Poets Who Went Blind: Homer, Dante, Milton, Borges and Joyce

(Purgatorio, Canto XXIV): Palate, The Edenic Tree, and Dolce stil novo

The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.

~ C.S. Lewis

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide is the great Roman poet Virgil and in this Twenty fourth Canto of the Purgatorio, Dante speaks of the sweet new style of poetry. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The sixth terrace of Gluttony, continued - Dante speaks with Forese about the shades there - The poet Bonagiunta, with whom they speak of Dante’s poetry - Dolce stil novo - The prophecies of Forese - A second tree, filled with fruit and fragrance - The exempla of Gluttony - Centaurs and the soldiers of Gideon - The Angel of Temperance removes the 6th P from Dante’s forehead - The path to the seventh terrace.

Canto XXIV Summary:

Still on the sixth terrace of Gluttony, Dante and Forese continued walking and talking quickly, all the while being gazed upon in amazement by the shades who looked dead twice over; once from their death on earth, twice from their starved state.

Dante explained to Forese that Statius—who by right of having attained purgation, could ascend quickly—was walking slower than necessary to keep pace with Virgil, who, we must assume, was also walking slowly to keep pace with Dante’s living body.

The observation regarding Statius suggests that, liberated as he is from this realm, as the closing words of the preceding canto stated, he could move instantly—or at least very fast—to the summit of the mountain, where, as we shall see, he must pass through the water of two streams before he may ascend to Paradise. Thus the fact that he delays this great moment in order to walk along with Virgil registers, in its own way, his great affection for him and his desire to be with him as long as possible.¹

Dante asked Forese both for news of his sister, Piccarda, and that he point out any other shades that he might know. Forese spoke of his sister’s virtue and beauty, of the crown of attainment that she had achieved, and her placement in Paradise.

Being devoutly disposed in her girlhood she entered a convent in Florence, but was forced thence by her brother Corso in order that he might marry her to a Florentine named Rossellino della Tosa; they add that very shortly after her marriage she fell ill and died, in answer, it is presumed, to her prayer that she might be saved from violating her vow of virginity.²

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I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.
II Timothy 4:7-8

Forese offered to name his companions, and began with the Tuscan poet Bonagiunta da Lucca, an acquaintance of Dante, with whom he will converse later in the canto. Bonagiunta was an orator and poet, and one who had a “great facility in finding rhymes but more adept at finding wines.”³ Next was Simon de Brie of Tours, who became Pope Martin IV. He died a glutton's death; he overindulged in eating freshwater eels soaked in milk and stewed in wine.

The Penance of the Gluttons, Meeting with Forese Donati and Bonagiunta Orbicciani, the Angel of Temperance – Sandro Botticelli

As Forese continued to name his companions, they seemed pleased to be so pointed out; perhaps, knowing that Dante was still living, they hoped that he would pass on the news of their purgatorial state so that others could pray for their quick ascent up the mountain.

Next, Forese named Ubaldino della Pila and Boniface, archbishop of Ravenna, whose “teeth were biting emptiness” (28), the imagery of which is reminiscent of Erysichthon’s insatiable hunger from canto xxiii:

Gentle sleep
fans Erysichthon with emollient wings;
in dreams he seeks imaginary feasts,
and opens wide to gobble nothingness;
he wears his teeth down, grinding one another,
deludes his throat with insubstantial food,
and for his banquet feasts on empty air.
Ovid, Metamorphosis viii.1156-1162

Ubaldino della Pila was of a famous Ghibeline family, many of whom have been mentioned in both Inferno and Purgatorio,⁴ and was known for his love of food and feasting. Boniface, the archbishop (not Pope Boniface VIII), wielded the “shepherd’s crook” over his large archdiocese:

In this case, the verb pasturare-to pasture or feed-has a double meaning, and the ambiguity determines the epigram between feeding the Christian flock with the evangelical word and with piety and feeding the hungry flock of courtiers who crowded around him.
Corrado Ricci, La Divina Commedia Illustrata

Forese introduced Lord Marchese, well-known for an epitaph that had been passed down regarding his love of wine:

One day he sent for his cellarer and asked him what people said of him in the city, to which the cellarer replied, “Master, everybody says that you do nothing but drink,” whereupon Messer Marchese rejoined with a smile, “Why don’t they say that I am always thirsty?”
Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola, Comentum Super Dantis Aldighieri Comoediam

Dante singled out one shade to whom he could speak further, that of Bonagiunta, the poet of Lucca. Bonagiunta mumbled a name, “Gentucca,” and made a prophecy that she, though now still young and unmarried, would make the city of Lucca one that Dante would love. In fact, she helped Dante through his exile. But Bonagiunta had more to say to Dante:

But tell me if the man whom I see here
is he who brought the new rhymes forth, beginning:
‘Ladies who have intelligence of love.’

I answered: “I am one who, when Love breathes
in me, takes note; what he, within, dictates,
I in that way, without, would speak and shape.”
xxiv.49-51

Gluttons and the First Tree – Luigi Ademollo (1817)

Bonagiunta was referring to a line of one of the more famous canzones of Dante’s Vita nuova:

Ladies, refined and sensitive in Love,
I wish to speak with you about my lady,
not thinking to complete her litany,
but talking, which perhaps may ease my mind.
When I reflect upon her worthiness
a love so sweet makes itself felt in me
that if at that point courage did not fail
my discourse would make lovers of you all.
Dante Vita nuova xix.1-8

Dante’s inspiration in writing this verse, as he stated in his response to Bonagiunta, is described in the commentary that he wrote preceding the poem itself; it represented a shift in style for him, and a new concept of the nature of love, and a new concept of style of poetry, which we shall see Bonagiunta refer to as the “sweet new manner,” or dolce stil novo. This moment in the poem is even of historical significance; the “sweet new style”,⁵ is first coined here, that Italian literary poetic movement, which some say was begun by Guido Guinicelli, and introduced by Dante. Here is Dante’s own commentary:

Then it happened that while walking down a road along which ran a very clear stream, I was so seized by the desire to compose poetry that I began thinking of how I should go about it. I thought that to speak of my lady would not be becoming unless I were to speak to ladies in the second person, and not to just any ladies, but only to those who are worthy and not merely women. Then my tongue, moving almost of its own accord, spoke and said: ‘Ladies refined and sensitive in Love.’
Dante Vita nuova xix

Piccarda Speaks with Dante in the Paradiso (colorized) – Gustave Dore

‘Oh brother, now I see,’ he said, ‘the knot
that kept the Notary, Guittone, and me
short of the sweet new manner that I hear.

I clearly see how your pens follow closely
behind him who dictates, and certainly
that did not happen with our pens; and he

who wants to probe this matter most profoundly
can find no other difference between
the two styles.’ He fell still, contentedly.
xxiv.55-63

Bonagiunta acknowledged the obstacle, that ‘knot’, that kept himself and other poets from breaking away from the passions of earthly love into that of a divine love, embodied by the representation of the women they were adoring.

The other poets he mentioned were established Italian poets; the Notary was Giacomo da Lentini, a Sicilian lyric poet, and Fra Guittone d’Arezzo, a poet who began his career writing passionate love poetry and who later joined the religious order of the Frati Gaudenti.⁶

In [Guido Guinicelli’s] famous Ode, “Love shelters ever in the gentle heart,” we find the first authentic expression of the new doctrine, which conceives Love, purified of its sensual elements, as a power of divine origin inseparable from the true nobility of soul, and ‘sublimating’ the passions.⁷

After this discourse on poetry, Dante graces us with a number of Homeric similes; as the souls who had listened to their discourse were ready to leave, they aligned like cranes flying single file as they sped away; Forese, who had been walking with him as he conversed with the poet Bonagiunta, slowed to let them pass as he asked Dante when they would meet again:

‘I do not know,’ I said, ‘how long I’ll live;
and yet, however quick is my return,
my longing for these shores would have me here

sooner-because the place where I was set
to live is day by day deprived of good
and seems along the way to wretched ruin.’
xxiv.76-81

Dante made another reference to being placed in Purgatory and working his way up the mountain after his death; and he is more than eager for that journey, as Florence—the home from which he was in exile as he wrote—continued to become more corrupt as time passed. Forese prophesied that his own brother Corso Donati, ‘the guiltiest of all’ (83), who was responsible for the White Guelfs (Dante’s own party) being exiled, would die in disgrace:

Corso fell into bad odour with his own party, and officers were sent to arrest him. After strenuous resistance, he fled from pursuit and, falling from his horse, was either, as Dante tells the story, dragged and battered to death or (according to Villani’s account) killed by the troopers.⁸

Among the Gluttons – Domenico Mastroianni

Forese noted how soon his prophecy would come true before leaving Dante behind, along with Virgil and Statius, to regain the precious time in penance lost to their conversation. Dante still pondered his words as another tree came into sight, heavy with fruit and fragrance, as had been the first tree that they had seen here on the sixth terrace of Gluttony.

Beneath the tree I saw shades lifting hands,
crying I know not what up toward the branches,
like little eager, empty-headed children,

who beg—but he of whom they beg does not
reply, but to provoke their longing, he
holds high, and does not hide, the thing they want.
xxvi.106-111

The shades stood beneath the tree, eager and longing for what was offered, but unable to obtain it, like the torment of Tantalus in the Underworld:

Tired Tantalus stands with empty gullet.
Over guilty head abundance hangs,
More fleeting prey than Phineus' birds.
Looming on each side with laden leaves,
Curving and quivering with its fruits,
The tree plays with the yawning hole.
Ravenous and impatient but often
Deceived, he declines to touch the fruit,
And turns eyes askance and locks his lips
And clamps his hunger by clenching teeth.
Then the whole orchard flaunts and dangles
Its riches, the mellow fruit taunt him
From above with their languid leafage
And fire his hunger, which bids futile
Hands to act.
Seneca, Tantalus 152-166

A voice emanated from the tree, warning those who would try to eat from it to stay away, and noted that yet another tree, the very tree of the temptation of Eve, of which it was an offshoot, was above on the summit of the next terrace.

Encounter with Bonagiunta and Pope Martin IV – G.G. Macchiavelli

The voice continued, giving the warnings, or the bridles, of excess Gluttony. First were the Centaurs—cloud born Dante called them, referring to their mother, the cloud goddess Nephele—who wreaked havoc at the wedding of Pirithoüs and Hippodamia; the Centaur Eurytus, after drinking too much wine, attempted to kidnap the bride while his companions took her attendants; Theseus was at the forefront of the fight:

The tables were all overthrown at once,
and the marriage feast was turned into a rout
as the new bride was picked up by the hair
and carried off! Eurytus seized Hippodame,
and the others seized the women that they fancied
or those that they were able to abduct,
and in no time at all the scene resembled
what happens when a city is despoiled.
Ovid, Metamorphoses xii.333-340

The next example was from the story of Gideon in the Old Testament; those soldiers who could not temper their thirst to stay vigilant were of no use to him in the upcoming battle:

By divine command, Gideon led his troops to drink at the river and observed which of them, remaining at the alert, merely scooped up water and lapped from the palms of their hands, and which, abandoning all precautions, kneeled down and swilled their fill from the stream.⁹

Another voice called out to them, the Angel of Temperance; they had reached the stairway to the seventh, and final terrace. Dante looked to see a figure glowing bright and red, who pointed them to the path upward; blinded by the brilliance, he felt the next P removed by the soft touch of the angels wings:

And like the breeze of May that—heralding
the dawning of the day—when it is steeped
in flowers and in grass, stirs fragrantly,

so did I feel the wind that blew against
the center of my brow, and clearly sensed
the movement of his wings, the air’s ambrosia.
xxiv.145-150

The blessing granted by the angel recovered that missing word—hunger—from the beatitude of canto xxii,¹⁰ with the assurance that hunger for righteousness was now fulfilled.

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge

~ Iris Murdoch

Gluttons, Arrival at the Second Tree – Federico Zuccari

They say the great Homer was blind, and so too was another epic poet, the author of the English language’s own Iliad and Odyssey, John Milton. Milton composed Paradise Lost entirely in his mind during the day, so that he could later dictate it to his daughters or paid scribes in the evening.

My favourite writer, Jorge Luis Borges also lost his sight, though gradually. He described the slow dimming of his vision with a single, poignant word: “nightfall.”

Being blind does not, of course, guarantee that one will become a great poet. Yet there is a peculiar sense that when a truly poetic mind loses its physical sight, it begins to see more deeply with the inner eye.

The Gluttons at the Second Tree – Bartolomeo Pinelli (1824)

I raised my head to see who it might be;
no glass or metal ever seen within
a furnace was so glowing or so red

as one I saw, who said: “If you’d ascend,
then you must turn at this point; for whoever
would journey unto peace must pass this way.”

But his appearance had deprived me of
my sight, so that—as one who uses hearing
as guide—I turned and followed my two teachers.
~ 136 - 146

In this canto, Dante is struck blind - the light he beholds is so intense that he loses the faculty considered most precious in the Medieval world: his sight.

It is remarkable how Dante, like an alchemist, hides secret meanings for those who are not blind to perceive them. The word that unlocks the meaning hidden between the lines of this canto is sentire (to feel, to hear, to smell, to taste, to perceive, to understand)

Just take a look at how Dante conjures his alchemical magic:

- line 33: e sì fu tal, che non si sentì sazio. (and yet could never satisfy his thirst.)
- line 38: sentiv’ io là, ov’ el sentia la piaga  (what I heard from the place where he could feel)
- line 148:tal mi senti’ un vento dar per mezza (so did I feel the wind that blew against)
- line 149: la fronte, e ben senti’ mover la piuma, (the center of my brow, and clearly sensed)
- line 150: che fé sentir d’ambrosïa l’orezza. (the movement of his wings, the air’s ambrosia.)
- line 151: E senti’ dir: «Beati cui alluma (And then I heard: “Blessed are those whom grace)

How many of Dante’s senses are sharpened by the temporary blindness inflicted by the Angel of Temperance - the Angel of Temperance! The Italian word sentire embraces multiple senses, and Dante experiences them all in this moment: the parched awareness of thirst, the sound of voices and breeze, the touch of the ground beneath him, the feel of air against his face, the weight and presence of his own body, and, finally, a heightened perception of the world around him.

Gluttons at the Tree – Gustave Dore (1868)

Dante now leads us to the crescendo of the alchemical path we have been tracing: from the images that impress themselves upon our souls, to the act of reading and truly understanding, as Statius’s story teaches us. And now, on the terrace of the Gluttonous, Dante shows us the next step, that our very senses must be sharpened.

The loss of sight sharpens Dante’s auditory, tactile, and olfactory senses. But more than sharpened, these senses are reawakened, as if rejuvenated from within. And this is where I wish to pause and ask you, my dear reader, a question.

Those geniuses I mentioned at the start - Homer, who lost his sight; Milton, who envisioned Lucifer in the darkness of the outer world yet in the brilliance of his inner vision; Borges, who called his blindness nightfall—did they lose their sight only for their other faculties to be heightened? Or was their genius so intense, their inner eye so piercing, that their physical eyes could no longer bear its light?

In one of his letters, the Roman philosopher Seneca advised his friend Lucilius to become accustomed to bland food - meals with no elaborate preparation and no spices to heighten the flavour. His reasoning was simple: the more intense the taste, the more it blinds and dulls the palate. Over time, he warned, we lose the ability to truly taste food at all.

A gluttonous man can no longer truly sense, smell, feel, taste, or perceive anything. And so, in answer to the speculative question I posed earlier, I would say this:

Homer and Milton, Borges and Joyce, their perception was so keen, so finely calibrated, so harmonious and sharply attuned, the very opposite of dull, that their inner light overwhelmed and blinded their physical eyes.

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This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

The Angel of Temperance and the Stairs to the Seventh Terrace – Federico Zuccari

I. The Second Tree

Oh, how much I wanted to focus on the tree but I was too seduced by sentire, our senses. Yet there is a profound connection between the focus of the Philosophical Exercises section and the Edenic tree we encounter here.

My reader will have noticed that we recalibrate our palate not on the terrace of Wrath or of Prodigality, but here, on the terrace of Gluttony.

The fruit our ancestors once plucked and ate was from the Tree of Knowledge, and it is striking to see the parallels between how our physical and our perceptive senses work. A person might attend a banquet and gluttonously gorge themselves on food; I, I must admit, do this with books. My gluttony lies in purchasing and hoarding them, thirsting for knowledge, often to the point of dulling my palate.

Here, however, the Edenic Tree does not tempt gluttony. As Dante expert Barolini notes, the grafted tree instead yokes two forms of excess: the excess of gluttony and the excess of curiositas, the insatiable appetite for forbidden knowledge. The beatitude at the canto’s end re-calibrates both hungers, restoring the senses to harmony.

II. Dolce stil novo

There is yet another dimension from which we could explore this canto, and that is through the lens of poetry.

Even today, if you open any textbook on Italian literature, you’ll find its history divided into two eras: before the dolce stil novo and after as clear a division as B.C. and A.D. in history.

This is another fascinating theme that Dante weaves subtly through his work. In the past two or three cantos, we have followed Statius’s salvation, but once again Dante conceals deeper meaning for those willing to decipher it.

The dolce stil novo marked a revolution in poetry, blending theology, philosophy, love, and personal experience. Homer, Virgil, and Statius were masters of the epic, but Dante, through his conversations with the souls, shows us that he aims for something far beyond a Christian epic. He is reinventing the very focus of poetry.

The stories of Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, or Aeneas were tales of heroes who belonged to the distant past. But now, the story turns inward: it is about the individual soul. And, as Dante reveals in his own poem, he himself is the hero. It is his journey to salvation that matters.

III. Virgil’s Silence

This is the longest Virgil has stayed quiet since the beginning of the poem. Does this imply that even Reason should be recalibrated? What does the fact that Dante hides behind Virgil and Statius when he sees blinding light imply?

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Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

And then I heard: “Blessed are those whom grace
illumines so, that, in their breasts, the love
of taste does not awake too much desire—

whose hungering is always in just measure.”

~ 151 -154 (Mandelbaum)

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caption...

1. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on the Purgatorio 560

2. Singleton 560

3. From Benvenuto’s Commedia commentary on this verse.

4. His brother was Cardinal Ubaldini (Inf. x.120), another relation was Ugolina d’Azzo (Purg. xiv.105), and he was the father of Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini (Inf. xxxiii.14).

5. So familiar to English majors!

6. Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary, sometimes also called The Jovial Friars, whom we first learned of in Inferno xxiii.

7. Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory 261

8. Sayers 261

9. Sayers 261

10. The angel had included the word sitiunt-thirst-yet had left out the word esuriunt-hunger-to save for this terrace.