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purpose of the poem, which has moved readers through the centuries, is, as Dante reveals in his epistle to Can Grande, “to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity. ”
    The poem is divided into three major sections:
Inferno
(Hell),
Purgatorio
(Purgatory), and
Paradiso
(Heaven). Each section contains thirty-three cantos, with the exception of Hell, which has thirty-four—the opening canto serving as an introduction to the work as a whole. For the
Commedia
Dante invented a rhyme scheme known as
terza rima
(tertiary rhyme:
aba bcb cdc
), thus continuing to display his fascination with the number three, which was so much on his mind when he was composing the
Vita nuova
many years earlier. And each canto is divided into three-line stanzas called
terzine,
or tercets, in which the first and third lines rhyme, while the middle or second lines rhyme with the first and third of the next
terzina.
The basic metrical unit of the verse is the hendecasyllabic line, quite common in Italian poetry: it is an eleven-syllable line in which the accent falls on the tenth syllable.
    The drama or main action of the poem centers on one man’s journey to God. It tells how God through the agency of Beatrice drew the poet to salvation; and the moral that Dante wishes his reader to keep in mind is that what God has done for one man he will do for every man, if every man is willing to make this journey. The reader of the poem would do well to distinguish from the very beginning of the
Commedia
between the two uses of the first-person singular: one designates Dante the pilgrim, the other Dante the poet. The first is a character in a story invented by the second. The events in the narrative are represented as having taken place in the past; the writing of the poem and the memory of these events, however, are represented as taking place in the present. For example, we find references to both past and present, and to both pilgrim and poet, in line 10 of the introductory canto of the
Inferno:
“How
I
entered
there
I
cannot
truly say” (italics added).
    There are times in the poem when the fictional pilgrim (Dante the pilgrim) embodies many of the characteristics of his inventor (Dante the poet); for the
Commedia,
though it is above all the journey of Everyman to God, is in many ways a personal, autobiographical journey. It is often difficult, most times impossible, to say whether what is happening in the poem belongs to the real-life biography of the poet or the fictional biography of the pilgrim. For instance, at the beginning of canto XIX of the
Inferno
the pilgrim alludes to having broken a baptismal font in the church of his “lovely San Giovanni” (line 17). Now, Dante the poet may well have broken the font to save someone who was drowning within, but it is highly unlikely (and most inartistic) that he would mention the incident for the sole purpose of clearing his name in connectionwith an act that some of his contemporaries would have thought sinful. The breaking of the font is an event that took place in the life of the pilgrim, and the pilgrim is not trying to “clear his name, ” as critics have suggested. Rather the poet is giving an example to the reader of the true nature of the sin of simony (the sin punished in canto XIX), which “breaks” the holy purposes of the church by perverting them.
    The poet is the poet, but he is not the pilgrim, and the story traced in the
Commedia
is the story of Dante the pilgrim, who is at once himself and Everyman. We must keep in mind the allegory of the opening verse of the poem: “
Nel
mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai
…” (“Midway along the journey of our life / I found myself …”). Dante begins to construct his allegory of the double journey: that is, his personal experience in the world beyond (“I found myself”), open to Everyman in his own journey through this life (“of our life”). The poet finds himself