Dean Church, in his classic essay on Dante, has a beautiful paragraph
that here calls for quotation: "Light in general is his special and
chosen source of poetic beauty. No poet that we know has shown such
singular sensibility to its varied appearances.... Light everywhere--in
the sky and earth and sea--in the stars, the flames, the lamp, the
gems--broken in the water, reflected from the mirror, transmitted
through the glass, or colored through the edge of the fractured
emerald--dimmed in the mist. The halo, the deep water--streaming through
the rent cloud, glowing in the coal, quivering in the lightning,
flashing in the topaz and the ruby, veiled behind the pure alabaster,
mellowed and clouding itself in the pearl-light contrasted with shadow,
shading off and copying itself in the double rainbow like voice and
echo--light seen within light--light from every source and in all its
shapes illuminates, irradiates, gives glory to the Commedia.... And when
he (Dante) rises beyond the regions of earthly day, light, simple and
unalloyed, unshadowed and eternal, lifts the creations of his thought
above all affinity to time and matter; light never fails him, as the
expression of the gradations of bliss; never reappears the same, never
refuses the new shapes of his invention, never becomes confused or dim,
though it is seldom thrown into distinct figure and still more seldom
colored.
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