Purgatory: Canto 24 -- Inquiry into the State of Poetry

"'Blessèd are they, whom so much Grace illumes,'/ I heard one saying, 'that the love of taste/ stirs not too great a longing in their breast, but always hunger only as is right!'" -- Langdon's angel's beatitude.



During this conversation with Farese, we notice something quite significant -- there is an entire community that travels together, moves as a single flock, and knows and understands the deeds of one another on earth as far as their gluttony is concerned -- and is comfortable in that omniscience. They love one another and are bonded, in the spirit of Blessed Angela Salawa who devoted her life to helping others, by the mutual overcoming of the vestiges of gluttony. While they don't seem to cry out their own whip and rein like the avaricious, they do seem to be highly involved in one another's process of purification (like the slothful who race around as a group), and they understand the pace at which the poets are moving and respect it since the conversations occur (in spite of Dore's pictures) while everyone is moving -- in fact, the gluttonous have to slow down to keep pace with Dante, and Forese, as soon as the flock flies off, lingers only long enough to ask when they might meet again. Pope explores this interaction of the self with others quite well when he writes in the sixth stanza of his third epistle,

On their own axis as the planets run,
Yet make at once their circle round the sun;
So two consistent motions act the soul;
And one regards itself, and one the whole.
Thus God and Nature linked the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.

In short, we have a community bound by love for one another around a common purification -- not so much the removal of gluttony as the filling of the deficit of moderation in all things, a deficit of abstinence. The community we saw slowly disintegrate in hell and slowly rebuild itself upon the mountain is manifest here.

While with this train, Dante is recognized for his own poetry in La Vita Nuova and is asked if indeed he is the one who wrote of ladies who have intelligence of love and in doing so inaugurated the sweet, new style of vernacular poetry in praise of love. Dante writes, according to Longfellow's translation, "One am I, who, whenever/ Love doth inspire me, note, and in that measure/ Which he within me dictates, singing go" (52-4). As in La Vita Nuova, he speaks in the present about his mere dictation of love's mandate in pursuing his poem. Perhaps this is the clearest link we find to Dante's continuation of the Vita, which he will promise to his readers in its last canto. The Divine Comedy is the fulfillment of that promise, of course, and in this cornice of the gluttons, he returns in the present moment to where he left off in that work. Canto 31 of La Vita Nuova, in fact, continues to resound in this 24th canto of Purgatory in that Dante ends it by telling his poem, "Now go your way in tears, sad little song, and find once more the ladies and the maidens to whom your sister poems were sent as messengers of happiness; and you who are the daughter of despair, go look for them, wearing my misery" (17) in the same way that Forese ends his encounter with Dante by stating "Now go . . . Now stay behind" (82, 91) though he does so through the relating of another prophecy.

S.