Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 1320
★ 4.03 from 214.6k ratings on Goodreads
A man lost in a dark wood is led down through nine circles of Hell, and the poet gives every sinner a voice, a grievance and a reason you half understand. A grave, deliberate descent through moral darkness, with dramatic voices and a slow, formal pace that keeps you alert.
Feels like dread, awe and grief. About morality, death and faith.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy moral drama, vivid voices, and poetry that asks you to think about sin and consequence. The Longfellow translation's old-fashioned diction and dense verse can make it slow going, especially if you want plain modern English.
Why read it
The stark moral atmosphere and the way each sinner's story makes judgment feel personal give you a serious, memorable journey through one of literature's great imagined worlds.
Pages from the book
A captain's speech to tired sailors about what humans are for.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.’So eager did I render my companions,With this brief exhortation, for the voyage,That then I hardly could have held them back.And having turned our stern unto the morning,We of the oars made wings for our mad flight,Evermore gaining on the larboard side. Why remembering a good year can hurt more than a bad one.
But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs,By what and in what manner Love conceded,That you should know your dubious desires?”And she to me: “There is no greater sorrowThan to be mindful of the happy timeIn misery, and that thy Teacher knows.But, if to recognise the earliest rootOf love in us thou hast so great desire,I will do even as he who weeps and speaks. Grief so complete it leaves a father silent as stone.
And I heard locking up the under doorOf the horrible tower; whereat without a wordI gazed into the faces of my sons.I wept not, I within so turned to stone;They wept; and darling little Anselm mineSaid: ‘Thou dost gaze so, father, what doth ail thee?’Still not a tear I shed, nor answer madeAll of that day, nor yet the night thereafter,Until another sun rose on the world. More passages from Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell
Dante Alighieri.Dante was exiled from Florence in 1302 under a sentence to be burned alive if he returned. He never saw the city again, and he wrote the Comedy in exile.
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More by Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri, 1321
A guided tour of the afterlife in which every punishment is a portrait of the sin, and every heaven a lesson in desire.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy moral drama, vivid voices, and poetry that asks you to think about sin and consequence. The Longfellow translation's old-fashioned diction and dense verse can make it slow going, especially if you want plain modern English.
- What is Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell like?
- A grave, deliberate descent through moral darkness, with dramatic voices and a slow, formal pace that keeps you alert. Feels like dread, awe and grief. About morality, death and faith.
- What should I read after Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell?
- If you liked Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell, try Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Beowulf (Beowulf poet) and The Odyssey (Homer).
A taste of the feed
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Frankenstein · Mary Shelley
What the greatest of the Greek heroes would trade for a day of paid labour.
“I spake; Achilles quickly answered me:— ‘Noble Ulysses, speak not thus of death, As if thou couldst console me. I would be A laborer on earth, and serve for hire Some man of mean estate, who makes scant cheer, Rather than reign o’er all who have gone down To death. Speak rather of my noble son, Whether or not he yet has joined the wars To fight among the foremost of the host.
The Odyssey · Homer
The mind can make a prison out of the one door it cannot see through.
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life;
Hamlet · William Shakespeare
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