TRANSLATED BY
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
(1807-1882)
CREDITS
The base text for this edition has been provided by Digital Dante,
a project sponsored by Columbia Universitys Institute for Learning
Technologies. ... Please refer to Project Gutenbergs e-text listings for
other editions or translations of The Divine Comedy. ...
Benevolence of the Divine Will. ...
Mystery of the Divine and Human Nature. ...
The Divine Comedy
translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(e-text courtesy ILTs Digital Dante Project)
INFERNO
Inferno: Canto I
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. ...
The time was the beginning of the morning,
And up the sun was mounting with those stars
That with him were, what time the Love Divine
At first in motion set those beauteous things;
So were to me occasion of good hope,
The variegated skin of that wild beast,
The hour of time, and the delicious season;
But not so much, that did not give me fear
A lions aspect which appeared to me. ...
Justice incited my sublime Creator;
Created me divine Omnipotence,
The highest Wisdom and the primal Love. ...
When they arrive before the precipice,
There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments,
There they blaspheme the puissance divine. ...
If thou regardest this conclusion well,
And to thy mind recallest who they are
That up outside are undergoing penance,
Clearly wilt thou perceive why from these felons
They separated are, and why less wroth
Justice divine doth smite them with its hammer. ...
Once more a little backward turn thee," said I,
"There where thou sayest that usury offends
Goodness divine, and disengage the knot."
"Philosophy," he said, "to him who heeds it,
Noteth, not only in one place alone,
After what manner Nature takes her course
From Intellect Divine, and from its art;
And if thy Physics carefully thou notest,
After not many pages shalt thou find,
That this your art as far as possible
Follows, as the disciple doth the master;
So that your art is, as it were, Gods grandchild. ...
Justice divine, upon this side, is goading
That Attila, who was a scourge on earth,
And Pyrrhus, and Sextus; and for ever milks
The tears which with the boiling it unseals
In Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo,
Who made upon the highways so much war. ... "
Aye to that truth which has the face of falsehood,
A man should close his lips as far as may be,
Because without his fault it causes shame;
But here I cannot; and, Reader, by the notes
Of this my Comedy to thee I swear,
So may they not be void of lasting favour,
Athwart that dense and darksome atmosphere
I saw a figure swimming upward come,
Marvellous unto every steadfast heart,
Even as he returns who goeth down
Sometimes to clear an anchor, which has grappled
Reef, or aught else that in the sea is hidden,
Who upward stretches, and draws in his feet. ...
Here pity lives when it is wholly dead;
Who is a greater reprobate than he
Who feels compassion at the doom divine? ...
Inferno: Canto XXI
From bridge to bridge thus, speaking other things
Of which my Comedy cares not to sing,
We came along, and held the summit, when
We halted to behold another fissure
Of Malebolge and other vain laments;
And I beheld it marvellously dark.
As in the Arsenal of the Venetians
Boils in the winter the tenacious pitch
To smear their unsound vessels oer again,
For sail they cannot; and instead thereof
One makes his vessel new, and one recaulks
The ribs of that which many a voyage has made;
One hammers at the prow, one at the stern,
This one makes oars, and that one cordage twists,
Another mends the mainsail and the mizzen;
Thus, not by fire, but by the art divine,
Was boiling down below there a dense pitch
Which upon every side the bank belimed. ... "
"Thinkest thou, Malacoda, to behold me
Advanced into this place," my Master said,
"Safe hitherto from all your skill of fence,
Without the will divine, and fate auspicious? ...
The Divine Comedy
translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(e-text courtesy ILTs Digital Dante Project)
PURGATORIO
Purgatorio: Canto I
To run oer better waters hoists its sail
The little vessel of my genius now,
That leaves behind itself a sea so cruel;
And of that second kingdom will I sing
Wherein the human spirit doth purge itself,
And to ascend to heaven becometh worthy. ... "
Then as still nearer and more near us came
The Bird Divine, more radiant he appeared,
So that near by the eye could not endure him,
But down I cast it; and he came to shore
With a small vessel, very swift and light,
So that the water swallowed naught thereof. ...
"This is a spirit divine, who in the way
Of going up directs us without asking,
And who with his own light himself conceals. ...
First it wills well; but the desire permits not,
Which divine justice with the self-same will
There was to sin, upon the torment sets. ...
Whenever Lachesis has no more thread,
It separates from the flesh, and virtually
Bears with itself the human and divine;
The other faculties are voiceless all;
The memory, the intelligence, and the will
In action far more vigorous than before. ... "
"That thou mayst recognize," she said, "the school
Which thou hast followed, and mayst see how far
Its doctrine follows after my discourse,
And mayst behold your path from the divine
Distant as far as separated is
From earth the heaven that highest hastens on. ...
The Divine Comedy
translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(e-text courtesy ILTs Digital Dante Project)
PARADISO
Paradiso: Canto I
The glory of Him who moveth everything
Doth penetrate the universe, and shine
In one part more and in another less. ...
O power divine, lendst thou thyself to me
So that the shadow of the blessed realm
Stamped in my brain I can make manifest,
Thoult see me come unto thy darling tree,
And crown myself thereafter with those leaves
Of which the theme and thou shall make me worthy. ...
Within the heaven of the divine repose
Revolves a body, in whose virtue lies
The being of whatever it contains. ... "
Whence I to her: "In your miraculous aspects
There shines I know not what of the divine,
Which doth transform you from our first conceptions. ...
If to be more exalted we aspired,
Discordant would our aspirations be
Unto the will of Him who here secludes us;
Which thou shalt see finds no place in these circles,
If being in charity is needful here,
And if thou lookest well into its nature;
Nay, tis essential to this blest existence
To keep itself within the will divine,
Whereby our very wishes are made one;
So that, as we are station above station
Throughout this realm, to all the realm tis pleasing,
As to the King, who makes his will our will. ...
"O love of the first lover, O divine,"
Said I forthwith, "whose speech inundates me
And warms me so, it more and more revives me,
My own affection is not so profound
As to suffice in rendering grace for grace;
Let Him, who sees and can, thereto respond. ... "
Beatrice gazed upon me with her eyes
Full of the sparks of love, and so divine,
That, overcome my power, I turned my back
And almost lost myself with eyes downcast. ...
Goodness Divine, which from itself doth spurn
All envy, burning in itself so sparkles
That the eternal beauties it unfolds. ...
But since the action of the doer is
So much more grateful, as it more presents
The goodness of the heart from which it issues,
Goodness Divine, that doth imprint the world,
Has been contented to proceed by each
And all its ways to lift you up again;
Nor twixt the first day and the final night
Such high and such magnificent proceeding
By one or by the other was or shall be;
For God more bounteous was himself to give
To make man able to uplift himself,
Than if he only of himself had pardoned;
And all the other modes were insufficient
For justice, were it not the Son of God
Himself had humbled to become incarnate. ...
From a cold cloud descended never winds,
Or visible or not, so rapidly
They would not laggard and impeded seem
To any one who had those lights divine
Seen come towards us, leaving the gyration
Begun at first in the high Seraphim. ...
A generated nature its own way
Would always make like its progenitors,
If Providence divine were not triumphant. ...
There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo,
But in the divine nature Persons three,
And in one person the divine and human. ...
Let not Dame Bertha nor Ser Martin think,
Seeing one steal, another offering make,
To see them in the arbitrament divine;
For one may rise, and fall the other may. ...
The One and Two and Three who ever liveth,
And reigneth ever in Three and Two and One,
Not circumscribed and all things circumscribing,
Three several times was chanted by each one
Among those spirits, with such melody
That for all merit it were just reward;
And, in the lustre most divine of all
The lesser ring, I heard a modest voice,
Such as perhaps the Angels was to Mary,
Answer: "As long as the festivity
Of Paradise shall be, so long our love
Shall radiate round about us such a vesture. ...
O divine Pegasea, thou who genius
Dost glorious make, and render it long-lived,
And this through thee the cities and the kingdoms,
Illume me with thyself, that I may bring
Their figures out as I have them conceived! ...
Well do I know, that if in heaven its mirror
Justice Divine another realm doth make,
Yours apprehends it not through any veil. ... "
Even as a falcon, issuing from his hood,
Doth move his head, and with his wings applaud him,
Showing desire, and making himself fine,
Saw I become that standard, which of lauds
Was interwoven of the grace divine,
With such songs as he knows who there rejoices. ...
Now knoweth he enough of what the world
Has not the power to see of grace divine,
Although his sight may not discern the bottom. ...
Regnum coelorum suffereth violence
From fervent love, and from that living hope
That overcometh the Divine volition;
Not in the guise that man oercometh man,
But conquers it because it will be conquered,
And conquered conquers by benignity. ... "
After this manner by that shape divine,
To make clear in me my short-sightedness,
Was given to me a pleasant medicine;
And as good singer a good lutanist
Accompanies with vibrations of the chords,
Whereby more pleasantness the song acquires,
So, while it spake, do I remember me
That I beheld both of those blessed lights,
Even as the winking of the eyes concords,
Moving unto the words their little flames. ...
When answer made the love that was therein:
"On me directed is a light divine,
Piercing through this in which I am embosomed,
Of which the virtue with my sight conjoined
Lifts me above myself so far, I see
The supreme essence from which this is drawn. ...
There is the Rose in which the Word Divine
Became incarnate; there the lilies are
By whose perfume the good way was discovered. ...
From that one which I noted of most beauty
Beheld I issue forth a fire so happy
That none it left there of a greater brightness;
And around Beatrice three several times
It whirled itself with so divine a song,
My fantasy repeats it not to me;
Therefore the pen skips, and I write it not,
Since our imagination for such folds,
Much more our speech, is of a tint too glaring. ... "
And then I heard: "The ancient and the new
Postulates, that to thee are so conclusive,
Why dost thou take them for the word divine? ...
With the profound condition and divine
Which now I touch upon, doth stamp my mind
Ofttimes the doctrine evangelical. ... "
As a disciple, who his teacher follows,
Ready and willing, where he is expert,
That his proficiency may be displayed,
"Hope," said I, "is the certain expectation
Of future glory, which is the effect
Of grace divine and merit precedent. ...
Begin then, and declare to what thy soul
Is aimed, and count it for a certainty,
Sight is in thee bewildered and not dead;
Because the Lady, who through this divine
Region conducteth thee, has in her look
The power the hand of Ananias had. ...
And if or Art or Nature has made bait
To catch the eyes and so possess the mind,
In human flesh or in its portraiture,
All joined together would appear as nought
To the divine delight which shone upon me
When to her smiling face I turned me round. ...
And in this heaven there is no other Where
Than in the Mind Divine, wherein is kindled
The love that turns it, and the power it rains. ...
Those other Loves, that round about them go,
Thrones of the countenance divine are called,
Because they terminate the primal Triad. ...
The three Divine are in this hierarchy,
First the Dominions, and the Virtues next;
And the third order is that of the Powers. ...
Nor did the interposing twixt the flower
And what was oer it of such plenitude
Of flying shapes impede the sight and splendour;
Because the light divine so penetrates
The universe, according to its merit,
That naught can be an obstacle against it. ...
If the barbarians, coming from some region
That every day by Helice is covered,
Revolving with her son whom she delights in,
Beholding Rome and all her noble works,
Were wonder-struck, what time the Lateran
Above all mortal things was eminent,--
I who to the divine had from the human,
From time unto eternity, had come,
From Florence to a people just and sane,
With what amazement must I have been filled! ...
And said the Old Man holy: "That thou mayst
Accomplish perfectly thy journeying,
Whereunto prayer and holy love have sent me,
Fly with thine eyes all round about this garden;
For seeing it will discipline thy sight
Farther to mount along the ray divine. ...
Behold now the high providence divine;
For one and other aspect of the Faith
In equal measure shall this garden fill. ...
Unto the canticle divine responded
From every part the court beatified,
So that each sight became serener for it. ...
APPENDIX
SIX SONNETS ON DANTES 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 oer;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar. ... Actually no one spoke a word about Dante or
his Divine Comedy, rather I heard a second-hand Goethe call architecture
"frozen music. ... 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. ...
Terragni thought it inappropriate to translate the Comedy literally into a
non-literary work. ... Paradise is organized on the basis of three types
of Divine Love, and further subdivided according to the three
theological and four cardinal virtues. ... 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. ... 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. ... Terragni saw his place within the Comedy as
surely as Dante saw his own. ... By presenting this electronic text to Project
Gutenberg it is my hope that in will not rest in a computer unknown and
unread; it is my hope that artists will see themselves in the Divine Comedy
and be inspired, just as Dante ran the paths left by Virgil and St. ...
End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Divine Comedy of Dante
as translanted by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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