Purgatorio XIX — The Dream of the Siren

Before reading

This is the canto in which the pilgrim wakes from his second Purgatorial dream and the doctrine of XVIII is given a test case in his own imagination. He has slept on the stair between sloth and avarice; he dreams; he is shaken from the dream by Virgil's voice; he climbs; he steps onto the fifth terrace and meets a soul lying face-down on the ground who, in the canto's quietest line, identifies himself by Latin scripture as the successor of Peter. The terrace of avarice has begun, and it has begun with a pope.

Where the canto sits

The night has passed and dawn is just breaking on the second full day of the climb. The pilgrim has come up through pride, envy, wrath, sloth — the four lower terraces — and now begins the climb through the upper three, which Virgil's doctrine in XVII identified as the terraces of excessive love of secondary goods: avarice, gluttony, lust. Each of these sins consists in loving a good thing too much. Avarice loves money and possessions past the measure that would leave room for love of God. The penance on this terrace will be the inverse of the sin's grasping: the avaricious will lie stretched flat on the ground, face-down, hands and feet bound, weeping into the stone.

The dream the pilgrim has just before waking is the second of the Purgatorio's three dreams (the first was the eagle in canto IX, the third will be Leah and Rachel in canto XXVII). All three dreams come just before dawn — in the medieval tradition the hour when dreams are most prophetic. The dream here, the femmina balba — the stammering woman — is the Commedia's most uncomfortable image of how the will can be deceived at the threshold of assent.

What it helps to know

In the dream, a woman appears whose first state is wretched: she stammers, she squints, she is twisted in her feet, her hands are maimed, her colour is sallow. As the pilgrim's eyes turn on her, the dream slowly makes her beautiful. Her tongue is loosed, her body straightens, her face becomes pleasant. She begins to sing. She announces herself as the sweet Siren who turned mariners aside in the open sea (the Sirens of Odyssey XII, who tried to detain Ulysses). She sings to keep the pilgrim listening. Then a holy lady — never named — appears beside her, calls urgently for Virgil, and Virgil rips the Siren's clothing open from the front, exposing her belly. The stench that issued from it wakes me.

The dream is a parable of the doctrine just delivered in XVIII. The Siren is not naturally beautiful; she is made beautiful by the gaze of the one who looks at her. The lower goods that the upper terraces purge — money, food, sex — are not in themselves beautiful in the way the soul takes them to be. They become beautiful only because the imagination dresses them in a beauty borrowed from the higher good. The Siren is the symbol of every disordered love whose attractiveness is, in fact, the lover's own projection. The holy lady — whom the early commentators variously identify as Beatrice, as Lucia, as Philosophy, as Reason — is the corrective who reveals the lower good for what it actually is. The stench from the exposed belly is the canto's most physical image of disenchantment.

The pope the pilgrim meets is Adrian V — Ottobuono dei Fieschi, of the Genoese noble family, who was elected pope on 11 July 1276 and died of malaria on 18 August 1276, having held the office for a little over five weeks. He never even completed the rituals of consecration. The historical Adrian V was not in fact especially avaricious; the early commentators speculate that Dante confused him with Adrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear, who was famously stingy) or that he drew on Genoese family gossip about the Fieschi. Whatever the source, the canto places him face-down on the terrace of avarice and gives him one of the Purgatorio's most beautiful confessions.

What to read for

Notice that the Siren announces herself mid-song. She names herself the sweet Siren and the one who turned Ulysses from his course. Compare this to the femmina balba's stammering at the start of the dream. The lower good, as soon as it is fully consented to by the gaze, speaks with the voice of a great classical seducer. The dream is teaching, with painful precision, how the disordered will mistakes its own creation for an ancient power.

Notice that Virgil himself rips open the Siren's clothes — at the holy lady's request. Pagan reason can perform the function of disenchantment when it has been summoned by a higher authority to do so. Virgil cannot initiate the corrective gesture, but he can carry it out. The doctrine of his limited but useful agency is being staged.

Notice the Latin in the canto. Adrian V identifies himself in Latin — Scias quod ego fui successor Petri, Know that I was the successor of Peter — and the avaricious weep their psalm in Latin — Adhaesit pavimento anima mea, My soul has cleaved to the pavement (Psalm 119:25). The terrace of avarice, where the Church's own corruption is most directly addressed, speaks in the language of the Church. Pay attention to where in the Commedia the Latin is allowed to surface.

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 inside the pilgrim's second Purgatorial dream and gave him, in fifty lines, the Commedia's sharpest image of how the will is seduced. A wretched stammering woman appeared; the pilgrim looked at her; under his gaze she straightened, became beautiful, opened her mouth in song, and announced herself as the sweet Siren who had once turned Ulysses from his course. A holy lady appeared beside her and called for Virgil; Virgil tore her clothes open and showed the dreamer her exposed belly; the stench woke him. The dream was a parable of the doctrine of XVIII: the lower goods are not in themselves beautiful in the way the soul takes them to be; they are made beautiful by the gaze that consents to them. The pilgrim then climbed to the fifth terrace, found it carpeted with souls lying face-down in their own bound bodies, weeping the Latin psalm my soul cleaved to the pavement, and met one of them — a soul who identified himself, also in Latin, as the late Pope Adrian V. The pope refused Dante's instinctive kneeling and corrected him gently about the conditions of equality on the mountain. The canto's two structural movements — the dream of seduction and the pope's confession — were both staged as scenes of correction: of the will's wrong gaze, of the layman's wrong reverence.

The dream as test case for the doctrine of XVIII

In the canto before, Virgil had explained that the first movement of love is natural and incurs no blame; merit and demerit live at the threshold of assent, where the will either consents to or refuses the inclination. The dream tests this doctrine on the sleeping pilgrim's own imagination. The Siren appears first as she actually is — stammering, squinting, twisted in the feet, maimed in the hands, sallow in colour. She is repulsive. The pilgrim's eyes turn on her — and the dream reports the eyes' work in slow motion. The first gaze loosens her tongue; the second straightens her body; the third gives her the face the dreamer wants to see. She is made beautiful by the act of being gazed at by a will that has begun to consent. By the time she sings, she is the great classical seducer of Odyssey XII — the sweet Siren who unmanned mariners amid the main. The disordered will has, through nothing more than its own unchecked attention, promoted a stammering wretch to a mythological power.

The holy lady's intervention is the threshold of assent in dramatic form. She does not strike the Siren; she does not even speak to her. She speaks to Virgil. The corrective is not direct intervention into the love-object but the summoning of reason to expose what the gaze has been pretending not to see. Virgil tears the Siren's clothing open and the belly — the seat of the appetites — is revealed in its actual condition: rotten, smelling, foul. The lower good, when seen as it really is, is what wakes the sleeper. The dream is therefore one of the most precise pieces of moral pedagogy in the Commedia. It tells the pilgrim, in a language his sleeping body understands, that every disordered love he is about to encounter on the upper three terraces — avarice for money, gluttony for food, lust for sexual pleasure — is the lover's own projection onto an object that, considered in itself, is much smaller and uglier than the consent has made it.

The unnamed holy lady has been variously identified by the early commentators as Beatrice, Lucia, Reason, Philosophy, or some allegorical figure of Truth. Dante does not name her, and the withholding is deliberate. She is the corrective principle as such, the unspecified higher authority that summons reason to act. The poem leaves the identification open because the operation is more important than the agent.

The avaricious face-down

The penance on the fifth terrace is the most physical inversion of its sin yet shown. The avaricious in life grasped; the avaricious in death cannot grasp anything, because their hands are bound under their own faces. The avaricious in life looked at earth (treasure, coin, possessions) instead of looking at heaven; the avaricious in death lie with their faces pressed into the very earth they once loved, unable to lift their eyes. My soul cleaved to the pavement — adhaesit pavimento anima mea — Psalm 119:25, sung by the penitents as the canto's terrace-wide hymn. The Vulgate verb adhaesit gives the canto its physical signature: the soul has stuck to the pavement and cannot free itself. The whole terrace lies as a single carpet of bound, weeping bodies pressed into the floor. There is no clearer example, in the Commedia's entire moral architecture, of how a sin's posture in life becomes its penance in death.

Adrian V and the conditions of equality

The pilgrim meets the soul who will identify himself as the late Pope Adrian V — Ottobuono dei Fieschi of the great Genoese family, elected to the papacy on 11 July 1276 and dead of malaria on 18 August of the same year, having held the throne for just over five weeks. The historical Adrian had no time to enact any policy and is not known by any independent source to have been especially avaricious; modern scholarship suspects Dante either confused him with Adrian IV or relied on a now-lost piece of Genoese family gossip. Whatever the source, the Commedia has placed him here, and the placement is the canto's claim: that even the briefest holder of the papal office can have been corrupted by what the office requires. A month and little more I learned how the great mantle weighs. Five weeks were enough.

The canto's most beautiful gesture is what follows. The pilgrim, recognising that he is talking to a pope, falls instinctively to his knees. Adrian, from the ground, with one bound hand barely able to gesture, tells him to rise. Straighten thy legs, and upward raise thee, brother. Err not. Fellow-servant am I with thee and with the others to one power. The Latin phrase he then quotes — Neque nubent — is from Christ's answer to the Sadducees in Matthew 22:30: in the resurrection neither do men marry, nor are they given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. Adrian extends the principle: in the world to come, there is no marriage and no hierarchy. The relations that organised the earthly Church — Pope, priest, layman, kneeler, blessed — do not survive death. Adrian is not less than Dante and Dante is not less than Adrian. They are fellow-servants of one power. The line is one of the Commedia's most quietly radical statements about the conditions of equality among the saved.

There is also a fragment of Adrian's personal history embedded in the canto, almost in passing. He mentions Alagia, his niece, and asks Dante's prayers for her — she is good. Alagia dei Fieschi was the wife of Moroello Malaspina, the lord of Lunigiana who would later shelter Dante in his exile. The poet who is writing the Commedia under the patronage of Moroello's circle is being given, by Moroello's late uncle-by-marriage, a personal request: pray for my niece, who is your patron's wife. The canto thus contains, almost invisibly, a small political acknowledgement that the Commedia's composition was being supported by people whose dead relations the poem was now placing in purgation.

Famous and meaningful passages

The Siren announces herself.

I am, she sang, I am the Siren sweet Who mariners amid the main unman, So full am I of pleasantness to hear. (Purg. XIX.19–21)

The most dangerous self-introduction in the Purgatorio. The wretched stammerer has become the Homeric seducer through the act of being gazed at. Io son la dolce sirena.

The exposure.

She seized the other and in front laid open, Rending her garments, and her belly showed me; This waked me with the stench that issued from it. (Purg. XIX.31–33)

Reason, summoned, exposes the object. The lower good, seen as it really is, is what wakes the sleeper. Three lines, the canto's central image.

The angel of zeal.

He moved his pinions afterwards and fanned us, Affirming those qui lugent to be blessed, For they shall have their souls with comfort filled. (Purg. XIX.49–51)

The Beatitude of mourning — Matthew 5:5 — as the answer to sloth. They that mourn shall be comforted. The cross-mapping is exquisite: the slothful mourned too little in life for the higher good they could not rouse themselves to pursue. Those who learn to mourn for what is lost will be comforted into the energy of pursuing it again.

The hymn of the avaricious.

Adhaesit pavimento anima mea, I heard them say with sighings so profound, That hardly could the words be understood. (Purg. XIX.73–75)

Psalm 119:25 in Latin. My soul cleaved to the pavement. The verb adhaesit is the terrace's physical signature: the soul sticks to the earth it loved.

Adrian identifies himself.

Wherefore our backs the heaven Turns to itself, know shalt thou; but beforehand, Scias quod ego fui successor Petri. (Purg. XIX.97–99)

The line is delivered in Latin, the language of the office. Know that I was the successor of Peter. The pope identifies himself by what the office made him, not by his Christian name. The Latin formality is the canto's quiet barb.

Adrian on the weight of the mantle.

A month and little more essayed I how Weighs the great cloak on him from mire who keeps it, For all the other burdens seem a feather. (Purg. XIX.103–105)

Five weeks were enough. Un mese e poco più provai io come pesa il gran manto. The line is the Commedia's shortest sustained complaint about the papacy from inside the office — and it comes from the pope who held it least.

The correction of the kneel.

Straighten thy legs, and upward raise thee, brother, He answered: Err not, fellow-servant am I With thee and with the others to one power. (Purg. XIX.133–135)

The structural keystone of the canto. Frate, drizza le gambe, lèvati su. The earthly hierarchies do not survive death; the pope on the ground and the layman kneeling are fellow-servants. One of the Commedia's most quietly democratic moments.

What to watch for

Watch the next canto continue the terrace. XX will give the avaricious their longest single voice — Hugh Capet, ancestor of the French royal house, in a great denunciation of his royal descendants — and will close with the earthquake that signals the completion of a soul's purgation.

Watch the dream image return. The femmina balba — the lower good made beautiful by the wrong gaze — is the structural premise of the entire upper mountain. Every penitent on avarice, gluttony, and lust is a soul who fell asleep before the holy lady arrived. Pay attention to how the upper terraces are organised by the same image, given different objects.

Watch the Latin. From here to the top of the mountain the Commedia will increasingly let the Vulgate speak through its own characters' mouths. The pope quotes Christ in Latin; the avaricious sing the psalter in Latin; the angels will sing Beatitudes in Latin. The poem is moving, terrace by terrace, into the registers of the Church it is reforming.

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.