Purgatory Canto V
Some people have a better excuse for being late-repenters — and so they’re further up the slope: the people who repented at the last moment because they died by violence. They’re engaged in the 2nd example of psalm-singing, the Miserere (Psalm 51, Vulgate 50), “Have mercy on me, O God, according to they mercy; according to the multitude of thy kindnesses blot out my iniquity,” but the chant changes when they see that Dante casts a shadow.

mutar lor canto in un “oh!” lungo e roco;  

they changed their song to one long speechless “Oh!” (V.27)

Listen to all the Os in the Italian! They may have delayed their earlier repentence, but they rush over to the pilgrims with three similes!

. . . No shooting stars
  have I seen slash the calm and starlit eve,
  nor shafts of sunset split the August clouds,
As quickly as I saw those spirits run
  and with the others turn their eyes our way–
  like horsemen charging on without the rein. (V.37-42)

Their re-formation is well underway.
One of the three who speak is the son of someone in Hell – Bonconte da Montefeltro, son of Guido da Montefeltro (Inferno XXVII). Where Guido made an outward conversion, even becoming a Franciscan, Bonconte died on the field of battle, and fighting against Florence. Once again, Dante rises above his own loyalties.
Here’s an even stronger example of speaking to the 14th Century audience than I wondered about in Canto III — and took some nerve on Dante’s part. Bonconte says that his wife and other relatives aren’t bothering to pray for him (V.89). Bonconte is about Dante’s age — Esolen suggests that Dante was present at the battle when Bonconte died — we might suppose that the widow was still alive when Dante was writing. Did he know something about her life? Had she happily remarried? Had she failed to have masses said – and was this public knowledge? It’s really a pretty stiff charge!
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Purgatory Canto II
Canto II begins with much astronomy, situating Mount Purgatory for the informed medieval reader — all of whom believed, of course, in a spherical world hanging at the center of the cosmos. Jerusalem was at the center of the inhabitable land mass and directly antipodeal to Mount Purgatory. The Pillars of Hercules were 90 degrees west of Jerusalem and the mouth of the Ganges 90 degrees east (neat, if inaccurate). No one who survives this course will ever believe in the Flat Earth Theory, concocted in the 19th century.
Across the waters of Ocean Dante sees the angelic opposite of Charon bringing souls to Mount Purgatory. Esolen has a graceful little note: The details of this scene echo and, as it were, correct those of the crossing of Acheron Inf 3.82-120)–boat, waters, pilot, speed, instruments, attitude of passengers.” I like that “correct” – a good word for Purgatory.
Most importantly for readers and interpreters of Dante, the souls are singing the Psalm 113, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, “When from the land of Egypt Israel came.” This is the very verse Dante explicated for Cangrande della Scala, lord of Verona, in the letter dedicating the Paradiso to him. Dante lays out four levels of polysemous meaning for the Big Dog: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.
So in the first 50 lines of the Canto we’re going to get to discuss medieval cosmology and medieval hermeneutics. Does it get better than that?
Here’s the letter, in Latin and English.
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Purgatory Canto I
I rush on with the pilgrims to the mountain of Purgatory.

My little ship of ingenuity
   now hoists her sails to speed through better waters,
   leaving behind so pitiless a sea

The commonplace is that everyone finds Hell more interesting than the other two realms. We’ll see how Romantic our students are.
Dante begins the canticle with an invocation of the Muses, but the strangest, most backhanded invocation of classical precedent I can think of — he calls on Calliope to sing this canticle of pardon while reminding her that she is merciless.

Here rise to life again, dead poetry!
  Let it, O holy Muses, for I am yours,
  and here, Calliope, strike a higher key,
Accompanying my song with that sweet air
  which made the wretched Magpies feel a blow
  that turned all hope of pardon to despair.
(Purg 1.7-12)

Esolen’s note reminds us that Virgil addressed Calliope and that Ovid told us the story (Metamorphoses 6.294-340, 662-78). Some foolish humans engaged in a singing match with the muse. She won, of course, and to remind them of their presumption turned them into magpies. No one ever came out ahead in those challenges to the Olympian gods – Arachne, Marsyas, these girls – and no mercy was shown, no chance of forgiveness. Dante is subtle here, reminding us that however much he loved those old poets, he did not love their gods.
The first soul they meet, the guardian of the beach of Mt Purgatory, is a puzzler – Marcus Porcius Cato – pagan, anti-Caesarian, and suicide. At best you’d think we was with the virtuous pagans in Limbo, at worst getting chewed by Satan, and most logically in the wood of the suicides. But here he is!
Esolen’s note helps a lot.

The explanation lies in Cato’s motive and in the meaning of Purgatory. Dante insisted (De monarchia 2.5) that Cato’s death was an act of devotion to freedom, a self-sacrifiing witness to its pricelessness. It was an act, althought Cato himself was not aware of it at the time, in imitation of Chrsti, who died that all men might be free. Dante could claim impressive precedent from the poet Lucan, whose Cato, after decrying the injustice of the Roman gods in leading the nation into civil war, seems to wish to do what those gods would not exclaiming: “Would it were possible for me to lay my head down, condemned by the gods of Heaven and Hell, and take upon myself all punishments!” (Pharsalia 2.306-7). “Let my blood redeem the nations” (2.312), he cries, longing not to enjoy freedom himself but to restore freedom to others. And freedom–the liberation of will from sin–is the aim of Purgatory. ( (Purgatory, 412)

There were some astronomical moments in the Inferno, but they become more frequent in Purgatory — here we see the the Southern Cross in the sky. I’ve got to look up how much of that was fancy and how much based on reports from sailors.
In Hell Dante and Virgil sometimes bargained with the damned – they wanted information and they offered fame through Dante’s poetry in return. In Purgatory they will offer or the souls will request that news be taken to their loved ones so that prayers can be said for them. The first attempt to carry news falls flat, though — Virgil offers to carry news to Martia, Cato’s wife, who is in the Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.

Inferno Canto XXXIV – the last canto
The pilgrimage takes 100 cantos — and thus the Inferno is one canto longer than the other two canticles. The structure doesn’t fall as neatly as 1 introductory canto and 33 in Hell – Dante and Virgil get to the gates of Hell at the start of Canto III.
Here in XXXIV we have the end of the descent into Hell and the beginning of the climb to Paradise – the pilgrims pass the center of the cosmos. But first they must past Satan’s faces. What Dante sees from a distance are the turning arms of a giant windmill – the sails that are eventually revealed to be the fruitlessly beating wings of Satan, imprisoned in the ice. Again, language fails Dante when he neither dies nor lives as he see “The emperor of the reign of misery” (34.28). But he goes on – and language ceases to fail. Begins to work? And he describes the ludicrous parody of the Trinity that Satan has become – a three-headed monster chewing three of the worst sinners, traitors against their benefactors.
Once again I’m left a little puzzled — Judas, sure. Brutus, sure, given the way Dante feels about Caesar and the Roman Empire. Cassius, fine, ditto.
But couldn’t Dante have thought of a third traitor that belongs in the mouth of Satan? Imagination is failing me at the moment, but perhaps it is part of the relentlessly Mediterranean world-view that Dante can’t think of anyone better than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar.
After all this long journey the end comes remarkably quickly. Virgil says

   But night is rising, and it’s time to leave,
   for Hell has nothing more for us to see. (34.68-9)

Then Dante climbs on Virgil’s back and Virgil begins to mountaineer down Satan’s hairy flanks into a crevasse. At a certain point they reverse and begin to climb up the legs. It was the center of the spherical cosmos — Satan had fallen from heaven and stuck like a dart in the center of the world, “…the point/toward which all weight from every side is drawn” (34.110-1). The heart of the material universe, of matter, is Satan’s selfishness.
The Inferno began with a middle aged man lost in a dark forest; it ends on another note.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
  
And we came out to see, once more, the stars. (34.139)

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