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Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls, Far more than were above: they strained their chests Against enormous weights, and with mad howls Rolled them at one another. Then in haste They rolled them back, one party shouting out: “Why do you hoard?” and the other: “Why do you waste?”

So back around that ring they puff and blow, Each faction to its course, until they reach Opposite sides, and screaming as they go The madmen turn and start their weights again To crash against the maniacs. And I, Watching, felt my heart contract with pain.

“Master,” I sad, “what people can these be? And all those tonsured ones there on our left – Is it possible they all were of the clergy?” And he: “In  the first life beneath the sun They were so skewed and squinteyed in their minds Their misering or extravagance mocked all reason.

The voice of each clamours its own excess When lust meets lust at the two points of the circle Where opposite guilts meet in their wretchedness. These tonsured wraiths of greed were priests indeed, And popes and cardinals, for it is in these The weed of avarice sows its rankest seed.”

And I to him: “Master, among this crew Surely I should be able to make out The fallen image of some soul I knew.” And he to me: “This is a lost ambition. In their sordid lives they laboured to be blind, And now their souls have dimmed past recognition.

All their eternity is to butt and bray: One crew will stand tight-fisted, the other stripped Of its very hair at the bar of Judgment Day. Hoarding and squandering wasted all their light And brought them screaming to this brawl of wraiths. You need no words of mine to grasp their plight.