He understands that “in her salutation dwelt all my blessedness.” He starts to behave strangely around her. Something like the glory of God is walking down the street towards him.” That understates it, but nicely so!ĭante meets Beatrice again a few years later, and this time she withholds her greeting, plunging him into grief.

They seldom do better than Dante himself, but I like Charles Williams, who writes, in The Figure of Beatrice: “A kind of dreadful perfection has appeared in the streets of Florence. Countless authors have analysed and discussed his experiences, retelling his story in their own words and trying to recapture the beauty and terror of it. It’s the oldest story in the world, yet no less marvellous for that, and made more so by Dante’s vivid telling of it. His behaviour alters: he is full of good will towards everyone and writes that, to any question asked of him, he would have answered “Love”. His health is affected and he becomes “frail and weak”. Her onslaught is total, affecting his liver (the seat of sexual desire) as well as his heart and mind. His dreams are lurid: love, in the person of a man “of terrible aspect” yet full of joy, speaks to him and says, “I am your Lord” love carries Beatrice in his arms, naked but wrapped in a blood-red cloth, and commands her to eat the poet’s heart.

On this occasion she salutes him and he is overwhelmed with bliss, retreating to his room to dream about her.

In fact, though, he has to wait another nine years before he sees her again, this time in the streets of Florence, when he is 18. From that time on, he says, “Love swayed my soul … and commanded me many times that I should seek out this youngest of the angels.” He says that, at the sight of her, his heart “began to tremble so violently that it was painfully perceptible”. About Beatrice’s effects on Dante we know a great deal more, because he writes them down in the Vita Nuova, a set of poems and prose commentaries that tells the story of his love for her.ĭante first meets Beatrice when she is 8 and he is 9, perhaps at a children’s party. She was in all likelihood real flesh and blood and was almost certainly Beatrice Portinari, a daughter of one of Florence’s nobler families, in which case she was born in 1266, married in 1287 and died aged 24 on 8 June 1290.

Beatrice the divine comedy