3) In Circle 7, the Violent are punished in three separate rounds depending on the nature of their violent tendencies. Choose one round within Circle 7 and explore an archetypal symbol that Dante uses there to explore the sin. You may, for example, look at the river of blood in Round 1 or the trees in Round 2 or the desert and fire in Round 3. Consider the archetype itself and then how Dante utilizes the symbol to enhance his own work.


In Circle 7, round 2, Dante uses the thorny leaved trees to convey his opinion and view on the particular group of sinners. The sin of this circle are the suicides and for their punishment, the souls are eternally trapped in almost deceased trees and are picked at by the Harpies, which ruins their leaves and branches and make them bleed out.  While the blood is pouring out from the trees, the souls have a chance to speak and communicate with Dante and Virgil. Due to their sin, they are rejected all human form and only allowed to converse while in extreme pain caused by the Harpies. Dante explains his state of mind in the woods, "Words and blood together, gout by gout./ Startled, I dropped the branch that I was holding/ and stood transfixed by fear..." (120).  Dante writes about how the blood and the speaking of the souls connect because without the blood, they would not be capable of communication.  He also exemplifies his state of mind and his fear of the blood and the talking trees. These trees are archetypes of the sinners because in life they were harmful to themselves and that is how they "spoke" or expressed their emotions, so in death the are only permitted to feel emotion through the pain of bleeding out and being physically hurt. When Dante breaks off a branch from one of the trees he is surprised by what happened, "And after blood had darkened all the bowl/ of the wound, it cried again: "Why do you tear me?"/ Is there no pity left in any soul?" (120).  His one tree exclaims the pain it is enduring and suffering the horrid pain of the limb being broken off.  This verse describes the punishment that these souls are undergoing and the sorrowful and hopeless nature of these sinners. 


The symbol of the trees in the Wood of the Suicides enhance Dante's work by adding imagery and creating a mental image of his circle and setting of the woods.  Dante writes, "Its foliage was not verdant, but nearly black./ The unhealthy branches, gnarled and warped and tangled,/ bore poison thorns instead of fruit" (119).  Dante describes the woods in detail and he characterizes the trees as being tangled, warped and gnarled.  These words create a scene of dark, destroyed, and dead like trees, in which encases the souls.  The representation of the trees as the sinners or the body of the sinners is important because it removes them from an identity because in life they took their own existence away so in death, they are seem as they were in life, insignificant and "dead".   Trees usually represent life and the circle of life with nature, but in this circle the trees are trapping the "life" or souls inside of them.  The tree hold the souls who denied life were denied it in Hell as well.  This makes the tree an archetypal character of life and the irony of how the "life" is trapping the "life".