m,/not of release, but even of less pain./As cranes go over sounding their harsh cry,/leaving the long streak of their flight in air,/so come these spirits, wailing as they fly” (Alighieri 40-48). In a way, Don Quixote’s preoccupation with romance and chivalry has put him into a whirl, but he is in a psychological whirl as he loses his grasp on reality and descends into his own realm of knighthood and perspective on things—one where a short, sturdy, wench (as Pancho Sanza calls Dulcinea) becomes the ultimate ideal of love and honor to Don Quixote.
Francesca and Paolo fell truly in love while they were reading together. As Don Quixote reads his tales of chivalry, so Francesca and Paolo were reading tales of knights, particularly those of Sir Lancelot, “On a day of dalliance we read the rhyme/of Lancelot, how love had mastered him./We were alone with innocence and dim time./Pause after pause that high old story drew/our eyes together while we blushed and paled;/but it was one soft passage overthrew/
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