The Journey of The Divine Comedy

The very form in which it is cast is that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change.

Continuing Dante Composes he Divine Comedy,
our selection from Essay on Dante by Richard William Church published in 1878. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Dante Composes he Divine Comedy.

Time: 1300-1318
Place: while he was exiled in Rome

Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at last in scorn and despair; but he never returned to Florence. And he found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church near Florence, planning with the Cerchi and the White party an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates; in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the West — with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little that is certain can be made out about the places where he was honored and admired, and, it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the lords of Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, “that mother of little love,” asked for his bones, but rightly asked in vain. His place of repose is better in those remote and forsaken streets “by the shore of the Adrian Sea,” hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire — the mausoleum of the children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian — than among the assembled dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa Maria del Fiore.

The Commedia, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author’s life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the Middle Ages in which “the way” was the technical theological expression for this mortal life; and “viator” meant man in his state of trial, as “comprehensor” meant man made perfect, having attained to his heavenly country. It is more than merely this. The writer’s mind is full of the recollections and definite images of his various journeys. The permanent scenery of the inferno and purgatorio, very variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such scenes — one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound. The severed rocks of the Adige Valley — the waterfall of St. Benedetto; the crags of Pietra-pana and St. Leo, which overlook the plains of Lucca and Ravenna; the “fair river” that flows among the poplars between Chiaveri and Sestri; the marble quarries of Carrara; the “rough and desert ways between Lerici and Turbia,” and whose towery cliffs, going sheer into the deep sea at Noli, which travelers on the Corniche road some thirty years ago may yet remember with fear. Mountain experience furnished that picture of the traveler caught in an Alpine mist and gradually climbing above it; seeing the vapors grow thin, and the sun’s orb appear faintly through them; and issuing at last into sunshine on the mountain top, while the light of sunset was lost already on the shores below:

“Ai raggi, morti gia’ bassi lidi,”

[“The beams on the low shores now lost and dead.”]

or that image of the cold dull shadow over the torrent, beneath the Alpine fir:

“Un’ ombra smorta Qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri Sovra suoi freddi rivi, l’Alpe porta;”

[“A death-like shade–Like that beneath black boughs
and foliage green O’er the cold stream in Alpine
glens display’d.”]

or of the large snowflakes falling without wind among the mountains:

“d’un cader lento Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde Come di neve in Alpe senza vento.”

[“O’er all the sandy desert falling slow, Were
shower’d dilated flakes of fire, like snow On Alpine
summits, when the wind is low.”]

Of these years, then, of disappointment and exile the Divina Commedia was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio’s life of Dante, told with some detail, implies, indeed, that it was begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence — begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it — continued afterward in Italian. This is not impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be traced in the Vita Nuova. The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet’s soul. She is already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the face of the Ever-blessed. And the envoye of the Vita Nuova is the promise of the Commedia. “After this sonnet” (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit) — “After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvelous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one until such time as I should be able to endite more worthily of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she truly knows.

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