"Contra Dante (Kind Of)" by Bill Coyle

Mea culpa regarding the scansion of line 29: I should've mentioned that you could also very reasonably interpret this as an acephalous iambic line. My bad. I like the trochees better though! 

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Dante's Purgatorio 
-"The God of This World To His Prophet" 
-Swedish skalds Hakan Sandell and Tomas Transtromer 
-Dante's tropical vacay 
-How Virgil and Moses are alike 
-Terza Rima 
-Dante's numerical obsession/magnificence 
-Hendecasyllabics 
-The Beatific Vision 
-A pun which only works perfectly in American English 
-Rhythm vs. Meter, Stress vs. Accent 
-The Book of Isaiah 
-Parallelist verse 
-Parallelist verse graphic: https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/hebrew_poetry01.pdf 
-The influence of biblical poetry in English via the KJV 
-Robert Alter's "Pen of Iron" 
-Moliere and irony (see especially "The Misanthrope") 
-The death of the personality in heaven 
-You know I had to bring in Aquinas 
-God as Actus Purus 
-If there's life after death, there is no death 
-We desire not heaven but more earthly life 
-Bill "Mr. Steal Your Girl" Coyle slides into Beatrice's DMs 
-Marlowe and Marvell 
-Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence 
-How much do you love your life? 

Text of poem: 

Contra Dante (Kind Of) 

Forget about the Beatific Vision. 
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory 
and worthy of a god in God’s position, 

but if I make it to Mount Purgatory 
(and yes, that’s one big “if,” I realize) 
and trudge my way up story after story 

I’ll settle in the Earthly Paradise 
located at the top, it being more, 
well, earthly, which is better in my eyes. 

Earthly perfection’s what I’m looking for: 
the world I know, more or less as I know it, 
prolonged, minus the death and pain and gore 

(hard to imagine, maybe, but read the poet 
Isaiah on the lion and the lamb). 
If I found that, there’s no way I’d outgrow it, 

even if I grew holier than I am 
(not the I AM, but I as I am now). 
Can I be honest? I don’t give a damn 

if I miss most of the celestial show 
(it will go on like clockwork whether I 
am there or not) so long as far below 

(which, from where I stand now, is still on high) 
I can sit down under an actual tree 
on actual grass beneath an actual sky 

of blue that as it drops back let me see 
the southern constellations overhead. 
That would be more than

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2-5: “Contra Dante (Kind Of)” by Bill Coyle 

Hey everyone, I hope you’ve had a lovely week, and welcome back to the show. As you may or may not know, this is the last episode I’ll be doing before taking a short holiday break, and the show will be back to the normal weekly schedule on MLK Day, January 16th. Thank you so much for listening, and if you haven’t already please consider rating or reviewing the show, and/or recommending the show to someone you think might enjoy it— all of those things actually do make an enormous difference in growing the listenership of the podcast, and I really do appreciate it. 

You may recognize today’s poet, Bill Coyle, from my Thomas Hardy episode, in which I read a short poem of Coyle’s that functioned as a snappy response to and commentary on Hardy’s poem. In today’s poem, Coyle performs a similar but more elaborate trick with Dante and his Divine Comedy, identifying and claiming a truth about human nature contrary to the assertions of the author he’s discussing, but in a way that actually enriches the source material he draws from, and balances playful wit with poignant insight. Whereas Smith’s poem was more condensed and somber like Davis’s, Coyle’s is chattier and wryer like Cunningham’s. Like Smith however, Coyle is using Dante’s Commedia as an occasion upon which to reflect on the appeal of earthly existence in contrast to the more alien delights of mystical, heavenly experience. Unlike Smith, Coyle has chosen to focus not upon an episode in The Paradiso, but the climax of the middle book of the trilogy, The Purgatorio. More on that in a moment. 

Before we talk Dante let’s talk Bill. Bill Coyle was born in 1968, and he’s probably my favorite poet of Generation X, my parents’ generation. I say that, moreover, based on the strength of the single book of original poetry he’s published, entitled The God of This World To His Prophet, which won the 2006 New Criterion Poetry Prize. In addition to sparingly publishing his own poetry, Coyle is also one of our premier translators of Swedish poetry into English, and in 2016 he released a collection of translations by Håkan Sandell entitled Dog Star Notations. Since then, he’s continued to teach English at Salem State University and just recently completed his PhD in Editorial Studies at Boston University, where he spent time working on an edition of an early journal of Sweden’s most famous poet, Tomas Tranströmer. I think I speak for everyone familiar with Coyle’s poetry when I say that I wish him the best of luck with his scholarly pursuits and translations, but I also can’t wait until his next original collection drops. 

Now, back to Dante. In The Inferno, Virgil had guided Dante deeper and deeper into the depths of Hell, which in Dante’s imagining is essentially a cavernous tunnel directly beneath the city of Jerusalem, marking the place where Satan fell to and through the earth after being expelled from heaven. After meeting Satan himself in the uttermost depths of this chasm, the poets emerged in the Southern Hemisphere at the antipodal point to Jerusalem, having traveled in a straight line all the way through the center of the Earth. Here, they find themselves, accurately, in the Pacific Ocean, on the shores of the island mountain of Purgatory, which was created by the volcanic expulsion of rock from the earth due to the impact of Satan’s fall. This mountain is the place that imperfect yet un-damned souls must ascend and purify themselves upon before entering into heaven. If we were to look at a real life globe, this would mean that Purgatory would literally be an undiscovered island of French Polynesia. In a certain frame of mind, we can think of Purgatorio as Dante’s tropical island adventure. 

Throughout the course of this poem, Dante and Virgil ascend up the mountain, meeting souls in various states of penance along the way, until they reach the peak, where God has recreated the earthly paradise of the garden of Eden, the last stop before the celestial ascent to heaven itself. It is at the gates of this earthly paradise that what many consider the most moving scene of the entire Commedia takes place: here, Virgil must leave Dante and go back to his home in limbo—as a virtuous pagan, he is able to gaze upon divine truth as far as the human powers of reason allow, but once he touches realms which depend upon revelation and faith, he can go no further. Like Moses upon Mt. Nebo, Virgil is only permitted a glimpse of the promised land. Having gotten the merest taste of what he is missing, the greatest of the Latin poets silently departs, and makes his way back down the mountain, never to see such glory or beauty again. 

Now, back to Coyle. It is at this point in Dante’s journey, poised between the paradise of Earth and the paradise of Heaven, that Coyle’s poem jumps in to say: “Dante, if I were you, I would stay right where I am.” In the context of Virgil’s recent departure in the narrative, we can interpret Coyle as advocating not only for Earthly pleasures, but for a life that climaxes in the happiness of reason, not of faith. The poem goes like this:

Contra Dante (Kind Of)

Forget about the Beatific Vision.                        
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory
 and worthy of a god in God’s position,

but if I make it to Mount Purgatory
 (and yes, that’s one big “if,” I realize)
 and trudge my way up story after story

I’ll settle in the Earthly Paradise
 located at the top, it being more,
 well, earthly, which is better in my eyes.

Earthly perfection’s what I’m looking for:
 the world I know, more or less as I know it,
 prolonged, minus the death and pain and gore

(hard to imagine, maybe, but read the poet                     

Isaiah on the lion and the lamb).                                    

If I found that, there’s no way I’d outgrow it,

even if I grew holier than I am
 (not the I AM, but I as I am now).
Can I be honest? I don’t give a damn

if I miss most of the celestial show
 (it will go on like clockwork whether I
 am there or not) so long as far below

(which, from where I stand now, is still on high)
 I can sit down under an actual tree
 on actual grass beneath an actual sky

of blue that as it drops back let me see
 the southern constellations overhead.
 That would be more than good enough for me,

enough to make me not mind being dead.
 And if Beatrice came from above
 to take me heavenwards, I’d try instead

to tell her she should be the one to move.
She’d hem, she’d haw, I’d bring her flowers and rhyme,
I’d say, “Stay here with me and be my love,

seeing we now have world enough and time.”

Formally, the first thing to notice is that Coyle is using the same rhyme scheme and stanzaic division as Dante himself in the Commedia-- what is called terza rima-- much as Smith wrote an Italian sonnet to match his Italian subject matter. Terza rima, which means “third rhyme” in Italian, is one of the most formally beautiful patterns in poetry, as it involves continually braiding three-line stanzas, called tercets, together through echoing, interlocking rhyme sounds, creating a sense of harmonic unity and narrative momentum. As we can see from Coyle’s poem, the scheme of terza rima is: ABA, BCB, CDC, and so on and so forth, and it can go on indefinitely, which is what makes it perfect for a long narrative poem. Though it’s a demanding form to use in English, it’s one of my favorites, and I myself have written many poems which employ it. 

Because for Dante the number three was the sacred number of the trinitarian god, he built his entire poem in multiples of threes: there are three books, each of which has 33 cantos. Together with one introductory canto, there are thus 100 cantos altogether. Hell, Purgatory and Heaven are each split into three regions each of which has three levels, making for nine levels in each realm; every canto is split into stanzas three lines long, tercets, and because each of Dante’s lines was hendecasyllabic—that is, had 11 syllables—each tercet was 33 syllables long. From the macroscopic to the microscopic level then, Dante infused his universe with the generative power of the trinity. 

Dante’s hendecasyllabic line roughly translates to a feminine iambic line in English. Though Coyle uses a mixture of feminine and masculine iambic lines in this poem, the first tercet is made up entirely of feminine lines, and thus mirrors Dante’s meter exactly: 

Forget about the Beatific Vision.                        
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory
 and worthy of a god in God’s position,

            It follows of course that this tercet has exactly 33 syllables. If we then zoom out to look at Coyle’s entire poem, we find that he’s done something clever: the poem is 33 lines long, plus an extra line to conclude the terza rima pattern, much as The Inferno contains an extra introductory canto. Coyle’s poem is thus meant to suggest a Dantesque epic in miniature. 

            If we look at the versification, we will note that Coyle remains pretty faithful to his iambic line, but that his line gets a tad looser after the fourth tercet: each of the next four tercets has at least one instance of anapestic substitution, always in either the fourth or fifth foot of the line, and trochaic substitutions in the first foot become common as well. The most radical break comes later in line 29, which according to my scansion is entirely trochaic with a catalectic ending: “And if Beatrice came from above.” Here, the stomping effect of the trochees serves to cast a humorously subversive light on the descent of the saintly, dainty Beatrice. Alternatively, you could preserve the iambic character of this line by reading “Beatrice” as a cretic substitution: and IF BEaTRICE came FROM aBOVE, but a cretic substitution would be such an unusual move that I think the former reading is to be preferred. 

            Finally, if we look at the mathematical center of this poem, the beginning of line 18, we find that this is precisely where Coyle pivots to a more heightened emotional tone: “Can I be honest? I don’t give a damn.” Coyle is thus thinking of his poem in dyadic as well as triadic terms. 

            In Smith’s poem, I divided my analysis into two parts in order to accommodate the high use of enjambment in the poem. I’m also going to divide today’s poem into two parts, even though it’s much longer— not because it’s enjambed, but because the language is already so clear and self-explanatory that a line by line analysis is less necessary. Let’s begin therefore with the first seventeen lines once again: 

Contra Dante (Kind Of)

Forget about the Beatific Vision.                        
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory
 and worthy of a god in God’s position,

but if I make it to Mount Purgatory
 (and yes, that’s one big “if,” I realize)
 and trudge my way up story after story

I’ll settle in the Earthly Paradise
 located at the top, it being more,
 well, earthly, which is better in my eyes.

Earthly perfection’s what I’m looking for:
 the world I know, more or less as I know it,
 prolonged, minus the death and pain and gore

(hard to imagine, maybe, but read the poet                     

Isaiah on the lion and the lamb).                                    

If I found that, there’s no way I’d outgrow it,

even if I grew holier than I am
 (not the I AM, but I as I am now).
 

            For those unfamiliar with the term, “beatific vision” refers in Catholicism to an individual’s direct encounter with the face or presence of God, usually after death. In Dante’s Commedia, Dante’s vision of the face of God is the climax of the entire poem, and the conclusion of Paradiso. For Coyle to say “forget the beatific vision” immediately strikes one as so irreverent and absurd that we know the poem is going to have a humorous bent to it. As the poem goes on however, we see that he develops his extravagant contrarianism into something a bit more convincing, without ever entirely losing a tongue-in-cheek quality. 

In line six, we get a pun on the word “story” which takes advantage of American spelling: In British English, a story you tell is spelled s-t-o-r-y, whereas a storey you climb has an “e” before the “y.” American English doesn’t have this distinction, so when Coyle says that trudges his way up “story after story,” he can refer both literally to the ascending rings of Purgatory as well as to the stories that Dante tells associated with each of those rings. 

            In line nine, we have a nice example of how rhythm can counterpoint against meter: “well, earthly, which is better in my eyes.” The syllables “well” and “earth” are both stressed when we speak these lines, a reading which is emphasized by the punctuation. Together however, they form a single iamb, because “earth” is stressed slightly more than “well.” When speaking the line, we give it four stresses: WELL, EARTHly, which is BETTer in my EYES. As an iambic pentameter line however, it has five metrical accents: “well EARTHly WHICH is BETTer IN my EYES. There are no metrical substitutions here, but the tension between the rhythm and the meter, the stresses and the accents, which overlap but do not align perfectly, like the melodic lines in a fugue, gives the line an energy and dynamism which it would not otherwise have. We see Coyle pull off an almost identical trick in line 22.

            In lines 13 and 14, Coyle references the verse Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” This verse has often been misremembered as the lion lying down with the lamb, and this is the image which Coyle references as a sign of the universal peace of the earthly paradise. More interesting is the fact that Coyle refers to Isaiah as a poet rather than a prophet. People often forget, but many parts of the Bible, including almost the entirety of the Book of Isaiah, are indeed written in a form of verse common to Hebrew poetry of that age— what is called Parallelist verse. If you’ll pardon a brief digression, I would love to touch on how this form of verse works. 

            Parallelist verse is interesting in that, unlike any other form of verse I know of, its patterns are built not out of individual sounds, but entire phrases. Rather than syllables, accents, or vowel lengths, the measure of Parallelist verse is syntax. 

            Consider the biblical verse I cited a moment ago: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” Here we have the pattern, x-noun shall verb with the y-noun, repeated to form a distich, a pair of two lines. The structures of the phrases are parallel, hence the term parallelist verse. In this kind of verse, music is created out of patterns of sentence cadence. In Western literature we also find instances of parallelism, particularly in the forms of anaphora and epistrophe, but these techniques are usually identified as tools of rhetoric rather than poetry. “I came, I saw, I conquered” is a famous example of rhetorical parallelism.

            What makes biblical Hebrew poetry unique is the fact that it harnesses parallelist rhetorical techniques to structure entire long-form works of literature, like Isaiah or Job or the Song of Songs, as well as shorter lyric pieces like the Psalms. 

Parallelism can work in many ways: lesser and greater degrees of repetition are possible with different parts of speech, phrases can be linked in groups of two or more, and paired phrases can follow different schemes, such as synonymous reiteration, elaboration of examples, or antithetical contrast. I’ll put a link in the shownotes to a very useful chart on Hebrew parallelism which I think will explain these techniques more clearly than I can here. 

            The translation of the Bible into other languages, English in particular, where the King James version has attained the status of a literary masterpiece, has led to parallelist Hebrew poetry having a large influence on Western literature as a whole. Perhaps most notably, Walt Whitman used biblical cadences as the foundation of the first American free verse, creating a style which ended up being massively influential in its own right. Whitman aside, in writers from Herman Melville to William Faulkner to Cormac McCarthy, biblical parallelism has echoed throughout English literature, and particularly American literature, as my examples indicate. For more on this subject, the interested listener should definitely check out the Hebrew scholar and translator Robert Alter’s book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. 

            By referring to Isaiah as a poet, Coyle highlights the rich tradition of Biblical poetry, but the specific choice to refer to him as a poet rather than a prophet could also be telling. By spurning the beatific vision, the speaker has already shown himself to be a heterodox, borderline heretical thinker; by calling Isaiah a poet rather than a prophet, he may be expressing an admiration for the Bible as literature while evincing skepticism about its value as truth. If the speaker is indeed a skeptic, this would provide more context for why he would find it more existentially useful to prefer earthly life to heavenly life—the one is something he already has and must learn to live with anyway, the other, something he can neither fathom nor fully believe in. 

He claims in lines 15 and 16 that if he found earthly paradise, “there’s no way I’d outgrow it, even if I grew holier than I am.” We of course have to take this claim with a wink and a nudge, as Coyle expects us to— Coyle has phrased this statement of bravado to be equivalent to the teenage refrain “it’s not a phase, mom!” and by including the verb “outgrow,” suggests that the speaker is someone who is unwilling to grow up— someone who is furthermore willing to say with confidence that their mind would not be changed even if they were holier than they are, which is to implicitly admit that they think themselves immaculately wise and holy already. Like the great playwright Moliere, Coyle’s simple and clean style contains deceptively complex ironies— on the one hand, Coyle himself appears to be the speaker of the poem, and to be making a straightforward argument; on the other hand, the intentionally humorous braggadocio of the speaker indicates a charming degree of self-awareness and self-ridicule, even scathing self-satire— while it would be easy enough to read this poem as a straightforward assertion of earthly values, we are never entirely rid of the suspicion that Coyle finds his own values, or least the values of the speaker, somewhat presumptuous and frivolous. This ambivalence toward his own attitudes may be the key to the title of this poem: Contra Dante… kind of.

In line 17, in one of the speaker’s characteristic parenthetical asides, the speaker clarifies that he is not comparing himself with the “I Am.” This is a reference to the famous verse Exodus 3:14, where God declares to Moses, “I Am that I Am,” a statement that is usually taken to mean that God is ineffable— unparaphrasable and unexplainable in any terms except Himself. Rather unnecessarily, the speaker insists that he is not claiming that he would grow holier than God Himself. The fact that the speaker would even think to address such a bombastic claim further reveals his irreverent tone and swaggering pomposity. How can we take such a voice seriously? It will be up to Coyle’s eloquence to convince us in the second half of this poem.

Let’s now begin again, and read the poem all the way through to the end: 

Forget about the Beatific Vision.                        
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory
 and worthy of a god in God’s position,

but if I make it to Mount Purgatory
 (and yes, that’s one big “if,” I realize)
 and trudge my way up story after story

I’ll settle in the Earthly Paradise
 located at the top, it being more,
 well, earthly, which is better in my eyes.

Earthly perfection’s what I’m looking for:
 the world I know, more or less as I know it,
 prolonged, minus the death and pain and gore

(hard to imagine, maybe, but read the poet                     

Isaiah on the lion and the lamb).                                    

If I found that, there’s no way I’d outgrow it,

even if I grew holier than I am
 (not the I AM, but I as I am now).
Can I be honest? I don’t give a damn

if I miss most of the celestial show
 (it will go on like clockwork whether I
 am there or not) so long as far below

(which, from where I stand now, is still on high)
 I can sit down under an actual tree
 on actual grass beneath an actual sky

of blue that as it drops back let me see
 the southern constellations overhead.
 That would be more than good enough for me,

enough to make me not mind being dead.
 And if Beatrice came from above
 to take me heavenwards, I’d try instead

to tell her she should be the one to move.
She’d hem, she’d haw, I’d bring her flowers and rhyme,
I’d say, “Stay here with me and be my love,

seeing we now have world enough and time.”

In line 18, the speaker’s “I don’t give a damn” is clearly doing more than channeling Clark Gable: Faust-like, it suggests that that he would gladly be damned to never enter heaven, so long as he was guaranteed paradise on earth. He goes on to belittle heaven as a “celestial show” that runs “like clockwork,” imputing an artificial, Deistic perfection to heaven that eradicates free will. The speaker thereby contradicts, or at least questions, Dante’s claim that everyone in heaven has freely aligned their will to that of God. For the speaker, this alignment of individual will to a greater will constitutes a destruction of the personality, a degradation of the human being. 

Theologically perverse as this train of thought is, it does throw into relief the very real fact that here on earth, because we are seemingly left to our own devices, wholly responsible for our own choices and salvation, we are capable of a certain idiosyncratic beauty and noble struggle which would seem impossible to recreate in a supremely organized and thoroughly righteous heaven. Regardless of how we feel about the speaker’s hasty, probably foolhardy rejection of heaven, we are right to be moved by the implication that our lives here on earth have a particular value to them which, despite however much we might gain in a higher realm, can be neither replicated nor replaced. 

In lines 23 and 24, the speaker repeats the word “actual” three times: “actual tree,” “actual grass,” “actual sky.” The word “actual” functions here as a kind of benediction, a blessing of material realness upon the objects he describes, in contrast to the immaterial abstractions of heaven. In a theological sense, the word actual can be contrasted with the word potential: for Thomas Aquinas, for something to be actual meant that its potential was at least partially realized, and imperfection could be defined as the amount of potential which remained to be realized in a given object: the delay or obstruction of an object’s actuality, leaving it with unfulfilled potential, left it incomplete, hence imperfect. As the one perfect entity, God is the only example of an actus purus, a pure act, with all possible potential fulfilled. In this sense, the speaker is paradoxically suggesting that Earth is more perfect than heaven, more divinely endowed with actuality. This could certainly bespeak a severe misunderstanding of heaven, but it does speak movingly to human experience, which has a difficult time conceiving of anything more real than what we encounter on a daily basis. Putting aside any rivalry with heaven, to view our everyday realness as sanctified is certainly the correct, healthy, and beautiful thing to do. 

 In each case in this passage, the word “actual” creates an anapestic disruption in the iambic line, sonically illustrating the fierce, decorum-breaking passion the speaker feels for the material world. Such ardor leads us to reflect: how much passion do our “actual” trees, grass, and sky inspire in us? Do we find them as wondrous as this speaker does? Should we? Are they elements which comprise a world which is as close to heaven as we will ever get? Even if there is another world, will we be fit for it as well as we are fit for this one? 

The mention of “Southern constellations” in line 26 reminds us that we are still in Polynesia, in the Southern hemisphere. Just as I think that it’s an interesting coincidence that Christians conceived of a realm of everlasting fire beneath their feet long before science discovered the magma-filled mantle, so too I think it’s interesting that when so many people today think of “paradise” they think of a South Pacific tropical island scene, which is exactly where, unknowingly, Dante placed his own earthly paradise. 

The speaker goes on to say that to dwell in the presence of actual material beauty forever— trees, grass, the starry sky—would be “enough to make me not mind being dead.” The statement is both funny and moving—funny because if one could dwell amidst earthly beauty forever, it would effectively erase all meaning from the phrase “being dead.” Being dead would simply be eternal life. It is moving because it hits the nail on the head of what we desire, and why we fear death—all we want is life, more life. Heaven is not something we know about or can guarantee—but for almost all of us, no matter how difficult life is, we desire more of it, and hate the prospect of losing it. As Janet Lewis observed in Episode 6, heaven can seem like a cold, strange, and distant prospect—Earth is our home, and we wish we could stay. 

The speaker’s last move in this poem is to try to rakishly steal Dante’s girl out from under his long aquiline nose. Unlike Dante, who rather pathetically idealized his unattainable but very flesh-and-blood crush Beatrice into a pristine avatar of holiness, a saintly guide to help him tour through all the realms of heaven, the speaker, true to his earthy character, treats Beatrice as a desirable lady fit for courting and bedding. “Stay here with me and be my love” he says, echoing the famous opening line of Christopher Marlowe’s poem, “The Passionate Shepherd To His Love.” “Seeing we now have world enough and time.” he says, transforming and echoing the famous first line of Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” These literary allusions which charmingly close out the poem confirm the speaker’s position and situate him within an illustrious tradition of poets who have sung and longed for the pleasures of this world. More than this, the speaker finds in Dante’s earthly paradise a fulfillment of the longing for pleasure’s permanence that we find in poets like Marlowe and Marvell, a perfect victory of the human spirit in love with life. As a poet himself, Coyle seems to cry out to us: “This is what poetry has always been about: to love the world and mourn its passing. If we had the opportunity to fulfill the dreams that our poetry laments, to seize the beauty of life forever, wouldn’t we take it? And wouldn’t this be preferable to anything else we could possibly imagine?” 

Like Nietzsche’s story of the demon who reveals to us that we must live our same identical lives over and over again for eternity, the news of which we are then called upon to bless or curse, the call in this poem to embrace an eternal earthly paradise is less of a theological argument than an existential challenge: how much do we love our lives? How capable are we of valuing the world as fiercely as we would value a perfect heaven? It is because this poem is able to raise such questions so potently that it remains valuable for us—the charm, the humor, and the formal excellence are just icing on the cake. 

With all that we have learned and explored, let’s experience this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

Contra Dante (Kind Of)

Forget about the Beatific Vision.                        
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory
 and worthy of a god in God’s position,

but if I make it to Mount Purgatory
 (and yes, that’s one big “if,” I realize)
 and trudge my way up story after story

I’ll settle in the Earthly Paradise
 located at the top, it being more,
 well, earthly, which is better in my eyes.

Earthly perfection’s what I’m looking for:
 the world I know, more or less as I know it,
 prolonged, minus the death and pain and gore

(hard to imagine, maybe, but read the poet                     

Isaiah on the lion and the lamb).                                    

If I found that, there’s no way I’d outgrow it,

even if I grew holier than I am
 (not the I AM, but I as I am now).
Can I be honest? I don’t give a damn

if I miss most of the celestial show
 (it will go on like clockwork whether I
 am there or not) so long as far below

(which, from where I stand now, is still on high)
 I can sit down under an actual tree
 on actual grass beneath an actual sky

of blue that as it drops back let me see
 the southern constellations overhead.
 That would be more than good enough for me,

enough to make me not mind being dead.
 And if Beatrice came from above
 to take me heavenwards, I’d try instead

to tell her she should be the one to move.
She’d hem, she’d haw, I’d bring her flowers and rhyme,
I’d say, “Stay here with me and be my love,

seeing we now have world enough and time.”