Honour the most exalted poet

What’s your punishment going to be, when you get to Hell? At least as envisaged by Dante, you might be somewhat surprised. Hitler (mass murderer) is in the outer ring of the seventh circle, up to his eyebrows in a river of blood and fire. Still, that’s a little better than the innocent manager of your local HSBC (banker), who is in the inner ring, running perpetually on burning sand. Both get off much lighter than the poor lady who, the other day, told me how much she’d enjoyed something or other I’d written (flatterer). She’s a whole circle lower down in the second bolgia, or pit, sitting in excrement forever, which seems rather harsh. Corrupt politicians are immersed in boiling pitch, but they are nowhere near as far down as the impersonators. If I were Rory Bremner I’d frankly be worried.

Because Dante’s language is so direct, his expressive style most powerful when most simple, and because his cosmology is so readily visualised and understood, we tend to think of him as easier than he is. Many an Italian schoolchild has found the Inferno much more vivid and accessible than their other standard set book, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, written 500 years later.

But that, of course, is an illusion. The poem seems to speak to us in the beautiful simplicity of its language — ‘nessun maggior dolor/Che ricordarsi del tempo felice/Nella miseria’. The complexities of suffering and the paradoxes of human motivation are richly encapsulated in language which a child could understand, never more so than when Ser Brunetto, running, leaves his pupil ‘e parve di costoro quelli che vince, non colui che perde’ — ‘he seemed like someone who was winning, not losing [a race].’

And if the human qualities of fallibility speak most strongly to us in the Inferno — we all feel the unfairness of Ulysses’ punishment — then humanity is never lost sight of, even at the most elevated moments of the Paradiso.