3) I found myself: Dante’s discovery that his life is lost to sin comes as a sudden shock. By mixing first-person plural (“our life” in 1. 1) with a first-person singular (“I found myself‘), Dante the Poet links the personal journey of Dante the Pilgrim with that taken by all of humanity.

4 (p. 3) of the good: In spite of the fear that struck Dante the Pilgrim upon entering the dark wood and the bitterness of remembering this experience, Dante the Poet feels compelled to describe the good he found there—God’s mercy in allowing him to experience the vision of salvation through his journey.

5 (p. 3) in my heart’s lake: In Dante’s time, the ”lake“ of the heart, where blood gathered, was also considered to be the seat of the emotion of fear in the body.

6 (p. 3) as he: This is the first of the hundreds of celebrated epic similes in The Divine Comedy. It is based on lines in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book I, where the Poet describes an exhausted Aeneas landing on the coast of Carthage after a shipwreck. In canto II: 32, Dante will protest to his guide Virgil that he is neither Aeneas nor Saint Paul (both of whom supposedly visited the other world), but, in fact, Dante the Poet presents Dante the Pilgrim as following in the tracks of both the classical hero and the Christian apostle.

7 (p. 4) the firm foot: Literally, Dante refers to the left, or bottom, foot being employed to anchor the Pilgrim on the hill as he advances with the right foot. According to Christian tradition, the left foot was identified with the will and the right foot with the intellect. Man was defined as homo claudus (limping man), his wounds being the result of Adam’s original sin.

8 (p. 4) A panther: Dante calls this first of three threatening beasts a lonza in Italian, which Longfellow translates as ”panther“ but which most recent translators render as ”leopard.“ According to medieval lore, the lonza was the fruit of crossbreeding between a lion and a leopard. No more vexing textual problem appears in the Inferno than the identification of the three beasts that confront Dante the Pilgrim. Early Dante commentators interpreted the three animals that appear—the spotted panther/leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf—as representing three of the seven deadly sins (respectively lust, pride, and avarice). Others link the beasts to envy, pride, and avarice. Still others associate the three beasts with qualities that Virgil, when outlining the system of Hell’s punishment of sins, describes in canto XI: 81—82: Incontinence, Malice, and insane Bestiality. What is clear in all discussions of these puzzling animals is that the three beasts represent three different categories of human sin, and that they all threaten to terminate the journey of Dante the Pilgrim.

9 (p. 4) those beauteous things: It was thought that when God (described as ”the Love Divine“ in 1. 39) created the universe and the heavenly bodies (”those beauteous things“), the sun was in conjunction with the constellation of Aries. This supposedly happened on March 25, the same day Dante and his contemporaries believed the Annunciation, the Incarnation, and the Crucifixion occurred.

10 (p. 5) E’en such made me that beast withouten peace: Dante’s second simile compares his stomach-wrenching fear upon seeing the beasts to the feeling experienced by a merchant or gambler who risks a profit or a bet and in an instant realizes that he has lost his chance of gain.

11 (p.5 ”Have pity on me“. In the original Italian, Dante the Pilgrim’s first spoken words are in Latin, Miserere di me.

12 (p. 5) ”Not man; man once I was“ :The shade is of Virgil, the Roman epic poet. He was born in 70 B.C. in the era of Julius Caesar (referred to as ”Sub Julio“ in 1. 70) and died in 19 B.C during the reign of Augustus Caesar. In Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, the Poet describes the foundation of the Roman Empire by refugees from Troy, and the work contains a famous journey to the underworld of the classical Hell by its protagonist, Aeneas. While many commentators have interpreted Virgil as the symbol, or the allegory, of human reason, Dante presents his guide as the shade of a specific historic individual and not an abstraction. He is a real person born near the northern Italian town of Mantua.

13 (p.5)”art thou that Virgilius“: Dante chooses Virgil (or, in Latin, Publius Vergilius Maro) as his guide through Hell for a variety of important reasons. As author of the Aeneid, he too created a literary figure who visits Hell. Virgil thus knows the way. Secondly, he was both a poet and an Italian poet: Dante is not above considerations of Italian patriotism, and he certainly believed that a great poet (particularly a classical poet) represented one of humanity’s highest repositories of learning.