The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Divine Comedy
📖 Click to Read the Opening Pages Online Preview
Inferno, Canto I: the dark wood
In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell It were no easy task, how savage wild That forest, how robust and rough its growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness not far from death. Yet to discourse of what there good befell, All else will I relate discover’d there. How first I enter’d it I scarce can say, Such sleepy dullness in that instant weigh’d My senses down, when the true path I left, But when a mountain’s foot I reach’d, where clos’d The valley, that had pierc’d my heart with dread, I look’d aloft, and saw his shoulders broad Already vested with that planet’s beam, Who leads all wanderers safe through every way. Then was a little respite to the fear, That in my heart’s recesses deep had lain, All of that night, so pitifully pass’d: And as a man, with difficult short breath, Forespent with toiling, ’scap’d from sea to shore, Turns to the perilous wide waste, and stands At gaze; e’en so my spirit, that yet fail’d Struggling with terror, turn’d to view the straits, That none hath pass’d and liv’d. My weary frame After short pause recomforted, again I journey’d on over that lonely steep,
The hinder foot still firmer. Scarce the ascent Began, when, lo! a panther, nimble, light, And cover’d with a speckled skin, appear’d, Nor, when it saw me, vanish’d, rather strove To check my onward going; that ofttimes With purpose to retrace my steps I turn’d. The hour was morning’s prime, and on his way Aloft the sun ascended with those stars, That with him rose, when Love divine first mov’d Those its fair works: so that with joyous hope All things conspir’d to fill me, the gay skin Of that swift animal, the matin dawn And the sweet season. Soon that joy was chas’d, And by new dread succeeded, when in view A lion came, ’gainst me, as it appear’d,
With his head held aloft and hunger-mad, That e’en the air was fear-struck. A she-wolf Was at his heels, who in her leanness seem’d Full of all wants, and many a land hath made Disconsolate ere now. She with such fear O’erwhelmed me, at the sight of her appall’d, That of the height all hope I lost. As one, Who with his gain elated, sees the time When all unwares is gone, he inwardly Mourns with heart-griping anguish; such was I, Haunted by that fell beast, never at peace, Who coming o’er against me, by degrees Impell’d me where the sun in silence rests. While to the lower space with backward step I fell, my ken discern’d the form one of one, Whose voice seem’d faint through long disuse of speech. When him in that great desert I espied, “Have mercy on me!” cried I out aloud, “Spirit! or living man! what e’er thou be!” He answer’d: “Now not man, man once I was, And born of Lombard parents, Mantuana both By country, when the power of Julius yet Was scarcely firm. At Rome my life was past Beneath the mild Augustus, in the time Of fabled deities and false. A bard Was I, and made Anchises’ upright son The subject of my song, who came from Troy, When the flames prey’d on Ilium’s haughty towers. But thou, say wherefore to such perils past Return’st thou? wherefore not this pleasant mount Ascendest, cause and source of all delight?” “And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring, From which such copious floods of eloquence Have issued?” I with front abash’d replied. “Glory and light of all the tuneful train! May it avail me that I long with zeal Have sought thy volume, and with love immense Have conn’d it o’er. My master thou and guide! Thou he from whom alone I have deriv’d That style, which for its beauty into fame Exalts me. See the beast, from whom I fled. O save me from her, thou illustrious sage!
That is the opening of the poem. The full text runs to one hundred cantos in three canticles.
Download Full EPUBc. 1320
~112,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 6.2 hours
Standalone
Hell, Purgatory and Paradise
3 canticles, 100 cantos
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.47 MB (EPUB) · 0.66 MB (AZW3) · 0.55 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #8800
The Divine Comedy is Dante Alighieri’s journey poem in three canticles. Lost in a dark wood, Dante is met by the Roman poet Virgil, who leads him down through the circles of Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory before handing him to Beatrice, the woman whose love first set the poem’s thought toward heaven. What begins as a confession of personal failure becomes an encyclopedia of sin, politics, science and desire, argued in verse and settled, in the last canto, in a vision of Love as the power that turns the heavens.
Dante finished the poem only in the last year of his life, and the hundred cantos are here in English verse rather than in the Italian of the original. Henry Francis Cary’s translation, named on the title page of this transcription, keeps the long sentences and the slow climbing movement of the original, and it is the reading text behind this edition; its blank verse is slower than a modern translation, and it rewards patience. See Wikipedia’s article on the Divine Comedy for the poem’s composition and reception. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #8800.
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of The Divine Comedy, the narrative poem Dante Alighieri finished shortly before his death in 1321. It is the story of a journey and also a catalogue of everything its author believed: the geography of the afterlife, the degrees of human guilt, the duties of emperors and popes, the physics of the heavens and the discipline of desire. The poem is written in the first person, and its pilgrim is no saint but a man who has lost the road, which is why its verdicts fall on him as often as on the damned. It is built in three canticles of thirty-four, thirty-three and thirty-three cantos, one hundred in all, and each canticle ends on the word stars. The three parts differ in tone as much as in subject. If your idea of epic was set by the Iliad or the Odyssey, this is a later and stranger voyage, and the poetry and epics shelf here gathers more of the same kind.
The Inferno takes up the first third. Virgil conducts Dante through the gate whose inscription promises a city of woe, past Charon and the river Acheron, into a funnel of circles where each sin is punished by a parody of itself: the lustful are blown about as passion once blew them, the gluttonous lie in cold filth, the violent boil in blood, the flatterers wallow in the mire their words resembled. The poem’s most famous encounters stand here, Francesca telling how love brought her and her lover to one death, Farinata degli Uberti rising from a burning tomb to defend his party, Ulysses burning in his tongue of flame. The poem’s geography is precise, with each ditch and ledge named and counted, and Virgil supplies the doctrine whenever a punishment needs explaining. At the bottom, frozen in the ice of Cocytus, Lucifer chews Judas, Brutus and Cassius, and the two poets climb down his body to come out under the stars.
Purgatory is the canticle of change. The mountain rises in circles, one for each of the capital sins, with a carving, a prayer and a choir of examples on every one, and the penitents are not tortured but retrained: the proud bend under stones, the envious have their eyes wired shut, the wrathful walk in smoke, the gluttonous are worn to skeletons. An angel marks Dante’s forehead with seven letters and each circle removes one; the climb is slow because the poem wants you to feel how slow reform is. On the way he meets Manfred, saved at the last moment; Sordello, who greets Virgil as a fellow Mantuan; Statius, the poet who credits Virgil with his conversion; and Forese Donati, a friend from Florence whose wasted face he barely recognises. At the summit, in the Earthly Paradise, Virgil vanishes, and Beatrice appears to judge him, correct him and finally cleanse his memory in the rivers Lethe and Eunoe.
Paradise is the hardest and the most beautiful part. Beatrice, now a guide rather than a remembered girl, takes Dante through the spheres of the heavens, and the blessed appear to him as lights, each in the sphere that matches the virtue it loved. The higher he climbs, the less the poem can show and the more it has to argue, and the blessed become progressively harder to tell apart from the light. The poem answers the questions the first two canticles raise: whether the good pagan can be saved, what a vow is worth, how empire and church should stand to one another. Near the end Dante meets his ancestor Cacciaguida, who tells him he will learn how salt the savour is of another’s bread and how hard the passage is by another’s stairs. The poem closes in the white rose of the blessed, and then in silence, with the will rolling onward like a wheel.
Reading the whole poem is a long ascent, and the text here is a plain transcription of one English translation rather than a critical edition: no notes, no line numbers, no facing Italian. The file is a reading copy rather than a study copy, and its canto headings and blank-verse paragraphs survive intact; it is the public-domain text posted as Project Gutenberg #8800, with nothing cut. That is a limitation and also an invitation. Cary’s version carries the architecture of the original in long, end-stopped lines, and its habits of speech occasionally sound archaic, which suits a poem whose vocabulary runs from the technical terms of scholastic philosophy to the slang of the Florentine market. Read it straight through once, then go back to the encounters that hold you. A canto at a time is enough, and the ending is worth the climb, since the last canto answers the question the poem asked in its first.
Historical Context
Dante wrote as a Florentine exile, and the poem never lets you forget it. Florence appears by name again and again, and almost always as a problem: its factions, its money, its appetite for novelty. The poet belonged to a city split between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and his own party later divided again, a division the poem treats as a moral disease rather than a policy. In the Paradiso his ancestor Cacciaguida foretells the exile in words that have never stopped being quoted: “Thou shalt prove How salt the savour is of other’s bread, How hard the passage to descend and climb By other’s stairs”. The command to write the poem comes with the banishment.
The poem’s politics are inseparable from its theology. Boniface VIII, the pope who was Dante’s enemy, is named among the simonists in the eighth circle, and Nicholas III mistakes Dante for Boniface arriving ahead of time: “Ha! already standest there? Already standest there, O Boniface!” The simonists are planted head down in rock with flames playing on their feet, and the whole encounter is an argument about whether the church should hold wealth and temporal power at all. Dante wanted a world empire and a poor church, and he wrote both convictions into the architecture of the afterlife rather than into a treatise.
Dante’s intellectual world was scholastic. The poem builds its Hell out of Aristotle’s ethics, its heaven out of the spheres of Ptolemy, and its arguments out of Thomas Aquinas, whose spirit speaks among the wise as a voice of light. Yet the text here comes without apparatus: no introduction, no notes, no line numbers, and exactly one translator’s aside in the whole poem, where Cary interrupts Beatrice to explain that her name “is pronounced in the Italian, as consisting of four syllables, of which the third is a long one.” That bareness makes the poem look like what it was for its first readers, a story in verse that assumes you will argue with it.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Dante the pilgrim: The narrator and protagonist, a Florentine poet who finds himself astray in a dark wood and is led through the three realms. He trembles, faints, weeps, asks questions and is rebuked, and the poem’s judgements on the dead are always also judgements on the living man who listens. His name is spoken only once in the whole Comedy, by Beatrice on the mountain, which keeps him a witness as much as a character.
- Virgil: The Roman poet of the Aeneid, sent by Beatrice to rescue Dante. He is reason in the poem’s allegory: patient, precise, sometimes testy with his pupil, and unable to enter Paradise because he lived before Christ. He carries Dante down the body of Lucifer, explains the grades of sin and the nature of love, and vanishes at the Earthly Paradise. The farewell is the most painful moment in the poem.
- Beatrice: Dante’s beloved, dead young, who descends from heaven to ask Virgil for help and later becomes the pilgrim’s guide through Paradise. She is theology and revelation, but the poem never lets her be only an idea: she weeps for him, reproaches him on the mountain until he confesses, and smiles. Where Virgil reasons, she commands, and the last canto is possible only because she has asked Bernard to pray for him.
- Francesca: A noblewoman killed with her lover by her husband, she speaks in the second circle, where the lustful are driven by a wind. Her account of reading the story of Lancelot and then kissing is the poem’s first great monologue, and the first place where pity and judgement pull against each other. She blames love itself, and Dante faints at the end of her speech, an answer the poem does not correct.
- Farinata degli Uberti: A Florentine nobleman and Ghibelline leader who rises from a burning tomb in the sixth circle, visible as far as the chin, and refuses to be humbled by the fire or by his political enemy. He asks after his descendants, defends his party, and speaks of his party’s ruin with the flat certainty of the damned. His dignity is the poem’s clearest study of a great soul in Hell.
- Count Ugolino: The Pisan count imprisoned in a tower with his sons, who watched them die of hunger; what happened after the fourth day the poem leaves deliberately half-told. In the ice of the ninth circle he gnaws the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, the man who betrayed him. Told between two frozen heads, his story is the darkest account in the poem of how politics turns a father into a beast.
Core Literary Themes
- Punishment as parody: The Comedy’s torments are built out of the crimes. Gluttons lie in cold filth, flatterers swim in the mire their words resembled, sowers of discord carry their own wounds, and the souls who refused to choose chase a banner in the outer ring. This is the poem’s most imitated invention, and its logic is moral rather than legal: what you loved becomes what you suffer, and the shape of the punishment is the shape of the sin. The scheme is applied with a poet’s eye rather than a lawyer’s, and its register shifts as the poem descends: the upper Hell is almost comic, the lower Hell almost surgical.
- Exile, Florence and politics: The poem is a political book written by a man who had lost his city. Its Hell is full of Florentines, its Paradise is full of arguments about empire and church, and its most personal prophecy is the announcement that Dante will taste another man’s salt bread. Florence is judged, mourned, insulted and loved in the same breath, and no reader can separate the allegory of the soul’s journey from the revenge and grief of a citizen. The exile is not a wound the poem merely reports; it is the condition that makes the poem possible, and Dante says so when Cacciaguida orders him to write.
- Love as order: The Comedy begins with a woman’s love and ends with a vision of Love as the mover of the heavens. Beatrice’s descent, Virgil’s errand and Bernard’s prayer are all acts of love, and the poem refuses to divide sacred from human affection: the earthly Beatrice is the way to the heavenly one. Against this order stands the false love of the lustful and the disordered love of the avaricious, so the poem’s ethics are finally a matter of what and how one loves. The Comedy is therefore a love poem as well as a theological one, and the two are not in competition: Beatrice’s beauty is part of the argument.
- Fame, memory and the poem itself: The dead beg Dante to remember them, and he negotiates constantly with what a name is worth: Bocca degli Abati will not give his, Brunetto Latini asks to be remembered in his book, and the poet worries in Paradise whether his poem will survive the hostility it will provoke. The Comedy is thus about its own survival as much as about the soul’s, and the two questions are never resolved separately. The poem’s own survival is the one prophecy it cannot make safely, since the book that predicts its fame is the book that has to survive to be read.
- Free will and providence: The poem insists that the universe is just, and spends a great deal of time on the objection that it does not look just. Marco Lombardo explains that the stars incline but do not compel; the eagle of justice answers the complaint that a good man is damned; the question of the unbaptised is left as a wound rather than a solution. Dante holds providence and freedom together without dissolving either, and the tension is what gives the cantos their bite. What the poem offers is not a solution but a way of holding providence and freedom together, and the difficulty is part of the design.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Divine Comedy?
Because the poem is long, this edition keeps it in one file, all three canticles and one hundred cantos, with no abridgement and no editorial cutting. The canto headings are preserved, so you can follow the journey from the dark wood to the final vision without losing your place, and you can read it in the order Dante wrote it or open the Inferno alone and treat it as the self-contained book many readers first meet.
Because the translation is readable. Cary’s English keeps the unrhymed verse and the steady climb of the original, and it is old enough to sound like verse rather than prose paraphrase. The text is clean and plain: no notes cluttering the page, no commentary between you and the poem, just the cantos and the translator’s single aside about the name Beatrice.
Because it costs nothing and locks you to nothing. The EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files open in ordinary readers on phones, tablets and e-ink devices, work offline, and carry no DRM. If you want to compare a passage with another translation, nothing stops you, and if you decide the poem is not for you after the third canto, you have lost only the download.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #8800, released in 2005 and the base of this EPUB. Nothing here is retyped, excerpted or condensed.
- Complete in one file All three canticles and one hundred cantos, from the dark wood to the final vision, with the original canto divisions kept intact.
- Cary’s English verse The translation named on the title page, in long declarative lines that keep the pace of the original rather than flattening it into prose.
- No DRM, no app EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB downloads that open in any ordinary reader, including offline on an e-ink device.
- Beowulf — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Prophet — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The Comedy is built in three canticles, each closing on the word stars: Hell in thirty-four cantos, Purgatory and Paradise in thirty-three apiece, one hundred in all, with the numbering starting again at I in each canticle. The summaries below gather the cantos into thirteen movements, following the journey from the dark wood to the final vision.
- Inferno, Cantos I-II: the dark wood and the errand: Dante, midway through his life, wanders into a savage forest and is turned back from the sunlit mountain by three beasts, a panther, a lion and a she-wolf. Virgil appears and offers another road, through Hell and Purgatory to a guide worthier than himself. In the second canto Dante hesitates, comparing himself with Aeneas and with Paul, until Virgil explains that Beatrice descended into Limbo to ask for help. The journey becomes an act of obedience to love. In the second canto the light has gone, and the invocation to the Muses opens the poem proper.
- Inferno, Cantos III-V: the gate, Limbo and Francesca: The gate promises a city of woe and commands that all hope be abandoned at entry. Beyond it lie the neutral souls stung by wasps, then Acheron and Charon’s ferry. In Limbo Dante meets Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan and learns that the virtuous pagans live desiring without hope. Minos assigns punishment by the coils of his tail, and among the lustful Francesca describes how a book and a kiss brought her and her lover to one death. Beyond the gate the souls crowd the river like leaves falling in autumn.
- Inferno, Cantos VI-XI: gluttony to the walls of Dis: Ciacco the glutton prophesies Florence’s factions from the hail of the third circle, Plutus howls, and the avaricious and the prodigal roll great weights against each other in the Styx. Filippo Argenti turns his avenging fangs on Dante in the mire, the Furies threaten Dante at the walls of Dis until a heavenly messenger opens the gate, and among the heretics Farinata degli Uberti rises from his tomb to defend his party. Virgil then explains how violence and fraud are graded, and his lecture on usury and on art as the grandchild of nature is the key to the whole circle.
- Inferno, Cantos XII-XVII: violence, suicides and Geryon: A ruined cliff gives way to the river of boiling blood, where tyrants and murderers are guarded by centaurs. In the wood of the suicides the Harpies nest in thorn trees and a soul speaks through a broken branch. Sodomites walk the burning sand, and Dante meets Brunetto Latini, his old teacher, who asks to be remembered. The group closes with Geryon, the monster with a just man’s face and a serpent’s body, who carries the poets down to the next ring. Brunetto runs off across the sand, and the poem has kept him running ever since.
- Inferno, Cantos XVIII-XXIII: Malebolge: Malebolge is a plain of ten stone trenches. Panderers and seducers are whipped, flatterers sit in filth, simonists are planted head down with flames on their feet, and Pope Nicholas III mistakes Dante for Boniface. Diviners walk with their heads twisted backwards, barrators boil in pitch while demons named for their malice quarrel over them, and hypocrites stagger under cloaks of gilded lead. Caiaphas, who counselled the death of one man for the people, is himself stretched on the ground. The demons’ quarrelling over the barrator is the poem’s broadest comedy.
- Inferno, Cantos XXIV-XXX: thieves, false counsel and falsifiers: Vanni Fucci, a thief, is bound by serpents and burns to ash only to be reassembled, then curses God with both hands. The evil counsellors burn in tongues of flame, Ulysses among them, and the sowers of discord are cut open by a sword, Mohammed and Ali among them. In the last trenches the falsifiers, counterfeiters and perjurers insult each other, and Virgil rebukes Dante for the pleasure he takes in listening, and the canto closes on a prophecy of Florence’s ruin.
- Inferno, Cantos XXXI-XXXIV: giants, ice and the stars: A horn blast announces the giants sunk to their waists in the pit, Nimrod among them, whose pride cost mankind a single language. Antaeus lowers the poets into Cocytus, the frozen lake of traitors, where Count Ugolino gnaws the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri and tells of the tower where his sons died of hunger. At the centre Lucifer stands breast-deep in ice, three-faced, chewing Judas, Brutus and Cassius. Virgil climbs down his body, and the two emerge to see the stars. The last words of the canticle are the first rest in the poem.
- Purgatorio, Cantos I-IX: the mountain and the gate: Dawn over the southern sea, four stars never seen by anyone since the first parents, and Cato the Roman keeping the shore. Casella arrives singing, Manfred waits with the late-repentant outside the gate, and in a dream an eagle lifts Dante to the threshold, where an angel scores seven letters on his forehead with a sword. The marks stand for the sins still to be purged, and one is wiped away at each circle. The gate is the needle’s eye of the mountain, and the angel’s sword is the first image of penance in the poem.
- Purgatorio, Cantos X-XX: the circles of sin: The lower slopes teach humility through carvings, the proud bend under stones, the envious have their eyes sewn shut with wire, the wrathful walk in smoke and the gluttonous starve. Dante dreams of a siren, and hears Hugh Capet denounce the greed of his descendants. Avarice, gluttony and lust are the last three sins, and each circle has its examples of virtue shouted aloud by the penitents. In the smoke of the wrathful Dante meets Marco Lombardo, and their argument about free will is the philosophical centre of the canticle.
- Purgatorio, Cantos XXI-XXXIII: the Earthly Paradise: Statius, freed from avarice, joins the poets and explains that Virgil’s poetry converted him; Forese Donati, Dante’s friend, appears wasted by hunger and asks Dante to speak to him. A wall of fire must be walked through, and a dream of Leah and Rachel prepares for what follows. On the summit Dante enters the Earthly Paradise, sees a procession, and meets Beatrice, who reproaches him until he weeps; Virgil is gone. The last cantos turn from penance to pageant, and the Earthly Paradise is the poem’s most visual set piece.
- Paradiso, Cantos I-XIV: the spheres: Beatrice explains the order of the heavens as Dante rises. Piccarda tells why a broken vow may be forgiven, Justinian recites Roman history in one long speech, and Charles Martel and Cunizza answer questions about providence and love. In the heaven of the sun, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure each praise the founder of the other’s order, and the canticle’s early questions about creation, angels and the resurrection of the body are answered at last. Justinian’s speech is the poem’s compressed history of Rome, and it takes a whole canto to itself.
- Paradiso, Cantos XV-XXII: Cacciaguida and the eagle: Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida, seen in the cross of Mars, describes the old Florence and forecasts the exile: how salt the savour is of another’s bread, how hard the passage by another’s stairs. The eagle of justice answers the old complaint that the good suffer, and the ladder of contemplation leads up through the spheres, where Dante glimpses the triumphant Christ and hears the apostles sing. Cacciaguida’s Florence is small, sober and sung in the past tense.
- Paradiso, Cantos XXIII-XXXIII: the rose and the silence: Peter examines Dante on faith, James on hope, John on love, and Adam explains language and the fall. Bernard takes over as guide, points out the white rose of the blessed and prays to the Virgin on Dante’s behalf. In the last canto the vision fails the memory but not the will, which rolls onward like a wheel in even motion, moved by the Love “That moves the sun in heav’n and all the stars.” The last word of the poem is stars, as it is in each of the three canticles.
The Divine Comedy: Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Divine Comedy one poem or three?
Which translation is this edition?
Do I have to read Inferno first?
Is the poem hard for a first-time reader?
Is this the whole Comedy or only the Inferno?
Is Dante’s Inferno the same as The Divine Comedy?
How long will it take me to read?
Where can I get the text for free?
Part of: Poetry & Epics · Classic Fiction
