Absence Becomes Elevated, High-Style Presence: PURGATORIO, Canto XXXI, Lines 49 - 63
Beatrice continues to lead Dante toward contrition, pointing out both the purposes of her body (or corpse) and the ways he has failed to followed her lofty beauty.She finishes her second salvo at the pilgrim with a rhetorical flourish, showing the reader (and Dante) that she is a master of rhetoric, someone who commands a high, elevated style of poetry--that is, a fusion of the literal and the metaphoric that will become increasingly necessary to describe the PARADISO experience.Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look at the conclusion of Beatrice's second run at the pilgrim Dante and find the…
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