In the midst of the stroll of this life that some call good
I came to my senses in a corpse-hued wood,
having strayed from or abandoned the righteous way.
Ah, that wood! Such rampant death as but to say
its grim and grinning names will summon back a fear
which made annihilation seem a mere idea,
and yet I need to treat of the dark before light.
There was little hope – I’d been so immersed in night
when my path was lost – of retracing with wide eyes
steps forced in sleep; I crept on; the ground began to rise,
and glancing up I saw the benevolent rays
of that planet which leads men through the deepest maze
minds can build, the glow the hillside wore like a cloak.
As a castaway whose very bones the seas soak
and then spit, his breath spent, upon a jagged shore
turns round and looks long at the grey and shifting moor
where he has roamed, so now my navigator’s soul
gazed at that paralysing valley’s tree-choked bowl,
the forest no flesh ever got out of alive;
I sat and rested there that my strength might revive,
then continued – firm foot hindmost – up the bare slope
until my circumspect tread encountered the lope
of a rosetted leopardess barring ascent,
her sleek face in my face whichever way I went.
It was dawn, when half-light and starlight are conjoined –
as they were at the holy time when Love first coined
the gold whose spinning holds us still – and it was spring,
and hour and season augured well of the leaping
of that printed beast. Next there came at me a lion,
his wild and oak-wide mane like some nightmare vision
but with undreamt fangs the air itself tried to flee,
and then a bitch wolf whose immense vacuity
declared a thirst for sweet meat no feast could sate.
At the sight of this final creature, such a weight
of ineffable dread oppressed me that my climb
felt hopeless; and, much as one who rides the time
dupes call boom then loses all in the scheduled bust8
will sit and wring his thoughts in the city’s cold dust,
the relentless approach of that hungering heart
pushed me back to the place where the sun’s song falls quiet.
Down I sped, bounding at first then eager to slow,
my streaming eyes glimpsing a man amongst the low
shrubs and shattered rock of the arid wilderness.
I instantly shout out of terror’s recklessness,
the blank despair that makes you pluck at ghostly sleeves:
“Man or spirit, have pity… help me, please!” Dry leaves
are thunderous when they delicately collide
compared to the rustle of the voice that replied.
“I am no living man,” it breathed, “but one who lived,
and your live glance reanimates what of me has survived.
My parents were Lombards, their country Mantua,
and I was young on the day of Caesar’s slaughter
and then a dweller in the Augustan city
when false gods flaunted their stone mendacity;
yet above all else a poet, and I spoke
of him who saved his father from the raucous smoke
of infiltrated Troy. Though why such stumbling haste,
such readiness to swap this spiritless waste
for the hill where every joy embarks and returns?”
I answered like some star-struck girl whose soft face burns:
“Are you really Virgil – the great Virgil – the source
of those works that branch like a mighty watercourse,
the illuminated one in a crowd of apes,
writer and director of the lighted landscapes
I have explored with equal diligence and love?
All that I know of how a flowing style can move
is derived from you, maestro… my soul’s author, too.
But quick, the thing I ran from you see above you –
protect me f...
