Because your human longings point to where portions grow smaller in shared fellowship, meanness of mind must make the bellows sigh. 52 If love, though, seeking for the utmost sphere, should ever wrench your longings to the skies, such fears would have no place within your breast. 55 For, there, the more that we can speak of “ours”, the more each one possesses of the good and, in that cloister, caritas burns brighter.
Look hard, all you whose minds are sound and sane, and wonder at the meaning lying veiled beyond the curtain of this alien verse.
Questo sonetto ha due parti principali; che ne la prima intendo chiamare li fedeli d’Amore per quelle parole di Geremia profeta che dicono: “O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus”, e pregare che mi sofferino d’audire;.
Anyone who reads the original will wonder at times if this is really “poetry.” Very well, then, let it be prose, if one insists on folly.
It was that hour that turns seafarers’ longings homeward- the hour that makes their hearts grow tender upon the day they big sweet friends farewell...
But if it is prose, it is prose of a previously unknown order, for the depth and multiplicity of mind that seem to function at every choice have not been matched in any piece of Western writing.
The moon, with midnight now behind us, made the stars seem scarcer to us; it was shaped just like a copper basin, gleaming, new.
And he, my strength, swung straight around to say: ‘Why so dismayed and faithless? Don’t you know that I am with you and still guide your steps?
How cautious we must always be when faced with those who, far beyond observing deeds, can gaze in wisdom on our very thoughts.
Remember this, if Fortune leads you on to where such spats as this are played out loud. 148 To wish to hear such stuff is pretty low.
For when the powers of working intellect are wed to strength and absolute illwill, then humans cannot find a place to hide.
She by her nature is cruel, so vicious she never can sate her voracious will, but, feasting well, is hungrier than before.
He eyed the snake. The reptile eyed him back. Each gave out smoke in streams – the wound of one, the serpent’s jaws. The smoke streams slowly met.
It follows, then, that the only way to get into Hell is to insist upon it. One must deliberately exclude himself from grace by hardening his heart against it. Hell is what the damned have actively and insistently wished for.
Quick! Quick! Let’s lose no time through lack of love!’ so all of those behind now shouted out. ‘For zeal in doing good turns grace new green.
Dante’s Cantos average about 140 lines. As a general thing he requires no more than twenty or thirty lines to identify the sinner and to describe the punishment.
T. S. Eliot said that the last cantos of Heaven were as great as poetry can ever get.
You have the light that shows you right from wrongs, and your Free Will, which, though it may grow faint in its struggles with the heavens, can still surmount all obstacles if nurtured well. You are free of subjects of a greater power, a nobler nature that creates your mind... So, if the world has gone astray, the cause lies in yourselves and only there!
Form, in its interrelations, is the most speaking element.
English “broadcast” once meant specifically “a way of sowing” and was borrowed by radio as an analogy.