Purgatory Canto XXVII
Canto XXVII begins with Dante’s greatest personal pain in the Commedia. The angel guardian of the next door says to the pilgrims, “Holy souls, you pass no farther on / unless you’re bitten by the fire” (Purg XXVII.10-11). He names Dante a “holy soul!” Talk about progress and healing! But Dante is still afraid, scared to death.

So did he say to us when we drew near,
  and I was like a corpse put in the grave,
  the words I heard so touched my heart with fear.
I joined my hands and stretched them to the flames,
  gazing, seeing too sharply in my mind
  bodies I’d seen die burning at the stake. (Purg XXVII.13-18).

At the stake is a little strong for the Italian, which is only “which I had seen burned,” già veduti accessi. But maybe that “burned” is to be understood as more actively done to the bodies than people who happen to have been caught in fires. Certainly Dante could have seen people burned.
Virgil reminds Dante of all the troubles they’ve been through to no effect, until he brings up Beatrice. Then Dante is willing to test the flame. Virgil goes first, Statius brings up the rear.

The blazes there inside did so surpass
  all measure, that to feel the cool again
  I’d haveflung myself into boiling glass.
But my sweet father spoke of Beatrice
  with every step he took, to comfort me:
  ”I think I can already see her eyes.” (Purg XXVII.49-54)

I’ve played with boiling glass at the Corning Museum of Glass. That’s vivid.
The pilgrims pass out of the fre and start up the last flight of stairs just as the sun sets – so they each take a step and go to sleep. Dante has a detailed dream of Leah, who talks about her sister Rebecca — and Leah is to Rebecca as Martha is to Mary, active and contemplative.
When they wake they finish that final staircase. Standing at the top, Virgil speaks his last words to Dante (though he will accompany Dante and Statius silently for a few more canti). Virgil tells Dante that he has led him by strength of mind (reason) and art (poetry?), but can go no further. He pushes Dante to accept his freedom as priest, prophet, and king — the baptismal promises.

No longer wait for what I do or say.
  Your judgment now is free and whole and true;
  to fail to follow its will would be to stray.
Lord of yourself I crown and miter you. (Purg XVII.139-142).

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Purgatory Canto XXVI
So the pilgrims (including Statius) are walking gingerly in single file along the rim, air to the right and a wall of flame to the left. The sun casts his shadow onto the flame, and that stirs the interest of souls again. They put it two ways — talking among themselves they say “It loks as if his body is not false” (Purg XXVI.12). That fittizio, “fictitious, false,” is interesting so soonafter the disquisition in XXV on the airy bodies the souls assemble.
More beautiful comes a little later, when they address Dante directly. “Tell how you’re a wall / against the sun” (Purg XXVI.22-3). Wall against the sun! I like that.
Dante notes that the souls come to the edge of the flame to approach him, but never leave it. That’s a strong statement of their acceptance of their correction. The canto will end by calling the flame foco che li afina, “refining fire.” This fire hurts – but it hurts in a way they accept.
The souls here are being purged of lust. Interesting, though; Dante seems to have disposed of them in the Inferno in separate places. The Circle of the Lustful was the second circle of Hell, Canto V. Only heterosexual lust was mentioned, and Paolo and Francesca were the interlocutors. The sodomites were much further down — in the Circle of the Violent, Canti XV and XVI, where the interlocutor in one was Brunetto Latini and the other was the gang of fire-slick Florentines.
The souls here are both persuasions, being corrected together — and their correction has gone so far they can greet each other with a kiss that is the kiss of peace rather than of lust (Purg XXVI.31), and their striving is friendly There is shouting, but it’s jocular, claiming their shame (is this the only shouting in Purgatory?).
Dante makes another one of those odd jabs at Caesar here — Caesar, who Dante puts in Limbo and whose assassins he saw chomped by Satan. Still, Dante remembers Suetonius’s report that when Caesar entered Rome as a triumphator, his soldiers hailed him as Queen of Bithynia, because he had supposedly spent his hitch as a legatus in Bithynia having an affair with the king. Dante’s attitude toward emperors is no simpler than his attitude toward popes. He loves the idea of empire and would like a more ideal papacy, but he spots human weakness.
Dante’s interlocutors here, like Brunetto Latini among the sodomites, are poets and beloved teachers – Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel. We last recalled Dante’s debt to Guinizelli in canto XXIV, when he talked with Bonogiunta of Lucca. Bonogiunta, who had dismissed the fancy love poetry of Guinizelli and Dante in life is the one now calls it dolce stil novo (Purg XXIV.57). Arnaut Daniel delivers the longest bit in a language other than Tuscan in the poem — 8 lines of Provençal.
Clearly these are two love poets who lived out their poetry. Perhaps Dante is suggesting that if Beatrice had been alive he would have tried? Certainly he will have to pass through the flame in the next canto.
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