"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 fear

references to hope

Canto 1 (trans. John Ciardi)

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

from the straight road and woke to find myself

alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,

so rank, so arduous a wilderness!

Its very memory gives a shape to fear. 

Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!

But since it came to good, I will recount

all that I found revealed there by God’s grace. 

How I came to it I cannot rightly say,

so drugged and loose with sleep had I become

when I first wandered there from the True Way. 

But at the far end of that valley of evil

whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear

I found myself before a little hill 

and lifted up my eyes. Its shoulders glowed

already with the sweet rays of that planet

whose virtue leads men straight on every road, 

and the shining strengthened me against the fright

whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart

through all the terrors of that piteous night. 

Just as a swimmer, who with his last breath

flounders ashore from perilous seas, might turn

to memorize the wide water of his death – 

so did I turn, my soul still fugitive

from death’s surviving image, to stare down

that pass that none had ever left alive. 

And there I lay to rest from my heart’s race

till calm and breath returned to me. Then rose

and pushed up that dead slope at such a pace 

each footfall rose above the last. (1.1-31)

Dante in the woods, illustration by Gustave Dore

 Dante's Prayer by Loreena McKennitt

When the dark wood fell before me.

And all the paths were overgrown.

When the priests of pride say there is no other way.

I tilled the sorrows of stone. 

I did not believe because I could not see.

Though you came to me in the night.

When the dawn seemed forever lost.

You showed me your love in the light of the stars. 

Cast your eyes on the ocean.

Cast your soul to the sea.

When the dark night seems endless.

Please, remember me. 

Then the mountain rose before me.

By the deep well of desire.

From the fountain of forgiveness.

Beyond the ice and the fire. 

Cast your eyes on the ocean.

Cast your soul to the sea.

When the dark night seems endless.

Please, remember me. 

Though we share this humble path, alone.

How fragile is the heart.

Oh give these clay feet wings to fly.

To touch the face of the stars. 

Breathe life into this feeble heart.

Lift this mortal veil of fear.

Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears.

We'll rise above these earthly cares. 

Cast your eyes on the ocean.

Cast your soul to the sea.

When the dark night seems endless.

Please, remember me...

Please, remember me...

Canadian folk singer, Loreena McKennitt

The allusions to Canto 1 in McKennitt's song are obvious: She sings about the "dark wood" where the "paths were overgrown." McKennitt also alludes to the 'little hill" (15) Dante attempts to climb to escape the "valley of evil" (13) when she sings "Then the mountain rose before me / By the deep well of desire."

In both Dante's work and McKennitt's, the path, the dark wood, and the hill/mountain all symbolize similar ideas. The path, which Dante later calls "the True Way" (12), represents a life of virtue: It's being certain about the goodness of our lives and the direction we are headed. The dark wood, which Dante says is "so drear, so rank, so arduous" (1.4-5), on the other hand, is made of the parts of our lives that are sorrowful, confusing, or disappointing--times when we don't know how we should act, or, even worse, behave in ways that we know are wrong. This imagery of a path through the woods resonates throughout cultures as highly archetypal representations of the challenges of navigating the trials and tribulations of the human experience. For instance, how many fairy tales begin with a trip through the woods?

For Dante and McKennitt in particular, the dark woods symbolize a fear of losing identity that is fundamentally human, a panic that we are not living as we should in our fleeting time on earth--Dante says, "Its very memory gives a shape to fear. / Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!" (1.6-7), and McKennitt pleads for someone to "Lift this mortal veil of fear."

Both the lyrics and the music in McKennitt's song, though, are permeated with hope. The song begins and ends with a Russian Orthodox choir chanting the Orthodox hymn "Behold the Bridegroom":

Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight,

And blessed is that servant whom He shall find watching,

And again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless.

Beware, therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep,

Lest you be given up to death, and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom.

But rouse yourself crying: Holy, Holy, Holy, art Thou, O our God,

Through the Theotokos have mercy on us. ("Behold the Bridegroom Comes")

A Russian Orthodox choir

In the hymn, the Bridegroom refers to Christ coming to save those "He shall find watching." Alluding to a parable from the Book of Matthew, the only danger the uncertainty of night truly brings is the temptation to forget that we have reason to hope. Further promises of salvation in McKennitt's song come in the lines "Though you came to me in the night / When the dawn seemed forever lost / You showed me your love in the light of the stars." Here, the stars serve as reminders and promises of hope among our fearful and lonely moments. Later, she calls back to those lines and sings "Oh, give these clay feet wings to fly / To touch the face of the stars." Love, McKennitt suggests, even gives us the capability to transcend human limitations.

These metaphors and images related to love, light, and stars could also be read as allusions to The Divine Comedy. We learn in Canto 2 that Virgil comes to Dante in the dark wood when hope seems lost because Dante's beloved Beatrice, a symbol of Divine Love, sends him. Beatrice is described as having eyes "kindled from the lamps of Heaven" (2.55) and says that "Love called me here" (2.72). When Dante finally understands that Virgil, whom he admires, and Beatrice, whom he loves, are there to save him, he says, 

As flowerlets dropped and puckered in the night 

turn up to the returning sun and spread

their petals wide on his new warmth and light--

          just so my wilted spirits rose again

and such a heat of zeal surged through my veins

that I was born anew. (2.124-129)

Beatrice and Virgil, illustration by Gustave Dore

The epic simile connects Dante to a fragile flower restored by sunlight, the compassion of his beloved Beatrice and his hero Virgil: Love and companionship is restorative to weary and lost human spirits.

As Dante discovers, getting back on the right path is not easy--he must recognize sin in hell (Inferno), then renounce sin in purgatory (Purgatorio) before he can find redemption in heaven (Paradiso). Ultimately, it is human relationships that lead us back on the right path in life, that help us re-discover ourselves in times of turmoil. For Dante, it is his relationship with Beatrice, who remembers him even after she dies and is in heaven; in "Dante's Prayer," it seems that the speaker (or, rather, singer) and her audience can save each other from darkness, as she implores in the refrain: "When the dark night seems endless / Please, remember me." Our relationships are reciprocal: We both give and receive hope through them.

A Soviet gulag

The biggest difference between "Dante's Prayer" and Dante's actual work is McKennitt's shift away from religious topics. Dante was firmly grounded in medieval Catholicism: Although it is Beatrice's efforts that save him, his path to redemption is a Christian one, depending upon, as he says in line 9, "God's grace." McKennitt's only nod toward religious belief is the inclusion of the hymn. McKennitt's explanation of the inclusion suggest that her addition of the hymn had less to do with it's religious themes and more to do with a specific experience she had in Russia. Travelling on the Trans-Siberian railway just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, McKennitt says she looked at the icy landscape of Siberia, where hundreds of thousands had been killed in Soviet gulags, and thought of Dante's hell. She says in the album notes, “Dante’s The Divine Comedy keeps running through my mind as I gaze out at the landscape passing before me, thinking of the people who inhabit it and how they share this human condition" ("Loreena McKennitt, 'Dante's Prayer'"). The hymn, then, surviving the religious persecution of the atheist Soviet state, perhaps as cold as the lowest depths of hell, can be seen as a symbol of humanity's ability to endure and console one another in even the darkest times.