Brendan’s Reviews > The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso > Status Update

“I have at times seen all the eastern sky
Becoming rose as day began and seen,
Adorned in lovely blue, the rest of heaven;
And seen the sun’s face rise so veiled that it
Was tempered by the mist and could permit
The eye to look at length upon it; so,
Within a cloud of flowers that were cast
By the angelic hands and then rose up
And then fell back, outside and in the chariot,
A woman showed herself to me…”

“For when your longings center on things such
That sharing them apportions less to each,
Then envy stirs the bellows of your sighs.

But if the love within the Highest Sphere
Should turn your longings heavenward, the fear
Inhabiting your breast would disappear;

For there, the more there are who would say ‘ours’,
So much the greater is the good possessed
By each…”

(Purgatorio XV)

Dante somehow conceived of films more than 600 years before their invention.

Each level of Purgatory contains exemplars of the virtues to which penitents aspire, drawn from history/Biblical narrative, and displayed to the Pilgrim as photorealistic, moving and talking images projected on smooth white marble. His senses are confounded in what can only be described as the first instance of ‘movie magic’

An aspect of Dante that I love is his choice of similes. They are so apt, and bear such scrutiny within the broader themes of the poem, as only the finest poets can achieve. Here, penitent souls are rebuked for lingering to hear an earthly song (requested by the hapless, blundering Pilgrim) rather than starting on their climb toward the gates of Purgatory:

700 years later, Dante is still capable of shocking the reader. Each time I read it, I’m blown away by Canto XXV, which reads like the script for a David Cronenberg film. The grotesque fusion of condemned thieves with serpents (representing their sneaking deceit in life) is straight out of ‘The Fly’. It is testament to Dante’s extraordinary fantastical abilities — this really is the first work of Sci-Fi!

“…the good of grace is in exact proportion / to the ardor of love that opens to receive it.”

“Opinions too soon formed often deflect / man’s thinking from the truth into gross error, / in which his pride then binds his intellect.”

“Then, just as fire yearns upward through the air, / being so formed that it aspires by nature / to be in its own element up there;

So love, which is a spiritual motion, / fills the trapped soul, and it can never rest / short of the thing that fills it with devotion.”

“…for who sees need / and waits a plea, already half refuses.”

“A breath of wind is all there is to fame / here upon earth: it blows this way and that, / and when it changes quarter it changes name.

Though loosed from flesh in old age, will you have / in, say, a thousand years, more reputation / than if you went from child’s play to the grave?

What, to eternity, is a thousand years? / Not so much as the blinking of an eye / to the turning of the slowest of the spheres”