Page 24 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+

Galiet & Galiet
Dante’s laurel is received as consequence, rather than cause. As a gift of divine love rather than of precious desire. And this gift is as transcendental and numinous as the pilgrim’s journey. It is beyond the sporadic epiphanies of immanence for it seeks refuge in God’s divine love and grace and not in the false appearances and opinions of this world. This journey is too an epistemological recollection towards divine goodness, beauty and truth beheld in the purity of the mirroring gaze of one’s beloved creator.
Cacciaguida’s vision. Just as Latini, Cacciaguida also foretells Dante’s dangerous and weary future in Paradiso 17. Dante learns of his banishment from Florence and of the impending lies and snares ahead, of his patrons’ names, of his future fame, and of the honour of avoiding bitterness in adversity’s gaze. Dante the poet also links his banishment to Hypolitus’s perverse exile from Athens. Just as evil Phaedra causes Hypolitus’s banishment, malicious Florence banishes Dante, as if she, once sweet and illustrious, had become his wicked stepmother. Later, Cacciaguida evokes in most memorable lines the bleak grief of Dante’s exile:
You’ll leave behind you all you hold most dear. And this will be the grievous arrow barb
That exile, first of all, will shoot your way. And you will taste the saltiness of bread When offered by another’s hand – as, too, How hard it is to climb a stranger’s stair.
(Par. 17, 55-60) For that ungrateful, crazy, vicious crew
Will turn as one against you. Yet it’s them
Whose brows before too long will blush with shame.
(Par. 17, 64-66)
Sombre passage for a sombre exile. It alludes to Christ’s persecution, alienation and crucifixion. On his way to the Calvary, Christ tastes ‘bitter vinegar’ from a sponge attached to a soldier’s
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