Page 41 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+

Galiet & Galiet
light, was given him to discern good from evil in his journey towards the rainbow of being:
And each one seemed reflected by the other
As rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire, Equally breathed forth by one and by the other.
(Par. 33, 118-120)
The trilogy of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso exalts divine contemplation. To go back, to return, to be in the beingness of being, to bade farewell to homelessness forever, to see, once more, one’s baptismal font, one must seek God’s Truth and his Holy Path in poetry’s singing pathways of exile and rebirth. In Purgatorio 19 (112) Pope Adrian V ponders his avarice and divorce from God. Virgil’s journey is one of equal contemplation and remorse for his paradise lost. Dante’s lifetime, devoutly given to philosophical, theological and poetic contemplations of the pre-dawn splendours that one day, as pilgrim, after ascending his Purgatorio 27 (109- 111), he will feel, in his manifold visions of fire and sun, that which he cannot deny, poetry’s all-seeing third light. Only then, he, Dante, prophet, pilgrim and poet, created in God’s image, recreates God’s image in his pilgrimage. First, as a Croatian pilgrim (Par. 31, 103-104) looking at St. Veronica’s Veil, then, as Dante the poet piercing through her veil (Par. 33) to come ‘face to face’ with God’s gaze. Ineffable, faint and visionary gaze that can only be seen painted in mortal hues: “deep in itself, it seemed, as painted now, in those same hues, to show our human form” (Par. 33, 130-131). Only then, will Dante’s pilgrim’s mirror, saviour of both Love and Beauty, point to the centre of the Labyrinth as if were Ariadne’s magic golden chord. Only then will Dante be able to see God’s Apocalyptic Book, Poem of poems, amongst the scattered leaves of the cosmos. Only then, perhaps, shall we dream of Dante’s Divina
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