In The Aeneid Virgil makes one of the most famous descriptions of the threshold of the infernal abodes. Following the advice of the Cumaean Sybil Aeneas must take a shoot from a tree with golden boughs that grows in a clearing near the entrance of the underworld. Once he procures a mistletoe branch—a plant whose pale green leaves acquire a golden hue during the winter—and has offered the due sacrifices to the deities of the underworld, Aeneas heads to the threshold of Hades:
Straightway they find a cave profound, of entrance gaping wide, o’erhung with rock, in gloom of sheltering grove, near the dark waters of a lake, whereby no bird might ever pass with scathless wing, so dire an exhalation is breathed out from that dark deep of death to upper air :— hence, in the Grecian tongue, Aornos called.1
Aorno, “without birds,” is the origin of the name Avernus. In the Phaedrus Plato argues that when the soul is perfect it is winged and adds that “the wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods.”2 A place in which birds are banned, where their wings are useless, is a place where the potency of heaven and the powers of the upper world are lost.
In one of her best-known poems, Emily Dickinson says: “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.” It was with reason that Dante put at the entrance of hell a brief legend that ends thus:
Before me there were no created things, Only eterne, and I eternal last. “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”
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