Purgatorio

This is an AI modernization of Purgatorio into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

This is the middle book of the poem Dante Alighieri wrote in exile between about 1308 and his death in 1321. He had been condemned in Florence in 1302 and could not go back on pain of burning. The poem is in three parts, all of them in this collection: the Inferno goes down through Hell, the Purgatorio climbs a mountain, and the Paradiso goes out through the spheres. Each can be read on its own, and this one is the part that readers who know only the Inferno are most surprised by.

Hell is a place where nothing can change. Purgatory is the opposite. Everyone on this mountain is going to be saved, knows it, and is being altered on the way up, so the suffering here — stones, sewn eyelids, smoke, fire, hunger — is entered willingly and has an end. Nobody argues his sentence. Seven terraces take the seven deadly sins in order, and Dante and Virgil climb them one at a time, stopping at nightfall because on this mountain you are not allowed to climb in the dark.

That clock is the thing to watch. This is the only one of the three parts with weather and a time of day. There is a sunrise on the shore, three nights on the steps, three dreams before dawn, and a sun whose position Dante checks constantly. It is also the warmest of the three. The dead here embrace, tease, apologise, remember meals, and ask to be prayed for. A musician sings a love song Dante himself wrote and the whole crowd stands still to listen until an old man shouts at them to get moving. A Florentine sits behind a rock making fun of the climb.

It is a poem about poets and about whether being good at anything is worth much. Dante keeps putting writers in front of the reader — one on the emptiness of fame, one converted by reading Virgil without Virgil ever knowing, one who names the new style Dante writes in. That thread pays off at the top of the mountain, where Virgil, who has brought him this far, has to stop.

The translation is from the Italian and keeps the shape: thirty-three cantos, 4,755 lines, three-line stanzas in the same number and order. The rhyme is not attempted, because terza rima cannot cross into English without padding. The Latin is left as Latin, since the souls are singing it and it is meant to be heard as singing. One exception is logged: eight lines near the summit are in Provençal, and those are given in English, because there was no room to gloss them and a hole in the poem is worse than a lost surface.

Contents

• Canto One
• Canto Two
• Canto Three
• Canto Four
• Canto Five
• Canto Six
• Canto Seven
• Canto Eight
• Canto Nine
• Canto Ten
• Canto Eleven
• Canto Twelve
• Canto Thirteen
• Canto Fourteen
• Canto Fifteen
• Canto Sixteen
• Canto Seventeen
• Canto Eighteen
• Canto Nineteen
• Canto Twenty
• Canto Twenty-One
• Canto Twenty-Two
• Canto Twenty-Three
• Canto Twenty-Four
• Canto Twenty-Five
• Canto Twenty-Six
• Canto Twenty-Seven
• Canto Twenty-Eight
• Canto Twenty-Nine
• Canto Thirty
• Canto Thirty-One
• Canto Thirty-Two
• Canto Thirty-Three

Canto One

	To run over better waters the little boat
	of my talent hoists its sail now,
	leaving behind it a sea so cruel;

	and I will sing of that second kingdom
	where the human spirit is made clean
	and becomes worthy to climb to heaven.

	But here let dead poetry rise again,
	holy Muses, since I am yours;
	and here let Calliope rise a little,

	following my song with the music
	that the daughters of Pierus felt so hard, when they challenged the Muses,
	that they gave up hope of pardon, and were turned into magpies.

	The sweet colour of eastern sapphire,
	gathering in the clear face of the air,
	pure all the way up to the horizon,

	began to be a delight to my eyes again
	as soon as I came out of the dead air
	that had weighed on my eyes and my chest.

	Venus, the lovely planet that gives heart to love,
	was making the whole east laugh,
	outshining the stars of the Fishes that came in her train.

	I turned to the right and set my mind
	on the other pole, and saw four stars
	never seen except by the first people.

	The sky seemed to take joy in their small flames.
	Oh widowed country of the north,
	since you are robbed of the sight of them!

	When I had taken my eyes away from them,
	turning a little towards the north pole,
	where the Great Bear had already gone down,

	I saw beside me an old man alone,
	whose look deserved as much reverence
	as any son owes to a father.

	He wore a long beard streaked with white,
	like his hair, of which a double band
	fell down over his chest.

	The rays of the four holy lights
	so trimmed his face with brightness
	that I saw him as if the sun were in front of him.

	"Who are you, that against the blind river
	have escaped out of the eternal prison?"
	he said, moving that honoured plumage.

	"Who guided you, or what was your lamp,
	coming up out of the deep night
	that keeps the valley of Hell forever black?

	Are the laws of the abyss so broken?
	Or has heaven changed its mind and made
	new law, that the damned come to my cliffs?"

	Then my guide took hold of me,
	and with words and with hands and with signs
	made my knees and my brow reverent.

	Then he answered him: "I did not come of myself.
	A lady came down from heaven, and at her prayers
	I helped this man with my company.

	But since it is your will that more be told
	about our condition, as it truly is,
	mine cannot be to refuse you.

	This man has never seen his last evening;
	but by his folly he came so close to it
	that very little time was left to turn back.

	As I have said, I was sent to him
	to save him; and there was no other road
	than this one I have taken.

	I have shown him all the guilty people,
	and now I mean to show him the spirits
	who make themselves clean under your charge.

	How I have brought him here would take long to tell.
	Power comes down from on high to help me
	bring him to see you and to hear you.

	Now be pleased to welcome his coming.
	He goes looking for freedom, which is so dear,
	as one knows who gives up his life for it.

	You know it, Cato, for death was not bitter to you
	for its sake at Utica, where you left behind
	the body that will shine so on the day of judgment.

	The eternal laws are not broken by us,
	for this man lives, and Minos, the judge of Hell, has no hold on me:
	I come from Limbo, the circle where the chaste eyes are

	of your Marcia, whose look still prays to you,
	holy heart, that you hold her as your own.
	For love of her, then, bend towards us.

	Let us go through your seven kingdoms.
	I will carry back your thanks to her,
	if you deign to be spoken of down there."

	"Marcia so pleased my eyes
	while I was over there," he said then,
	"that every favour she asked of me, I did.

	Now that she lives on the far side of Acheron, the evil river,
	she can move me no longer, by the law
	that was made when I came out of Hell.

	But if a lady of heaven moves and directs you,
	as you say, there is no need for flattery:
	it is enough that you ask me in her name.

	Go then, and see that you gird this man
	with a smooth rush and that you wash his face,
	so that every trace of filth is gone from it;

	for it would not be fitting to go, with the eye
	clouded by any mist, before the first
	of the angels who serve here, who is one of the angels of paradise.

	This little island, right round its lowest edge,
	down there where the wave beats against it,
	bears rushes over the soft mud.

	No other plant that puts out leaves
	or hardens into wood can live there,
	because it will not give way to the blows.

	Afterwards do not come back this way.
	The sun, which is rising now, will show you
	where to take the mountain by an easier climb."

	With that he vanished; and I stood up
	without speaking, and drew myself back
	close to my guide, and turned my eyes to him.

	He began: "Son, follow my steps.
	Let us turn back, for the plain slopes
	this way down to its lowest edge."

	Dawn was overcoming the hour before morning,
	which fled away in front of it, so that far off
	I made out the trembling of the sea.

	We went along the lonely plain
	like a man going back to a road he has lost,
	who until he finds it feels he walks for nothing.

	When we came to where the dew
	fights with the sun, being in a place
	where the breeze keeps it from thinning fast,

	my master spread both his hands
	gently on the young grass;
	and I, who understood what he meant,

	held out my wet cheeks to him,
	and there he uncovered all of that colour
	of mine which Hell had hidden.

	Then we came onto the deserted shore,
	whose waters no man ever sailed
	who afterwards knew the way back.

	There he girded me with the rush, as Cato had wished.
	And here is the marvel: the humble plant
	he chose grew again exactly as it was,

	instantly, in the place where he had pulled it.

Canto Two

	The sun had already reached the horizon
	over Jerusalem, on the other side of the world,
	where it was setting as it rose for us;

	and night, which circles opposite to him,
	was coming up out of the Ganges under the sign of the Scales,
	which drop out of her hand in autumn, when the nights grow long;

	so that the white and the crimson cheeks
	of the lovely dawn, there where I was,
	were turning orange as the dawn grew old.

	We were still there beside the sea,
	like people thinking about the road ahead,
	who go in their hearts and stay where they are.

	And then — as, caught by the morning,
	Mars glows red through the thick vapours
	low in the west over the floor of the sea —

	so there appeared to me, and may I see it again,
	a light coming over the water so fast
	that no flight could match its moving.

	And when I had taken my eye off it
	for a moment, to ask my guide about it,
	I saw it again, brighter and grown larger.

	Then on either side of it there appeared
	something white I could not name, and below
	little by little another whiteness came out.

	My master still did not say a word
	while the first whitenesses showed as wings;
	then, when he knew the steersman well,

	he cried: "Down, down onto your knees.
	Here is the angel of God: fold your hands.
	From now on you will see officers like this.

	See how he scorns all human contrivance,
	so that he wants no oar, and no sail
	but his own wings, between such distant shores.

	See how he has them pointed at the sky,
	beating the air with everlasting feathers,
	which do not moult as mortal hair does."

	Then, as the divine bird came nearer
	and nearer to us, he showed brighter,
	so that my eye could not bear him close by,

	and I bent it down; and he came to the shore
	with a boat so slender and so light
	that the water swallowed none of it.

	At the stern stood the heavenly pilot,
	whose look alone would make a man blessed to describe;
	and more than a hundred spirits sat inside.

	"In exitu Israel de Aegypto", when Israel came out of Egypt,
	they were singing all together, in one voice,
	with all the rest of that psalm as it is written.

	Then he made them the sign of the holy cross,
	and they all threw themselves onto the beach;
	and he went off as quickly as he came.

	The crowd that stayed behind seemed strangers
	to the place, looking about them
	like people trying something new.

	The sun was shooting the daylight from every side,
	and with his practised arrows
	had chased the sign of the Goat out of the middle of the sky,

	when the new people raised their faces
	towards us, saying: "If you know it,
	show us the way to go up the mountain."

	And Virgil answered: "You believe, perhaps,
	that we are familiar with this place;
	but we are strangers here, as you are.

	We came just now, a little before you,
	by another road, so rough and hard
	that the climbing will seem play to us after it."

	The souls, who had noticed by my breathing
	that I was still alive,
	went pale with wonder.

	And as people crowd towards a messenger
	carrying an olive branch, to hear the news,
	and nobody minds being trodden on,

	so those fortunate souls, every one of them,
	fixed their eyes on my face,
	almost forgetting to go and make themselves beautiful.

	I saw one of them come forward
	to embrace me with such great feeling
	that it moved me to do the same.

	Oh shades, empty except to the eye!
	Three times I clasped my hands behind him,
	and three times brought them back against my chest.

	I think I was painted with astonishment,
	because the shade smiled and drew back,
	and I, following him, pressed forward.

	Gently he told me to stop;
	then I knew who he was, and begged him
	to stay a little and talk with me.

	He answered: "Just as I loved you
	in my mortal body, so I love you freed from it.
	So I stay. But you — why are you going through?"

	"Casella, my friend, to come back another time
	to where I am now, I am making this journey,"
	I said. "But why have you been so long delayed?"

	And he said to me: "No wrong has been done me
	if the angel who takes whom he pleases, and when he pleases,
	has refused me this crossing several times;

	for his will is made out of a just will.
	Truly, for three months now, since the Jubilee began, he has taken
	whoever wanted to come aboard, in perfect peace.

	So I, who had turned then towards the shore
	at the mouth of the Tiber, where its water turns salt,
	was kindly gathered in by him.

	He has set his wing towards that river mouth,
	because there is where they always gather
	who are not going down to Hell by way of Acheron."

	And I: "If a new law has not taken from you
	the memory or the practice of that song of love
	which used to quiet all my longing,

	be pleased to comfort with it a little
	this soul of mine, which, coming here
	with its body, is so worn out."

	"Love that speaks to me within my mind"
	he began then, so sweetly
	that the sweetness still sounds inside me.

	My master and I and those people
	who were with him seemed as contented
	as if nothing else were on anyone's mind.

	We were all still, and attending
	to his notes; and then the honoured old man, Cato, came,
	shouting: "What is this, you laggard spirits?

	What negligence, what standing about is this?
	Run to the mountain and strip off the husk
	that keeps God from being plain to you."

	As, when they are gathering grain or tares,
	the pigeons collected at their feeding,
	quiet, without showing their usual strut,

	if something appears that frightens them
	suddenly leave the food alone,
	because a bigger worry has come on them,

	so I saw that new-landed company
	leave the singing and make for the hillside,
	like a man who goes without knowing where he comes out;

	and we were no slower in leaving than they were.

Canto Three

	Although that sudden flight
	had scattered them across the plain,
	turned to the mountain where justice probes us,

	I drew close to my faithful companion.
	And how could I have run on without him?
	Who would have brought me up the mountain?

	He seemed to me to be gnawing at himself.
	Oh dignified and clean conscience,
	how bitterly a small fault bites you!

	When his feet gave up the haste
	that takes the dignity out of any act,
	my mind, which until then had been narrowed,

	widened its attention, as if hungry,
	and I set my face towards the hill
	that rises highest out of the water towards heaven.

	The sun, flaming red behind us,
	was broken in front of me by my own shape,
	because his rays came to rest on me.

	I turned to one side, afraid
	that I had been left alone, when I saw
	the ground darkened in front of me only,

	and my comfort, turning right round to me,
	began: "Why do you still distrust?
	Do you not believe I am with you and guiding you?

	It is evening already over there in Italy, where the body
	is buried that I used to cast a shadow with.
	Naples has it; it was moved there from Brindisi, where I died.

	Now, if nothing casts a shadow in front of me,
	do not wonder at it more than at the heavens,
	where one does not block the light of another.

	God's power makes bodies like this, shadowless,
	that can still suffer torments, heat and frost;
	and how it does it, it does not want revealed to us.

	Anyone is mad who hopes our reason
	can travel the endless road
	that God, one being in three persons, takes.

	Be content, human race, with the fact, and do not ask why;
	for if you had been able to understand everything,
	there would have been no need for Mary to give birth,

	and you have seen men longing without fruit
	whose longing would otherwise have been quieted,
	which is given them eternally as their grief:

	I mean Aristotle, and Plato,
	and many others." And here he bent his head
	and said no more, and stayed troubled.

	Meanwhile we came to the foot of the mountain.
	There we found the rock so sheer
	that quick legs would have been no use on it.

	The most deserted, the most broken landslide
	between Lerici and Turbia is a stairway,
	compared with that, easy and open.

	"Now who knows which way the slope goes down,"
	said my master, stopping his step,
	"so that a man without wings can climb?"

	And while he kept his face lowered,
	examining in his mind what road to take,
	and I was looking up around the rock,

	on the left hand there appeared to me a crowd
	of souls, moving their feet towards us,
	and not seeming to, they came so slowly.

	"Master," I said, "lift your eyes:
	here are people who will give us advice,
	if you cannot get it out of yourself."

	He looked then, and with an easier air
	answered: "Let us go to them, since they come slowly;
	and you, sweet son, hold your hope firm."

	Those people were still as far off,
	after we had gone a thousand paces, I mean,
	as a good thrower could send a stone by hand,

	when they all pressed against the hard rocks
	of the high bank, and stood still and close together
	as a man stands to stare when he is in doubt.

	"You who have ended well, spirits already chosen,"
	Virgil began, "by that peace
	which I believe you are all waiting for,

	tell us where the mountain lies less steep,
	so that going up is possible;
	for the more a man knows, the more he hates losing time."

	As sheep come out of the fold
	by ones and twos and threes, and the rest
	stand timidly, with eye and muzzle to the ground,

	and what the first one does the others do,
	crowding up behind her if she stops,
	simple and quiet, and not knowing why;

	so I saw the head of that fortunate flock
	begin to move and come forward then,
	modest in the face and dignified in walking.

	When those in front saw the light
	broken on the ground at my right side,
	so that my shadow lay from me to the cliff,

	they stopped, and drew themselves back a little,
	and all the others coming on behind,
	not knowing why, did the same.

	"Without your asking, I admit to you
	that this is a human body you see,
	which is why the sunlight is split on the ground.

	Do not be astonished, but believe
	that it is not without power come from heaven
	that he seeks to get over this wall."

	So my master; and those worthy people
	said: "Turn back, then, and go on ahead of us,"
	making the sign with the backs of their hands.

	And one of them began: "Whoever
	you are, turn your face towards me as you go:
	consider whether you ever saw me over there."

	I turned towards him and looked at him hard:
	he was fair and handsome and of noble bearing,
	but a blow had split one of his eyebrows.

	When I had humbly denied
	ever having seen him, he said: "Now look";
	and he showed me a wound at the top of his chest.

	Then, smiling, he said: "I am Manfred,
	grandson of the Empress Constance;
	so I beg you, when you go back,

	to go to my beautiful daughter, mother
	of the honour of Sicily and of Aragon,
	and tell her the truth, if anything else is said.

	After my body had been broken
	by two mortal wounds, I gave myself up,
	weeping, to the one who forgives willingly.

	My sins were horrible;
	but infinite goodness has such wide arms
	that it takes in whatever turns back to it.

	If the bishop of Cosenza, who was set
	on hunting me down by Pope Clement then,
	had read this page of God's book properly,

	the bones of my body would still be
	at the head of the bridge near Benevento,
	under the guard of the heavy cairn.

	Now the rain washes them and the wind moves them,
	outside the kingdom, by the river Verde,
	where he carried them with the candles put out, as an excommunicate's are.

	No curse of theirs so loses a man
	that eternal love cannot come back to him,
	as long as hope has anything green in flower.

	It is true that whoever dies in defiance
	of Holy Church, even if he repents at the end,
	must stay outside this bank

	thirty years for every year he spent
	in his defiance, unless that sentence
	is shortened by good prayers.

	See now whether you can make me glad,
	telling my good Constance how you have seen me,
	and about this ban as well;

	for here we gain a great deal by the prayers of those over there."

Canto Four

	When, through pleasure or through pain
	that one of our faculties takes in,
	the soul gathers itself hard onto that faculty,

	it seems to attend to nothing else;
	and this disproves the error which holds
	that we have several souls, one lit above another.

	And so, when something is heard or seen
	that keeps the soul strongly turned towards it,
	time goes by and a man does not notice;

	for the power that keeps track of time is one thing,
	and the power that has hold of the whole soul is another:
	the first is, as it were, tied up, and the second is free.

	I had true experience of this,
	listening to that spirit and marvelling;
	for the sun had climbed a good fifty degrees

	and I had not noticed it, when we came
	to where those souls with one voice
	called out to us: "Here is what you asked for."

	A farmer often stops up a wider gap in his hedge
	with one little forkful of thorns,
	when the grapes are darkening and he wants them safe,

	than the opening was that my guide climbed by,
	and I after him, the two of us alone,
	once the troop had gone away from us.

	One can walk up to San Leo and down into Noli,
	can climb the crags of Bismantova and Cacume
	on one's feet; but here a man had to fly,

	I mean with the quick wings and the feathers
	of great longing, behind that leader
	who gave me hope and made light for me.

	We were climbing up inside the broken rock,
	and on either side the edge pressed us,
	and the ground under us wanted hands as well as feet.

	When we were on the topmost rim
	of the high bank, out on the open slope,
	"Master," I said, "what road shall we take?"

	And he to me: "Let no step of yours fall back;
	only keep gaining up the mountain behind me
	until some wise guide appears to us."

	The summit was so high it beat the eye,
	and the slope far steeper than forty-five degrees,
	the line from the middle of a quarter-circle to its centre.

	I was tired when I began: "Sweet father,
	turn round and look how I am left alone
	unless you stop."

	"My son," he said, "drag yourself as far as there,"
	pointing me to a ledge a little above us
	which goes right round the hill on that side.

	His words so spurred me on
	that I forced myself, scrambling behind him,
	until the ring of rock was under my feet.

	There we both sat down,
	turned towards the east, from where we had climbed,
	which a man usually likes to look back at.

	First I turned my eyes down to the shores below;
	then I lifted them to the sun, and I was amazed
	that we were being struck by it on the left.

	The poet saw very well that I was standing
	stupefied by the sun's chariot,
	which had come in between us and the north.

	So he said to me: "If the sun, the mirror
	that carries its light up and down the sky,
	were in the sign of the Twins now instead of the Ram,

	you would see the red-glowing zodiac
	turning still closer to the Bears, the north,
	unless it left its ancient road.

	How that can be, if you want to think it out,
	gather yourself in and imagine Jerusalem
	standing on the earth exactly opposite this mountain,

	so that the two share a single horizon
	and are in different hemispheres; then the sun's road,
	which Phaethon could not drive well,

	must pass, you will see,
	on one side of the one and on the other side of the other,
	if your understanding keeps its eye clear."

	"Certainly, my master," I said, "never yet
	have I seen so clearly as I see now,
	where my wits seemed to fall short,

	that the middle circle of the turning heavens,
	which the astronomers call the equator,
	and which always lies between the sun and the winter,

	for the reason you give, is as far from here
	towards the north as the Hebrews in Jerusalem
	used to see it towards the hot south.

	But if it please you, I would gladly know
	how far we have to go; because the hill rises
	higher than my eyes can climb."

	And he to me: "This mountain is such
	that it is always hard at the beginning, low down,
	and the further up a man goes the less it hurts.

	So when it seems so easy to you
	that going up will be as light for you
	as going downstream in a boat,

	then you will be at the end of this path.
	There you may look for your weariness to rest.
	I say no more, and this I know for true."

	And as he finished speaking,
	a voice sounded close by: "Perhaps
	you will need to sit down before that!"

	At the sound of it each of us turned,
	and we saw on the left a great boulder,
	which neither he nor I had noticed before.

	We drew over there; and there were people
	lying in the shade behind the rock
	the way a man settles himself out of laziness.

	And one of them, who looked worn out to me,
	was sitting with his arms round his knees,
	holding his face down low between them.

	"Oh my sweet lord," I said, "look at that one,
	who shows himself lazier
	than if idleness were his sister."

	Then he turned to us and took notice,
	moving his face only up along his thigh,
	and said: "Go on up then, you who are so strong!"

	Then I knew who he was; and the shortness
	of breath that was still troubling me a little
	did not stop me going to him. And when

	I had reached him, he barely raised his head,
	saying: "Have you quite seen how the sun
	drives his chariot past your left shoulder?"

	His lazy movements and his short words
	moved my lips a little towards a smile;
	then I began: "Belacqua, from now on

	I do not grieve for you. But tell me: why
	are you sitting just here? Are you waiting for an escort,
	or have your old lazy habits caught you again?"

	And he: "Oh brother, what is the use of going up?
	God's angel, who sits at the gate,
	would not let me through to the torments.

	First the heavens must turn round me
	outside it as long as they did in my life,
	because I put off my good sighs to the end,

	unless a prayer helps me sooner,
	one that rises from a heart living in grace.
	What good is any other, that is not heard in heaven?"

	And already the poet was climbing on ahead of me,
	and saying: "Come now; you see the sun
	is at its noon here, and on the far shore of the world

	night is already setting its foot on Morocco."

Canto Five

	I had already left those shades
	and was following in my guide's footsteps
	when, behind me, pointing his finger,

	one of them cried: "Look, the ray does not seem
	to shine on the left of the one lower down,
	and he seems to walk like a living man!"

	I turned my eyes at the sound of that,
	and saw them staring in astonishment
	at me, only at me, and at the broken light.

	"Why does your mind get so caught up,"
	said my master, "that you slacken your walking?
	What is it to you what they whisper here?

	Come after me and let the people talk.
	Stand like a firm tower, which never shakes
	its top for all the blowing of the winds;

	for a man in whom thought sprouts on thought
	always puts his target further off,
	because the rush of one saps the other."

	What could I say back except "I am coming"?
	I said it, sprinkled a little with the colour
	that sometimes makes a man deserve pardon.

	And meanwhile, across the slope,
	people were coming a little ahead of us,
	singing the Miserere, the psalm of repentance, verse by verse.

	When they saw that I gave no passage
	to the rays because of my body,
	they changed their singing to a long hoarse "Oh!"

	And two of them, like messengers,
	ran to meet us and asked us:
	"Tell us what you are."

	And my master: "You may go
	and report to those who sent you
	that this man's body is real flesh.

	If they stopped because they saw his shadow,
	as I suppose, that is answer enough for them.
	Let them do him honour: it may be worth their while."

	I never saw shooting stars split
	the clear sky of early night so quickly,
	nor summer lightning in August clouds at the sun's going down,

	as those two went back up in less time;
	and, arriving there, they wheeled towards us with the others,
	like a troop riding with a loose rein.

	"There are a great many of these people crowding on us,
	and they come to ask you something," said the poet.
	"So keep going, and listen as you go."

	"Oh soul who go to be happy
	with the very limbs you were born in,"
	they came crying, "slow your step a little.

	See whether you ever saw any of us,
	so that you may carry news of him over there.
	Ah, why do you go on? ah, why do you not stop?

	We all of us died by violence,
	and were sinners up to the last hour.
	There a light from heaven made us see,

	so that, repenting and forgiving, we came out
	of life at peace with God, who wounds us
	with the longing to see him."

	And I: "However I look into your faces,
	I recognize nobody. But if there is anything
	I can do that would please you, well-born spirits,

	say it, and I will do it, by that peace
	which, behind the feet of a guide like this,
	makes me go looking from world to world."

	And one began: "Every one of us trusts
	your good office without your swearing to it,
	provided that lack of power does not cut off the will.

	So I, who speak alone before the others,
	beg you, if you ever see the March of Ancona,
	the country that sits between Romagna and King Charles's kingdom of Naples,

	to be generous with your prayers for me
	in Fano, so that they pray for me well there,
	and I may purge away my heavy offences.

	I was from there; but the deep wounds
	that let out the blood I used to live in
	were made in me at Padua, in the lap of the Paduans, the people of Antenor the traitor,

	just where I thought I was safest.
	The lord of Este had it done, who was angry with me
	far beyond what justice wanted.

	But if I had run towards La Mira
	when I was overtaken at Oriago,
	I would still be over there where men breathe.

	I ran for the marsh, and the reeds and the mud
	so tangled me that I fell; and there I saw
	a lake made on the ground out of my veins."

	Then another said: "Ah, so may that longing
	be granted which draws you up the high mountain,
	help mine with kind pity!

	I was of Montefeltro; I am Buonconte.
	Giovanna, my wife, and the rest have no care for me,
	which is why I go among these with my head down."

	And I to him: "What force or what chance
	took you so far astray from Campaldino
	that your burial place was never known?"

	"Oh," he answered, "at the foot of the Casentino
	a water crosses that is called the Archiano,
	which rises in the Apennines above the Hermitage.

	There, where the Archiano runs into the Arno and loses its name,
	I arrived, with my throat pierced,
	fleeing on foot and bleeding over the plain.

	There I lost my sight and my speech.
	I ended on the name of Mary, and there
	I fell, and my flesh was left alone.

	I will tell the truth, and you tell it again among the living:
	God's angel took me, and the one from Hell
	shouted: 'You from heaven, why do you rob me?

	You carry off the eternal part of this man
	for one little tear that takes him from me;
	but I shall deal otherwise with the other part!'

	You know well how the wet vapour gathers
	in the air and turns back into water
	as soon as it climbs where the cold catches it.

	The devil brought his evil will, which wants only evil,
	together with his intelligence, and stirred up the mist
	and the wind by the power his nature gives him.

	Then, when the day went out, he covered the valley
	from Pratomagno to the great ridge
	with cloud, and made the sky above so heavy

	that the loaded air was turned to water.
	The rain fell, and what the ground could not take
	of it came down into the gullies;

	and as it joined into the larger streams,
	it hurtled towards the Arno, the royal river, so fast
	that nothing could hold it back.

	The raging Archiano found my frozen body
	at its mouth, and drove it into the Arno,
	and undid the cross on my breast

	which I had made of myself when the pain overcame me.
	It rolled me along the banks and the bed,
	then covered and wound me in its spoil."

	"Ah, when you have gone back to the world
	and rested from the long road,"
	the third spirit followed on the second,

	"remember me, who am La Pia.
	Siena made me; Maremma unmade me:
	he knows it, the husband who first put a ring on me

	and married me with his jewel, and then had me killed."

Canto Six

	When a game of dice breaks up,
	the one who has lost stays behind unhappy,
	going over the throws, and sadly learns;

	the whole crowd goes off with the other man.
	One walks in front, one takes him from behind,
	one at his side reminds him who he is.

	He does not stop, and listens to this one and that one;
	whoever he holds out a hand to presses him no more,
	and so he defends himself from the crush.

	That was what I was like in that thick crowd,
	turning my face to them, this way and that,
	and getting free of them by promising.

	There was the judge from Arezzo who took his death
	from the fierce arms of the bandit Ghino di Tacco,
	and the other Aretine, who drowned running from a battle.

	There Federigo Novello prayed with his hands
	held out, and that man of Pisa
	whose murder let his father, good Marzucco, show his strength by forgiving it.

	I saw Count Orso, and the soul cut off
	from its body out of spite and envy,
	as he said himself, and not for any fault of his —

	I mean Pierre de la Brosse; and let the lady of Brabant, the queen who accused him,
	see to it, while she is still over there,
	that she does not end in a worse flock for it.

	As soon as I was free of all
	those shades who only asked that others pray,
	so that their becoming holy might be hurried,

	I began: "It seems to me, my light,
	that you deny outright in one passage of your Aeneid
	that prayer can bend a decree of heaven,

	and these people are praying for just that.
	Is their hope useless, then,
	or have I not understood your words?"

	And he to me: "My writing is plain,
	and the hope of these people does not fail,
	if it is looked at with a sound mind;

	for the height of judgment is not lowered
	because the fire of love completes in a moment
	what the man who is lodged here must satisfy.

	And where I laid that point down, in my poem,
	no fault was mended by praying,
	because the prayer was a pagan's, and cut off from God.

	But truly, do not settle on so high a doubt
	unless she tells you so, who will be the light
	between the truth and your understanding.

	I do not know if you follow: I mean Beatrice.
	You will see her above, on the summit
	of this mountain, laughing and happy."

	And I: "My lord, let us go faster,
	for I am not tiring now as I was before,
	and you see the hill is throwing a shadow already."

	"We shall go on with this day," he answered,
	"as far as we still can;
	but the case is otherwise than you suppose.

	Before you are up there you will see him come back
	who is already hidden by the slope,
	so that you do not break his rays.

	But look over there at a soul who, set
	all by herself alone, is looking towards us:
	she will show us the quickest way."

	We came to her. Oh Lombard soul,
	how you stood there, haughty and disdainful,
	and dignified and slow in the moving of your eyes!

	She said nothing at all to us,
	but let us come on, only watching
	the way a lion does when he lies at rest.

	Still Virgil went up to her, asking
	that she would show us the better climb;
	and she did not answer his question,

	but asked us about our country and our life;
	and my sweet guide began
	"Mantua —" and the shade, until then all shut in itself,

	rose towards him from where she had been,
	saying: "Oh Mantuan, I am Sordello,
	of your own town!" And each embraced the other.

	Ah, Italy the slave, hostel of grief,
	ship without a helmsman in a great storm,
	no lady of provinces but a brothel!

	That noble soul was so quick,
	only at the sweet sound of his town's name,
	to make his fellow citizen welcome here;

	and now the living in you are never
	without war, and those shut inside one wall
	and one ditch gnaw at one another.

	Search, wretched country, round the edges
	of your coasts, and then look into your own breast,
	whether any part of you enjoys peace.

	What use was it that Justinian mended
	your bridle with his laws, if the saddle is empty of an emperor?
	Without the bridle, the shame would be less.

	Ah, you people who ought to be devout,
	and let Caesar sit in the saddle,
	if you understood what God writes for you,

	see how vicious this beast has become
	for not being corrected by the spurs,
	since you put your hands on the reins.

	Oh German Albert, emperor who abandon her
	now that she has turned wild and unbroken,
	when you ought to be astride her saddlebows,

	may a just judgment fall from the stars
	on your blood, and be strange and open,
	so that your successor is afraid of it!

	For you and your father have allowed,
	held back over there by greed,
	the garden of the empire to be left waste.

	Come and see the Montagues and the Capulets,
	the Monaldi and the Filippeschi, careless man,
	the feuding families: those already ruined, and these in fear!

	Come, cruel one, come and see the oppression
	of your nobles, and doctor their wounds,
	and you will see how safe the county of Santafiora is now!

	Come and see your Rome, who weeps,
	widowed and alone, and cries day and night:
	"My Caesar, why are you not with me?"

	Come and see how the people love one another!
	And if no pity for us moves you,
	come to be ashamed of your own reputation.

	And if I may say it, highest Jove,
	Christ, who were crucified on earth for us,
	are your just eyes turned somewhere else?

	Or is it a preparation you are making
	in the deep of your counsel, for some good
	entirely cut off from what we can see?

	For the cities of Italy are all full
	of tyrants, and every peasant who comes
	playing at party politics sets up as a Marcellus, a great man of the state.

	My own Florence, you may well be pleased
	with this digression, which does not touch you,
	thanks to your people, who argue so well.

	Many have justice in their hearts, and are slow
	to let it fly, since they will not draw the bow without taking advice;
	but your people have it on the tip of the tongue.

	Many refuse the burden of public office;
	but your people answer eagerly,
	without being called, and shout: "I'll take it on!"

	Now be glad, for you have good reason:
	you rich, you at peace, you full of wisdom!
	If I speak the truth, the facts do not hide it.

	Athens and Sparta, which made
	the ancient laws and were so civilized,
	gave only a small hint towards living well

	compared with you, who make such fine
	provisions that what you spin in October
	does not last to the middle of November.

	How many times, within the memory you have,
	have you changed laws, coinage, offices, customs,
	and made new limbs for yourself!

	And if you remember well and see any light,
	you will see yourself like a sick woman
	who can find no rest on the feathers,

	but fends off her pain by turning over.

Canto Seven

	After the dignified and joyful greetings
	had been repeated three and four times,
	Sordello drew back and said: "Who are you?"

	"Before the souls worthy of climbing to God
	were turned towards this mountain,
	my bones were buried by the emperor Augustus.

	I am Virgil; and for no other fault
	did I lose heaven than for not having faith."
	So my guide answered him then.

	As a man who suddenly sees something
	in front of him that astonishes him,
	and believes and does not, saying "It is — it is not —",

	so that one looked; and then he lowered his eyes
	and came back to him humbly
	and embraced him low, round the knees, as a lesser man embraces a greater.

	"Oh glory of the Latins," he said, "through whom
	our language showed what it could do,
	oh eternal honour of the place I came from,

	what merit or what grace shows you to me?
	If I am worthy to hear your words,
	tell me if you come from Hell, and out of what cloister."

	"Through all the circles of the sorrowful kingdom,"
	he answered him, "I have come here.
	Power from heaven moved me, and I come with it.

	Not for doing, but for not doing, I have lost
	the sight of the high Sun that you long for
	and that I came to know too late.

	There is a place down there not sad with torments
	but only with darkness, where the lamenting
	does not sound like howling but is sighs.

	There I am with the innocent children
	who were bitten by the teeth of death
	before baptism freed them of the human fault;

	there I am with those who did not put on
	the three holy virtues, faith, hope and love, and without vice
	knew all the other virtues and followed them.

	But if you know and can, give us some sign
	so that we may come the sooner
	to where Purgatory truly begins."

	He answered: "No fixed place is set for us;
	I am allowed to go up and around;
	as far as I can go, I will come as your guide.

	But see how the day is already going down,
	and one cannot climb by night;
	so it is well to think about a good resting place.

	There are souls here on the right, off by themselves.
	If you consent, I will take you to them,
	and you will not be sorry to know them."

	"How is this?" was the answer. "If a man wanted
	to climb by night, would he be prevented
	by someone else, or would he not because he could not?"

	And good Sordello drew his finger along the ground,
	saying: "Look — you would not get across
	even this line once the sun has gone,

	not that anything else would hinder
	your going up, except the darkness of the night;
	that tangles the will with the lack of power.

	One could well go back downwards with it,
	and wander about the slope,
	while the horizon keeps the day shut in."

	Then my lord, as though wondering, said:
	"Take us, then, to that place where you say
	we can have some pleasure in waiting."

	We had gone only a little way from there
	when I saw that the mountain was hollowed,
	the way valleys hollow the mountains here.

	"Over there," said that shade, "we shall go,
	where the slope makes a lap of itself;
	and there we shall wait for the new day."

	Between steep and level there was a slanting path
	which led us to the side of the hollow,
	where the rim dies away by more than half.

	Gold and fine silver, scarlet and white lead,
	indigo, bright clear wood,
	fresh emerald at the moment it is split —

	set inside that fold of ground, each would be
	beaten in colour by the grass and the flowers there
	as the less is beaten by the greater.

	Nature had not only painted there,
	but out of the sweetness of a thousand scents
	made one there, unknown and past telling.

	"Salve, Regina", sitting on the green
	and on the flowers, I saw souls singing
	who could not be seen from outside the valley.

	"Before the little sun that is left goes to its nest,"
	began the Mantuan who had led us there,
	"do not ask me to take you down among them.

	From this bank you will make out the gestures
	and the faces of all of them better
	than you would gathered among them in the hollow.

	That one who sits highest, and who has the look
	of having neglected what he should have done,
	and does not move his mouth to the others' singing,

	was the Emperor Rudolph, who could have healed
	the wounds that have killed Italy,
	so that another must revive her, and too late.

	The other, who comforts him by his look,
	ruled Bohemia, the country where the water rises
	that the Moldau carries into the Elbe, and the Elbe to the sea:

	Ottokar was his name, and in swaddling clothes
	he was worth far more than his bearded son
	Wenceslaus, whom lust and idleness feed.

	And that little-nosed one, Philip of France, who seems to be
	deep in talk with Henry of Navarre, the man with the kindly face,
	died running from a battle, and shamed the lilies of France:

	look there how he beats his breast!
	And see the other, who has made a bed
	of his palm for his cheek, sighing.

	Those two are the father and the father-in-law of the plague of France, Philip the Fair:
	they know his corrupt and filthy life,
	and from that comes the grief that pierces them so.

	That one who looks so heavily built, Peter of Aragon, and who sings
	in time with Charles of Anjou, the man of the manly nose,
	wore the cord of every virtue girded on him;

	and if the young man sitting behind him, his son Alfonso,
	had stayed king after him instead of dying young,
	the virtue would have passed properly from vessel to vessel,

	which cannot be said of the other heirs.
	James and Frederick have his kingdoms;
	neither of them has the better inheritance, his worth.

	Human goodness rarely rises again
	through the branches; and he who gives it wills it so,
	that it may be asked of him.

	My words go to Charles, the big-nosed one, as much
	as to the other, Peter, who sings with him,
	and Apulia and Provence already grieve for his heir.

	The son is as much less than the father
	as Constance, Peter's widow, can boast more of her husband
	than Beatrice and Margaret can of theirs, Charles.

	See the king of the simple life
	sitting there alone, Henry the Third of England:
	he has better fruit on his branches, his son Edward.

	The one who sits lower than these on the ground,
	looking upwards, is William, marquis of Monferrato,
	whose capture by the town of Alessandria, and the war that followed,

	set Monferrato and the Canavese weeping."

Canto Eight

	It was already the hour that turns the longing
	of men at sea and softens their hearts,
	the day they have said goodbye to sweet friends,

	and that pricks the new traveller with love
	if he hears a bell far off
	that seems to mourn the dying day,

	when I began to let my hearing go
	and to watch one of the souls
	who had stood up and asked with her hand to be heard.

	She joined and raised both her palms,
	fixing her eyes towards the east,
	as if saying to God: "I care for nothing else."

	"Te lucis ante", the hymn before the night, came out of her mouth
	so devoutly and with such sweet notes
	that it carried me out of my own mind;

	and then the others, sweetly and devoutly,
	followed her through the whole hymn to its end,
	with their eyes on the wheels above.

	Sharpen your eyes here, reader, on the truth,
	for the veil is now so thin
	that going through it is certainly easy.

	I saw that noble army afterwards
	looking up in silence,
	as if waiting, pale and humble;

	and I saw come out of the height and down
	two angels with two flaming swords,
	broken off and without their points.

	They were green in their clothing as young leaves
	just born, which they drew behind them,
	beaten and fanned by their green wings.

	One came to stand a little above us,
	and the other came down on the opposite side,
	so that the people were held between them.

	I could make out their fair heads well;
	but in the face the eye was lost,
	like a faculty confounded by too much.

	"Both come from Mary's own bosom,"
	said Sordello, "to guard the valley
	against the serpent, who will come at any moment."

	At which I, who did not know by which path,
	turned about and pressed myself close,
	frozen through, to those trusted shoulders.

	And Sordello again: "Now let us go down
	among the great shades, and speak to them.
	It will please them very much to see you."

	I think I had gone only three steps down
	when I was below, and saw one who was watching
	only me, as though he wanted to know me.

	It was already the time when the air was darkening,
	but not so much that it did not make clear
	between his eyes and mine what it had shut in before.

	He came towards me and I towards him.
	Noble Judge Nino of Gallura, how glad I was
	when I saw you were not among the damned!

	No fine greeting was left unsaid between us;
	then he asked: "How long is it since you came
	to the foot of the mountain over the far waters?"

	"Oh," I said to him, "I came this morning
	out of the sorrowful places, and I am in my first life,
	although by going this way I gain the other."

	And as soon as my answer was heard,
	Sordello and he drew back
	like people suddenly bewildered.

	One turned to Virgil, and the other to one
	who was sitting there, calling: "Up, Currado!
	Come and see what God has willed by his grace."

	Then, turned to me: "By that special gratitude
	you owe to God, who hides
	the first reason for what he does so deep that no one can wade to it,

	when you are beyond the wide waters,
	tell my daughter Giovanna to pray for me
	there where the innocent are answered.

	I do not think her mother loves me any longer,
	since she put off her widow's white veil to marry again,
	and, poor woman, she will come to want it back.

	By her one understands very easily
	how long the fire of love lasts in a woman
	if eye or touch does not often light it.

	The viper on the Visconti banner, that leads the Milanese to the field,
	will not make her so fine a tomb
	as my own cock of Gallura would have done."

	So he spoke, with the stamp on his face
	of that upright zeal
	which burns in the heart within measure.

	My greedy eyes kept going to the sky,
	just there where the stars are slowest,
	as a wheel is nearest to its axle.

	And my guide: "Son, what are you looking at up there?"
	And I to him: "At those three little torches, three stars,
	that set this whole pole on fire."

	And he to me: "The four bright stars
	you saw this morning are down below there,
	and these have risen where those were."

	As he was speaking, Sordello drew him to himself,
	saying: "Look over there — our adversary,"
	and pointed his finger so that he should look.

	On the side where the little valley
	has no rampart there was a snake,
	perhaps the one that gave Eve the bitter food.

	Through the grass and the flowers came the evil streak,
	turning its head now and then, and licking
	its back like an animal grooming itself.

	I did not see, and so I cannot say,
	how the angels, those heavenly hawks, got started;
	but I clearly saw both of them moving.

	Hearing the air split by the green wings,
	the serpent fled, and the angels wheeled,
	flying back up to their posts, keeping level.

	The shade who had drawn close to the judge
	when he called had never for one moment
	through all that assault let go of watching me.

	"So may the lamp of grace that leads you up
	find in your own will as much wax to burn
	as is needed to reach the flowering summit,"

	he began, "if you have true news
	of the Val di Magra or the country near it,
	tell me, for I was a great man there once.

	I was called Currado Malaspina;
	not the old one, but descended from him.
	I bore my family the love that is being purified here."

	"Oh," I said to him, "I have never been
	in your country; but where in all Europe
	do men live that it is not known?

	The fame that honours your house
	proclaims the lords and proclaims the land,
	so that a man knows it who was never there;

	and I swear to you, so may I go up,
	that your honoured family does not strip itself
	of the glory of the purse and of the sword.

	Custom and nature so privilege it
	that, though the guilty head of the world, the pope, twists everything,
	it alone goes straight and scorns the evil road."

	And he: "Now go; for the sun will not come back
	seven times to the bed of the Ram,
	seven springs will not pass,

	before this courteous opinion of yours
	will be nailed into the middle of your head
	with bigger nails than other men's talk,

	if the course of judgment does not stop."

Canto Nine

	The dawn, the mistress of old Tithonus,
	was already whitening the eastern balcony,
	just out of the arms of her sweet lover;

	her forehead was bright with the stars
	of the Scorpion, the cold animal
	that strikes people with its tail;

	and night, in the place where we were,
	had taken two of the six steps she climbs by,
	and the third hour was already lowering its wings,

	when I, who had Adam's body with me and its needs,
	overcome by sleep, lay down on the grass
	where all five of us were sitting.

	At the hour when the little swallow
	begins her sad songs near the morning,
	perhaps in memory of her first sufferings,

	and when our mind, more of a pilgrim
	away from the flesh and less held by its thoughts,
	is almost a prophet in its visions,

	in a dream I seemed to see an eagle
	hanging in the sky with feathers of gold,
	his wings open and set to come down;

	and I seemed to be on Mount Ida, where
	Ganymede's companions were left behind
	when the eagle carried him up to the gods.

	I thought to myself: "Perhaps he only strikes
	here, out of habit, and perhaps he scorns
	to carry anyone up in his claws from anywhere else."

	Then it seemed to me that, after wheeling a while,
	he came down terrible as lightning
	and snatched me up as far as the fire.

	There it seemed that he and I were burning,
	and the imagined blaze so scorched me
	that my sleep had to break.

	Achilles started up no otherwise,
	turning his wakened eyes about him
	and not knowing where he was,

	when his mother carried him off, asleep
	in her arms, from Chiron to Skyros,
	the place the Greeks later took him from,

	than I started, when sleep fled from my face
	and I went pale
	as a man does who freezes with fright.

	At my side was my comfort, and no one else,
	and the sun was already more than two hours up,
	and my face was turned towards the sea.

	"Do not be afraid," said my lord.
	"Be sure of yourself, for we are at a good point.
	Do not draw in, but let all your strength out.

	You have come now to Purgatory:
	see there the bank that closes it round;
	see the entrance there, where it seems split.

	A while ago, in the dawn that comes before day,
	when your soul was asleep inside you,
	over the flowers that make the place beautiful

	a lady came, and said: 'I am Lucia.
	Let me take this man who is sleeping;
	I will make his way easier for him.'

	Sordello stayed, and the other noble shapes.
	She took you up, and when the day was clear
	she came up here, and I on her tracks.

	She laid you down here; but first her lovely eyes
	showed me that open entrance;
	then she and your sleep went away together."

	Like a man who is reassured out of his doubt
	and whose fear changes into comfort
	once the truth has been uncovered to him,

	so I changed; and as soon as my guide
	saw me free of care he set off up the bank,
	and I behind him, towards the height.

	Reader, you see well how I lift up
	my matter, so do not be surprised
	if I shore it up with more art.

	We came closer, and were at a place
	where, at the point that had seemed to me
	simply broken, like a crack that splits a wall,

	I saw a gate, and three steps below it
	to go up by, of different colours,
	and a doorkeeper who as yet said nothing.

	And as I opened my eyes on him more and more,
	I saw him sitting on the topmost step,
	such in the face that I could not bear it;

	and he had a naked sword in his hand
	which threw the rays back so at us
	that I often turned my face towards it in vain.

	"Say it from there: what do you want?"
	he began to say. "Where is your escort?
	Take care that coming up does not hurt you."

	"A lady of heaven, who knows about these things,"
	my master answered him, "said to us
	only just now: 'Go there: the gate is there.'"

	"And may she advance your steps for your good,"
	the courteous doorkeeper began again.
	"Come forward, then, to our stairs."

	We came there; and the first step
	was white marble, so polished and clear
	that I saw myself in it as I look.

	The second was darker than deep purple,
	of a rough, burnt-looking stone,
	cracked along its length and across.

	The third, which lies massive on the top of them,
	seemed to me porphyry, as flaming
	as blood that spurts out of a vein.

	On this one God's angel had both his feet,
	sitting on the threshold,
	which seemed to me a stone of diamond.

	Up the three steps my guide drew me
	willingly, saying: "Ask him humbly
	to undo the lock."

	I threw myself devoutly at the holy feet;
	I asked for mercy, and that he would open to me,
	but first I struck myself three times on the breast.

	He wrote seven P's on my forehead
	with the point of his sword, and said: "See that you wash
	these wounds off when you are inside."

	Ashes, or earth dug out dry,
	would be one colour with his clothing;
	and from under it he drew two keys.

	One was of gold and the other of silver;
	first with the white one and then with the yellow
	he did so to the gate that I was satisfied.

	"Whenever one of these keys fails
	and does not turn properly in the lock,"
	he said to us, "this passage does not open.

	One is more precious; but the other needs
	a great deal of art and wit before it unlocks,
	because it is the one that unties the knot.

	I hold them from Saint Peter, and he told me to err
	on the side of opening rather than of keeping it shut,
	so long as the people throw themselves at my feet."

	Then he pushed the door of the sacred gate,
	saying: "Come in; but I warn you
	that whoever looks back goes outside again."

	And when the pivots of that holy gateway,
	which are of metal, loud and strong,
	were turned in their sockets,

	the doors of the Roman treasury on the Tarpeian rock did not roar so,
	nor grind so harshly, when good Metellus, who guarded it,
	was dragged away and Caesar emptied it.

	I turned round, attentive at the first sound,
	and I seemed to hear "Te Deum laudamus", we praise you, God,
	in voices mixed with that sweet noise.

	What I was hearing gave me exactly
	the impression one usually gets
	when people are singing to an organ:

	now you can make out the words and now you cannot.

Canto Ten

	When we were inside the threshold of the gate
	which the bad love of souls leaves unused,
	because it makes the crooked road look straight,

	I heard by its sound that it had closed again;
	and if I had turned my eyes to it,
	what would have been a fit excuse for the fault?

	We were climbing through a split rock
	that shifted one way and the other,
	like a wave that runs off and comes back.

	"Here we must use a little skill,"
	my guide began, "in keeping close,
	now this side, now that, to the wall as it draws away."

	And this made our steps so short
	that the waning moon got back to its bed
	to lie down again before we were

	out of that needle's eye.
	But when we were free and in the open,
	up where the mountain draws back on itself,

	I tired out and both of us uncertain
	of our road, we stopped on a level place
	lonelier than a track through a desert.

	From its edge, where it borders on the void,
	to the foot of the high bank that keeps on rising,
	would measure three times a human body;

	and as far as my eye could take wing,
	now on the left flank and now on the right,
	this terrace looked to me the same.

	Our feet had not yet moved up there
	when I saw that the bank all round —
	which had no room for climbing, being sheer —

	was of white marble, and so adorned
	with carvings that not only Polycletus, the great Greek sculptor,
	but nature herself would have been shamed by.

	The angel Gabriel, who came to earth with the decree
	of the peace that had been wept for so many years,
	and opened heaven after its long ban,

	appeared before us, carved there
	in an attitude so gentle and so true
	that he did not seem an image that keeps silent.

	One would have sworn that he was saying "Ave!";
	for she was pictured there
	who turned the key to open the high love;

	and in her attitude she had these words
	stamped: "Ecce ancilla Dei", behold the handmaid of the Lord,
	exactly as a figure is sealed in wax.

	"Do not keep your mind in one place only,"
	said the sweet master, who had me
	on the side where people have their hearts.

	So I moved my face, and saw
	behind Mary, on the side
	where he was who was moving me,

	another story set in the rock;
	so I stepped past Virgil and went close,
	so that it should be laid out for my eyes.

	Carved there in the same marble were
	the cart and the oxen drawing the holy ark of the covenant,
	which teaches men to fear an office not given them, since Uzzah died for touching it.

	In front there seemed to be people, all of them
	divided into seven choirs, who made
	one of my two senses say "No", the other "Yes, they sing."

	In the same way, at the smoke of the incense
	pictured there, my eyes and my nose
	disagreed over yes and no.

	There, going in front of the blessed ark,
	King David, the humble psalmist, danced with his robe hitched up,
	and in that act was both more and less than a king.

	Opposite, at the window of a great palace,
	his wife Michal was shown looking on
	like a woman full of scorn and grief.

	I moved my feet from where I stood
	to look closer at another story
	which showed white to me behind Michal.

	There was carved out the great glory
	of the Roman emperor whose worth
	moved Pope Gregory to pray him out of Hell, his great victory:

	I mean the Emperor Trajan;
	and a poor widow was at his bridle,
	with the bearing of tears and of grief.

	Around him it seemed crowded and full
	of horsemen, and the eagles in the gold
	above them seemed to move in the wind.

	The poor woman among all these
	seemed to say: "My lord, get me vengeance
	for my son, who is dead, and my heart breaks";

	and he to answer her: "Wait now
	until I come back"; and she: "My lord,"
	like someone whose grief is in a hurry,

	"and if you do not come back?" And he: "Whoever
	is in my place will do it for you"; and she:
	"What is another's good deed to you, if you forget your own?"

	At which he: "Now take comfort; for I must
	pay my duty before I move.
	Justice wills it, and pity holds me here."

	God, who never sees anything new,
	made this speech you could see,
	new to us because there is nothing like it on earth.

	While I was taking my pleasure in looking
	at the images of such humilities,
	precious for the sake of the workman who made them,

	"Look, over here, but they take slow steps,"
	the poet murmured, "a great many people:
	these will send us on our way to the high stairs."

	My eyes, which were happy to be gazing,
	being greedy for the new things they love,
	were not slow in turning towards him.

	I do not want you, reader, to be knocked out
	of your good resolve by hearing
	how God wills that the debt be paid.

	Do not attend to the shape of the punishment:
	think what comes after it; think that at worst
	it cannot go past the great sentence.

	I began: "Master, what I see
	moving towards us does not look like people to me,
	and I cannot tell what it is, my sight so wanders."

	And he to me: "The heavy condition
	of their torment bends them to the ground,
	so that my own eyes had a struggle with it at first.

	But look hard over there, and untangle
	with your eyes what is coming under those stones:
	you can make out by now how each one beats himself."

	Oh proud Christians, wretched and weary,
	who, sick in the eyes of the mind,
	put your trust in a road that leads backwards,

	do you not see that we are worms
	born to form the angelic butterfly
	that flies to judgment without defences?

	What is your spirit floating so high on,
	since you are as it were insects that have failed,
	like a grub in which the forming goes wrong?

	As sometimes, to hold up a floor or a roof,
	one sees a figure used as a corbel
	bringing its knees up against its chest,

	which, out of unreality, makes a real distress
	be born in whoever looks at it, so I saw
	these, when I paid proper attention.

	It is true that they were more and less bent
	according as they had more and less on their backs;
	and the one who had the most patience in his bearing

	seemed, weeping, to be saying: "I can do no more."

Canto Eleven

	"Our Father, who are in the heavens,
	not shut in there, but out of the greater love
	you have for your first works on high,

	praised be your name and your power
	by every creature, as it is right
	to give thanks to your sweet breath.

	Let the peace of your kingdom come to us,
	for we cannot come to it by ourselves,
	with all our wit, if it does not come.

	As your angels make a sacrifice
	to you of their own will, singing hosanna,
	so let men make one of theirs.

	Give us today our daily manna,
	without which, through this harsh desert,
	the man who strains hardest to go forward goes back.

	And as we forgive to everyone
	the evil we have suffered, do you forgive
	kindly, and do not look at what we deserve.

	Do not put our strength, which gives in so easily,
	to the test with the devil, the old adversary,
	but free it from him, who spurs it so.

	This last prayer, dear lord,
	is not made for ourselves, for we have no need,
	but for those who have stayed behind us."

	So those shades, praying good speed
	for themselves and for us, went on under their burden,
	like the one a man sometimes carries in dreams,

	all of them round the first terrace,
	unequally tormented and worn out,
	purging away the smoke of the world.

	If good is always said for us over there,
	what can be said and done for them here
	by those whose will has a good root?

	We ought certainly to help them wash off the marks
	they carried from here, so that clean and light
	they can come out to the wheeling stars.

	"Ah, so may justice and mercy soon
	unload you, and let you move the wing
	that will lift you according to your longing,

	show us on which hand the way to the stairway
	is shortest; and if there is more than one crossing,
	teach us the one that goes down least steeply;

	for this man who comes with me, because of the weight
	of Adam's flesh he is dressed in,
	is slow at climbing, against his own will."

	Whose the words were that came back
	to these that had been said by the one I was following
	was not clear;

	but it was said: "Come with us to the right
	along the bank, and you will find the pass
	that a living person can climb.

	And if I were not hindered by the stone
	that tames my proud neck,
	so that I must carry my face low,

	this man, who is still alive and does not name himself,
	I would look at, to see whether I know him
	and to make him sorry for this load.

	I was Italian, and the son of a great Tuscan:
	Guglielmo Aldobrandesco was my father.
	I do not know whether his name ever reached you.

	The ancient blood and the handsome deeds
	of my ancestors made me so arrogant
	that, not thinking of our common mother, the earth we all come from,

	I held every man in such contempt
	that I died of it, as the Sienese know,
	and every child in Campagnatico knows it.

	I am Omberto; and pride does not damage
	only me, for it has dragged all my kinsmen
	with it into disaster.

	And here I must carry this weight for it
	until God is satisfied, since I did not do it
	among the living, here among the dead."

	Listening, I bent my face down;
	and one of them — not the one who was speaking —
	twisted round under the weight that hampers them,

	and saw me and knew me and called out,
	keeping his eyes with difficulty fixed
	on me, who went along bent right down with them.

	"Oh," I said to him, "are you not Oderisi,
	the honour of Gubbio and the honour of the art
	of painting manuscripts, which in Paris they call illuminating?"

	"Brother," he said, "the pages Franco of Bologna
	brushes laugh more brightly than mine;
	the honour is all his now, and only partly mine.

	I would not have been so generous
	while I lived, because of the great desire
	for excellence that my heart was set on.

	The price of such pride is paid here;
	and I would not even be here yet, but that,
	while I could still sin, I turned to God.

	Oh empty glory of human powers!
	How short a time the green stays on the treetop,
	unless a dull age comes after it, with nobody better!

	Cimabue believed he held the field
	in painting, and now Giotto has the cry,
	so that the fame of the other is dim.

	So one Guido, Cavalcanti, has taken from the other, Guinizelli,
	the glory of our poetry; and perhaps someone is born already
	who will drive both of them out of the nest.

	The world's noise is nothing but a breath
	of wind, which comes now from here and now from there
	and changes its name because it changes its quarter.

	What more fame will you have if you strip off
	your flesh when it is old, than if you had died
	before you gave up your pap and your pennies,

	when a thousand years have gone by? And that is
	a shorter space to eternity than the blink of an eye
	is to the slowest circle turned in heaven.

	That one going along so short a stretch
	of road in front of me was the talk of all Tuscany,
	and now they hardly whisper of him in Siena,

	where he was lord when the fury of Florence,
	which was as proud then as it is a whore now,
	was destroyed on the field of Montaperti.

	Your reputation is the colour of grass,
	which comes and goes, and the same sun that draws it
	green out of the ground takes its colour away."

	And I to him: "Your true speech puts good humility
	into my heart and flattens a great swelling in me.
	But who is the one you were speaking of just now?"

	"That," he answered, "is Provenzan Salvani;
	and he is here because he was presumptuous
	in wanting all Siena in his hands.

	He has gone like this, and goes, without rest,
	since he died. This is the coin paid
	in satisfaction by whoever dares too much over there."

	And I: "If that spirit who waits for the edge
	of life before he repents
	stays down below and does not climb up here,

	unless good prayer helps him,
	until as much time has passed as he lived,
	how was the coming here granted to him?"

	"When he was living in his greatest glory,"
	he said, "he set himself down freely
	in the Campo of Siena, with all shame laid aside;

	and there, to raise the ransom that would get his friend out
	of King Charles's prison, he begged from passers-by,
	and brought himself to tremble in every vein with shame.

	I will say no more, and I know I speak darkly;
	but a short time will pass before your fellow citizens
	teach you what begging is, and then you will be able to explain it.

	That deed took those boundaries away from him."

Canto Twelve

	Side by side, like oxen going in a yoke,
	I went along with that loaded soul
	as long as my sweet schoolmaster allowed it.

	But when he said: "Leave him and press on,
	for here it is good that each should drive his boat
	with wings and with oars, as hard as he can,"

	I made myself straight again in the body,
	as one has to be for walking, although my thoughts
	stayed bowed down and made small.

	I had set off, and was gladly following
	my master's steps, and both of us
	were already showing how light we were,

	when he said to me: "Turn your eyes downward:
	it will be good for you, to quiet the road,
	to see the bed your feet are treading."

	As, so that there may be some memory of them,
	the flat tombs over the buried
	carry marked on them what they were before,

	which is why men often weep over them again
	at the prick of remembering,
	which spurs nobody but the loving;

	so I saw carved there, but of better likeness
	for the workmanship, the whole width
	that juts out from the mountain as a path.

	I saw on one side Lucifer, who was created
	nobler than any other creature,
	coming down from heaven like lightning.

	I saw the giant Briareus on the other side,
	lying transfixed by the thunderbolt,
	heavy on the ground with the chill of death.

	I saw Apollo, I saw Pallas and Mars,
	still armed, around their father Jupiter,
	looking at the scattered limbs of the Giants.

	I saw Nimrod at the foot of his great work, the tower of Babel,
	half out of his wits, and looking at the people
	who had been proud with him on the plain of Shinar.

	Oh Niobe, with what sorrowing eyes
	I saw you drawn there on the road,
	between your seven and seven children killed!

	Oh Saul, how you appeared there dead
	on your own sword, on Gilboa,
	which afterwards felt neither rain nor dew!

	Oh mad Arachne, so I saw you,
	already half spider, wretched on the shreds
	of the work that you made to your own harm.

	Oh Rehoboam, your image there does not seem
	to threaten any more; but a chariot carries it off
	full of terror, with nobody chasing it.

	It showed as well, that hard pavement,
	how Alcmaeon made his mother pay dearly
	for the cursed necklace she had betrayed his father for.

	It showed how his own sons threw themselves
	on King Sennacherib inside the temple,
	and how, when he was dead, they left him there.

	It showed the ruin and the cruel butchery
	Queen Tomyris made, when she said to the dead Cyrus:
	"You thirsted for blood, and I fill you with blood."

	It showed how the Assyrians fled in a rout
	after Holofernes had been killed,
	and the leavings of the slaughter too.

	I saw Troy in ashes and in holes in the ground:
	oh Ilion, how low and vile that carving,
	which can be made out there, showed you!

	What master of the brush or of the pen
	could have drawn the shading and the strokes
	that would make any fine mind stare there?

	The dead looked dead and the living living:
	no one who saw the real thing saw better than I,
	as far as I trod on it, going bent over.

	Now be proud, and go with your heads high,
	children of Eve, and do not bend your faces
	to see the bad path you are on!

	More of the mountain had been rounded by us,
	and far more of the sun's road spent,
	than my un-free mind was reckoning,

	when the one who always went ahead of me,
	watching, began: "Lift your head.
	This is no time to go so absorbed.

	Look over there at an angel getting ready
	to come towards us. See, the sixth hour, the sixth handmaid of the day,
	is already finishing her service: it is past noon.

	Adorn your face and your bearing with reverence,
	so that he takes pleasure in sending us up.
	Remember that this day never dawns again."

	I was so used to his warnings
	about not losing time that in that matter
	he could not speak to me obscurely.

	Towards us came the beautiful creature,
	dressed in white, and in the face
	like the morning star trembling.

	He opened his arms, and then opened his wings;
	he said: "Come: the stairs are near here,
	and from now on the climb is easy.

	Very few come at this invitation.
	Oh human race, born to fly upward,
	why do you fall at such a little wind?"

	He took us to where the rock was cut;
	there he beat his wings across my forehead,
	then promised me a safe going up.

	As, on the right hand, to climb the hill
	of San Miniato, the church that looks down
	on well-governed Florence above the Rubaconte bridge,

	the steepness of the ascent is broken
	by the stairways that were made in an age
	when the city's ledgers and its salt-measures were honest,

	so the bank slackens that falls here
	very steeply from the next circle;
	but on this side and on that the high rock grazes you.

	As we turned our bodies there,
	voices sang "Beati pauperes spiritu!", blessed are the poor in spirit,
	so sweetly that no speech could tell it.

	Ah, how different those passages are
	from the ones in Hell! For here one enters
	to singing, and down there to fierce laments.

	We were already going up the holy stairs,
	and it seemed to me I was far lighter
	than I had seemed to myself on the level before.

	So I said: "Master, tell me, what heavy thing
	has been taken off me, that I feel
	almost no labour at all in walking?"

	He answered: "When the P's which are still left,
	almost rubbed out, on your face
	are wholly shaved away, as one of them is,

	your feet will be so overcome by good will
	that they will not only feel no labour,
	but it will be a delight to them to be driven up."

	Then I did as people do who go along
	with something on their heads they do not know about,
	except that other men's signs make them suspect it,

	so that the hand helps them make sure,
	and searches and finds, and does the office
	that cannot be done by sight;

	and with the fingers of my right hand spread
	I found only six of the letters
	that the angel with the keys had cut on my forehead:

	and looking at that, my guide smiled.

Canto Thirteen

	We were at the top of the stairway,
	where the mountain that cures whoever climbs it
	is cut back for the second time.

	There a terrace binds the hill round
	in the same way as the first one,
	except that its curve bends more sharply.

	There is no shade there, and no carving to be seen:
	the bank looks bare and the path looks bare,
	with the livid colour of the raw stone.

	"If we wait here for people to ask,"
	the poet reasoned, "I am afraid perhaps
	our choice will be too long delayed."

	Then he fixed his eyes on the sun,
	made his right side the centre of the movement,
	and swung his left side round.

	"Oh sweet light, in whose trust I enter
	on this new road, lead us," he said,
	"as one must be led inside here.

	You warm the world, you shine upon it;
	if no other reason argues against it,
	your rays must always be our guides."

	As far as counts for a mile here,
	so far we had already gone there,
	in a short time, because the will was eager;

	and towards us there were heard flying,
	though not seen, spirits speaking
	courteous invitations to the table of love.

	The first voice that went by in flight
	said aloud "Vinum non habent", they have no wine,
	Mary's words at the wedding, and went on repeating it behind us.

	And before it had gone quite out of hearing
	by getting further off, another passed
	crying "I am Orestes", the friend's words that offered his own life, and did not stop either.

	"Oh," I said, "father, what voices are these?"
	And as I asked, here was the third,
	saying: "Love those from whom you have had evil."

	And the good master: "This circle whips
	the fault of envy, and so the cords
	of the lash are drawn out of love.

	The bridle that checks envy is made of the opposite sound, examples of it;
	you will hear it, I believe,
	before you come to the angel who pardons and lets you pass.

	But drive your eyes hard through the air
	and you will see people sitting in front of us,
	each one settled along the cliff."

	Then I opened my eyes wider than before;
	I looked ahead and saw shades with cloaks
	no different in colour from the stone.

	And when we had gone a little further on,
	I heard them cry: "Mary, pray for us",
	cry "Michael" and "Peter" and "All the saints".

	I do not believe there walks the earth today
	a man so hard that he would not have been pierced
	with pity at what I saw then;

	for when I had come so near to them
	that their gestures were clear to me,
	heavy grief was milked out through my eyes.

	They seemed to me covered in coarse haircloth,
	and one propped up another with his shoulder,
	and all of them were propped by the bank.

	So the blind, when they have nothing,
	stand begging at church doors on feast days for what they need,
	and one lets his head sink on another,

	so that pity may be quickly stirred in others,
	not only by the sound of the words
	but by the sight, which asks no less.

	And as the sun is no use to the blind,
	so to the shades there, of whom I am speaking now,
	the light of heaven will not give itself;

	for an iron wire pierces the eyelids of them all
	and sews them, as is done to a wild hawk
	because it will not stay quiet.

	It seemed to me that I did them a wrong,
	going along seeing others and not being seen;
	so I turned to my wise counsellor.

	He knew well what the dumb man meant to say;
	and so he did not wait for my question,
	but said: "Speak, and be short and to the point."

	Virgil was walking on the side of the terrace
	where a man can fall off,
	because it is not garlanded with any parapet;

	on the other side of me were the devout
	shades, who through the horrible stitching
	pressed the tears out until they wet their cheeks.

	I turned to them and: "Oh people certain,"
	I began, "of seeing the high light
	which is all that your desire cares for,

	so may grace soon dissolve the scum
	off your conscience, so that the river of the mind
	may come down clear through it,

	tell me — it would be gracious and dear to me —
	if any soul here among you is Italian;
	and perhaps it will be good for that soul if I learn it."

	"Oh my brother, each of us is a citizen
	of one true city; but you mean to say
	one who lived in Italy as a pilgrim."

	This is what I seemed to hear in answer
	from somewhat further on than where I stood,
	so I made myself heard still further along.

	Among the others I saw one shade who looked
	as if she were waiting; and if anyone asks "How?" —
	she was lifting her chin the way a blind man does.

	"Spirit," I said, "who tame yourself in order to climb,
	if you are the one who answered me,
	make yourself known to me by your place or your name."

	"I was Sienese," she answered, "and with these
	others I mend my wicked life here,
	weeping to him to lend himself to us.

	I was not wise, although I was called Sapia, which means wisdom,
	and I was far gladder of other people's losses
	than of my own good fortune.

	And so that you may not believe I am deceiving you,
	hear whether I was as mad as I tell you,
	when the arc of my years was already going down.

	My fellow citizens of Siena were joined in battle
	with their enemies of Florence near Colle,
	and I was praying God for what he had already willed.

	They were broken there and turned into the bitter
	steps of flight; and seeing the chase,
	I took a joy unlike any other,

	so much that I turned my face up, in my daring,
	shouting to God: "Now I fear you no longer!"
	as the blackbird does at a little fair weather.

	I wanted peace with God at the very end
	of my life; and my debt would still not be
	reduced by penitence,

	if it were not that Pier Pettinaio, the holy comb-seller of Siena, remembered me
	in his prayers,
	who out of charity was sorry for me.

	But who are you, who go asking about
	our condition, and carry your eyes unbound,
	as I believe, and speak by breathing?"

	"My eyes," I said, "will be taken from me here too,
	but for a short time, since the offence is small
	of having turned them in envy.

	Far greater is the fear that keeps my soul
	hanging over the torment below,
	for the load down there weighs on me already."

	And she to me: "Who has led you up here
	among us then, if you expect to go back down?"
	And I: "This man who is with me and says nothing.

	And I am alive; so ask of me,
	chosen spirit, if you want me to move
	my mortal feet over there for you."

	"Oh, this is so new a thing to hear,"
	she answered, "that it is a great sign God loves you;
	so help me sometimes with your prayer.

	And I beg you, by what you most long for,
	if ever you tread the soil of Tuscany,
	that you set my name right with my relatives.

	You will see them among those empty-headed people
	who put their hopes in Talamone, their new harbour, and will lose
	more hope there than in digging for the Diana, the lost underground river;

	but the admirals of that harbour will lose most of all."

Canto Fourteen

	"Who is this man who goes round our mountain
	before death has given him flight,
	and opens and shuts his eyes as he pleases?"

	"I do not know who he is, but I know he is not alone.
	You ask him, since you are nearer to him,
	and greet him gently, so that he speaks."

	So two spirits, leaning one towards the other,
	were talking about me there on the right hand;
	then they turned their faces up to speak to me,

	and one of them said: "Oh soul who go
	towards heaven still fixed in your body,
	for charity comfort us and tell us

	where you come from and who you are; for you make us
	wonder as much at the grace given you
	as a thing must that never happened before."

	And I: "Through the middle of Tuscany there wanders
	a little river that rises in Falterona,
	and a hundred miles of running does not satisfy it.

	I bring this body of mine from up above it.
	To tell you who I am would be talking for nothing,
	because my name does not yet make much sound."

	"If I get at your meaning properly
	with my understanding," the one who had spoken first
	then answered me, "you are speaking of the Arno."

	And the other said to him: "Why did he hide
	the name of that river,
	as a man does with horrible things?"

	And the shade who was asked this
	paid his debt so: "I do not know; but it is right
	that the name of such a valley should be lost;

	for from its beginning, in the Apennines, the mountain chain
	that Sicily was once broken off from, where it stands so high
	that in few places it rises higher,

	as far as the point where it gives itself back to the sea,
	to make good what the sky dries up off the sea
	and returns as the water that runs in every river,

	goodness is fled from as an enemy
	by everyone, like a snake, whether by the misfortune
	of the place or by bad habit that goads them:

	so that the dwellers in the wretched valley
	have so changed their nature
	that it looks as if the witch Circe had turned them into beasts and put them out to pasture.

	Among filthy pigs, the people of the Casentino, more fit for acorns
	than for any food made for human use,
	it first directs its poor course.

	Then, coming down, it finds curs, the men of Arezzo,
	snarling more than their strength calls for,
	and turns its snout away from them in scorn.

	It goes on falling; and the more it swells,
	the more the accursed and ill-fated ditch
	finds the dogs turning into wolves, at Florence.

	Then, dropping through more deep pools,
	it finds foxes, at Pisa, so full of fraud
	that they fear no trap that might catch them.

	Nor shall I stop speaking because another man hears me;
	and it will be good for this one if he remembers later
	what a true spirit unfolds to me.

	I see your grandson, Fulcieri, who becomes
	a hunter of those wolves of Florence on the bank
	of the savage river, and terrifies them all.

	He sells their flesh while they are still alive;
	then he butchers them like old cattle.
	Many he robs of life, and himself of honour.

	He comes out bloody from the sorry wood;
	he leaves it such that from now to a thousand years
	it will not grow back to what it was."

	As, at the announcement of grievous losses,
	the face of the listener is troubled,
	from whatever side the danger bites at him,

	so I saw the other soul, who had turned
	to listen, grow troubled and go sad
	when she had taken those words in.

	The speech of the one and the look of the other
	made me want to know their names,
	and I asked for them, with entreaties mixed in;

	so the spirit who had spoken to me first
	began again: "You want me to lower myself
	to doing for you what you will not do for me.

	But since God wills that so much of his grace
	should shine through you, I will not be stingy with you:
	so know that I was Guido del Duca.

	My blood was so burnt up with envy
	that if I had seen a man made happy
	you would have seen me covered with the livid colour.

	Of my sowing I reap this straw.
	Oh human race, why do you set your hearts
	where sharing must be shut out?

	This is Rinieri; this is the glory and the honour
	of the house of Calboli, where nobody since
	has made himself the heir of his worth.

	And it is not only his blood that has been stripped,
	between the Po and the mountains and the sea and the Reno,
	of the good that truth and pleasure need;

	for inside these bounds the ground is choked
	with poisonous scrub, so that by now they would be slow
	to die out even under cultivation.

	Where is good Lizio, and Arrigo Mainardi?
	Pier Traversaro, and Guido di Carpigna?
	Oh men of Romagna turned into bastards!

	When will a Fabbro take root again in Bologna?
	When a Bernardin di Fosco in Faenza,
	a noble shoot from a small weed?

	Do not wonder if I weep, Tuscan,
	when I remember, with Guido da Prata,
	Ugolin d'Azzo who lived among us,

	Federigo Tignoso and his company,
	the Traversara house and the Anastagi
	(and both those families are without heirs),

	the ladies and the knights, the labours and the ease
	that love and courtesy made us long for,
	there where hearts have been made so wicked.

	Oh Bertinoro, why do you not run away,
	since your family has gone,
	and many good people with it, so as not to be corrupted?

	Bagnacavallo does well, having no more sons;
	and Castrocaro does badly, and Conio worse,
	which still troubles itself to breed such counts.

	The Pagani will do well once their devil, Maghinardo,
	has left them; but not so well that a clean
	record of them will ever be left.

	Oh Ugolin de' Fantolin, your name is safe,
	since nobody is expected now
	who could darken it by degenerating.

	But go your way now, Tuscan; for I take
	far more pleasure now in weeping than in talking,
	our talk has so wrung my mind."

	We knew that those dear souls
	heard us going; so, by keeping silent,
	they made us confident of the road.

	Then, when we had been left alone, going on,
	a voice that met us seemed like lightning
	when it splits the air, saying:

	"Whoever finds me will kill me", Cain's cry after the murder;
	and it fled like thunder that dies away
	if the cloud suddenly bursts.

	As soon as our hearing had a truce from it,
	here was the other, with so great a crash
	that it seemed like thunder following at once:

	"I am Aglauros, who envied my sister and was turned to stone";
	and then, to press myself against the poet,
	I took my step to the right and not forward.

	The air was quiet on every side by now,
	and he said to me: "That was the hard bit
	which ought to keep a man inside his bounds.

	But you take the bait, so that the hook
	of the devil, the old adversary, pulls you to him;
	and so bridle and call are of little use.

	Heaven calls you and wheels around you,
	showing you its eternal beauties,
	and your eye looks only at the ground;

	so he who sees everything beats you."

Canto Fifteen

	As much of the sky as the sun, which is always
	playing about like a child, travels
	between dawn and the end of the third hour,

	so much of his course seemed now to be left
	him before evening: three hours to sunset.
	It was vespers there, and midnight here in Italy.

	And the rays struck us full in the face,
	because we had gone so far round the mountain
	that we were now walking straight towards the sunset,

	when I felt my forehead weighed down
	by a brightness far greater than before,
	and the things I could not account for astonished me;

	so I lifted my hands above my eyebrows
	and made myself the little shade
	that files down the excess of what can be seen.

	As, when a ray leaps off water
	or off a mirror to the opposite side,
	rising up at the same angle

	as the one it comes down at, and moves away
	from the fall of a stone by an equal distance,
	as experiment and art both show;

	so it seemed to me that I was struck there
	in front by a reflected light,
	so that my sight was quick to run away.

	"What is that, sweet father, which I cannot
	screen my eyes from well enough to be any use,"
	I said, "and which seems to be coming towards us?"

	"Do not be surprised if the family of heaven
	still dazzles you," he answered me.
	"It is a messenger, come to invite us to climb.

	Soon it will be no burden to you to see
	these things, but as much a delight
	as nature has fitted you to feel."

	When we had come to the blessed angel,
	he said with a glad voice: "Come in here
	to a stairway far less steep than the others."

	We were climbing, already gone up from there,
	and "Beati misericordes!", blessed are the merciful, was sung
	behind us, and "Rejoice, you who overcome!"

	My master and I, the two of us alone,
	were going up; and as I went I thought
	to gain some profit from his words,

	and turned to him, asking:
	"What did Guido, the spirit from Romagna, mean,
	when he spoke of 'shut out' and 'sharing'?"

	At which he to me: "He knows the harm
	of his own worst fault, so do not wonder
	if he reproves it, that men may weep less for it.

	Because your desires come to a point
	where a share is lessened by company,
	envy works the bellows for your sighs.

	But if the love of the highest sphere
	twisted your longing upwards,
	that fear would not be in your breast;

	for the more they say 'ours' up there,
	the more of the good each one possesses,
	and the more charity burns in that cloister."

	"I am hungrier for being satisfied,"
	I said, "than if you had said nothing to me first,
	and I gather more doubt in my mind.

	How can it be that one good, shared out
	among more owners, makes them richer of it
	than if it were owned by few?"

	And he to me: "Because you keep driving
	your mind back into earthly things only,
	you pick darkness out of true light.

	That infinite good beyond all words
	that is up there runs to meet love
	as a ray of light runs to a shining body.

	It gives itself according to the ardour it finds,
	so that however far charity reaches,
	the eternal worth grows over it.

	And the more people who understand each other up there,
	the more there is to love well, and the more they love,
	and each gives back to the other as a mirror does.

	And if my reasoning does not feed you,
	you will see Beatrice, and she will take away
	this hunger from you, and every other, completely.

	Only see to it that the five wounds
	are soon rubbed out, as two of them are already,
	which close by being painful."

	As I was about to say "You have satisfied me,"
	I saw that I had come onto the next circle,
	so that my hungry eyes made me keep silent.

	There it seemed to me I was suddenly caught up
	into a vision, out of myself,
	and saw several people in a temple;

	and a woman at the entrance, saying
	with the sweet manner of a mother: "My son,
	why have you done this to us?

	Look, your father and I have been searching
	for you in grief." And as she fell silent here,
	what had appeared at first disappeared.

	Then another appeared to me, with those waters
	down her cheeks that grief distils
	when it is born of great anger at somebody,

	saying: "If you are lord of Athens, the city
	whose name the gods quarrelled over,
	and out of which every science sparkles,

	take your revenge on those bold arms
	that embraced our daughter, Pisistratus."
	And her lord seemed to me, kindly and gentle,

	to answer her with a face under control:
	"What shall we do to a man who wishes us harm,
	if we condemn the man who loves us?"

	Then I saw people, kindled in the fire of anger,
	killing a young man, Stephen, with stones, shouting
	loudly, over and over, to each other: "Kill him! Kill him!"

	And I saw him sinking towards the ground
	because of the death that already weighed him down,
	but always making gates of his eyes to heaven,

	praying to the high Lord, in such a war,
	to forgive his persecutors,
	with that look which unlocks pity.

	When my soul came back outside again
	to the things that are true outside it,
	I recognized my not-false errors.

	My guide, who could see me acting
	like a man loosening himself from sleep,
	said: "What is the matter with you, that you cannot hold yourself up,

	but have come more than half a league
	with your eyes veiled and your legs tangling,
	like a man that wine or sleep bends over?"

	"Oh my sweet father, if you will hear me,
	I will tell you," I said, "what appeared to me
	when my legs were taken from me so."

	And he: "If you had a hundred masks
	over your face, your thoughts, however small,
	would not be shut off from me.

	What you saw was so that you should not refuse
	to open your heart to the waters of peace
	that are poured out from the eternal fountain.

	I did not ask 'What is the matter with you?' as one does
	who looks only with the eye that does not see
	when the body lies with the soul gone out of it;

	but I asked to give strength to your feet.
	The lazy must be goaded like this, who are slow
	to use their waking when it comes back."

	We went on through the evening, straining
	our eyes as far ahead as they could reach
	against the late and shining rays.

	And then, little by little, a smoke came
	towards us, as dark as night,
	and there was nowhere to get out of its way.

	It took our eyes and the clean air from us.

Canto Sixteen

	The dark of Hell, and of a night stripped
	of every planet, under a poor sky
	blackened with cloud as much as it can be,

	never made so thick a veil over my face
	as that smoke which covered us there,
	nor one so rough to the feeling,

	for the eye could not bear to stay open;
	so my knowing and faithful escort
	came close and offered me his shoulder.

	As a blind man walks behind his guide
	so as not to get lost and not to knock
	against something that hurts him, or perhaps kills him,

	so I went through that bitter and filthy air,
	listening to my guide, who kept saying
	only: "See that you are not cut off from me."

	I heard voices, and each one seemed
	to pray for peace and for mercy
	to the Lamb of God who takes away sins.

	They all began "Agnus Dei", Lamb of God;
	there was one word in all of them and one measure,
	so that all harmony seemed to be among them.

	"Are those spirits I hear, master?"
	I said. And he to me: "You understand rightly,
	and they are undoing the knot of anger."

	"Now who are you, splitting our smoke,
	and speaking of us just as though
	you still divided time by calendars?"

	So it was said by one voice;
	at which my master said: "Answer,
	and ask whether one goes up this way."

	And I: "Oh creature who make yourself clean
	to go back beautiful to him who made you,
	you will hear a marvel if you come along with me."

	"I will follow you as far as I am allowed,"
	he answered; "and if the smoke does not let us see,
	hearing will keep us joined instead."

	Then I began: "I am going up still wrapped
	in the body that death unwinds,
	and I came here through the anguish of Hell.

	And if God has shut me so inside his grace
	that he wills me to see his court
	in a way quite outside modern practice,

	do not hide from me who you were before your death,
	but tell me, and tell me if I am going right for the pass;
	and your words shall be our escort."

	"I was a Lombard, and I was called Marco, Marco Lombardo.
	I knew the world, and I loved that worth
	at which everybody now has unstrung his bow.

	For going up, you are walking straight."
	So he answered, and added: "I beg you
	to pray for me when you are up there."

	And I to him: "I bind myself by my faith
	to do what you ask me; but I am bursting
	inside with a doubt, if I do not open it out.

	It was single before, and now your saying
	has made it double, confirming for me
	here what I couple it with elsewhere.

	The world is indeed as barren of every virtue
	as you say to me,
	and pregnant with wickedness and covered by it;

	but I beg you to point out the cause to me,
	so that I may see it and may show it to others;
	for one man puts the cause in the stars and one down here."

	He first let out a deep sigh, which grief squeezed
	into an "ah!"; and then began: "Brother,
	the world is blind, and you certainly come from it.

	You who are alive refer every cause
	up to the heavens only, just as though
	they moved everything with them of necessity.

	If it were so, free will would be destroyed
	in you, and there would be no justice
	in joy for good and mourning for evil.

	The heavens set your motions going —
	I do not say all of them; but suppose I did say it,
	a light is given you for good and for wickedness,

	and free will, which, if it holds out through the labour
	of the first battles with the heavens,
	afterwards wins everything, if it is well nourished.

	You lie free under a greater power
	and a better nature, and that creates
	the mind in you, which the heavens have no charge of.

	So, if the present world goes astray,
	the cause is in you, and is to be looked for in you;
	and I will be a true spy on it for you now.

	Out of the hands of him who loves it
	before it exists, like a little girl
	who plays at crying and laughing,

	comes the simple soul, which knows nothing
	except that, being moved by a joyful maker,
	it turns gladly to whatever amuses it.

	First it tastes the flavour of some small good;
	there it is deceived and runs after it,
	unless a guide or a bridle bends its love.

	So it was necessary to set law as a bridle;
	it was necessary to have a king who could make out
	at least the tower of the true city.

	The laws exist, but who puts a hand to them?
	Nobody, because the shepherd who goes in front, the pope,
	chews the cud, like a clean beast in the old law, but has not the cloven hoof: he can meditate, but cannot tell one thing from another;

	so that the people, who see their guide
	striking only at the good they are greedy for,
	feed on that and ask for nothing more.

	You can see well that bad leadership
	is the cause that has made the world guilty,
	and not any nature corrupted in you.

	Rome, which made the world good,
	used to have two suns, the emperor and the pope, which made both roads
	plain, the world's road and God's.

	One has put out the other, and the sword
	is joined to the shepherd's crook in one hand, and the two together
	must by sheer force go badly;

	because, joined, neither one fears the other.
	If you do not believe me, look at the ear of grain,
	for every plant is known by its seed.

	In the country the Adige and the Po water,
	worth and courtesy used to be found
	before the emperor Frederick had his quarrel with the Church;

	now anyone can pass through it safely
	who would have kept away for shame
	of talking with good men or coming near them.

	It is true there are three old men still there
	in whom the old age reproves the new,
	and it seems long to them till God puts them in a better life:

	Currado da Palazzo, and the good Gherardo,
	and Guido da Castel, who is better called,
	in the French way, the plain Lombard.

	Say from now on that the Church of Rome,
	by confusing two governments in itself,
	falls in the mud, and dirties itself and its load."

	"Oh my Marco," I said, "you argue well;
	and now I see why the priests, the sons of Levi,
	were left out when the land was shared, so as not to mix the two powers.

	But which Gherardo is this whom you name
	as a sample left over from the vanished people,
	as a rebuke to this savage age?"

	"Either your speech deceives me or it is testing me,"
	he answered me; "for, speaking Tuscan to me,
	you seem to have heard nothing of the good Gherardo.

	I know no other surname for him,
	unless I took one from his daughter Gaia.
	God be with you: I come no further with you.

	See the dawn shining through the smoke
	and going white already, and I must leave
	before I am seen by the angel, who is there."

	So he turned back, and would not hear me any more.

Canto Seventeen

	Remember, reader, if ever in the mountains
	a fog caught you through which you could see
	no better than a mole sees through its skin,

	how, when the wet thick vapours
	begin to thin out, the disc of the sun
	comes weakly in through them;

	and your imagination will be quick
	to reach seeing how I saw the sun again
	at first, when it was already at its setting.

	So, matching my steps with the trusted steps
	of my master, I came out of that cloud
	into rays already dead on the low shores.

	Oh imagination, that steal us so
	sometimes away from outside things that a man
	does not notice a thousand trumpets sounding round him,

	who moves you, if the senses offer you nothing?
	A light moves you which takes form in heaven,
	by itself or by a will that sends it down.

	The trace of the cruelty of Procne, who killed her son in her rage
	and was changed into the bird that most delights in singing,
	appeared in my imagination;

	and here my mind was so shut in
	upon itself that nothing came from outside
	which it would have taken in then.

	Then there rained down into my high fantasy
	a man crucified, Haman, scornful and fierce
	in his look, and he was dying so;

	around him were the great king Ahasuerus,
	Esther his wife, and the just Mordecai,
	whom Haman had meant to hang, and who was so whole in his speaking and his doing.

	And as this image broke of itself,
	by itself, like a bubble
	when the water it was made under fails,

	there rose in my vision a girl, Lavinia,
	weeping hard, and she said: "Oh queen, my mother Amata,
	why did you choose out of anger to be nothing, and hang yourself?

	You have killed yourself so as not to lose Lavinia;
	now you have lost me! I am the one who mourns,
	mother, for your ruin before another's."

	As sleep is broken when new light suddenly
	strikes the closed eyes, and it flickers, broken,
	before it dies out altogether,

	so my imagining fell away
	as soon as a light struck my face
	far greater than any we are used to.

	I was turning to see where I was
	when a voice said: "Here is the way up,"
	which took me off every other purpose;

	and it made my will so eager
	to look at who it was that spoke
	that it never rests until it stands face to face.

	But as at the sun, which weighs our sight down
	and by its excess veils its own shape,
	so my power failed me there.

	"This is a divine spirit, who sets us
	on the road to go up without our asking,
	and hides himself in his own light.

	He does with us what a man does with himself;
	for whoever waits to be begged, and sees the need,
	is already meanly disposed to refusing.

	Now let our feet agree to such an invitation;
	let us try to climb before it darkens,
	for then we could not, until the day comes back."

	So my guide said, and I with him
	turned our steps to a stairway;
	and as soon as I was on the first step

	I felt near me something like the moving of a wing,
	and a fanning in my face, and a voice saying:
	"Beati pacifici, blessed are the peacemakers, who are without evil anger!"

	The last rays of the day, that night follows,
	were already so far raised above us
	that the stars were appearing on many sides.

	"Oh my strength, why do you melt away so?"
	I said to myself, for I felt
	the power of my legs put under truce.

	We were where the stairs went up no further,
	and we were fixed there
	like a ship that comes onto the beach.

	And I listened a little, to hear whether
	anything came from the new circle;
	then I turned to my master and said:

	"My sweet father, tell me, what offence
	is purged here in the circle where we are?
	If our feet stand still, do not let your speech stand still."

	And he to me: "The love of the good, fallen short
	of its duty, is made up here;
	here the oar that was slacked is pulled again.

	But so that you may understand it more openly still,
	turn your mind to me, and you will pick up
	some good fruit from our staying here."

	"Neither creator nor creature ever was
	without love," he began, "my son,
	either the love that is instinct or the love that is chosen; and you know it.

	Instinctive love is always without error,
	but chosen love can go wrong by choosing a bad object
	or through too much or too little force.

	While it is directed to the first goods,
	and in the secondary ones keeps measure in itself,
	it cannot be the cause of any wicked pleasure;

	but when it twists towards evil, or runs at the good
	with more or less care than it should,
	the creature is working against its maker.

	From this you can understand that love
	must be the seed in you of every virtue
	and of every act that earns punishment.

	Now, since love can never turn its face
	away from the good of its own subject,
	all things are safe from hating themselves;

	and since no being can be understood as cut off
	and standing by itself apart from the first,
	every creature is barred from hating him.

	It follows, if I divide the matter rightly,
	that the evil which is loved is one's neighbour's; and this
	love is born in three ways in your clay.

	There is the man who hopes for excellence
	through his neighbour's being put down,
	and only for this longs to see him thrown low;

	there is the man who is afraid of losing
	power, favour, honour and fame because another rises,
	and grows so sad at it that he loves the opposite;

	and there is the man who seems so shamed by an injury
	that he becomes greedy for revenge,
	and such a man must be busy with another's harm.

	This threefold love is wept for down below here.
	Now I want you to understand about the other,
	which runs at the good with its order corrupted.

	Every man confusedly grasps a good
	in which his mind may rest, and desires it;
	so that everyone struggles to reach it.

	If a slow love draws you towards seeing it
	or towards gaining it, this terrace,
	after true repentance, torments you for it.

	There is another kind of good that does not make a man happy;
	it is not happiness, it is not the good
	itself, God, the fruit and root of every good.

	The love that gives itself too much to that
	is wept for in three circles above us;
	but how it is talked of as threefold

	I keep quiet about, so that you may search it out yourself."

Canto Eighteen

	The high teacher had put an end
	to his reasoning, and was looking closely
	into my face to see whether I seemed satisfied;

	and I, whom a new thirst was already pricking,
	kept quiet outside, and inside said: "Perhaps
	the too much questioning I do is a burden to him."

	But that true father, who saw
	the timid wish that was not opening itself,
	by speaking gave me courage to speak.

	So I: "Master, my sight is so quickened
	in your light that I make out clearly
	whatever your reasoning divides or describes.

	So I beg you, sweet dear father,
	to explain love to me, to which you trace back
	every good act and its opposite."

	"Turn towards me," he said, "the sharp eyes
	of your understanding, and the error of the blind
	who make themselves guides will be plain to you.

	The mind, which is created quick to love,
	can be moved to anything that pleases,
	as soon as it is woken to act by pleasure.

	Your faculty of perception draws an image
	from something real and unfolds it inside you,
	so that it turns the mind towards it;

	and if, so turned, the mind bends towards it,
	that bending is love, that is nature,
	which is bound in you afresh by pleasure.

	Then, as fire moves upward
	by its own form, which is born to rise
	to where it lasts longest in its matter,

	so the captured mind enters into longing,
	which is a movement of the spirit, and never rests
	until the thing it loves makes it rejoice.

	Now you can see how far the truth is hidden
	from people who claim that every love
	is in itself a praiseworthy thing;

	because perhaps its matter always looks
	to be good, but not every seal is good,
	even if the wax is."

	"Your words and my mind following after them,"
	I answered him, "have uncovered love for me,
	but this has made me more pregnant with doubt;

	for if love is offered to us from outside,
	and the soul walks on no other foot,
	it is no credit to her whether she goes straight or crooked."

	And he to me: "As far as reason sees here,
	I can tell you; beyond that, wait
	for Beatrice, since it is a work of faith.

	Every soul, which is a form separate
	from matter and yet united with it,
	has a power of its own gathered in it,

	which is not felt except in action,
	and is never shown except by its effects,
	as life in a plant is shown by green leaves.

	And so, where the understanding of the first notions
	comes from, a man does not know,
	nor the affection for the first objects of desire,

	which are in you as the instinct in a bee
	to make honey; and this first willing
	is not open to praise or to blame.

	Now, so that every other willing may be gathered to this one,
	the power that counsels is innate in you,
	and it must keep the threshold of assent.

	This is the principle from which is taken
	the reason for deserving in you, according
	as it gathers and winnows good and bad loves.

	Those who reasoned down to the bottom of things
	knew of this innate freedom,
	and so they left morality to the world.

	So, granted that every love that is kindled
	inside you rises of necessity,
	the power to hold it back is in you.

	The noble power Beatrice means
	by free will; so see that you have it
	in mind, if she ever begins to speak of it to you."

	The moon, late, near midnight,
	was making the stars look thinner to us,
	shaped like a copper bucket burning all over;

	and she ran against the turning of the sky, along the roads
	the sun sets on fire in winter, when a man in Rome
	sees him go down between Sardinia and Corsica.

	And that noble shade, Virgil, for whom his birthplace Pietola
	is more famous than any other Mantuan village,
	had put down the load of my questions;

	so that I, who had gathered in the reasoning,
	plain and open, upon my questions,
	stood like a man who wanders half asleep.

	But this drowsiness was suddenly taken from me
	by people who had already come round
	behind our shoulders towards us.

	And as the rivers of Thebes, Ismenus and Asopus, long ago saw
	fury and crowding by night along their banks
	whenever the Thebans called on Bacchus for help,

	so, by what I saw of them coming,
	they curved their steps round that circle,
	ridden by good will and just love.

	They were soon on us, because all that great crowd
	was moving at a run;
	and two in front were crying out, weeping:

	"Mary ran to the hill country in haste, to Elizabeth;
	and Caesar, to subdue Lerida,
	struck at Marseilles and then ran on into Spain."

	"Quick, quick, let no time be lost
	for want of love," the others behind them cried,
	"for eagerness in doing well makes grace grow green again."

	"Oh people in whom a sharp fervour now
	makes up, perhaps, for negligence and delay
	put by you into doing good through lukewarmness,

	this man, who is alive — and truly I am not lying to you —
	wants to go up, as soon as the sun shines on us again;
	so tell us where the opening is nearest."

	These were my guide's words;
	and one of those spirits said: "Come along
	behind us, and you will find the gap.

	We are so full of the will to move
	that we cannot stop. So forgive us
	if you take our justice for rudeness.

	I was abbot at San Zeno in Verona
	under the rule of the good emperor Barbarossa,
	whom Milan still talks about in sorrow, since he destroyed it.

	And there is a lord of Verona who already has a foot in the grave
	who will soon be weeping for that monastery,
	and be sorry for having had power over it;

	because he has put his son, deformed in body,
	worse in mind, and born wrong,
	in the place of its true shepherd."

	I do not know whether he said more or fell silent,
	he had already run so far beyond us;
	but I heard this, and was glad to keep it.

	And he who was my help at every turn
	said: "Turn round here: see two of them
	coming, taking a bite at sloth."

	Behind everyone they were saying: "The people of Israel,
	for whom the Red Sea opened, were all dead in the desert
	before the Jordan saw their heirs cross into the promised land.

	And the crowd who would not bear the labour
	to the end with Aeneas, and stayed behind in Sicily,
	gave themselves up to a life without glory."

	Then, when those shades were so far away
	from us that they could no longer be seen,
	a new thought set itself inside me,

	out of which others were born, many and various;
	and I wandered so from one to another
	that I closed my eyes with the drifting,

	and turned my thinking into a dream.

Canto Nineteen

	At the hour before dawn, when the day's heat
	can no longer warm away the cold of the moon,
	beaten by the cold of the earth, and sometimes of Saturn,

	when the fortune-tellers see the pattern of stars they call the Greater Fortune
	rise in the east, before the dawn,
	by a road that stays dark for only a little longer,

	there came to me in a dream a woman who stammered,
	squinting, and twisted on her feet,
	with maimed hands, and of a sallow colour.

	I looked at her; and as the sun revives
	the cold limbs that the night weighs down,
	so my looking loosened her tongue for her,

	and then straightened her all up
	in a little while, and coloured her lost face
	the way love wants it.

	When her speech had been unbound like that,
	she began to sing so that it would have been hard
	for me to turn my attention away from her.

	"I am," she sang, "I am the sweet siren
	who lead sailors astray in mid sea,
	I am so full of pleasure to hear!

	I turned Ulysses from his wandering road
	with my singing; and whoever gets used to me
	rarely leaves, I satisfy him so completely."

	Her mouth had not yet closed again
	when a lady appeared, holy and quick,
	at my side, to put her to confusion.

	"Oh Virgil, Virgil, who is this?"
	she said fiercely; and he came on
	with his eyes fixed only on that honest one.

	She took hold of the other and opened her in front,
	splitting her clothes, and showed me her belly;
	the stink that came out of it woke me.

	I moved my eyes, and the good master said: "Three times
	at least I have called you! Get up and come;
	let us find the opening for you to go in by."

	I got up; and all the circles of the holy mountain
	were already full of high day,
	and we walked with the new sun at our backs.

	Following him, I carried my forehead
	like a man who has it loaded with thought
	and makes half the arch of a bridge of himself,

	when I heard "Come; the crossing is here"
	spoken in a way so gentle and kind
	as is not heard in this mortal country.

	With his wings open, which looked like a swan's,
	the one who spoke to us so turned us upward
	between the two walls of the hard rock.

	Then he moved his feathers and fanned us,
	saying that "Qui lugent", those who mourn, are the blessed,
	for their souls shall be comforted.

	"What is the matter, that you keep looking at the ground?"
	my guide began to say to me,
	when we had both climbed a little above the angel.

	And I: "A new vision makes me walk
	with so much misgiving, and bends me to itself,
	so that I cannot get away from thinking about it."

	"You saw," he said, "that ancient witch, the false pleasures of the world,
	which alone are wept for on the three terraces above us now;
	you saw how a man is loosed from her.

	Let that be enough for you, and beat your heels
	against the ground. Turn your eyes to the lure
	the eternal king spins with the great wheels."

	As the falcon first looks at his feet,
	then turns to the call and stretches out
	for the longing for the food that draws him there,

	so I became; and so, as far as the rock is split
	to make a way for whoever goes up,
	I went on to where the circling begins.

	When I had come out onto the fifth circle,
	I saw people all over it who were weeping,
	lying on the ground, all turned face down.

	"Adhaesit pavimento anima mea", my soul cleaves to the dust,
	I heard them say, with sighs so deep
	that the words could hardly be made out.

	"Oh chosen of God, whose sufferings
	both justice and hope make less hard,
	set us towards the high climbing."

	"If you come free of lying here,
	and want to find the way most quickly,
	keep your right hands always on the outside."

	So the poet asked, and so we were answered
	from a little way in front of us; so that I
	made out in the speaking what else was hidden,

	and turned my eyes to my lord's eyes;
	at which he agreed, with a glad sign,
	to what the look of my longing asked.

	When I could do as I wished with myself,
	I drew over above that creature
	whose words had first made me take notice,

	saying: "Spirit in whom weeping ripens
	that without which there is no going back to God,
	put aside your greater care a little for me.

	Who you were, and why you have your backs
	turned upwards, tell me, and whether you want me
	to get you anything over there, from where I set out alive."

	And he to me: "Why heaven turns our backs
	towards itself, you shall know; but first,
	scias quod ego fui successor Petri: know that I was a pope.

	Between Sestri and Chiavari there runs down
	a beautiful river, the Lavagna, and from its name
	my family, the Fieschi, takes its title.

	For a month and a little more I found out
	how the great cloak of the papacy weighs on a man who keeps it
	out of the mud, so that all other burdens seem feathers.

	My conversion, alas, was late;
	but as soon as I was made shepherd of Rome
	I discovered how the life lies.

	I saw that the heart was not quieted there,
	nor could one climb any higher in that life;
	so love of this one was kindled in me.

	Up to that moment I was a wretched soul,
	cut off from God, wholly greedy;
	now, as you see, I am punished for it here.

	What avarice does is declared here
	in the purging of the converted souls,
	and the mountain has no bitterer punishment.

	As our eye did not lift itself
	on high, being fixed on earthly things,
	so justice here has sunk it into the earth.

	As avarice put out our love for every good,
	so that our works were lost,
	so justice holds us here tight,

	bound and taken by the feet and by the hands;
	and as long as it is the just Lord's pleasure,
	so long we shall stay stretched out and still."

	I had gone down on my knees and wanted to speak;
	but as I began, and he noticed
	only by hearing that I was doing him reverence,

	"What reason," he said, "has bent you down like that?"
	And I to him: "For your dignity
	my conscience justly pricked me."

	"Straighten your legs, get up, brother!"
	he answered. "Do not be mistaken: I am a fellow servant
	with you and with the others of one power.

	If you ever understood that holy sound of the Gospel
	that says "Neque nubent", in heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage,
	you can see well why I say there is no rank here.

	Go on your way now: I do not want you to stop any longer,
	for your staying disturbs my weeping,
	with which I ripen what you spoke of.

	I have a niece over there whose name is Alagia,
	good in herself, so long as our house
	does not make her wicked by its example;

	and she alone is left me over there."

Canto Twenty

	Will fights badly against a better will;
	so, against my own pleasure, to please him,
	I drew the sponge unfilled out of the water.

	I moved off; and my guide moved along
	the clear spaces close by the rock,
	as one walks on a wall close to the battlements;

	for the people who melt out through their eyes,
	drop by drop, the evil that fills the whole world,
	come too near the edge on the other side.

	Curse you, ancient she-wolf, greed,
	who have more prey than all the other beasts
	because of your endlessly deep hunger!

	Oh heaven, in whose turning men seem to believe
	that conditions down here are changed,
	when will he come who will drive her away?

	We went with slow and short steps,
	and I attentive to the shades, whom I heard
	weeping and lamenting pitifully;

	and by chance I heard "Sweet Mary!"
	called out in front of us, in the weeping,
	the way a woman does who is in labour;

	and going on: "You were as poor
	as can be seen by that stable
	where you laid down your holy burden."

	Next I heard: "Oh good Fabricius, the Roman consul,
	you chose to have goodness with poverty
	rather than great riches with vice."

	These words had pleased me so much
	that I drew on further to make the acquaintance
	of the spirit they seemed to come from.

	He was still speaking about the generosity
	of Saint Nicholas to the three young girls, whose dowries he gave in secret,
	to bring their youth to honour.

	"Oh soul who speak of so much good,
	tell me who you were," I said, "and why
	you alone renew these worthy praises.

	Your words will not be without reward,
	if I go back to finish the short road
	of that life which flies to its end."

	And he: "I will tell you, not for any comfort
	I expect from over there, but because so much
	grace shines in you before you are dead.

	I was the root of the evil plant
	that overshadows all the Christian land,
	so that good fruit is rarely picked from it.

	But if Douai, Lille, Ghent and Bruges
	had the power, there would soon be vengeance for it;
	and I ask it of him who judges everything.

	Over there I was called Hugh Capet;
	from me are born the Philips and the Louis
	by whom France is ruled these days.

	I was the son of a butcher of Paris.
	When the ancient line of kings had all come to an end,
	except for one who had turned monk and wore grey,

	I found the reins of the government of the kingdom
	tight in my hands, and so much power
	newly gained, and so many friends,

	that to the widowed crown my son's head
	was promoted, and from him
	began the consecrated bones of these men.

	As long as the great dowry of Provence
	had not taken the shame out of my blood, my house
	was worth little, but at least it did no harm.

	There its plundering began, by force
	and by lying; and afterwards, by way of amends,
	it took Ponthieu and Normandy and Gascony.

	Charles of Anjou came into Italy and, by way of amends,
	beheaded the boy Conradin; and then
	pushed Thomas Aquinas back to heaven with poison, by way of amends.

	I see a time, not long after today,
	that draws another Charles, Charles of Valois, out of France,
	to make himself and his people better known.

	He comes out unarmed, with no weapon but the lance
	that Judas jousted with, treachery, and he aims it so
	that he makes the belly of Florence burst.

	From it he will win no land, but sin and shame,
	the heavier for him the more lightly
	he reckons up harm of that kind.

	The other Charles, of Naples, who was once taken prisoner in a sea-fight,
	I see selling his daughter into marriage, and haggling over her
	as the pirates do over their other slave women.

	Oh avarice, what more can you do to us,
	now that you have drawn my blood so far to you
	that it does not care for its own flesh?

	So that past and future evil may seem less,
	I see the fleur-de-lis of France come into Anagni,
	and Christ made prisoner in his vicar, Pope Boniface.

	I see him mocked a second time;
	I see the vinegar and the gall renewed,
	and him killed between living thieves.

	I see the new Pilate, King Philip, so cruel
	that this does not satisfy him, but without any decree
	he carries his greedy sails against the Knights of the Temple.

	Oh my Lord, when shall I be glad
	to see the vengeance which, being hidden,
	makes your anger sweet in your secret?

	What I was saying about that only bride
	of the Holy Spirit, and which made you
	turn to me for some explanation,

	is the answer to all our prayers
	as long as the day lasts; but when night comes on,
	we take up the opposite sound instead.

	Then we say over Pygmalion, Dido's brother,
	whom his throat greedy for gold made
	a traitor and a thief and a kin-killer;

	and the misery of the miserly Midas,
	which followed on his gluttonous request,
	and which men must always laugh at.

	Then everyone remembers foolish Achan,
	and how he stole from the spoils of Jericho, so that Joshua's anger
	seems still to bite him here.

	Then we accuse Sapphira and her husband, who lied about their money to the apostles;
	we praise the kicks the horse gave Heliodorus, who came to rob the temple;
	and Polymestor, who killed the boy Polydorus for his gold,

	goes round the whole mountain in infamy.
	Last of all the cry here is: "Crassus,
	tell us, since you know, since they poured it molten down your throat: what does gold taste like?"

	Sometimes one speaks loudly and another low,
	according to the feeling that spurs us
	to go now at a greater step and now a smaller;

	so, over the good that is spoken of here by day,
	I was not alone just now; but nobody else
	near here was raising his voice."

	We had already left him,
	and were struggling to get over the road
	as fast as we were allowed by our strength,

	when I felt the mountain tremble, like something
	falling; at which a chill took me
	such as usually takes a man going to his death.

	Certainly the island of Delos was not shaken so hard
	before Latona made her nest in it
	to give birth to the two eyes of heaven, the sun and the moon.

	Then a shout began on every side,
	such that the master drew close to me,
	saying: "Do not be afraid, while I am guiding you."

	"Gloria in excelsis Deo", glory to God in the highest, they were all
	saying, by what I understood
	from those near, from whom the cry could be made out.

	We stood still and hanging there
	like the shepherds who first heard that singing,
	until the trembling stopped and the song was finished.

	Then we took up our holy road again,
	looking at the shades lying on the ground,
	who had gone back already to their usual weeping.

	No ignorance ever made me want to know
	with so much war in me,
	if my memory does not go wrong about it,

	as I seemed to have then, thinking it over;
	and I did not dare to ask, because of the hurry,
	nor could I see anything there by myself:

	so I went on, timid and full of thought.

Canto Twenty-One

	The natural thirst for knowledge that is never satisfied
	except with the living water the poor Samaritan woman
	asked Christ for as a favour

	was tormenting me, and haste was spurring me
	along the crowded road behind my guide,
	and I was grieving at the just punishment.

	And then, just as Luke writes for us
	that Christ appeared to the two who were on the road,
	risen already out of the hole of the tomb,

	a shade appeared to us, and came along behind us,
	looking down at the crowd that lies there;
	and we did not notice him until he spoke first,

	saying: "My brothers, God give you peace."
	We turned round at once, and Virgil
	gave him back the sign that answers to it.

	Then he began: "May the true court
	which binds me in eternal exile
	set you in peace in the blessed assembly."

	"What!" he said, while we went on quickly.
	"If you are shades whom God does not think fit for above,
	who has brought you so far up his stairs?"

	And my teacher: "If you look at the marks
	this man carries, which the angel traces,
	you will see well that he must reign with the good.

	But because Lachesis, the Fate who spins day and night,
	had not yet drawn off for him the whole thread of life
	that her sister Clotho loads on the spindle for everyone,

	his soul, which is your sister and mine,
	could not come up alone,
	because it does not see in our way.

	So I was brought out of the wide throat
	of Hell to show him, and I shall show him further,
	as far as my school can lead him.

	But tell me, if you know, why the mountain
	gave such shakings just now, and why it all seemed
	to shout together, down to its wet feet."

	By asking that he threaded the needle's eye
	of my longing so exactly that with hope alone
	my thirst was made less starved.

	He began: "There is nothing that the holy rule
	of the mountain allows to happen without order,
	or that is outside its custom.

	This place is free from every alteration:
	only what heaven takes into itself from itself
	can be a cause here, and nothing else.

	So neither rain nor hail nor snow
	nor dew nor frost falls higher up
	than the short stairway of three steps.

	Clouds do not appear, thick or thin,
	nor lightning, nor the rainbow, Thaumas's daughter,
	who over there so often changes her quarter;

	dry vapour, which makes earthquakes, does not rise beyond
	the top of the three steps I spoke of,
	where the angel who keeps the gate for Peter has his feet.

	It may tremble lower down, a little or a lot;
	but by wind hidden in the earth — I do not know how —
	it has never trembled up here.

	It trembles here when some soul feels itself
	clean, so that it rises or moves
	to climb up; and such a shout follows it.

	Of the cleanness the will alone gives proof:
	suddenly free to change its dwelling,
	it takes the soul by surprise, and the soul is glad to will it.

	The soul wills the good before that, but the desire
	for its punishment does not let it go, the desire that divine justice
	sets in it towards the torment, as once it was set towards the sin.

	And I, who have lain in this pain
	five hundred years and more, only now felt
	a free will for a better threshold:

	so you felt the earthquake, and heard the devout
	spirits all over the mountain give praise
	to that Lord — and may he send them up soon."

	So he told us; and because a man enjoys
	drinking as much as his thirst is great,
	I could not say how much good he did me.

	And the wise guide: "Now I see the net
	that catches you here, and how one slips it,
	and why the mountain trembles, and what you rejoice at together.

	Now be pleased to let me know who you were,
	and let it be in your own words why you have lain
	here so many centuries."

	"In the time when the good emperor Titus, with the help
	of the highest king, destroyed Jerusalem and avenged the wounds
	out of which came the blood that Judas sold,

	I was over there," that spirit answered,
	"under the name of poet, which lasts longest and honours most,
	and famous enough, but not yet with the faith.

	My spoken breath was so sweet
	that Rome drew me, a man of Toulouse, to herself,
	where I deserved to have my temples crowned with myrtle for my verse.

	People over there still call me Statius:
	I sang of Thebes, and then of the great Achilles;
	but I fell on the road with the second load.

	The seeds of my ardour were the sparks
	that warmed me from the divine flame
	which has lit more than a thousand;

	I mean the Aeneid, which was a mother to me
	and was my nurse in writing poetry:
	without it I would not have weighed a gram.

	And to have lived over there when Virgil lived,
	I would agree to one more year here
	than I owe before coming out of my banishment."

	These words turned Virgil towards me
	with a face which, saying nothing, said "Say nothing";
	but the power that wills cannot do everything;

	for laughter and tears follow so closely
	on the feeling each of them springs from
	that they follow the will least in the most truthful.

	I only smiled, like a man giving a hint;
	at which the shade fell silent and looked me
	in the eyes, where the expression is most fixed;

	and "So may you finish so much labour well,"
	he said, "why did your face just now
	show me a flash of laughter?"

	Now I am caught on both sides:
	one makes me keep quiet, the other begs me
	to speak; so I sigh, and I am understood

	by my master, and "Do not be afraid to speak,"
	he says to me, "but speak, and tell him
	what he asks with so much care."

	So I: "Perhaps you are wondering,
	ancient spirit, at the laugh I gave;
	but I want something greater than wonder to take you.

	This man who guides my eyes on high
	is that Virgil from whom you took
	your strength to sing of men and of the gods.

	If you believed there was another reason for my laughing,
	let it go as untrue, and believe it was
	those words you said about him."

	He was already bending to embrace my teacher's feet,
	but he said to him: "Brother,
	do not: you are a shade and a shade is what you see."

	And he, rising: "Now you can understand
	how great is the love that warms me towards you,
	when I forget our emptiness

	and treat shades as if they were solid things."

Canto Twenty-Two

	The angel was already left behind us,
	the angel who had turned us to the sixth circle,
	having shaved a stroke off my face;

	and he had called those blessed who have
	their longing set on justice, and his voice
	finished it with "sitiunt", who thirst, and nothing more.

	And I went along lighter than at the other passes,
	so that without any labour at all
	I followed the swift spirits upward,

	when Virgil began: "Love kindled by goodness
	has always kindled other love,
	so long as its flame showed outside;

	so, from the hour when the poet Juvenal came down
	among us into the Limbo of Hell,
	and told me how much you loved my poem,

	my goodwill towards you was as strong
	as ever bound a man to a person he had not seen,
	so that now these stairs will seem short to me.

	But tell me, and forgive me as a friend
	if too much confidence lets my rein out,
	and speak with me now as with a friend:

	how could avarice find room
	inside your breast, among so much good sense
	as you were filled with by your own care?"

	These words first moved Statius
	a little towards laughter; then he answered:
	"Everything you say is a dear sign of love to me.

	Truly, things often appear
	that give false matter for doubt,
	because the true reasons are hidden.

	Your question shows me you believe
	that I was avaricious in the other life,
	perhaps because of the circle where I was.

	Now know that avarice was too far
	from me, and this want of measure, the opposite one, spending too freely,
	has been punished by thousands of moons.

	And if I had not straightened out my ways
	when I understood the place in your poem where you cry out,
	as though angry with human nature:

	'Why do you not govern, holy hunger
	for gold, the appetite of mortals?', reading it as a call for measure,
	I would be down in Hell, feeling the grim joustings, rolling weights against the misers.

	Then I saw that the hands could open their wings
	too wide in spending, and I repented
	of that as I did of my other wrongs.

	How many will rise again at the judgment with their hair cropped, as spendthrifts,
	through ignorance, which robs them of repentance
	for this sin, in life and at the last!

	And know that the fault which strikes back
	at a sin by its straight opposite
	dries its green here together with it;

	so, if I have been among those people
	who weep for avarice, in order to purge myself,
	it has happened to me through its contrary."

	"Now when you sang of the cruel war
	between Jocasta's two sons, the double sorrow of Thebes,"
	said Virgil, the singer of the shepherds' songs,

	"from what your muse Clio touches on there with you,
	it does not appear that the faith had yet
	made you a believer, without which good deeds are not enough.

	If that is so, what sun or what candles
	so cleared the dark for you that afterwards
	you set your sails behind Peter the fisherman?"

	And he to him: "You first sent me
	towards Parnassus, the Muses' mountain, to drink from its springs,
	and then you first lit my way to God.

	You did as a man does who walks by night
	and carries the light behind him and is no use to himself,
	but makes the people after him wise,

	when you said: 'The age begins again;
	justice comes back, and the first human time,
	and a new offspring comes down from heaven.'

	Through you I was a poet, through you a Christian;
	but so that you may see better what I am drawing,
	I will stretch out my hand to colour it.

	The whole world was already pregnant
	with the true belief, sown
	by the apostles, the messengers of the eternal kingdom;

	and that word of yours I touched on
	chimed with the new preachers,
	so that I took to visiting them.

	They came to seem so holy to me
	that when Domitian persecuted them
	their weeping was not without my tears;

	and while I stayed over there
	I helped them, and their upright ways
	made me despise all the other sects.

	And before I had brought the Greek army in my poem
	as far as the rivers of Thebes, I had been baptized;
	but out of fear I was a secret Christian,

	showing myself a pagan for a long time;
	and this lukewarmness made me go round
	the fourth circle more than four hundred years.

	You, then, who have lifted the lid
	that hid from me the great good I speak of,
	while we have time to spare on the climb,

	tell me where our ancient Terence is,
	and Caecilius and Plautus and Varro, the old Latin poets, if you know:
	tell me if they are damned, and in what quarter."

	"They, and Persius, and I, and many others,"
	my guide answered, "are with Homer, the Greek
	whom the Muses suckled more than any other,

	in the first ring of the blind prison, Limbo.
	Often we talk about Parnassus, the mountain
	that always has the Muses, our nurses, on it.

	Euripides is there with us, and Antiphon,
	Simonides, Agathon, and other Greeks
	who once decked their foreheads with laurel.

	There among your own people can be seen
	Antigone, Deiphyle and Argia,
	and Ismene, as sad as she ever was.

	There is Hypsipyle, who showed the army the spring of Langia;
	there is Tiresias's daughter Manto, and Thetis,
	and Deidamia with her sisters."

	Both the poets were silent by now,
	attentive again to looking about them,
	free of the climbing and of the walls;

	and four hours of the day, its handmaids,
	were already left behind, and the fifth was at the shaft of the sun's chariot,
	still pointing its burning horn upward: it was between ten and eleven,

	when my guide said: "I think we must
	turn our right shoulders to the edge,
	going round the mountain as we usually do."

	So custom was our teacher there,
	and we took the road with less misgiving
	for the agreement of that worthy soul.

	They went in front, and I alone
	behind, and I listened to their talk,
	which gave me understanding for poetry.

	But their sweet reasoning was soon broken
	by a tree we found in the middle of the road,
	with apples sweet and good to smell;

	and as a fir tapers upward
	from branch to branch, so this one downward,
	I believe, so that nobody can climb it.

	On the side where our road was closed off,
	a clear liquid fell from the high rock
	and spread over the leaves above.

	The two poets came near the tree,
	and a voice inside the leaves
	cried: "You shall go hungry for this food."

	Then it said: "Mary at the wedding at Cana thought more about
	how the feast should be honourable and complete
	than about her own mouth, which now prays for you.

	And the ancient Roman women were content
	with water for their drinking; and Daniel
	scorned food and gained wisdom.

	The first age, beautiful as gold,
	made acorns tasty with hunger,
	and every stream nectar with thirst.

	Honey and locusts were the food
	that fed the Baptist in the desert;
	and so he is glorious and as great

	as the Gospel makes plain to you."

Canto Twenty-Three

	While I was driving my eyes through the green leaves,
	the way a man does
	who wastes his life after little birds,

	the one who was more than a father said to me: "Son,
	come along now, for the time set for us
	must be shared out more usefully."

	I turned my face, and my step no less quickly,
	after the wise ones, who talked in such a way
	that they made the walking cost me nothing.

	And then weeping and singing were heard,
	"Labia mea, Domine", Lord, open my lips, in a way
	that gave birth to delight and to grief.

	"Oh sweet father, what is it that I hear?"
	I began; and he: "Shades who go along
	perhaps loosening the knot of their debt."

	As thoughtful pilgrims do,
	when they come up on the road with people they do not know,
	and turn to them and do not stop,

	so behind us, moving faster,
	coming and passing us, a crowd of souls
	looked at us in wonder, silent and devout.

	Each was dark and hollow in the eyes,
	pale in the face, and so wasted
	that the skin took its shape from the bones.

	I do not believe that Erysichthon, cursed with hunger by the goddess,
	was dried to such a rind of himself
	by fasting, even at the end, when he ate his own flesh.

	I said to myself, thinking: "Here are the people
	who starved in the siege of Jerusalem, when a woman called Mary
	set her teeth in her own son!"

	Their eye sockets seemed rings without their gems.
	People say the word "omo", man, is written in every face, the eyes its two O's and the nose and brows its M;
	whoever reads it there would certainly have made out the M in these.

	Who would believe that the smell of an apple
	could rule them so, by making them long for it,
	and the smell of water, without knowing how?

	I was already wondering what makes them so hungry,
	the reason for their thinness and their sad scaliness
	being still not clear,

	and then out of the deep of his head
	a shade turned his eyes on me and stared hard;
	then he cried out: "What grace is this given me?"

	I would never have known him by his face,
	but in his voice there was made plain to me
	what his looks had ruined in themselves.

	This spark rekindled the whole of my knowledge
	of those changed features,
	and I made out the face of Forese.

	"Ah, do not fasten on the dry scurf
	that discolours my skin," he begged,
	"nor on any lack of flesh I have;

	but tell me the truth about yourself, and say who those
	two souls are who are escorting you there.
	Do not stand there without speaking to me!"

	"Your face, which I wept for once when it was dead,
	gives me no less grief for weeping now,"
	I answered him, "seeing it so twisted.

	So tell me, for God's sake, what strips you so.
	Do not make me speak while I am wondering,
	for a man speaks badly who is full of another want."

	And he to me: "Out of the eternal counsel
	a power falls into the water and into the tree
	we have left behind, at which I grow so thin.

	All these people who sing while they weep
	made themselves holy again here, in hunger and thirst,
	for having followed their throats beyond measure.

	The smell that comes out of the apple, and of the spray
	that is spread over its greenness,
	kindles in us a care for drinking and eating.

	And not once only, as we go round
	this floor, is our pain made fresh:
	I say pain, and I ought to say comfort,

	for the same will leads us to the trees
	that led Christ to cry "Eli", my God, gladly on the cross,
	when he freed us with the blood in his veins."

	And I to him: "Forese, from that day
	on which you changed worlds for a better life,
	five years have not turned round until now.

	If the power to sin any more was ended in you
	before the hour of the good grief came
	that marries us to God again,

	how have you come up here so soon?
	I expected to find you down there below,
	where time is made good with time."

	At which he to me: "My Nella, with her flooding tears,
	has brought me so soon to drink
	the sweet wormwood of the torments.

	With her devout prayers and with her sighs
	she has drawn me from the slope where men wait,
	and freed me from the other circles.

	My little widow, whom I loved so much,
	is dearer and more precious to God
	the more she is alone in doing good;

	for the wild Barbagia of Sardinia is far more modest
	in its women
	than that other Barbagia, Florence, where I left her.

	Oh sweet brother, what would you have me say?
	A future time is already in my sight,
	which will not find this hour very old,

	when it will be forbidden from the pulpit
	for the shameless Florentine women
	to go about showing the breast with the nipples.

	What barbarian women, what Saracens,
	were there ever who needed spiritual
	or any other discipline to make them go covered?

	But if the shameless things were certain
	of what the swift heaven is preparing for them,
	they would have their mouths open to howl already;

	for, if foresight does not deceive me here,
	they will be in grief before the cheeks grow hair
	on the boy who is soothed now with a lullaby.

	Ah, brother, do not hide yourself from me any longer.
	You see that not only I, but all these people,
	stare at the place where you veil the sun."

	So I to him: "If you bring back to mind
	what you were with me, and what I was with you,
	the memory will still be heavy now.

	Out of that life this man who goes in front of me
	turned me the other day, when the sister
	of that one, the full moon, showed herself round to you" —

	and I pointed at the sun — "he has led me
	through the deep night of the truly dead
	with this true flesh which follows him.

	From there his comfortings have drawn me up,
	climbing and going round the mountain
	that straightens you whom the world made crooked.

	He says he will keep me company
	until I am where Beatrice will be;
	there I must stay without him.

	Virgil is this one who tells me so" —
	and I pointed to him — "and this other is that shade
	for whom just now every slope of your kingdom

	shook, as it let him out of itself."

Canto Twenty-Four

	Neither did the talking make the walking slower,
	nor the walking the talking, but we went on
	fast as we talked, like a ship driven by a good wind;

	and the shades, who looked like things twice dead,
	drew wonder at me through the pits of their eyes,
	having noticed that I was alive.

	And I, going on with what I was saying,
	said: "He goes up perhaps more slowly
	than he would, for somebody else's sake.

	But tell me, if you know, where Piccarda is;
	tell me if I see anyone worth noting
	among these people who stare at me so."

	"My sister Piccarda — I do not know whether she was more
	beautiful or good — is triumphing gladly
	in her crown already in high heaven."

	So he said first; and then: "Here it is not forbidden
	to name anybody, since our looks
	have been milked so dry by the diet.

	This," and he pointed with his finger, "is Bonagiunta,
	Bonagiunta of Lucca; and that face
	beyond him, more pricked out than the rest,

	had Holy Church in his arms, for he was Pope:
	Martin, from Tours, and by fasting he purges
	the eels of Bolsena and the sweet wine he stewed them in."

	He named many others to me, one by one,
	and they all seemed pleased to be named,
	so that I saw no dark look for it.

	I saw Ubaldino della Pila use his teeth
	on nothing, out of hunger, and Boniface, the archbishop of Ravenna,
	who pastured many people with his crook.

	I saw Messer Marchese, who once had leisure
	to drink at Forlì with less dryness,
	and even so was such that he never felt full.

	But as a man does who looks and then thinks
	more of one than of another, I did with the man of Lucca,
	who seemed to know most about me.

	He was murmuring; and I heard something
	like "Gentucca", a woman's name, there in his mouth, where he felt the wound
	of the justice that plucks them so.

	"Oh soul," I said, "who seem so eager
	to talk with me, make yourself plain to me,
	and satisfy both yourself and me by speaking."

	"A woman is born, and is not yet married,"
	he began, "who will make my city, Lucca, please you,
	however men may blame it.

	You will go away with this foreknowledge.
	If you took my murmuring wrongly,
	the facts themselves will make it clear to you.

	But tell me if I see here the man
	who brought out the new rhymes, beginning
	'Ladies who have understanding of love'."

	And I to him: "I am one who, when
	Love breathes in me, take note, and go setting it down
	in the way he dictates inside."

	"Oh brother, now I see," he said, "the knot
	that kept Giacomo the Notary and Guittone and me, the old school,
	short of the sweet new style I hear!

	I see well how your pens
	go close behind the one who dictates,
	which certainly did not happen with ours;

	and whoever sets himself to look further
	sees no more difference between the one style and the other" —
	and, as if satisfied, he fell silent.

	As the birds that winter along the Nile
	sometimes make a flock in the air
	and then fly faster and go in a line,

	so all the people who were there,
	turning their faces, quickened their step,
	made light both by thinness and by will.

	And as a man tired of trotting
	lets his companions go on and walks
	until the heaving of his chest works itself out,

	so Forese let the holy flock pass
	and came along behind with me,
	saying: "When will it be that I see you again?"

	"I do not know," I answered him, "how long I shall live;
	but my coming back will not be so soon
	that I shall not be at the shore first in my will,

	because the place where I was set to live
	strips itself of good more from day to day,
	and seems disposed to a sorry ruin."

	"Now go," he said; "for I see the man who has
	most blame for it, my brother Corso, dragged at the tail of a horse
	towards the valley of Hell, where nobody is ever cleared.

	The beast goes faster at every step,
	always faster, until it strikes him
	and leaves the body foully undone.

	Those wheels" — and he raised his eyes to the sky —
	"have not far to turn before that is clear to you
	which my speech cannot make clearer.

	Stay behind now, for time is precious
	in this kingdom, and I am losing too much of it
	coming along level with you like this."

	As a horseman sometimes rides out at a gallop
	from a troop on the march
	to win the honour of the first encounter,

	so he left us with longer strides;
	and I stayed on the road with the two poets
	who were such great masters in the world.

	And when he had gone so far ahead of us
	that my eyes followed him
	as my mind followed his words,

	the loaded and living branches of another
	apple tree appeared to me, and not far off,
	since I had only just then turned that way.

	I saw people under it lifting their hands
	and shouting I do not know what towards the leaves,
	like greedy silly children

	who beg, and the one they beg does not answer,
	but to make their wanting keener
	holds what they long for high and does not hide it.

	Then they went away as if undeceived;
	and we came now to the great tree,
	which refuses so many prayers and tears.

	"Pass on beyond without coming close.
	Higher up there is a tree that Eve bit,
	and this plant was raised from it."

	So somebody said among the branches;
	so Virgil and Statius and I, pressing together,
	went on along the side that rises.

	"Remember," it said, "the accursed Centaurs,
	born of a cloud, who, when they were drunk at the wedding,
	fought Theseus with their double breasts, man and horse;

	and the Hebrews who knelt to drink at the river, and showed themselves soft,
	so that Gideon would not have them as companions
	when he came down the hills towards Midian."

	So, keeping close to one of the two edges,
	we passed by, hearing of the sins of the throat
	followed once by miserable gains.

	Then, spreading out along the empty road,
	a good thousand steps and more carried us on,
	each of us thinking without a word.

	"What are you three thinking about, going along alone?"
	a sudden voice said; at which I started
	as frightened, skittish animals do.

	I raised my head to see who it was;
	and never in a furnace were glass or metals
	seen so shining and so red

	as I saw one who was saying: "If it please you
	to go up, you must turn here;
	this is the way for whoever wants to walk to peace."

	His look had taken my sight from me,
	so I turned round behind my teachers,
	like a man who goes by what he hears.

	And as, announcing the dawn,
	the May breeze stirs and gives off scent,
	all impregnated with grass and with flowers,

	so I felt a wind strike the middle of my forehead,
	and felt clearly the angel's feathers move,
	which made the air smell of ambrosia.

	And I heard it said: "Blessed are those whom so much grace
	lights that the love of taste does not smoke up
	too much longing in their breasts,

	but who hunger always for what is just!"

Canto Twenty-Five

	It was an hour when the climb allowed no dawdling,
	for the sun had left the circle of noon
	to the Bull, and the night to the Scorpion: it was about two in the afternoon;

	so that, as a man does who does not stop
	but goes on his way, whatever appears to him,
	if the goad of need pricks him,

	so we went into the gap,
	one in front of another, taking the stairs
	which by their narrowness unpair the climbers.

	And as the young stork lifts its wing
	for the wish to fly, and does not dare
	to leave the nest, and lowers it again,

	so was I, with the wish to ask
	kindled and put out, coming as far as the act
	of a man who is getting ready to speak.

	My sweet father did not let it pass,
	fast though our walking was, but said: "Loose
	the bow of your speaking, which you have drawn to the iron."

	Then I opened my mouth confidently
	and began: "How can one grow thin
	where the need of nourishment does not touch?"

	"If you called to mind how Meleager
	wasted away as the log burned that his life was tied to,"
	he said, "this would not be so hard for you;

	and if you thought how, at your own flicker,
	your image flickers inside a mirror,
	what seems hard to you would seem soft.

	But so that you may settle into what you want,
	here is Statius; and I call on him and beg him
	to be the healer now of your wounds."

	"If I unfold the eternal view to him,"
	Statius answered, "with you here,
	let it excuse me that I cannot refuse you."

	Then he began: "Son, if your mind takes in
	and keeps my words,
	they will be a light to you on the how you ask about.

	Perfect blood, which is never drunk
	by the thirsty veins and stays behind
	like food you take away from the table,

	takes in the heart a power to inform
	all the human members, like the blood
	that runs through the veins to become them.

	Digested once more, it goes down to the parts it is more decent
	to keep quiet about than to name; and from there it drips
	afterwards on another's blood in the natural vessel, the womb.

	There the one and the other are gathered together,
	the woman's disposed to receive and the man's to act,
	because of the perfect place it is pressed from, the heart;

	and, joined to it, it begins to work,
	first curdling, and then giving life
	to what it has made solid for its own matter.

	The active power, having become a soul
	like a plant's — differing so far
	that this one is on the way and that one is at shore —

	then works so that it moves and feels,
	like a sea sponge; and then it sets about
	organizing the powers whose seed it is.

	Now, my son, the power unfolds and now spreads out
	which comes from the heart of the begetter,
	where nature attends to all the members.

	But how from an animal it becomes a speaking thing
	you do not see yet: this is a point
	that once made a man wiser than you, Averroes, go wrong,

	so that by his teaching he made the mind that understands
	a thing separate from the soul,
	because he saw no bodily organ taken up by it.

	Open your breast to the truth that is coming,
	and know that as soon as the articulation
	of the brain is perfect in the foetus,

	God, the first mover, turns to it, glad
	at so much art of nature, and breathes
	a new spirit into it, full of power,

	which draws whatever it finds active there
	into its own substance, and makes one single soul
	that lives and feels and turns upon itself.

	And so that you may wonder less at my words,
	look at the heat of the sun, which becomes wine
	when it is joined to the sap that runs from the vine.

	When Lachesis, the Fate, has no more thread to spin,
	the soul is loosed from the flesh, and carries away
	with it in power both the human and the divine:

	the other faculties are all of them dumb;
	memory, understanding and will
	far sharper in action than before.

	Without stopping, of itself it falls
	marvellously to one of the two shores, the Acheron's or the Tiber's;
	there it first learns its roads.

	As soon as a place bounds it there,
	the forming power radiates around it,
	as it did, and as much as it did, in the living limbs.

	And as the air, when it is full of rain,
	becomes adorned with different colours
	by another's ray reflected in it,

	so the air nearby sets itself
	into that form which the soul, come to rest,
	seals on it by its power;

	and afterwards, like the little flame
	that follows the fire wherever it moves,
	the spirit is followed by its new form.

	Because from that it has its appearance afterwards,
	it is called a shade; and from that it then organizes
	every sense, right up to sight.

	From that we speak and from that we laugh;
	from that we make the tears and the sighs
	which you may have heard about the mountain.

	As desires and the other feelings afflict us,
	the shade takes shape;
	and this is the cause of what you were wondering at."

	And by now we had come to the last turning,
	and had gone round to the right hand,
	and were attentive to another care.

	There the bank shoots flame outward,
	and the terrace breathes a blast upward
	that bends the flame back and keeps it away;

	so that we had to go along the open side
	one by one; and I was afraid of the fire
	on this hand, and afraid of falling off on that.

	My guide said: "Through this place
	the rein must be held tight on the eyes,
	because one could go wrong at very little."

	"Summae Deus clementiae", God of highest mercy, I heard sung then
	in the heart of that great burning,
	which made me care no less about turning;

	and I saw spirits walking through the flame,
	so that I watched them and watched my steps,
	dividing my sight between them, now one, now the other.

	After the end that is made to that hymn,
	they cried aloud: "Virum non cognosco", Mary's words, I know no man;
	then they began the hymn again, low.

	When it was finished, they cried again: "Diana
	kept to the wood, and drove the nymph Helice out of it,
	who had felt the poison of Venus."

	Then they went back to their singing; then they cried out
	the names of wives and husbands who were chaste
	as virtue and marriage require.

	And this way is enough for them, I believe,
	for all the time the fire burns them:
	with such care and with such food

	the wound must be sewn up at the last.

Canto Twenty-Six

	While we went along the edge like that,
	one in front of another, and the good master
	kept saying to me: "Take care: let my warning be some use";

	the sun was striking me on the right shoulder,
	and its rays were already changing the whole west
	from blue to a white look;

	and with my shadow I was making the flame
	seem redder; and at only that sign
	I saw many shades, as they went, take notice.

	This was the reason that gave them a beginning
	for talking about me; and they began
	to say: "That one does not look like a body made of air";

	then some of them came towards me
	as far as they could, always taking care
	not to come out where they would not be burned.

	"Oh you who go behind the others, not for being slower
	but perhaps out of reverence,
	answer me, who burn in thirst and in fire.

	And your answer is needed not by me alone;
	for all these have greater thirst for it
	than an Indian or an Ethiopian has for cold water.

	Tell us how it is that you make a wall of yourself
	against the sun, just as though you had not yet
	come inside the net of death."

	So one of them spoke to me; and I would have
	made myself known already, if I had not been intent
	on another new thing that appeared just then;

	for through the middle of the burning road
	came people with their faces towards these,
	which held me in suspense with looking.

	There I see on either side each shade
	make haste and kiss another, one with one,
	without stopping, content with a short greeting;

	so, inside their dark column,
	one ant nuzzles another,
	perhaps to ask their road and their luck.

	As soon as they break off the friendly meeting,
	before the first step there has gone by,
	each one strains to shout louder than the rest:

	the newcomers "Sodom and Gomorrah",
	and the others: "Pasiphaë goes into the cow,
	so that the young bull may run to her lust."

	Then, like cranes that fly, part of them
	to the Riphean mountains and part towards the sands,
	these shy of the frost, those of the sun,

	one lot of people go and the other lot come,
	and they turn back, weeping, to their first songs
	and to the shout that suits each of them best;

	and the very ones who had begged me before
	came close to me again, as they had done,
	attentive in their faces to listen.

	I, who had seen twice over what they wanted,
	began: "Oh souls who are certain
	of having a state of peace, whenever it comes,

	my limbs have not been left over there
	either unripe or ripe, but are here with me,
	with their blood and with their joints.

	I go up this way so as not to be blind any longer.
	There is a lady above who wins me the grace
	by which I carry the mortal part through your world.

	But so that your greatest longing may soon
	be satisfied, and the heaven house you
	which is full of love and stretches widest,

	tell me, so that I may still rule lines on paper and write of it,
	who you are, and who is that crowd
	which is going away behind your backs."

	The mountaineer is not more stupidly confounded,
	and does not go dumb with staring,
	when, rough and wild, he comes into town,

	than each of those shades was in his looks;
	but when they were unloaded of their astonishment,
	which is soon quieted in high hearts,

	"Blessed are you, who to die the better
	take on board experience of our marches,"
	the one who had questioned me first began again.

	"The people who do not come with us offended
	in the way for which Caesar, in his triumph,
	once heard 'Queen' called out against him, for what he did with the king of Bithynia;

	so they go off crying 'Sodom',
	reproaching themselves as you have heard,
	and they help the burning by their shame.

	Our sin was of the two sexes, man with woman;
	but because we did not keep human law,
	following our appetite like beasts,

	when we part we read out, in our own disgrace,
	the name of Pasiphaë, who made a beast of herself
	inside the wooden cow.

	Now you know our acts and what we were guilty of.
	If perhaps you want to know by name who we are,
	there is no time to say, and I would not know how.

	I will make your wish smaller as to me:
	I am Guido Guinizelli, and I am already purging myself
	for having grieved well before the very end."

	As the two sons of Hypsipyle became when they saw their mother again,
	in the story, as Lycurgus was about to kill her,
	so I became, though I did not run to embrace him,

	when I hear naming himself the father
	of me and of the others, my betters, who ever used
	sweet and graceful rhymes of love;

	and without hearing or speaking I went on
	thinking a long while, gazing at him,
	and because of the fire I came no nearer.

	When I had fed myself with looking,
	I offered myself wholly ready to his service,
	with the swearing that makes another believe you.

	And he to me: "You leave such a trace in me,
	by what I hear, and so clear a one,
	that Lethe, the river of forgetting, cannot take it away or make it dim.

	But if your words swore true just now,
	tell me what is the reason that you show,
	in your speech and in your look, that you hold me dear."

	And I to him: "Your sweet lines,
	which, as long as modern use lasts,
	will make even the ink they are written in precious."

	"Oh brother," he said, "this one whom I point out
	to you with my finger" — and he pointed to a spirit ahead —
	"was a better craftsman of the mother tongue.

	In verses of love and in the prose of romances
	he beat them all; and let the fools talk
	who think Giraut, the man of Limoges, is ahead of him.

	They turn their faces to rumour rather than to truth,
	and so they settle their opinion
	before they will listen to art or reason.

	So many of the old did with Guittone,
	giving the prize only to him, cry after cry,
	until the truth beat him with more voices.

	Now if you have so wide a privilege
	that you are allowed to go to the cloister
	where Christ is abbot of the college,

	say an Our Father there for me,
	as much of it as we need in this world
	where the power to sin is no longer ours."

	Then, perhaps to make room for another
	who was near him, he vanished through the fire
	as a fish goes through water to the bottom.

	I moved forward a little towards the one he had shown me,
	and said that my longing was making
	a place of welcome ready for his name.

	He began, freely, in his own tongue, to say:
	"So much does your courteous asking please me
	that I neither can nor want to hide myself from you.

	I am Arnaut, who weep and go singing;
	in sorrow I see the folly that is past,
	and I see with joy the gladness I hope for ahead.

	Now I beg you, by that power
	which guides you to the top of the stairway,
	remember my pain at the right time!"

	Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them.

Canto Twenty-Seven

	As the sun stands when it shoots its first rays
	over Jerusalem, where its maker shed his blood,
	while Spain's river Ebro lies under the midnight Scales

	and the waves of the Ganges are scorched by noon,
	so the sun stood over us: it was setting, the day was going,
	when God's angel appeared to us, glad.

	He stood on the bank, outside the flame,
	and was singing "Beati mundo corde!", blessed are the pure in heart,
	in a voice far more alive than ours.

	Then: "You go no further, holy souls,
	unless the fire bites you first. Go into it,
	and do not be deaf to the singing beyond,"

	he said to us when we came near him;
	so that when I understood him I became
	like a man who is being put into the grave.

	I stretched forward over my folded hands,
	looking at the fire and imagining hard
	human bodies I had seen burning once.

	The good escorts turned towards me,
	and Virgil said to me: "My son,
	here there may be torment, but not death.

	Remember, remember! And if I brought you safe
	down through Hell on the back of the monster Geryon,
	what shall I do now, so much nearer God?

	Believe it for certain, that if you stood
	inside the belly of this flame a thousand years,
	it could not make you the balder by one hair.

	And if you think perhaps that I am deceiving you,
	go up to it and make yourself sure
	with your own hands, at the hem of your clothes.

	Put down, put down every fear now.
	Turn this way and come: come in without fear!"
	And I stood still, and against my conscience.

	When he saw me standing still and stubborn,
	a little disturbed he said: "Now look, son:
	between Beatrice and you there is this wall."

	As Pyramus, at the point of death,
	opened his eyes at Thisbe's name and looked at her,
	the day the mulberry turned red with his blood,

	so, my stubbornness having gone soft,
	I turned to my wise guide when I heard the name
	that always springs up in my mind.

	At which he shook his head and said: "What!
	Do we mean to stay on this side?" Then he smiled
	as one does at a child who is won by an apple.

	Then he went into the fire in front of me,
	begging Statius to come behind,
	who for a long way had walked between us.

	As soon as I was inside, I would have thrown myself
	into boiling glass to cool off,
	the burning there was so beyond measure.

	My sweet father, to comfort me,
	kept talking about Beatrice as he walked,
	saying: "I think I see her eyes already."

	A voice that sang on the other side guided us;
	and we, attending only to it,
	came out where the way up began.

	"Venite, benedicti Patris mei", come, you blessed of my Father,
	sounded inside a light that was there,
	such that it overcame me and I could not look at it.

	"The sun is going," it added, "and evening comes.
	Do not stop, but press on with your steps,
	while the west is still not dark."

	The road went straight up inside the rock
	towards a quarter where I cut off the rays
	in front of me from a sun that was already low.

	And we had tried only a few steps
	when I and my wise ones knew by my shadow
	going out that the sun had set behind us.

	And before the horizon in all its huge parts
	had been made one colour,
	and night had all its dominions,

	each of us made a bed of one step;
	for the nature of the mountain broke in us
	the power to climb further, and the pleasure.

	As goats stand chewing the cud, quiet,
	who were quick and wild
	over the peaks before they had fed,

	silent in the shade while the sun is hot,
	watched by the herdsman, who leans
	on his staff and looks after them at rest;

	and as the drover who lodges out of doors
	spends the night quietly beside his flock,
	watching that no wild beast scatters it;

	so were the three of us then,
	I like a goat and they like herdsmen,
	walled in on this side and that by the high rock.

	Little could be seen there of what was outside,
	but through that little I saw the stars
	brighter and larger than they usually are.

	So chewing over things and so gazing at them,
	sleep took me: the sleep that often
	knows the news before the fact.

	At the hour, I think, when Venus, the morning star,
	first shone on the mountain from the east,
	who always seems to burn with the fire of love,

	I seemed to see, in a dream, a lady,
	young and beautiful, walking over a plain
	gathering flowers; and she said, singing:

	"Let whoever asks my name know
	that I am Leah, and I go moving
	my beautiful hands round to make myself a garland.

	I adorn myself here to please myself at the glass;
	but my sister Rachel never moves away
	from her mirror, and sits all day.

	She longs to see her own lovely eyes
	as I do to adorn myself with my hands;
	looking satisfies her, and working satisfies me."

	And already, by the brightness before the dawn,
	which rises the more welcome to travellers
	the less far from home they lodge as they come back,

	the shadows were fleeing on every side,
	and my sleep with them; so I got up,
	seeing the great masters already up.

	"That sweet apple which the care of mortals
	goes looking for on so many branches
	will set your hungers at peace today."

	These were the words Virgil used
	towards me; and there were never gifts
	that could match those for giving pleasure.

	Such will came on me, on top of will,
	to be up there, that at every step after it
	I felt my feathers growing for flight.

	When the whole stairway had been run under us
	and we were on the topmost step,
	Virgil fixed his eyes on me,

	and said: "You have seen the fire that ends, here,
	and the fire that never ends, my son; and you have come
	to a place where I of myself see no further.

	I have brought you here by wit and by art;
	take your own pleasure now for your guide.
	You are out of the steep ways, out of the narrow.

	See the sun, which shines on your forehead;
	see the young grass, the flowers and the bushes
	which here the ground brings out of itself alone.

	Until the lovely eyes come, glad,
	which weeping made me come to you,
	you can sit down, and you can walk among them.

	Do not wait for my word any more, or my sign.
	Your judgment is free, upright and whole,
	and it would be a fault not to act on its will:

	so I crown and mitre you over yourself."

Canto Twenty-Eight

	Eager now to search inside and about
	the divine forest, thick and living,
	which tempered the new day to my eyes,

	without waiting any longer I left the edge,
	taking the open ground very slowly
	over a soil that gave off scent on every side.

	A sweet breeze, without any change
	in itself, struck me on the forehead
	with no more blow than a gentle wind;

	and at it the branches, trembling, all
	bent readily towards the quarter
	where the holy mountain throws its first shadow;

	not so far bent out of standing straight, though,
	that the little birds in the tops
	left off practising all their art;

	but with full gladness they took the first hours
	singing among the leaves,
	which kept a ground bass to their rhymes,

	such as gathers from branch to branch
	through the pine wood on the shore at Chiassi, by Ravenna,
	when Aeolus, keeper of the winds, lets the sirocco loose.

	My slow steps had already carried me
	so far inside the ancient wood that I
	could not see back to where I had come in;

	and then a stream stopped me going further,
	which with its little waves bent to the left
	the grass that came up on its bank.

	All the waters that are purest here
	would seem to have some mixture in them
	compared with that one, which hides nothing,

	although it moves along very dark
	under the perpetual shade, which never lets
	sun or moon shine there.

	I stopped with my feet, and passed with my eyes
	over the little river, to look at
	the great variety of the fresh boughs of May;

	and there appeared to me, as a thing appears
	suddenly which by its wonder
	turns away all other thinking,

	a lady quite alone, who went along
	singing and picking flower from flower,
	with which her whole way was painted.

	"Ah, beautiful lady, who warm yourself
	in the rays of love, if I may believe the looks
	that are usually witnesses of the heart,

	may it come into your will to come forward,"
	I said to her, "towards this river,
	so far that I can make out what you are singing.

	You make me remember where Proserpina was, gathering flowers,
	and what she was like, at the time when
	her mother lost her, and she lost the spring."

	As a lady turns when she is dancing,
	with the soles of her feet close to the ground
	and close together, and hardly puts foot before foot,

	so she turned to me on the red
	and on the yellow flowers, exactly
	like a girl who lowers her modest eyes;

	and she made my prayers contented,
	coming so near that the sweet sound
	came to me with its meanings.

	As soon as she was where the grass
	is already wetted by the waves of the fair river,
	she made me the gift of lifting her eyes.

	I do not believe so great a light shone
	under the lids of Venus when she was pierced
	by her son Cupid's arrow, quite by accident.

	She was laughing there, upright on the other bank,
	arranging more colours in her hands
	than the high ground puts out without seed.

	The river held us three paces apart;
	but the Hellespont, where Xerxes crossed and fled back,
	still a bridle on all human pride,

	did not suffer more hatred from Leander,
	who swam it every night to his love, for tossing between Sestos and Abydos,
	than that little river did from me, for not opening then.

	"You are new here, and perhaps because I laugh,"
	she began, "in this place chosen
	as a nest for human nature,

	some misgiving holds you in wonder;
	but the psalm Delectasti, you have made me glad, Lord, by your works,
	gives a light that can clear the fog out of your understanding.

	And you who are in front, and who begged me,
	say if you want to hear anything else; for I came
	ready for every question of yours, as far as is enough."

	"The water," I said, "and the sound of the forest
	fight inside me against a new belief
	in something I heard that was contrary to this."

	At which she: "I will tell you how what makes you wonder
	comes about by its own cause,
	and I will clear the fog that strikes you.

	The highest Good, who alone is pleased with himself,
	made man good and for good, and gave him this place
	as a pledge of eternal peace.

	By his own fault he stayed here only a short time;
	by his own fault he changed honest laughter
	and sweet play for weeping and hardship.

	So that the disturbance made below by the exhalations
	of the water and of the earth,
	which follow the heat as far as they can,

	should make no war on man,
	this mountain rose so far towards heaven,
	and is free of them from the gate upwards.

	Now, because the whole air turns in a circle
	with the turning of the outermost heaven,
	unless the circle is broken on some side,

	at this height, which stands wholly free
	in the living air, that motion strikes,
	and makes the wood sound, because it is thick;

	and the plant that is struck has such power
	that it impregnates the breeze with its own virtue,
	and that, wheeling round, then shakes it about;

	and the other earth, according as it is fit
	by itself and by its sky, conceives and gives birth
	to various trees of various powers.

	Then it would not seem a wonder over there,
	once this is heard, when some plant
	takes root there without any visible seed.

	And you must know that the holy country
	where you are is full of every seed,
	and has fruit in it that is not picked over there.

	The water you see does not rise from a vein
	fed by vapour that the cold turns to water,
	like a river that gains and loses breath;

	but it comes out of a fixed and certain fountain,
	which takes back from the will of God
	as much as it pours out, open on two sides.

	On this side it comes down with a power
	that takes away the memory of sin;
	on the other it gives back the memory of every good deed.

	Here it is Lethe; so on the other side
	it is called Eunoe, and it does not work
	unless it is first tasted on this side and on that;

	its taste is above all other tastes.
	And although your thirst may be well enough
	satisfied for me to uncover no more to you,

	I will give you a corollary as well, out of grace;
	nor do I believe my speech will be less dear to you
	if it goes on with you beyond my promise.

	Those who in the old days wrote poems
	about the age of gold and its happy state
	perhaps dreamed of this place, on Parnassus, the poets' mountain.

	Here the root of mankind was innocent;
	here it is always spring, and there is every fruit;
	this is the nectar that everyone speaks of."

	Then I turned right round
	to my poets, and saw that they had heard
	the last conclusion with a smile;

	then I turned my face back to the beautiful lady.

Canto Twenty-Nine

	Singing like a woman in love,
	she went on, at the end of her words:
	"Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata!", blessed are they whose sins are covered.

	And like nymphs who used to walk alone
	through the wild shadows, one wanting
	to see the sun and another to escape it,

	she then moved against the stream, going
	along the bank; and I level with her,
	following her small step with a small one.

	Between her steps and mine there were not a hundred
	when the banks turned equally,
	in such a way that I was facing east again.

	Nor had our road gone far like that
	when the lady turned right round to me,
	saying: "My brother, look and listen."

	And then a brightness suddenly ran
	on all sides through the great forest,
	so that I wondered whether it was lightning.

	But because lightning stops as soon as it comes,
	and this, lasting, shone brighter and brighter,
	I said in my thought: "What is this thing?"

	And a sweet melody was running
	through the shining air; at which good zeal
	made me reprove the boldness of Eve,

	who, there where earth and heaven were obedient,
	a woman, alone and only just formed,
	would not bear to stay under any veil;

	under which, if she had been dutiful,
	I would have felt those unspeakable delights
	earlier, and for a longer while.

	While I went on among so many first fruits
	of the eternal pleasure, wholly suspended,
	and still longing for more gladness,

	the air under the green branches became
	before us like a kindled fire;
	and the sweet sound was now understood as singing.

	Oh most holy Virgins, Muses, if hunger,
	cold or sleepless nights I ever suffered for you,
	the case spurs me to call on you for payment.

	Now your spring on Helicon must pour out for me,
	and Urania, muse of the heavens, help me with her choir,
	to put into verse things hard to think of.

	A little further on, the long stretch of air
	still between us and them
	made seven golden trees of what was there;

	but when I had come so near them
	that the common object, which deceives the sense,
	no longer lost any of its features by distance,

	the faculty that hands what it sees to reason
	understood that they were candlesticks,
	and understood "Hosanna" in the voices of the singing.

	Above, the beautiful equipment was flaming
	far brighter than the moon in a clear
	midnight sky in the middle of her month.

	I turned round full of wonder
	to the good Virgil, and he answered me
	with a look loaded with no less astonishment.

	Then I gave my face back to the high things,
	which were moving towards us so slowly
	that new brides would have outrun them.

	The lady scolded me: "Why do you burn so
	with love only for the living lights,
	and do not look at what comes behind them?"

	Then I saw people coming after them,
	as if after their leaders, dressed in white;
	and there was never such whiteness here.

	The water shone on my left side,
	and gave me back my own left side, if I looked
	into it, as a mirror does.

	When I had taken up such a station on my bank
	that only the river kept me at a distance,
	I stopped my steps to see better,

	and saw the little flames going in front,
	leaving the air painted behind them,
	so that they looked like trailed brushes;

	so that above them there stayed marked out
	seven bands, all in those colours
	the Sun makes his rainbow of, and the moon her halo.

	These streamers went back further than my sight,
	and, by my reckoning, the outer ones
	were ten paces apart.

	Under so beautiful a sky as I describe,
	twenty-four elders, two by two,
	came crowned with fleurs-de-lis.

	They were all singing: "Blessed are you
	among the daughters of Adam, and blessed
	be your beauties for ever!"

	When the flowers and the other fresh grass
	on the other bank, opposite me,
	were free of those chosen people,

	as light follows light in heaven,
	four living creatures came after them,
	each crowned with green leaves.

	Each of them was feathered with six wings;
	the feathers full of eyes; and the hundred eyes of Argus,
	if they were alive, would be like these.

	I do not spread more rhymes on describing
	their shapes, reader; for another cost presses me,
	so that I cannot be generous with this one;

	but read Ezekiel, who paints them
	as he saw them come from the cold quarter
	with wind and with cloud and with fire;

	and just as you will find them in his pages,
	so they were here, except that as to the wings
	John is with me, and differs from him.

	The space inside the four of them held
	a triumphal chariot on two wheels,
	which came drawn at the neck of a griffin.

	He stretched up one wing and the other
	between the middle band and the three and three,
	so that in splitting them he did no harm to any.

	They rose so high that they were out of sight.
	His limbs were of gold where he was bird,
	and the rest white, mixed with red.

	Not only did Rome never make Scipio Africanus glad
	with so fine a chariot, or Augustus either,
	but the Sun's own would be poor beside it —

	the Sun's, which, going off its road with Phaethon driving, was burnt
	at the prayer of the devout Earth,
	when Jove, in his hidden way, was just.

	Three ladies came dancing in a circle
	at the right wheel; one of them so red
	that she would hardly have been noticed inside a fire;

	the second was as if her flesh and bones
	had been made of emerald;
	the third seemed snow just fallen;

	and now they seemed led by the white one,
	now by the red; and from her singing
	the others took their step, slow and quick.

	On the left four kept festival,
	dressed in purple, following the way
	of one of them who had three eyes in her head.

	After the whole company I have described
	I saw two old men in unlike clothing,
	but alike in bearing, dignified and solid.

	One showed himself to be a physician, one of the household
	of that great Hippocrates whom nature
	made for the creatures she holds dearest;

	the other showed the contrary care,
	with a sword shining and sharp,
	such that it frightened me on this side of the river.

	Then I saw four in humble bearing;
	and behind all of them a single old man
	coming, asleep, with a keen face.

	And these seven were dressed like the first troop,
	but they did not make a garland
	of lilies about their heads,

	but of roses and other red flowers;
	a look from a little distance would have sworn
	that they were all on fire above their eyebrows.

	And when the chariot was opposite me,
	a thunderclap was heard, and those worthy people
	seemed to be forbidden to go further,

	stopping there with the leading standards.

Canto Thirty

	When the seven candlesticks, the seven stars of the highest heaven,
	which never knew setting or rising
	nor any veil of mist but that of guilt,

	and which made everyone there aware
	of his duty, as the seven stars of the Plough do
	for whoever turns the tiller to come to port,

	stood still: the truthful people,
	who had come first between the griffin and them,
	turned to the chariot as to their peace;

	and one of them, as if sent from heaven,
	singing "Veni, sponsa, de Libano", come, bride, from Lebanon,
	cried three times, and all the others after him.

	As the blessed at the last trumpet
	will rise quickly, each from his own hollow,
	singing hallelujah with the voice put on again,

	so on the divine chariot there rose up
	a hundred, ad vocem tanti senis, at the voice of so great an elder,
	ministers and messengers of eternal life.

	They were all saying: "Benedictus qui venis!", blessed are you who come,
	and, throwing flowers above and around,
	"Manibus, oh, date lilia plenis!", oh, give lilies with full hands, which is Virgil's own line.

	I have seen before now, at the beginning of the day,
	the eastern quarter all rose-coloured
	and the rest of the sky adorned with clear beauty;

	and the face of the sun rise shadowed,
	so that through the tempering of the vapours
	the eye could bear it a long while:

	so, inside a cloud of flowers
	that rose from the angels' hands
	and fell down again inside the chariot and outside it,

	over a white veil, girdled with olive,
	a lady appeared to me, under a green mantle,
	dressed in the colour of living flame.

	And my spirit, which for so long a time
	had not been broken, trembling,
	by wonder in her presence,

	without having any further knowledge through the eyes,
	by a hidden power that went out from her,
	felt the great force of the old love.

	As soon as that high power struck my sight
	which had already pierced me
	before I was out of my boyhood,

	I turned to my left with the trust
	with which a small child runs to his mother
	when he is afraid or when he is hurt,

	to say to Virgil: "There is less than a gram
	of blood left in me that does not tremble:
	I know the signs of the old flame."

	But Virgil had left us without him —
	Virgil, sweetest father,
	Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation;

	and all that our first mother lost
	could not keep my cheeks, though washed with dew,
	from turning dark again with weeping.

	"Dante, because Virgil is going away,
	do not weep yet, do not weep yet;
	for you must weep for another sword."

	Like an admiral who goes to stern and to prow
	to see the men who serve on the other ships
	and heartens them to do well,

	on the left side of the chariot,
	when I turned at the sound of my own name,
	which of necessity is written down here,

	I saw the lady who had appeared to me first,
	veiled under the angels' festival,
	turning her eyes towards me across the stream.

	Although the veil that came down from her head,
	circled with the olive, Minerva's leaves,
	would not let her be plainly seen,

	royally, still stern in her bearing,
	she went on like one who speaks
	and keeps the hottest words for later:

	"Look at me well. I am indeed, I am indeed Beatrice.
	How did you think fit to come to the mountain?
	Did you not know that here man is happy?"

	My eyes fell down into the clear water;
	but seeing myself in it, I drew them to the grass,
	so heavily did shame weigh on my forehead.

	So a mother seems severe to her son,
	as she seemed to me; because the taste
	of harsh pity has bitterness in it.

	She was silent; and the angels sang at once
	"In te, Domine, speravi", in you, Lord, I have hoped;
	but they did not go past "pedes meos", the verse that sets my feet in a wide place.

	As the snow freezes among the living rafters, the trees,
	along the Apennines, the back of Italy,
	blown and packed by the winds from the north-east,

	and then, melting, filters down into itself,
	as soon as a warm wind breathes from Africa, the land where the sun casts no shadow,
	so that it seems a fire melting a candle;

	so I was without tears and without sighs
	before the singing of those who always sing
	after the notes of the eternal circles;

	but when I understood in their sweet harmonies
	their pity for me, more than if they had said:
	"Lady, why do you break him down so?" —

	the ice that had gathered tight round my heart
	became breath and water, and with anguish
	came out of my breast through my mouth and my eyes.

	She, still standing motionless on the said side
	of the chariot, then turned her words
	to the merciful beings in this way:

	"You keep watch in the eternal day,
	so that neither night nor sleep steals from you
	a step the world may take on its roads;

	so my answer is made with more care
	that the one who is weeping over there should understand me,
	so that guilt and grief may be of one measure.

	Not only by the working of the great wheels of the heavens,
	which direct every seed to some end
	according to the stars that keep it company,

	but by the generosity of divine graces,
	which have for their rain such high vapours
	that our sight does not come near them,

	this man was such in his new life,
	in what he might become, that every good habit
	would have made a marvellous proof in him.

	But the ground that has more good earthly strength
	becomes more wild and more malignant
	with bad seed and left untilled.

	For a while I held him up with my face:
	showing him my young eyes,
	I took him with me, turned the right way.

	As soon as I was on the threshold
	of my second age and changed my life,
	he took himself from me and gave himself to others.

	When I had risen from flesh to spirit,
	and beauty and virtue had grown in me,
	I was less dear to him and less welcome;

	and he turned his steps by a way that was not true,
	following false images of good
	which keep no promise whole.

	Nor did it help me to win inspirations for him,
	with which, in dreams and otherwise,
	I called him back: so little did he care!

	He fell so low that all arguments
	for his salvation were already too short,
	except to show him the people who are lost.

	For this I visited the doorway of the dead,
	and my prayers were carried, weeping,
	to the one who has brought him up here.

	God's high decree would be broken
	if Lethe were crossed and such food
	were tasted without any payment

	of repentance that sheds tears."

Canto Thirty-One

	"Oh you who are on the other side of the holy river,"
	turning the point of her speech towards me,
	which even with the edge had seemed sharp to me,

	she began again, going on without any pause,
	"say, say if this is true. To so heavy an accusation
	your own confession must be joined."

	My power was so confounded
	that my voice started, and was put out
	before it was unlocked from its organs.

	She bore it a moment; then she said: "What are you thinking?
	Answer me; for the sad memories in you
	have not yet been damaged by the water."

	Confusion and fear mixed together
	pushed such a "yes" out of my mouth
	that it needed the eyes to make it out.

	As a crossbow breaks its cord and its bow
	when it is fired from too great a strain,
	and the shaft touches the mark with less force,

	so I burst under that heavy load,
	pouring out tears and sighs,
	and my voice slackened on its way.

	At which she to me: "Inside those desires of mine,
	which were leading you to love the good
	beyond which there is nothing to aspire to,

	what ditches across your way, what chains
	did you find, that you had to strip yourself
	of the hope of going forward?

	And what advantages or what gains
	showed themselves on the brows of the others,
	that you had to walk up and down in front of them?"

	After the drawing of a bitter sigh,
	I hardly had the voice that answered,
	and my lips made it with difficulty.

	Weeping I said: "Present things,
	with their false pleasure, turned my steps
	as soon as your face was hidden."

	And she: "If you kept silent, or if you denied
	what you confess, your fault would not be
	less noted: it is known by such a judge!

	But when the accusation of the sin
	bursts out of the sinner's own cheek, in our court
	the wheel turns itself back against the edge.

	Even so, so that you may bear shame now
	for your straying, and so that another time,
	hearing the sirens, you may be stronger,

	put down the seed of weeping and listen:
	so you will hear how my buried flesh
	ought to have moved you the other way.

	Never did nature or art present to you
	a pleasure like the beautiful limbs I was
	shut in, and which are scattered now in earth;

	and if the highest pleasure so failed you
	by my death, what mortal thing
	should have drawn you afterwards into wanting it?

	Truly, at the first arrow of deceitful things
	you should have got up and followed me,
	who was no longer such a thing.

	No girl, and no other novelty of so short a use,
	should have weighed your wings down
	to wait for another shot.

	The young bird waits for two or three;
	but in front of the eyes of the full-fledged
	a net is spread or an arrow shot for nothing."

	As children stand, silent for shame,
	with their eyes on the ground, listening
	and knowing themselves and repenting,

	so I stood; and she said: "Since it grieves you
	only to hear, lift up your beard,
	and you will take more grief in looking."

	A strong oak is torn up with less resistance,
	whether by our own north wind
	or by the one that blows from Africa,

	than I raised my chin at her command;
	and when she asked for my face by my beard,
	I knew well the poison in the argument.

	And as my face was lifted,
	my eye saw that those first creatures
	had stopped their scattering;

	and my sight, still not very sure of itself,
	saw Beatrice turned towards the griffin, the beast
	that is one person only in two natures.

	Under her veil, and beyond the river,
	she seemed to me to beat her own former self
	more than she beat the others here when she was with us.

	The nettle of repentance so pricked me there
	that of all other things, whatever had twisted me
	most into loving it became most my enemy.

	Such recognition bit into my heart
	that I fell down overcome; and what I became then
	she knows, who was the cause of it.

	Then, when my heart gave me back my outward strength,
	I saw above me the lady I had found alone,
	and she was saying: "Hold on to me, hold on!"

	She had drawn me into the river up to my throat,
	and, pulling me after her, was going
	over the water light as a shuttle.

	When I was near the blessed bank,
	"Asperges me", wash me and I shall be whiter than snow, was heard so sweetly
	that I cannot remember it, let alone write it.

	The beautiful lady opened her arms;
	she took my head in them and dipped me under
	where I had to swallow the water.

	Then she took me out, and offered me, bathed,
	into the dance of the four beautiful ladies in purple;
	and each of them covered me with her arm.

	"Here we are nymphs, and in heaven we are stars.
	Before Beatrice came down into the world
	we were appointed to her as her handmaids.

	We shall bring you to her eyes; but in the joyful
	light that is inside them the three over there, in red and green and white,
	who see deeper, will sharpen yours."

	So they began, singing; and then
	they took me with them to the griffin's breast,
	where Beatrice stood turned towards us.

	They said: "See that you do not spare your looking.
	We have set you in front of the emeralds, her eyes,
	from which Love once drew his weapons at you."

	A thousand desires hotter than any flame
	bound my eyes to the shining eyes,
	which stayed fixed only on the griffin.

	As the sun in a mirror, exactly so
	the double beast was shining inside them,
	now with one nature and now with the other.

	Think, reader, whether I wondered,
	when I saw the thing itself stay still
	and its image change in her eyes.

	While my soul, full of astonishment and glad,
	was tasting that food which, satisfying with itself,
	makes a man thirst for itself,

	the other three, showing themselves
	of a higher rank in their bearing, came forward,
	dancing to their own angelic song.

	"Turn, Beatrice, turn your holy eyes,"
	was their song, "on your faithful one,
	who has taken so many steps to see you!

	Of your grace do us the grace of uncovering
	your mouth to him, so that he may make out
	the second beauty which you keep hidden."

	Oh splendour of living eternal light,
	what poet who ever went pale with labour under the shadow
	of Parnassus, or drank at its spring,

	who would not seem to have his mind clogged,
	trying to render you as you appeared there,
	where the sky in its harmony overshadowed you,

	when you unveiled yourself in the open air?

Canto Thirty-Two

	My eyes were so fixed and intent
	on slaking their ten years' thirst
	that all my other senses were put out.

	And on this side and on that they had a wall
	of not caring — so did the holy smile
	draw them to itself with the old net! —

	when my face was turned by force
	towards my left by those three goddesses,
	because I heard from them a "Too fixedly!";

	and the state in which eyes are for seeing
	when they have just been struck by the sun
	left me for a while without my sight.

	But when my sight had re-formed itself to the small
	(I say "the small" in comparison with the great
	object of sense I had been forced away from),

	I saw that the glorious army had wheeled
	on its right, and was going back
	with the sun and the seven flames in its face.

	As a troop turns under its shields to save itself,
	and swings round with its standard
	before the whole of it can change front,

	so that soldiery of the heavenly kingdom
	which was in front all passed by us
	before the chariot turned its pole.

	Then the ladies went back to the wheels,
	and the griffin moved the blessed load
	so that not one of his feathers shook.

	The beautiful lady who had drawn me through the ford,
	and Statius and I, were following the wheel
	that made its track on the smaller curve.

	So, walking through the high empty wood —
	empty by the fault of her who believed the serpent —
	an angelic music kept our steps in time.

	Perhaps in three flights of an unleashed arrow
	we had come as far as we had gone
	when Beatrice came down.

	I heard them all murmur "Adam";
	then they circled a tree stripped
	of leaves and of any other foliage on every branch.

	Its crown, which spreads out wider
	the higher it goes, would be marvelled at
	for its height by the Indians in their woods.

	"Blessed are you, griffin, who do not tear
	with your beak at this wood, sweet to the taste,
	since the belly is badly twisted by it afterwards."

	So the others cried around the strong tree;
	and the twice-born animal:
	"So is the seed of all justice kept."

	And turning to the pole he had drawn,
	he pulled it to the foot of the widowed tree
	and left it tied to what belonged to it.

	As our plants swell in spring, when the sun's great light
	comes down mixed with the light of the Ram,
	the sign that shines behind the heavenly Fish,

	and then each is renewed in its own colour
	before the sun harnesses his horses
	under another star;

	so, opening a colour less than the rose
	and more than the violet, the tree was made new
	which before had had its branches so bare.

	I did not understand, and here on earth we do not sing,
	the hymn that those people sang then,
	nor could I bear the whole of the melody.

	If I could draw how the hundred pitiless eyes of Argus were put to sleep
	as they heard Mercury tell the tale of Syrinx,
	the eyes whose watching cost them so dear,

	then, like a painter who paints from a model,
	I would draw how I fell asleep;
	but let whoever will pretend to sleep well.

	So I go on to when I woke,
	and I say that a brightness tore the veil
	of sleep from me, and a calling: "Get up: what are you doing?"

	As, when they were brought up the mountain to see Christ transfigured,
	a blossom of that apple tree whose fruit makes the angels greedy
	and makes a perpetual marriage feast in heaven,

	Peter and John and James, overcome,
	came to themselves again at the word
	by which greater sleeps than theirs were broken,

	and saw their company diminished
	both of Moses and of Elijah,
	and their master's clothing changed;

	so I came to, and saw standing over me
	that merciful lady who had been
	the guide of my steps beside the river before.

	And all in doubt I said: "Where is Beatrice?"
	At which she: "See her sitting under the new leaves
	on the root of the tree.

	See the company that is round her:
	the others are going up behind the griffin
	with a sweeter song and a deeper one."

	Whether her speech went on longer than that
	I do not know, because by then I had before my eyes
	the one who had closed me off from attending to anything else.

	She sat alone on the bare ground,
	as if left there to guard the wagon
	which I had seen the two-formed beast tie up.

	The seven nymphs made a cloister of themselves
	in a circle round her, with the seven candlesticks in their hands,
	lights that are safe from the north wind and the south.

	"Here you will be a forester for a short time,
	and you will be with me for ever a citizen
	of that Rome where Christ is a Roman.

	So, for the good of the world that lives badly,
	keep your eyes on the chariot now, and what you see,
	when you are back over there, see that you write it."

	So Beatrice; and I, who was wholly devoted
	at the feet of her commands,
	gave my mind and my eyes where she wanted.

	Fire never came down with so swift a motion
	from a thick cloud, when it rains
	from that boundary that lies furthest off,

	as I saw the eagle, the bird of Jove, come down
	through the tree, tearing the bark
	as well as the flowers and the new leaves;

	and it struck the chariot with all its strength,
	so that the chariot heeled like a ship in a storm
	beaten by the waves, now to starboard, now to port.

	Then I saw a fox throw itself into the cradle
	of the triumphal vehicle,
	which seemed starved of all good food;

	but, reproving it for its filthy faults,
	my lady turned it into such a flight
	as its bones without any flesh could bear.

	Then, from the place it had first come from,
	I saw the eagle come down into the chariot's body
	and leave it feathered with itself;

	and, like a voice out of a heart that grieves,
	such a voice came out of heaven and said:
	"Oh my little ship, how badly you are loaded!"

	Then it seemed to me that the ground opened
	between the two wheels, and I saw a dragon come out of it
	which drove its tail up through the chariot;

	and like a wasp drawing back its sting,
	pulling its wicked tail back to itself
	it dragged part of the floor away, and went off wandering.

	What was left was covered over with the feathers,
	as good ground is with couch grass,
	offered perhaps with a sound and kindly intention;

	and one wheel and the other and the pole
	were covered by them in less time
	than a sigh keeps the mouth open.

	The holy structure, so transformed,
	put out heads on all its parts,
	three over the pole and one at each corner.

	The first were horned like oxen,
	but the four had a single horn on the forehead:
	such a monster was never seen before.

	Confident, like a fortress on a high mountain,
	I saw a loose whore sitting on it,
	with her eyes quick to look around;

	and, as if so that she should not be taken from him,
	I saw a giant standing upright beside her,
	and now and then they kissed each other.

	But because she turned her greedy, roving eye
	on me, that fierce lover
	whipped her from her head to her feet;

	then, full of suspicion and raw with anger,
	he untied the monster and dragged it off through the wood,
	so far that he made a shield of the trees alone

	between me and the whore and the new beast.

Canto Thirty-Three

	"Deus, venerunt gentes", O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance,
	now three of them and now four, alternating the sweet psalm,
	the ladies began, and weeping;

	and Beatrice, sighing and full of pity,
	listened to them, so changed in her face
	that Mary at the cross was hardly more changed.

	But when the other virgins made room
	for her to speak, she rose straight to her feet
	and answered, coloured like fire:

	"Modicum, et non videbitis me: a little while, and you will not see me;
	et iterum, and again, my beloved sisters,
	modicum, et vos videbitis me: a little while, and you will see me."

	Then she put all seven in front of her,
	and behind her, only by a sign, she moved
	me and the lady and Statius, the sage who had stayed.

	So she went on; and I do not believe
	her tenth step had been set on the ground
	when she struck my eyes with her eyes,

	and with a calm face said to me: "Come faster,
	so that if I speak with you
	you are well placed to listen to me."

	As soon as I was with her, as I should be,
	she said to me: "Brother, why do you not dare
	to ask me anything, now that you come with me?"

	As happens to those who out of too much reverence
	speak in front of their betters,
	and do not bring the living voice out to their teeth,

	so it happened to me, and without a whole sound
	I began: "My lady, you know
	what I need, and what is good for it."

	And she to me: "I want you now to unwrap
	yourself out of fear and shame,
	so that you no longer talk like a man dreaming.

	Know that the chariot the dragon broke
	was and is not; but let the man who is guilty of it believe
	that God's vengeance is not put off by a sop eaten on the grave, as the murderers of Florence think.

	The eagle that left its feathers on the chariot,
	so that it became a monster and then a prey,
	will not be without an heir for all time;

	for I see certainly, and so I tell it,
	stars already near at hand to give us a time,
	safe from every check and every barrier,

	in which a five hundred, ten and five,
	sent by God, shall kill the thieving woman
	together with that giant who sins with her.

	And perhaps my dark telling of it,
	like the riddles of Themis and the Sphinx, persuades you less
	because in their way it clouds your understanding;

	but soon the facts will be the Naiads
	who will solve this hard riddle
	without loss of sheep or of corn.

	Take note; and just as they are given by me,
	so pass these words on to the living
	of the life that is a race to death.

	And keep in mind, when you write them,
	not to hide what you have seen of the tree
	which has now twice been robbed here.

	Whoever robs it or tears at it
	offends God by a blasphemy in act,
	who created it holy for his own use alone.

	For biting it, Adam, the first soul, longed in pain
	and in desire five thousand years and more
	for Christ, who punished that bite in himself.

	Your wit is asleep if it does not judge
	that for some special reason it is so tall
	and so turned upside down at the top.

	And if your empty thoughts had not been water
	of the Elsa about your mind, the river that turns things to stone,
	and their pleasure had not stained it as Pyramus stained the mulberry,

	by so many circumstances alone
	you would know God's justice, in the ban on touching it,
	as the moral meaning of the tree.

	But because I see your understanding
	made of stone and, being stone, stained,
	so that the light of my words dazzles you,

	I want you to carry it inside you, if not written
	then at least painted, the way a pilgrim's staff
	is carried back wreathed with palm."

	And I: "As wax under a seal,
	which does not change the shape stamped on it,
	so my brain is stamped now by you.

	But why does your longed-for word fly
	so far above my sight
	that the more it strains, the more it loses it?"

	"So that you may know," she said, "the school of philosophy
	you have followed, and see how far its teaching
	can follow after my word;

	and see that your road is as far from the divine
	as the highest and fastest heaven
	is distant from the earth."

	At which I answered her: "I do not remember
	that I ever made myself a stranger to you,
	nor have I any conscience that bites me for it."

	"And if you cannot remember it,"
	she answered, smiling, "then call to mind
	how you drank of Lethe today;

	and if fire is argued from smoke,
	this forgetting concludes plainly
	that there was fault in your will, which was set elsewhere.

	But truly from now on my words shall be naked,
	as far as it is fitting
	to uncover them to your rough sight."

	And more glittering, and with slower steps,
	the sun was holding the circle of noon,
	which moves here and there as the point of view does,

	when the seven ladies stopped, as a man stops
	who goes in front of people as their escort
	if he finds something new, or traces of it,

	at the edge of a pale shadow such as the mountains
	carry over their cold streams
	under green leaves and black branches.

	In front of them I seemed to see Euphrates and Tigris
	come out of one fountain
	and part slowly, like friends.

	"Oh light, oh glory of the human race,
	what water is this, which spreads out here
	from one source and puts itself far from itself?"

	To such a request it was said to me: "Ask
	Matelda to tell you." And here the beautiful lady
	answered, as one does who clears herself of blame:

	"This and other things have been told him
	by me; and I am sure
	that the water of Lethe did not hide it from him."

	And Beatrice: "Perhaps a greater care,
	which often takes the memory away,
	has made the eyes of his mind dark.

	But see Eunoe, which runs there:
	take him to it, and, as you are used to do,
	revive his fainting power."

	As a noble spirit does, who makes no excuse
	but makes another's will its own
	as soon as it is opened out by a sign,

	so, when she had taken me,
	the beautiful lady set off, and said to Statius
	with a lady's courtesy: "Come with him."

	If I had more room to write in, reader,
	I would sing at least in part
	of the sweet drinking that would never have filled me;

	but because all the pages laid out
	for this second cantica are full,
	the bridle of my art lets me go no further.

	I came back from the most holy water
	made new again, as new plants are
	renewed with new leaves,

	pure and ready to rise to the stars.