The poem begins at the precise midpoint of human life — Dante is thirty-five years old, the year is 1300, and the date is Good Friday. He finds himself in a dark wood: not a forest he entered deliberately but a lostness he woke into, a disorientation so total he cannot say how he arrived. The image is one of the most powerful in Western poetry precisely because it requires no interpretation — everyone has woken in a dark wood at some point. The wood is dense, bitter, harsh; recalling it is as bad as death itself. But something good came of it, and that is why he must tell it.
He sees a hill above him, its shoulder clothed in light — the sun rising over it, casting warmth down on the darkness where he stands. He begins to climb. But as the path rises, three beasts block his way: first a spotted leopard (incontinence — the sins of appetite that will inhabit Hell's upper circles); then a lion, great and fierce, whose head held high makes the air itself tremble (violence — the sins of the middle circles); and finally a wolf, lean and famished with every desire, who has driven many to misery and will drive more (fraud — the sins of the deep circles). The wolf drives Dante back down toward the dark wood, hopeless.
Then a figure appears in the darkness — dimmed by long silence, as if its voice had gone faint from disuse. It is the shade of Virgil, the great Roman poet who died thirteen hundred years before. He has come to guide Dante through Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory; from there another guide will take him further. Dante clings to Virgil as a student to a master. They set out together toward the gates of Hell as night falls.