It is not true of many another Canto, as it certainly is of Purg. V, that its thematic structure recapitulates the movement of the whole Divine Comedy. It does this by looking back to the earth of the living and eventually re-echoing the infernal world, while at its climax foreshadowing Paradise; indeed a Paradisal anticipation can be overheard in the Canto even before the transfigured voice of Pia de’ Tolomei comes to suggest heavenly peace as an antiphon to the remembered turmoil of murder, battle, and storm. Few Cantos exhibit such variety of tones, and no other so thoroughly rehearses the fundamental gesture of the Comedy from the perspective of Purgatory—a privileged perspective for our poet, who can here enjoy the double advantage of closeness to earth, to human history with its passions, and openness to heaven. We might rephrase this by pointing out how this closeness to the physical world is also a distance. The empire of passion—a slavery in Hell—is now left behind, and viewed at one remove, with the liberty warranted by final hope. Yet this hope is bound up with memory, and love with suffering—we are “no longer down there” but also “not yet up there”; we are in a middle kingdom, a kingdom of impermanence between two extremes—and as such indeed the ideal kingdom of artists, who significantly abound on the slopes of this island mountain. A further consideration will show that this transitory stage between two worlds [the one of despair and the one of ecstasy] is the more nearly human world, the one where man, although he has left his flesh behind, must labor to transcend its residual heritage.

In Canto V, transitoriness is even more poignant because we are still in Antepurgatorio—on the threshold of Heaven's threshold, so to speak, in a kind of no man's land where the souls feel their earthly ties along with the urgency of an admission to the hierarchy of purgative suffering. The relief at knowing themselves saved is counterpointed by recurrent nostalgia, as unforgettably focussed by the beginning of Canto VIII. Nostalgia grips Dante and Casella upon meeting each other on Purgatory shore, so that stern Cato has to break up what is an emotional and aesthetic indulgence to urge the new arrivals on to their assignments.

A similar sternness prompts Virgil in turn to scold his easily distracted ward at the beginning of our Canto, when the thronging souls' cries of wonder at Dante's corporeality [he is the only one there to cast a shadow] cause the unghostly one to slow down:

… vidile guardar per maraviglia
pur me, pur me, e ‘l lume ch’era rotto.
“Perché l’animo tuo tanto s’impiglia”
disse ‘l maestro, “che l’andare allenti?
che ti fa ciò che quivi si pispiglia?
Vien dietro a me, e lascia dir le genti …

Virgil's sententious admonition here, exhorting Dante to keep his purpose more firmly in mind, sounds excessive at first by comparison with the slight occasion for it [in the same way, one resents Cato's censorious intrusion upon the lovely gathering in Canto II]. Our sympathy is with the spontaneous behavior of the childishly curious souls, and with Dante's equally spontaneous reaction:

… e seguitava l’orme del mio duca,
quando di retro a me, drizzando il dito,
una gridò: “Ve’ che non par che luca
lo raggio da sinistra a quel di sotto,
e come vivo par che si conduca!”
Gli occhi rivolsi al suon di questo motto,
e vidile guardar per maraviglia …

Actually, our pilgrim is emerging from the midst of the negligent souls, and his solicitous guide has reason to warn him against any waste of time. Dante has just taken his leave of lazy Belacqua [Canto IV], and the natural action of turning around and slowing down his gait at the voice of curiosity is too natural for comfort in view of the self-purifying task that awaits him in this realm of purification. At the gate of Purgatory proper, the angel will tell Dante that there is no turning back. As against the solicitude and ascetic purposiveness required by the situation, Belacqua was a comical portrait of the allzumenschlich man, of non-self-transcending naturalness. And a comic note—of the refined quality compatible with Purgatorial atmosphere—rings on right here at the beginning of Canto V, down to Dante's blush at his master's reproach: the self-mortification of the poet renders a kind of poetic justice to Belacqua. We shall find more examples of this Purgatorial humor later on, when Virgil and Dante momentarily conspire to keep eager Statius in the dark about the revered Latin's identity, or when [XXIV, 2-24] Forese shows his friend Dante the Rabelaisian Pontiff who is now purging his immoderate taste for

l’anguille di Bolsena e la vernaccia.

And at the beginning of Canto VI, as a kind of comic relief from the high pitch reached in Canto V through the tragic voices of Jacopo, Buonconte, and Pia, we shall see Dante again involved in a situation of humorous import when the anxious souls crowd around him to wrest promises he knows he cannot keep, feeling as he does like a winning player beset by the less fortunate ones.

To be sure, the comic note is never an end in itself, but only modulates consummate transitions to lyrical transport, as at the end of Canto XXI, when Statius embraces Virgil unexpectedly recognized “trattando l’ombre come cosa salda,” or at the outset of Canto VI, where the animation of the garrulously insistent petitioners around Dante turns out to provide a sharp foil for the affectionate meeting of Virgil with his proudly solitary fellow poet from Mantua and for Dante's own passionate invective against strife-ridden Italy. Here in Canto V, the comical start will gradually introduce the complex choreography that is to culminate in the sustained trio of two warriors and a woman whose epitaph rings forever in our mind's ear. In ranging through such a vast gamut of tones, Dante's gift for dramatic modulation shows to advantage as he reattains a pitch worthy of Inferno's strongest moments yet with an ease, an airiness which would have been impossible there. This ease springs from the new acceptance of human nature as something to be improved, but also understood [hence the airy nature of humor here], and from the detachment with which life on earth is viewed [hence the airy nature of tragedy here: the Antepurgatorio spirits who died violently and repented at the last moment are still recent dead, still very much of earth, yet not so bound to their earthly roots that they cannot rise above them in the very act of describing their earthly end: a cathartic serenity softens the notes of pity and horror here, whereas horror and pity held full sway in Hell].

In such a context, ease is only the other side of solicitude, or else the initial comedy could not lead so naturally to the crescendo of earnestness that brings the Canto, as a subordinate organic unit of the long poem, to its resolution. Consider the comedy of manners, the ritual of etiquette that provides the initial movement: the curious souls attracting Dante's attention, Dante's response [a mixture of embarrassment, amusement, and vanity, as expressed by that “pur me, pur me”] eliciting Virgil's reprimand [no time to lose!], Dante dutifully falling into line as a scolded schoolboy, then a renewed interruption, harder to ignore because it comes, this time, from a flock of souls walking in front and across our visitors' path, not behind; and also because they seem less idle and gossipy than the others—they are brought up short in their absorbing litany by the unexpected discovery of a living visitor in their realm:

E ’ntanto per la costa di traverso
venivan genti innanzi a noi un poco,
cantando ‘Miserere’ a
verso a verso.
Quando s’accorser ch’i’ non dava loco
per lo mio corpo al trapassar de’ raggi,
mutar lor canto in un ‘Oh!’ lungo e roco …

Again, it is a comical note that elicits dramatic movement and plausibility: Dante's “realism,” to say it with Luigi Malagoli, Dante's observance, Dante's spare language which is all things and actions, and thus makes the essential innuendos possible. At this point, the proceedings cease to be casual and formalize themselves into a kind of courtly choreography, with the new group of souls sending out two messengers to find out who our two pilgrims are, and the messengers returning to their senders with Virgil's diplomatic reply—a reply which shows some relenting from his earlier refusal to get involved with these curious people, without however failing to make the point that Dante's time is precious:

           … “Voi potete andarne
e ritrarre a color che vi mandaro
che ‘l corpo di costui è vera carne.
Se per veder la sua ombra restaro,
com’io avviso, assai è lor risposto:
faccianli onore, ed esser può lor caro”.

Virgil's diplomacy is a matter of solicitude for his pupil, whom he is trying to shield from importunate curiosity. There is condescension in his message to the eager souls, and just as he reproached Dante for indulging in idle diversion, he now emphasizes to the crowding inhabitants of the place the importance of the distinguished “foreign” visitor. The exhortation to honor Dante may, however, imply more than a plea for discretion: it leaves the door open for an interview if the souls here met have more serious business in mind than childlike curiosity. Thus, by a carefully worded after-thought, Virgil the severe mentor becomes once again the tactful intercessor—his severity being definitively mollified by the meteor-like swiftness with which the two messengers flit back to report his words to their group, and by the group's quick response:

Vapori accesi non vid’io sì tosto
di prima notte mai fender sereno,
né, sol calando, nuvole d’agosto,
che color non tornasser suso in meno;
e, giunti là, con li altri a noi dier volta
come schiera che scorre sanza freno.

Apart from the airy, almost Paradisal quality of the similes employed to depict the messengers' rapidity and their senders' promptness in forcing an interview upon our exceptional visitor, it is hard to miss in their action a touch of humor which seems consistent with their bodiless nature. This Purgatorial smile compounds loss and deliverance [what does it mean to have shed a body without yet attaining the ultimate fulfillment of Heaven? small wonder that the bodiless ones fuss about Dante's corporeal integrity, and that the theme of flesh unexpectedly present and flesh too suddenly relinquished runs through the whole Canto, counterpointing smile to sadness!]. The humor is not lost on Virgil the impatient but benevolent oldtimer of the Beyond vis-à-vis these newcomers; at the same time, our stern master of ceremonies would not countenance the sudden unrestraint of these recent dead [who still have to undergo the refining ordeals of Purgatory, and still belong in a no man's land], and he would not plead their cause with Dante, as he does in lines 43-45, if he did not sense in their haste [an otherwise unseemly form of behavior for him] a candid expression of zest. Curiosity was a regrettable form of self-indulgence, but it actually sparked solicitude, and this affords a mutual reward in the initially casual encounter. It is here, at the hinge of dramatic action, when external movement rises to its climax, that comedy modulates into deep earnestness, with Virgil withdrawing from conversation to let Dante take over.

“Questa gente che preme a noi è molta”: these people are not to be put off, and they must not, for their urgency is an imperious prayer, “e vegnonti a pregar.” The exchange between them and Dante can only be defined as passionate courtesy; the diplomacy of exploration yields to the effusion of prayer, the heightened form of solicitude, which includes the dead and the living and makes Dante an intercessor in his turn between the two worlds. This justifies pragmatically the dramatic device of “building up” Dante's person from the start by having him function as the center of converging interest from all sides. There is appropriate dramatic progression in the way Virgil passes on to Dante the role of interceding for the dead with the living, and this progression develops further as Dante hears out the soliciting chorus and in so doing yields in his turn the center of the stage. The dead—for whom it is a little like returning to life to have the privilege of speaking to a man in flesh and blood—first address him as a unanimous chorus, to state their condition and general request; they want to be recognized or at least known, so that their plight and their need for supporting prayer may be reported to whoever cares in the world they so abruptly left:

“O anima che vai per esser lieta
con quelle membra con le quai nascesti”
venian gridando, “un poco il passo queta.
Guarda s’alcun di noi unqua vedesti,
sì che di lui di là novella porti:
deh, perché vai? deh, perché non t’arresti?
Noi fummo tutti già per forza morti,
e peccatori infino a l’ultima ora …”

Then, after Dante denies having ever met any of them before, and assures them of his willingness to help, in the name of that peace which through Virgil

di mondo in mondo cercar mi si face,

the chorus individualizes itself in a succession of three personal voices summarizing three unique destinies. This is the full release of the dead folk's urgency [“questa gente che preme a noi è molta …”], and here the poetry of the episode gains full momentum with the utmost sharpening of dramatic focus. The initial groping of curiosity and wonder has become dawning cognition and final recognition, even if not of the kind that previous personal acquaintance makes possible in the cases of a Latini, a Casella or a Forese. The latter kind, of course, would have demanded a continued dialogue between poet and interlocutor, with the intimate touches that are out of place in this different context, where the voice of each self-revealing figure supersedes that of its intent evoker.

If the breathless sequence of the three tragic stories, punctuated only by Dante's question to Buonconte about Buonconte's burial, rhythmically embodies the release of mounting pressure, the fullest expansion of that delayed release has to be seen in Buonconte's prolonged description of the devil-conjured storm and flood which disposed of his forlorn corpse. The onrush of his words mimetically parallels the fury of the torrential waters, and throws into sharper relief the epigrammatic composure of Pia's elegy:

“Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
e riposato de la lunga via”
seguitò il terzo spirito al secondo,
“ricorditi di me che son la Pia:
Siena mi fé; disfecemi Maremma;
salsi colui che 'nnanellata pria
disposando m’avea con la sua gemma”.

Here the expansive momentum of release makes room for an ingathering of the voice, an orchestral etherealization resulting from diminished volume and higher register—fit climax for the dramatic progression we have been tracing in the elaborate unfolding of this rich Canto. After Jacopo del Cassaro's grim account of his bloody death, and Buonconte's story of the power that hell wields on earth, Pia de’ Tolomei's feminine gentleness brings a glimmer of Paradisal peace in the stormy context. Unlike her rugged male companions, she avoids grisly details and—in prefiguration of Paradiso style—gives us the purified essence of her destiny on earth [“Siena mi fé; disfecemi Maremma”]. This shows even in her choice of the most symbolically comprehensive verb for the action of death [“Maremma unmade me”] as against the specific realism of “I fell” on the part of both Jacopo and Buonconte [“Corsi al palude, e le cannucce e ’l braco / m’impigliar sì, ch’i’ caddi …”; “e quivi / caddi e rimase la mia carne sola”].

Thus gentle Pia, midway between Francesca and Beatrice, crowns this foreshortened epic of medieval Italy [the dimension Vico saw as dominant in our manifold poem] with her unwarlike song; and she does that the better because she reveals herself as the very essence of solicitude in this Canto where solicitude provides the keynote against a background of the world's ravages and neglect. Jacopo and Buonconte urge Dante to obtain prayers for them from the survivors; she thinks first of his fatiguing journey, as a sister would, and of the rest he will have to take before busying himself with his embassies from the world of the dead. Her greater detachment from earth and selfishness shows also in the discretion of her request to Dante, whom she merely asks to remember her, while Jacopo gives specific directions as to what to do for him in his native town of Fano, and Buonconte laments that “Giovanna o altri non ha di me cura.” Jacopo even sighs for the world he left when he considers that, if he had not taken the wrong path to escape his murderers, he would “still be there, where one breathes.” It is an understandable trait in such a man of action that he should fleetingly regret the lost chance for further action on earth, while Pia, a passive victim, only thinks of herself in passive terms, even stylistically [“Siena made me; Maremma unmade me; … he knows who … had put his wedding ring on me”]. It is likewise understandable that she, a woman, should refer to her murderous husband [without of course mentioning his name, as if to exorcise him in the very act of bringing him into the picture] and wistfully think of the wedding ceremony.

But all the Canto has been a ceremony enacting the progression of solicitude, as those dead well know who remember their “deserted flesh” and their untended name among the living [“non ha di me cura …”]. Dramatic characterization has undergone a gradual heightening to ritual choreography and choral song, as led by choragus Jacopo and concluded by the soprano voice of Pia. Between Belacqua's laziness in Canto IV and Dante's outburst of patriotic outrage in Canto VI, the awakening and intensification of cura is aptly placed in Canto V. As an ambassador of the dead, Dante speaks to the living, and if he cares for the individual destiny of each purging soul, he cares even more for the communal destiny of Italy and Christianity, which embraces the living and the dead. But only a poet—especially a poet among poets here in Purgatorio—can be trusted with such a mission, and the occasional reluctance he and Virgil show to the thronging souls that want to be heard is only ironic dramatization of this solicitous care. The souls crowding around Dante in Cantos V and VI are characters in search of an author. Like Pirandello's figures in the play by that name and in a short story related to it, these souls solicit their prospective author because they want to exist more fully. It is a double deliverance they expect of him: that he obtain prayers on their behalf to shorten their waiting period in Purgatory, and that he renew their memory on earth—by giving them a local habitation and a name in his poem. If he cannot satisfy all of them, this only dramatizes the magnitude of his task as a poet, as the intermediary zwischen zwei Welten, and his awareness of the impossibility to do total justice to his mission. But the fact that some of these restless ghosts do find their author in Dante seals his success, while objectifying for us the progress of solicitude as the drama of poetry taking shape right here, in this Purgatorial Limbo, on the threshold of a threshold—where the poet's concern for his prospective creatures is most urgently needed, and coincides with his concern for the world they once shared.