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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Divine Comedy," by Dante Alighieri.

(Inferno)

As she said this,

the other spirit, who stood by her, wept
so piteously, I felt my sense reel
and faint away with anguish. I was swept

by such a swoon as death is, and I fell,
as a corpse might fall,
to the dead floor of Hell.



That chasm sinks so deep we could not sight
its bottom anywhere until we climbed
along the rock arch to its greatest height.

Once there, I peered down; and I saw long lines
of people in a river of excrement
that seemed the overflow of the world’s latrines.

I saw among the felons of that pit
one wraith who might or might not have been tonsured -
one could not tell, he was so smeared with shit.



From every mouth a sinner’s legs stuck out
as far as the calf. The soles were all ablaze
and the joints of the legs quivered and writhed about.

Withes and tethers would have snapped in their throes.
As oiled things blaze upon the surface only,
so did they burn from the heels to the points of their toes.



If all these

were gathered, and one showed his limbs run through,
another his lopped off, that could not equal
the mutilations of the ninth pit's crew.



(Purgatorio)

Horrible were my sins, but infinite
is the abiding Goodness which holds out
Its open arms to all who turn to It.



But save all questions of such consequence
till you meet her who will become your lamp
between the truth and mere intelligence.



(Paradiso)

I did not speak, but on my face, at once,
were written all my questions and my yearnings,
far more distinctly than I could pronounce.



If the agony on the cross, considering this,
was a punishment of the nature thus assumed,
no verdict ever bit with greater justice;

Just so, no crime to match this can be cited
when we consider the Person who endured it
in whom that other nature was united.




Ingrate and godless, mad in heart and head
will they become against you, but soon thereafter
it will be they, not you, whose cheeks turn red.

O splendor of God eternal through which I saw
the supreme triumph of the one true kingdom
grant me the power to speak forth what I saw!