Inferno

As mentioned earlier on the blog, I’ve been reading the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The most famous portion is the first, Inferno, Dante’s description of his tour through hell. He envisioned hell as a lake of unending fire, but with some variation in the landscape. At the deepest point of the pit, however, it is not fire but ice that reigns supreme. The worst sinners are trapped in ice, encased forever. It’s not just chilling, in the sense of being eerie. It’s chilling in the sense that it is as if, the farther one gets from God, the closer one approaches absolute zero, the point of ceasing to exist while simultaneously not being released from life.

Inferno
— after Dante

Dragons morph to snakes
winged, sunlit, sailing overhead
yet serpents all along

Six wings, or ten, or
two beating faster than hearts:
flies frantic behind glass

All month we wake cold--
no tea, no toast, can warm us--
another snow globe day

Fire isn’t the only destroyer
Dante cured the worst sinners
in ice these seven hundred years

Well, our winter ice hasn’t lasted seven hundred years, though there was a point a month or two ago when I was beginning to wonder if we were starting down a new ice age.

Yes, you have noticed correctly. The 4 stanzas of this poem are, nominally, structured like haiku. The more I read Dante, with his long, complicated schema and detailed, highly formal yet flowing verse, the shorter my own writing seems to become.

You can read and search the Divine Comedy online, including over seventy commentaries, at the Dartmouth Dante project.