One of my favorite things in reading is when, unknowingly, you stumble into an incredible romance. It’s not in story you go searching for, but in search for something else, it is revealed and takes you completely by surprise, drawing you in and refusing to let you break away.
Recently, I began reading Dante. I heard him referenced in a couple other books I was reading, and their speaking of his art made me want to find him. When I did, I discovered more than his art: his reason for writing any of it all: Beatrice—the “Giver of Blessings.”
She was a woman who history says, in life, Dante knew very little of and rarely saw, and yet—to Dante—she was perceived as an agent of Divine Revelation in his life: a medium by which he discovered and came to write of God, Love, and the Eternal. His first book Vita Nuova—New Life—is a devotion to her and blends poems written for her within a narrative of how she shaped his heart and early writing. It is to her he devoted The Divine Comedy, and it is she that guides him into Paradise when Virgil—human reason—is incapable of understanding.
Looking for a story on God, I found a romance, and I wonder if that’s not how God intends it: to live His love in the giving and expressing of it to Another, however absurd it may seem to witnessing world.
Breaking from the poets of his time, Dante wrote in the colloquial, not Latin, and for doing so considered the father of the Italian language. He wrote in what then were simple words used by the common man, bringing high art to the level of all.
In The Divine Comedy, he structured his writing around three-line stanzas—the first acknowledged to do so—to honor the Holy Trinity and visually display the presence of God in art. Each section—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—contain 39 Cantos (the first with an additional one for explaining the setting scene). He chose thirty-nine, again, for speaking to the Trinity—three being for the Trinity and nine for the Trinity Squared.
In Vita Nuova, Dante ends abrupt after a vision saying after that he would write no more of Beatrice until he was equal to write something worthy of her honor. The Divine Comedy is that work.
Reading and discovering this lived story, I wanted to write something emulative of Dante’s inspiration and speak to themes Dante describes of Beatrice and her effect on his perception, life, and art. I wrote in three-line stanzas, and—falling short of nine—chose six stanzas (Trinity-times-two) to tell a story I imagined true for him and perhaps lives true for some today, as I believe it has for others across the near-millennium between.
Sometimes, the greatest romances are not the ones we go searching for but are the ones we lose ourselves into and are consumed within when we see it for what it is and all we can do is take it in and be affected.
That’s where this poem came from. That’s what this poem is about. This poem is “For Beatrice”—then, now, before, between, and ever-after—in whomever she appears.