SOURCE: "The Symbolic Imagination: The Mirrors of Dante," in Collected Essays, Alan Swallow, 1959, pp. 408-31.

In the excerpt that follows, Tate explores reflected light as an image in the Comedy.

It is right even if it is not quite proper to observe at the beginning of a discourse on Dante, that no writer has held in mind at one time the whole of The Divine Comedy : not even Dante, perhaps least of all Dante himself. If Dante and his Dantisti have not been equal to the view of the whole, a view shorter than theirs must be expected of the amateur who, as a writer of verses, vainly seeks absolution from the mortal sin of using poets for what he can get out of them. I expect to look at a single image in the Paradiso, and to glance at some of its configurations with other images. I...