Purgatorio · Canto VIII ·
Purgatorio VIII — The Evening Bell
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 42 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto VIII
Before reading
Evening falls in the Valley of Princes. The cantica's first real night is about to begin. The canto is built around three things that happen at the boundary between day and night: a hymn, a descent, and an attack. Each is brief; each is laid into the canto with such craftsmanship that the whole sequence feels, on first reading, like a piece of staged liturgy — which is what it is.
Where the canto sits
You are still in the Valley of Princes from the previous canto. The seven kings sit on the grass, the Salve Regina of evening has just been sung, and the cantica is about to teach the reader, by enactment, why this small recessed valley has been hollowed out below the open slope. The valley is, structurally, the Commedia's first piece of nighttime stagecraft: an open-air chapel set into the mountainside, where the souls perform the Church's compline office before sleep.
What it helps to know
The hymn the souls will sing is the Te lucis ante terminum — the great compline hymn of the medieval Latin Church, sung at the close of the day. Its three verses ask God to protect us through the silent hours, cleanse our dreams of phantoms and dark fancies, and check the enemy so that we may rest without his trouble. The hymn is asking, very specifically, for protection from demonic temptation in the dark. The cantica is about to enact, immediately after the hymn is sung, exactly what the hymn is praying against.
Two angels will descend. They are green — verdant wings — the colour of hope, the third theological virtue. Their swords are truncated and deprived of their points. The detail is doctrinally exact. The angels are not coming to kill the serpent. They are coming to frighten it off. The whole drama of the cantica's night-watch is built on the proposition that the threat is real and that the response is sufficient without being terminal — exactly the proposition that distinguishes Purgatorio from Inferno. In Hell, the demons used pitchforks on the damned; in Purgatory, the angels deploy broken swords against the serpent. Coercion in Hell; deterrence on the mountain.
Two named souls speak in the canto:
- Nino Visconti (c. 1265–1296), of the Visconti of Pisa, judge of Gallura in Sardinia and a friend of Dante's. He was a Guelph who shared political work with Dante in Tuscany. His complaint in this canto is about his widow — Beatrice d'Este — who remarried into a Ghibelline family within a few years of his death, abandoning his memory. The lament is the cantica's first picture of widow-faithlessness as a moral category.
- Conrad Malaspina (d. c. 1294), of the great northern Italian noble family of the Lunigiana. He is met at the canto's end and makes a prophecy about Dante's coming exile and the hospitality his family will extend to the exile. The detail is autobiographical — when the historical Dante was driven out of Florence in 1302, the Malaspina were among the first noble houses to give him shelter. The poem is repaying a debt of hospitality by writing the family into Purgatorio.
A small astronomy note. The four cardinal stars of canto I will, in this canto, give way to three new stars rising in the south. These are the three theological virtues — Faith, Hope, and Charity — completing the constellation of seven that ordered the medieval moral universe. The pagan four hold the dawn; the Christian three rise at evening. The cantica's symbolism is exact.
What to read for
Read the opening tercets aloud. They are among the most quoted lines in Italian literature, and Longfellow holds the rhythm. They are also, structurally, a displacement: the canto is about to describe a religious office, but it opens by describing the secular emotion that office answers — the homesickness of the exile at the end of the day. The cantica is teaching the reader, by sequence, that religious longing and homesickness are the same longing in two registers.
Notice the angels' broken swords. The detail is small and decisive. Watch what the broken sword is, and is not, capable of doing.
Notice Nino Visconti's voice. He is the cantica's first soul who is recognised personally by the pilgrim as a friend. Watch the affection.
Listen for the prophecy. The Malaspina passage is the canto's quiet thank-you note to a family that would soon shelter the exile. Dante is paying his debts in advance, in the only currency he has.
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 staged the Commedia's first piece of liturgical theatre. Evening fell on the Valley of Princes; a compline hymn rose from the seated kings; two angels with broken swords came down from above; a serpent moved through the grass; the angels drove it off; the kings sat through the whole exchange and did nothing. The sequence is rendered with such economy and grace that the canto reads almost as a piece of staged ritual — which is exactly what it is. The Church's compline office of Dante's day asked God for protection from demonic temptation in the night-watch, and the canto enacts the office's content in a sequence of visible images. By the canto's end the cantica has taught the reader, by demonstration, that night on Purgatory's mountain is a real spiritual danger handled by exactly the means the Church names: hymn, angelic guard, and the soul's quiet attention.
The opening tercets, and what homesickness is
The two opening tercets are among the most loved in Italian poetry. They describe the moment at the end of the day when the sailor on the sea looks back and his desire for home is quickened, and when the new pilgrim on a foreign road, hearing a distant bell, feels his love for what he has left behind. The tercets are doing structural work for the rest of the canto: they argue, before the canto's main action, that the religious longing the souls are about to express in their compline hymn is the same longing the secular emotion of homesickness names. Evening softens the heart of both the sailor and the new pilgrim because evening is the hour the heart returns to what it loves. The cantica is collapsing, in three lines, the supposed distance between amor patriae and amor Dei. The exile who is writing this canto has lost both his city and his easy access to God; the tercets ache simultaneously for both.
The hymn, the angels, the broken swords
The Te lucis ante terminum is the great compline hymn of the Latin Church — sung at the close of every day, asking the Creator who before the end of light should keep watch through the silent hours, cleanse dreams and phantoms, and check the enemy. The hymn's third verse names exactly the threat the canto is about to enact: hostemque nostrum comprime, ne polluantur corpora. The cantica is having its souls pray, and then is showing the prayer being answered in real time.
The two angels descend in verdant wings — green, the colour of hope — and carry swords truncated and deprived of their points. The detail is precise theology. The angels of Hell would use entire blades; the angels of Purgatory carry broken ones. The night-watch on the mountain is a deterrent not a combat. The serpent will not be killed; it will be frightened. This is the cantica's first staged picture of how grace operates on the saved: not by annihilating the temptation but by sending sufficient guard to prevent its bite. The eschatological battle that Inferno staged as a war between the demons and the damned is here restaged, in miniature, as a chaste compline office between two green-winged angels and a serpent that flees at the sound of their wings.
What the kings do, and do not, do
A small detail of the canto easy to miss: the seated kings do nothing during the exchange. They sing the hymn; they look up; they watch. They do not pick up swords; they do not chase the serpent; they do not even rise to assist. The cantica is staging, very precisely, the doctrine that the soul on Purgatory's slope is not its own defender. The night attacks; the angels respond; the soul prays. The kings in life were exactly the figures whom the institutional vocabulary of medieval Christendom expected to defend the realm against the enemy — and here, in Purgatory, they are exempted from that office. Defence is grace's affair, not the king's. The whole secular theology of the miles Christi, the soldier-king as defender of the Church, is gently suspended in this small valley.
Nino Visconti, and the widow
Nino Visconti — Guelph judge of Gallura in Sardinia, friend of Dante in life, dead in 1296 — is the first soul Dante meets in this cantica whom he had known personally. The recognition is warm and quick: Noble Judge Nino! how it me delighted, when I beheld thee not among the damned! The phrasing is unusual — joy at not finding a friend in Hell. Nino's complaint, when it comes, is about his widow. His wife Beatrice d'Este had remarried, within a few years of his death, into the rival Visconti of Milan — a Ghibelline house, politically hostile to her late husband. Nino's grief is that she had stopped wearing his white-and-black mourning bands; the cantica reads the abandonment of mourning as the abandonment of memory. The lament does not curse her; it asks the pilgrim to carry word to my Giovanna (his young daughter) that she pray for me. The cantica's economy returns: the prayers of the daughter, in grace, can shorten the father's wait. The widow has failed the dead; the daughter is the new agent of the suffrage.
The Malaspina prophecy, and Dante's debt
The canto closes with a brief meeting with Conrad Malaspina of the Lunigiana — a quiet figure whose only function in the canto is to receive Dante's praise of his family's liberality and to deliver a prophecy about the pilgrim's coming exile. Conrad foretells that within seven years Dante will know the courteous custom of the Malaspina family from personal experience. The detail is autobiographical and grateful. The historical Dante, driven out of Florence in 1302, was sheltered in the Lunigiana by the Malaspina; he wrote some of the Convivio there, and probably parts of the Commedia itself. By writing Conrad Malaspina into Purgatorio with a prophecy of the family's coming hospitality, Dante is paying the family back in the only currency a poet has — putting one of them on the way to Heaven.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening on the evening hour.
'Twas now the hour that turneth back desire In those who sail the sea, and melts the heart, The day they've said to their sweet friends farewell, And the new pilgrim penetrates with love, If he doth hear from far away a bell That seemeth to deplore the dying day. (Purg. VIII.1–6)
The two most quoted tercets of the cantica. That seemeth to deplore the dying day — che paia il giorno pianger che si more — the bell weeping for the day it cannot keep. Read aloud, slowly.
The compline hymn.
Te lucis ante so devoutly issued Forth from its mouth, and with such dulcet notes, It made me issue forth from my own mind. And then the others, sweetly and devoutly, Accompanied it through all the hymn entire, Having their eyes on the supernal wheels. (Purg. VIII.13–18)
The hymn sung by one and then taken up by all. Having their eyes on the supernal wheels — the kings, who in life looked down at maps and crowns, are looking up.
The two angels.
I saw that army of the gentle-born Thereafterward in silence upward gaze, As if in expectation, pale and humble; And from on high come forth and down descend, I saw two Angels with two flaming swords, Truncated and deprived of their points. (Purg. VIII.22–27, approx.)
Truncated and deprived of their points. The cantica's most precise piece of theology rendered as a visual detail. The swords are sufficient.
The serpent.
Upon the side on which the little valley No barrier hath, a serpent was; perchance The same which gave to Eve the bitter food. 'Twixt grass and flowers came on the evil streak, Turning at times its head about, and licking Its back like to a beast that smoothes itself. (Purg. VIII.97–102, approx.)
The serpent identified, with deliberate qualification, as perchance the same that tempted Eve. The picture of the snake licking its own scales — like to a beast that smoothes itself — is one of the most physically uncomfortable images in the cantica.
The angels' wings.
Hearing the air cleft by their verdant wings, The serpent fled, and round the Angels wheeled, Up to their stations flying back alike. (Purg. VIII.106–108, approx.)
The air cleft by their verdant wings — l'aere fendendo con le verdi ali. The whole defence is in the sound. The serpent does not need to be struck; the air parted by the angels' wings is enough.
Nino Visconti to his daughter.
Then, turned to me: By that especial grace Thou owest unto Him, who so conceals His own first wherefore, that it has no ford, When thou shalt be beyond the waters wide, Tell my Giovanna that she pray for me, Where answer to the innocent is made. (Purg. VIII.67–72, approx.)
The same request as Manfred's, as Jacopo's, as Belacqua's — but now passed to a child. Where answer to the innocent is made — the prayer of the small daughter has, in the cantica's economy, a particular force.
What to watch for
Watch the three new stars. They will return in canto XXX, at Beatrice's apparition in the Earthly Paradise — the same three theological virtues, now embodied as three women in her chariot. The cantica is building a constellation that has a payoff.
Watch the broken sword. It is the cantica's emblem for the angelic mode of action: deterrent, not destructive. Every angelic appearance in the rest of Purgatorio will be characterised by this same restraint.
Watch the Malaspina. The family will not appear again, but the prophecy will be fulfilled, off-page, in Dante's own life. The poem is using the afterlife to record a debt the living poet expects to owe.
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.