Your comments and honesty are appreciated, as are your prayers. I will respond however, by saying that if it’s Chinese you’re hungry for, you’re better off not going to a Pizza Parlor.

This is a men’s interest publication that primarily concerns itself with the discussion of masculinity in today’s secular world. If you want to read an extensive scholarly analysis of the Divine Comedy or an essay detailing the influence of Dante’s Catholic faith on his life and works, you’ve come to the wrong place. Religion and spirituality are issues of sufficient depth that, once raised, must be dealt with adequately. To assume that one could or should do so here would be to entirely misunderstand the proper scope of this website. This simply isn’t the place for a detailed discussion on the Catholicity of Dante or the theology behind the Divine Comedy, but rather where one can reflect on how the example given by his life and works relates to modern masculinity.

The inclusion of an explicit mention of God or Christianity at this point would at seem at best frivolous and at worst disrespectful of the material itself. Shoehorning throwaway religious references into a forum that cannot appropriately address them is the mark of no small misunderstanding of the relationship between faith and literature. Recall that even Dante himself refrained from making direct references to both Christ and the Virgin Mary not out of some desire to make his work more ‘appealing’ to society, but out of respect. Sometimes an honest forbearance is simply that, and not the sign of some ill-gotten desire to bleach God out of the picture.

A good Christmas and New Year to you.

“Well, Seppo, now a lot of people will recognise you for what you are and discount you accordingly, if they hadn’t realised already.”

Good grief. Heh.

salimmo sù, el primo e io secondo,
tanto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle
che porta ’l ciel, per un pertugio tondo.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle

Regarding the diversions from the pattern, Divine Comedy doesn’t have such things as far as I know.

- use a different but linked pattern at each end, e.g. a couplet;

- run each section into its successor, e.g. each canto, though this doesn’t deal with the very beginning and end;

- wrap each section’s end around onto the beginning.

In some ways this is like how chromosomes work – ending with near dummy telomeres or (in some bacteria) wrapping around.

Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dante very occasionally diverted from his own choice of pattern for poetic reasons; Virgil did precisely that in the Aeneid, dropping out of pentameter two or three times.

It’s the expression of Ulysses, a man that explored the world even against god’s will, and after being judged and trown to hell for it, doesn’t blame himself or god, but reclaim this as his way and the way of mankind.

Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza”

Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,
But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge

Now I will stop feeding the troll.

“Seppo, you are being offensive”

Ya, no kidding genius.