Before 1302, the year of his expulsion, he had been aįine lyric poet and an impressive scholar. Nothing better captured how I felt the four years I spent struggling to find my way out of the dark wood of grief and mourning.Īnd yet Dante could write “The Divine Comedy” only because of his exile, when he accepted once and for all that he would never return to Florence. “You will leave behind everything you love / most dearly, and this is the arrow / the bow of exile first lets fly.” His words on the experience would become a mantra to me: He met with fellow exiles, plotted military action, connived with former enemies - anything In those first years, Dante wandered around Tuscany, desperately seeking to return to his beloved city. After a charmed youth as a leading poet and politician in Florence, Dante was sentenced to exile while on a diplomatic I immediately thought of Dante, the author I had devoted much of my career to teaching and writing about. I ran into the priest who had assisted at my college’s memorial service. Soon after, I went for a walk in the upstate New York village where Katherine and I had been living. An hour with the angels is about all we can take. Like all other mortals, I would have to return to the planet earth of grief. It was the last communion I would ever have with her, and I have never felt so unbearably connected to the rhythms of I could feel part of me going down with Katherine’s coffin. My personal loss felt almost beside the point: A young woman who had been bursting Till then - pain, sadness, suffering - no longer made sense, as a feeling of cosmic, paralyzing sorrow washed over me. I had left the house that morning at 8:30 to teach a class by noon, I was a father and a widower.Ī few days later, I found myself standing in a cemetery outside Detroit in the cold rain, watching as my wife’s body was returned to the earth close to where she was born. Forty-five minutes before her death, she delivered our daughter, Isabel, a miracle of health rescued by emergencyĬesarean. That day came six years ago for me, when my pregnant wife, Katherine, died suddenly in a car accident. The pronouns says it all: Although the “I” belongs to Dante, who died in 1321, his journey is also part of “our life.” We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day, the lines suggest. So begins one of the most celebrated and difficult poems ever written, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” a more than 14,000-line epic on the soul’s journey through the afterlife. “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.” Moreover, he has ‘miles to go before he sleeps’, referring to all the things he still wants to, or feels that he has to do before he can give in to his urge to go into the woods and potentially die there.Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives. The narrator’s horse, however, rouses him from his thoughts and brings him back to the present moment, in which he realises that he has ‘promises to keep’, such as a duty to his loved ones to stay alive. ‘The darkest evening of the year’ could be a metaphor for depression, or another moment in which life is at its toughest, thus making the oblivion of the woods extra appealing. To lie down in the woods with the snow falling will almost certainly lead to death. They are quiet and restful, like deep sleep or oblivion. The woods are described to be ‘lovely, dark and deep’, they are beckoning and tempting the narrator. Personally, I have always read this poem as being quite dark. On the surface, the poem is a simple anecdote about someone who goes for a sleigh ride in the snow and is tempted to stop for a moment in the woods but then remembers all of their previous commitments and goes back home. It reads quite easily, but the interpretation is less straightforward and can be quite bleak.ĬW: suicide Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Today’s poem is very suitable for these cold & dreary January days.
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