If all that I have said of her below
were gathered now into a single paean,
that would be scant praise of her beauty now.
The beauty I saw there transcends all measure
of mortal minds. I think only her Maker
can wholly comprehend so great a treasure.
Here I concede defeat. No poet known,
comic or tragic, challenged by his theme
to show his power, was ever more outdone.
As feeblest eyes, struck by the sun, go blind,
so the remembrance of my lady’s smile
strikes every recognition from my mind.
(XXX, 16-27)
American painter Mary Cassatt understood the prolonged conversation of eye contact between mother and child. What was the pool into which Dante looked as he gazed in prolonged conversation into the eyes of Beatrice? Or Dali, gazing into the eyes of Gali?
“The flame of high desire that makes you yearn
for greater knowledge of these things you see
pleases me the more I see it burn.
But only this same water satisfies. You must bend down and drink.”
–So spoke the pole-star of my eyes.
. . .
No babe in arms that ever wakened hungry
from having slept too long could turn its face
to its dear mother’s milk more eagerly
than I bent down to drink in Paradise
of the sweet stream that flows its grace to us,
so to make better mirrors of our eyes.
. . .
And as a slope shines in the looking glass
of a lake below it, as if to see itself
in its time of brightest flower and greenest grass;
so, tier on tier, mounting within that light,
there glowed, reflected in more than a thousand circles,
all those who had won return to Heaven’s height.
And if so vast a nimbus can be bound
within its lowest tier, what then must be
the measure of this rose at its topmost round? . . .
Into the gold of that rose that blooms eternal,
rank on rank, in incenses of praise
it sends up to the Sun forever vernal– . . .
(XXX, 70-7-75, 82-87,109-126)
The beatific point mathematically implicit in the Mystic Rose is that Each is jointly in relation not only to the Center but to Each.
Parker J. Palmer, in a section on “Truth Revisited” in The Courage to Teach (99-106), envisions teaching and learning as a Community of Truth, which each Knower relating to each Knower, around and in relation to a central Subject. Dante’s Mystic Rose invites us to this Wisdom Community.
