Divine Comedy - The Trinity in Dantes Inferno Essay -- Divine Comedy

The Trinity in The underworld Dantes Inferno, itself atomic number 53 piece of a literary trilogy, repeatedly deploys the leitmotif of the number lead as a metaphor for ambiguity, compromise, and transition. A work in terza rima that inside information a descent finished Nine Circles of Hell, The Inferno encompasses temporal, literary, and political link up and chasms that link Dantes inspired Centaur work between the autobiographical and the fictive, the mundane and the godlike and, from a contemporary viewpoint, the Medieval and the ModernDantes recognition of the Renaissance as our millenniums metamorphic period and of himself as its poetic forerunner (until de maculation by Shakespeare). The Inferno is a work of transition between dickens points, as attested by the opening lines When I had journeyed half of our lifes way,/ I put up myself within a shadowed forest,/ for I had lost the path that does non stray (I, 1-3). Echoes of these famous lines can be he ard in Robert Frosts The way Less Traveled whereas Frosts poem concerns itself with the duality and firmness of decision, Dantes tercet implies an time interval of great indecision and limbo. Indeed, he is anything but entrenched in position I cannot clearly say how I had entered/ the wood I was so full of sleep just at/ The point where I wedded the true path (I, 10-12). Dante is nearly sleepwalking, yet another fusion of two worlds, the conscious and unconscious. This division of self can best be explained by Dantes exile and his loss of national identity. He examines this alienated state through a geographic metaphor And just as he who, with wearied breath,/ Having escaped from sea to shore, turns back/ To watch the dangerous waters he has q... ...ts notion of a third way as an ambiguous compromise. What is just about fascinating is the degree to which one of the more stable metaphors, that of past, present, and future, has come true. The Inferno repeatedly invo kes past epics, especially Virgils Aeneid, with such cries as O Muses, o high genius, help me now, and Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan welcome Dante and Virgil into Limbo. Now many modern poets, more or less notably T.S. Eliot, allude quite frequently to Dantes work. It seems that The Inferno will forever be canonically in the terza rimaoriginally written as a centrepiece to the Italian epic, now accepted as a framer of world literature. kit and boodle CITED Brucker, Gene A. Renaissance Florence. Berkeley University of California Press, 1969. Mandelbaum, Allen. Inferno (translation). Berkeley University of California Press, 1980.