I’ve done many real literary walks – a route through Mrs Dalloway’s London, a path taken in the poems of Dylan Thomas by his Boathouse in Laugharne. But now I’m lacing up my hiking boots for a metaphysical journey with the Podcast ‘Walking with Dante’. Guiding me through his ‘Divine Comedy’ is the American scholar and writer Mark Scarbrough – a witty and wise companion.
If you are journeying into hell, it’s best to be in good company!
Taking this trip into the afterlife, I realise that I see Dante’s great epic through the eyes of William Blake’s illustrations.
Responding to a commission from a young artist, Blake, already 65 years old and in poor health, worked obsessively on the project creating over a hundred mostly watercolour paintings in what was to be the last months of his life. It was the final and perhaps greatest flowering of his visionary imagination. They are simply breathtaking.
I also remember a fantastic door (on a piece of furniture) created by the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti at Red House. Rossetti was actually named after the Italian poet and so I close with this door. It represents the last words of the ‘Divine Comedy’: ‘Love which moves the sun and the other stars’.
Here, to get you started, is the opening of Mark Scarbrough’s completely mad labour of love, his journey through 14, 000 lines, now at 450 episodes – from Hell, through Purgatory, to Paradise!
