Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (May 14/June 13 1265 – September 13/14, 1321), is one of the greatest poets in the Italian language; with the comic story-teller, Boccaccio, and the poet, Petrarch, he forms the classic trio of Italian authors. Dante Alighieri was born in the city-state Florence in 1265. He first saw the woman, or rather the child, who was to become the poetic love of his life when he was almost nine years old and she was some months younger. In fact, Beatrice married another man, Simone di' Bardi, and died when Dante was 25, so their relationship existed almost entirely in Dante's imagination, but she nonetheless plays an extremely important role in his poetry. Dante attributed all the heavenly virtues to her soul and imagined, in his masterpiece The Divine Comedy, that she was his guardian angel who alternately berated and encouraged him on his search for salvation.
Politics as well as love deeply influenced Dante's literary and emotional life. Renaissance Florence was a thriving, but not a peaceful city: different opposing factions continually struggled for dominance there. The Guelfs and the Ghibellines were the two major factions, and in fact that division was important in all of Italy and other countries as well. The Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor were political rivals for much of this time period, and in general the Guelfs were in favor of the Pope, while the Ghibellines supported Imperial power. By 1289 in the battle of Campaldino the Ghibellines largely disappeared from Florence. Peace, however, did not insue. Instead, the Guelf party divided between the Whites and the Blacks (Dante was a White Guelf). The Whites were more opposed to Papal power than the Blacks, and tended to favor the emperor, so in fact the preoccupations of the White Guelfs were much like those of the defeated Ghibellines. In this divisive atmosphere Dante rose to a position of leadership. in 1302, while he was in Rome on a diplomatic mission to the Pope, the Blacks in Florence seized power with the help of the French (and pro-Pope) Charles of Valois. The Blacks exiled Dante, confiscating his goods and condemning him to be burned if he should return to Florence.
Dante never returned to Florence. He wandered from city to city, depending on noble patrons there. Between 1302 and 1304 some attempts were made by the exiled Whites to retrieve their position in Florence, but none of these succeeded and Dante contented himself with hoping for the appearance of a new powerful Holy Roman Emperor who would unite the country and banish strife. Henry VII was elected Emperor in 1308, and indeed laid seige to Florence in 1312, but was defeated, and he died a year later, destroying Dante's hopes. Dante passed from court to court, writing passionate political and moral epistles and finishing his Divine Comedy, which contains the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. He finally died in Ravenna in 1321.
“Love, that moves the sun and the other stars”
“Through me is the way to the city of woe. Through me is the way to sorrow eternal. Through me is the way to the lost below. Justice moved my architect supernal. I was constructed by divine power,supreme wisdom, and love primordial. Before me no created things were. Save those eternal, and eternal I abide. Abandon all hope, you who enter.”
“If i thought i was replying to someone who would every return to the world, this flame would cease it's flickering. But since no one has returned from these depths alive, if what I've heard is true, I will answer you without fear of infamy.”
“The broken branch hissed loudly, and then thatwind was converted into these words: "Briefly willyou be answered.When the fierce soul departs from the body fromwhich it has uprooted itself, Minos sends it to theseventh mouth.It falls into the wood, and no place is assigned toit, but where chance hurls it, there it sprouts like agrain of spelt.It grows into a shoot, then a woody plant; theHarpies, feeding on its leaves, give it pain and awindow for the pain.Like the others, we will come for our remains, butnot so that any may put them on again, for it is notjust to have what one has taken from oneself.Here we will drag them, and through the sadwood our corpses will hang, each on the thornbrushof the soul that harmed it.”
“Until he shall have driven her back to Hell,”
“That with him were, what time the Love Divine”
“Here pity only lives when it is dead - Virgil”
“Now you know how much my love for youburns deep in mewhen I forget about our emptiness,and deal with shadows as with solid things.”
“Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to theother shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice.”
“No dirsas trompeti viņš iztaisīja.”
“The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.”
“The wish to hear such baseness is degrading.”
“And all the while one spirit uttered this,The other one did weep so, that, for pity,I swooned away as if I had been dying,And fell, even as a dead body falls.”
“I make no other answer than the act, the Master said: "The only fit reply to a fit request is silence and the fact." [XXIV]”
“should it occur again, as we walk on, that we find ourselves where others of this crewfall into such petty wrangling and upbraiding. The wish to hear such baseness is degrading.”
“All Being within this order, by the laws of its own nature is impelled to find its proper station round its Primal Cause.Thus every nature moves across the tide of the great sea of being to its own port, each with its given instinct as its guide.”
“The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
“For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.”
“No inferno os lugares mais quentes são reservados àqueles que escolheram a neutralidade em tempo de crise.”
“Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state,perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and herewere every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.”
“Segui il tuo corso et lascia dir les genti(Follow your road and let the people say)”
“My course is set for an uncharted sea.”
“To get back up to the shining world from thereMy guide and I went into that hidden tunnel,And Following its path, we took no careTo rest, but climbed: he first, then I-so far,through a round aperture I saw appearSome of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
“The day that man allows true love to appear, those things which are well made will fall into cofusion and will overturn everything we believe to be right and true.”
“The devil is not as black as he is painted.”
“all things created have an order in themselves, and this begets the form that lets the universe resemble God.”
“L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.”
“O you, who in some pretty boat,Eager to listen, have been followingBehind my ship, that singing sails alongTurn back to look again upon your own shores;Tempt not the deep, lest unawares,In losing me, you yourselves might be lost.The sea I sail has never yet been passed;Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.You other few who have neck upliftedBetimes to the bread of angels upon Which one lives and does not grow sated,Well may you launch your vesselUpon the deep sea.”
“I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightfoward pathway had been lost. Ah me! How hard a thing is to say, what was this forest savage, rough, and stern, which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more...”
“And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:"Master, what is it that I hear? Who arethose people so defeated by their pain?" And he to me: "This miserable wayis taken by the sorry souls of thosewho lived without disgrace and without praise. They now commingle with the coward angels,the company of those who were not rebelsnor faithful to their God, but stood apart. The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them —even the wicked cannot glory in them.”
“Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
“On march the banners of the King of Hell.”
“As phantoms frighten beasts when shadows fall.”
“Love insists the loved loves back”
“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground”
“As one who sees in dreams and wakes to find the emotional impression of his vision still powerful while its parts fade from his mind - Just such am I, having lost nearly all the vision itself, while in my heart I feel the sweetness of it yet distill and fall.”
“There is no greater sorrow then to recall our times of joy in wretchedness.”
“The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.”
“The well heeded well heard.”
“Oh blind, oh ignorant, self-seeking cupidity which spurs as so in the short mortal life and steeps as through all eternity.”
“The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.”
“There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair”
“They yearn for what they fear for.”
“Thus you may understand that love aloneis the true seed of every merit in you,and of all acts for which you must atone.”
“It was the hour of morning,when the sun mounts with those starsthat shone with it when God's own lovefirst set in motion those fair things”
“so word for word/My master spoke, and I asked him for the food/To fill the appetite these words inspired.”
“He is, most of all, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.”
“Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving,Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly,That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me.”
“Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.”
“They had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead of them. ...And since he wanted so to see ahead, he looks behind and walks a backward path.”