Purgatorio XXVI — The Two Bands Meet

Before reading

The seventh and last cornice. Lust. A wall of fire on one side, a drop on the other, and a narrow ledge between. The penitents walk inside the fire, in two bands that move in opposite directions, meet, kiss briefly in greeting, and separate. The pilgrim walks the ledge between them, and on this cornice he meets the two poets who matter most to him after Virgil.

Where the canto sits

This is the highest of the seven cornices, just below the angel-stair to the Earthly Paradise. The whole Purgatorio has been a progressive lightening of penances, and this one is the lightest in mechanism — fire only, no weight, no blindness, no hunger — but the heaviest in personal significance. The two poets the pilgrim meets here have shaped his own writing more than any others except Virgil. The conversation has been being prepared since Inferno I, where Dante told Virgil he had taken from him the beautiful style that has done me honour. The beautiful style will be paid back here to the poets it actually came from.

What it helps to know

Two bands of shades meet, kiss briefly, and separate. The kiss is a greeting; the separation is forced by the work of the terrace. As they part, each band shouts an example of its sin — one shouts Sodom and Gomorrah, the other shouts of Pasiphae (the queen who lay with a bull and bore the Minotaur). The doubling tells the reader that the cornice purges two kinds of lust: homosexual (the band that shouts of Sodom) and heterosexual but disordered (the band that shouts of Pasiphae). Dante's scheme keeps both penitences on the same cornice with the same penance. They are equal members of a single class.

The first poet who speaks is Guido Guinizelli of Bologna (c. 1230–1276), author of the canzone Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore — To the gentle heart Love always returns — which is the seed-poem of the dolce stil novo. Dante had cited Guinizelli's gentle heart doctrine from Francesca's mouth in Inferno V. Here he meets the man himself. Watch the way Dante speaks to him.

The second poet, named only at the end of the canto, is Arnaut Daniel (c. 1150–c. 1210), the great Provençal troubadour Dante admired more than any other vernacular poet outside Italian. Dante had named him in his earlier prose treatise De vulgari eloquentia as the better smith of the mother tongue. The canto stages this praise in person — but with a twist. Arnaut, when he is asked to speak, speaks in Provençal: eight lines of his native tongue in the middle of the Italian poem. They are the only non-Italian/non-Latin direct speech in the entire Commedia. The poem is making a courteous gesture so extreme that the reader is reminded how rare it is.

A short note on the kiss. The brief greeting the souls exchange is described in plain ordinary language — like ants meeting muzzle to muzzle to spy their journey. The plainness is doing work. The canto is not interested in setting the souls' affection at a moral distance from the sin that put them here; it is interested in showing that the form of love that fed both the sin and the salvation is the same form. The cornice does not reject love; it reorders it.

What to read for

Notice the first thing Dante does that draws the souls' attention. He is the only one in the file who casts a shadow. The whole cornice realises in the same instant that he is alive. The poem is reminding us, on the last of the seven terraces, how strange the living body still is in this place.

Notice the way Guinizelli describes Arnaut when he points him out. The praise is the praise of a master for a master. Dante is also writing the line, and so the line is also one master's praise of another.

Listen for the Provençal at the end. The eight lines of Arnaut's speech are the only piece of non-Italian text in the Commedia you will encounter as direct speech. Read them aloud even if you do not know the language. The point of the canto is partly the sound — the courteous concession that the dolce stil novo owes its courtesy to a tongue across the Alps.

Listen for the final image. Arnaut, having spoken, hides himself in the fire that purifies them. The verb is a small theological argument. The fire is not a punishment to be endured. It is a purification to be entered.

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 two great vernacular poets behind Dante's own writing appeared, one after the other, on the last cornice of the mountain. Guido Guinizelli — the father of me and of my betters — was met with reverence so total that the pilgrim stood within the fire's reach and did not move. Arnaut Daniel — the better smith of the mother tongue — was named, and was then permitted by the poem to speak in his own language, the only sustained piece of non-Italian direct speech in the Commedia. The cornice of lust thus turns out to be the cornice where Dante pays his literary debts in person. Both poets are saved; both are being purged of the sin that produced the love-poetry the dolce stil novo refined. The canto does not deny the connection. It writes it down and walks past it.

Two bands, one sin

A reader expecting a clear moral schema is owed a small note. The two bands that meet and kiss on this cornice are doing two different things. One — that yonder which goes upon its way behind your backs — shouts Sodom and Gomorrah, and Guinizelli identifies its members as those who offended in that for which once Caesar, triumphing, heard himself called in contumely, Queen: the allusion is to a story in Suetonius of soldiers mocking Julius Caesar's youthful relations with King Nicomedes of Bithynia. This band, by the Commedia's scheme, is purging homosexual acts. The other band — our own transgression was hermaphrodite; but because we observed not human law, following like unto beasts our appetite — shouts of Pasiphae in the cow, the queen who lay with a bull and conceived the Minotaur. This band is purging heterosexual acts of an unrestrained or unnatural kind.

The detail worth carrying forward is that the two bands are on the same cornice. Both penances are equal in length, both penances are equal in mechanism — a single wall of fire — and the souls of both bands embrace as they pass. The poem does not separate them into superior and inferior categories of lust. It places them side by side, equal, saved. This is one of the Commedia's less remarked moments of moral generosity. Compare it to the Inferno, where Dante had placed sodomy in a separate ring under burning sand (canto XV) and treated it as a violence against nature. In Purgatorio the same act is among the lightest of the sins purged, on the same cornice as heterosexual incontinence, and the souls who practised it are saved. The fire that takes them is the same fire that takes everyone else.

Why Dante stops at Guinizelli

When Guinizelli names himself, Dante does what he has not done for any other shade in the cantica. He compares his own reaction to a mythological scene of extreme reunion — the same that in the sadness of Lycurgus two sons became, their mother re-beholding — and then says, simply: I rise not to such height. The reaction is restrained because the reverence is total. I heard name himself the father of me and of my betters, who had ever practised the sweet and gracious rhymes of love.

The phrase of me and of my betters — di me e de li altri miei miglior — is an extraordinary one. Dante puts himself in the line of poets who took the gentle heart doctrine from Guinizelli, and within that line he calls himself the least. The betters are Guido Cavalcanti (already dead in 1300 only by the fiction of the poem; in real life he died only months after the poem's date) and Cino da Pistoia. Dante is, on the last cornice of the mountain, paying a precise debt: the stil novo is Guinizelli's invention; everyone in it, Dante included, is less than him in the order of paternity. The canto does not flatter; it places.

Why Arnaut speaks Provençal

Guinizelli, asked by Dante why he is so dear to him, replies that the dearness is owed to a poet of the mother tongue a better smith, and points at the shade walking ahead of him in the file. Verses of love and proses of romance, he mastered all; and let the idiots talk, who think the Lemosin surpasses him. The Lemosin is the dialect of the troubadour Giraut de Bornelh; Guinizelli is here repudiating the conventional preference for Giraut and naming Arnaut Daniel as the true master.

Dante then approaches Arnaut and asks his name. The answer is the canto's most famous gesture. He of his own free will began to say:

Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman, qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire. Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; consiros vei la passada folor, e vei jausen lo joi qu'esper, denan. Ara vos prec, per aquella valor que vos guida al som de l'escalina, sovenha vos a temprar ma dolor.

So pleases me your courteous demand, I cannot and I will not hide me from you. I am Arnaut, who weep and singing go; mournful I see the folly of the past, and joyful see before me the joy I hope for. Now I pray you, by that virtue which guides you to the summit of the stair, be mindful in due season of my pain.

The eight lines are in Provençal. They are the only sustained passage of non-Italian, non-Latin direct speech in the entire Commedia. The gesture is courtly in the precise sense the troubadours invented — Arnaut, asked his name in Italian, replies in his own tongue, and the question and the answer together honour the language they share without sharing. Sovenha vos a temprar ma dolor — be mindful in due season of my pain — is the request of one poet to another to remember him in the world above, paid in the currency that costs most to give: the poet's own language.

Then he hid himself in the fire that purifies them. The verb is the canto's small theological argument. The fire is not endured; it is entered. Lust on this cornice is being healed by being remade.

What the canto is doing with its own past

The cornice's logic is more uncomfortable than it appears. The poets Dante meets here — Guinizelli of the Al cor gentil, Arnaut Daniel of the troubadour fin'amor tradition — are the Commedia's direct literary fathers. The love-poetry the dolce stil novo perfected, with its doctrine of love seizing the gentle heart, is the same love-poetry whose theology Francesca recited in Inferno V to explain her own damnation. The two poets who purged in the fire here invented the literary form that produced Francesca's grammar of helplessness. The Commedia is permitting them to be saved while also writing the Inferno canto that condemned the doctrine they invented.

The contradiction is not resolved by the canto. It is allowed to stand. Two readings are possible. One: the doctrine of the stil novo is theologically correct but was misused by Francesca, and the masters who taught it are therefore innocent of her error. The other: the doctrine had the seed of Francesca's error in it from the start, and the masters are being purified of the same sin the doctrine licensed. The canto's silence on which reading to take is the canto's most honest gesture.

Famous and meaningful passages

The shadow that gives the pilgrim away.

And with my shadow did I make the flame Appear more red; and even to such a sign Shades saw I many, as they went, give heed. (Purg. XXVI.7–9)

The whole cornice realises in the same instant that a living man is among them. The cornice of lust is announced, first, by the strangeness of a body still casting a shadow.

The shouts at parting.

The new-come people: Sodom and Gomorrah! The rest: Into the cow Pasiphae enters, So that the bull unto her lust may run! (Purg. XXVI.40–42)

The two bands' examples shouted aloud as they part. The doubling of the cornice declared by its own penitents.

The naming of the father.

Wouldst thou perchance by name know who we are, There is not time to tell, nor could I do it. Thy wish to know me shall in sooth be granted; I'm Guido Guinicelli, and now purge me, Having repented ere the hour extreme. (Purg. XXVI.89–93)

Guinizelli names himself with a small clause that explains his early death and his late repentance.

The reverence.

The moment I heard name himself the father Of me and of my betters, who had ever Practised the sweet and gracious rhymes of love; And without speech and hearing thoughtfully For a long time I went, beholding him, Nor for the fire did I approach him nearer. (Purg. XXVI.97–102)

Di me e de li altri miei miglior — of me and of my betters. The dolce stil novo's family tree spoken aloud and Dante's place in it named as the lower one.

The dulcet lays.

And I to him: Those dulcet lays of yours Which, long as shall endure our modern fashion, Shall make for ever dear their very ink! (Purg. XXVI.112–114)

The praise Dante offers to Guinizelli's verse. Long as shall endure our modern fashion is itself a small prophecy of the poem the praise appears in.

The pointing.

O brother, said he, he whom I point out, And here he pointed at a spirit in front, Was of the mother tongue a better smith. (Purg. XXVI.115–117)

Guinizelli yields the laurel of vernacular poetry to Arnaut. Miglior fabbro del parlar materno — better smith of the mother tongue — the line T. S. Eliot took for his dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound.

The Provençal.

He of his own free will began to say: Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman, Que jeu nom puesc ni vueill a vos cobrire; Jeu sui Arnaut, que plor e vai chantan; Consiros vei la passada folor, E vei jauzen lo jorn qu'esper denan. Ara vus prec per aquella valor, Que vus condus al som de la scalina, Sovenga vus a temprar ma dolor. (Purg. XXVI.140–147)

The only sustained passage of non-Italian, non-Latin direct speech in the Commedia. The courtesy of the answer is the answer.

The disappearance.

Then hid him in the fire that purifies them. (Purg. XXVI.148)

Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina. The canto's last line. The fire is not a punishment; it is the means of purification, and to step deeper into it is to choose more of the cure.

What to watch for

Watch the next cornice. It is not a cornice but the wall of fire itself, which the pilgrim must cross. The fire that purifies the lustful here will be the fire the pilgrim is asked to enter in the very next canto.

Watch for the name Beatrice. The pilgrim has not heard it on the mountain since Virgil first spoke it in Purgatorio VI. The next canto will use the name as a weapon — the only thing that gets Dante through the fire.

Watch Virgil. After Statius's lecture in XXV and Guinizelli's appearance in XXVI, Virgil has been gradually outranked by the company around him. The next cantos will complete that displacement.

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.