“So may the lamp which leads you still to rise
find in your own free will sufficient wax
to reach the glittering heights of Paradise…” (viii.112-114)
This tercet confuses me. Lamp…rise…wax??
Thinking as I write here… none of the translators comment on this, but I wonder if Dante is reversing the myth of Icarus. Icarus flew too high, the sun melted the wax which held his wings together, and he fell to his death. Dante, in the lowest places, is being drawn upward by the “lamp” (divine grace, according to Sayers and Esolen—also, Virgil earlier used the sun as an image of God). This lamp apparently works upon the “wax” of his free will—not to destroy it, but to shape it more perfectly. Maybe Dante has Mt 23:12 in mind: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
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