Purgatory
Foreword
If a poem is not forgotten as soon as the circumstances of its
origin, it begins at once to evolve an existence of its own, in
minds and lives, and then even in words, that its singular maker
could never have imagined. The poem that survives the receding
particulars of a given age and place soon becomes a shifting
kaleidoscope of perceptions, each of them in turn provisional and
subject to time and change, and increasingly foreign to those
horizons of human history that fostered the original images and
references.
Over the years of trying to approach Dante through the words he left
and some of those written about him, I have come to wonder what his
very name means now, and to whom. Toward the end of the Purgatorio,
in which the journey repeatedly brings the pilgrim to reunions with
poets, memories and projections of poets, the recurring names of
poets, Beatrice, at a moment of unfathomable loss and exposure,
calls the poem's narrator and protagonist by name, "Dante," and the
utterance of it is unaccountably startling and humbling. Even though
it is spoken by that Beatrice who has been the sense and magnet of
the whole poem and, as he has come to imagine it, of his life, and
though it is heard at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, with the
terrible jour ... read full excerpt from: Purgatory ebook
