In the opening cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, Dante sets up the background for the rest of the entire series. It opens with him lost in a dark wood and it shows his attempt and failure to find the sunlight on his own. He then manages to meet up with a guide, Virgil, who offers to show him the way. Within this brief first canto, Dante creates the allegory between everyone and the journey of life, how everyone must lose their way when they’re guided only by their base desires, and how they need art and poetry to help guide them along another way to salvation.
When the poem opens, Dante introduces himself as the main character and establishes for the audience that his poem is supposed to be seen as an allegory. He says “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost” (1-3). He uses the word ‘our’ to speak of himself, which suggests he isn’t just talking about himself but all of us, as if we are all part of this journey. This starts to set up our understanding of this as a metaphor. Then he talks about the ‘forest dark.’ Pathways like this are often used in literature as metaphors for life journeys. Once the metaphor has been established, Dante then deepens its connection to the journey of life. He talks about how bitter life can be and how it’s easy to lose one’s way. “I cannot well repeat how there I entered, / So full was I of slumber at the moment / In which I had abandoned the true way” (10-12). In this, he is talking about how people lose track of what they’re doing in life and lose their spiritual way.
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Although he knows he lost his way, Dante still struggles to satisfy his instinctual desire to reach the sunlight and salvation which he can see at the top of a nearby mountain. He struggles through the valley to the mountain and tries to make it up the slope toward the light, but is continuously blocked by different beasts that block his way. “E’en such made me that beast withouten peace, / Which, coming on against me by degrees / Thrust me back thither where the sun is silent” (58-60). Dante cannot overcome the base desires on his own and he is chased back down the mountain. He despairs of ever finding his way, but then he sees a guide has come to help him.
Dante makes the argument that one can only find the way to salvation through art and poetry by making this guide Virgil, an ancient Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid and who Dante greatly admired. “Therefore I think and judge it for thy best / Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide, / And lead thee hence through the eternal place” (112-114). Virgil offers to guide Dante through the various levels of the inferno and then purgatory up to the gates of heaven itself. But then, Virgil tells him, “if thou wishest to ascend, / a soul shall be for that than I more worthy; / With her at my departure will I leave thee” (121-123). Poetry and the arts can only take him so far. It will require Dante making a connection with a higher spiritual force before he can find the salvation he seeks:
Through this first canto, Dante establishes that he will be talking about the soul’s journey to salvation by first establishing the allegory to life’s journey and then taking it a step further to the level of the soul. He shows that the soul cannot find salvation just by wanting it, but it can get close through art and poetry. However, it is only by finding a higher spiritual connection that salvation can actually be achieved.
- Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. H.W. Longfellow. Seattle: World Wide School, 1997.
