We've come to the river of blood in the seventh circle of INFERNO, the first ring of the violent--and we don't meet any sinners. Instead, we meet the tormentors: the centaurs who fire cruel arrows at those sunk in the boiling muck.

This passage has some problems in it, but none more than the opening three lines, a direct address from the poet.

Why does Dante feel the need to step out from behind the curtain of the narrative right here and speak directly to his readers? He's not giving us a cue about how to read the passage. Instead, he seems to be warning us away from the motivating sins--which are different than the evil being punished.

To say the least, this is a complicated passage in INFERNO. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we take a slow stroll through it and begin to pull out both its themes and the poetics that may well like under Dante's increasingly elaborate narrative structure.

Here are the segments of this episode:

[01:01] My English translation of the passage: INFERNO, Canto XII, lines 49 - 75. If you want to see this passage, look for it on my website, markscarbrough.com, under the header "Walking With Dante."

[02:59] A direct address from the poet that shows us 1) the underlying motivations for the evil punished here in the first ring of the seventh circle of hell and 2) the underlying metaphors that form the backbone of this canto. In other words, the surface and the depths are not always unified.

[07:45] The arrival of the centaurs in the poem.

[10:03] More on those centaurs, including where Dante the poet may be getting the information for this passage.

[12:28] Three centaurs break off from the group. Who are these three? And why is that important?

[14:31] Virgil's reply--and the problem with the story in this passage. Maybe the story is beginning to be in competition with the "point" Dante wants to make.

[25:13] More about the uneasy alliance of point and narrative that underlies almost all imaginative literature.