The Sweet Song of Dante Alighieri's Siren

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The Sweet Song of Dante Alighieri's Siren Among the various tools Dante Alighieri employs in the Commedia, his grand imaginative interpretation of life after death, scenes involving figures and beasts from classical mythology provide the reader with allegories and exempla effectively linking universal human themes with Christian thought and ideology. Among these, the figure of the Siren, found in Canto 19 of the Purgatorio, exists as a particularly sinister and moribund image. Visiting Dante in a dream upon the heights of Mount Purgatory, the Siren attempts to seduce the sleeping traveler with her sweet song. Dante finds himself on the brink of giving in to her deadly charms when Virgil, through the intercession of a heavenly lady, wakes him from this troubled slumber (Purgatorio 19.7-36). A complex image, Dante's Siren demonstrates the deadly peril of inordinate earthly pleasure masked by a self-fabricated visage of beauty and goodness, concurrently incorporating themes of unqualified repentance and realization of the true goodness of things divine. The Sirens are familiar literary characters from Greek mythology; they are most recognized as one of the many perils Odysseus encounters in Homer's Odyssey. As Circe explains to Odysseus before he sets out for home, "You will come first of all to the Sirens, who are enchanters / of all mankind and whoever comes their way…/ They sit in their meadow, but the beach before it is piled with boneheaps / of men now rotted away, and the skins shrivel upon them" (Homer 12.39-50). Odysseus chooses to listen to their sweet song as his boat passes their island, and, were it not that he were bound fast to the mast, would have jumped overboard to seek his death upon their shores. Acc... ... middle of paper ... ...New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1995. Homer. The Odyssey of Homer. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Musa, Mark. Introduction. The Portable Dante. By Dante Alighieri. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1995. ix-xxxvi. The New American Bible. St. Joseph Edition. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1986. Toynbee, Paget. Concise Dicitonary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante. New York: Phaeton Press, 1968. Tozer, Rev. H.F., MA. An English Commentary on Dante's Divina Commedia. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1975. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays. Ed. Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

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