The shade that frightens old women and children was itself afraid, and Alighieri underwent fever and chills all the way from marvelous fits of self-esteem to feelings of utter worthlessness.

Up to now Dante’s fame has been the greatest obstacle to understanding him and to the deeper study of him and it will for a long time continue to be so. His lapidary quality is nothing other than a product of the huge inner imbalance which found its outlet in the dream executions, the imagined encounters, the exquisite retorts, prepared in advance and nurtured by biliousness, calculated to destroy utterly his enemy, to bring about the final triumph.

How many times did the loving father, preceptor, sensible man, and guardian silence the internal raznochinets of the fourteenth century, who was so troubled at finding himself in a social hierarchy at the same time that Boccaccio, practically his contemporary, delighted in the same social system, plunged into it, sported about in it?

Che fai?—“What are you doing?”—sounds literally like the shout of a teacher: “You’ve gone crazy!” Then one is rescued by the playing of the organ pipes, which drown out shame and cover embarrassment.

It is absolutely incorrect to conceive of Dante’s poem as a single narration extended in one line or even as a voice. Long before Bach and at a time when large monumental organs were not yet being built, and there existed only the modest embryonic prototypes of the future marvel, when the chief instrument was still the zither, accompanying the voice, Alighieri constructed in verbal space an infinitely powerful organ and was already delighting in all of its imaginable stops and inflating its bellows and roaring and cooing in all its pipes.

Com’avesse l’inferno in gran dispitto.14

(Inferno, X, 36)

—the line that gave rise to all of European demonism and Byronism. Meanwhile, instead of elevating his figure on a pedestal, as Hugo, for example, would have done, Dante envelops it in muted tones, wraps it about in grey half-light, hides it away at the very bottom of a dim sack of sound.

This figure is rendered in the diminuendo stop; it falls down out of the dormer window of the hearing.

In other words, the phonetic light has been switched off. The grey shadows have been blended.

The Divina Commedia does not so much take up the reader’s time as intensify it, as in the performance of a musical piece.

In lengthening, the poem moves further away from its end, and the end itself arrives unexpectedly and sounds like a beginning.

The structure of the Dantean monologue, built on a system of organ stops, can be well understood with the help of an analogy to rocks whose purity has been violated by the intrusion of foreign bodies. Granular admixtures and veins of lava point to one earth fault or catastrophe as the source of the formation. Dante’s lines are formed and colored in just such a geological way. Their material structure is infinitely more important than the famous sculptural quality. Let us imagine a monument of granite or marble the symbolic function of which is not to represent a horse or a rider but to disclose the inner structure of the very marble or granite itself. In other words, imagine a monument of granite which has been erected in honor of granite and as though for the revelation of its idea. You will then receive a rather clear notion of how form and content are related in Dante.

Every unit of poetic speech—be it a line, a stanza, or an entire composition—must be regarded as a single word. When we pronounce, for example, the word “sun,” we are not throwing out an already prepared meaning—that would be a semantic abortion—we are living through a peculiar cycle.

Every word is a bundle and the meaning sticks out of it in various directions, not striving toward any one official point. When we pronounce “sun” we are, as it were, making an immense journey which has become so familiar to us that we move along in our sleep. What distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us awake in the middle of a word. Then the word turns out to be far longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road.

The semantic cycles of Dante’s cantos are so constructed that what begins with mëd “honey,” for instance, ends with med’ “bronze,” and what begins with lai, “bark of a dog,” ends with lëd, “ice.”

Dante, when he has to, calls the eyelids “the lips of the eye.” That is when the icy crystals of frozen tears hang from the lashes and form a covering which prevents weeping.

li occhi lor, ch’eran pria pur dentro molli,

gocciar su per le labbra . . .15

(Inferno, XXXII, 46–47)

Thus, suffering crosses the organs of sense, creates hybrids, produces the labial eye.

There is not one form in Dante—there is a multitude of forms. One is driven out of another and it is only by convention that they can be inserted one into the other.

He himself says: “Io premerei di mio concetto il suco” (Inferno, XXXII, 4), “I would squeeze the juice out of my idea, out of my conception.” That is, form is conceived of by him as something wrung out, not as something that envelops. Thus, strange as it may be, form is pressed out of the content—the conception—which, as it were, envelops the form. Such is Dante’s clear thought.

But only if a sponge or rag is wet can anything, no matter what, be wrung from it. We may twist the conception into a veritable plait but we will not squeeze from it any form unless it is in itself a form. In other words, any process of creating a form in poetry presupposes lines, periods, or cycles of form on the level of sound, just as is the case with a unit of meaning that can be uttered separately.

A scientific description of Dante’s Comedy—taken as a flow, a current—would inevitably take on the aspect of a treatise on metamorphoses, and would strive to penetrate the multitudinous states of the poetic matter just as a physician making a diagnosis listens to the multitudinous unity of the organism. Literary criticism would approach the method of live medicine.

III.

Penetrating as best I can into the structure of the Divina Commedia, I come to the conclusion that the entire poem is one single unified and indivisible stanza. Or, to be more exact, not a stanza but a crystallographic shape, that is, a body. There is an unceasing drive toward the creation of form that penetrates the entire poem. The poem is a strictly stereometric body, one integral development of a crystallographic theme. It is unthinkable that one might encompass with the eye or visually imagine to oneself this shape of thirteen thousand facets with its monstrous exactitude. My lack of even the vaguest notion about crystallography—an ignorance in this field, as in many others, that is customary in my circle—deprives me of the pleasure of grasping the true structure of the Divina Commedia. But such is the astonishing, stimulating power of Dante that he has awakened in me a concrete interest in crystallography, and as a grateful reader—lettore—I shall endeavor to satisfy him.

The formation of this poem transcends our notions of invention and composition. It would be much more correct to acknowledge instinct as its guiding principle. The approximate definitions offered here have been intended as anything but a parade of my metaphoric inventiveness. This is a struggle to make the whole conceivable as an entity, to render in graphic terms what is conceivable.