purgatory in Divine Comedy

And of that second kingdom will I sing Wherein the human spirit doth purge itself, And to ascend to heaven becometh worthy. Having left the tormenting sights of the Inferno, Dante/pilgrim Dante now begins to sing of Purgatory. He compares his intelligence to a boat that is about cross waters that are kinder than hell. In this second kingdom, Purgatory, souls are cleansed of their sins. He invokes Calliope, the head Muse to help him so that his poem may rise again from the dead realm of Hell.   Feeling relieved to be out of hell, where "the miserable magpies felt /The blow so great, that they despaired of pardon", Dante is delighted to see the pure sky once again, ' the sweet colour of the oriental sapphire"! In his notes of the translation of 'Divine Comedy', Henry Wadsworth Longfellow explains, "  The Mountain of Purgatory is a vast conical mountain, rising steep and high from the waters of the Southern Ocean, at a point antipodal to Mount Sio...

Dante and the Three Kingdoms, 1465 Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence                                                         https://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/d/domenico/michelin/dante.html To read Dante's 'Divine Comedy' has been on my bucket list for quite some years. But argh! The bulk of the text and its sublime language had always posed some mental block within me. But recently I happened to google and to see some illustrations by Gustave Dore which had such astounding effects on my mental realm. Stunning, I must say! Now I feel  I am almost prepared to enter the vast Dantesque domain. !!  'Inferno' can wait, I'm afraid, for some future date. But 'Purgatorio' may accede to cooperate with my limited IQ !! So today let me just begin with a little intro. Since the time of the early church, the faithful had praye...