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On Assignment, Virgil Rescues Dante from the Wilderness
Transcendent friendships accompany us from doubt to faith.
William Blake, “Dante and Virgil Escaping from the Devils” (from Dante’s Divine Comedy), Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1943.443
By Diane Mehta
The grandest friendship in literature is the story of Dante and Virgil in Dante Alighieri’s poem The Divine Comedy, or in Italian, the Divina Commedia. I’ve spent several years thinking about why their friendship is so important to me, and to the way we tell stories and the way we create art.
The Commedia is many things: a love story, an epic poem, an autobiography, historical fiction, and a conversation between two friends walking. It a 14,233-line poem about a poet who, after he finishes his journey through the afterlife, will become the poet who is capable of writing the poem. He is the greatest poet I have ever read. I cannot find anything that compares to the way Dante works on so many levels at once. He pulls in psychology, politics, history, astronomy, myth and legend, theology, religion, character, motivation, rhetoric, and language in every single canto. We all know how the Commedia begins: Dante is lost in the woods, and he is frightened. He’s 35, middle-aged, and filled with despair. Virgil shows up to rescue Dante. But why Virgil?
I ask myself this question because I wonder how we choose friends who help us become better people and better artists. Dante chooses Virgil. He puts Virgil into his poem. But in the poem, Virgil chooses Dante. That’s what we are led to believe. But it is a setup. Dante wanted us to consider how a relationship starts and how it grows. It turns out that Virgil is on assignment. Dante’s true love, Beatrice, up in heaven, calls up Virgil from limbo, where the virtuous pagans live, and orders him to go save Dante. This setup is central to the way Dante narrates his story.
The Commedia is a story about becoming. It is a journey from error to truth, from despair to hope, from loneliness to companionship, from doubt to faith, and from inexperience to deep experience. There is no shortcut to psychological and spiritual renovation, or to the work of accumulating experience. Who will you choose to mentor and accompany you—and who chooses you? Who will tolerate all your questions and make a commitment to having an ongoing conversation so that you can figure out how to tell meaningful stories and become diligent enough to mature into an artist who surprises herself?
What resonates with me about the friendship between Dante and Virgil is that it is often in middle age that we recognize how to choose the kinds of friends who will be able to protect and inspire us. When you are an artist, you need a constant supply of love because that is your resource. You have to figure out how to love the right things and the right people more in order to feel vulnerable. If you do not allow yourself to feel vulnerable, you cannot be an artist.
William Blake, “Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest” (from Dante’s Divine Comedy). Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
My time with Dante began in Italy. I’d been invited to live at a castle in Umbria for six weeks in 2021, and I was having a grand time. I was at an artist residency. I had been reading a new translation of Purgatorio by a psychoanalyst, but I hadn’t brought my book to Italy, figuring the library had 14,000 books and surely it would have what I needed. (The Commedia includes three canticles: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.) As it turned out, it didn’t. So I downloaded a course on Dante taught by two professors at SUNY Geneseo, William Cook and Ronald Herzman. Every day, I put on my headphones and walked into the hills, listening to them talk. Later, when I started thinking about how my own Dante project began, I realized that their rapport—their friendship—is what entranced me most. I liked their company. They finished one another’s sentences and explained what was going on. Their goal was to get you to enjoy Dante and then read him again.
I was not lost in the woods when I started reading the Commedia, so reading Dante did not save me. Still, it has taken me a very long time to realize what kind of person and poet I want to be. I remember a time when I was reeling from a divorce—I was sad, my kid was sad, and I could not reconcile my situation. I did not have very many friends.
Dante makes the friendship between Virgil and Dante central to the action of the poem, but that friendship was also central to Dante’s life. He had an intimate, long-term relationship with a poet who had been dead for more than 1,300 years. It is not difficult to imagine how isolated Dante must have been in order to spend years engineering a poem in which he spent two-thirds of the time talking to the poet he most admired. Virgil saved Dante from losing his mind in the anger and boredom of exile, and filled him with a sense of adventure and possibility. Virgil was his companion in the story, but Dante the poet lived through every syllable of that story, and Virgil really did save him.
In Italy, I became friends with two women, a porcelain artist and a cellist. It was accidental that we chose one another. The cellist and I connected because she gave me an extra pillow. I had two pillows but I needed three, and the housekeeping staff had left. I texted the group of artists and expected no one to respond—but Frances called and said, “Meet me outside!” The artist, Mary, and I kept seeing each other on walks up a steep hill between two valleys, and I was curious about her because she worked in porcelain and my son, at the time, was a serious potter. I wanted to know what she thought of his moon jars.
Before I arrived, I pored over the bios and photographs of the artists I’d be spending six weeks with. I liked that Mary had said she was formerly an abstract painter but couldn’t figure out when a painting was done, and I was in awe of Frances, whose bio said: “She is the inventor of a technique using two bows in one hand to create four, three, two-part chords, with a free left hand.” I frantically started listening to the Hungarian composer György Kurtág because he was on her list of influences. Whatever would I talk about with this woman?
Both women noticed that I was rapt during my walks, and they were interested in what I was learning about Dante. We started to schedule walks together, and to sit next to one another at meals. Frances and I picked grapes from a trellis on her patio and wandered into a local cemetery. Mary and I discovered zucchini flowers, eggplant, and a rusty rabbit cage in the castle garden. She plucked mint from the herb garden and made me tea when I didn’t feel well. Frances showed me the dozens of resonators she’d made in clay, and Mary showed me the demons she was making from discarded materials. Every day in Italy was enlivened by interacting with them—even if our time together was brief. There must be some combination of magic and strategy that helps us intuit who to choose, who to care about.
There must be some combination of magic and strategy that helps us intuit who to choose, who to care about.
When I got home, I picked up my Purgatorio and started reading it again. Both women had asked if they could read Dante with me; so deep was my excitement that I had gotten them excited, too. I was friends with each of them separately. They did not know each other very well.
We started reading Dante together. Mary and I had different translations, and Frances read in Italian. We decided to meet every Thursday at one o’clock on Zoom. I was not excited to read the Inferno because I’d read it several times in my twenties and I was not impressed with the monsters. I found it boring. Mary, the porcelain artist, wanted to go really fast. She was used to producing stuff, so she had us reading five cantos a week, and we were completely lost. Over time we thought oh, this is tough, let’s just read three, then two, and finally one canto a week. That was nearly three years ago. We are on our second full reading of the work. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. we click on Zoom to talk.
One day the cellist said, “Hey just a thought, but—what if we read this again when we’re done?” And we jumped and said “Oh yes, let’s do that. Let’s read it again.” Then she said: “What if we read it forever?” We knew how important and rare and difficult it was to commit to something once a week forever. Of course we said yes.
Why Virgil? What changes in the poem because Virgil is there? What is Dante telling us about the relationship and about how to tell a story?
There are practical reasons why Dante stuck Virgil in his story. The Aeneid is one of the few Roman epics that survived. It’s an epic poem about a man named Aeneas who was exiled. Dante was exiled. Virgil wrote in Latin, and Dante broke the tradition of writing in Latin. Virgil’s subject was the founding of Rome and Italy. Dante’s subject was the corruption and ruin of Rome and Italy. Virgil was a star, a household name, the national poet of Rome. Dante recognized that Rome was important for theology. It was the center of the papacy and heir to the Christian empire. Dante wanted to write a Christian poem that showed its classical inheritance.
The relationship has poignant asymmetries. Virgil is stronger earlier on—and Dante is a rube who rises in wisdom and sanctity later. Virgil was paternal, a mentor and a guide. There was an order and a chain of command. Virgil explained the world and led the way, and stepped in when Dante got into scrapes. Dante was a broken, impoverished, exiled poet who had few friends—but he is the recipient of the Christian message, and so he is superior. Virgil is a pagan. He cannot be saved, and this is the tragedy of the Commedia.
Dante has made his pilgrim a sensitive fellow, which is a good setup for discovery. A writer friend of mine summed it up efficiently by noticing that when Dante begins his journey, he is “immersed in an anarchy of surprises and he has heard of hell but it isn’t the same as being in it.” He faints or cries at people’s tragic stories—but even in the Inferno you can see that Dante is proud, and you can see that he is gathering information. He wants to know about everyone he is meeting, and he is already smart enough to let those people tell us their stories without interfering so that we judge them, not him.
He dramatizes the relationship between himself and Virgil in their adventures across bloody rivers and barren landscapes, up crumbling mountain terraces and through blinding fog, while meeting a madcap cast of characters from antiquity and medieval Florence. Sometimes these conversations are meaningful, edifying, or prophetic—as with Farinata, a political enemy who hints at Dante’s future exile—and sometimes they are ordinary. They look up at the stars, talk about the weather, and walk together, meditating wordlessly.
Over the course of their walk, their relationship deepens and the power dynamic shifts. Dante has made Virgil fallible and a little discombobulated.
The spiritual momentum of the poem parallels the long descent into hell and the difficult climb up the mountain of Purgatory. Over the course of their walk, their relationship deepens and the power dynamic shifts. Dante has made Virgil fallible and a little discombobulated. He doesn’t have the keys to the City of Dis in hell and the devils won’t let him in. He says to Dante don’t worry, no problem, and Dante is terribly worried until an angel appears and touches the door, impatient to be called down to perform this ridiculously easy task. He storms off. The door opens.
Virgil’s next screwup is getting directions from a posse of demons he had pissed off. Dante and Virgil started talking to a sinner they’d caught, and the sinner used the opportunity to outfox the demons and escape. Enraged, the demons start brawling with each other. In the next scene, as Dante and Virgil walk off alone, Dante worries:
If anger’s to be added to their malice,
they’ll hunt us down with more ferocity
than any hound whose teeth have trapped a hare.1
He realizes the demons must feel humiliated, and he smells danger. Dante tells Virgil: Get us out of here! But just as Virgil snaps to and relays his plan for escape, the demons are upon them with outstretched wings. Virgil moves fast. He snatches up Dante the way a mother who wakes up in a house on fire grabs her child, and he runs. He slides down an embankment “while bearing me with him upon his chest, / just like a son, and not like a companion.” Virgil is fatherly and motherly at once. They land in a circle where sinners (“an assembly of sad hypocrites”) wearing cloaks made of lead struggle to walk under their burden. Dante and Virgil keep moving, and talking, but they do not discuss the mishap: Virgil made a mistake and let his guard down. Yet the less powerful Virgil becomes, the more Dante loves him.
Dante knew what he was doing. He adored Virgil, but he was also strategizing around his hero. Having Virgil in his book raised his stature; it signaled that he was a poet trained by the best. Through Virgil, Dante could connect classical and Christian traditions, show the influence of one on the other, and sweep it all into an entirely new system of Christian punishment while announcing that we are in control of our actions and responsible for their consequences. He knows all this—he says later, in Paradiso—because Beatrice told him to take dictation so that he could return to Earth and deliver God’s plan.
He is persuasive. Dante is so efficient at using imagery, metaphors, dialogue, and rhetoric that you do not see his anger. But you can feel it in the punishments, which are unyielding.
Before Dante started writing the Commedia, he took about six years to figure out what he was going to do. Part of that time he spent learning how not to be angry—it would be easy to stick his enemies in hell and send his friends to paradise. He had much to be angry about. He was falsely accused by political rivals, banished from Florence, and condemned to be burned alive if he ever returned. He was poor, living on handouts. He had lost access to his wife and kids, and the young girl he fell in love with—Beatrice—was long dead. He saw the rest of his life before him and it was pretty empty. So what was he going to do? He tried to loosen his anger and prepared to write a poem. The poem Dante would write would not be retaliatory, and it would not come out of anger, but there would be much in it that represented anger and suffering.
We all know that Virgil will leave Dante. And now we have a sense of why it was Virgil who rescued him. But Dante is a poet who understands that you experience your emotions and face your work alone. He chose Virgil because only a serious poet would know this, and I suspect Dante really believed that Virgil relished the assignment of showing him people who sin and people who cure themselves, because it is not only a moral education but a metaphor for creating the conditions that enable you to do stronger and more mature work.
Every Thursday when my friends and I meet on Zoom, we turn to the text, compare translations, and share our favorite moments and our confusions. Frances takes the lead when a phrase is unclear and we have to switch to the Italian. We offer one another unconditional support. We talk about what we’re up to. Mary might be banging copper strips on her anvil or firing saints in her kiln and preparing for an exhibition. Frances might be in Italy for a concert or at a bow-making class, and I might be writing a poem or editing an essay. Profound moments of our daily lives connect to Dante. Once, after we had talked about the sun’s motion, Mary inched her chair across her porch all day long to experience it.
We arrive with gifts, too many to remember. Mary might bring copies of frescoes by Giotto. Frances sent us primers on the rhythmic structure of Dante’s time while observing that the sound effects of roof tiles crashing down around her during a storm are astonishing. Every moment is so fully lived through her ears. She sent us examples of dance music of the late Middle Ages and the music Dante might have heard in the church as a child. I send them poems and thoughts from dreamy or feverish moments. I prepare intensely, and I, too, enact what I hear and see. When Dante saw the sculptures God had carved into a mountain, on the terrace of pride, he wrote an acrostic into his poem to demonstrate his ambition—and in response I wrote an acrostic into a poem that rhymed on the right. These were grinding constraints, and I wasn’t sure I could do it.
We are the children who leave and the parents who die. This is our lot, and our job. Dante wants to teach us how to say goodbye.
It is rare to have transcendent friendships that will break our hearts when we say goodbye. Virgil, for Dante, was like that. We all know that our parents will die and our children will leave. We are the children who leave and the parents who die. This is our lot, and our job. Dante wants to teach us how to say goodbye.
All through Purgatorio, Virgil warns Dante to stop looking back; we’re going to paradise, he’d say. The structure of the poem is designed around companionship, so it’s a shock to hear Dante keep driving home the fact that as we get older we have to learn how to leave the people we care about most. Dante meets people all the time, but there are only two friends in the poem. He bumps into his childhood friend Casella at the beginning of Purgatorio. Casella plays music and sings one of Dante’s love songs. What a good time—it’s just like being young and in Florence again. Dante asks Casella if he loves him and Casella says yes, I loved you in my mortal body and I love you now. It is painful to watch them say goodbye, but the loss of Casella is only a hint of the greater loss to come. So often during the journey, Dante casts Virgil in a parental role so that we recognize how it will feel when Virgil leaves. Near the end of Purgatorio, Dante feels Beatrice in the air:
I turned around and to my left—just as
a little child, afraid or in distress,
will hurry to his mother—anxiously,
to say to Virgil: “I am left with less
than one drop of my blood that does not tremble:
I recognize the signs of the old flame.”2
You know it’s coming. This is canto 30 in Purgatorio and only three cantos are left before Paradiso starts. Virgil is talking less, the language is heightening, angels are appearing, Dante is having visions. Virgil knows he’s not going to paradise. Like any parent, he brings Dante as far as he can and he launches him. Goodbye, good luck. When Virgil disappears and Beatrice arrives, Dante starts crying. “Stop crying!” Beatrice says with contempt. He weeps through the whole canto. At the moment of Dante’s greatest joy he cannot share his news.
William Blake, “St Peter and St James with Dante and Beatrice” (from Dante’s Divine Comedy). Public Domain, Google Art Project
But Dante shows us that he is independent-minded, and even disobedient, on the way to paradise. In the fuzzy moments when Virgil disappears and Beatrice arrives, Dante starts reciting the Aeneid. “I recognize the signs of the old flame” is lifted right out of Chapter 4. The words are spoken by Dido, who recognizes that she is falling in love with Aeneas. She weeps because she has not experienced this feeling since her husband died. In homage to Virgil, Dante transposes this line as if he were picking up love where Virgil left off. He’s talking about Beatrice, who is the subject of his poem. But the sniff of Beatrice means the departure of Virgil, and Dante the poet, now a shade, is smiling because he made us fall in love with Virgil, not Beatrice. And because Dante will enter the River Lethe before he enters paradise, he will forget Virgil—but we will not. Dante wanted us to keep loving Virgil and to remember their friendship. It is not unusual for a book to turn on a loss. There are no worthwhile stories without loss in them. There is no forward motion in life without loss.
I think about Virgil all the time. This is part of Dante’s setup, his cunning approach to storytelling. We think the climax of the action is at the end of the poem, in Paradiso, when Dante meets God. Not so. It’s here, when Virgil leaves. Virgil has prepared him for the confusing and rigorous swirl of Paradiso, which has organizing principles, but they are not clear. We are left to contemplate Virgil and his return to limbo. A friend has suggested: What if we read the Commedia as Dante’s prayer that Virgil be saved? How much we love the artist friends we choose, and how much they love us.
Every Thursday at one o’clock, we meet to talk about a canto. Each of us feels like we are scrambling to keep up with the others. Nobody ever feels prepared enough, but we honor our commitment. It is beautiful and hard work because Dante is working on so many levels simultaneously, but like Dante we are all capable of doing this in our own work, and this way of working is what we love.
When we turn on the cameras and my friends and I start talking, I am paying attention to how they think, what they notice, what they care about, what the weather’s doing, and what they share about being an artist. I know that our tacit goal is to systematically understand not only what Dante was doing but what we are doing in our work, to finish one other’s sentences and interrupt and question everything we read, to come to our own conclusions and to learn not to question love. In the Inferno, Dante criticizes the people who “weep in circumstances which should make them happy.” Stop crying! Buck up! All artists get derailed and struggle with doubt, but when we are together, we focus on the incredibly interesting work and lives we have carved out for ourselves.
Here are some ways our commitment to one other and to Dante has changed me: My writing used to be more intuitive, but Dante is precise, so my writing has become more precise than intuitive. Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Dante was free imagination, all wings, yet he wrote like Euclid.” Because I read Dante so much, and so closely, I have changed how I approach a poem. I have a talent for lyrical syntax, a gift for rhythm, but I am not precise in the way Dante is, and I can digress. He has taught me to be more logical and to stick to the point.
In 2022, I started writing a poetry cycle connected to the Commedia. My poems use the overarching structure of the epic poem as a framework for exploring experience. It’s a kind of process art, in which reading and responding is part of the improvisation required to create something lasting and coherent. I’m also trying to see what happens when I make a commitment. For example, I have started a long-term project with The New Chamber Ballet in New York City, but all along I’ve been confused about what to produce. I go once a week most months. The choreographer, six dancers, and I share the experience of being artists. I don’t know if the story of the ballet is the story of the choreographer’s method, the story of each dancer becoming a better dancer, or the story of six young women figuring out how to work together. But I do know that each of these stories parallels the work implied in the Commedia. I know that I want to work at being a proper audience member who does not base her sense of what a ballet is on a single performance. It would be the equivalent of Dante leaping straight to canto 33 in Paradiso without earning what he knows. Like Dante, I am unsure of myself, and I have no idea what will happen next. I take notes, write poems, record conversations, exchange ideas, and trust that I will figure out something inventive over time. It is slow and uncomfortable, and it is not what I expected.
I asked my two friends what they felt about doing this work of reading Dante with me. Mary said: “Words are important to you, and it’s contagious.” She likes the commitment of doing it every week and the fact that we will change our appointments to make time for one another. She said that my seriousness makes her more serious. Frances said: “For me it is a deep dive into the Italian, old Italian, such as I felt when I first read Chaucer in high school. I can almost taste the words, some of which aren’t in usage today or have morphed into modern Italian.” She likes Mary’s informative Catholic upbringing and the contrast between her freewheeling and often funny takes on the texts and my investigations. I have told them that because of Dante and because of them, I work more slowly—though I have double the work because I am exploring more ideas.
Just as Dante did not have the words to express his vision at the end of Paradiso, neither do I have the words to express my awe at their intelligence, acuity, and friendship. When I met Frances and Mary in Italy three years ago, I did not anticipate that I’d find their friendship so transcendent that I would change the way I structure my weeks and years, and that I would commit to reading and studying one book on a loop for the rest of my life. Every Thursday at one o’clock, we meet to talk about a canto. How much we love the artist friends we choose, and how much they love us.
Notes:
- This and all subsequent quotes are from Allen Mandelbaum’s translation. See Teodolinda Barolini, “Inferno 23: Imaginary — or Real?” Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries, 2018). Go to this link for the entire scene: digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-23.
- Teodolinda Barolini, “Purgatorio 30: You Turned from Me (Aversio), You Turned toward Others (Conversio),” Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries, 2014), digitaldante.columbia.edu.
Diane Mehta’s Happier Far: Essays comes out in 2025 with the University of Georgia Press. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Tiny Extravaganzas (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and Forest with Castanets (Four Way Books, 2019) and her writing has been recognized by the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, and fellowships at Civitella Ranieri and Yaddo.
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