Read Dante's Inferno for Free Online

shadow arose, visible to the chin;
    It raised itself upon its knees
    And looked about as if it hoped to see
    Whether someone else was accompanying me,
    And when its expectation was quenched
    It stuttered, weeping: ‘If it be genius
    That gives you the right to freely roam
    This blind prison, where is my boy,
    Whose scholarship in US Studies
    Is second to none, and why
    Is he not by your side?’ ‘I’m not alone,’
    I said, ‘that man who waits over there
    Guides me through this stinking cauldron,
    A poet, perhaps, your Owen held in scorn?’
    (His face, and the question he posed, revealed his name
    To me, and made my pointed answer possible.)
    At once, he sprang up to his full height and cried:
    ‘What did you say? He
held
? Is he not living then?’
    And when he heard the silence
                                                    of my delay
    In responding to his question, he fell back
    Into his room, not to be seen again.
    The other shade, who’d been talking before,
    Showed no concern at all, but turned to me,
    Picking up where he’d left off:
    ‘Tell me, for you might know the answer,
    Why did Essex cancel its contracts with me
    In the 1970s? What was wrong with my bangers?’
    ‘I’m sure there was nothing wrong with them,”
    I said, ‘but the students of that day
    Were mostly hippies, vegetarians who stuck

    Two fingers up at the meat industry;
    They were the generation that picketed
    The livestock exports from Brightlingsea:
    Butchery was out of fashion.’ ‘Unjust! Unjust!’
    He cried, ‘A bunch of pot-smoking good-for-nothings!
    Let me tell you now, for the record,
    This craze for vegetarianism, of which you speak,
    Is one whose years are numbered;
    Before the passage of fifty moons
    It will have died out completely;
    And in days to come the fur trade too
    Will make a healthy comeback:
    Not far off lies the day when coats
    Of mink and fox fur, badger, bear,
    And even Dalmatian will again be worn with pride!’
    ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ I said,
    ‘But tell me, can you answer a question
    That’s been bugging me:
    If I understand correctly, all of you
    Can see ahead to what the future holds,
    But your knowledge of the present is shaky.’
    ‘Here we see like those with an eye defect,’
    He said, ‘what’s in the distance we see
    Clearly, with 20/20 vision,
    But when an object is up close
    It’s all a blur; without gossip
    We’d know nothing of your living state.’
    Then, moved by regret for what I’d done
    I said: ‘Will you tell your room-mate
    His son is still among the living,
    And if, when he asked, I held my silence,
    Let him know that as he spoke all my thought
    Was taken up with that point you’ve explained.’

    Berrigan had begun to call me back,
    So quickly I asked the shade to tell me
    What other souls were cooking in this tower.
    He said: ‘More than a thousand souls lie here
    With me, among them some of the Angry Brigade,
    One of them’s another poet
    Wrongly imprisoned in life,
    Who now spends her days imprisoned here,
    Anna Mendelssohn, also known as Grace,
    Of the rest I speak not.’ Then he was gone,
    And I turned back towards Berrigan,
    Thinking on what this man had said about the fur trade.
    We moved on, and as we went, Berrigan asked:
    ‘What’s bugging you now? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
    And I satisfied him in his question.
    ‘Look,’ he said firmly, ‘what these people say needs
    To be taken with a pinch of salt.’
    Then he turned to the left, up a stairway,
    And we were nearly knocked out by a fearful stink.

CANTO XI
    ‘That smell,’ said Berrigan, ‘comes from the bins
    Which lie below, full of uneaten food and
    Stinking rubbish – the bad news is that
    It gets worse the closer you get to it,
    And we’re heading that way.’ Before I had
    A chance to protest, Berrigan had summoned
    The lift which took us down in seconds,
    Then we proceeded a little way on foot.
    The place we came