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.

21

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. The narrator is the pilgrim returned from the whole journey whose task is to retell the story so crucial to his own life but also to show how relevant the story is to the lives of his readers. This double narrative perspective, naïve traveler and reflective narrator, establishes a variety of understandings from the very inception of the poem.

While rooted in the life of Dante and his time, the Comedy lays claims to being a universal story. The fate of one man, the pilgrim, is crucial because of its reverberating consequences for his soul through eternity. The absoluteness of the state of the soul in Dante’s Christianity and its endurance, along with the religious and philosophical framework for the story, give the poem an almost scriptural status. The opening of the work establishes many expectations as well as immediate concerns and even puzzling elements.