Extract

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

A pilgrim wakes in a dark wood at the midpoint of his life, the straight way lost. What Dante Alighieri composed in exile from Florence across the first decades of the fourteenth century is nothing less than the architecture of eternity rendered in terza rima, that interlocking triple rhyme pulling the reader forward like destiny itself. Through the concentric horrors of Hell, the terraced patience of Purgatory, and the luminous geometry of Paradise, the poem holds philosophy, politics, autobiography, and theology in a single sustained vision. It is a love poem, ultimately: Beatrice, glimpsed once in childhood, becomes the force that draws a soul through the cosmos toward the love that moves the sun and the other stars.