by Nicolette L. Cagle, PhD, June 21, 2026
While re-reading excerpts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, it occurred to me that place and landscape play a large role in his spiritual and moral journey with the venerable Virgil. Writing in exile between 1308 and 1321, cast from his birthplace and home city of Florence, Dante’s Divine Comedy relies on landforms familiar to Dante as a denizen of what is now Italy to relay a complex emotional geography and moral map to readers.
In the first canticle, “Inferno,” Dante uses the imagery of “a dark forest” (Canto I) with “gnarled and intertangled” branches (Canto XIII) to describe a confused and dark internal landscape. He also references the perils of the sea, borrowing from Homer and using Ulysses’s voice explaining how he “put forth on the high open sea with one sole ship,” linking Ulysses’s long and dangerous personal journey and Dante’s own (Canto XXVI). Marshes and mud are featured in the fifth circle (Cantos VII & VIII) giving hell a hydrology. The souls there suffer from wrath, fighting eternally amongst themselves in a marshland, covered with mud.
Dante’s Inferno also invokes divine fire, “in Mongibello at the swarthy forge” (Canto XIV); Mongibello is Mount Etna. Later, Dante takes us high into the Alps (Canto XVI) and to the coldest and deepest hell of a frozen lake, one “that from the frost the semblance had of glass, and not of water” (Canto XXXII). Now the relationship between Dante’s own physical geography, his sense of place embedded in Italy, connects explicitly to the work relying on mountains of metaphor and seas of simile.
The Divine Comedy‘s other two canticles, Purgatorio and Paradiso, also rely on landscape formations and references to the natural world to bring the reader through the narrative poem. The images in these sections are gentler and mundane: we feel the sun “that shines upon the forehead” (Canto XXVII, Purgatorio); we can see the forestes valley with “gold and fine silver, and scarlet and pearl white” speckling the green foliage “by herbage and by flowers within that hollow planted” (Canto VII, Purgatorio); we can gaze up “at a rivulet from some high mount descending to the lowland” as Beatrice attempts to orient Dante in Paradiso (Canto I).
Dante’s classic work spans the Italian landscape north from the Alps and south to Sicily’s Mt. Etna, the whole of creation is superimposed on Dante’s own physical geography and sense of place. The metaphors evoked by Dante’s place, surely influenced by antecedent works of Western literature like Homer’s Odyssey, also set a precedent for literary metaphor that worked its way into works as towering as Moby-Dick, where the sea becomes its own emotional terrain, one of struggle and obsession, and eventually to writings as humble as my own teenage poetry.
As I explore, retrospectively, how my own sense of place shows up in the 200+ poems I have written over the last 35 years, I find myself reliving the landscape of my own life. I travel through the forests and oak savanna-covered dunes along Lake Michigan, north of Chicago, venture to the wide open grasslands and remnant postage-stamp prairies of central Illinois, and end up much further south in the rolling hills covered by 70-year-old mixed hardwood-pine forests along the Eno River in Durham, North Carolina.
Despite a strong and stable connection to one place, and to the natural world, rooted in my childhood, my earliest extant poetry (from my early teens, age 13 to 15) does not yet reflect my home or connection to place. Instead, it reflects an emotional geography superimposed on the tropes of Western literary landscapes. Though I was landlocked in the central US, I wrote about escaping on rough seas to tropical destinations. As an early teen, I ignored the Des Plaines river which I could have canoed or kayaked to freedom. As a teen processing dark emotions and death, I ignored Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, waterbodies splattered onto my own genealogical watercolor, a lake that drowned the two young daughters of a Chicago-based Pontius ancestor in the early 1900s, and a river that took the lives of 844 passengers looking for day of fun and relaxation when the SS Eastland capsized while still docked, a dock to which my great-grandmother, a trained nurse, rushed in 1915 to try to assist the victims.
Instead of drawing on my own landscapes, I was influenced by the 1980s pop music and movies of my childhood. My first poems, written at the age of 6, were song-poems. I wrote over a hundred pieces and trashed as a 13-year-old, thinking them childish and stupid, a trove of lines and lyrics lost that might now help me understand the broader human experience and my own inner world.
Then, I loved Madonna, dancing around to “Like a Virgin” and imbibing metaphorical landscapes like “La Isla Bonita” (1986/7). I can still hear Madonna singing about San Pedro island, “tropical the island breeze, all of nature wild and free, this is where I long to be, la isla bonita.” Through music, Madonna’s sense of place was translated into the emotional geography of my pre-adolescent poems, with sandy beaches becoming a destination I longed for, but couldn’t quite reach.
"When I'm waiting for the morning"
When I'm waiting for the morning
and the warm summer light,
I know outside it's pouring
on a cool autumn night.
I'm thinking about you,
and I don't know what to do.
Should I sit here waiting,
while my hope is fading?
Trees line the ocean,
and the sand tickles my feet.
The clouds are in motion
as I stare from the street.
I wish for a clue
as you step into view.
How can you be calmly pacing
while my heart is racing?
During my childhood, from the age of five onward, my parents and I would see a matinee at the movie theatre every Wednesday, followed by pizza at Gino’s or takeout from Rosatti’s. These movies, too, seeded my psychology, creating emotional connections to landscapes on the big screen that I had never seen in real life. Movies expanded my metaphorical vocabulary. “The Little Mermaid” (1989) offers the sea up as a place of childhood safety and the land as a place of adult romance. “Joe Versus the Volcano” (1990) was a Dantesque journey to a tropical island, a fable connecting island geography to struggle, absurdity, and eventually rebirth. Even “Jurassic Park” (1993) offers tropical islands up as places of wonder and adventure, although still vulnerable to the hubris of the Western scientific-industrial complex. This new vocabulary can be seen in another one of my early poems:
"Yearning to escape"
Yearning to escape
unloving, treacherous territory
Venturing toward the seascape
a tantalizing glory
Setting one's sights
a majestic ship comes into view
Dreaming of unforgettable tropical nights
it travels closer over glassy indigo blue
Hopeful tears well in confused eyes
difficult emotions ascend to the surface
pondering over close family ties
suddenly disregarding those that one may miss
Running over sun warmed sand
leaping onto the tempting boat
drifting away from the treasonous land
one's truly happy smile transforms into a gloat
Turning around and looking forward
an exciting adventure where hope is amassed
glancing back where memories are stored
the brazen past and broken glass
sailing lazily
across the calm sea
moving not quite aimlessly
soon to be wild and free
at last the wooden vessel halts
the newfound paradise radiates good fortune
searching for Eden's non-existent faults
to find the perfect amber rays of tropical sun
More spectacular than one can comprehend
the sailing days were spent well
all gaping wounds should be easy to mend
but that is something only time can tell
Writing between 1994 and 1996 (age 13 to 15), oceans and islands were simple places — landscapes of longing, destination for a burgeoning sense of self-determination. The emotional geography of my early teens was created by culture, echoing Homer and Dante, refracted through a contemporary culture crafted by pop stars and screenwriters. Only later would a more mature inner geography emerge to be expressed in rhythm and words; only later would my inner geography become more local, more ecological, and more rooted in the rivers, prairies, dunes, and forests I had known all along.
Sense of Place 
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