For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

Whatever verses the maid has traced on leaves she arranges in order and stores away in the cave. These remain unmoved in their places and quit not their rank; but when at the turn of the hinge a light breeze has stirred them, and the open door scattered the tender foliage, never does she thereafter care to catch them, as they flutter in the rocky cave, nor to recover their places, nor to unite the verses; uncounseled, men depart, and loathe the Sibyl's seat.

Thus forewarned by Helenus, Aeneas is armed against the inevitable dispersion of the Sibyl's wisdom. Finding her at Cumae in book six, he begs her to divulge her oracles (tuas sortis arcanaque fata / dicta; 6.72-73) in song, and not to inscribe them on leaves that surely "will fly away in disorder, the sport of rushing winds" (ne turba volent rapidis ludibria venus; v. 75). When the Sibyl agrees to do this and then chants the terrible future that Aeneas and his people can expect to find in Italy-bella, horrida bella (v. 86)-Virgil describes her performance as follows:

In such words the Cumaean Sibyl chants from the shrine her dread enigmas and echoes from the cavern, wrapping truth in darkness-so does Apollo shake the reins as she rages, and ply the spur beneath her breast.

Through a single Latinism, ambage (Paradiso 17.31), Dante points us not only to the passage in the Aeneid quoted immediately above but to all this Virgilian vatic lore.19 he draws a line in the sand between Cacciaguida and the Sibyl that is also a timeline separating the Christian revelation-"clear and precise"-from a pagan truth wrapped in darkness and futility. On closer examination, such oppositions proliferate: the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world versus Apollo; a beloved paterno amor versus an oracle hated by men whose trust she has betrayed; a calm smile versus frenetic possession; a measured unfolding of the future under the sign of the cross versus a vision of ongoing horror. Nor can it be lost on Dante's readers that in these lines he is also contrasting his comedy with Virgil's epic lacrimae rerum. The poet of the Commedia may be congiunto with the author of the Aeneid, but he inevitably parts company from him and his text. In a move that is at once chiuso e parvente (Paradiso 17.36; "hidden and revealed"), Dante uses his beloved precursor in order-fondly, ruthlessly-to step beyond him.

The Commedia's last allusion to Virgil occurs as late as the final canto, when the poet marks the dissolution of his own powers in the face of God's reality. What can he possibly leave behind, in memory or on the page? The experience he once had in his moment of vision, and the alta fantasia (Paradiso 33.142) that until now has made his text possible, are both diminishing rapidly, almost without a trace left behind. he likens himself to a man who has a powerful dream but, upon waking, recalls only an inarticulate feeling, an aftertaste, a distillation, an evaporation of what once was:

Thenceforward my vision was greater than my speech can show, which fails at such a sight, and at such excess memory fails. As he who is dreaming sees, and after the dream the passion remains imprinted and the rest returns not to the mind; such am I, for my vision almost wholly fades away, yet does the sweetness that was born of it still drop within my heart. Thus is the snow unsealed by the sun; thus in the wind, on the light leaves, the Sibyl's oracle was lost.