 So, then, in Canto 13, Dante enters a bizarre and unnatural forest, says Dante. Its leaves not green but dingy and dull black. No slender limbs but hunched with knots and gnarls. No hanging fruit but sticks and poisonous thorns. Upon the limbs of these thorn trees perched the harpies. Half woman, half bird of prey, shrieking and tearing at the branches. Cries can be heard all around, but no bodies are to be seen. At first Dante believes that the souls are hiding in the thick woods. But Virgil, to disabuse him of that error, instructs him to snap some little twig from off one of these plants. Dante does so. And suddenly a plaintive cry comes from the violated tree. Why do you hack at me? When it had darkened with its dripping blood, it cried anew, why do you mangle me? Isn't there any pity in your soul? Once we were men, now we are stubs and stakes. Your hand might well have felt more sympathy, even if we had been the souls of stakes. These are the suicides imprisoned forever in trees. Before we ask, why this punishment? We should note the sad irony of the words that this unknown speaker has spoken to us. He says, he says, Dante has hacked and mangled him. But all Dante has done is to snap a twig off a little branch. We shouldn't think that the soul is deliberately exaggerating. He feels, with excruciating tenderness, the violation of his strange body. Now in life, he cast that body away. He cast it away as if it were trash. But now in hell, he's utterly solicitous for its welfare, its integrity. He accuses Dante of having no pity. And in reality, he's the one who had no pity. He's the one who treated his own body as if it were merely a den for something worthless like the soul of a serpent. Neither Dante nor Virgil sought to cause the spirit this pain. In the Aeneid, Virgil was the first poet to use the motif of a soul imprisoned in a tree and the blood and the voice coming from the broken branch. There in the Aeneid, the soul of the murdered Trojan Polydorus warned Aeneas and his men not to settle in that country because the people there were devoted to violence. Polydorus had been a guest whose host accepted a bribe to put the boy to death. We're meant then to associate suicide with that vicious action of bribery for murder. And there's a certain consistency to it. The suicide, after all, if we think about it a little bit, the suicide intends to buy with his self-murder a certain defiant pleasure or perhaps an escape from pain. So for all that, we're meant to feel some pity for this broken tree.