Notes on Gem of the Ocean, Week 9

rdmaxwell55

May 15

I fell a couple of weeks behind due to a really bad bout with hay fever. I had a major exposure to pollen dust out walking to my neighborhood public library, and of course, because we've been "shut in," my immunity to hay fever this year was all out of whack. Such is life.

I completed the reading of Gem for the Ocean for tomorrow's discussion and was amazed at some many oblique and direct references the play made portions of Dante's Divine Comedy, especially the second canticle, Purgatorio. And it's not just specific references, but the whole story of one to the whole story of the other.

Before going to far and too deep, let me share with you a quick/compact summary I posted to a blog last December when a different group was covering "Gem." Here's the link: https://raymmaxx.wordpress.com/2021/12/11/blogmas-day-11/

As Citizen Barlow tours the underwater City of Bones, he constantly hears its inhabitants exhorting him to "remember me." Isn't it ironic that throughout his journey in Purgatory, Dante hears the same exhortation, "remember me," often accompanied by the explanation that souls in Purgatory, when prayed for and thus remembered by humans, find their periods of penitence of shorter duration? In Canto 5 (130-133), Pia says to the pilgrim Dante,

"Oh, when you have returned into the world
and rested from the long and weary way . . . .
Kindly remember me - my name is Pia."

In Canto 6 (25-31), in a conversation between Dante and his guide, Virgil, Dante observes,

And after I was free
of all those shades who prayed that others pray
to speed them on their way to sanctity,
"O my true light, you seem to have denied
explicitly, in a particular verse,"
said I, "that prayer can bend high Heaven's decree,
Yet this is all the people pray for here."

Then the plot thickens. In Canto 13 (146-150), another resident of Purgatory, Sapia, says to Dante,

"It's a great sign that God must love you!
So please, assist me sometimes by your prayer.
I beg of you, by all you're yearning for . . . .
go to my neighbors and renew my name."

Finally, in Canto 27 (139-142), Dante's "graduation," i.e., the completion of his understudy with Virgil, is reminiscent and analogous to Citizen's emergence from his ordeal with the City of Bones:

"No longer wait for what I do or say.
Your judgement now is free and whole and true;
to fail to follow its will would be to stray.
Lord of yourself I crown and miter you."

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