Poem of the week – Death, always cruel by Dante Alighieri

This year is the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death. Since his demise in 1321, the ‘Supreme poet’ of Italian literature has consistently cast a vast and influential shadow over the multiple mediums that constitute European culture. Famed for his monumental work, The Divine Comedy, despite his austere and unornamented style, Dante was a master of romantic lyricism as well as being a skilled and accomplished manufacturer of profound and memorable metaphors.

This week’s poem was translated by the pre-Raphaelite poet, Rossetti, and encompasses several of Alighieri’s major themes – the redemption of love and the encroachment of death. It opens with a lament for the inescapable consumption of life by death and goes on to express contrition for the passing of a woman that he loved. The poem closes with subtle praise for the goodness his deceased lover inspired in him and cautions how people destined for hell shall never know the revelatory exaltation that romantic love enkindles. We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.

Death, always cruel

Death, always cruel, Pity’s foe in chief,
Mother who brought forth grief,
Merciless judgment and without appeal!
Since thou alone hast made my heart to feel
This sadness and unweal,
My tongue upbraideth thee without relief.

And now (for I must rid thy name of ruth)
Behoves me speak the truth
Touching thy cruelty and wickedness:
Not that they be not known; but ne’ertheless
I would give hate more stress
With them that feed on love in very sooth.

Out of this world thou hast driven courtesy,
And virtue, dearly prized in womanhood;
And out of youth’s gay mood
The lovely lightness is quite gone through thee.

Whom now I mourn, no man shall learn from me
Save by the measure of these praises given.
Whoso deserves not Heaven
May never hope to have her company.

Translated by D.G. Rossetti