Holdyn Estes’s Reviews > The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso > Status Update

“My Guide and I crossed over and began
To Mount that little know and lightless road
To ascend into the shining world again.
He first, I second, without thought of rest
We climbed the dark until we reached the point
Where a round opening brought in sight the blest
And beauteous shining of the Heavenly cars.
And we walked out once more beneath the Stars.”

“Who could describe, even words set free
Of metric and rhyme a thousand time retold,
The blood and wounds that now were shown to me!

At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain;
The language of our sense and memory
Lacks the vocabulary of such pain”

“And when I looked down from their faces, I saw
That each of them was hideously distorted
Between the top of the chest and the lines of the jaw;
For the face was reversed on the neck, and they came on
Backwards, staring backwards at their loins,
For to look before them was forbidden”

“Led by my Guide and his truth, I leave the gall
and go for the sweet apples of delight.
But first I must descend to the center of all.”