Dante: The Divine Comedy — Paradiso

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…