Page 31 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+

Galiet & Galiet
just as Virgil is Beatrice’s Hermes and psychopompos. Dante stands outside the walls of Florence, Babylon and Rome as salubrious seeker of spiritual treasure. Thus he admonishes with love divine the followers of the scarlet-swathed and gold- bejewelled harlot drunk with the ‘blood of saints’ (Rev. 17:4,5) as he, in his Stairway to Heaven, unknowingly entwines his verse with the laurel wreath. Justly so, to the heathen, as Cacciaguida exclaims, his ascending moralism will be hideous; to the righteous, nourishment (Pur. 17, 129-130). Foremost, Dantean justice belongs to the immortal pages and dreams of one whom once sung and saw Athens’ moral corruption dressed as daughter of the Peloponnesian War, twice daughter of Lucan’s Pharsalia and Florence’s civil wars. Of one who once placed justice amidst the laudable four of classicism’s soaring heights. Of one who once defined justice as a way of justly doing one’s own part.10 And Dante, noble and tragic hero, indeed his just part in the ladder does. As pious Florentine exile, Dante’s three-fold spirit must atone for his sins by exiling, with quill as sword, while exile weeps its melancholic song.
The Quill & The Sword. Dante wears philosophy’s and theology’s shield in a quest for crusaders made, whose deeds and words must gallop through the mounts of Truth beheld by Beatrice’s cruciform chariot, with the faith of a St. Paul, the piety of an Aeneas and the valour of knights, wielding his fearless quill “standing square against the blows that were to come” (1.24). Dante’s Holy War engagement, slashing infidels and vice, corrupt lords and popes with words as his sword, also mortifies envy, avarice and pride. Indeed, as Dante the Poet gallops the heavens lost in after-life thought, endlessly truthful to his vision and song, he relinquishes blasphemy’s persecuting shadow by wilfully averting a double exile
10 Plato. Complete Works. Republic. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997. Book VI.
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