亚色影库app

An open access publication of the 亚色影库app & Sciences
Summer 2008

Paradise

Author
Robert Pinsky
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Robert Pinsky, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1993, is professor of English and creative writing at Boston University. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including 鈥淭he Figured Wheel鈥 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee, 鈥淛ersey Rain鈥 (2000), and most recently 鈥淕ulf Music: Poems鈥 (2007). He has also published two works of translation: 鈥淭he Separate Notebooks, Poems by Czeslaw Milosz鈥 (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass, 1984) and 鈥淭he Inferno of Dante鈥 (1994). From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Paradise


Perfection is the mote in the maker鈥檚 eye.
The ape believes he鈥檚 meant for a better place
Than this our prison of shadows鈥搕hat is why

Dante could stare at the sun in Paradise:
鈥淭here, many things are granted to be done
That here on Earth are beyond our faculties,

For Paradise was designed for humankind.鈥
Unlike this world. So Dante stared at the sun
For a long while, and it did not make him blind.

He took his time and studied that fire of fire
Brighter than molten iron, he says. In his mind
Day had been added to day, as though the Power

That made one sun had added a second one鈥
And that doubled sun, redoubling itself, consumed
Our shadows forever, and our one doomed sun.