The Divine Comedy Analysis

“Like the rest, we shall return to claim our bodies, but never again to wear them— wrong it is for a man to have again what he once cast off” (102-103). The seventh layer of hell: where the suicides’ go to forever take on the body of a tree, and to have life begin to grow only to be eaten by Harpies. Dante Alighieri, author of the poem, “The Divine Comedy” derives the meaning behind the “forest of suicides” and the “bush-souls” from the influence the Catholic Church played in Florence around the 1300’s. The “forest of suicides can be explained through the Last Judgment, and how the sinners punishment compliments their crime. As for the “bush- souls” it reflects Florence’s turn to Christianity, and the change from mythological legend to John the Baptist. The Suicides’ punishment is to be forever intertwined as a tree. Bleeding when broken, growing leaves only to have them painfully eaten off, and eternally living when the only thing they ever wanted to do was die. The punishment, at first, seems unfitting until one of the trees begins talking about the Last Judgment. When one is sent down into the seventh layer the soul will be mindlessly thrown, once it reaches the ground it begins to germinate: turning into a sapling then a full grown tree (93-99). When Judgment day comes these trees, like everyone else, will
The people left traditional views of worshiping multiple gods, they abandoned the god Mars as the cities leader, and turned towards Catholicism. The “bush- souls” tells the story “I was from the city that took the Baptist in exchange for 142- 146). The city of Florence turned away from their patron, they turned away from traditional beliefs and away from mythological legend. In Dante’s case he is using this spiritual transition to account for earthly events. The change from many gods to one God was to blame for the infighting, and the infighting strongly swayed how the last 10-15 lines were