Post II  Dante's Epic Poem Divine Comedy

The text verses in Canto 1 (of 100) at the beginning serves as an introduction to the entire Poem.

Dante, who describes and writes about himself as a "Pilgrim" on a journey through hell and purgatory awakens to find himself in a wood. He is driven by fierce beasts deeper into it. There he meets Virgil who undertakes to guide him on a path through these two regions.

Of the many translations I particularly like that by Mark Musa written in the 1980's. He provides extensive abstracts and notes to each Canto which he places immediately before and after the text.

The very first lines are:

"Midway along the journey of our life

     I woke to find myself in a dark wood

     for I had wandered off from the straight path"


As you might expect from the rest of this Blog I am always intrigued by and want to get the best out of speech and gesture from the written word. To help this happen it is helpful to form a vivid picture image of what we believe a writer was trying to convey.

The context in which Dante wrote this Poem was his late 13th, early 14th Century experience of his life in Florence, from which he became exiled.

Each of the above first three lines contains within the words written, ten syllables. There are ten or eleven in each line throughout the whole Poem. Although the original speech metre rhythm created by Dante no longer exists the regular number of syllables in lines, in groups of three, supports regularity.

Further, the regularity of rhythm can be enhanced by: apportioning musical note values to syllables for length of sound; placing "bar lines" to stress the importance of descriptive words and colour symbols to show the "pitch" of the speech sound reflecting the picture image of what is being said.

In the above three lines musical bar lines can be placed to accentuate and stress the potential picture image from the word that immediately follows a (bar) line. I have placed these before the word "journey" in line 1, the word "woke" in line 2, "in" in line 2 and "wandered" in line 3.

The pitch of the speech sound for these three lines is generally low but particularly so for the words "dark wood" in line two and "wandered off" in line three.

It is also interesting to experience the nature of speech sound where there is a preponderance of one particular vowel. An example is in the first line where the vowel "o" is present a number of times in "along the journey of our life." The nature and characteristics of vowel sounds will be explored in this Blog upon completion of exploring the consonants. We only have X, Y and Z to complete.

With this range of tools experiment with how through conscious formation of speech sounds we can live the experience Dante was seeking to describe.

Further tools of great value are Illustrations, paintings and pencil drawings. Illustrations by Gustave Dore, paintings by William Blake and pencil drawings by Sandro Botticelli.

The most important tool however is looking for and replicating, experiencing, the "gesture" a character is experiencing. The gesture of the Dante as the pilgrim entering into The Forest at the beginning of the Divine Comedy is shown beautifully in the Illustration by Gustave Dore simply entitled The Forest. You can see this by Googling "The Forest" Illustration by Gustave Dore.

Be the individual in this Illustration, feel what it is like to both be going forward, looking back and have his feet and lower legs surrounded by foliage and creepers. Then speak the three lines above reflecting this context and the gesture you see.

Let me and others know of your experience.

We next will look at the scene at The Gate of Hell as depicted in a painting by William Blake together with accompanying verses translated my Mark Musa.