Customer Reviews

Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante's Divine Comedy

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The moment I saw the references to Charles Williams and Dorothy L. Sayers I was hooked. Culturely familiar with, but never having studied, Dante's poem, I had always understood it as an allegory of life after death. Wrong! The intersections between Dante's journey as portrayed by Helen Luke and portions of my spiritual journey were intense, meaningful, detailed -- and totally unexpected. The reality of the passage through Hell and Purgatory in this life points to the hope of a portion of the feast to come also in this life. It is not an easy read, but I found myself unable to put it down -- except when the power of a passage would so resonate in me I had to pause to mark it and reflect on it.

helen luke is dead now but i wish she wasn't. this
is the best book i ever found about dante. if dante's
comedy seems a mystery to you, if it seems hard to
reach, or if it seems like it has nothing to say to us
now, you need this book. helen luke used dante's poetry
to write a magnificent jungian deconstruction of growth
and love. it makes everything simple. it is magnificent.
i was interested to see that she liked dorothy sayers'
translations (of all the dante translations that there
are) the best. if you have this book, you don't need
any other growth book, you don't need any other literary
analysis of the comedy. she knew dante very well.

This marvellous book opens up Danteland for the contemporary reader. Helen Luke's masterful guidance on the paths of Dante's three-tiered cosmos not only helps us to reenter and relish the Divine Comedy - the towering literary achievement of the medieval imagination - but to use it to enter deeper levels of reality through meditation and active imagination. I have based deeply moving group meditations on this, along the lines of those decribed in my own book "Dreamgates", and we have found that Dante's gates can actually take us into imaginal realms that people appear to inhabit after physical death. As the life dreamer she was, Helen Luke reminds us of the way the radiant guide keeps calling the seeker through dreams, which are so often ignored or forgotten until the BIG moment of spiritual trial and eventual initiation. I would recommend using the middle section of the book in tandem with W.S.Merwin's excellent recent translation of the "Purgatorio", which is more readable than the older versions quoted by Ms. Luke.

I think the title of the review says it all.
I am glad I came across this book after knowing and studying the Divine Comedy for many years; Otherwise it may have been pearls before swine.
But if you are a novice, get it and keep it on your bookshelf, and go back to it every once in a while. As your love of Dante, and your faith deepens, you will appreciate it more and more, and like, me may find you need to buy a second copy after the first became so dogeared and fragile.

Though I'm not as verbally articulate as your previous reviewers I, too, was mesmerized by Helen Luke's DARK WOOD TO WHITE ROSE. I had always thought that The Divine Comedy would be a "slog" of a read and that it was only written for those of the literary world. Boy! was I wrong. Helen made it not only accessible, but so very personal that it was as if the book were written for me. Life-affirming and life-altering all at once. I have given copies to friends. Loaning my own out would frighten me lest it not be returned, and the poor reader would have to deal with the under-linings, comments, exclamations I wrote throughout.
I knew Helen personally, but didn't read DARK WOOD TO WHITE ROSE until after her death. What a sweet, loving woman... always in the present, always greeting one as if she'd known them forever.
Perhaps she had...