Part 22

Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf Our volume through, would still some page discover Where he could read, ‘I am as I am wont.’

’Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta, From whence come such unto the written word That one avoids it, and the other narrows.

Bonaventura of Bagnoregio’s life Am I, who always in great offices Postponed considerations sinister.

Here are Illuminato and Agostino, Who of the first barefooted beggars were That with the cord the friends of God became.

Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here, And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain, Who down below in volumes twelve is shining;

Nathan the seer, and metropolitan Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;

Here is Rabanus, and beside me here Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim, He with the spirit of prophecy endowed.

To celebrate so great a paladin Have moved me the impassioned courtesy And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,

And with me they have moved this company.”

Paradiso: Canto XIII

Let him imagine, who would well conceive What now I saw, and let him while I speak Retain the image as a steadfast rock,

The fifteen stars, that in their divers regions The sky enliven with a light so great That it transcends all clusters of the air;

Let him the Wain imagine unto which Our vault of heaven sufficeth night and day, So that in turning of its pole it fails not;

Let him the mouth imagine of the horn That in the point beginneth of the axis Round about which the primal wheel revolves,—

To have fashioned of themselves two signs in heaven, Like unto that which Minos’ daughter made, The moment when she felt the frost of death;

And one to have its rays within the other, And both to whirl themselves in such a manner That one should forward go, the other backward;

And he will have some shadowing forth of that True constellation and the double dance That circled round the point at which I was;

Because it is as much beyond our wont, As swifter than the motion of the Chiana Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.

There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo, But in the divine nature Persons three, And in one person the divine and human.

The singing and the dance fulfilled their measure, And unto us those holy lights gave need, Growing in happiness from care to care.

Then broke the silence of those saints concordant The light in which the admirable life Of God’s own mendicant was told to me,

And said: “Now that one straw is trodden out Now that its seed is garnered up already, Sweet love invites me to thresh out the other.

Into that bosom, thou believest, whence Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek Whose taste to all the world is costing dear,

And into that which, by the lance transfixed, Before and since, such satisfaction made That it weighs down the balance of all sin,

Whate’er of light it has to human nature Been lawful to possess was all infused By the same power that both of them created;

And hence at what I said above dost wonder, When I narrated that no second had The good which in the fifth light is enclosed.

Now ope thine eyes to what I answer thee, And thou shalt see thy creed and my discourse Fit in the truth as centre in a circle.

That which can die, and that which dieth not, Are nothing but the splendour of the idea Which by his love our Lord brings into being;