Canto IX
Time to dream
Scene I
The greenish background
of the shade of white-streaked across the skies like the painter’s brush with
bold strokes. For many years, there was no explanation for the phenomena at
both ends of the hemisphere atmospheres until it was discovered to be the
interaction of charged particles from the sun with atoms there. It was not then in the ancient era when the
tools of science were in their infancy stages.
The Aurora was
considered in Roman mythology as the Goddess Aurora renewing herself at dawn
and flies across the sky to greet the Sun. She was said to be the sibling of
Sol, the Sun, and Luna, the Moon. It was fabled and adopted by the Romans from
the Greeks, that she was the lover or rather one of the many of Prince of Troy,
Tithonus. The prince was a mortal and Aurora asked Jupiter to grant immortality
to the prince. It was done but there was a missing part to it; eternal youth
and the prince continued to age and were forever older. In the end, the prince
was changed into a cicada; large in the insects grouping and made conspicuous
by its courtship calls of the males which sounded more songlike.
“Inebriate, dost in the desert
woodlands sing;
Perched in the spray-top with indented feet,
Thy dusky body’s echoing harp-like ring.
Come, dear cicada, chip to all the grove,
The Nymphs and Pan, a new responsive strain;
That I, in the noontide sleep, may steal from love,
Reclined beneath the dark overspreading plane”
(an ode to cicadas by Meleager of
Gadara, a first-century B.C. Syrian-Greek poet; https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/o-shrillvoiced-insect-the-cicada-poems-of-ancient-greece)
Dante then sat up from his dream.
He smiled to himself. He had once kept a cicada as his pet but it went off one late
evening and was never found. The reason he smiled for there was an ancient
saying that the dreams experienced close to daybreak were most likely to come
true.
“I am like the cicada, bellowing my
song for Beatrice and yet she has not appeared,” Dante muttered to himself. He
then saw the sweeping shadow on the surface and looked up. It was an eagle.
With its acute eyesight, the eagle has come
to embody an all-seeing EYE. The eagle is often a solar symbol and can be
linked to all-sky gods. It signifies inspiration, release from bondage,
victory, longevity, speed, pride, father, and royalty; it is often an emblem
for powerful nations. The Roman, French, Austrian, German, and American peoples
have all adopted this image as their symbol. Hence, a two-headed eagle has come
to often mean the union of two nations, but it also means creative power. In
psychological symbology, the eagle is viewed as "a mightily winged
creature in the heavens of the mind" (Biederman, 110). Since it lives in the
full light of the sun, it is considered luminous and shares characteristics
with air and fire. Through its detachment from the earth, it represents spirit
and soul. Dante has called the eagle of 'bird of God', while Jung defines it
merely as height.
The eagle is often depicted in combat with
other animals; when seen in combat with a bull or lion, it represents the
spirit or the intellect in conflict with the physical. When shown with
a SERPENT in its talons, the two represent the struggle and unity of LIGHT and DARKNESS;
good and evil. In this context, the eagle depicts LIGHT and good,
while the serpent represents evil and DARKNESS. Often its opposite is the
owl -- the bird of darkness and death. (http://umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/E/eagle.html).
Then, the inevitable happens: the eagle dives like a lightning bolt and
snatches up Dante in its talons, and soars upward. They both burn in the
flaming sky. (https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/purgatorio/summary/purgatory-canto-ix-ante-purgatory-the-valley-of-the-rulers).
“Virgil!” Dante called out in
fright while he saw himself lifted higher towards the sky.
“Wake up, Dante. You are dreaming.” Virgil shook him out of his dream.
“You are fine. Don’t worry.”
“Where am I?” Dante asked. He saw then the sun was at its zenith then.
He then saw what was unbelievable… there was the sea.
“You are in Purgatory. You made it in.”
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