For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

The poet and his guide enter a woody landscape that quite surpasses the poem's opening canto in gnarly oscurita; this selva has likewise lost the vera via, being a wood che da neun sentiero era segnato (13.3; "which was not marked by any path"). Nesting in the rough boughs of these convoluted trees are bird-women, whose original "home" in Aeneid 3.209-57 is made explicit: "Here the foul Harpies make their nests, who drove the Trojans from the Strophades with dismal announcement of future ill" (vv. 10-12). In this evocative setting, Virgil prepares Dante pilgrim to be astonished at what he is about to see. Indeed: "Pero riguarda ben; si vedrai / cose ehe torrien fede al mio sermone" (vv. 20-21; "Look well, therefore, and you shall see things that would make my words incredible"). At first, Dante is not engaged by sight but by sound: he hears wailing within the trees and underbrush, yet sees nothing. Virgil tells him to break off a branch at random in order that li pensier c'hai si faran tutti monchi (v. 30; "the thoughts you have will all be cut short"). No sooner does he do so than we are suddenly back in Thrace, standing astonished with Aeneas, broken twig in hand:

Then I stretched my hand a little forward and plucked A twig from a great thorn bush, and its stub cried, "Why do you break me?" And when it had become dark with blood, it began again to cry, "Why do you tear me? Have you no spirit of pity? We were men, and now are turned to stocks. Truly your hand ought to be more merciful had we been souls of serpents."

As words and blood sputter together, Dante in terror drops the branch he'd broken off. Yet it is not to him that Virgil speaks but rather to the incarcerated soul of Pier delle Vigna, who has just been involved in a painful experiment intended to reveal the extent of the pilgrim's recall of the Aeneid and his trust in its sermone: Virgil says,

"If he, wounded spirit, had been able to believe before," replied my sage, "what he had never seen save in my verses, he would not have stretched forth his hand against you; but the incredible thing made me prompt him to a deed that grieves me.

This passage spins off in various interpretative directions: To what extent are either the Aeneid or the Commedia "true"? What is the role of the incredible in either of these poems? What would it mean for Dante to "believe" Virgil? What particularly interests me here, however, is how Virgil's recollection of one of his own scenes seems ostensibly to demonstrate the priority of his poem, its reliability as a description of reality no matter how fantastical, and the ultimate reliability of his words, whether they be found in the "there" of the poem he once wrote or in the "here and now," in the words of instruction and guidance he provides in the Commedia. The broken branch, the invisible voice, and the bleeding bark-all hearken back to another text and another world. No matter that the whole business is a cosa incredibile. He had the benefit of my poem, Virgil essentially says-he had la mia rima-and if he had believed what he read there, this painful exercise could have been avoided. To remember Polydorus would have obviated the "deed that grieves me."