In the centuries before the Reformation declared that every man could be his own priest, few laymen actually read the Bible. Dante was certainly an exception to this general practice, and the Bible he would have read would have been some version of Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. In The Divine Comedy, Dante draws almost 600 references or citations from the Bible, compared to almost 400 from Aristotle and almost 200 from Virgil. Interestingly enough, the number of classical and biblical citations is almost identical, an eloquent testimony to Dante’s conscious desire to synthesize the classical and Christian traditions in his poem.

The theme of Dante’s epic work is the state of souls after death. Consequently, the entire work is subdivided into three parts, each corresponding to one of the three possibilities in the Christian afterlife. In Inferno XX: 1—3, Dante refers to the part of the poem devoted to Hell as “the first song” (“la prima canzon”). Canzone means both “song” in a generic sense but may also refer to a specific poetic genre, a relatively long composition, the rough equivalent of the ode, with a number of stanzas and an envoy. Dante valued the Italian canzone form for its rich poetic possibilities. At the end of Purgatory, in canto XXXIII: 140, he employs another, even more suggestive term for the three major parts of the work—canticle (cantica). If labeling his epic poem a canzone recalls Dante’s origins in his secular lyrics, both the amorous and the moralizing variety, calling it a cantica reminds us of the religious nature of its content, since the term retains the biblical suggestion of Song of Songs (Cantica canticorum in the Vulgate Bible). The two terms Dante employs when referring to his poem also reflect Dante’s intention to synthesize very different literary and philosophical traditions in his epic, blending the secular love lyrics of La Vita Nuova and the tradition of courtly love with the greatest lyric poetry of the Bible.

Besides the terms Dante uses to refer to the three parts of his epic poem (the number of parts suggesting the Holy Trinity), Dante employs the term canto (first mentioned in Inferno XX: 2) for the name he gives to the 100 subdivisions of the three canticles of his poem. Canto suggests both poetry and song and singing in Italian. The cantos in the poem are divided as follows: thirty-four in the Inferno and thirty-three in both Purgatory and Paradise. Dante obviously considers canto I of the Inferno to be a kind of general prologue to the work. Thus the poem may be said to reflect the following numerical structure: I + 33 (Inferno) + 33 (Purgatory) + 33 (Paradise) = 100. Given Dante’s fascination with symbolic numbers, the suggestive quality of this arrangement is certainly intentional.

Dante’s poem contains 14,233 lines of hendecasyllabic verse in terza rima. The length of each canto may vary from between 115 and 160 lines. Hendecasyllabic verse, following Dante’s noble example, became the elevated poetic line of choice in Italian literature, just as the peerless example of Shakespeare’s blank verse of iambic pentameter has privileged that poetic form in English. In general, the most successful English translations of Dante, such as Longfellow‘s, have always been in blank verse, not in rhymed verse. Italian poetry is not scanned by feet but by counting the number of syllables in a line. Since most Italian words are accented on the penultimate syllable, hendecasyllabic verse generally contains eleven syllables with the tenth accented. However, lines of ten syllables or even twelve syllables occur in the poem infrequently but still follow the general rule governing accents: In the first case, the tenth or last syllable is accented, while in the second case, the tenth syllable of a twelve-syllable line retains the accent.

Dante’s great metric invention was terza rima. This incomparable narrative form has stanzas of three lines (tercets) in which the first and third lines rhyme with each other, and the second lines rhyme with the first and third lines of the next tercet. The formula for terza rima may be written as follows: aba bcb cdc d... wxw xyx yzy z. Note that each canto begins with a pair of alternating rhymes but ends on a single line. The rhyme scheme also makes run-on lines (enjambement) infrequent in the poem, since the focus is upon rhymes at the end of lines. English, compared to Italian, is relatively impoverished with rhymes, and this explains in large measure why most attempts to repeat Dante’s terza rima have met with dismal failure in English translations. The Trinitarian association with a rhyme scheme that relentlessly repeats itself in series of threes seems obvious. What is less obvious but probably also intended by Dante is that terza rima helped to protect his manuscripts from changes by scribes (either accidental or intentional) and eventually by proof-readers after the advent of printing. We may not have an autograph manuscript of The Divine Comedy, but even after the passage of six centuries, the text of Dante’s poem that has been established for us today represents an amazingly accurate version of what Dante must have written, thanks in part to the meter the poet invented.

Dante’s Hell: Conception Geography, and Its System of Punisbments

Church doctrine in Dante’s time (as today) holds that Hell’s function is to punish for eternity human souls who died in mortal sin without a sincere confession of their faults that expresses repentance for their misdeeds. These miscreants do not qualify for the purifying punishments of Purgatory, where souls who do not die in mortal sin escape eternal damnation and suffer temporary expiation before receiving their blissful reward in Paradise. When Dante began his poem, he was certainly aware of biblical and classical views of the afterlife. In the Sheol of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Hades of classical antiquity, souls after death did not really receive retribution for their earthly sins or particularly attractive rewards for their earthly merits. But the Christian church, affirmed by the theology of such major writers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, conceived of Hell as a place where the good were separated from the evil, and deeds on earth were weighted and judged.