The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides

The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides is a pencil, ink and watercolour on paper artwork by the English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake (1757–1827).

Dante alludes to this by placing suicides in the seventh circle of Hell, where the violent are punished, alongside murderers, tyrants, blasphemers, sodomites and usurers.

[1] In Dante's poem, the tree contains the soul of Pietro della Vigna (1190–1249), an Italian jurist and diplomat, and chancellor and secretary to the Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250).

[1] Examining Blake's use of camouflage in the work, the art historian Kathleen Lundeen observes, "The trees appear to be superimposed over the figures as if the two images in the previous illustration has been pulled together into a single focus.

"[9] Three large harpies perch on branches spanning the pair of travellers, and these creatures are depicted by Blake as monstrous bird–human hybrids, in the words of the art historian Kevin Hutchings, "functioning as iconographic indictments of the act of suicide and its violent negation of the divine human form".

[10] The harpies' faces are human-like except for their pointed beaks, while their bodies are owl-shaped and equipped with claws, sharp wings and female breasts.

Blake renders them in a manner faithful to Dante's description in 13:14–16: "Broad are their pennons, of the human form / Their neck and countenance, armed with talons keen / These sit and wail on the dreary mystic wood.