What the Bird Said Early in the Year

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear: This year the summer will come true. This year. This year. Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas. This year time’s nature will no more defeat you, Nor all the promised moments in their …

Dante and A Moral Dimension

After an initial ascension in the first canto, Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of heaven These are concentric and spherical, similar to aristotelian and ptolemaic cosmology. Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see. Thus the vision of heaven found in the …

La Vita Nuova; A Personal Experience

It was while he was still a child that he underwent a personal experience which, trivial as it might appear at first sight, was yet to prove the most important and the most enduring influence upon his life and genius, and to provide, as it were, the mirror in which, at the height of his …