Time, eternity and terza rima in Dante’s Inferno 5
I wish I could remember exactly what Edward Wilson-Lee said on today’s The Verb about the way rhyme worked in Keats’ sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ – something about how by folding ideas together the rhymes created a kind of palimpsest of impressions transcending the movement of time. I thought it was beautifully put and gelled with my own much more inarticulate feelings. It’s the way syntax, metre and rhyme work together in Dante’s Commedia, for example, that make me feel it’s vital to read key cantos in the original, however gropingly dependent on parallel texts you may … Continue Reading