From Darkness, Comes Light –or- How I Learned to Love My Fate
A personal, poetic response to Dante’s Inferno
By: Luke Schulz
This poem is written as a personal reflection on the relationship between Virgil and Dante I could never hope to approach the grandeur of The Commedia. I should be glad if I could even live up to Lewis’ Great Divorce. However, I have attempted here to creatively capture the sense I felt in Inferno, and what that would look like in my own personal experience. Nietzsche has meant a lot to me, and he was, though a self-styled antichrist, a light in my darkest hour. The ironic prophet in my return to the light, and his teaching has returned me to the Christian fold. Like Virgil, he cannot take me all the way to that multi-folate rose, yet he is an invaluable guide on the journey, and in my view certainly deserves to be awarded the status of Prophet. He is prophecy reads like the Old Testament at times, but that is in some sense his mission, to reboot the West, an OT renaissance sans what the Christian religion has become. I hope the value of his vision is conveyed in these verses.
Because I am no high romantic writer, at least not at this stage of the game, I chose to stylistically reflect the time and place this has been written. Borrowing in some ways from the style of T. S. Eliot, there is no set rhyme scheme in the poem. In fact, the first section contains few rhymes, if any. But as the teaching takes hold of the student, the poetic speech begins to flourish. This happened naturally as I wrote, but I understand why. It is the same with my own thinking. As my personal views become more clarified, they also become more poetic. Many of the verses here occurred to me just as they remain written, knowledge
comes to me in little, metered, pieces, and the next thought, the next idea, often rhymes with the last as it occurs to me. I have allowed this process to be laid bare in the text. So what we have here is a post-modern prose of seven line stanzas, why, I am not too sure, but that was the only rule I followed. The rhyme and meter come and go, but increase as the Prophet’s vision becomes more clear.
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