"We Walk This Humble Path Alone"
Contemporary Canadian folk singer Loreena McKennit is the voice of my October-December music. Just like fall, her music is moody and mysterious. Conveniently, she has a song called "Dante's Prayer" that alludes to Canto 1 of Inferno and to the themes of The Divine Comedy as a whole. Since we are only reading Inferno , which has all of the fun, nasty bits, it's easy to forget that Dante's journey is not one of damnation but rather one of repentance and then salvation. The beginning of Canto 1 explains this directly when Dante interrupts the story of being lost in the woods to assure us that "But since it came to good, I will recount / all that I found revealed their by God's grace" (1.8-9). This bit of editorializing reminds us that the end will be happy even in the midst of darkness. Similarly, McKennitt's song, although melancholy, does not focus primarily on the idea of being lost but rather on being found . figurative language references to ...
