The second ring of the seventh circle is a wild wood — no green leaves, only dark and twisted branches; no smooth boughs, only gnarled and knotted tangles; no fruit, only poisonous thorns. The Harpies nest in it and tear the leaves and cry. This wood is where the suicides reside: they have become trees. Virgil tells Dante to break a branch and see what happens. Dante hesitates, then breaks a small twig. The tree cries out and bleeds black blood, demanding: why do you tear me? Is there no pity in you? A voice emerges from the wound.
The tree is Pier della Vigna — the great chancellor and poet of Frederick II's court, who was accused of treason, blinded, and imprisoned, and who killed himself in his cell to escape the dishonor. He insists on his innocence: envy of his closeness to Frederick turned the court against him; the false accusations broke him. His Latin-inflected speech, with its legal precision and rhetorical antitheses, is itself a character portrait — this was a man of letters, a man of words, and words destroyed him. He asks Dante to restore his good name among the living.
The contrapasso is exact and terrible: the soul that violated the body God gave it — that refused the vessel of human life — is now trapped in wood, denied the form of a human body for eternity. At the Last Judgment, when all souls are reunited with their bodies, the suicides will receive their flesh back but will not inhabit it: they will hang their own bodies on their thorn-branches like grotesque ornaments. Nearby, the prodigals — who were violent against their own substance — are torn through the wood by black hounds, shredded and scattered.