" But when I came to stop

Below a hill that marked one end of the valley

That had pierced my heart with terror, I looked up

Toward the crest and saw its shoulders already

Mantled in rays of that bright planet that shows

The road to everyone, whatever our journey.

Then I could feel the terror begin to ease

That churned in my heart's lake all through the night.

As one still panting, ashore from dangerous seas,

Looks back a the deep he has escaped,"

                       Inferno from Canto 1

                                    Dante Pinsky trans.

 Our weather which has been unseasonably warm was 

interrupted by a skiff of winter snow last night. So I took 

these photos while out in the yard with the dogs on the

morning of Good Friday. My poetry selections are made

because I remember something that seems apt or because

I am reading some particular work at the time. Today

it is both, I have several translation, courses etc of Dante's

Divine Comedy and have been collecting

materials on him for years. So this afternoon while 

looking through Pinsky's translation I found a passage

 that seemed to fit my present mood. Eventually

it occurred to me that Dante sets the first Canto of the 

Inferno  on Good Friday of the year 1300. These connections

are one of the great joys that literature can bring to my life.

It was while looking through Longfellow's note to his translation

that I found the passage below on one of the end pages of my  

Routledge edition.

"How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!

This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves

Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves

Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,

And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow