Make Up Cantos 13-17

In these canto 13 through 17, we are understanding the punishments of the second and third terrace which are the Envious and the Wrathful. The second terrace’s punishment was that “their eyes, sewn so atrociously”. They had to be in this terrace with their eyes shut with iron wires. So, they are not able to see anything and would have to rely on their other senses to understand what is going on around them. I thought this was very intriguing because if my sight was taken away from me, I would be very miserable. Not only did they get their vision taken away but they had iron wires being sown into their eye lids to shut them together. At the end of Canto 13, there is an image of a person with their eyes sown shut and I thought it was a very dark image and showed how horrible it looked. I know that they are souls, so they do not feel pain, but just imaging how that feels and how it looks like was not a pretty picture in anyone’s head when reading this. What I thought was most interesting was how the third terrace’s punishment was “smoke as black as night; and there was no place where we could have avoided it.”. Here we see two terraces having very similar punishments but one is more gruesome than the other. The black smoke was so bad that Dante’s “eyes could not endure remaining open” therefore forcing the people in this terrace to close their eyes. Even though these punishments were for the souls that have sinned, it made me realize how grateful I am to be able to have good vision. I feel like most of us take for granted the gift of vision we have because its normal to be able to see. So I believe these punishment are rough because it takes away the most important human sense, in my opinion, which is vision.