Purgatorio · Canto XXIII ·
Purgatorio XXIII — The Famished Crowd
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 57 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XXIII
Before reading
The pilgrim has left the tree of forbidden fruit at the centre of the sixth terrace and walks on with Virgil and Statius. The terrace punishes gluttony, and the punishment is not a flame and not a weight but a hunger so extreme that the bodies of the shades have been hollowed out to almost nothing. This canto is the one in which the famished crowd arrives and one of its souls turns out to be a friend.
Where the canto sits
We are in the upper levels of the mountain, three terraces from the summit, on the day before the climb into the Earthly Paradise. The order of the terraces has been ascending through the seven capital sins from the heaviest (pride, at the base) to the lightest (lust, just below the garden). Gluttony is the second from the top. The poem is now nearing its hinge — every canto in this stretch is closer to Beatrice than the one before — and the encounters become correspondingly more personal. The crowd Dante meets here includes people he had known.
What it helps to know
The friend he meets is Forese Donati, a Florentine of about Dante's own age, a cousin of Dante's wife Gemma Donati, and the brother of the Corso Donati who as leader of the Black Guelfs would within a few years engineer Dante's exile. Forese died in 1296, four years before the fictional date of the poem. He and Dante had exchanged a famous tenzone — a flyting in sonnets — in their youth: scurrilous, obscene, the kind of rough comedy two young friends trade with each other. The reunion in this canto must be read against the memory of that exchange. They were close enough to insult each other in writing and have it survive.
A small device the canto works hard. The starved faces of the gluttonous are so wasted that the bone structure shows through as if forming letters. In medieval mnemonic tradition the cheekbones and brow of a human face were said to spell out OMO — homo, man — with the eyes for the two O's and the nose and brows for the M. The poem uses this old reading literally: the famished face has had everything erased except the letters that say human. Notice how the canto turns a piece of common-school iconography into doctrine.
The discipline of the terrace is announced by the chant the souls sing as they arrive — Labia mea, Domine, the opening of Psalm 51. Open my lips and my mouth shall declare thy praise. The mouth that sinned by eating is purged by being used for prayer.
What to read for
Notice that the punishment of gluttony is no food, and that the shades nevertheless explain their hunger as a solace. Watch for the moment Forese makes this paradox explicit. The terrace is teaching, by the body, that the difference between torment and joy lies entirely in what the suffering is for.
Notice the politics that arrive without warning. Forese is asked nothing about Florence and yet what he says about Florence is the most ferocious denunciation of the city in the whole Purgatorio. The cantica has been gentler on Florence than the Inferno was. Forese reopens the wound.
Listen for the way Dante introduces Virgil and Statius to his old friend. He names them carefully, and the order in which he names them is doing structural work.
The canto is the prelude to a larger conversation about poetry that the next canto will open. Read this one as the personal half of a two-part movement.
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
A crowd of starving shades overtook the three poets on the sixth terrace, and one of them turned out to be a friend. That is the whole external action, and like all the great Purgatorial meetings it is doing more than it appears to. The canto is a study in the body as the place where penance is written — the gluttonous have been so consumed by the same desire that consumed them in life that they are now legible as nothing but bones, and the bones spell man. It is also a study in friendship across the gap of death. Forese Donati and Dante had exchanged scurrilous sonnets in their youth; in 1300 Forese is four years dead and on the next-to-last terrace of the mountain. The reunion is tender and the conversation that comes out of it includes the most ferocious denunciation of Florence in the whole Purgatorio. The terrace teaches that hunger is not the punishment but the means; and the canto teaches that an old friend, met in the right place, is still a witness to the city you both came from.
What the punishment is doing
The shades are starving in sight of a tree whose fruit they cannot reach and whose fragrance maddens them. The fragrance comes from the same tree, by way of a spray of water from the cliff above it; nothing else nourishes the air around it. The image is in part a contrappasso — the throat that took in too much takes in now only smell — and in part a deeper proposition. Forese makes the proposition explicit: I say our pain, and ought to say our solace, for the same wish doth lead us to the tree which led the Christ rejoicing to say Eli. The wish that drives them to the unreachable tree is the same wish that drove Christ to the cross. The pain is the solace because both are gestures of the same will, oriented now toward God. The sixth terrace is the Comedy's clearest statement that, in Purgatory, the suffering and the joy are not opposed; they are the same act of love read from two sides.
The face that says man
The poem's most famous mnemonic device makes its appearance here. The faces of the famished shades have wasted to bone, and the bones — cheekbone, brow, the bridge and arches of the nose — form the letters OMO: homo, man, with the eyes for the two O's and the nose-and-brow for the M. The reading was a commonplace of medieval schoolbook iconography. Dante's use of it is literal and theological. Hunger has erased everything from these faces except the letters that say human. The flesh that hid the man has been melted away, and what remains is the word for what the man is. The penance of gluttony is the recovery of the human shape by the deletion of everything that was not it.
Forese, and the politics of the unspoken question
Dante did not ask Forese about Florence. He asked about his death — up to this time five years have not rolled round, how hast thou come up hitherward already? — and Forese answered with his widow Nella, whose prayers cut his time in Ante-Purgatory short. That answer (which closes one of the Commedia's small monuments to a faithful woman) opens of its own momentum into the denunciation that follows. Florentine women, Forese says, are immodest in a way no Sardinian Barbagia could match; a sermon will one day be needed to forbid them their open dress; and a future of grief is being prepared for the city before its present infants have grown beards. The diatribe arrives without invitation because for Forese the holiness of Nella and the shamelessness of Florence cannot be held apart. The canto is teaching the reader something it will repeat all the way up the mountain: the political comes out of the personal at the speed of grief. There is no neutral talk with a Florentine about a Florentine.
The political wound has another layer the canto does not name. Forese's brother is Corso Donati, leader of the Black Guelfs, whose 1301 coup drove Dante out of the city; Corso is the he most guilty of it whom Forese sees dragged along at a beast's tail in his prophecy of doom. The denunciation of Florentine women includes, by inheritance, a quiet denunciation of the brother who will sentence the friend.
Three names in order
When Forese asks who Dante's companions are, the poet introduces them in a careful order. This is Virgilius, who thus says to me — the other is that shade for whom just now shook every slope your realm, that from itself discharges him. Virgil named, Statius identified only by the trembling of the mountain at his release. The hierarchy is being marked. Virgil is the named guide; Statius is the new companion, the one whose name belongs to the next terrace and the next argument. The canto closes Forese's part of the conversation but leaves Statius standing in the wings for canto XXV.
Famous and meaningful passages
The penitential psalm.
And lo! were heard a song and a lament, Labia mea, Domine, in fashion Such that delight and dolence it brought forth. (Purg. XXIII.10–12)
Psalm 51, opening: open my lips, Lord, and my mouth shall declare thy praise. The mouth that sinned is purged by being used for prayer.
The face as a word.
Their sockets were like rings without the gems; Whoever in the face of men reads omo Might well in these have recognised the m. (Purg. XXIII.31–33)
The schoolbook mnemonic taken at the level of doctrine. The wasted face has been reduced to the letters that say human.
The Erysichthon comparison.
I do not think that so to merest rind Could Erisichthon have been withered up By famine, when most fear he had of it. (Purg. XXIII.25–27)
The mythological glutton of Ovid's Metamorphoses who, cursed by Ceres, devoured himself. The poem's reference for the worst hunger imaginable; outdone by the shades on the cornice.
Recognition by voice.
Never should I have known him by his look; But in his voice was evident to me That which his aspect had suppressed within it. (Purg. XXIII.43–45)
The face is gone; the voice is intact. In a canto about the body wasted to its meaning, the soul's distinguishing mark is left in the throat.
The paradox of the terrace.
All of this people who lamenting sing, For following beyond measure appetite In hunger and thirst are here re-sanctified. ... And not a single time alone, this ground Encompassing, is refreshed our pain, — I say our pain, and ought to say our solace, — For the same wish doth lead us to the tree Which led the Christ rejoicing to say Eli, When with his veins he liberated us. (Purg. XXIII.64–66, 70–75)
The doctrinal centre of the whole terrace. The pain is the solace. The wish that drives the famished to the unreachable tree is the wish that drove Christ to the cross. Purgatorial suffering is christological in its grammar.
Nella's tears.
Thus speedily has led me To drink of the sweet wormwood of these torments, My Nella with her overflowing tears; She with her prayers devout and with her sighs Has drawn me from the coast where one awaits… (Purg. XXIII.85–89)
One of the Commedia's small monuments to a faithful widow. The prayers of a living woman shorten the penance of a dead husband.
The denunciation of Florence.
When from the pulpit shall be interdicted To the unblushing womankind of Florence To go about displaying breast and paps. What savages were e'er, what Saracens, Who stood in need, to make them covered go, Of spiritual or other discipline? (Purg. XXIII.100–105)
The most ferocious diatribe against Florence in the whole Purgatorio — and the source of more than one Renaissance preacher's sermon. Forese has been dead five years; the city's shame has only thickened.
The three companions named.
Through the deep Night of the truly dead has this one led me, With this true flesh, that follows after him. ... This is Virgilius, who thus says to me, And him I pointed at; the other is That shade for whom just now shook every slope Your realm, that from itself discharges him. (Purg. XXIII.121–123, 130–133)
The hierarchy of guides marked aloud. Virgil named; Statius identified by the mountain that trembled at his release.
What to watch for
Watch Statius. He has been all but silent in this canto; canto XXV will give him the longest single piece of doctrinal exposition in the whole Purgatorio and explain why a shade can have an apparent body at all.
Watch the next tree. Another inverted-pine tree of fruit will appear on the same terrace in canto XXIV, with a different voice speaking from within it. The poem is teaching the reader, by repetition, that the cornice has more than one of these and that the lesson is to be heard more than once.
Watch for Bonagiunta. Among the shades named in canto XXIV will be the Lucchese poet who asks the question that opens the whole dolce stil novo argument. The personal reunion with Forese has been the warming-up; the literary argument is next.
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.