With the forementioned vivid consciousness
Have drawn me from the sea of love perverse,And of the right have placed me on the shore.
The leaves, wherewith embowered is all the gardenOf the Eternal Gardener, do I loveAs much as he has granted them of good.”
As soon as I had ceased, a song most sweetThroughout the heaven resounded, and my LadySaid with the others, “Holy, holy, holy!”
And as at some keen light one wakes from sleepBy reason of the visual spirit that runsUnto the splendour passed from coat to coat,
And he who wakes abhorreth what he sees,So all unconscious is his sudden waking,Until the judgment cometh to his aid,
So from before mine eyes did BeatriceChase every mote with radiance of her own,That cast its light a thousand miles and more.
Whence better after than before I saw,And in a kind of wonderment I askedAbout a fourth light that I saw with us.
And said my Lady: “There within those raysGazes upon its Maker the first soulThat ever the first virtue did create.”
Even as the bough that downward bends its topAt transit of the wind, and then is liftedBy its own virtue, which inclines it upward,
Likewise did I, the while that she was speaking,Being amazed, and then I was made boldBy a desire to speak wherewith I burned.
And I began: “O apple, that matureAlone hast been produced, O ancient father,To whom each wife is daughter and daughter-in-law,
Devoutly as I can I supplicate theeThat thou wouldst speak to me; thou seest my wish;And I, to hear thee quickly, speak it not.”
Sometimes an animal, when covered, strugglesSo that his impulse needs must be apparent,By reason of the wrappage following it;
And in like manner the primeval soulMade clear to me athwart its coveringHow jubilant it was to give me pleasure.
Then breathed: “Without thy uttering it to me,Thine inclination better I discernThan thou whatever thing is surest to thee;
For I behold it in the truthful mirror,That of Himself all things parhelion makes,And none makes Him parhelion of itself.
Thou fain wouldst hear how long ago God placed meWithin the lofty garden, where this LadyUnto so long a stairway thee disposed.
And how long to mine eyes it was a pleasure,And of the great disdain the proper cause,And the language that I used and that I made.
Now, son of mine, the tasting of the treeNot in itself was cause of so great exile,But solely the o’erstepping of the bounds.
There, whence thy Lady moved Virgilius,Four thousand and three hundred and two circuitsMade by the sun, this Council I desired;
And him I saw return to all the lightsOf his highway nine hundred times and thirty,Whilst I upon the earth was tarrying.
The language that I spake was quite extinctBefore that in the work interminableThe people under Nimrod were employed;