Walking With Dante

After her final discourse in PURGATORIO, Beatrice and Dante enter into a brief conversation in which he admits he already has images stamped into his brain but he doesn't know what many of them mean, particularly those from her.

She, on the other hand, launches into her final condemnation: the school he followed was too debased to capture the truths she has in hand.

But she doesn't end there. She also promises greater clarity ahead. Thank goodness!

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we work through the conclusion of her discourse and discover the...

Beatrice concludes her monologue at the end of PURGATORIO with some dazzling metaphoric pyrotechnics, a slam on Dante's intellect, and a redefinition of this journey across the known universe. It's not just any old pilgrimage. It's a crusade.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look at the final images of her speech and discover its larger, structural details . . . which point us directly ahead to PARADISO.

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Here are the segments...

Beatrice continues her discourse at the end of PURGATORIO by offering Dante classical examples of her own obscurity, Christian resonances for the very hope of writing, and a challenge for him to become her scribe, to take notes on her lectures.

This passage falls in the middle of her long monologue in the last canto of PURGATORIO and it forms the fulcrum that turns us from the apocalyptic vision to something much closer to Dante's own concerns: the craft of writing.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we tease out the difficulties in this notoriously challenging...

As Beatrice and Dante continue to walk through Eden, she begins the final discourse that will end PURGATORIO: a cryptic, apocalyptic vision of the world (or maybe just the church?) set right. But by whom? Or when? And is the church destroyed? Or is it going to be rehabilitated?

Beatrice's vision is the capstone of PURGATORIO and prepares us for the elliptical and stylized poetry to come in PARADISO, just ahead of us. It's a test to see whether we can make it. Don't worry: We will!

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we begin our...

From tragedy to comedy, the apocalyptic vision in Canto XXXII has come to an end and Beatrice accepts Dante as her walking companion in Eden.

A relatively easy passage begins the final canto of PURGATORIO, perhaps a breather before the much more difficult material that will make up the bulk of the last canto of PURGATORIO.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we walk with Beatrice, Dante, the seven ladies, the lady who tends Eden, and Statius. They're a final parade to wrap up this second canticle of COMEDY.

Here are the segments for...

In the last episode, we talked through some of the "superficial" factors in the grand apocalyptic vision in Eden: its structure, some diction cues, even a few rifts or cracks in its flow.

In this episode, let's turn to the much thornier issue of what it all means. A consensus has developed over the seven hundred years of commentary. That reading (or interpretation) now dominates the Anglo-American, rationalist outlooks on the vision.

But might there be more? And might that reading be prone to mistakes or gaffes it cannot accommodate?

Join me, Mark...

Dante is now ready for the final apocalyptic vision of PURGATORIO . . . and in the last place we might expect it: in that bastion of innocence and purity, the Garden of Eden.

In seven vignettes, Dante witnesses some chaotic and catastrophic collapse of the chariot and even one of the original trees of Eden.

But all is not lost. Beatrice is on the scene. And Dante himself participates in this vision, seemingly instigating a new ending to what had become a disaster.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for the first of two episodes on the...

Before we continue with Beatrice (and even the young woman who tends the Garden of Eden), let's stop and talk all too briefly about the roles and available places for women in Dante's day, the high middle ages.

Although we can't hope to cover this subject in depth, we might be able to see some of its reflections in COMEDY so far, as well as in the complex and even contradictory characterization of Beatrice in COMEDY.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we take an all too quick side quest into the question of women in...

Dante wakes back up from his unexpected sleep to find that the grand parade is heading off into the forest (or maybe the skies). He's in a panic that Beatrice has left, too, although the young woman of Eden comforts him and shows her now humble place under the renewed tree.

Meanwhile, we readers are equally panicked . . . or at least de-centered, as we try to make sense of complicated similes and oblique symbolic meanings. COMEDY is getting more complex by the line. It's a game of interpretation we've been preparing to play since INFERNO, Canto I.

The griffin pulls the chariot or cart up to the denuded tree--the "widowed" tree--and the tree regenerates into a color reminiscent of other moments in PURGATORIO. But which one exactly?

We're descending into the murk of mystery with new songs that can't be defined, with allegories that are becoming increasingly opaque, and even with classical references that seem somehow out of place in the overall arch of the glorious parade.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we begin to approach the strange and incomprehensible mysteries that lie at the end of the second canticle of COMEDY.<...

The griffin rolls his chariot up to the foot of a denuded tree as Beatrice descends out of her ride. The symbolism (the allegories, in fact) become increasingly murky, difficult to parse, especially when the griffin says his one and only line in COMEDY.

Dante's Garden of Eden is a place where the games of interpretation kick into high gear. Nothing is what it seems . . . yet what it is is a matter of much debate.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we work through this increasingly complex passage on our way to the final apocalyptic vision...

Face to face with Beatrice, the pilgrim Dante is ready for more revelation. Problem is, even after Lethe he's still doing things wrong and must be corrected by the women around the griffin's chariot.

But what is he doing wrong? And why does the entire parade of revelation go into retreat? What indeed does that griffin symbolize? And how did we get from the intensely personal experience of Dante's confession and contrition to this much more global view of the allegories on the march?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we begin to walk slowly through...

As we've done across the second canticle of Dante's masterpiece, COMEDY, we're taking some time to read through the final two cantos of PURGATORIO, XXXII and XXXIII.

I'll read my rough English translation of the cantos. I'll finesse these more when we take the cantos apart passage by passage.

For now, just sit back and listen to the narrative sweep of the final two cantos of PURGATORIO, truly the climax of the canticle.

[01:43] A read-through of my loose translation of PURGATORIO, Cantos XXXII and XXIII.

We finally come to the face-to-face meeting of Beatrice and Dante. We've waited for this moment since INFERNO, Canto II, when Beatrice first stepped into COMEDY.

Neither Dante nor Beatrice speak at their close meeting. Instead, the women around the chariot beg Beatrice to reveal her second, hidden beauty: her mouth.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the complex symbolism in this passage. We'll also take on its textual difficulties: a Biblical allusion that has been muddled in commentary, a lost word that's hard to translate, and a question of quotation marks in a...

Dante has now crossed Lethe and is ready to face Beatrice head on. She has moved to get ready for this eye-to-eye conversation. She's positioned nearer the griffin, a complicated symbol that may have more than one interpretation.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore both Beatrice (particularly her emerald eyes) and this dual-natured beast that seems to become more difficult to interpret with its every move in the poem.

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Here are the segments...

Dante wakes up in the arms of the young woman who first welcomed him to the Garden of Eden. She's dragging him through Lethe before she forcefully pushes him underwater.

This scene is deeply symbolic and allegorical . . . although it raises many more questions than it answers. In fact, it seems to want to leave many things open-ended, a cue that Dante wants us in the poem, working on solutions to the many puzzles he has set.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we see the pilgrim Dante cleansed and ready to dance with the seven virtues...

Beatrice has finished her case against the pilgim Dante. All that's left is for him to find his way beyond confession and into confession . . . which he does with a major crack-up that leads him to faint for the third time in COMEDY.

Before he collapses, the poem begins a series of inversions or reversals that both increase the ironic valences of the passage and give its reader an almost vertigo-inducing sense of Dante's emotional landscape.

A difficult passage in the Garden of Eden, here Beatrice accomplishes what she came for. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as...

Beatrice continues to lead Dante toward contrition, pointing out both the purposes of her body (or corpse) and the ways he has failed to followed her lofty beauty.

She finishes her second salvo at the pilgrim with a rhetorical flourish, showing the reader (and Dante) that she is a master of rhetoric, someone who commands a high, elevated style of poetry--that is, a fusion of the literal and the metaphoric that will become increasingly necessary to describe the PARADISO experience.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look at the conclusion of Beatrice's second run at...

Ever since INFERNO, Canto I, we've never fully understood why Dante woke up lost in that dark wood.

Now, in the Garden of Eden, Beatrice brings him to the point where he can voice what he did wrong. He can finally offer his confession.

It was all about her all along. And maybe about what he wrote. And maybe about another woman who caught his eye. Or maybe all of it at once.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the moment in PURGATORIO in which Beatrice finally brings the pilgrim to his...

Wailing, Dante comes in for Beatrice's impatience. He hasn't responded yet to her charges, so she turns the spear point of her words on him.

He cracks . . . and in doing so, loses language, words, the very things that are the heart of his craft.

Canto XXXI opens with an intensely emotional scene, meant to bring the pilgrim right to the brink of his ability to handle things . . . about like what happened with Francesca in INFERNO, Canto V.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the second canto of PURGATORIO that is centered on...

Beatrice finishes her first indictment of Dante by showing him the fit subject matter for his abundant talent: her and the damned.

She accuses him of chasing after false images, then of discounting her own inspiration in dreams. She ends with her final hope: to descend to the doorway of the dead and get the pilgrim started across the known universe.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the final lines of PURGATORIO, Canto XXX: Beatrice's first indictment of Dante.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:25...

Beatrice is now fully in charge . . . so much so that she can even tell the angels in the chariot with her what they can't understand.

She launches into her first indictment of the pilgrim, Dante. Here, she claims that he hasn't fulfilled his talent.

He hasn't? With so much of COMEDY behind us?

And what if then the point of this journey? Is it poetic craft or personal redemption?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we comb through the first of Beatrice's condemnations of Dante's many failings that have led him to...

Beatrice has offered her first condemnation of Dante, just as his salve and mentor, Virgil, has left the scene. He's stuck across Lethe with the ice sheet encasing his heart. Even the angels surrounding Beatrice in the chariot seem dumbfounded by her vitriol and offer the pilgrim a psalm of consolation . . . which finally makes the ice that has surrounded his heart melt. He ends up wailing.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore this brilliant passage about interiority from the very top of Mount Purgatorio in the Garden of Eden.

Here are the segments for...

We finally hear the first words from Beatrice's mouth. (We've heard her before but as told by Virgil in INFERNO, Canto II.) She is certainly not person we expected. She's the admiral controlling her ship.

She names the pilgrim, names herself, and gets very close to blasphemy in a passage that defies our expectations, about as revelation should.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for the moment that Beatrice takes center stage in Dante's masterwork, COMEDY.

If you'd like to help underwrite this podcast, please consider a one-time donation or a very small monthly stipend...

The parade of revelation has stopped and everything holds its breath for what comes next.

She's veiled, behind scattered flowers. But Beatrice arrives, in the place of Jesus Christ, her second coming, her advent in the victory chariot.

And as she arrives, Virgil disappears from COMEDY. (Statius, too, even if he's still standing next to the pilgrim.)

This moment is perhaps the climax of the poem as we have understood it up until now. From here on, everything changes. We have moved out of time and into a world beyond human reason. It's...

The grand parade of revelation has come to a stop across Lethe from our pilgrim, Virgil, and Statius. Everything seems to hold its breath: the constellations stop moving, the crowd goes quiet, one voice calls out for the bride, then a hundred angels appear, calling out for the groom . . . which is surely Jesus, right?

We seem to be on the verge of a celestial marriage ceremony, the mystic union of Jesus and his church . . . except Virgil's AENEID gets the last word and darkens the scene considerably.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we stand in expectation...

As we have done throughout PURGATORIO, let's read through a chunk of the canticle to get the plot down so that we can then focus on the many moving parts that comprise it.

Here are cantos XXX and XXXI, in many ways the climax of the first part of COMEDY: the arrival of Beatrice, long awaited since INFERNO, Canto II.

Her arrival is like nothing we can expect. In fact, it's her second coming . . . like Christ, in judgment.

Get ready. She's not one to be toyed with!

[01:29] A read-through of PURGATORIO...

The pilgrim has found the perfect perch to see the full scope and length of the parade of allegories at the top of the Mount Purgatory in the garden of Eden.

After the griffin and its chariot come seven merry women and seven more somber men. They are complex allegories that have inspired much debate.

More than that, they are also an atemporal moment, something outside of chronological time, the way revelation most often happens.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look more closely at the end of the (first half of the...

The parade goes on to include a Roman, two-wheeled, victory chariot between the four animals. It's a brilliant moment, a chariot better than even famous Roman conquerors got, pulled by a griffin, a legendary two-natured creature . . . yet with a curious moment of emptiness right in all of the victory.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we continue deeper into the allegory of the parade of revelation at the top of Mount Purgatory.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:32] My English translation of PURGATORIO, Canto XXIX, lines 106 - 120. If you'd...

The parade goes on, now that the pilgrim, Dante, is in a good spot to see it.

After the twenty-four lords in white come four animals with green fronds as crowns. They are like the Cherubim in both the prophecies of Ezekiel and in the Apocalypse of St. John (or the book of Revelation).

Except not really. Or sort of. Well, the poet doesn't have time to explain. Go read the text yourself. And especially the one that doesn't quite agree with what I saw.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we find Dante's...

The parade goes on! Our pilgrim, Dante, turns back from Virgil's amazement and finds more of the parade coming toward him . . . at least, he does so after he's reprimanded by the lady who stands across Lethe.

In this passage, the poet's craft heightens to reveal gorgeous poetry that comes from the apocalyptic tradition but far exceeds its beauty with both the Easter eggs Dante puts in the text and the ways the poetry itself enhances the wonder of the parade at hand.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we work through our second passage on the...

As the pilgrim, his poets, and the beautiful lady continue to stand beside Lethe, they see the approaching parade of the apocalypse, which is an example of emergent revelation, the truth coming in slowly and even deceptively.

Our poet has set up a poetic space that leaves even Virgil speechless as we witness the first of the parade of multiple, open-ended meanings proliferate in the Garden of Eden.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we catch our first glimpse of Dante's answer to St. John's Apocalypse.

If you'd like to help underwrite the many...

Our pilgrim, Dante, and the beautiful lady across Lethe walk on for a bit before the stream bends and the pilgrim ends up facing the right way to see the first flash of light that will signal the great apocalyptic parade in Eden.

The opening of PURGATORIO, Canto XXIX, brings us back to the pastoral world of Guido Cavalcanti's poem before launching us into allegory, theology, morality, and even misogyny.

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The beautiful lady winds up her discourse with a corollary that combines both revelation and reason to offer a fulcrum to COMEDY as a whole: The classical world dreamed of Eden.

Redemption is a cul-de-sac, returning us to our primal state while also offering us a way to remain readers of the classical world's poetry.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the end of the lady's discourse, the longest speech by a woman yet in COMEDY.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:15] My English translation...

The lady across the stream continues her answer to the pilgrim Dante's question about the breeze and the water. In this case, she explains the ecology of Eden, offers an understanding of global botany, and finally layers the meaning thick over the rivers of Eden, one of which is the poet's utter invention.

The landscape itself is becoming allegorical, moral, theological, even anagogical, all while remaining true to its pastoral form (and roots).

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we delve deeper into the lady's capacious answers and the poet's ever-widening imagination.

If you'd...

The lady in Eden says she's come to answer the pilgrim's questions. And he's got one. It just might not be the first question on our minds.

But it's one that reveals the hall of mirrors that the poet has created in COMEDY, in which the poem itself justifies its own fictional if scientific answers to questions that lead the fictional pilgrim (and the very real reader) to a position of faith, based on the imagined landscape.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we work through the first of the lady's speech with our pilgrim (as...

The lady in the forest has come to face the pilgrim and his poets across the stream in the forest.

The pilgrim clearly feels a sexual attraction toward her, one that might even make us think of his reactions to Beatrice.

She, however, has other ideas, like answering their many questions. Except in so doing, she raises even more questions than she has time to answer.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we work through this passage in PURGATORIO in which we first learn we're wandering around in the Garden of Eden.

...

Our pilgrim, Dante, calls the solitary lady over to him. She can't cross the stream that divides them, but she can dance in place before coming closer to him.

All the while, the poet keeps darkening the poetry around her with threatening references in the pilgrim's mouth--that is, classical examples of profane love that end up in tragic circumstances.

And all this, despite our poet quoting repeatedly from his rival poet's poem.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we watch meaning get thicker and thicker at the top of Mount Purgatory.

If...

Our pilgrim continues walking through the old-growth forest, so dark that very little light can get into its cooling shade.

He is eventually blocked by two seemingly small things: a little brook flowing to the left and a solitary lady across the way, singing and picking flowers.

But the poet Dante gives us hints that all is already not what it seems.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we continue our journey across the top of Mount Purgatory . . . and notice that meaning is becoming layered over the naturalist details our pilgrim innocently notices.

Our pilgrim has been set free--crowned and mitered, in fact--and can wander at will through the dense, thick wood that tops Mount Purgatory.

The opening lines of Canto XXVIII are fully from the pilgrim's point of view. They offer us a wealth of naturalistic detail that looks simple on first blush but that will get layered with sedimentary meaning over the next five and a half cantos.

This place is unprecedented in all of COMEDY. Let's see it for what it is, without delving into the exact answers to the questions of where we are...