Purgatorio (36 page)
Authors: Dante
‘I have brought you here with intellect and skill.
From now on take your pleasure as your guide.
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You are free of the steep way, free of the narrow.
‘Look at the sun shining before you,
look at the fresh grasses, flowers, and trees
‘You may sit down or move among these
until the fair eyes come, rejoicing,
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which weeping bid me come to you.
‘No longer wait for word or sign from me.
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Your will is free, upright, and sound.
Not to act as it chooses is unworthy:
they are newcomers and thus perhaps do not understand why she smiles in this place
primo mobile;
when it strikes a plant, the plant puts its potency back into the breeze, which then scatters it to the appropriate parts of the earth, where a diversity of flora is found; thus on earth no one should be surprised that plants spring up without being sown; and where you are now, every seed is found, including those the fruit of which is unknown to earthlings
Eager to explore the sacred forest’s boundaries
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and its depth, now that its thick and verdant foliage
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had softened the new day’s glare before my eyes,
I left the bank without delay
and wandered oh so slowly through the countryside
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that filled the air around with fragrance.
yet they were not so much bent down
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that small birds in the highest branches
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were not still practicing their every craft,
meeting the morning breeze
with songs of joy among the leaves,
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which rustled such accompaniment to their rhymes
as builds from branch to branch
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throughout the pine wood at the shore of Classe
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when Aeolus unleashes his Sirocco.
Already my slow steps had carried me
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so deep into the ancient forest
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I could not see where I had entered,
when I was stopped from going farther by a stream.
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Its lapping waves were bending to the left
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the grasses that sprang up along the bank.
All the streams that run the purest here on earth
would seem defiled beside that stream,
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which reveals all that it contains,
even though it flows in darkness,
dark beneath perpetual shade
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that never lets the sun or moon shine through.
Though my feet stopped, my eyes passed on
beyond the rivulet to contemplate
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the great variety of blooming boughs,
and there appeared to me, as suddenly appears
a thing so marvelous
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it drives away all other thoughts,
a lady, who went here and there alone, singing
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and picking flowers from among the blossoms
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that were painted all along her way.
‘Pray, fair lady, warming yourself in rays of love—
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if I am to believe the features
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that as a rule bear witness to the heart,’
I said to her, ‘may it please you
to come closer to this stream,
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near enough that I may hear what you are singing.
‘You make me remember where and what
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Proserpina was, there when her mother
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lost her and she lost the spring.’
As a lady turns in the dance
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keeping her feet together on the ground,
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and hardly puts one foot before the other,
on the red and yellow flowers
she turned in my direction,
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lowering her modest eyes, as does a virgin,
and, attending to my plea, came closer
so that the sound of her sweet song
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reached me together with its meaning.
As soon as she was where the grass is merely
moistened by the waters of the lovely stream,
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she granted me the gift of raising up her eyes.
I do not think such radiant light blazed out
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beneath the lids of Venus when her son by chance,
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against his custom, pierced her with his arrow.
Straightening up, she smiled from the other shore,
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arranging in her hands the many colors
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that grow, unplanted, on that high terrain.
The river kept us just three steps apart,
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yet the Hellespont where Xerxes crossed—
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a bridle still on human pride—
was not more hated by Leander for its tossing waves
between Sestos and Abydos than I did hate
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that rivulet for not parting then.
‘You are new here,’ she began, ‘and,
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perhaps because I’m smiling in this place
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chosen for mankind as its nest,
‘you are perplexed and filled with wonder,
but the psalm
Delectasti
offers light
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that may disperse the clouds within your minds.
‘And you who stand in front and who entreated me,
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say if you’d hear more, for I have come
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ready to answer every question you might have.’
‘The water and the sound of wind among the trees
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contradict what I was told and had accepted,’
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I said, ‘about the nature of this place.’
And she: ‘I will explain that what you marvel at
has its own special cause
