Canto XXIV. Dante and his companions continue on their way, Dante still speaking with Forese. They find a second tree, where the souls undergoing purgation hear a voice recite the bridle of gluttony. Dante is told that this second tree is a descendant of the tree of knowledge, `the tree that fed that greed of Eve’ in the words of the voice that speaks the bridle. The angel of temperance wipes a further ‘P’ from Dante’s brow, and he, Virgil and Statius continue up the pass.

Dante has relatively little to say about gluttony, as such, and in this Canto a good deal of the talk is about Florence, and poetry. Dante’s poetry on love is foundational to the Divine Comedy, and we shall see more about that in later Cantos. Perhaps he has the liberty to discuss his poetry this close to the top of the mountain precisely because of the importance of his understanding of love to the rest of the narrative, whereas at the bottom (see Canto 2) verse and song was a distraction for the newly-arrived souls, who were chastised by Cato.

Dante meets the Angel of Temperance.


http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/jpegs/holkham/misc/48/1000/04800483.jpg