In Canto XX, the speaker Dante and his guide Virgil enter the fourth bolgia, where the Fortune Tellers and Diviners reside. The conflict in this Canto is that the sinners have their heads turned backwards, …show more content…
The speaker uses many predicate adjectives before the subject of a sentence, revealing everything the speaker thinks of as he sees what is in front of him. The speaker focuses more on describing how objects appear, rather than what they do. The poem is also written in iambic pentameter, which gives the poem rhythm and helps dramatize the situation. Each of Dante’s cantos also end in couplets, such as the couplet in canto XX, “Shone down upon your way before the dawn;/ And as he spoke to me, we traveled on” (30-31). In this couplet, the word “shone” is used, and it can have the meaning as the past tense of show, as “shown” or the past tense of “shine” written as “shone”. Referring to the dawn, the word “shone” would be the sun shining at the end of the day before the sun rises at dawn again. The word “shown” refers to what has been shown to Dante that day so he can take it all in before the new day begins. The word “dawn also has two meanings, one being the appearance of light when the sun first rises, and the other meaning, to be perceived or understood. With the word “shown”, the couplet can represent Dante understanding what has happened in that day, so he can take it all in, and “shone” referring to the light from the