Following my second level inquiry, here are tasks of the third and final level inquiry,
still for my WEM Self-Project.
Is there a moment of choice or of change in
the poem?
Before
entering the Hell, Dante seems to be in a comfort of his life. It is Beatrice
(the woman he loves) who sends Virgil to guide Dante to the path of salvation.
So, if there is a change, it would be in Dante himself, before and after he
witnesses punishments and hopelessness provided for sinners, and in that he
warns us to not fall into the same hole.
Is there cause and effect?
Dante must have
related his own life and experiences in this poem, as most of the time he would
speak about Florence and the city’s political movements. Besides historical and
mythical characters, Dante also puts numbers of Florence people onto the
circles of Hell. It seems that Dante wants to punish them for their failures
(according to him). So, yes, I think there is cause and effect in Dante’s mind,
and he might have reflected very hard to set those sinners and the level of
their punishments.
What is the tension between the physical
and psychological, the earthly and the spiritual, the mind and the body?
In writing
those punishments in amazing details, Dante has tried to transform the physical
experience he brought us to imagine, to a spiritual enlightenment. Whatever the
sin, the punishments will take much longer and severe than the deeds; it makes
us think how unworthy it is to ever do those sins!
What is the poem’s subject?
A warning to
Florence people and to all human kind, that each sin must lead to a just
punishment.
Do you feel sympathy?
I sympathize
with all human kind who is at present still in their path of life. Many of us
take it for granted in living our daily lives, making our worldly business the
most real thing and treating religion as an abstract thing to do.
As for the characters in the Hell circles, maybe my sympathy goes to them who
are in Limbo. Some of them might have lived a good life without sins, but
because they were born before Christ or have not been introduced to Him, they
must linger within the Limbo. It’s really not their choices, and in a way it’s
almost unfair for them. But anyway, it reminds me too of how much I must be
grateful that God had put me to be Christian.
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