The beasts drive him back despairing into the darkness of error, a 'lower place' ( basso loco ) where the sun is silent ( l sol tace ). It is now dawn of Good Friday, April 8, with the sun rising in Aries. Sayers assigns the leopard to incontinence and the she-wolf to fraud/malice. According to John Ciardi, these are incontinence (the she-wolf) violence and bestiality (the lion) and fraud and malice (the leopard) Dorothy L. The three beasts, taken from Jeremiah 5:6, are thought to symbolize the three kinds of sin that bring the unrepentant soul into one of the three major divisions of Hell. He sets out to climb directly up a small mountain, but his way is blocked by three beasts he cannot evade: a lonza (usually rendered as ' leopard' or ' leopon'), a leone ( lion), and a lupa ( she-wolf). The poet finds himself lost in a dark wood ( selva oscura ), astray from the 'straight way' ( diritta via, also translatable as 'right way') of salvation. The narrator, Dante himself, is thirty-five years old, and thus 'midway in the journey of our life' ( Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita ) – half of the biblical lifespan of seventy ( Psalm 89:10, Vulgate Psalm 90:10, KJV). The poem begins on the night of Maundy Thursday on March 24 (or April 7), 1300, shortly before the dawn of Good Friday. Here, Dante is lost at the start of Canto I of the Inferno.

Gustave Doré's engravings illustrated the Divine Comedy (1861–1868).

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