Love is what made poetry famous. From Shakespeare with his sonnets to children with their red roses, everyone uses poetry to express love. Love is the topping in the cake of poetry, the melody of its symphony and the fear of pregnancy in its serial. According to Dante, not only poetry, but everything is composed of love: neither the Creator nor any creature, as you know, has ever existed without love, the love of the soul or the love that comes from nature. (Alighieri 185) The human race finds it difficult to express an emotion as complex as love in prose or ordinary speech; we must add another dimension of beauty or meaning to make it worthy of our most precious emotion. In Purgatory, Dante capitalizes on this almost archetypal relationship between verse and romance to make his point. Purgatory is a love poem... about God, and Dante never misses an opportunity to make it clear. The very structure of Purgatory begins to form the basis of Dante's theme. Even today, Italian is the language of love. Perhaps this idea comes from an entire generation who, as children, watched the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp one too many times, but the same view was shared in the Middle Ages. Latin was the language of scholars; Italian was not. Everything of any intellectual influence was written in Latin, but Dante composed his masterpiece in his vernacular, which at the time was considered suitable only for less than artful documents. This is the reader's first clue to Dante's purpose. To a medieval readership, this apparent gap between the intellectual content and the plebeian performance would have been glaring and would certainly have aroused interest. Beyond the form and construction of poetry, Dante uses...... middle of paper..... . the passionate, swooning praise with which his audiences were more familiar. After passing through all the levels of Purgatory, Virgil explains, one's will and desires are synonymous with those of God (Alighieri 297). Here we see a comparison with earthly couples who are often (perhaps even more so in the past) described as having one will. Throughout his work, Dante worked extensively to translate the strong feelings of earthly love into divine love. He attempted to cultivate the same ardor of romantic love between his reader and the deity, even enlisting the help of Venus in the introduction: "The radiant planet favoring love like rain made all the heavens laugh with light of the Orient, veiling the star fish in its suite. » (Alighieri 5). He emphasized that while loving others is commendable, if anything is truly worth loving, it is God..