The Poets enter the FOURTH CIRCLE and find what seems to be a war in progress.

The sinners are divided into two raging mobs, each soul among them straining madly at a great boulder-like weight. The two mobs meet, clashing their weights against one another, after which they separate, pushing the great weights apart, and begin over again.

One mob is made up of the HOARDERS, the other of the WASTERS. In life, they lacked all moderation in regulating their expenses; they destroyed the light of God Within themselves by thinking of nothing but money. Thus in death, their souls are encumbered by dead weights (mundanity) and one excess serves to punish the other. Their souls, moreover, have become so dimmed and awry in their fruitless rages that there is no hope of recognizing any among them.

The Poets pass on while Virgil explains the function of DAME FORTUNE in the Divine Scheme. As he finishes (it is past midnight now of Good Friday) they reach the inner edge of the ledge and come to a Black Spring which bubbles murkily over the rocks to form the MARSH OF STYX, which is the FIFTH CIRCLE, the last station of the UPPER HELL.

Across the marsh they see countless souls attacking one another in the foul slime. These are the WRATHFUL and the symbolism of their punishment is obvious. Virgil also points out to Dante certain bubbles rising from the slime and informs him that below that mud lie entombed the souls of the SULLEN. In life they refused to welcome the sweet light of the Sun (Divine illumination) and in death they are buried forever below the stinking waters of the Styx, gargling the words of an endless chant in a grotesque parody of singing a hymn.

 

“Papa Satán, Papa Satán, aleppy,”
Plutus ducked and stuttered in his rage;
and my all-knowing Guide, to comfort me:

 

“Do not be startled, for no power of his,
however he may lord it over the damned,
may hinder your descent through this abyss.”

 

And turning to that carnival of bloat
cried: “Peace, you wolf of Hell. Choke back your bile
and let its venom blister your own throat.

 

Our passage through this pit is willed on high
by that same Throne that loosed the angel wrath
of Michael on ambition and mutiny.”

 

As puffed out sails fall when the mast gives way
and flutter to a self-convulsing heap—
so collapsed Plutus into that dead clay. (15)

 

Thus we descended the dark scarp of Hell
to which all the evil of the Universe
comes home at last, into the Fourth Great Circle

 

and ledge of the abyss. O Holy Justice,
who could relate the agonies I sawl
What guilt is man that he can come to this?

 

Just as the surge Charybdis hurls to sea
crashes and breaks upon its countersurge,
so these shades dance and crash eternally.

 

Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls,
far more than were above: they strained their chests
against enormous weights, and with mad howls

 

rolled them at one another. Then in haste
they rolled them back, one party shouting out:
“Why do you hoard?” and the other: “Why do you waste?” (30)

 

So back around that ring they puff and blow,
each faction to its course, until they reach
opposite sides, and screaming as they go

 

the madmen turn and start their weights again
to crash against the maniacs. And I,
watching, felt my heart contract with pain.

 

“Master,” I said, “what people can these be?
And all those tonsured ones there on our left-
is it possible they all were of the clergy?”

 

And he: “In the first life beneath the sun
they were so skewed and squinteyed in their minds
their misering or extravagance mocked all reason.

 

The voice of each clamors its own excess
when lust meets lust at the two points of the circle
where opposite guilts meet in their wretchedness. (45)

 

These tonsured wraiths of greed were priests indeed,
and popes and cardinals, for it is in these
the weed of avarice sows its rankest seed.”

 

And I to him: “Master, among this crew
surely I should be able to make out
the fallen image of some soul I knew.”

 

And he to me: “This is a lost ambition.
In their sordid lives they labored to be blind,
and now their souls have dimmed past recognition.

 

All their eternity is to butt and bray:
one crew will stand tight-fisted, the other stripped
of its very hair at the bar of Judgment Day.

 

Hoarding and squandering wasted all their light
and brought them screaming to this brawl of wraiths.
You need no words of mine to grasp their plight. (60)

 

Now may you see the fleeting vanity
of the goods of Fortune for which men tear down
all that they are, to build a mockery.

 

Not all the gold that is or ever was
under the sky could buy for one of these
exhausted souls the fraction of a pause.”

 

“Master,” I said, “tell me—now that you touch
on this Dame Fortune—what is she, that she holds
the good things of the world within her clutch?”

 

And he to me: “O credulous mankind,
is there one error that has wooed and lost you?
Now listen, and strike error from your mind:

 

That king whose perfect wisdom transcends all,
made the heavens and posted angels on them
to guide the eternal light that it might fall (75)

 

from every sphere to every sphere the same.
He made earth’s splendors by a like decree
and posted as their minister this high Dame,

 

the Lady of Permutations. All earth’s gear
she changes from nation to nation, from house to house,
in changeless change through every turning year.

 

No mortal power may stay her spinning wheel.
The nations rise and fall by her decree.
None may foresee where she will set her heel:

 

she passes, and things pass. Man’s mortal reason
cannot encompass her. She rules her sphere
as the other gods rule theirs. Season by season

 

her changes change her changes endlessly,
and those whose turn has come press on her so,
she must be swift by hard necessity. (90)

 

And this is she so railed at and reviled
that even her debtors in the joys of time
blaspheme her name. Their oaths are bitter and wild,

 

but she in her beatitude does not hear.
Among the Primal Beings of God’s joy
she breathes her blessedness and wheels her sphere.

 

But the stars that marked our starting fall away.
We must go deeper into greater pain,
for it is not permitted that we stay.”

 

And crossing over to the chasm’s edge
we came to a spring that boiled and overftowed
through a great crevice worn into the ledge.

 

By that foul water, black from its very source,
we found a nightmare path among the rocks
and followed the dark stream along its course. (105)

 

Beyond its rocky race and wild descent
the river floods and forms a marsh called Styx,
a dreary swampland, vaporous and malignant.

 

And I, intent on all our passage touched,
made out a swarm of spirits in that bog
savage with anger, naked, slime-besmutched.

 

They thumped at one another in that slime
with hands and feet, and they butted, and they bit
as if each would tear the other limb from limb.

 

And my kind Sage: “My son, behold the souls
of those who lived in wrath.