Dante’s Inferno; Canto 1-8

This reading, similarly to The King James Bible, was very interesting to me. In the parts of the bible we’ve read in class, there’s only been explanations of sins as well as the consequences of them during life- but in here, we get to see the consequences of sins in the afterlife. An example of this is in Canto V, where people who have committed the sin of lust have been put to punishment in a never-ending howling wind. It’s an interesting concept, as each sin has a different punishment towards it. It shows that hell does not discriminate, no matter who the person is or what their previous status was prior to death, if you commit a sin you will face the same consequence as another person who committed it. This may be something that was obvious to other readers, but something I noticed very late into reading this was that written in the format of a poem, which I found to be very interesting as Dante was a poet himself, so it would only make sense that he recalls this story through a poem. Clearly I hadn’t read the back of the book or else I would have known a lot sooner, but sometimes it’s ones own little discoveries that make a reading more enjoyable.