SEVERANCE

Dante: Inferno, Canto 34

Heaven wears deep beyond Satanic ice,
and partings wider than in triple jaws:
union obeys its own bedazzling laws,
shields of the flower-hive of Paradise.
Heaven holds many that see only one
(as we two might); nor can their Gloria pause
while multiplicity radiance lives on.
What harps will sour, though, if the fire withdraws!

But glaciered rocks demand no anodyne.
Ice and aurora!  When the sun-day bleeds
like a cut flower, and the lights are down
to lair of octopus, to bed-crabs' roads;
when star and pestilence awake at noon:
where is your gift?  All deeps are solitudes.