“. . . imitative rhyme,
  Harsh Runic copy of the Soutb’s sublime.” [16]

The poem foretells “the fortunes of Italy in the ensuing centuries,” and is a rheotorical piece, diffuse and declamatory, and therein quite the opposite of Dante.  It manifests Byron’s self-conscious habit of submitting his theme to himself, instead of losing himself in his theme. He is Dante in exile, and Gemma Donati is Lady Byron—­

          “That fatal she,
  Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought
  Destruction for a dowry—­this to see
  And feel and know without repair, hath taught
  A bitter lesson; but it leaves me free: 
  I have not vilely found nor basely sought,
  They made an exile not a slave of me.”

Dante’s bitter and proud defiance found a response in Byron’s nature, but his spirit, as a whole, the English poet was not well fitted to interpret.  In the preface to “The Prophecy,” Byron said that he had not seen the terza rima tried before in English, except by Hayley, whose translation he knew only from an extract in the notes to Beckford’s “Vathek.”

Shelley’s knowledge and appreciation of Dante might be proved from isolated images and expressions in many parts of his writings.  He translated the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti with greater freedom and elegance than Hayley, and wrote a short copy of verses on the Hunger Tower at Pisa, the scene of Ugolino’s sufferings.  In the preface to “Epipsychidion” he cites the “Vita Nuova” as the utterance of an idealised and spiritualised love like that which his own poem records.  In the “Defence of Poetry” he pays a glowing tribute to Dante as the second of epic poets and “the first awakener of entranced Europe.”  His poetry is the bridge “which unites the modern and the ancient world.”  Contrary to the prevailing critical tradition, Shelley preferred the “Purgatory” and the “Paradise” to the “Hell.”  Shelley also employed terza rima in his fragmentary pieces, “Prince Athanase,” “The Triumph of Life,” “The Woodman and the Nightingale,” and in one of his best lyrics, the “Ode to the West Wind,” [17] written in 1819 “in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence.”  This linked measure, so difficult for the translator and which gives a hampered movement to Byron’s and Hayley’s specimens of the “Inferno,” Shelley may be said to have really domesticated in English verse by his splendid handling of it in original work: 

  “Make me thy lyre even as the forest is: 
  What if my leaves are falling, like its own? 
  The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
  Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
  Sweet though in sadness.  Be thou, spirit fierce,
  My spirit!  Be thou me, impetuous one!”

Shelley expressed to Medwin his dissatisfaction with all English renderings from Dante—­even with Cary—­and announced his intention, or desire, to translate the whole of the “Divine Comedy” in terza rima.  Two specimens of this projected version he gave in “Ugolino,” and “Matilda Gathering Flowers” ("Purg.,” xxviii., 1-51).  He also made a translation of the first canzone of the “Convito.”