Dante's Inferno

inferno a modern reflection on the nature of hell and sin Dante Alighieri //Gustave Dore // Nova Meurice

01

she-wolf of incountinence “

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She-Wolf drove upon me, a starved horror ravening and wasted beyond all belief.

She seemed a rack for avarice, gaunt and craving.

Oh the many souls she has brought to endless grief!

She brought such heaviness upon my spirit at sight of her savagery and desperation I died from every of every hope of that high summit.

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02

tempest of lust “

this, I learned, was the never ending flight of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty who betrayed reason to their appetite.

As the wings of wintering starlings bearn them on in their great wheeling fliights, just so the blast wherries these evil sould through time forgone.

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03

wood of the suicides “

Briefly is the answer given: when out of the flesh from which it tore itself, the violent spirit comes to punishment, Minos assigns it to the seventh shelf.

It falls in the wood, and landing there, wherever fortune flings it, it strikes root, and there it sprouts, lusty as any tare, shoots up a sapling, and becomes a tree.

The Harpies, feeding on its leaves, then, give it pain and pain’s outlet simultaneously.

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04

robes of the hypocrites “

The outside is all dazzle, golden and fair; the inside , lead, so heavy that Frederick’s capes, compared to these, would seem light as air.

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