The Gate of the City of Dis
The Sixth Circle. Heresy
The color cowardice brought out on me,
who saw my Leader coming back, the sooner
repressed in him his unaccustomed hue.
He stopped attentive like a man who listens;
because his eyesight could not lead him far
through the dark air, and through the heavy fog.
“Yet we must win the battle,” he began,
“unless . . . One such did offer us herself!
Oh, how I long for some one to arrive!”
I well perceived how, when he overlaid
what he began to say by what came after,
that these were words that differed from the first.
But none the less his language gave me fear,
because I lent to his unfinished phrase
a meaning worse, perhaps, than he intended.
“Into this bottom of the dismal shell
doth any of that first grade e’er descend,
whose only penalty is hope cut off?”
I asked this question. He replied to me:
“It seldom comes to pass that one of us
performs the journey whereupon I go.
’T is true that I was conjured once before
down here by magic of that wild Erìchtho,
who used to call shades back into their bodies.
My flesh had hardly been made bare of me,
when me she forced to enter yonder wall,
and thence withdraw a soul from Judas’ ring.
That is the lowest and the darkest place,
and from the heaven that turns all things most distant;
well do I know the road; so be at rest!
This marsh, from which the mighty stench exhales,
girdles the woeful city round about,
which without wrath we cannot enter now.”
And more he said, but I recall it not,
because mine eye had made me wholly heed
the glowing summit of the lofty tower,
where three infernal Furies stained with blood
had suddenly uprisen all at once,
having the members and the mien of women,
and girt with water-snakes of brightest green;
for hair they had small serpents and horned snakes,
wherewith their frightful temples were entwined.
And he, who well the handmaids of the Queen
of everlasting lamentation knew,
said unto me: “Behold the fierce Erìnyes!
This is Megaera here upon the left;
Alecto, she who weepeth on the right;
Tisìphonë’s between.” Thereat he ceased.
Each with her nails was tearing at her breast;
they smote them with their hands, and cried so loud,
that to the Poet I drew close in dread.
“Now let Medusa come! We ’ll turn him thus
to stone!” they all cried out, as down they looked;
“wrong were we not to punish Theseus’ raid.”
“Turn back, and close thine eyes, for should the Gorgon
reveal itself, and thou behold the face,
there ’d be no more returning up above.”
The Teacher thus: and turning me himself,
on my hands he did not so far rely,
as not to close mine eyes with his as well.
O ye in whom intelligence is sound,
heed carefully the teaching…
