Past the judge, the second circle announces itself first as noise — wailing that arrives before anything is visible — and then as a wind that never stops, a black storm carrying the souls of the lustful in flocks the way winter carries starlings; and while Dante watches, Virgil points into the gale and names the famous dead one by one, empresses and queens and the heroes of Troy, until the pilgrim who came down here to look at justice finds that what has actually happened to him is pity.
Inferno · Canto 5 · Lines 25–72 · Scene 15
The judge is behind them. Dante steps down into the second circle, and the first thing that changes is the sound: wailing reaches him before he can see anything at all. Then he arrives somewhere strange — a place he describes as silent of all light, which is a deliberately impossible way to put it, and which bellows like a sea in a storm when opposing winds fight over it. That is the second circle. A black wind blows here and never stops, and it carries the souls of the lustful with it, spinning them, striking them, giving them nothing to hold on to. When they come to a certain place, the screaming and lamenting rises, and they curse the power of God. Then Dante tells us plainly what these people did to deserve it, and the definition is worth slowing down for: these are the carnal sinners, the ones who put reason underneath appetite. Not people who wanted things — people who let wanting do the steering. Dante gives us two pictures of what the crowd looks like. First, starlings: the way a huge flock gets carried on their own wings in the cold season, wide and full, that is how the wind takes the ordinary lustful, this way and that, up and down, with no hope of rest and not even the hope of a smaller pain. Then, cranes: the way cranes fly in a long line singing their sad songs, that is how the famous ones come, drawn out in a row, wailing as they pass. Dante asks who they are, and Virgil starts naming. The first was an empress who ruled many languages, so broken by lust that she wrote her own desires into law to keep from being blamed for them — Semiramis. Then a woman Virgil will not name, who killed herself for love and broke faith with her dead husband’s ashes. Then Cleopatra. Then Helen, who cost the world so many terrible years; then Achilles, who fought with love at the end and lost; then Paris, then Tristan. Virgil points into the wind and names more than a thousand, all of them people love drove out of life. And here the scene turns away from them and onto Dante. He has just listened to his teacher recite the ladies and knights of the old world like a roll call of the dead — and what happens to him is not horror at their punishment. Pity takes him, and he says he was nearly lost. That last word is the same one he used for himself at the very beginning of the poem, in the dark wood. Something has gone wrong with the pilgrim, and the two souls he is about to speak to have not even opened their mouths yet.
The Italian — Tempest of the Lustful
Source: Wikisource (public domain, pre-1929 text)
Lines 25–27
25. Or incomincian le dolenti note26. a farmisi sentire; or son venuto27. là dove molto pianto mi percuote.
literary key: Line 25 — ‘le dolenti note’ — the notes of grief. ‘Note’ is a word for musical notes, and it opens the circle on the ear before the eye: this is the first region of Hell whose inhabitants are introduced by the sound they make. The canto that ends in a poem about reading begins by treating suffering as music. [Model knowledge · high]
vocabulary: Line 27 — ‘mi percuote’ — strikes me. The verb belongs to blows, not to hearing. Weeping is given physical force against the pilgrim’s body, which prepares the wind that will shortly be doing the same thing to everyone else in the circle. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 28–30
28. Io venni in loco d’ogne luce muto,29. che mugghia come fa mar per tempesta,30. se da contrari venti è combattuto.
literary key: Line 28 — ‘loco d’ogne luce muto’ — a place mute of all light. Light is granted the power of speech and then denied it. Dante had used the figure once before, at ‘dove ‘l sol tace’ — where the sun is silent — and here he expands it from one line into a whole region. Modern criticism often calls this synaesthesia; the term was coined centuries later, and the rhetoric Dante himself would have recognized is catachresis, a deliberately improper comparison. [Source: Inferno I.60 (‘dove ‘l sol tace’)]
vocabulary: Line 29 — ‘mugghia’ — bellows. The verb is used of cattle, and it keeps the animal register that entered the canto with Minos’ snarl. The comparison that follows turns on contrariety: a sea fought over by opposing winds, motion with no direction in it. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 31–33
31. La bufera infernal, che mai non resta,32. mena li spirti con la sua rapina;33. voltando e percotendo li molesta.
literary key: Line 31 — ‘La bufera infernal, che mai non resta’ — the infernal squall, which never rests. The punishment of this circle, named at last, and defined by the clause attached to it: what makes the storm infernal is that it does not stop. The fourteenth-century commentator Guido da Pisa read it as the lustful soul’s condition in life, blown by every wind of temptation and never at rest, citing Isaiah on the wicked heart as a sea that cannot be quiet. [Model knowledge · high]
vocabulary: Line 32 — ‘con la sua rapina’ — with its seizing. ‘Rapina’ is the noun of snatching and carrying off, the same root that gives ‘rapture’ and ‘rape’; it makes the wind an agent that takes hold rather than a weather condition the souls are merely standing in. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 34–36
34. Quando giungon davanti a la ruina,35. quivi le strida, il compianto, il lamento;36. bestemmian quivi la virtù divina.
literary key: Line 34 — ‘davanti a la ruina’ — before the ruin. This is the hardest word in the canto and it has never been solved. Six separate schools of interpretation have been counted. The most attractive to English readers treats it as the fissure opened in Hell’s rock by the earthquake at the Crucifixion, named openly only at Inferno XII; the objection is that Dante would nowhere else make a word wait seven cantos for its sense. Others read ‘ruina’ in a secondary sense as fury or violence, taking the storm itself as the antecedent. Each reading costs something in grammar. [Model knowledge · high]
literary key: Line 36 — ‘bestemmian quivi la virtù divina’ — there they blaspheme the divine power. Reported flat, with no comment. The souls of this circle curse the authority that placed them, and the narrator neither rebukes them nor treats the curse as evidence; it is simply part of the noise the place makes. [Model knowledge · high]
Lines 37–39
37. Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento38. enno dannati i peccator carnali,39. che la ragion sommettono al talento.
literary key: Line 38 — ‘i peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento’ — the carnal sinners, who subject reason to appetite. Dante’s definition of lust, and it works entirely at the level of the faculties: no act is named, no body part is punished. The sin is an inversion of the faculties, appetite installed above reason. Nothing in the Comedy inflicts sexualized torture, which sets the poem sharply apart from the vision literature and the painted Last Judgments of Dante’s own day. [Model knowledge · high]
vocabulary: Line 39 — ‘talento’ — appetite, the wanting faculty, not talent in the modern sense. The word carries the technical weight of the definition: what is condemned is the arrangement in which ‘talento’ gives the orders. A likely model is Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, whose chapter on chastity describes reason left underneath desire in whoever lets himself be conquered. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 40–42
40. E come li stornei ne portan l’ali41. nel freddo tempo, a schiera larga e piena,42. così quel fiato li spiriti mali
cultural ref: Line 40 — ‘li stornei’ — the starlings. The first of the canto’s three bird similes, and its model is Virgilian: the massed flights of Aeneid VI. The starling flock supplies anonymity and scale, a crowd with no individuals in it, and the choice of birds carries an old assumption that lust belongs to creatures below the human. [Model knowledge · high]
Lines 43–45
43. di qua, di là, di giù, di sù li mena;44. nulla speranza li conforta mai,45. non che di posa, ma di minor pena.
literary key: Line 43 — ‘di qua, di là, di giù, di sù’ — this way, that way, down, up. Four monosyllabic directions in a single line, each cancelling the last. The verse performs aimlessness by refusing to resolve toward any one of them, and the verb it finally reaches, ‘mena’ — drives, leads — will become the canto’s key word for what love does to people. [Model knowledge · high]
literary key: Line 45 — ‘non che di posa, ma di minor pena’ — neither of rest, nor even of lesser pain. ‘Posa’ is the crucial noun. The storm was defined at line 31 as what never rests, and the souls are defined here by being denied rest, which places the whole circle inside the Augustinian account of desire as a heart in motion that cannot find quiet. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 46–48
46. E come i gru van cantando lor lai,47. faccendo in aere di sé lunga riga,48. così vid’io venir, traendo guai,
cultural ref: Line 46 — ‘i gru van cantando lor lai’ — the cranes go singing their lais. The ‘lai’ is a form of the French love-lyric, and the word was used by the Provençal poets for the laments of amorous birds; the famous lovers arrive singing love-songs. Cranes in formation come from Virgil and from Statius, and the shift from the starlings’ scattered flock to ‘lunga riga’, a long line, is functional — a row can be reviewed and named, which is what Virgil is about to do. [Model knowledge · high]
vocabulary: Line 48 — ‘traendo guai’ — drawing out wails. ‘Guai’ rhymes with ‘lai’ two lines above, binding the love-song to the howl: the sound these souls make is both at once. The word already opened the canto at line 3, where the narrower circle ‘punge a guaio’, goads to wailing. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 49–51
49. ombre portate da la detta briga;50. per ch’i’ dissi: «Maestro, chi son quelle51. genti che l’aura nera sì gastiga?».
vocabulary: Line 51 — ‘l’aura nera’ — the black air. ‘Aura’ is a soft word, the breeze of love poetry, and Dante blackens it. The question it carries is the pilgrim’s first act in this circle: he asks for names, and the request is what produces the catalogue. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 52–54
52. «La prima di color di cui novelle53. tu vuo’ saper», mi disse quelli allotta,54. «fu imperadrice di molte favelle.
vocabulary: Line 54 — ‘imperadrice di molte favelle’ — empress of many tongues. The periphrasis measures an empire by the number of languages it swallowed, and it withholds the name for four more lines. Virgil’s catalogue works by delay throughout: the description arrives first and the reader is left to supply, or wait for, the person. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 55–57
55. A vizio di lussuria fu sì rotta,56. che libito fé licito in sua legge,57. per tòrre il biasmo in che era condotta.
cultural ref: Line 56 — ‘che libito fé licito in sua legge’ — who made the permitted out of the desired, in her own law. The line renders a phrase from Orosius’ Historia, one of Dante’s standard sources for ancient history, and the Italian sharpens it into a pun: ‘libito’ and ‘licito’ differ by a single letter. Legislation collapses into appetite, and the motive given is public relations — ‘per tòrre il biasmo’, to remove the blame she had incurred. [Model knowledge · high]
Lines 58–60
58. Ell’è Semiramìs, di cui si legge59. che succedette a Nino e fu sua sposa:60. tenne la terra che ‘l Soldan corregge.
cultural ref: Line 58 — ‘Ell’è Semiramìs’ — she is Semiramis, the legendary queen of Assyria, who in the medieval accounts legalized incest to cover her liaison with her own son. ‘Di cui si legge’, of whom one reads, is Virgil’s careful phrasing: the charge arrives with its source attached, a thing the books carry. [Model knowledge · high]
cultural ref: Line 60 — ‘la terra che ‘l Soldan corregge’ — the land the Sultan rules, meaning Egypt. This is a geographical slip: Semiramis reigned in Assyria, and Dante appears to have taken her capital, Babylon, for the Egyptian city of the same name, relocating her empire by several hundred miles. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 61–63
61. L’altra è colei che s’ancise amorosa,62. e ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo;63. poi è Cleopatràs lussurïosa.
literary key: Line 61 — ‘colei che s’ancise amorosa’ — she who killed herself for love. Dido is described and not named, and the poem will withhold the name until line 85, in the scene that follows. The technique flatters the reader into completing the identification, and it makes the eventual naming land harder. [Model knowledge · high]
literary key: Line 62 — ‘ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo’ — she broke faith with the ashes of Sichaeus, her dead husband; the charge condenses a line of the Aeneid. Dido’s presence here raises a question about Hell’s architecture, since she died by her own hand and the suicides are punished in Inferno XIII. The poem appears to sort souls by the impulse driving the act: she dies out of wanting Aeneas, so the wanting is what she is judged on. Cleopatra, also a suicide, is placed on the same principle. [Model knowledge · medium]
Lines 64–66
64. Elena vedi, per cui tanto reo65. tempo si volse, e vedi ‘l grande Achille,66. che con amore al fine combatteo.
cultural ref: Line 64 — ‘Elena vedi, per cui tanto reo / tempo si volse’ — see Helen, for whom so evil a time revolved. The tradition standing behind this is the medieval Troy books, which assign Helen the blame for the war and everything that followed from it. The line measures her in years of ruin, and says nothing at all about beauty. [Model knowledge · medium]
cultural ref: Line 65 — ‘l grande Achille, / che con amore al fine combatteo’ — great Achilles, who fought with love at the end. Dante knew no Greek and had not read Homer, who reached Latin translation only later in the fourteenth century; his Achilles comes from Statius and the medieval Troy tradition, in which the hero is lured to a temple by the promise of marriage to Polyxena and killed there. Nothing in the Iliad supports the line, and it needs that other story to make sense. [Model knowledge · high]
Lines 67–69
67. Vedi Parìs, Tristano»; e più di mille68. ombre mostrommi e nominommi a dito,69. ch’amor di nostra vita dipartille.
vocabulary: Line 68 — ‘nominommi a dito’ — named them to me with his finger. Virgil identifies the dead by pointing, and the catalogue ends by refusing to continue: ‘più di mille’, more than a thousand, closes the list by declaring it unfinishable. [Model knowledge · medium]
literary key: Line 69 — ‘ch’amor di nostra vita dipartille’ — whom love parted from our life. ‘Nostra vita’ is the phrase that opens the entire poem, ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’, returning here inside a roll call of the dead. The pilgrim who was lost in the middle of our life is being shown a thousand people whom love took out of it. [Source: Inferno I.1 (‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’)]
Lines 70–72
70. Poscia ch’io ebbi ‘l mio dottore udito71. nomar le donne antiche e ‘ cavalieri,72. pietà mi giunse, e fui quasi smarrito.
literary key: Line 71 — ‘le donne antiche e ‘ cavalieri’ — the ancient ladies and the knights. Classical antiquity is dressed in the costume of a medieval court, and the anachronism erases the distance the catalogue has just travelled from Assyria to Cornwall. Semiramis and Helen are made contemporaries of Tristan, which is precisely the flattening the next scene will exploit. [Model knowledge · medium]
literary key: Line 72 — ‘pietà mi giunse, e fui quasi smarrito’ — pity reached me, and I was almost lost. ‘Smarrito’ is the word Dante used of himself in the poem’s third line, where the straight way was lost; hearing the roll call has returned him to his opening condition. The narrator supplies no judgment on this — whether the pity is a fault, a qualification, or simply what listening does — and the scene ends on it, one line before the pilgrim asks to speak to the two who go together. [Source: Inferno I.3 (‘ché la diritta via era smarrita’)]
Seven Centuries of Reading Tempest of the Lustful
Medieval Readers: Punishment as Portrait
The earliest commentators read the storm as a mirror held up to a life already lived. Guido da Pisa glossed the infernal wind as the condition the lustful had always been in — driven by every gust of temptation, their wills never at rest. The reading sits naturally alongside the Augustinian account of desire that the early commentators had to hand — a restlessness that cannot find its peace because it is turned away from the only thing that would end it. The punishment does not add anything new; it simply makes permanent what the sinners had chosen. That logic is severe, but the early readers found it clean.
Pietro Alighieri kept a similar frame but sharpened the moral vocabulary. He emphasized Dante’s line about reason placed beneath appetite, treating it as the definitional sin from which everything else follows. Benvenuto da Imola, writing in the 1370s and 1380s, brought wider classical learning to the roll call of named figures. Semiramis drew particular attention from him, as she had from earlier readers, since her legend joins political power to sexual licence in a way the tercet itself only gestures at. Boccaccio, whose Esposizioni lectured on this canto before the series broke off partway through Canto 17, gave the catalogue’s women the kind of narrative expansion that is characteristic of him throughout the commentary — a habit worth remembering, because it is the same habit that produced the familiar life of Francesca in the canto’s second half, where the historical record is almost silent.
Renaissance and Early Modern Shifts
Humanist readers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not abandon the moral frame, but they adjusted its weight. The catalogue of lovers — Helen, Achilles, Paris, Tristan — began to be read as a kind of literary gallery. Cristoforo Landino, whose commentary appeared in Florence in 1481, brought to the poem the Neoplatonism of the circle he moved in. In that frame the souls are caught between matter and spirit, unable to rise because they gave themselves over entirely to the body. The wind, for Landino, figures not just appetite but the soul’s failure to direct itself upward.
Later sixteenth-century readers grew more interested in the poem’s formal properties than its theology. The similes comparing the souls to starlings and cranes attracted attention as examples of elevated style. The scene began to be read, in part, as a demonstration of how to write about large crowds in motion — an aesthetic question Dante’s imitators found urgent. The blasphemy at line 36, which the medieval commentators had treated as a moral data point, attracted noticeably less attention in this period than the similes did.
The Romantic Recovery: Sympathy as Problem
Francesco De Sanctis, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, transformed the conversation. He argued that Dante the character undergoes a genuine emotional crisis in this scene — that the pity Dante feels at line 72 is real, humanly valid, and in tension with the doctrinal verdict already recorded. De Sanctis was not interested in theology as a grid. He wanted the poem’s drama, and the drama he found was the pilgrim’s compassion straining against the structure meant to contain it. That reading was enormously influential. It licensed a century of readers to treat sympathy for the lustful as the point of the scene, rather than a complication within it.
The Romantic tradition De Sanctis helped shape also elevated the visual and emotional texture of the passage at the expense of its argument. The starling and crane similes were read as evidence of Dante’s tenderness. The storm was beautiful as well as terrible. Readers began to separate the poet’s imaginative power from what they took to be his Church-mandated cruelty, praising the one and excusing the other.
Twentieth-Century Arguments: Theology, Figure, and Secular Resistance
Charles Singleton brought the scene back to its doctrinal architecture. He argued that Dante’s poem is constructed on the assumption that theology is literally true — that the punishments in Hell are not metaphors but real states of soul, and that Dante’s pity, however genuinely felt, registers a moral error the poem is careful not to endorse. For Singleton, the line about reason submitted to appetite is not background information; it is the interpretive key the reader must hold onto even when the drama pulls in another direction.
Erich Auerbach approached the poem from a different direction, and his account of it bears directly on this circle even though his celebrated close readings fall elsewhere in the Inferno. He argued that Dante’s figural realism — his practice of making each soul fully and concretely itself — is what gives the Commedia its power and its paradox. The damned are eternally fixed, yet more vividly alive than almost any figure in medieval literature. Auerbach saw that tension as the poem’s defining achievement, not a problem to be resolved.
Teodolinda Barolini has proposed a source for the punishment that sharpens the whole scene into an argument. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes voluntary from involuntary action, and his example of a compulsion that removes responsibility is a person carried off by a wind. Dante built the contrapasso of this circle out of the philosopher’s textbook case of an excuse — and then placed, a few lines later, a definition that revokes it: these are souls who put reason underneath appetite. Barolini also stresses what the circle conspicuously lacks. The vision literature Dante knew, and the painted hells of his own day, punished lust on the body; there is no sexualised torment anywhere in his poem. The sin has been moved off the body and onto the ordering of the faculties, which is why the definition at lines 38–39 mentions reason and appetite and nothing else.
Open Questions in Current Scholarship
Some questions in the passage remain genuinely open, and the hardest of them is a single word. What is la ruina at line 34, the thing the souls arrive in front of? One count of the commentary tradition identified six distinct schools of interpretation, and none has held. The proposal most attractive to English-speaking readers treats the noun as deliberately withheld until Canto 12, where questa ruina names the fissure torn in Hell’s rock by the earthquake at the Crucifixion — but it is hard to accept that Dante would leave a word’s plain sense waiting seven cantos for its antecedent. Others have argued for a secondary sense of the word, fury or violence, taking the storm itself as what the souls come up against; others again read the arriving souls as a glance back at the crowd waiting on Minos. Each solution buys clarity in one place and pays for it in grammar somewhere else.
The blasphemy at line 36 remains similarly unsettled. Dante records it as bare fact. Readers disagree about whether the poem treats the souls’ cursing of divine power as an additional sin, as evidence of their permanent condition, or simply as what damnation sounds like from the outside. The narrator offers no gloss. Current scholarship also continues to debate the final word on pietà at line 72 — the same word Dante used to describe his opening confusion in Canto 1. Whether his return to that state marks failure, readiness for what comes next, or simply the honest response of any human listener is something Dante placed in the text and declined to answer.
The Two Main Positions on Tempest of the Lustful
The Storm as Mirror
The wind shows the sinners what their desire always was. This is the oldest reading and the one the early commentary tradition supplies: Guido da Pisa glossed the storm as the state of the lustful in life, blown by every wind of temptation, their souls in perpetual tempest, and read it through Isaiah’s wicked heart that cannot rest. The punishment is therefore descriptive. It fixes the souls permanently in a motion they entered voluntarily and never wished to leave, and the poem’s insistence on the missing ‘posa’ makes the point in Augustinian terms — desire that refused rest is granted an eternity without it. Nothing in the wind compels; it only continues.
Key passage: «la bufera infernal, che mai non resta» (31) paired with «nulla speranza li conforta mai, / non che di posa, ma di minor pena» (44–45) — the storm is defined by sleeplessness and the sinners by the denial of rest, exactly the Augustinian restlessness of desire made into a landscape.
The Storm as Argument
The wind is chosen because it is the standard excuse, and the canto is constructed to take it apart. In the Nicomachean Ethics, a person carried off by a wind is the philosopher’s example of an action so compelled that responsibility does not attach to it. Dante makes that image the punishment, and then, before any soul can plead it, states in his own voice that these are people who put reason underneath appetite. The souls in this circle can now say they were driven — the scenery agrees with them — while the definition already on the page says the driving was something they arranged. The courtly doctrine that love is an irresistible external force is being given its most flattering possible setting and refuted inside it.
Key passage: The placement of «Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento / enno dannati i peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento» (37–39) — a verdict in the narrator’s own voice, delivered immediately after the storm is described and before a single sinner has spoken, so that every subsequent plea in this circle is heard against it.
What the Text Does — and What That Means (Contested)
On the page: The sin is defined at 38–39 entirely in terms of faculties, reason subjected to appetite, and the poem describes no bodily punishment of the sexual organs anywhere; the storm is never said to compel the souls to anything, only to carry them after the fact; the souls blaspheme the divine power at 36 and the narrator neither corrects nor endorses them; the definition arrives before any soul in this circle has spoken a word; and the pity that arrives at 72 is reported without comment.
What scholars dispute: Whether the wind is a descriptive image of what passion feels like or a precisely aimed philosophical trap depends on whether Aristotle’s example of involuntary motion stands behind it — a source proposed in modern criticism rather than identified by the early commentators. The meaning of ‘la ruina’ at line 34 has resisted six distinct schools of interpretation and remains genuinely unsettled.
What Dante Leaves Unresolved
What ‘la ruina’ at line 34 is has never been settled; six schools of interpretation have been counted and each fails somewhere on grammar or on distance from its antecedent. The blasphemy at line 36 is recorded as bare fact, with no indication whether the poem regards the souls’ curse as an additional sin or simply as what damnation sounds like. And the scene ends without judging its own last event: «pietà mi giunse, e fui quasi smarrito» (72) uses the word Dante applied to himself in the poem’s third line, so the pity that has just arrived is marked as a return to his opening condition — but the narrator does not say whether that is a failure, a qualification for what follows, or merely what happens to anyone who listens to the roll call.
The Open Question
Dante builds the punishment of lust out of a wind — and a wind is precisely the example philosophers used for a force that carries a person off against their will, making the action involuntary. So does the second circle stage the sin as something its victims genuinely could not resist, or does it hand them the perfect excuse in order to show that it fails?
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