scarlet and pearl-white — the colours of jewels, named in the language of medieval lapidary description. The princes sit on grass and sing the Salve Regina, the great Marian hymn of the Church's evening prayer. The whole setting is evening. The cantica's first canto of dusk is this one.

What to read for

Read Virgil's introduction of himself for what it does not claim. He names his hell, names his sin (a sin of not doing), and names what he sees too late. The whole tragedy of the pagan virtuous is in three tercets.

Notice the geography of the valley. The princes are seated. They are not climbing. The cantica is staging, for the first time, the difference between delay and peace.

Notice the pairing of enemies. Aragon sits beside Anjou; Ottocar sits beside Rudolph who killed him. Watch what the singing of the Salve Regina does to the historical hatreds that should still divide them.

Listen for the tercet on inherited worth. It is one of the bleakest sentences in the cantica, and it carries Dante's whole political pessimism. Three lines that explain the medieval European disaster as the failure of sons.

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 resumed in a register of small intimate ceremony after the previous canto's diatribe and made two large moves under that small ceremony. First: it gave Virgil his most concise self-introduction in the entire Commedia — three tercets in which the great pagan poet names his sin, his hell, and the limit of his sight, addressed to the one shade in Purgatory most able to receive the address. Second: it staged the cantica's first complete political tableau, the Valley of Princes — seven major European monarchs, mostly bitter enemies in life, seated together at evening singing a hymn to Mary in a hollow of flowers. The two moves are related. The valley is a picture of what politics in repose looks like; Virgil's introduction is a picture of the limit of what the pagan virtue that built that politics could see. The canto is one of the cantica's quietest and one of its most strategically placed.

Virgil names himself

Sordello, ignorant of who the second poet on the slope might be, asks. Virgil's reply is the most painful self-introduction in the Commedia:

I by not doing, not by doing, lost The sight of that high sun which thou desirest, And which too late by me was recognized. A place there is below not sad with torments, But darkness only, where the lamentations Have not the sound of wailing, but are sighs. (Purg. VII.25–30, approx.)

Per non far, non per far. The chiasmus is the diagnosis. Virgil's hell is not Hell of the punished but Limbo of the never-baptised; his sin is omission, not commission. The sun he has not seen is divine truth; the too late is the gap between the Aeneid and Christ. Sordello's reaction — what? you are Virgil? — is shock at the discovery that the shade beside him is the greatest poet of his language and is here, in the gentle vestibule, going no higher. The pathos of the moment is structural: Virgil's hell is not the bleeding wood or the burning sand, but precisely the limit the cantica has been quietly marking since the missing shadow of canto III. He cannot see the sun. He never will.

The Valley of Princes, and the politics of repose

Sordello leads the travellers a short distance down the slope to a small valley recessed in the mountain's flank. The valley is the cantica's first description of a garden — gold and fine silver, and scarlet and pearl-white, the language of medieval lapidary description, naming colours by their precious counterparts because the colours themselves exceed paint. The grass is finer than any green; the flowers exceed any pigment; the scent is a mingled fragrance and unknown. The poet is straining the resources of medieval description; the valley is, by design, the cantica's first hint of what the Earthly Paradise at the summit will be.

In this garden the negligent rulers are seated together singing the Salve Regina, the Marian hymn of the Church's evening prayer. Salve Regina, mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve. The choice of hymn is precise — it is the prayer for mercy, the prayer that names Mary as life, sweetness, and our hope — and the choice of singers is precise. These are the kings of late-thirteenth-century Europe. In life, they fought each other. Aragon and Anjou tore the Western Mediterranean apart over Sicily; Bohemia and the Habsburgs killed each other on the field at Marchfeld; France, England, Spain, the Empire were locked in the dynastic struggle that would define the fourteenth century. Here they sit on grass. They sing the same words. The dynastic enmities are not erased — Sordello names them — but they have stopped operating. The valley is the Commedia's picture of what European politics would look like if its rulers were, all together, doing penitence at the same hour.

Sordello as troubadour-historian

Sordello's catalogue is structured like his own most famous Provençal poem, the Lament for Blacatz — a savage satirical lament that invited the cowardly kings of his era to eat the heart of the dead Blacatz so as to inherit a portion of his courage. The pattern is the same here: name the king, name the failure, name the unworthy son who inherited. Almost every figure in the catalogue is paired with a son or successor who failed him. Rudolph's son Albert refused the Italian crown (as the previous canto already complained); Philip III's son is Philip the Fair, the persecutor of Boniface VIII and (in Dante's analysis) the destroyer of Christian kingship; Henry I of Navarre's daughter married Philip the Fair and made the dynastic disaster definitive; Ottocar's son Wenceslaus is dismissed as worthless; Peter of Aragon's son James is praised but no other heir is.

The pattern issues in one of the canto's most cited tercets:

Not oftentimes upriseth through the branches The probity of man; and this He wills Who gives it, so that we may ask of Him. (Purg. VII.121–123, approx.)

The doctrine is unmistakable. Probity does not pass through the bloodline. Dante is breaking, in three lines, the entire dynastic theory of medieval kingship — the assumption that a worthy father will produce a worthy son and that the realm should hand power along the line of descent. He breaks it on theological grounds: God deliberately withholds the inheritance of virtue so that we may ask of Him. Virtue is granted, not inherited. The political consequence — that dynastic monarchy cannot rely on producing kings adequate to the kingdom — is one of the most quietly subversive sentences in medieval political poetry.

The pagan virtue and its limit

Read against Virgil's self-introduction, the Valley of Princes makes another argument. These kings are not pagans. They are Christian rulers, late-repentant, on the way to salvation. But the form of their virtue — the courtly, dynastic, secular form — is essentially the form Rome bequeathed Europe, and that form is exactly the form Virgil's Aeneid gave shape to. The valley is what the Aeneid eventually produced — and the Aeneid's author is standing on the slope above it, unable to enter it. The cantica is, by this juxtaposition, making one of its quietest and most painful theological claims: the pagan virtue that built Rome and seeded medieval kingship can carry a soul almost to salvation; it cannot carry the poet who articulated it.

Famous and meaningful passages

Virgil names his sin.

I by not doing, not by doing, lost The sight of that high sun which thou desirest, And which too late by me was recognized. (Purg. VII.25–27, approx.)

Per non far, non per far. Three Italian words doing the work of a whole theology of omission. The pagan virtue's failing is what it did not do — recognise Christ.

Virgil names his place.

A place there is below not sad with torments, But darkness only, where the lamentations Have not the sound of wailing, but are sighs. (Purg. VII.28–30, approx.)

Limbo described in three tercets. Sospiri — sighs — not wails. The pagan eternity is one of unfulfilled longing.

The valley described.

Gold and fine silver, and scarlet and pearl-white, The Indian wood resplendent and serene, Fresh emerald the moment it is broken, By herbage and by flowers within that hollow Planted, each one in colour would be vanquished, As by its greater vanquished is the less. Nor in that place had nature painted only, But of the sweetness of a thousand odours Made there a mingled fragrance and unknown. (Purg. VII.73–81, approx.)

The medieval lapidary catalogue — the names of precious materials used to fix colours the descriptive vocabulary cannot directly hold. Fresh emerald the moment it is broken — the most precise comparison the poet can make for the green.

The princes singing.

Salve Regina, on the green and flowers There seated, singing, spirits I beheld, Which were not visible outside the valley. (Purg. VII.82–84)

The hymn of mercy sung at evening by the kings who in life refused mercy to each other. The valley is hidden from the open slope; the song is heard only by those who descend to it.

Rudolph of Habsburg.

Rudolph the Emperor was, who had the power To heal the wounds that Italy have slain, So that through others slowly she revives. (Purg. VII.94–96, approx.)

The first king named. Who had the power. The whole indictment of imperial negligence in one verb-tense.

The line on inheritance.

Not oftentimes upriseth through the branches The probity of man; and this He wills Who gives it, so that we may ask of Him. (Purg. VII.121–123, approx.)

Three lines that break dynastic monarchy as a theological proposition. Worth is granted, not inherited.

What to watch for

Watch the time. The canto sits at evening. The next canto will sit at nightfall, and will introduce the cantica's first liturgy of evening prayer (the Te lucis ante terminum) and the cantica's first nocturnal threat (the serpent in the grass). The Valley of Princes is the cantica's first day-into-night.

Watch the four stars. They have already given way to a clearer sky at dawn; in the next canto, three new stars will appear — the three theological virtues, completing the cardinal four. Dante's astronomy is symbolic and exact.

Watch the dynastic theme. The argument that worth is not inherited is the canto's most subversive sentence. It will return in canto XI, when Oderisi da Gubbio's meditation on fame will deliver the individual version of the same argument — worth is not inherited even from oneself.

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.