Dante and Beatrice in the Heaven of Saturn – Botticelli
A while back I wrote a little sequence of poems called ‘Seven Heavens, Seven Hells’, which took the mediaeval vision of the seven spheres of the heavens, the spheres that Dante travels through and about which Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, and used them as a pattern for some contemporary reflections. Saturn, the furthest of the spheres was associated in the mediaeval mind with disaster and melancholia – but also with wisdom. And re-reading my little poem on Saturnian wisdom I thought it might have something to say to us in this moment. There is so much heart-break everywhere, so many endings, and in the end only God himself can wipe away our tears, for in Christ he knows what it is to shed them, but I hope these lines may speak into some hearts for good.
The poem was published last year in my book After Prayer. You can hear me read it by clicking on the title or the ‘play’ button
I
In every heart-break wisdom can be found,
The end of things may be the place to start,
The hard frost helps to break the stony ground
In every heart.
Nothing remains the same, things fall apart.
We listen for the music; not a sound.
But we discover, silent and apart,
The meditative minutes circle round,
There is a deeper dance, an inner art,
There is a hidden treasure to be found
In every heart.
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Malcolm Guite 