Figurative Language (Format and Structure

of Dante’s Inferno)
As we all know, or at least should know by now, Dante Aligierhi
was a poet. Like any modern poet of his time, Dante was a deeply
religious man. Well at least to certain extents at least. Dante found
Christianity to be a source of inspiration for his poems. In the case of
the Inferno it is genuinely reflected in the way he wrote this divine
comedy.
He uses his own form of figurative language and a pattern of the
number three which represents the Holy Trinity in Christianity. It is uses
in the structure of the entire poem. Every verse is in several groups of
3. First of all, the verses all consist of three lines. Second of all, there
are three patterns of a rhyming system: 1.A-B-A 2.B-C-B and 3.C-D-C.
Each repeated letter represents where the rhyming words are. The
number three can also be found in the three different parts of the
comedy which are Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The number of
circles of hell is also a representation of the Holy Trinity. There are nine
circles and nine is a multiple of three. These forms of the number three
are just a few of the many ways we can find figurative language in
Dante’s Inferno.
Figurative Language is used all throughout Dante’s Inferno. It
would be nearly impossible to go through and show you every single
form of figurative language used in the entire comedy, so I’ll just show
you a few examples from Circles Six and Seven point one:

Line 52 of lines 52-54 of page 105 in my section uses a metaphorical

reference, a form of figurative language, when talking about the sin of fraud:
52 Fraud, which is a canker to every conscience,

53 may be practiced by a man on those who trust him,

54 and on those who have reposed no confidence.

A metaphor is a comparison of one thing to another without using the words

“like” or “as.”
I line fifty-two, Virgil calls the sin of fraud “a canker to any conscience.” A
canker is a defined area of disease or a sore. By using Virgil to call it this,
Dante means to say that he sees the sin of fraud as a huge ailment on the
conscience of a human, and that is a flaw that will surely get you sentenced
to a very low place in hell. (Specifically circles 8 or 9)

On line 71 of lines 70-74 on the same page and page 106 Dante, as the
author, uses another form of figurative language, personification, to ask
Virgil about the way the heretics are punished in circle 6:

70 But tell me: those who lie in the swamp’s bowels,

71 those the wind blows about, those the rain beats,

72 and those who meet and clash with such mad howls

73 why are they not punished in the rust-red city…

Personification means giving a nonliving object human features or the ability

to do human things. It is used to show people exactly what they’re trying to
portray by using something that we are all familiar with; our own bodies. In
this entry Dante gives the swamp bowels, the wind the ability to blow, and
the rain the ability to beat the sinners. His use of personification in this entry
is one of many different steps in giving us a better understanding of the
structure of the different levels of sin and of hell itself.

On line 3 of lines 1-3 on page 110, Dante uses Hyperbole to describe the
landscape of the plunge into the first round of circle seven:

1 The scene that opens from the edge of the pit

2 was mountainous, and such a desolation

3 that every eye would shun the sight of it

Hyperbole, by definition, is the use of intentional exaggeration n order to

make a bold statement. Now obviously everyone in this world thinks in
different ways, and not every single person on earth would “shun the sight”
of the first descent into circle seven of Hell. Some people might find this
huge monstrosity interesting and fascinating. Therefore, the statement that
“every eye would shun the sight of it” is the exaggerated point in this section
making this line an example of hyperbole.