Page 22 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+

Galiet & Galiet
outweighs the harm of ‘slandering tongues’ suggesting his own redemption. Virgil’s short exile from Limbo mirrors the power of faith and the limits of reason. By means of Virgil’s guidance, Dante the poet reminds himself, over and over again, that to attain salvation, he must make a leap of faith and grow the wings of poesy if he is to see his beloved Beatrice’s gaze and face God’s everlasting presence. Boethius’s injurious exile and unjust execution are justly rewarded in Paradise. Boethius, like Dante, possesses the visionary clarity to see beyond the world’s fallaciousness (Par. 10-125).
Forebodings of Exile. Dante not only has seen his exile mirrored in de la Vigna, Romeo, Virgil and Boethius, but Latini and Cacciaguida foretell his future course. In Inferno 15 (49-54), the circle of Sodomites, Dante meets Brunetto Latini, his beloved mentor, who asks him by what chance he journeys through the afterlife and by whose hand. Dante responds that he lost his path, “all blurred,” in verses that emulate Inferno 1:
At one point, midway on our path in life,
I came around and found myself now searching Through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.
(Inf. 1, 1-3)
Latini’s vision. Dante, a leading White-Guelph from the party of the woods, so called because of the rural origins of its leading clan, the Cherdri, gets ironically tangled in the “selva oscura” of Florentine factional politics. Latini will prophecy Dante’s exile from Florence in ways that will echo Ciacco (prophecy of the three brief suns) and Farinata (prophecy about his impeding exile). In Inferno 15, (55-78), he reassures Dante, a ‘luscious fig’ and ‘springing sprout,” that if he pursues his kind star, he will arrive at his glorious port of destination despite his many bitter and envious foes. He warns him, too, that though Fortune beholds immense
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