current. There are few sentences in the Divina Commedia in which
a difficulty is occasioned by lack of definiteness of thought or
distinctness of image.

A far deeper-lying and more pervading source of imperfect
comprehension of the poem than any verbal difficulty exists in
the double or triple meaning that runs through it. The narrative
of the poet's spiritual journey is so vivid and consistent that
it has all the reality of an account of an actual experience; but
within and beneath runs a stream of allegory not less consistent
and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself. To the
illustration and carrying out of this interior meaning even the
minutest details of external incident are made to contribute,
with an appropriateness of significance, and with a freedom from
forced interpretation or artificiality of construction such as no
other writer of allegory has succeeded in attaining. The poem may
be read with interest as a record of experience without attention
to its inner meaning, but its full interest is only felt when
this inner meaning is traced, and the moral significance of the
incidents of the story apprehended by the alert intelligence. The
allegory is the soul of the poem, but like the soul within the
body it does not show itself in independent existence. It is, in
scholastic phrase, the form of the body, giving to it its special
individuality. Thus in order truly to understand and rightly
appreciate the poem the reader must follow its course with a
double intelligence. "Taken literally," as Dante declares in his
Letter to Can Grande, "the subject is the state of the soul after
death, simply considered. But, allegorically taken, its subject
is man, according as by his good or ill deserts he renders
himself liable to the reward or punishment of Justice." It is the