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Updated: June 13, 2025
It was after this calamity that Longfellow undertook his metrical translation of Dante's "Divina Commedia," a much more difficult and laborious work than writing original poetry. As his brother said, "He required an absorbing occupation to prevent him from thinking of the past."
This is not impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be traced in the Vita Nuova. The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the face of the Ever-blessed. And the envoye of the Vita Nuova is the promise of the Commedia.
That is the doctrine which you will find stated most fully and clearly in the immortal poem of John Milton, the English Divina Commedia, "Paradise Lost."
We piled them on the oak chest for reference, and ran backwards and forwards to them from the table where we sat and beat our brains over the "Divina Commedia," while the wind growled in the tall old box-trees without, and the dogs growled in dreams upon the hearth. It is by this well-scrubbed table, in this kitchen, that our biographies are to be written.
While, however, as far as France is concerned, the Italian influence must strike everybody who studies the stage history of the country, the evidence of a fertilization of English scenic art by the commedia dell' arte is scanty. Yet I think it is sufficient to deserve more attention than has hitherto been bestowed upon it.
But there is another and higher sense of the word dramatic, where Goethe is supreme, the sense in which Dante's great poem is called Commedia, a play. There is a drama whose scope is beyond the compass of any earthly stage, a drama not for theatre-goers, to be seen on the boards, but for intellectual contemplation of men and angels. Such a drama is "Faust," of which I shall speak hereafter.
The very ends of the harbour piers might have stood in the Divina Commedia instead of the Moray Frith. Oh that wonderful look everything wears when beheld from the other side! Wonderful surely will this world appear strangely more, when, become children again by being gathered to our fathers joyous day! we turn and gaze back upon it from the other side!
A fair comprehension of the Divina Commedia is impossible without some knowledge of the factions that rent Florence; of the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline; of the spirit that banished Dante, and gave him an humble tomb in Ravenna instead of a sepulchre in the pantheon of Santa Croce. Shakespeare was a child of his age; it had long been preparing for him; its expression culminated in him.
When a poet is in warm sympathy with the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition. In citing some of the most prominent in the "Divina Commedia," we at once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest translators, using the version of Dr.
The earthly Beatrice is exalted to the heavenly in the later poem; but the same perfect purity and intensity of feeling with which she is reverently regarded in the "Divina Commedia" is visible in scarcely less degree in the earlier work. The imagination which makes the unseen seen, and the unreal real, belongs alike to the one and to the other.
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