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APPENDIX
SIX SONNETS ON DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY
BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)
I
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
II
How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!
But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,
And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediaeval miracle of song!
III
I enter, and I see thee in the gloom
Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!
And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine.
The air is filled with some unknown perfume;
The congregation of the dead make room
For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine;
Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine,
The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb.
From the confessionals I hear arise
Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,
And lamentations from the crypts below
And then a voice celestial that begins
With the pathetic words, "Although your sins
As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow."
IV
With snow-white veil, and garments as of flame,
She stands before thee, who so long ago
Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe
From which thy song in all its splendors came;
And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name,
The ice about thy heart melts as the snow
On mountain heights, and in swift overflow
Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame.
Thou makest full confession; and a gleam
As of the dawn on some dark forest cast,
Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase;
Lethe and Eunoe--the remembered dream
And the forgotten sorrow--bring at last
That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.
V
I Lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
With forms of saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante's side
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires
O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
Proclaim the elevation of the Host!
VI
O star of morning and of liberty!
O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines
Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea,
The voices of the mountains and the pines,
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights,
Through all the nations; and a sound is heard,
As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,
In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
And many are amazed and many doubt.
POSTSCRIPT
'Ich habe unter meinen Papieren ein Blatt gefunden,
wo ich die Baukunst eine erstarrte Musik nenne.'
(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1829 March 23)
I found Dante in a bar. The Poet had indeed lost the True Way to be
found reduced to party chatter in a Capitol Hill basement, but I had
found him at last. I must have been drinking in the Dark Tavern of
Error, for I did not even realize I had begun the dolorous path followed
by many since the Poet's journey of A.D. 1300. Actually no one spoke a
word about Dante or his Divine Comedy, rather I heard a second-hand
Goethe call architecture "frozen music." Soon I took my second step
through the gate to a people lost; this time on a more respectable
occasion--a lecture at the Catholic University of America. Clio, the
muse of history, must have been aiding Prof. Schumacher that evening,
because it sustained my full three-hour attention, even after I had just
presented an all-night project. There I heard of a most astonishing
Italian translation of 'la Divina Commedia' di Dante Alighieri. An
Italian architect, Giuseppi Terragni, had translated the Comedy into the
'Danteum,' a projected stone and glass monument to Poet and Poem near
the Basilica of Maxentius in Rome.
Do not look for the Danteum in the Eternal City. In true Dantean form,
politics stood in the way of its construction in 1938. Ironically this
literature-inspired building can itself most easily be found in book
form.
Reading this book I remembered Goethe's quote about frozen music. Did
Terragni try to freeze Dante's medieval miracle of song? Certainly a
cold-poem seems artistically repulsive. Unflattering comparisons to the
lake of Cocytus spring to mind too. While I cannot read Italian, I can
read some German. After locating the original quotation I discovered
that 'frozen' is a problematic (though common) translation of Goethe's
original 'erstarrte.' The verb 'erstarren' more properly means 'to
solidify' or 'to stiffen.' This suggests a chemical reaction in which
the art does not necessarily chill in the transformation. Nor can
simple thawing yield the original work. Like a chemical reaction it
requires an artistic catalyst, a muse. Indeed the Danteum is not a
physical translation of the Poem. Terragni thought it inappropriate to
translate the Comedy literally into a non-literary work. The Danteum
would not be a stage set, rather Terragni generated his design from the
Comedy's structure, not its finishes.
The poem is divided into three canticles of thirty-three cantos
each, plus one extra in the first, the Inferno, making a total of
one hundred cantos. Each canto is composed of three-line tercets,
the first and third lines rhyme, the second line rhymes with the
beginning of the next tercet, establishing a kind of overlap,
reflected in the overlapping motif of the Danteum design. Dante's
realms are further subdivided: the Inferno is composed of nine
levels, the vestibule makes a tenth. Purgatory has seven
terraces, plus two ledges in an ante-purgatory; adding these to
the Earthly Paradise yields ten zones. Paradise is composed of
nine heavens; Empyrean makes the tenth. In the Inferno, sinners
are organized by three vices--Incontinence, Violence, and
Fraud--and further subdivided by the seven deadly sins. In
Purgatory, penance is ordered on the basis of three types of
natural love. Paradise is organized on the basis of three types
of Divine Love, and further subdivided according to the three
theological and four cardinal virtues.
(Thomas Schumacher, "The Danteum,"
Princeton Architectural Press, 1993)
By translating the structure, Terragni could then layer the literal and
the spiritual meanings of the Poem without allowing either to
dominate. These layers of meaning are native to the Divine Comedy as
they are native to much medieval literature, although modern readers and
tourists may not be so familiar with them. They are literal,
allegorical, moral, and anagogical. I offer you St. Thomas of Aquinas'
definition of these last three as they relate to Sacred Scripture:
. . .this spiritual sense has a threefold division. . .so far as
the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law,
there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things done in
Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types
of what we ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as
they signify what relates to eternal glory, there is the
anagogical sense. (Summa Theologica I, 1, 10)
Within the Danteum the Poet's meanings lurk in solid form. An example:
the Danteum design does have spaces literally associated with the
Comedy--the Dark Wood of Error, Inferno, Purgatorio, and the
Paradiso--but these spaces also relate among themselves
spiritually. Dante often highlights a virtue by first condemning its
corruption. Within Dante's system Justice is the greatest of the
cardinal virtues; its corruption, Fraud, is the most contemptible of
vices. Because Dante saw the papacy as the most precious of sacred
institutions, corrupt popes figure prominently among the damned in the
Poet's Inferno. In the Danteum the materiality of the worldly Dark Wood
directly opposes the transcendence of the Paradiso. In the realm of
error every thought is lost and secular, while in heaven every soul's
intent is directed toward God. The shadowy Inferno of the Danteum
mirrors the Purgatorio's illuminated ascent to heaven. Purgatory
embodies hope and growth where hell chases its own dark inertia. Such
is the cosmography shared by Terragni and Dante.
In this postscript I intend neither to fully examine the meaning nor the
plan of the Danteum, but rather to evince the power that art has acted
as a catalyst to other artists. The Danteum, a modern design inspired
by a medieval poem, is but one example. Dante's poem is filled with
characters epitomizing the full range of vices and virtues of human
personalities. Dante's characters come from his present and literature's
past; they are mythological, biblical, classical, ancient, and
medieval. They, rather than Calliope and her sisters, were Dante's
muses.
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