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Your escape he has not therefore lost

in a lap top

the roadside:the race that thin

sits coils far,purpurea in the hole

where a riot of souls greets

the insignia of the Unicorn and Tortoise.

The launch of the banners do not suit

in the face; blaze has consumed too much

gl'indizi that scorgesti;

recent announcements that smell of turpentine and storm

imminent and that warm ooze

clouds torn,Late in the glory of a kind greeting

that also escapes the fate. From the tower

falls sound of bronze: the parade

continues between drums argueto the glory of the districts.It 'strange: you

you watch the riot vastness,bricks darkened, the uncertainly

balloon card that stands out

ghosts animated on the dial

immense clock, arpeggiant

evaulting swarms and amazement

that invades the shelldel Campo, you feel

the seal between the fingers imperiously,I thought I lost

and the light of first spreads

on the heads and the bleaching of his lilies.

Back echo beyond "once upon a time '(The prayer that recalls the dark

He arrived one morning) "Not a kingdom, but the slender

track filigree

that leave no signour feet touched. Under the once icy

now weighs a sleep of stone,the voice from the cellarno 

one is listening, or are you.

The bar on the cross not scandelight for who we have lost,death has no voicethe spreading of life. "

but another voice here escape the horror

the prison and for her the refrain

not worth the scrawl auction wrapped(Goose and Giraffe) that cross high

and falling in flames. Moans the stagethe passage of brocchi greeted

by a single cry. It 'a flight! And you forget!Forget death

toto coelo reached and ergotante

stuttering of the damned! There was the day

of living, you see, and apparently immobile

Ruby water that populates

of images. This moves away

and the goal is there: out of the forest

the banners, on the bell-ringing

irrefrenato the sky, beyond the gaze

man - and you fixed. So get up,his ideas until the top pin

but the gap remains engraved. Then, nothing.

(translated by google)

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John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all of Europe, including Russia. While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the thing-in-itself, metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history (or politics), as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia. Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutinizing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. In a day and age when much too little is translated and thus known about foreign literature, and when Europeans themselves are pondering the common denominators of their own culture, this book is as indispensable as it is engaging.

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Nobelprize.org, The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1975 was awarded to Eugenio Montale"for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions".

MLA:

MLA style: "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1975". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 26 Apr 2015. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1975/>

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Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm, and the Jewish Sunflower uncovers one of the great hidden sagas of modern literature. During Italy's fascist period, Eugenio Montale - winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the greatest modern poets in any language - fell in love with Irma Brandeis, a glamorous and beautiful Dante scholar and an American Jew. While their romance would fall apart, it would have literary repercussions that extended throughout the poet's career: Montale's works abound with secret codes that speak to a lost lover and muse. This study is the first to completely unlock the cryptic thematic link that connects many of Montale's most important poems, which, taken together, form the most significant hidden poetic cycle of modernism. David Michael Hertz explores the intersecting poetic myth and background biography, with precision made possible through recently published archival materials. Bringing the reader into an intense experience of great poetry while telling an engaging story, Hertz vividly shows that close reading in conjunction with biographical and historical materials can be an unforgettable and rewarding experience.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17892879-eugenio-montale-the-fascist-storm-and-the-jewish-sunflower

MLA: Hertz, David Michael. Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm and the Jewish Sunflower. U of Toronto. Print.

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A thorough update on one of our most popular posts.

How long ago was WWII?

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Critical interest in biography and autobiography has never been higher. However, while life-writing flourishes in the UK, in Italy it is a less prominent genre. The twelve essays collected here are written against this backdrop, and address issues in biographical and autobiographical writing in Italy from the later nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between individual lives and life-writing and the wider social and political history of Italy. The majority of essays focus on well-known writers (D'Annunzio, Svevo, Bontempelli, Montale, Levi, Calvino, Eco and Fallaci), and their varying anxieties about autobiographical writing in their work. This picture is rounded out by a series of studies of similar themes in lesser known figures: the critic Enrico Nencioni, the Welsh-Italian painter Llewellyn Lloyd and Italian writers and journalists covering the Spanish Civil War. The contributors, all specialists in their fields, are Antonella Braida, Charles Burdett, Jane Everson, John Gatt Rutter, Robert Gordon, Gwyn Griffith, Peter Hainsworth, Martin McLaughlin, Gianni Oliva, Giuliana Pieri, and Jon Usher. The volume is dedicated to John Woodhouse, on his seventieth birthday, and concludes with a bibliography of his writings.

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Biography 

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York of the Austro-Bohemian origin, he studied literature, especially of Italian literature and Dante , and taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University . In 1933 he meets Eugenio Montale in Florence during a summer trip (had read Cuttlefish Bones ), and was born a love story destined to end definitively in 1938 ; the story is also experienced by Montale same time as with Drusilla Tanzi (with which the poet would be married in the early sixties ), and Drusilla would seek to terminate the relationship between Eugene and Brandeis. In 1939 ceases their intense correspondence, after the expiry of the last chance for the poet to embark to reach the United States. [1] The story of their love letters was recently disclosed in the book Letters to Clizia (2006), in which among other things Eugenio Irma writes to two suicide attempts by Drusilla, made ​​to discourage the idea of a possible departure to New York , where he planned to reach his beloved. [2] The last letter of Irma in possession of scholars expresses his feelings and his disappointment: "Unfortunately, I love you. Everything you do to hurt you, you make it to me. I can not stand this life painful and not very heroic, almost ridiculous, but I see that it is too late to correct it ... " [3] . In 1960 he released his study Dante's The Ladder of Vision. A Study of Dante's Comedy (Chatto & Windus, London), on the scale that goes to God in Comedy , text also inspired by the ideas of Singleton , of which she was a pupil. [4]

Irma-Clizia  

Montale poetically idealized figure of Irma, called in the lyrics with the soprannome- senhal of Clizia , especially it Opportunities , as a visiting angel able to give meaning to his life and allow him to confront his existential dramas. Paolo De Caro in Journey to Irma ... (1999) sees Irma-Clizia Montale as a "Woman-Messiah" internal to a symbolic form of "private religion" the poet, with references to ancient mystical texts. [5] Francesco Zambon Similarly, while reviewing all the humanity of this female character, recognizes in her a "divine sign" mysterious. [6] In Ti free forehead icicles expression chilly sun is also seen as a senhal surname (of German origin) of Irma, fragmented in the meanings of its two components "Brand-eis" (Fire and Ice). [7 ]

Irma Brandeis (1905-1990) was a Jewish American Professor of Italian Studies.

Born in New York, NY in 1905.

Was Professor at Sarah Lawrence College and Bard College.

Specialized in Italian Studies, in particular on Dante Alighieri.

Died in 1990 at Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

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Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Thursday Literary: Montale behind the scenes. P.2 / 4 to 29 January - 18:00 - Room XXIII of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Presentation of the book of Carla Riccardi, Montale behind the scenes. Sources and poems by Ossi to Blizzard, spacing, Novara 2014, pp. 184, EUR 20 ("Library", 62), ISBN 978-88-8212-954-5. Introduction of Msgr. Marco Ballarini, director of the Class of Italian Studies at the Academy Ambrosiana. It features Alberto Cadioli. Moderated by Armando Torno. Author spoke. The meeting presents another important step in addition to the bibliography of studies Montale. With flair that sets it apart, Carla Riccardi reconstructs and analyzes the ideas and suggestions to the base of the masterpieces of the Nobel Prize for poetry in 1975, by the exchange of letters with the great American poet Ezra Pound (which is dedicated to enlightening appendix) the tormented relationship with Irma Brandeis, or Clizia, the "muse" Montalian for excellence. The author is professor of Italian literature at the University of Pavia, he has taught at various universities in Europe and elsewhere and deals with literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has published, among other things, the critical editions of Life of the fields and the Mastro Don Gesualdo Verga (in Edition National), the Infamous Column (National Edition and the European Union) and the writings of literary Manzoni (in "Classic Mondadori" ). He published many essays that both philological critics.

https://youtu.be/ufsmtEwDa2g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naQ7Jz4mOMY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfQ8QMbmvoc

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Eugenio Montale Poesie da "Ossi di seppia" Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera: desolata t'attende dalla sera in cui...

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“Many years ago, I do not remember the date about 34 years ago. I met one evening Vittorio, a novelist, and he had asked me to write music reviews.”

Part 2:

https://youtu.be/kKl2FlKZ_as

part 3:

 https://youtu.be/Ndxhw418q-w

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Introduzione alla vita e alle opere di Eugenio Montale, a cura di Andrea Cortellessa.   Eugenio Montale nasce a Genova nel 1896 da una famiglia

Introduction to the life and works of Eugenio Montale, edited by Andrea Cortellessa. Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896 from an upper-class family. He spent his childhood in Monterosso, where the family goes on vacation. Around '23 begins to develop a poetry collection that brings initially the title of Scrap.  With this title pays his debt to an Expressionist tradition tied to the magazine "The Voice" and its poets like Clemente Rebora and Camillo Sbarbaro , author of Stampings .The life of Montale seems uneventful and in a poem by Cuttlefish Bones , Arsenio , the poet calls her a "strangled life", taking up an expression that Benedetto Croce had used to Leopardi . A strangled life which fails to meet the 'existence in the full sense . Fascist era Montale approaches the anti-fascist resistance : public in 1925 Cuttlefish Bones , the first collection edited by Piero Gobetti, that the next year will be killed by the fascists, and always in '25 signs the "Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals" of Benedetto Croce. In the years after the poet retires to Florence , is used in a library, living in guest house of the art historian Matteo Marangoni, husband of Drusilla Tanzi, with which Montale will have a long relationship, until her death in 60s and celebrated in poetry I fell, giving the arm, at least one million stairs  collection Satura . But another woman will be important for the life of the poet, Irma Brandeis, American, of Jewish origin and literary criticism, in which born a love story, which will end in 1938. This woman becomes the poems of Montale emblem of salvation possible, especially in the collection The occasions where it appears with the nickname of-senhal Clizia. Montale in 1939 published his second collection, The occasions , perhaps the most important collection of poems of the twentieth century. Is published by Einaudi, a new publishing house, collection center of writers and intellectuals antifascists. After the war (1948) he moved to Milan , where he began collaborating with the Corriere della Sera . In 1956 publishes The storm and another , a collection of poems about the war and the pain. After the blizzard, Montale's poetry takes a turn intimate and dusk.In 1966 the poems collected in  Xenia are dedicated to his late wife, Drusilla Tanzi, called "Moscow".The collection will then be published together with the collection Satura in 1971. In 1975 Montale gets the Nobel Prize for literature to die in 1981 in Milan. Andrea Cortellessa is an Italian literary critic, literary historian and associate professor at the University Roma Tre, where she teaches Contemporary Italian Literature and Comparative Literature. Collaborates with several magazines and newspapers including Alfabeta2, the manifesto and The Print-Tuttolibri.

http://www.oilproject.org/lezione/eugenio-montale-sintesi-1369.html

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An American woman calls her Italian lover and leaves a message reciting his poetry. She was really calling for another specific reason, the complexities of which…

https://vimeo.com/76586201

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Delusione al primo incontro. Ma poi la passione fu travolgente

It's July 15, 1933

when a young, tall and slender, blue eyes, short hair, Bob, is presented to Vieusseux to ask the Director. It's called Irma Brandeis, is un'italianista Jewish American and was struck by the reading of Cuttlefish Bones, the first collection of poems by Eugenio Montale, which since March 1929 directs the Florentine library. You will find only the next day. "We have become friends! - Writes with enthusiasm Brandeis in a letter -. We spoke to Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, England, America and Italy. " "Dressed in good taste," but already old to 37 years (she 28), very kind, "really simple, very ugly and often, even, flat." Never a conversation from which to save the "ten words worthy to be remembered," note the girl, but then that comes home and starts again, enchanted, to read his book. The month later he added: "The great poet can not speak. I said, humbly, stupid things. And I like it now, not because it looks so much like his work, but because they do not like us at all. " Thus spake the future Clizia, the muse of many poems of Ovid Opportunities.

The fact is that at the July 15 , writes Rosanna Bettarini, philologist Montalian of exception for an exceptional collection as are the Letters to Clizia (Knopf 2006), followed by "a few days estimated enchanted courtship, with book exchange and literary opinions as a strategy of rapprochement. " Irma and Eugene (also in the variant with Arsenio of signing many letters) will meet, only rarely, in the cafe, tavern, to the park, along the river, where one evening, at last face to face, they look the other couples dancing. In early August, Montale is in Paris and then London, and already writes to "My dearest Irma," alternating the Italian to an English often ironic is approximate, as will later. On holiday with the poet is the '' former Miss' Drusilla Tanzi, who lives with her ​​husband, the art critic Matteo Marangoni, via Benedetto Varchi 6. There Montale, left the Board Colombini, had found, for a fee , a 'couch the night. " Paris and London are in those days, for him, the two cities "uninteresting" and "ridiculous." Already facing the theme of love from a distance, which will be the leitmotif of the correspondence for years, shored up by the pull-and-spring of a possible (continuously promised, deferred and never realized) transfer him overseas.Still, the charm is still to come and will be at Piazzale Michelangelo on the night of September 5, which will multiply the allusions in the letters to come and whose memory still appear in poems later: "I'll never forget that return between scales and water terraces. I was not drunk of that fiasco triple bottom, dear Irma, but you and your presence. And then ... when you were so happy at least for an hour you can still do something to be grateful to fate and to overcome the difficulties. "

The poet Eugenio Montale (1896-1981)

The difficulties will multiply over the years.

Irma part Montale and remains the "slavery" voluntary Drusilla, called the Moscow (the "Dear little insect" of a famous poem), with which it is linked by Arsenio time, "a chain no one has put his neck "(Bettarini), but which holds him forever. Only in November, while repeats of not being able to think "the brief oasis of September 5 without going crazy" and to love "every inch of you and your body," the lover away begins to insinuate nell'amica the worm of X ( the acronym-incognita to be saddled with Moscow in all the correspondence, foreshadowing the future Xenia poems). But when, in the summer of 1934, approaching the return of Clizia in Italy, the hint you need more explicit. And she wrote in his diary: "Florence Italy with EM Venice or the beginning of life and death (I learned of X just before you go)."Sull'idillio much anticipated, the "good wishes" fell the shadow of Drusilla, his blackmail and threats of suicide, strychnine, the noose, the flight from the seventh floor. What transformed the existence of Montale, between despair, compassion and even fear, in a "dog's life" unbearable. Add to this, in 1938, the impending war ("Here's something more serious than X, between us"), dismissal for political reasons by the WC (the Vieusseux in the jargon of the lovers), then the premature death of his sister Marianna and final departure of Clizia following the racial laws. These were years of passion at a distance, that touch almost simultaneously the peak and decline, with the fixed idea of finding forever in New York (date, as likely, to 90% in an epistle friend Bobi Bazlen in ' August '38), until December 1939, when the love letters with Irma-Clizia are interrupted: "I love you more than my eyes and I do not know why I insist to remain alive," is the greeting before dark.

The poet will live with Moscow. The married in April 1962, just over a year before the death of her. The "bad epistolografo" (his words) probably deliver to the flames, as a precaution, the letters of the American queen of hearts, to which (in encrypted initials IB) will dedicate Opportunities starting from the edition of '49. One that will live long in dreams, thoughts, memories and fantasies of the poet is no longer Irma Clizia but not the passionate lover, but an increasingly angelic, that last note, in June 1981, the shaky hand of the poet now old (he died three months later) still calls "my divinity."

Paolo Di Stefano July 19, 2011 (Last Modified: July 20, 2011 17:40)© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The report

The meeting The poet Eugenio Montale and Italianist Jewish American Irma Brandeis meet for the first time July 15, 1933. It is the woman who comes to Vieusseux, of which Montale is director because she was fascinated by the reading of the collection "Cuttlefish Bones."

Farewell

The relationship between Montale and Brandeis ends in 1939. Irma leave Italy because of the racial laws, but the poet decides not to move to the US.

The writings in Irma, nicknamed Clizia, the poet dedicates "Opportunities". In the photo above you can see Irma (third from left) and Eugene (top left) with Paul Vivante, Camillo Sbarbaro, Elena De Bosis and Leone Vivante.

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Articles by Irma Brandeis

WINTER 1957

Dante’s Canzone I

Poetry

WINTER 1956

Metaphor in The Divine Comedy

Criticism

AUTUMN 1953

On Reading Dante Whole

Criticism

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義大利“暴風雨的聲音”但丁

BookRags Literature Criticism Critical Essay by Irma Brandeis For the online version of BookRags' Critical Essay by Irma Brandeis Literature Criticism, including complete copyright information, please visit: http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/paradiso_03/ Copyright Information ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved. (c)2000-2006 BookRags, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Critical Essay by Irma Brandeis SOURCE: Brandeis, Irma. "The Ladder of Vision." In The Ladder of Vision: A Study of Dante's Comedy, pp. 185-227. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1962. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1960, Brandeis describes the Paradiso as "the supreme test of Dante's poetic power," since this work presented the formidable challenge of conveying transcendent experience using worldly language and conventional poetic devices. The third canticle [of The Divine Comedy] is the supreme test of Dante's poetic power, since here he faces the virtually impossible task of making the concrete world of images suggest an experience which is totally foreign to almost every reader, and which, by its very nature, would seem untranslatable into words. It is a supreme test of the reader, too: if he is honest, he will see that the book has no easy charm; he must give it the severest attention before he can come to its severe and radiant beauty. He must lay aside altogether the comforting vain little joke about the boredom of the eternal hosannas of Heaven as compared with the liveliness of Hell. Lastly, if he have not yet lifted up his neck for bread of angels, he must wish to try. As for the critic, all persons who write or talk about the Paradiso must not merely take heed of Dante's perfectly serious warning to those who try to follow him in little skiffs1--which is warning with regard to the high sense of the poem--but must, whatever the size of their craft, beware of pursuing a poetic effect as though it were a murderer at large. For it is one thing to shoot a desperado, and another to make an interesting corpse of so living and resistant a work of art. I give notice that I am aware of these dangers; and, being perhaps about to fall into the trap (when all I mean to do is to report certain facts), I warn the reader duly. Let him keep the text of the Paradiso in his hand; it has for over six hundred years successfully protected itself against critical shrinkage and deformation. The pilgrim's voyage in the Paradiso is in its simplest sense an effortless rising from sphere to sphere of a concentric, ten-sphered universe, with the earth at centre and the unmoving Empyrean outmost. It is at the same time the travelling of an immaterial path of intellectual light, educating him in the relation of human life to eternal being, and of human judgment to absolute truth; leading him finally to a momentary glimpse of the ordering and limiting principle of all existence, the totally immaterial Goal and Source of all thought and all matter. But this is far easier to state neatly than truly, for a precision of ideas, if one can reach it, is no more the ideal key to the final poetic experience than to the spiritual transformation Dante is attempting to render. The lovely verb trasumanar, a key-word to the canticle, opening and locking at the same time, epitomizes our difficulty: if the poet speaks as one transhumanized, he must borrow and patch up human language to express this state; while the reader, as he grasps the notion of transhumanization, grasps also the fact of his own remoteness from it. By its imaging process the poem develops this necessary sense of remoteness, with its implicit insights. The literal journey does not, as in the earlier canticles, form a concrete and easily grasped starting point for the steps of the figurative journey. In the Paradiso as the goal of the whole action is more and more closely approximated to light, the field of the literal journey thins away into the airiest remnant of concreteness; the travellers enter into the body of the moon; they halt on the body of the sun, unscorched; there is no visible landscape whatever on the planets, and nothing meets the eye but souls and soul-formations. Furthermore, nothing that is witnessed in Heaven--neither the appearances of souls nor their motions--corresponds to any familiar experience. The souls are sparks and torches; they move in garlands, in cross-form, in eagle-outline. There is no anchorage in the home world of solid things for these strange sights. We are lifted from firm ground and set down on, surrounded by, discoursed to by light. Too much of it? More variations, embellishments and contradictions of experience than the reader can take in? But surely nobody ever knew better than Dante what he risked, as well as what he stood to gain. Surely he meant to press the reader beyond the commonplace, saturate him with light, force him to struggle with it in difficult symbols and interlocked analogies, to feel it as energy and delight in the innumerable splendours, sparklings, whirlings, brightenings, with their musical quality and their dancing motion. He meant to inundate the reader with images of light until the incandescence, increased beyond anything that might be mistaken for mere visibilia--the outrageous incandescence--together with all the things seen which could not possibly be seen by eyes, suggest what they are intended to mean, and precipitate an intellectual atmosphere filled with the exultancy of understanding and its consequent love. We are supposed to understand Beatrice well when she describes the Empyrean as composed of"luce intellettüal, piena d'amore; amor di vero ben, pien di letizia; letizia che trascende ogni dolzore." "light intellectual full-charged with love, love of true good full-charged with gladness, gladness which transcendeth every sweetness." XXX, 40-42 By the time we reach the final three heavens with their increasingly extraordinary sights, Dante has led us to feel suspended between two kinds of being: cut away from the almost familiar variety in which ideas are couched in matter, and craning forward towards the ideal, where they exist in total independence. Deliberately and gradually he has undone our sense of an abiding metaphor under whose terms we have been able to view alternately two sorts of reality, two sorts of brightness--the one sensible, the other ideal--and has left us with a peculiar new awareness of the two as integrated, absolute, as one thing, perfectly real, but of which we cannot say what thing it is. This entity is what the transhumanized eyes see. It is what the reader is left craning forward towards, with the feeling that the very slightest additional push would precipitate him, too, into it. Dante has led us as close as he could to an approximation of what he understands to be at the heart of existence. How close, how worth following, each reader determines for himself. Two images based on light--one at the beginning, one close to the end of the canticle--gather up between them and summarize the great theme of God's action, both creative and resumptive, as an eternal shattering of his light into the universe and a gathering back of its reflections from every member of the creation. The first of these images describes the primal issuing of the One into the Many, and governs all the analyses of the poem. It is extremely brief:La gloria di colui che tutto move per l'universo penetra e risplende in una parte più e meno altrove. The glory of him who moves all things penetrates throughout the universe and reglows in one place more and in another less.2 I, 1-3 The second describes the essential interrelationship of all created things and their attributes, celebrating the consummation of universal wholeness in God. It governs the syntheses of the poem, and is their final statement. The pilgrim, looking into the absolute light, records this:Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna, legato con amore in un volume, ciò che per l'universo si squaderna; sustanze e accidenti e lor costume, quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo che ciò ch'i' dico è un semplice lume. La forma universal di questo nodo credo ch'i' vidi & Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe: substance and accidents and their relations, as though together fused, after such fashion that what I tell of is one simple flame. The universal form of this complex I think that I beheld & XXXIII, 85-92 If one reads the opening triplet in the popular mood suggested by Dante's reputation as a "beautiful" poet, it is quite likely that one will pass it with no more than a vague impression that something grand and vaguely pious has been uttered. If, however, one expects something more precise of the terms, they will, without losing the grandeur they possess (in Italian), show that they are clearly chosen and distinguished in a carefully balanced statement, meaningful down to the very order in which the words appear. The glory comes first--the radiance of God as logical subject of the whole passage. The all-mover occupies a stirring, yet merely descriptive, attributive clause. The two actions of the glory--penetrates and reglows--seem at first to balance one another perfectly, each with its modifying phrase, the one expressing the outgoing, the other the return of light; reglows, however, is weighted by its position at the end of the line, stopping us for a moment as though the train of thought were completed. The final phrase, which does complete the thought, surprises and challenges, and invites us to ask: why, in what way, by what cause does the reflection from the creation differentiate the light which comes to it without distinction of kind or quantity? The canticle will be at work above all to answer this. It will revert again and again to all these terms, developing each in a variety of instances; but it will be a poem chiefly concerned with the reflected splendour of the universe. Eventually this opening image will expand over the whole range of the canticle until all its terms and their relations are as acutely felt as they are articulated. They will be felt as celebratory of what is and must remain a mystery, yet, as always with Dante, they themselves will be unfolded with utter lucidity and exquisite precision. The first simple statement of the glory is clarified in the traditional matter of the canticle dealing with the divine mystery by which God produces the plurality of the creation. He who moves all things is shown to be in essence Absolute Truth (that truth & beyond which no truth hath range3); in manifestation Absolute Light (that deep light which in itself is true4); and in action glory or radiance. The glory is shown penetrating equably throughout the universe, distinct and yet not separate from God (the living light issues in such a way from its source that it departeth not therefrom5), and emerges more and more clearly as signifying Christ, the Logos or Word of God (the splendour of that idea which our Sire begets in loving6), until the full radiance of creative energy becomes synonymous with the Son of God. But the second statement of the opening image is of more than equal weight and of greater expansion in the poem. The reglow is the testimony, by light, of God's presence in creatures. It is the reverberation of light from the creation's mirroring of God. The most superb poetry of the Paradiso arises from Dante's concern with this response of the universe to the light that forms and informs it. That every least creature furnishes a gleam or a splendour according to its kind and capacity--so that a blade of wheat and a king testify to the same formative Intelligence and the same ultimate goal, while their excellence or failure results from the conditions of their receptivity--this is what the poet feels wherever his eye falls on the pursuit each creature so painstakingly makes of its own entelechy; this is what he unfolds in instance after instance, full of love, pity, wonder and awe. This is the subject he is in love with. The world points to God, instructs him in God; and God sends him back again, with certain lessons learned, into the world. The whole hierarchy of created things, from angels to clods, lies somewhere in the light-path, unequally open to it, according as their substance is of one kind or another, and, within kinds, of one degree or another of receptivity:Nell'ordine ch'io dico sono accline tutte nature, per diverse sorti, più al principio loro e men vicine; onde si muovono a diversi porti per lo gran mar dell'essere, & In the order of which I speak all things incline by diverse lots more near and less unto their principle; wherefore all move to diverse ports o'er the great sea of being & I, 109-113 The angelic host receive the light directly, divide it piecemeal among themselves, and in their reglow shed it downward and outward into the creation as from so many mirrors wherein it breaketh.7 And mirrors they are, of the periscope variety, receiving from above and reflecting into the world below. Intent forever upon God, the angels are pure receptacles of light; they contain nothing else, no medium intervenes between them and their object of contemplation, they are aware of none of the differentiations of time or space.8 Indifferent in the same sense as God to where the light falls in its reflection from them, they make no distinction between one or other tenement9 that may be open to receive it. The souls of the blest, too, stand in the direct path of the light, and reglow to the point where nothing else of them but their light is visible: in the seven planetary heavens they are perceptible to the pilgrim's eye only as sparks, torches, splendours. But whereas the angels are composed of light, these are swathed with it, each according to its greater or lesser capacity sharing sweet life, with difference, by feeling more and less the eternal breath.10 And while direct intelligence of God is in the angelic being, the souls perceive God as external to themselves, however close, and everywhere deeper and wider than their capacity to scan or plumb. Turned directly towards him, they look into him as into the veracious mirror which doth make itself reflector of all other things,11 and read there accurately whatever the scope of their own vision permits. This is what the soul of St Thomas means when he says to the pilgrim:"Così com'io del suo raggio resplendo, sì, riguardando nella luce etterna, li tuoi pensieri onde cagioni apprendo." "Even as I glow within its ray, so gazing into the eternal light I apprehend whence thou dost take occasion for thy thoughts." XI, 19-21 And similarly Cacciaguida to the pilgrim:"& i minori e' grandi di questa vita miran nello speglio in che, prima che pensi, il pensier pandi." "& less and great in this life gaze on the mirror whereon, ere thou thinkest, thou dost outspread thy thought." XV, 61-63 The God-light when it enters the world, as we have seen, is indirect, reflected down from the angelic receivers, and thus tempered to weak receptacles. Each creature, well-made or poorly such as Nature furnishes it--takes what it can of the proffered light; each makes a fresh alloy with it, and reglows accordingly. Let men not complain of this differentiation of individuals, for it is not the amount of light he may be able to receive that determines how well a man may live, but his clear or sullied use of it.12 Great and small minds are found in Hell and Heaven. Further, this differentiation is man's collective boon: because of it man may live diversely and with diverse offices,13 and from the varied human membership create the ordered unity of the state. Differentiation that resolves itself in unity, unity that gives birth to plurality--this is the way of God (as the two great images beginning and ending the Paradiso indicate), and the model followed as nearly as possible by man. The human intelligence divides its single light among the several faculties with which it explores experience; but, too, it strives to unify its perceptions in speculation. Now speculation, as we have already observed, is in Dante's view the supreme function of the human race. And, whether he judges entirely by the distinction this ability confers on man, or in part by the value he, himself, sets on it, Dante's strong sense of order is also pleased to observe that speculation has its divine archetype. How this may be we can see by examining the word speculation which proves, like its counterpart, reflection, to be a metaphor, and to mean in its literal sense, mirroring. Thus the human speculator who begins by mirroring such bits of truth as he may, copies the mirror of all mirrors which captures everything.14 Some mortal mirrors are darkened, as we have noted in Hell; but however faint or falsely coloured the light which reglows from these, it is one with that which illuminates the saints. For if aught else than the eternal good seduce your love, naught is it save some vestige of this light, ill understood, that shineth through therein.15 Actually the notion of this single light, everywhere given and everywhere sought after, running along so many strands of thought and action throughout the Comedy, is at the heart of the poem's deep life, so that one is false to it to some extent in every schematic or localized discussion. It yields, for example, an acute and profound approach to the tragic quality of man's existence, nowhere stated but built into the whole poem, hint by hint, from the earliest cantos. For we see that man's supreme objective is that unqualified absolute Light which is his source. We see that it was desire for this that engendered his first disobedience and brought about his Fall. In the world he is cut off from it, striving for it. In his notion of truth, which he holds to in his dispossession, and even in pagan ignorance, lies his guarantee that it exists. After long ages of bridgeless remoteness, it has again been made accessible by the Redemption. Yet it is still distant; and man is born with fallible senses and no knowledge of the roads. Material things lure him into their comfortable shadow; they generate the Dark Wood of desire into which he is virtually sure to stumble; they generate the three Beasts who, if he cannot circumvent them, will press him by their own paths into the darkest region of all, where he can no longer distinguish the cause of his suffering nor, therefore, cure it. But should he escape the Beasts, he must still pass through Hell and face its dangers in almost naked ignorance, in order to get the first glimmering of the light he so intensely desires and cannot yet locate. And if he emerges (the risk is very great), he must face the arduous purgatorial journey into that submission of self to a power greater than self, which Adam refused, and at which the Old Adam still rebels. Between the downpouring of the light described in the first lines of the canticle and the gathering of the whole created universe into God at the end, lies the path travelled by Dante's pilgrim, from the condition of moral enlightenment in which he left Purgatory to the instant of transcendent illumination that completes the narrative. His moral education occurred under the light of the natural sun, the greatest minister of nature, who with the worth of heaven stampeth the world,16 displaying to him the practical good--the achievements of making and doing, witnessed in the things done and made there on the mountain. But doing and making are paths; they are undertaken for the sake of something else. If this is so they must come to an end when their goal is reached. And Dante takes this goal to be the perfect understanding that transcends all phenomena, together with its natural consequence of love for that which is understood. The souls of the elect in Paradise have come to the natural end of action, the natural end of their craving for things, and into the possession of them all in flawless contemplation. The light that fills these souls they reflect willingly upon the living pilgrim. They shower him with discursive lessons, they teach him by their altered and still altering appearances, by their audible harmony and visible grace and ardour, until he begins to know how to winnow the phenomena of space and time for their concealed truths and how to value these on an eternal scale.