The Wood of the Self-Murderer - The Harpies and the Suicides

A face emerges from a tree trunk, its open mouth almost lost among the long folds of bark. Across the picture, an inverted body merges with a rooted stem. Above them perch three creatures with women’s faces and clawed bird feet. William Blake’s The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides makes the forest itself suffer. Dante and Virgil stand in a narrow opening within it, surrounded by forms that demand a different kind of attention from ordinary trees. ^[1]

Blake made the drawing in 1824–7 for his illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Tate holds the sheet as N03356, recording graphite, ink and watercolour on paper, with a support measuring 372 × 527 mm. Its historical title reflects the judgement built into Dante’s medieval account of Hell. The scene concerns people who have died by suicide and whose souls, in the poem’s invented afterlife, have become trees. That literary punishment belongs to Dante’s religious framework. ^[1][2]

A forest with human anatomy

The largest trunks rise like walls on either side of the poets. Their roots spread over the foreground, and their branches join across the upper part of the sheet. The arrangement gives the central figures a rough doorway, but there is no clear path beyond them. Smaller trunks occupy the gaps, repeating the larger trees at a distance. Pale spaces between the branches let the eye move through the wood while the bodies remain enclosed. ^[1]

Blake makes recognition gradual. At first the dark lines describe knots, ridges and rough edges. Then a forehead, an eye or a hanging arm changes what those lines can mean. The bearded face in the broad trunk to the right of the poets shares its elongated shape with the grain surrounding it. Below the mouth, the bark continues in long, twisting bands. A human expression appears without the tree ceasing to look wooden. ^[1]

The left-hand figure is more fully exposed. A rounded torso descends into an inverted head near the roots; raised limbs extend upwards into the trunk. The body’s orientation opposes the upright stance of the two travellers beside it. Dante and Virgil can walk, turn and look. The transformed figure is held in an arrangement that offers no comparable freedom. Its contours lead the eye into the ground. ^[1]

Thin colour allows much of the drawing to remain visible. Grey-brown washes cross the trunks, with blue touches in the foliage and shadows. Fine lines articulate features that the broader pools of colour only partly define. Along the edges of branches, thornlike points interrupt the softer washes. The contrast matters: the pale atmosphere does not make the forest harmless. Its danger lies close to the surface, in an edge that can pierce or a branch that can be torn. ^[1]

Dante begins the canto by describing a wood without a worn track. Its foliage is dark, its branches tangled, its growth poisonous. Blake retains the congestion and the twisted growth, while allowing light to enter through numerous openings. Darkness here is more complicated than an absence of illumination. The travellers can see their surroundings and still fail to understand what they are seeing. ^[2][1]

The small inscription at the lower right names Hell and canto 13. It supplies a literary location beneath a scene whose strange anatomy might otherwise seem to belong wholly to Blake’s own mythology. Tate also records canto references on the reverse and a paper watermark, “WELGAR 1796”. The recorded watermark is distinct from Tate’s dating of the drawing to 1824–7. These physical details place an extraordinary forest on a particular sheet, marked and organised as part of a sequence. ^[1]

The broken branch and the speaking tree

At the end of Inferno XII, the centaur Nessus leaves the poets after helping them across the river of boiling blood. They enter the forest before he has reached the opposite bank. This is the second ring of the seventh circle, following the punishment of violence against others. Virgil tells Dante to look carefully, preparing him for something that words alone would scarcely make credible. ^[2]

The first difficulty concerns hearing. Dante detects lamentation everywhere but sees nobody who could be making it. He imagines people concealed among the bushes. Virgil proposes an experiment: break off a twig, and the misunderstanding will disappear. Dante reaches towards a tree. The broken trunk cries out, and dark blood follows the injury. What seemed to be an unfeeling object protests against being hurt. ^[2]

The poem compares the emergence of speech and blood to a green stick burning at one end while air hisses from the other. Breath, moisture and sound pass through the damaged wood together. This comparison makes the extraordinary event tangible. A reader need not have heard a tree talk to recognise the noise of sap-filled fuel. Dante uses an ordinary physical process to bring the wounded speaker within reach of experience. ^[2]

Blake gives this joining of wood and flesh a conspicuous colour. Near the centre, red runs from a broken branch and separates into drops against the pale opening. Farther down, a red mark lies close to the poets’ feet. These small accents interrupt the prevailing greys and browns. The wound is much smaller than the forest, yet it changes the meaning of everything around it: the great rooted structures can bleed. ^[1]

The poets occupy the space beneath the hanging drops. The brown-clad figure extends both hands low towards the tree at the left, while the blue-clad companion stands immediately behind. Their faces turn upwards and across the opening. Neither adopts a commanding pose. The gestures leave room for uncertainty, surprise and listening, rather than reducing the encounter to an action performed with confidence. ^[1]

In the poem, Dante lets the broken branch fall in terror. Virgil then acknowledges his own responsibility for prompting the injury. He offers the suffering spirit a possible compensation: Dante can return to the living world and renew its reputation. Knowledge has been gained through harm, and the guide recognises that a response is owed to the person who has suffered it. The scene changes from a demonstration into a conversation. ^[2]

Teodolinda Barolini connects the episode with the bleeding vegetation of Polydorus in Virgil’s Aeneid. She reads Dante’s demand for direct proof as a challenge to his precursor’s authority. The guide’s literary knowledge has not prevented an injury; the traveller must learn how to recognise a person in an unfamiliar form. ^[13]

Pier delle Vigne and a damaged reputation

Tate’s catalogue identifies the encounter as Dante’s meeting with Pier delle Vigne, an imperial minister of Frederick II. The speaking tree presents himself through his former office: he held the keys to the emperor’s heart, controlling access to its intimate counsels. His language turns trust into an image of skilled opening and closing. Even after transformation, he remains someone accustomed to describing the operation of power. ^[1][2]

Pier attributes his disgrace to envy at court. In his account, other people’s hostility inflamed the emperor against him, replacing honour with misery. He insists that he remained faithful and asks that his memory be cleared when Dante returns. These are the claims of a character speaking within the poem. Barolini distinguishes Dante’s version from the uncertain historical causes of the minister’s fall; the speech cannot by itself settle those causes. ^[2][13]

That distinction strengthens the encounter. The speaker wants a listener to carry a particular account of his life back to the world. His predicament involves reputation as well as physical suffering: he can speak, but he cannot go where his story needs to be heard. Dante’s ability to leave the wood gives the living traveller a responsibility unavailable to the rooted person addressing him. ^[2]

The image’s many faces complicate any quick division between one important speaker and an anonymous background. They extend suffering across the forest without providing a reliable name for every trunk. Tate’s catalogue tentatively connects the inverted female figure at the left with Pier’s personification of Envy. That proposal can illuminate the image’s unusual anatomy, but it does not turn the figure into an identified participant in Dante’s conversation. Blake has made the wood more visibly human than the travellers initially find it in the poem. ^[1][2]

Nor does the presence of a human face make listening easy. The large bearded head is stretched by its wooden setting, while other features seem embedded more faintly in surrounding trunks. A viewer must keep adjusting between person and vegetation. The picture gives us visual evidence of what Dante learns through sound, yet preserves the difficulty of recognising an individual inside an altered body. ^[1][2]

What the harpies do

Three harpies occupy the branches overhead. Their feet grip the wood with conspicuous claws, and their human faces sit above rounded breasts and feathered bodies. The central creature spreads its wings, exposing blue and reddish passages of colour, while the outer pair form more compact shapes. Their high position makes them a company above the poets, watching or crying from the trees that support them. ^[1]

These creatures are distinct from the people transformed into trees. Dante describes the harpies as monstrous birds with human necks and faces, broad wings and taloned feet. He recalls their persecution of the Trojans at the Strophades, placing them within the classical world familiar to Virgil. The human features of bird and tree therefore belong to different kinds of hybrid life. One group torments; the other endures the torment. ^[2]

Pier explains the relation between them. A soul falls into the wood and sprouts where chance has placed it, growing from a seedlike beginning into a wild plant. The harpies feed upon its leaves. Their feeding causes pain and creates an opening through which grief can escape. Speech depends on a breach in the transformed body, whether produced by the bird’s feeding or the traveller’s hand. ^[2]

Blake does not need to show every stage of that process. The harpies are perched rather than caught in a clearly depicted act of tearing foliage. Below them, red drops make the wounded state of the wood unmistakable. Placing predator and sufferer within one continuous structure allows the branches to perform two roles at once: they are a dwelling for the birds and part of the bodies on which those birds feed. ^[1][2]

The beasts’ faces also keep the upper register from becoming a merely decorative canopy. Their open mouths and emphatic expressions echo the suffering features below. Yet their capacity to spread wings contrasts with the rooted trunks. Across the picture, human appearance is shared among beings whose powers of movement and capacities to harm differ sharply. The two standing poets occupy a third position, able to move through an environment whose living relations they must learn. ^[1]

A body that cannot be left behind

Dante’s questions continue after Pier has told his story. Through Virgil, he asks how a soul becomes bound to a plant and whether it can ever leave. Pier’s answer carries the punishment into the future. At the Last Judgement, these souls will retrieve their former bodies, but will not put them on again. They will drag them into the wood, where each body will hang from the tree belonging to its own shade. ^[2]

This is a prediction spoken within the encounter, not a description of bodies already suspended throughout Blake’s scene. The inverted figure is visibly continuous with the trunk; it should not automatically be described as one of those future corpses. Keeping the distinction allows the drawing’s present bodily transformations and the poem’s future punishment to retain their separate force. ^[1][2]

Barolini interprets the canto through Dante’s conviction that body and soul form an inseparable self. The transformed person continues to feel, speak and remember. Even the eventual return of the discarded body cannot undo that identity: it produces a terrible attachment instead of a restored human form. This describes Dante’s theological logic within the poem. ^[13]

In Blake’s drawing, bodily continuity is something the eye follows. A cheek becomes a ridge; a limb becomes a branch; a lower trunk broadens into roots. The transitions are troubling because there is no clean boundary at which the person ends and the tree begins. The drawn line can serve both anatomy and vegetation, joining forms that ordinary experience keeps apart. ^[1]

The chase that follows

The conversation is interrupted by a crashing sound. Two naked figures run through the undergrowth, pursued by black hounds. They are the spendthrifts, whose destruction of their possessions forms another category of violence against the self in Dante’s scheme. Lano runs ahead, while Giacomo di Sant’Andrea tries to hide in a bush. The dogs tear apart the fugitive who has taken shelter, damaging the bush as well. ^[2][13]

This later episode is not shown by the three harpies in Blake’s image. Birds feeding on tree-souls and dogs pursuing human figures are separate punishments within the same wood. The distinction also prevents the injured bush at the canto’s end from being confused with Pier. That final speaker is an unnamed Florentine, who asks the poets to gather the broken foliage around his roots. ^[2]

The opening of Inferno XIV completes the request. Moved by their shared homeland, Dante collects the leaves and returns them before the travellers leave the forest’s edge for the burning sand. The canto’s first experiment broke a branch; its closing encounter leads to an act of gathering. The injury cannot be reversed, but the visitor can respond to the sufferer’s request. ^[2]

Blake holds us within the earlier encounter. Above the poets, the harpies command the branches; around them, roots and trunks close the space. Between those masses, the small human gestures remain visible. The apparently familiar surfaces of the forest carry people whose voices, memories and pain continue within the wood. ^[1][2]