Circle 7 Round 2: Archetypes and their meanings

Dante and Virgil continue there journey into Hell by meeting the souls of the suicides in Circle Seven Round Two. Their "...unhealthy branches, gnarled and warped and tangled..."(102) give the reader a clear image that these souls are very weak and hurt. Here they committed violence to themselves now serving their punishment in Hell as trees in a forrest. Harpies come and snatch pieces of them making them bleed and have to ability to talk as they bleed. Dante's use of the trees to as an archetypal symbol is very important to not only the sin, but the punishment of the suicides crime.

To really understand this blog question, every detail to this round is significant. The Harpies, for example, were known in Greek Mythology to steal food from Phineas and the word meaning "to snatch". This would then be a very symbolic creature to steal the souls limbs from them, for they are one of the most important things they have. This then goes back to the contropasso with the Harpies break and tear the souls apart "...feeding on it's leaves.../ give it pain and pain's outlet simultaneously." (105) The souls of the Suicides now have to perminatly live as trees, being denied a human body that they destroyed an Harpies constantly attacking them to remind them of what they did. 

Also the choosing of the tree as the souls also was an interesting choice. When I think of a tree and God together, The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life pop into my head. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil defiantly can relate to the suicides with both the suicides and Adam and Eve both doing harm to themselves even when they know it's wrong by God. Even when Dante writes '.. bore poison thorns instead of fruit"(102), that mentioning of not having fruit could also imply that they will never have the pure and healthy life like The Tree of Life and also another sign back to Adam and Eve. It's like God's throwing it back in the Suicides faces that they will always be in the state of how they died and nothing more. 

Harpie

This whole round, like the majority of the book, was specifically calculated by Dante to be symbolic and make sense. When you look up every detail in the Round, all of the creatures and things included go back to the sin of the souls. Dante does this to show the reader how he views this sin. We do this by not just looking at the symbols in the round, but also Dante's reactions to the souls. This and the symbols give a clear picture to the reader of how the contropasso makes sense to the crime. It gives the book a fine opinion supported by tons and tons of evidence that support his claim to how they will be punished forever and ever. 




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5kX8KWYCf8&feature=fvst
This is a link to a storyboard animated videos that someone did for a class. I thought it was cool in how she interpreted the Canto.