Inferno is full of division, both of kinds of transgression and of one soul from another. Here the great personalities cling to their separateness and their own concepts of reality. We encounter such memorable figures as the amorous Francesca (Canto 5), the grand general Farinata (Canto 10), the corrupt pope Nicholas III (Canto 19), and the bold, ever seeking Ulysses (Canto 26). The external torments of these lost souls are endlessly varied and often fascinating in their inventiveness and sharpness: souls submerged in mud, fire raining down, distorted human figures, and souls frozen in ice.

But as inventive and varied as he makes the external effects of Inferno on its inhabitants, Dante gives dramatic and even psychological particularity Inferno

Introduction to Canto 1

The pilgrim awakes in a dark wood.

A hill lit by the sun

The pilgrim opposed by three beasts

The appearance of the poet Virgil to be the guide The first canto works as both an introduction to Inferno and the Comedy overall. Here we are immediately brought into the spiritual crisis of the pilgrim, his fear of death, and his unsuccessful struggle against three beasts to escape from the terrors of the dark wood to the inviting sunlit hill that stands beyond. Only extraordinary measures will open the future for the pilgrim, the intervention of the great Roman poet Virgil and the prospect of a journey through the lands of the dead: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.

This opening canto seems to take place in a liminal place, on the boundary between sin and salvation, evil and good, water and land, spiritual unconsciousness and an abruptly awakened moral concern. The mood mingles the insubstantial images of dreams with the emotional panic and needs of the pilgrim. The medieval form of the dream vision allows for a sense of inner immediacy and a flexible use of symbolic images that suggest a range of other levels of meaning. The narrator will often address the reader, as at Canto 9.61-63, to consider the moral and spiritual meanings of the literal events being presented. That multi-layered awareness in the poem will become part of the reader’s response and growing experience.

The canto opens in a sudden crisis of mortal peril. The memorable opening lines speak of a spiritual awakening at the chronological and symbolic center of human life:

In the middle of the journey of our life,

I found myself in a dark wood,

where the straight path was lost.

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Inferno

The pilgrim is thirty-five years of age, the middle of the seventy normative Biblical years of human life. He is both himself and an everyman, who represents the pattern of human experience. As he struggles to emerge from darkness, he moves toward a hill touched by the rays of the sun. The hill suggests an image of escape from fear and darkness and the prospective expectation of salvation that will be explored extensively in Purgatory and Paradise later in the second and third parts of the Comedy. His desire to climb is thwarted by three beasts, a lion, a leopard, and a wolf, and they drive him back into darkness. These beasts work as external figures of power in the poem but also symbols the internal images of weakness and sin. The medieval interest in using animals in symbolic ways permeates the poem.

In the darkness a shade appears, the image of a man now dead. This is Virgil, the poet of the Roman epic, the Aeneid. He is the pilgrim’s artistic hero and a representative of the excellence of human potential unaided by Christian revelation. He bears both the supremacy of the art of language and the exercise of intellect schooled in the ancient world of human virtue and thought.

The time is Good Friday in the year 1300, and the journey to be taken involves the Biblical concepts of the individual soul and the pattern of eternal hope in the search for the sources and potential of life. The danger to the pilgrim is great, but the time of the year suggests the hope of renewal.

Uniquely among the great epic tales, here the narrator is the experienced pilgrim recounting his own story, and the pilgrim yet to make that journey has a poignant autobiographical experience. In the time of the action, the journey itself, the pilgrim is the endangered but inexperienced figure whose task is to learn of the nature of human reality and its consequences, and to apply such learning to his own life.