Dante & Virgil continue to weave their way through the souls of those whose sin was excessive love of worldly things – avarice.  The poet summarizes the process of repentance on the mountain with a wonderfully simple image:

the mass of souls whose eyes were, drop by drop,
shedding the sin which occupies our world

“You saw,” he said, “that ageless sorceress
for whom alone the souls above must weep;
you also saw how men escape from her.”

XIX 58-60

Previously we learned that Dante had encounted a Siren in his dreams.  The dream ended as Virgil, under the direction of a “saintly lady”, tears apart the outward [...]

There came into my dream a woman, stuttering,
cross-eyed, stumbling along on her maimed feet,
with ugly yellow skin and hands deformed.

I stared at her.  And as the sun revives
a body numbed by the night’s cold, just so
my eyes upon her worked to free her tongue

and straighten our all her deformities,

Some years ago I was hiking with a group of students in Mount Robson Park.  As fate would have it, there had been a flash flood the previous evening.  The natural consequence of such an event is, of course, that the bridge over which I had hoped to cross was completely washed out.

[...]

The center of the center is love.  Readers of Dante have long noticed that this Canto falls in the middle of the Purgatorio, which is itself the middle of the poem as a whole.  And that in this Canto Virgil begins his speech on the nature of love.  Love, then, is the very center of [...]

At the beginning of Canto XV there Dante encounters a “light
far brighter” than any he has encountered so far.  He tells us that his “mind was stunned by what it did not
know” (XV.12).  To explain the
intensity of the light, Dante uses the image of a ray [...]