This poem is the result of my ruminating upon my senior high English class at St Bernard’s High School in St Paul. St Bernard’s closed its doors about 10 to 12 years ago. Mr Kolbinger, my English teacher, had us study the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno. It was a Renaissance nightmare of hellish proportions from whose imagery many heavy metal and death metal groups stole during the 80’s, and, from which horror movie creators continue to borrow.
I must confess that I was watching President Trump speak the other day and I was reminded of a line from the XXI Canto in which a demon bends over and makes a trumpet of his ass (the exact English translation of Dante’s Italian). When we read this passage in class, the whole class erupted in laughter with a sound, which I believed, resembled in volume and tonality, the sound that issued from the ass of the demon. I started to free associate the word, trump, with that of trumpet, and wondered if the root word the President’s surname resembled that of the Italian “tromba” or “trombettista” (trumpet or trumpeter). While I can never know exactly the sound of the fart that Dante described, I hazard a guess that it was as pleasant sounding as what I was hearing on the television.
This poem is not a free association of demon farts and President Trump. I will leave that to you. However, it is a reflection on what I read back in my senior year of high school and how we should heed the words of 14 century Dante in our own 21st century.
A HIGH SCHOOL JOURNEY TO DANTE’S INFERNO
In a high school classroom,
now long vacated,
disused, insects stirring
collected dust its only activity,
we sat, long ago, opening our
copies of Dante’s Inferno.
At Mr Kolbinger’s direction,
we turn the pages
of Dante’s poetic description
of Hell, a downward journey
into Dante’s vision,
painted with the theologies,
the imagery, and colors,
of Renaissance Florence,
his Florentine enemies
strategically placed
and scattered
amidst the nine circles.
We journey alongside
Dante and Virgil, passing
under the sign warning
us to abandon all hope
should we enter, from
which return is impossible,
pass the circle of the unbaptized,
and, the virtuous non-believers,
then those consumed
by lust (among whom
many adolescent boys
saw our own selves),
stepping carefully through
the putrefying recycling
waste of the gluttons,
(are second helpings sinful?)
into the circle of greed,
a screaming horde of
hoarders and squanderers,
bankers and bishops,
misers and the self-indulgent,
addicted eternally to the
acquisition and spending
of untold wealth.
We pause on our journey,
allowing our imaginations
to rest and breathe, before
picking up the staves
of our text books and
continuing our guided tour
by Dante and Virgil.
Then, once more we descend,
Circle Five, a foul smelling
waterway of the river Styx,
ferried over the souls
of the damned,
actively and passively,
consumed by hate,
into the lower depths
ruled by Pluto, the Underworld’s
dark Lord, pass the flaming
tombs of the heretics,
the war makers and
all profiteers of violence,
those shattered by suicide,
and those violators of human nature.
We discover no end to
this Dylanesque Dystopic
nightmare of “Desolation Row”,
and must rest again.
We climb upon the
Reptilian back of Geryon,
the winged monster of fraud,
with his human face,
and scorpion’s tail,
flying steeply, spirally,
down, down, down
into the depths of
panderers, seducers,
flatterers, Renaissance
marketeers selling
Divine Indulgences
and Grace to buying
consumers fearing for
their own eternal souls.
Then to the circle
of grafters, politicians,
then as now, auctioning
their souls and office,
boiling in the tar
of their own greed.
We pass those bent
over by the leaden cloaks
of their own hypocrisy,
the bodies of the damned,
torn and bitten by the
snakes and lizards
of their thievery;
the flamed engulfed
promoters of fraud,
the demonically hacked
and mutilated bodies
of those who sowed
discord; torn eternally
by demons with the
same relish as those
lives of family, religions,
and society they
hacked apart in life.
We take a much needed
respite from the horror
of our journey, reflecting
upon the similarity of
Dante’s Hellish Renaissance
with that of our own Hell.
We then rise upon our
literary journey descending
down past the liars and
the perjurers, the grifters,
and scam artists, to the
vast, frozen lake of the treacherous
damned into an eternity,
encased in ice,
up to their necks.
Among their number,
the betrayers and murderers
of family, friends, and nations;
and, there in their midst,
the greatest traitor of all,
the former angel of light,
betrayer of God all powerful,
with three heads.
Lucifer, consumed by his
own hatred, gnawing
vigorously, viciously, eagerly
in his three mouths,
the heads and bodies,
of Brutus, Cassisus,
and Judas Iscariot.
We carefully navigate
the frozen lake, avoiding
the heads of the damned,
unable to free themselves
from the treachery that
has buried them in the ice,
and climb down the
hairy back of Lucifer,
grasping with great
handfuls the hair to
prevent our own
falling into the abyss.
Down becomes up,
and up we climb,
upward to a distant light,
a light shining from
the classroom, vacant,
empty, a room
emptied of knowledge,
the only thing gathering there,
insects moving through the dust,
settled in piles
scattered here and there.
Dante’s warning to his
Renaissance world is
projected seven hundred
years to our twenty-first century;
the same sins, just a different
century and location,
different players, politicians,
clerics, financers, sinners.
Are our minds as empty
and vacant as this
former classroom, filled
only with crawling insects
disturbing mounds of dust?
Our ears deafened
to the voice of this Florentine
poet of the 14th century?
Are we able to lift ourselves
from the rubble of humanity’s
past, to his vision of Paradiso?
Or, will we find ourselves
only increasing the population
of Florentines’ damned so long ago?
(c) 2019, Robert Charles Wagner. All right reserved.
