Virgil in the wood

Virgil in Hell, with Homer and other poets
(Barry Moser, illustration for Mandelbaum's Inferno)

I recently posted on how the Jon and Vangelis song "I'll Find My Way Home" is about Dante in the wood, as recounted in the first canto of his Comedy.

This song is about Virgil in the wood -- how he emerges, a shade, from the dark to guide Dante and to share his road. Reading Dante, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Virgil is damned -- a fact that, if we did keep it in mind, would color every aspect of the Comedy. Not that he's burning in a lake of fire or anything, he hastens to clarify; he and his fellow poets are "punished just with this: we have no hope and yet we live in longing." It seems punishment enough!

Incidentally, I agree with this self-assessment put in Virgil's mouth by Dante. The Aeneid -- a book second only to the Bible in my heart -- is so unrelentingly dark, so deeply and knowingly without hope, that it sometimes feels almost "modern." Virgil was paganism taken to its logical conclusion, paganism pushed to its breaking point, on the cusp of graduating into Christianity. In choosing that particular poet as the guide to take him to the threshold of paradise, Dante shows his penetrating insight and his genius.

Content warning: Teh gay.

Some context:

• Dorothy L. Sayers on the first few Circles of Hell
• For Dante, hope is the one thing needful