Sibyl

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In Canto XXXIII of Paradise Dante turns to the figure of the Sibyl for a simile that closes the supreme vision. The images of the dream, the snow that melts, and the leaves on which the Sibyl had written her pronouncement, scattered by the wind, are the three comparisons used to describe the fading away of what has been seen, of which only a faint trace remains. The note on the passage refers back to Virgil's account in the Aeneid (III 448-51), where it is described how a breath of wind entered the Sibyl's cave and made the tender leaves fly about, disarranging their order. The Sibyl's pronouncement, lost and now unreadable, thus becomes an image of the dissolving of a form and of the persistence only of a shadow, a theme that the introduction to the canto links to the mystery of the unity of the manifold and to the book that gathers the scattered pages.