Love That Moves the Sun and Other Stars Read online

  Dante Alighieri

  * * *

  LOVE THAT MOVES THE SUN AND OTHER STARS

  Translated by

  Robin Kirkpatrick

  Contents

  Canto III

  Canto X

  Canto XI

  Canto XIV

  Canto XVII

  Canto XXIII

  Canto XXVII

  Canto XXX

  Canto XXXII

  Canto XXXIII

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  DANTE ALIGHIERI

  Born 1265, Florence, Italy

  Died 1321, Ravenna, Italy

  Dante wrote the Divina Commedia between 1308 and 1321. This selection of cantos is taken from Paradiso translated by Robin Kirkpatrick, Penguin Classics, 2007.

  DANTE IN PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Inferno

  Purgatorio

  Paradiso

  The Divine Comedy

  Vita Nuova

  Canto III

  She – as the sun who first in love shone warm

  into my heart – had now, by proof and counterproof,

  disclosed to me the lovely face of truth.

  And being ready, as was only right,

  to own my errors – and new certainties –

  I flung my head back, and I meant to speak.

  But then, it seemed, a vision came to me

  and bound me up so tightly to itself

  that these confessions would not come to mind.

  Compare: from clear and polished panes of glass,

  or else from glinting waters, calm and still

  (but not so deep their depths are lost in darkness),

  we see reflections that reveal a hint,

  though faint, of our own looks, and reach the eye

  less strongly than a pearl on some white brow.

  So I saw many faces, keen to speak,

  and ran now to the opposite mistake

  from that which fired the love of man and stream.

  No sooner had I noticed – and supposed

  that these were seemings in a looking-glass –

  I turned my eyes to see who these might be.

  I saw there nothing, so returned my glance

  straight to the shining-out of my dear guide,

  who, smiling at me, blazed in her own look.

  ‘You baby!’ she said. ‘Don’t worry or wonder,

  to see me smile at all these ponderings.

  Those feet are not yet steady on the ground of truth.

  Your mind, from habit, turns round to a void.

  And yet those beings that you see are true,

  bound here below for vows they disavowed.

  So speak to them. And hear and trust their words.

  The light of truth that feeds them with its peace

  will never let their feet be turned awry.’

  Now turning to the shadow who most yearned,

  in love and pure delight, to speak to me,

  I said, nearly entranced by eagerness:

  ‘You spirit, well created in the rays

  of this eternity of life, you feel

  a sweetness never known, if not by taste.

  Let me, then, in your kindness, hear your name,

  and tell me what your destiny has been.’

  To which – eyes smiling – she at once replied:

  ‘We, living in God’s love, can no more lock

  our doors against true-minded aims of will

  than God’s love does, which wills this court like him.

  I was a virgin sister in the world.

  Search deep in memory. My being now

  more beautiful won’t hide me from your eyes.

  I am Piccarda – as you’ll know I am –

  and blessed among the many who are blessed,

  within this slowest moving of the spheres.

  The flames of what we feel are lit in us

  by pleasure purely in the Holy Spirit,

  dancing for happiness in that design.

  And though the part allotted us may seem

  far down, the reason is that, yes, we did

  neglect our vows. These were in some part void.’

  ‘A wonder shining in the look you have

  reveals,’ I said, ‘an I-don’t-know of holiness

  that alters you from how you once were seen.

  So recognition did not speed to mind.

  Yet all you say has helped me understand.

  Your image speaks precisely to me now.

  But tell me this: you are so happy here,

  have you no wish to gain some higher grade,

  to see and be as friends to God still more?’

  Smiling a moment with the other shades,

  she then, in utmost happiness, replied,

  blazing, it seemed, in the first fires of love:

  ‘Dear brother, we in will are brought to rest

  by power of caritas that makes us will

  no more than what we have, nor thirst for more.

  Were our desire to be more highly placed,

  all our desires would then be out of tune

  with His, who knows and wills where we should be.

  Yet discord in these spheres cannot occur –

  as you, if you reflect on this, will see –

  since charity is a priori here.

  In formal terms, our being in beatitude

  entails in-holding to the will of God,

  our own wills thus made one with the divine.

  In us, therefore, there is, throughout this realm,

  a placing, rung to rung, delighting all

  – our king as well in-willing us in will.

  In His volition is the peace we have.

  That is the sea to which all being moves,

  be it what that creates or Nature blends.’

  Now it was clear. I saw that everywhere

  in Paradise there’s Heaven, though grace may rain

  in varied measure from the Highest Good.

  But then, as often happens over food

  (though satisfied with one, we crave the next,

  reaching for that while still we’re saying ‘thanks’),

  so now in word and gesture I betrayed

  an eagerness to hear from her what weave

  her spool had not yet drawn out to the end.

  ‘Perfect in life, her merits raised on high,

  there is a lady – more in-heavened than we –

  who wrote, on earth, a Rule of dress and veil,

  that lets its wearer sleep and wake till death

  beside a husband who accepts those vows

  that charity conforms to his delight.

  To follow her, I fled – a girl, no more –

  out of the world. I pulled her cowl to me,

  and promised my obedience to that Rule.

  Men now arrived, more set on harm than good.

  They dragged me from the cloister I had loved,

  and God well knows what then my life became.

  But, over to my right, there shows to you

  another splendour who, enkindled now

  with all the light that gathers in our sphere,

  knows from her own life what I say of mine.

  She was our sister. And from her head, too,

  was torn the shadow of her pure, white hood.

  This is the light of Constance, that high queen

  who bore to Swabia’s second storm a son,

  the third – and ultimate – of that great line.

  And yet – although against her will, against

  all decency – she went back to the world,

  she never let the veil fall from her
heart.’

  Those were her words to me. But then ‘Ave

  Maria’ began, singing. And, singing,

  she went from sight, as weight sinks deep in water.

  My eyes pursued as far as eyesight can,

  but, as I lost her, so I turned once more

  to target a desire far greater still.

  Now all my thoughts were fixed on Beatrice.

  But she, as lightning strikes, so stunned my gaze,

  my eyes at first could not support the sight,

  and this was why my question came so slow.

  Canto X

  Looking within his Son through that same Love

  that Each breathes out eternally with Each,

  the first and three-fold Worth, beyond all words,

  formed all that spins through intellect or space

  in such clear order it can never be,

  that we, in wonder, fail to taste Him there.

  Lift up your eyes, then, reader, and, along with

  me, look to those wheels directed to that part

  where motions – yearly and diurnal – clash.

  And there, entranced, begin to view the skill

  the Master demonstrates. Within Himself,

  He loves it so, His looking never leaves.

  Look! Where those orbits meet, there branches off

  the slanting circles that the planets ride

  to feed and fill the world that calls on them.

  And were the path it takes not twisted so,

  then many astral virtues would be wasted,

  and almost all potential, down here, dead.

  And were the distance any more or less

  from that straight course, then much – above and here –

  so ordered in the world, would be a void.

  Now, reader, sit there at your lecture bench.

  And, if you want not tedium but joy,

  continue thinking of the sip you’ve had.

  I’ve laid it out. Now feed on it yourself.

  The theme of which I’m made to be scribe

  drags in its own direction all my thoughts.

  The greatest minister of natural life

  who prints the worth of Heaven on the world,

  and measures time for us in shining light,

  conjoined with Aries (as we’ve called to mind),

  was spinning through those spirals where, each hour,

  its presence is revealed to us the sooner.

  And with him I was there, but no more knew

  of making that ascent than anyone

  will know a thought before it first appears.

  It’s she – Beatrice – who sees the way,

  from good to better still, so suddenly

  her actions aren’t stretched out in passing time.

  How brilliant they must all, themselves, have been

  seen in the sun where I now came to be,

  not in mere hue but showing forth pure light.

  Call as I might on training, art or wit,

  no words of mine could make the image seen.

  Belief, though, may conceive it, eyes still long.

  In us, imagination is too mean

  for such great heights. And that’s no miracle.

  For no eye ever went beyond the sun.

  So shining there was that fourth family

  that’s always fed by one exalted Sire

  with sight of what He breathes, what Son He has.

  And now, ‘Give thanks,’ Beatrice began.

  ‘Give thanks to the Him, the Sun of all the angels.

  In grace, He’s raised you to this sun of sense.’

  No mortal heart was ever so well fed

  to give itself devoutly to its God

  so swiftly, with such gratitude and joy,

  as now, to hear her words ring, I became.

  I set my love so wholly on that Sun

  that He, in oblivion, eclipsed even Beatrice.

  This did not trouble her. She smiled at it.

  And brightness from the laughter in her eyes

  shared out to many things my one whole mind.

  Bright beyond seeing, I saw, now, many flares

  make us their centre and themselves our crown,

  still sweeter even in voice than radiance.

  Sometimes, in that same way, we see a zone

  around Latona’s daughter – lunar rays,

  held in by gravid air, which form her belt,

  There in that heavenly court from which I come

  are found so many jewels, so fine, so rare,

  they cannot be abstracted from that realm.

  The singing of the lights was one of these.

  So minds who don’t, self-winged, coming flying here,

  must wait to gather news from tongues struck mute.

  And when, still singing, all these burning suns

  had spun three turns around us where we were –

  as stars more swift the closer to fixed poles –

  girl-like in formal dance they looked to me,

  in figure still but silent, pausing now,

  listening until they caught the next new note.

  And deep in one of these I heard begin: ‘When

  rays of grace igniting love in truth –

  those rays through which, in loving, love still grows –

  reflect in you so multiplied that you

  are led along with them to climb this stair,

  which none descends who will not rise again,

  whoever, seeing this, should then withhold

  the wine flask that you thirst for counts as free

  no more than rain not streaming to the ocean.

  You wish to know what plants these are – enflowered,

  entranced – a garland round that donna who,

  in beauty, strengthens you to dare the skies.

  I was a lamb within that holy flock

  that Dominic conducts along the road

  where “All grow fat who do not go astray”.

  This one, who here is nearest on my right,

  was master to me, and a brother, too –

  Albert of Köln. I’m Thomas Aquinas.

  And if you wish to know the rest as well,

  then follow with your eyes the words I speak,

  circling around this interwoven string.

  The next flame blazes out from Gratian’s smile.

  He’s loved in Paradise for having served

  both civil and ecclesial courts so well.

  Then next, that Peter ornaments our choir

  who, like the widow in Saint Luke’s account,

  offered his treasured all to Holy Church.

  The fifth light, and the loveliest of us all,

  breathes with such love that everyone down there

  hungers to have fresh word if he is saved.

  A mind so high is there, to which was sent

  knowledge so deep that, if the truth is true,

  no second ever rose who saw so much.

  You see a candle shining by him there

  that saw, while in the flesh, most inwardly

  the nature of the angels and their works.

  Then in the very smallest of these lights

  there smiles the one who spoke for Christian times.

  Augustine cited him in what he wrote.

  Now if, to track my words of praise, you draw

  the eye of intellect from light to light,

  already you’ll be thirsting for the eighth.

  Rejoicing, deep within, to see all good,

  the blessèd soul is there who made quite plain

  the world’s fallaciousness – to all who’d hear.

  The body he was driven from lies, now,

  below in Golden Heaven Church. He came

  to peace from exile, from his martyrdom.

  Burning beyond, you see the breathing fires

  of Bede, then Isidore and Richard, too –

  in contemplati
on he was more than man.

  The one from whom your glance returns to me

  is light born of that spirit who, oppressed

  in thought, saw death, it seemed, come all too slow.

  This is the everlasting light of Siger,

  whose lectures, given in Straw Alleyway,

  argued for truths that won him envious hate.’

  And now, like clocks that call us at the hour

  in which the Bride of God will leave her bed

  to win the Bridegroom’s love with morning song,

  where, working, one part drives, the other draws –

  its ‘ting-ting’ sounding with so sweet a note

  that now the spirit, well and ready, swells –

  so in its glory I beheld that wheel

  go moving round and answer, voice to voice,

  tuned to a sweetness that cannot be known,

  except up there where joy in-evers all.

  Canto XI

  Those idiotic strivings of the human mind!

  How flawed their arguments and logic are,

  driving our wings to flap in downward flight.

  Some follow Law. Some drift (great tomes in hand)

  to Medicine, others train in priestly craft.

  Some rule by force, as others do by tricks.

  Some choose to steal, some trade in politics,

  some toil, engrossed in pleasures of the flesh,

  and others concentrate their minds on ease,

  while I, released from all that sort of thing,

  was gathered up on high with Beatrice

  in glorious triumph to the heavenly spheres.

  When each soul, dancing, had returned to that

  position on the circle where it once had been,

  all paused, like candles in a chandelier.

  And in that flare which spoke to me at first,

  I, hearing, sensed these words begin, smiling

  as in their brilliance they became more pure.

  ‘As I am here a mirror to the radiance

  of everlasting light, so, looking back,

  I grasp, in that, the wherefore of your thoughts.

  You have your doubts. You want me to define –

  with sharper and more open explanations,

  directed at your human ear – the words

  I uttered earlier: “Where all grow fat …”

  and where I said: “No second ever rose.”

  We need to make distinctions as to that.

  The providence that rules the universe,

  in counsels so profound that all created

  countenance will yield before it finds its depth,

  intended that the Bride of Christ (He wooed her