Let him imagine, who would well conceive
  What now I saw, and let him while I speak
  Retain the image as a steadfast rock,

The fifteen stars, that in their divers regions
  The sky enliven with a light so great
  That it transcends all clusters of the air;

Let him the Wain imagine unto which
  Our vault of heaven sufficeth night and day,
  So that in turning of its pole it fails not;

Let him the mouth imagine of the horn
  That in the point beginneth of the axis
  Round about which the primal wheel revolves,--

To have fashioned of themselves two signs in heaven,
  Like unto that which Minos' daughter made,
  The moment when she felt the frost of death;

And one to have its rays within the other,
  And both to whirl themselves in such a manner
  That one should forward go, the other backward;

And he will have some shadowing forth of that
  True constellation and the double dance
  That circled round the point at which I was;

Because it is as much beyond our wont,
  As swifter than the motion of the Chiana
  Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.

There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo,
  But in the divine nature Persons three,
  And in one person the divine and human.

The singing and the dance fulfilled their measure,
  And unto us those holy lights gave need,
  Growing in happiness from care to care.

Then broke the silence of those saints concordant
  The light in which the admirable life
  Of God's own mendicant was told to me,

And said: "Now that one straw is trodden out
  Now that its seed is garnered up already,
  Sweet love invites me to thresh out the other.

Into that bosom, thou believest, whence
  Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek
  Whose taste to all the world is costing dear,

And into that which, by the lance transfixed,
  Before and since, such satisfaction made
  That it weighs down the balance of all sin,

Whate'er of light it has to human nature
  Been lawful to possess was all infused
  By the same power that both of them created;

And hence at what I said above dost wonder,
  When I narrated that no second had
  The good which in the fifth light is enclosed.

Now ope thine eyes to what I answer thee,
  And thou shalt see thy creed and my discourse
  Fit in the truth as centre in a circle.

That which can die, and that which dieth not,
  Are nothing but the splendour of the idea
  Which by his love our Lord brings into being;

Because that living Light, which from its fount
  Effulgent flows, so that it disunites not
  From Him nor from the Love in them intrined,

Through its own goodness reunites its rays
  In nine subsistences, as in a mirror,
  Itself eternally remaining One.

Thence it descends to the last potencies,
  Downward from act to act becoming such
  That only brief contingencies it makes;

And these contingencies I hold to be
  Things generated, which the heaven produces
  By its own motion, with seed and without.

Neither their wax, nor that which tempers it,
  Remains immutable, and hence beneath
  The ideal signet more and less shines through;

Therefore it happens, that the selfsame tree
  After its kind bears worse and better fruit,
  And ye are born with characters diverse.