Page 25 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+

Galiet & Galiet
pole, just as Dante will taste ‘salty bread.’ On the cross, Christ’s flank is pierced and wounded by an arrow barb, just as Dante will feel his being pierced by exile. On his way to crucifixion, Christ climbs the foreign hill of Golgotha just as Dante will climb foreign stairs. Dante, too, like Christ in Judas, will experience treason and denial. Dante, too, in likeness with Christ, will be an outcast and outlaw. Just as Jesus is persecuted by the Sanhedrin, and condemned by the Jewish mob and Pilates, Dante, too, will be persecuted by the mob of Black Guelphs and Pope Boniface VIII, and exiled forever from Florence’s sweet bread and bosom.
The Salt and Bread of Exile. Cacciaguida’s mournful song becomes the Hototogisu’s torn lament. Yet, the saltiness of bread celebrates that wondrous necessity of contraries to fulfil one’s life as richly and wholly depicted in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell centuries later. Dante, like Romeo, will beg, crust by crust, (Par 6, 139-141) for his bread. His toil shall slightly mirror Ugolino’s exile, who locked in his tower of punishment, starved to death. Not nearly as bad, Dante, too, like a famished man will bite into his bread (Inf. 32, 127-129) and will hear, perhaps, in the shadows of his sleep, how Ugolino’s children were once perhaps his own or perhaps even himself, the Pilgrim child, who once, like them, wept in his sleep asking for his bread of the day (Inf. 33, 39), the very bread “our loving Father keeps from none” (Par. 18, 127- 129).
Dante, although fully aware that by “toil it is man’s lot to earn his bread” (Inf. 11, 106-108), never expected the wheel of fortune to turn to bitter salt. Not only does salt suggest bitter nourishment, but it also alludes to the loss of Dante’s nature and essence: his bread of life as his being, his bread of life kneaded as in his native Florence. To eat another’s bread hints at exile and to a reversal of
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