Abstract

Wisdom’s pursuit through symbols, metaphors, poetry, and therapy is a path of indirection, less available the more one’s pursuit is direct. Wisdom may be gained through particular processes of knowing, pilgrimages towards the truth of things. Dante’s 14 th century poem engages a new rhyme scheme to further this pursuit of knowing towards wisdom. He called it terza rima, or third rhyme. Its structure, the essay argues, embodies two movements of the soul: the journey towards knowing, one which is always bending back in memory, and the movement of therapy itself, wherein one becomes more conscious by seeing in the present a confluence of one’s history and one’s destiny at the same instant. Love and the gracious heart are but one thing, As that wise poet puts it in his poem; As much can one without the other be As without reason can the reasoning mind