Time, eternity and terza rima in Dante’s Inferno 5

I wish I could remember exactly what Edward Wilson-Lee said on today’s The Verb about the way rhyme worked in Keats’ sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ – something about how by folding ideas together the rhymes created a kind of palimpsest of impressions transcending the movement of time. I thought it was beautifully put and gelled with my own much more inarticulate feelings. It’s the way syntax, metre and rhyme work together in Dante’s Commedia, for example, that make me feel it’s vital to read key cantos in the original, however gropingly dependent on parallel texts you may be in doing so, as I certainly am. I’d like to glance at a small bit of the fifth canto of Inferno with Wilson-Lee’s comment in mind.

The whole canto is brilliantly and poignantly structured to move through a vast, dark scenario of elliptical, fragmentary, swirling impressions to something that unfolds in tiny, intimately focused, hesitant steps that force one to empathise, reflect and question, where earlier one was simply overwhelmed by the bombardment of terrifying revelations. As readers of the Commedia will know, after Virgil has brought Dante into the second circle of hell, past the judge of the damned in the entrance, they find themselves in a tempestuous darkness where vast numbers of souls condemned for lust are blown around helplessly like flocks of starlings, crying out like cranes. Dante calls to two of them – Francesco and her brother-in-law lover Paolo who were murdered by her husband. She tells him how they fell into sin. Poignancy arises – for those of us who do find her sympathetic and her fate pitiable – because she speaks so gently and courteously in terms that evoke her yearning for the human sympathy that Dante shows and that is so alien to hell. It hurts her to remember and speak, she says, but she will do it in gratitude for Dante’s sympathy and courtesy. When she comes to the critical moment she says

“Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse
quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.”

If you can read Italian at all you can feel the double movement here – on the one hand how slowly, step by step, and in what sharp focus, metre, rhyme and syntax make us see and imaginatively inhabit what’s happening to the pair, and on the other how relentlessly we’re drawn to what follows by the way the second line of each tercet rhymes with the first and third line of the tercet that follows. This slowing does so many things. It gives weight to every line, both making us feel on our pulses how momentous the moment is and creating a mental space in which suggestions and reflections can flow around the words. It makes us feel how raptly Francesca is remembering the moment in all the tenderness and terror and joy it had at the time and in all the dreadfulness of its consequences. Most terrifyingly and movingly – most in tune with Wilson-Lee’s words about rhyme it makes us see things simultaneously from the perspective of time and eternity – so that we’re intently absorbed in the moment and momentary feelings of that kiss and at the same time see, as the lovers didn’t then but do now, how their fate for all eternity depended on what they did then. Solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse echoes with that horrified realisation. Quel giorno più non vi legemmo avante seems to me to echo with the same poignant irony. That day they saw no further into the consequences of what they were drawn into.

Here’s how the passage is rendered into English by Robert and Jean Hollander in their magnificent translation of Inferno for Anchor Books:

‘One day, to pass the time in pleasure,
we read of Lancelot, how love enthralled him.
We were alone, without the least misgiving.

‘More than once that reading made our eyes meet
and drained the colour from our faces.
Still, it was a single instant overcame us:

‘When we read how the longed-for smile
was kissed by so renowned a lover, this man,
who never shall be parted from me,

‘all trembling, kissed me on my mouth.
A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it.
That day we read in it no further.’

 

One Response to “Time, eternity and terza rima in Dante’s Inferno 5”

  1. Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 5 – Via Negativa said:

    Feb 04, 25 at 12:02 am

    […] Edmund Prestwich, Time, eternity and terza rima in Dante’s Inferno 5 […]


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