Tumbling Over A Simile About A Waterfall: Inferno, Canto XVI, Lines 91 - 105

We're going to slow up even more and take one long look at a very complicated fifteen lines that include a twelve-line simile about the waterfall ahead of us.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we walk passage by passage through Dante's masterwork, COMEDY. We're in the seventh circle of Inferno, in the second rung (or almost the third rung) of that circle and we have come to a passage that downshifts the narrative and allows the poet more freedom to step out from behind the curtain of his creation.

But to get that freedom, he first has to marshall his poetic tools with this tour-de-force simile.

Here are the segments of this podcast episode:

[01:39] The passage itself: Inferno, Canto XVI, lines 91 - 105. If you want to see my translation of this passage, you can find it on my website, markscarbrough.com, under the blog header about this podcast, Walking With Dante.

[03:27] A little bit about the geography mentioned in this simile--and why it's not all it's cracked up to be.

[08:01] This is the longest simile we have yet to encounter in COMEDY. Why is that important? Because it's setting us up for the monster similes that dominate the eighth circle of hell. And it shouldn't surprise us that monster similes exist ahead of us--because we're about to enter the land of fraud. And what's more fraudulent that poetry?

[12:09] The waterfall and similes about that waterfall are the structuring device of Canto XVI of Inferno.

[13:39] The simile itself replicates the very waterfall it's trying to explain. This simile is a tumble of verbals, participles, and clauses, all coming together to create one big rush of language.

[17:14] More about the geography here. The seventh circle opens at the top of the Italian peninsula and then comes toward its close with another reference to those Alpine regions. Dante is truly an artistic at work, building the architecture of his poem as he also deepens its thematics.