It explains (to the pilgrim, if not to us) how an individual man, Dante Alighieri, can at the same time be all men, without any compromise of his identity. It also helps to explain, retrospectively, how an apparently chance encounter of a boy and a girl in medieval Florence on an exactly specified day could at the same time contain within it the pattern of universal salvation, without any surrender of historicity to a vague realm of ideas. Finally, perhaps most importantly for the modem reader, the vision of the Incarnation coincides with the coming together in the poem of the pilgrim and the author and narrator who has been with us from the beginning of the poem. It is as if the abstracted, confident voice of Dante-poet were an all-knowing principle of intelligibility and the figure of Dante-pilgrim were a flesh-and-blood reality, for that very reason struggling to understand his own meaning. When pilgrim and poet meet at the last stage of the journey, the circle is squared, to use Dante’s figure, the poet’s word joins the flesh of his experience and, in a sense that is at once paradoxical and exact, the poem is born.

At the beginning of this essay, I suggested that Dante could think of himself as a new Jason, returning with the Golden Fleece of his vision and of the poem that we read. In the last canto of the poem, this is in fact the figure that he uses:

Twenty-five centuries since Neptune saw the Argo’s keel have not moved all mankind, recalling that adventure, to such awe As I felt in an instant ...

The perspective of Neptune, from the bottom of the ocean looking up to witness man’s first navigation, is our perspective on the poet’s journey, a celestial navigation, of which the “mad flight” of Ulysses’ journey is the Promethean anti-type. The figure completes the navigational imagery with which the Paradiso began. At the same time, the perspective from the depths is the poet’s as well, who, like all prophets worthy of the name, has returned to tell us all. This didactic intent is finally what separates Dante’s vision from its more romantic successors or from its heroic predecessors. The final scene is not an apotheosis of the self in splendid isolation, but a return to the darkness of this world for its own good and a reintegration of poetry into society. There is a precise syntactic moment that marks his return in the final verses:

Here my powers rest from their high fantasy, but already I could feel my being turned-instinct and intellect balanced equally as in a wheel whose motions nothing jars—by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

The restless drive of Dante’s verse reaches its climax and its repose with the word “Love” in the last verse, just as the desire that is in human terms insatiable finds its satisfaction in the Love of God. What follows after the word represents a fall to earth, which is to say to us, after the ecstatic moment. Dante’s personal fulfillment of his own most intimate desires is perfectly harmonized with the Love that is the motive force of the entire universe, of the Sun and the other stars. Spatially, to speak of the Sun and stars is to return to our perspective, looking up at the heavenly bodies which had long been surpassed by the pilgrim’s journey to the Empyrean. The word “Love” is therefore the link that binds heaven to earth and the poet to his audience, containing within it the substance of the poem.

—John Freccero

CANTO I

THE EARTHLY PARADISE

The Invocation

ASCENT TO HEAVEN

The Sphere of Fire
The Music of the Spheres

DANTE STATES his supreme theme as Paradise itself and invokes the aid not only of the Muses but of Apollo.

Dante and Beatrice are in THE EARTHLY PARADISE, the Sun is at the Vernal Equinox, it is noon at Purgatory and midnight at Jerusalem when Dante sees Beatrice turn her eyes to stare straight into the sun and reflexively imitates her gesture. At once it is as if a second sun had been created, its light dazzling his senses, and Dante feels the ineffable change of his mortal soul into Godliness.

These phenomena are more than his senses can grasp, and Beatrice must explain to him what he himself has not realized: that he and Beatrice are soaring toward the height of Heaven at an incalculable speed.

Thus Dante climaxes the master metaphor in which purification is equated to weightlessness. Having purged all dross from his soul he mounts effortlessly, without even being aware of it at first, to his natural goal in the Godhead. So they pass through THE SPHERE OF FIRE, and so Dante first hears THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES.

The glory of Him who moves all things rays forth
through all the universe, and is reflected
from each thing in proportion to its worth.

I have been in that Heaven of His most light,
and what I saw, those who descend from there
lack both the knowledge and the power to write.

For as our intellect draws near its goal
it opens to such depths of understanding
as memory cannot plumb within the soul.

Nevertheless, whatever portion time
still leaves me of the treasure of that kingdom
shall now become the subject of my rhyme.

O good Apollo, for this last task, I pray
you make me such a vessel of your powers
as you deem worthy to be crowned with bay.

One peak of cleft Parnassus heretofore
has served my need, now must I summon both
on entering the arena one time more.

Enter my breast, I pray you, and there breathe
as high a strain as conquered Marsyas
that time you drew his body from its sheath.

O power divine, but lend to my high strain
so much as will make clear even the shadow
of that High Kingdom stamped upon my brain,

and you shall see me come to your dear grove
to crown myself with those green leaves which you
and my high theme shall make me worthy of.

So seldom are they gathered, Holy Sire,
to crown an emperor’s or a poet’s triumph
(oh fault and shame of mortal man’s desire!)

that the glad Delphic god must surely find
increase of joy in the Peneian frond
when any man thirsts for it in his mind.

Great flames are kindled where the small sparks fly.
So after me, perhaps, a better voice
shall raise such prayers that Cyrrha will reply.

The lamp of the world rises to mortal view
from various stations, but that point which joins
four circles with three crosses, it soars through

to a happier course in happier conjunction
wherein it warms and seals the wax of the world
closer to its own nature and high function.

That glad conjunction had made it evening here
and morning there; the south was all alight,
while darkness rode the northern hemisphere;

when I saw Beatrice had turned left to raise
her eyes up to the sun; no eagle ever
stared at its shining with so fixed a gaze.

And as a ray descending from the sky
gives rise to another, which climbs back again,
as a pilgrim yearns for home; so through my eye

her action, like a ray into my mind,
gave rise to mine: I stared into the sun
so hard that here it would have left me blind;

but much is granted to our senses there,
in that garden made to be man’s proper place,
that is not granted us when we are here.

I had to look away soon, and yet not
so soon but what I saw him spark and blaze
like new-tapped iron when it pours white-hot.

And suddenly, as it appeared to me,
day was added to day, as if He who can
had added a new sun to Heaven’s glory.

Beatrice stared at the eternal spheres
entranced, unmoving; and I looked away
from the sun’s height to,fix my eyes on hers.

And as I looked, I felt begin within me
what Glaucus felt eating the herb that made him
a god among the others in the sea.

How speak trans-human change to human sense?
Let the example speak until God’s grace
grants the pure spirit the experience.

Whether I rose in only the last created
part of my being, O Love that rulest Heaven
Thou knowest, by whose lamp I was translated.

When the Great Wheel that spins eternally
in longing for Thee, captured my attention
by that harmony attuned and heard by Thee,

I saw ablaze with sun from side to side
a reach of Heaven: not all the rains and rivers
of all of time could make a sea so wide.

That radiance and that new-heard melody
fired me with such a yearning for their Cause
as I had never felt before. And she

who saw my every thought as well as I,
saw my perplexity: before I asked
my question she had started her reply.

Thus she began: “You dull your own perceptions
with false imaginings and do not grasp
what would be clear but for your preconceptions.

You think you are still on earth: the lightning’s spear
never fled downward from its natural place
as rapidly as you are rising there.”

I grasped her brief and smiling words and shed
my first perplexity, but found myself
entangled in another, and I said:

“My mind, already recovered from the surprise
of the great marvel you have just explained,
is now amazed anew: how can I rise

in my gross body through such aery substance?”
She sighed in pity and turned as might a mother
to a delirious child. ”The elements

of all things,” she began, “whatever their mode,
observe an inner order. It is this form
that makes the universe resemble God.

In this the higher creatures see the hand
of the Eternal Worth, which is the goal
to which these norms conduce, being so planned.

All Being within this order, by the laws
of its own nature is impelled to find
its proper station round its Primal Cause.

Thus every nature moves across the tide
of the great sea of being to its own port,
each with its given instinct as its guide.

This instinct draws the fire about the moon.
It is the mover in the mortal heart.
It draws the earth together and makes it one.

Not only the brute creatures, but all those
possessed of intellect and love, this instinct
drives to their mark as a bow shoots forth its arrows.

The Providence that makes all things hunger here
satisfies forever with its light
the heaven within which whirls the fastest sphere.

And to it now, as to a place foretold,
are we two soaring, driven by that bow
whose every arrow finds a mark of gold.

It is true that oftentimes the form of a thing
does not respond to the intent of the art,
the matter being deaf to summoning—

just so, the creature sometimes travels wide
of this true course, for even when so driven
it still retains the power to turn aside

(exactly as we may see the heavens’ fire
plunge from a cloud) and its first impulse may
be twisted earthward by a false desire.

You should not, as I see it, marvel more
at your ascent than at a river’s fall
from a high mountain to the valley floor.

If you, free as you are of every dross,
had settled and had come to rest below,
that would indeed have been as marvelous

as a still flame there in the mortal plain.”
So saying, she turned her eyes to Heaven again.

Notes

1. of Him who moves all things: God as the unmoved mover. Since any change from perfection would have to be toward a lessening, God is changeless in Dante’s conception. Himself changeless (unmoved), therefore, he. imparts the creating motion to all things.

2-3. reflected ... in proportion to its worth: The more perfect the thing, the more perfectly it will reflect God’s perfect shining. The more clouded the glass, so to speak, the less its ability to reflect the light.

4. that Heaven of His most light: Literally: “that heaven that takes (i.e., “receives” and, by implication, “reflects again”) the most of His light.” The Empyrean.

5-12. those who descend ...