We enter the third and final part of the cantica. These divisions, antipurgatorium (the first naming of 'ante-purgatory' in the commentaries), purgatorium, and postpurgatorium, are found in Benvenuto da Imola (general note to the canto).

Dante's first word, vago (eager) ties him to Ulysses, eager for adventure (for the word vago see the note to Purg. XIX.22-24). Virgil had told him, in his final instruction (Purg. XXVII.138), that in the garden he will be free either to sit (thus imitating Rachel, the contemplative life) or to move about (thus imitating Leah, the active life). We should not be surprised that Dante makes the latter choice. Since, as we shall see, his contemplative faculties are at this point faulty at best, his choice will be reflected in his intellectual difficulties with understanding the nature of the love represented by the beautiful woman he will shortly meet (and who is eventually identified as Matelda).

Matelda will only be named at Purgatorio XXXIII.119. It may be helpful to the reader to deal with her identity and her role in the poem before then. However, the reader should not forget that Dante has presented this woman as nameless, perhaps, among other reasons, to make us pay attention to what she means rather than concentrating on who she is. For the question of her identity, see the note to Purgatorio XXVIII.40-42. For a study of the numerological significance of the number of this canto, 28, which the writer demonstrates to have a long standing among Neoplatonists (Martianus Capella), St. Augustine (that 'reformed Neoplatonist'), and other Fathers of the Church (e.g., the Venerable Bede), see Victoria Kirkham (“Dante's Polysynchrony: a Perfectly Timed Entry into Eden,” Filologia e critica 20 [1995]), pp. 336-44. To them it was a 'perfect number' for several reasons, arithmetical and geometric in nature. Kirkham also points out (p. 348 [n. 29]) that Matelda is the twenty-eighth woman encountered in the poem. (See her earlier discussion in “Eleven Is for Evil: Measured Trespass in Dante's Commedia,” Allegorica 10 [1989], pp. 27-50). Kirkham's arguments are engaging. One wonders, nonetheless, how much of this tradition held Dante's attention as he wrote this canto; one wonders, as well, why the cantos numbered 28 in the other two cantiche seem not to have the same numerological proclivity (they are not, in any case, referred to in Kirkham's discussion).

For an extensive treatment of the principal enigmas found in this canto, see Paola Pacchioni-Becker, Matelda e il Paradiso terrestre nella “Commedia” di Dante Alighieri. Intertestualità e tipologia (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2004).

This forest is sacred, in the words of Andreoli (comm. to this verse) 'because it was planted by the very hands of God.' Many discussants of the opening of this canto realize that the poet is drawing a line across the page between the last canto and this one. Dante has finished the first half of the journey and now he finds himself in a very different sort of forest from the dark wood in which he came to his senses at the opening of Inferno. That wood was 'aspra e forte' (harsh and dense [Inf. I.5]) while this forest is 'spessa e viva' (thick and verdant).

It is instructive and amusing to consider the opening remarks of Benvenuto da Imola (comm. to vv. 1-6) as he addresses this canto: 'Before I come to its literal meaning, I would like you first to note that this entire chapter is figurative and allegorical, for otherwise it would in large measure be fatuous and untrue.' Benvenuto is essentially denying the claim made by the poet that this is the actual garden of Eden. He goes on to assert that the garden signifies 'the happy state of man in the perfection of his virtue, as much as is possible in this miserable life of ours.' Benvenuto's commentary, which remains one of the most intelligent and helpful ever written, has a blind eye for Dante's theological strategies.

In this forest Dante the sightseer can move lento lento (very slowly), enjoying his surroundings. Here he will not be subject to the fear that afflicted him in the selva oscura.

The gentle breeze, as we shall learn (Purg. XXVIII.85-87), surprises Dante, who had expected to find no meteorological disturbance of any kind in the garden. It strikes upon his brow, perhaps reminding us that that was where the seven P's were inscribed on him by the warder of the purgatorial gate (Purg. IX.112). He is, as was Adam when he found himself in this place 6,499 years ago (see Par. XXVI.119-123), innocent. Unlike Adam, Dante will not fall in it.

From the westward movement of the boughs of the trees we learn that the wind in the garden blows from the east, a propitious source, since it is associated with the rising sun and thus with Christ, often represented as the sun climbing the sky, resurrected from the darkness of death.

The morning breeze does not disturb the birds plying their crafts (singing and nesting, according to John of Serravalle [comm. to vv. 7-15], but surely flying as well). Lest the reader believe these birds are actually birds, Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 7-15) reveals what they 'really' represent: 'wise and virtuous men, who rise to the heights of virtue and joyfully sing their praise of God.' An allegorical temper can steal the joy from any poem. In the summer of 1979 Ted Blaisdell, himself a singer and then a student at Dartmouth, wondered whether these singing birds are to be taken as the immortal birds that were in Eden 7800 years ago. One does not know on what grounds that question might be answered, but is pleased with the question.

The harmony of birdsong and forest murmur, treble and bass, respectively, reveal the favorable conjunction of art (the birdsong) and nature (the wind in the trees) in Eden.

The sound of the forest is compared to that made by the trees in the great pine forest near Ravenna when it is stirred by the strong wind from Africa, released, at least in myth, from Aeolus's bag of the winds. John of Serravalle, jogged by the mention of Chiassi to think of the city of Ravenna, adds a personal note to his commentary (comm. to vv. 16-21): Dante, he says, is buried in the Franciscan monastery in Ravenna and he once offered prayers there for the poet's soul.

The image of wind making melody on a natural instrument, the Aeolian harp, became a staple of Romantic literature. In his biography of the great American musician Louis Armstrong Laurence Bergren (Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life [New York: Broadway, 1997]), p. 261, reports that another American jazzman, Eddie Condon, commenting on the quantity and quality of jazz playing in Chicago in 1925, had this to say: 'Around midnight you could hold your instrument in the middle of the street and the air would play it.'

Insisting again on the slowness, and thus the calm, of his progress (see Purg. XXVIII.5), Dante implicitly contrasts his entrance into the world of sin in the first canto of the poem with his arrival in the garden. Here, just as there, he takes stock by looking back through a wood toward his point of entrance: 'How I came there I cannot really tell, / I was so full of sleep / when I forsook the one true way' (Inf. I.10-12), but the differences between the two places overwhelm their similarities.

The phrase selva antica (ancient forest) possibly reflects, as commentators, beginning with Tommaseo (comm. to these verses) have suggested, Aeneid VI.179: 'itur in antiquam silvam' (they move into the ancient forest). Virgil is speaking of Aeneas and his men, engaged in cutting down trees for the funeral pyre of Misenus, and the forest is that at Cumae, where Aeneas will shortly find the golden bough that will allow him to enter the underworld.

This stream is Lethe, the river of oblivion in classical literature, in which Christians in Dante's Eden leave the memory of their sins behind them for eternity, as Matelda will explain (vv. 127-128). For this river Tommaseo (comm. to these verses) cites Virgil, Georgics IV.19: 'tenuis fugiens per gramina rivus' (a slender stream stealing through the grassy field). Virgil is describing an appropriate spot in which to set up a hive in order to make honey.

Beginning with Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 25-27) commentators have suggested a source in Ovid (Metam. V.388-391) for the shaded garden here, the Sicilian scene of Proserpina's rape (see Purg. XXVII.49-51), where the forests above the pools in the hills of Enna keep them protected from Apollo's rays.

The fascination of the character introduced anonymously here (we will not find out her name until Purg. XXXIII.119) has proven so great that in Dante studies there is practically a separate industry devoted to problems associated with her identity and her significance. The position taken in what follows is based on the following given: Matelda (that is the name that we eventually hear, and it is spelled with an 'e' [and not an 'i'] in all the manuscripts consulted by Petrocchi) is not 'allegorical' but historical. Almost all the early commentators believe that she is Matilda of Tuscany (1046-1115). Their cases pleaded from ca. 1860 on, the two principal other historical claimants to the role are thirteenth-century German nuns, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Mechthild of Hackeborn, but they have both been mainly abandoned in recent and current discussions. Starting in the nineteenth century there was a reaction against all such historical figures and, led by Scartazzini, once he came over to this view, an attempt to establish her identity as one of the 'other women' in Dante's Vita nuova, a position given support in our own era by so eminent a student of the Commedia as Gianfranco Contini (Un' idea di Dante [Turin: Einaudi, 1976]), pp. 173-74. A calmer and more sensible survey than Scartazzini's is found in Moore (Studies in Dante, Third Series: Miscellaneous Essays [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968 (1903)]), pp. 210-16; he ends up cautiously maintaining the claim of Matilda of Tuscany. Indeed, a close reading of Matelda tends to make such interpretations as Scartazzini's and his latter-day followers, based in the Romantic era and in a Romantic sensibility, difficult to accept; and Matelda's role in the poem is probably too theologically determined to have encouraged such attempts. If she is the representative of the active life, she must surely have more gravitas than those young girls, must surely be more recognizable to a wider public. Thus it is interesting to consider Cino da Pistoia's praise of Contessa Matilda as a fitting representative of the active life (see Hollander [“Dante and Cino da Pistoia,” Dante Studies 110 (1992)], p. 231 [n. 106]). As opposed to the nuns, who are contemplatives, Matelda's service to the Church is clearly related to the active life, based precisely on the Church's own favorite mode for the laity's involvement: financial support. None of the young women in the Vita nuova is easily understood in any such role. This is to take issue with Hollander's earlier view (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], pp. 152-53).

For 77 screens of text in the Dante Dartmouth Project dedicated to the problem of Matelda see Scartazzini (comm. to verse 148), with an immense bibliography even though it reaches only to 1873. He reviews seven candidates who have had major appeal to various and three women mentioned in the Vita nuova (the donna gentile, Beatrice's dead friend, and students of the problem (Matilda of Tuscany, the mother of Emperor Otto the Great, the two German nuns named Mechthild, Guido Cavalcanti's Giovanna) and rules all of these out, finally settling on an unlikely choice, the 'screen lady' of the Vita nuova. For the allegorical sense of Matelda he opts for 'simbolo del ministerio ecclesiastico' (symbol of the Church's ministry). Victoria Kirkham (“Purgatorio XXVIII,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), p. 422, gives a list of 35 possible allegorical meanings that have been variously proposed and then, not chastised by the opprobrium the very list would offer such an attempt, goes on to champion one of these: Wisdom. Yet we have no reason to believe that there is any allegorical meaning to Matelda. Why was not the Countess of Tuscany (Kirkham's choice for her historical meaning) enough? For similar behavior see Giovanni Pascoli (Sotto il velame: saggio d'un' interpretazione generale del poema sacro [Messina: Muglia, 1900]), p. 565, in his usual magisterial tones, declaring that Matelda is 'l'arte nipote a Dio' (Art, God's grandchild [Inf. XI.105]). Such asseverations are fairly typical of the label-attaching that is frequent among Matelda's allegorizers.

Matilda of Tuscany, by mere virtue of having so much support in the early commentaries (the first real opposition to her occurs only in 1732 in Venturi [comm. to verse 40]), is probably the most intelligent choice. For an attempt to restore her identity see Villa (“In favore della Gran Contessa,” Quaderni del Dipartimento di lingue e letterature neolatine dell'Istituto universitario di Bergamo 2 [1987], pp. 67-76). However, she is nonetheless problematic for at least three reasons. (1) She was fiercely supportive of the political claims of the Church against the emperor; (2) she is presented here as a beautiful young woman, which little accords with her descriptions in the chronicles, which make her seem little less than a virago, a female soldier, and surely less 'romantic' than would accord with such a portrait as Dante's; (3) since the function she performs in the garden seems to be universal (but there is debate about this, with some believing that she is only here for Dante's visit [see the note to Purg. XXXIII.128-135]), the fact that she could not have begun her task until 1115 is a bar to her candidacy. This, however, is true for all candidates, as it was not, for instance, for that other genius loci, Cato (presiding over purgatory as Matelda presides over Eden), who died before Christ harrowed hell, before there were any souls in purgatory, and who thus was able to take up his function only when there were those who required it.

Someone (it may have been Charles Singleton) once remarked that if we did not know Matelda's name we would know much more readily who she is. In her role in the garden of Eden she is, there can hardly be a doubt, a representation of unfallen Eve. The commentary tradition, so taken up with the puzzle of her name, does not see the plain reference to the first female being before her fall, Eve dressing and keeping the garden. Fallani (comm. to verse 148), in passing, refers to Matelda as the 'new Eve.' Hermann Gmelin (Kommentar: der Läuterungsberg [Stuttgart: Klett, 1955]), p. 440, speaks plainly: she is 'eine figura der Eva vor dem Sündenfall' (a figure of Eve before the Fall). See also A. Bartlett Giamatti (The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966]), p. 110: 'she is an Eve who will not fall.' Singleton, having decided that she is presented as the 'new Astraea' (Journey to Beatrice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967 (1958)], pp. 190-201), has difficulty saying as clearly that she is Eve, too; it is nonetheless clear from his treatment of Matelda's function in the poem that he sees her as another Eve (see pp. 204-11). (See also Hollander [Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969)], pp. 153-58.)

As the 'new' (or 'original old' or 'perpetually new') Eve, she makes sense. She represents the active life that Leah led us to expect in her (as Rachel associates Beatrice with the contemplative life) and she can have been here from the beginning of purgation. And it is also true that, in Genesis, unfallen Eve is never named; she is only named after the fall, when Adam calls his wife 'Eve' (Genesis 3:20). Matelda, too, is named belatedly.

Here the reader should probably be aware of a distinction between what the poet knows of Matelda's significance and what the character makes of her. A strategic awareness of the evident difference in perspective between narrator and character as a general aspect of the poem is, surprisingly enough, a fairly recent development. See Leo Spitzer (“A Note on the Poetic and the Empirical 'I' in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 [1946]), pp. 414-22; Charles Singleton (An Essay on the “Vita Nuova” [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977 (1949)]), p. 25; Gianfranco Contini (Un' idea di Dante [Turin: Einaudi, 1976 (1958)]), pp. 33-62; Rocco Montano (Storia della poesia di Dante, vol. I [Naples: Quaderni di Delta, 1962]), pp. 367-76. See also Michelangelo Picone (“Dante come autore/narratore della Commedia,” Nuova Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 2 [1999], pp. 9-26) as well as Mario Aversano (“Il canto XXXII del Purgatorio,” in La quinta rota: Studi sulla “Commedia” [Turin: Tirrenia,1988]), p. 40 and n., pointing out that Francesco D'Ovidio (Il canto dei Simoniaci [Naples: Guida, 1932]), p. 279, had already made a telling observation along exactly these lines. And see the somewhat over-emphatic claim of Giovanni Cecchetti (“The Statius Episode: Observations on Dante's Conception of Poetry,” Lectura Dantis [virginiana] 7 [1990]), p. 112, that the distinction actually goes back to the early commentators (although he admits that their awareness of the distinction between auctor and agens is not always clear [to which may be added the observation that it is anything but systematic]). Cecchetti suggests that Singleton had in fact derived his version of the concept from the commentary of G. A. Venturi (Milano, 1924). See also Francesco Mazzoni's view (“L'Epistola a Cangrande,” Rendiconti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei [Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche] Ser. 8, 10 [1955]), pp. 174-78, that Dante himself, in the Epistle to Cangrande (Epist. XIII.xiv.38), used the word agens to refer, not to himself as author, but to the character who bears his name in the work. His view, while attractive, has not won general support; see Hollander (Dante's Epistle to Cangrande [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993]), pp. 21-22.

Dante sees that Matelda is 'in love' and wants to understand what she is singing. The response of Venturi (comm. to verse 43) indicates that the current debate was already in progress nearly 300 years ago. He takes Matelda to be singing 'of divine love and not, as some ignorant fools understand, of the bestial kind.' However, many commentators, aroused by the sensual tone of the protagonist's responses, disagree.

The first major use of Guido Cavalcanti's poem, 'In un boschetto trova' pasturella' (In a little wood I came upon a shepherd girl), to amplify the meaning of this scene was made by Charles Singleton (Journey to Beatrice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967 (1958)]), pp. 214-16, even if he was not the first to call attention to its importance here (see Scartazzini [comm. to Purg. XXIX.1]). This ballata is in a genre worked previously by dozens of French and Provençal poets, a genre in which poets who more usually wrote songs about unattainable ladies had their 'revenge,' as it were. The pastourelle or pastorella (the genre is named for the willing and socially unimportant shepherdess it celebrates) generally, as in Cavalcanti's lyric, has a high-born protagonist ride into a clearing in a wood where he finds a lovely and willing young woman who gives him sexual pleasure at his merest request (indeed, in Cavalcanti's poem, it is she who proposes the amorous encounter to him). Any study of this ballata makes it immediately clear that Dante had it on his mind as he composed this canto. But see Poggioli (“Dante poco tempo silvano: or a 'Pastoral Oasis' in the Commedia,” Annual Report of the Dante Society 80 [1962], pp. 1-20), who only gingerly accepts the likelihood of so contemporary and erotic a connection, since he is more interested in the more sedate influence of the classical tradition of the locus amoenus (pleasant place, the pastoral escape from 'civilization'). And see, opposing the view that Matelda is a 'pastorella' in any meaningful way, Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno (“Matelda's Dance and the Smile of the Poets,” Dante Studies 112 [1994], pp. 115-32). See also Massimiliano Chiamenti (“Corollario oitanico al canto ventottesimo del Purgatorio,” Medioevo e rinascimento 13 [1999], pp. 207-20), who argues that the generic identity of the lyric moment is better understood as reflecting the reverdie than the pastourelle. It nonetheless clearly reflects a very particular poem of Guido Cavalcanti that happens to be a pastorella, as Barolini recognizes (Dante's Poets [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984]), pp. 148-53. For a wider sense of the generic classifications of the pastourelle see Dan Octavian Cepraga (“Sistema dei generi lirici e dinamiche compilative: la posizione della pastorella nei canzonieri occitanici,” Critica del testo 3 [2000], pp. 827-70).

Awareness of Cavalcanti's poem as germane to Dante began with the Anonimo Fiorentino (comm. to vv. 97-99), who merely mentions the poem in his note detailing Cavalcanti's works. Gregorio Di Siena (comm. to Inf. II.55) was the first to point out that the opening line of the next canto (Purg. XXIX.1), 'Cantando come donna innamorata' (like a lady touched by love she sang), derived from Guido's pastorella, the verse 'cantava come fosse 'nnamorata'; he also argued that Dante had already cited the second verse of Guido's pastorella in Virgil's description of Beatrice in Inferno II. If he is correct, Dante would then have borrowed Guido's frankly sensual portrait of a young woman to describe ladies of a far more spiritual inclination. Scartazzini (comm. to Purg. XXIX.1) was the first to suggest that many elements of Cavalcanti's poem were active participants, as it were, in Purgatorio XXVIII. Bosco (comm. to vv. 63-68) offers the fullest treatment found in the commentaries, but does not acknowledge his predecessors.

Once we see Guido's poem behind Dante's we can also discern an authorial strategy behind its presence. Matelda does not come as a shepherdess, but as the unfallen Eve, virginal, upright, completely uninterested in sex. It is the protagonist, his head full of Cavalcantian sexuality, who imagines that she is in love with him, just like a pretty pastorella. It will take him some time to discover the wrongness of his view of her, and some of his readers have yet to make that discovery. For the view that Dante's sexual desire for Matelda is 'innocent and happy' see Peter Dronke (“Viaggi al Paradiso terrestre,” in Dante: da Firenze all'aldilà. Atti del terzo Seminario dantesco internazionale, ed. Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2001]), pp. 94-95. Victoria Kirkham (“Purgatorio XXVIII,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), p. 424, also believes that she represents sensual love (she is 'thoroughly sensual and Venerean').

The protagonist first associates Matelda with Ovid's Proserpina (Metam. V.391-401), seen, grasped, and carried off by Pluto. Dante, who has begun this scene believing that Matelda is in love with him, now lets his erotic misinterpretation show; he thinks he is in the role of Pluto to her Proserpina because he thinks she is a pastorella.

Playing off Dante's carnal appreciation of her meaning, Matelda comes closer so that he can hear the words of her song, thus acceding to his request. She is portrayed, in simile, as being as chaste as virginity itself.

Dante's wish, expressed at Purgatorio XXVIII.48, to make out the words of Matelda's song, is here granted. Few texts in the poem have been as poorly treated by the commentators as this one. The protagonist's wish made us want to know what Matelda was singing; and here we learn that Dante now can make out her words. However, the poet does not tell us what she sang. It is at least possible that he expected us to puzzle out the identity of her song. No one has. Perhaps it is the Psalm to which she refers at verse 80, perhaps it is another song altogether. Our teachers, with only one exception, are silent, merely saying the obvious, that Dante understood what she was singing, and, with only the exceptions of Isidoro Del Lungo (comm. to verse 60) and Charles Singleton (comm. to verse 60), not even bothering to point out that the poet refuses to share this information with us. About all that can safely be said is that she probably sings a song that is kindred in spirit to the Psalm to which she later refers (see the note to Purg. XXVIII.80-81).

Matelda's gaze, the poet remembers, was like the amorous gaze of Venus, wounded by mistake by the arrow of her son, Cupid, and consequently madly in love with Adonis, in a second Ovidian reminiscence (Metam. X.525-532).

Matelda, resuming her role as a latter-day Leah (and Eve as well), picks the self-seeding plants the nature of which she will disclose to Dante at Purgatorio XXVIII.109-120.

The first reference is to the Persian king Xerxes, who found a way to cross the wide Hellespont in 480 B.C. by having his vast army build a bridge out of ships lashed together; defeated by the Greeks whom he was attacking, he had to sail home in ignominy in a small boat.

The sight of this lady moved the protagonist, the poet informs us, to lustful thoughts like those of Leander, unable to cross the rough seas of the Dardanelles from Abydos to make love to his girlfriend Hero at Sestos, the third Ovidian reference, this time to the Heroides (XVIII). Leander finally drowned in his attempt to swim to Hero.

These three classical allusions to destructive sexual passions, aligning Matelda, in the protagonist's eyes, with Proserpina, Venus, and Hero, and himself with Pluto, Adonis, and Leander, function, as Hollander suggested (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969]), pp. 154-58, much as did the associations with the dream in Purgatorio IX, in which three classical references, involving rape or other destructive behavior, were balanced and corrected by the Christian benevolence of St. Lucy. Here the protagonist's sexualized vision of Matelda yields to a better understanding once she reveals the nature of her love: Christian charity. Once she does so, the protagonist, whose will came through his self-produced temptation well enough (he does not attempt to cross the narrow stream to be with her), finally has his understanding corrected and no longer thinks of Matelda in sexual terms for the rest of his six cantos in the garden.

Some readers have found the three paces that must not yet be crossed allegories of the three 'steps' of confession, contrition, and satisfaction that await Dante later when he must deal with Beatrice's accusation in cantos XXX and XXXI. Others think they are only indicative of a short distance and have no deeper meaning.

Matelda, who has appeared at Purgatorio XXVIII.40, finally speaks. Addressing all three poets (we have surely forgotten about the presence of Statius and of Virgil – as has Dante), she says things that at least Statius and Dante are able to understand. They are 'new' (in the sense that they have never been here before but also in that they are 'new men,' remade, sinless) and perhaps expect to hear a lament for the fall, for the loss of this place by the human race because of original sin. Her message, however, is not the tragic message of the fall but the comic one of recovery, of paradise regained.

With regard to the word rido: Matelda is probably not laughing, as some hold, but smiling; see Bernhard König (“Canto XXVIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Purgatorio, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2001]), p. 441, citing Convivio (III.viii.8) for a smile as the shining forth of delight in the soul.

Psalm 91 (92), 'A Psalm or Song for the sabbath day,' begins as follows: 'It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto your name, O most High.' The verse that Matelda refers to, 91:5 in the Vulgate, runs as follows in the English Bible: 'For you, Lord, have made me glad (delectasti me) through your work: I will triumph in the work of your hands' (92:4). For the similar view of the Psalm found in Peter Abelard's expositio in Hexaemeron, see Singleton (comm. to verse 80); and in Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum, see Hawkins (“Watching Matelda,” in Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, eds., The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante's “Commedia” [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991]), pp. 198-99. Matelda is expressing her Leah-like devotion to the active life, her delight in 'dressing and keeping the garden' as Eve was enjoined to do (but did not, eating the forbidden fruit instead). She is once again joined in our understanding to the unfallen Eve, her constant typological referent in Dante's garden of Eden. If we ever had any doubt about the nature of the love she feels, we do so no longer. She is 'in love' with God, not with Dante except as she loves him in God, as we shall see all the saved loving one another (and Dante) in Paradiso.

In his Monarchia (III.xv.7) Dante says that the earthly paradise signifies the beatitudo huius vitae (the blessedness of the earthly life). For discussion see Edward Williamson (“De Beatitudine Huius Vite,” Dante Studies 118 [2000 (1958)], pp. 109-27).

Having cleansed Dante's mind of its impurities, Matelda now assumes, as a sort of handmaid of Beatrice, the role of teacher, leaving her sexuality a forgotten thought in Dante's formerly clouded mind.

Dante's double question refers to the explanation of Statius (Purg. XXI.43-72) that the earthquake marking his liberation from the memory of sin was not, as Dante had imagined, a natural meteorological event, but a supernatural one. Just so the running water of the stream and the constant breeze, Matelda will explain, are not natural phenomena but supernatural ones, heavenly artifices to harmonize the physical attributes of this place with its spiritual essence.

Once again Matelda refers to Dante's mental processes as 'beclouded' or 'befogged'; first he did not understand the nature of her love (Purg. XXVIII.81) and now he does not understand the nature of the garden's nature.

Matelda essentially repeats what Statius had said below (see the note to Purg. XXVIII.85-87): God limits the natural meteorology of the mountain to the ante-purgatory. The first humans, Adam and Eve, were placed in this spot free of any such disturbance; but they themselves, in their disobedience, disturbed the laws of eternal nature in the garden (vv. 94-96).

The 'weather' here is thus not the sign of some kind of disturbance, but was, from the Beginning, the sign of the harmonious essence of the created universe. The breeze in the garden, limited to this upper reach of the mountain, was (and is) caused by the movement of the highest sphere in the heavens, the primum mobile, the first moving (which, we will learn eventually, in Paradiso, moves toward God in desire and by so doing creates the movement of all the heavens below it). That breeze scatters the seeds of most (but not all) of the plants of Eden down onto the earth below. And this is why, she explains, that mortals at times cannot find the source of a plant new to their experience; it has been carried by the wind from Eden and then somehow across the seas of the southern hemisphere and deposited in the landmass half a world away. And this is why Dante will also see some plants here that have no counterpart on earth.

Having explained the source and result of the constant breeze in the garden, Matelda turns to the equally constant water, which also does not suffer the changes of water in our world, condensing and then being released from the clouds (consider the transformations of the Arno's waters in Purg. XIV.34-36). What the rivers here 'lose' as they run out of Eden is not restored from the clouds, but from an eternal fountain in the garden, put into operation by God Himself.

Eleanor Cook (“Scripture as Enigma: Biblical Allusion in Dante's Earthly Paradise,” Dante Studies 117 [1999]), pp. 9-10, points to a source for the description of this remarkable spring in Hebrews 6:19, where hope is the 'anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast.'

Having answered both of Dante's questions (Purg. XXVIII.85-87) Matelda now turns her attention to the twofold river in this garden. The Bible says there are four rivers in Eden, Phison (Ganges), Gehon (Nile), Tigris, and Euphrates (Genesis 2:10-14). Dante says there are two, Lethe and Eunoe. The first of these is looked forward to by Virgil (Inf. XIV.136-138) in response to Dante's wrongful assumption that it is a river in hell. The second, Eunoe, appears to be no less than a Dantean invention. Thus Dante has first of all reduced the number of the garden's rivers from four to two. Caron Ann Cioffi suggests that he does so in order to avoid having the same numbers of rivers in this good place as there are in hell (four): Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus (see 'Eunoe' in The Dante Encyclopedia [ed. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 2000], p. 358). It was probably also Dante's intent to replace the two he does later name (Tigris and Euphrates at Purg. XXXIII.112) both for practical and symbolic reasons. It would have been difficult or impossible to argue that the Tigris and Euphrates ran from Eden to Armenia and thence into the Persian Gulf; in any case, and as Singleton (Journey to Beatrice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967 (1958)]), pp. 167-68, has argued, Dante wanted two rivers here that would serve a purpose in 'the process of man's purgation and redemption from sin.' And so, while indicating that he knows we expect those other four rivers, he gives us these two. Thus, when he in fact does refer to the 'orthodox' rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, he is winking at the reader who expects to find them here along with two others. The fact that, when he does mention the 'correct' paradisal rivers, he chooses to refer to only two of them seals his playfulness, for these two rivers, Lethe and Eunoe, look just like them. For a study of Dante's highly idiosyncratic hydrography, see Daniel J. Donno (“Moral Hydrography: Dante's Rivers,” Modern Language Notes 92 [1977], pp. 130-39.).

Lethe is the classical river of oblivion, present in the poets best known to Dante: Virgil (Aen. VI.713-715, where drinking from it deprives the soul of its entire remembered experience and thus prepares it for another life), Ovid (Metam. XI.602-604), Statius (Theb. I.296-298), Lucan (Phars. V.221-222). As for the word Eunoe, a Dantean Greek-derived coinage, Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 127-129) was perhaps the first commentator to consider Dante as having cited himself (Conv. II.iii.11), when he says that the Empyrean heaven was formed by the divine mind alone, or Protonoe (protos = first; nous = mind). Here Dante reformulates that Greek term, itself derived by Uguccione da Pisa from Martianus Capella (see Cesare Vasoli [Il Convivio, in Dante Alighieri, Opere minori, vol. I, part ii (Milan: Ricciardi, 1988)], p. 138n.), into eu (good) and nous (mind – or here perhaps 'memory').

There is some disagreement among the commentators as to whether the rivers' water taken as a whole (i.e., that of both Lethe and Eunoe) is sweeter than any other taste, or whether Eunoe's water is even sweeter than Lethe's, as our translation indicates that we believe.

Chiamenti (“Corollario oitanico al canto ventottesimo del Purgatorio,” Medioevo e rinascimento 13 [1999]), pp. 214-15, citing Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, argues for the classical Latin meaning for the word 'corollary' here, a present or gratuity (e.g., a gift of money offered in exchange for a garland of flowers), as filtered through Old French poems describing ladies in gardens. While we have left the term intact in our translation, we agree with Chiamenti's inclination to read it in the floral tradition of Romance poems, since the whole passage is so redolent of such scenes.

When they were inspired on their holy mountain, Parnassus (that is, when they were most inspired by their muses), the classical poets sang of the age of gold (e.g., Ovid in the beginning of the Metamorphoses, Virgil in his fourth Eclogue). In doing so, they perhaps had some intimation of this place, scene of the true 'golden age,' where mankind was created in innocence and joy.

Ovid's description of the classical 'Eden' (Metam. I.89-112) is remembered closely in this tercet. One of its particulars is arresting. Where Dante makes his springtime eternal, in Ovid (Metam. I.107) it became ephemeral and now leaves us every year: 'ver erat aeternum' (the spring was everlasting). The drama of the fall and resurrection is reflected in this tercet. In this garden humankind was created innocent and fell; nonetheless, the garden awaits our redemption in its eternal unfallen condition, filled with the nectar and ambrosia of the classical Golden Age in its Edenic form: fruit and water (see Purg. XXII.148-150).

Singleton (Journey to Beatrice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967 (1958)], pp. 192-99), points out that the virgin Astraea, or Justice, is a significant presence in both Ovid's and Virgil's presentations of the Golden Age, the last goddess to leave the earth in Ovid's myth, only to return in Virgil's prophecy. And just so, for Singleton, does Matelda serve in the role of Astraea here in Dante's garden, representing original justice (as well as our memory of the unfallen Eve).

The protagonist's series of smiles (beginning at Purg. XXI.109), caused by his pleasure in the prospect of the joy that Statius will experience once he discovers that he is in the company of Virgil, is now matched by the two smiling countenances of those two poets as they understand, through Matelda's 'corollary,' that they have finally found the true Golden Age.