Dante is pleased to find himself accepted as an equal by the great classical poets. There are also some worthy Arabs, and the virtuous Jews of the Old Testament were there until Christ took them to Heaven. In Limbo there are the virtuous non-Christians: ancient Greek and Roman heroes, philosophers, and so forth. An earthquake leaves Dante unconscious, and when he wakes up they are in the first circle of Hell, Limbo.

Then they come to the Acheron, an infernal river, where the boatman Charon ferries the damned souls into Hell. Dante is a little frightened, but is encouraged by the thought that Beatrice is looking over him.įirst Dante and Virgil go through the space outside Hell in the underworld, where the neutral spirits, who were neither good nor bad, are left to bewail their fate neither Heaven nor Hell will accept them. (Beatrice was the spirit of a woman Dante loved very much, who had died years before.) However, Virgil says, they must go through Hell to get there. Fortunately he then meets the spirit of the Roman epic poet Virgil, who says that he has been sent by Beatrice to lead him to salvation. He sees a sunlit hill but it unable to climb it because three wild beasts frighten him back (these symbolize different sins). The Inferno begins when Dante, in the middle of his life, is lost in a metaphorical dark wood that is, sin. God is almost totally absent, and Dante, not excessively constrained by piety, feels free to make Hell colorful and lively, which is not necessarily the case in the Paradiso. The Inferno is generally thought to be the best and most interesting part, which may be a result of its inverse structure: the moral plot is less visible because Dante descends into Hell. The plot of the Divine Comedy is thus very simple: it is the narrative of Dante's journey towards redemption. On the top of Purgatory there is the terrestial paradise (the garden of Eden), and after that he works his way through the celestial spheres. In the Inferno, Dante starts on ground level and works his way downward he goes all the way through the earth and Hell and ends up at the base of the mountain of Purgatory on the other side. The poems are quite short: it would take about as long to read the whole Inferno as it would to read the detailed canto summaries and analyses, although they might be helpful for understanding Dante's difficult language. The Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri's poem, the Divine Comedy, which chronicles Dante's journey to God, and is made up of the Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise).

Dante alighieri inferno