Beatific Vision is not deferred to the Day of Judgment, but is possessed
at once after death but the Just, in whom there is no stain of sin or
who have no temporal punishment to be expiated; and, furthermore, that
all human beings at the end of the world will arise with their own
bodies."

How will the poet bring home those incomprehensible truths to his
readers? He has to treat a subject wholly transcendent and supernatural.
Though his vision be celestial, his langauge must be terrestrial. He
must visualize states of the soul which are alien to the eyes of the
body and translate into terms of the senses things which are wholly
non-sensuous. Dante is aware that no poet ever essayed that feat before:
"The sea I sail has never yet been passed." (1, 8.) He knows, also, that
shoals and rocks, seemingly impassable and a sea which may engulf his
genius, are before him. "It is no coastwise voyage for a little barque,
this sea through which the intrepid prow goes cleaving nor for a pilot
who would spare himself." (XXIII, 67.)

And yet he will attempt the impossible, he will endeavor to sing not of
the scenes but of the states of suprasensible spiritual joys--joys which
Bishop Norris says "are without example, above experience and beyond
imagination, for which the whole creation wants a comparison, we an
apprehension and even the word of God, a revelation." Conscious of all
that, Dante confesses the impotency of speech, the inadequacy of memory,
the helplessness of imagination for the task to which he sets himself.
He tells us that the sublime songs of the elect "have lapsed and fallen
out of my memory"--"that to represent and transhumanize in words
impossible were." (I, 71.)

"And what was the sun wherein I entered,
Apparent, not by color, but by light
I, though I call on genius, art and practice
Cannot so tell that it could be imagined."
(X, 41.)

So by the very nature of the subject visualization can be only
partial--only "the shadow of the blessed realm," can be shown. But what
human nature can do, even if its feat seems solitary and unique, Dante
has accomplished in a failure which constitutes the most wonderful
achievement in the domain of the sublime in literature, an achievement
leaving us with a sense of his own ineffable bliss and of the
inexpressible joys of the Elect--an achievement which came to pass, say
some readers, because his poem is an account of a supernatural
vision--and Dante hints