The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 19

A. S. Kline
Inferno Canto I:1-60 The Dark Wood and the Hill

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct
way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was,
so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death: but, in order to tell
of the good that I found there, I must tell of the other things I saw there.
I cannot rightly say how I entered it. I was so full of sleep, at that point where I abandoned
the true way. But when I reached the foot of a hill, where the valley, that had pierced my
heart with fear, came to an end, I looked up and saw its shoulders brightened with the rays of
that sun that leads men rightly on every road. Then the fear, that had settled in the lake of my
heart, through the night that I had spent so miserably, became a little calmer. And as a man,
who, with panting breath, has escaped from the deep sea to the shore, turns back towards the