Beatrice stands gazing upward with the intensity of a mother bird watching for the dawn, waiting for the return of light to the nest. Dante watches her face and learns her longing. Then it comes: a great splendor, blazing above, and within it — Christ. A sun of such brightness that nothing Dante has seen could have prepared him. He looks at it and is overwhelmed; only later will he know that he saw what he could not retain. He confesses the defeat openly: no poet has crossed this sea, and if he could render it, he would diminish it. The poem's inadequacy is itself a testimony.
From that blazing center falls a smile of light — Beatrice's word for it — and the whole garden of the blessed blooms beneath the radiance of Christ as a meadow blooms under direct sunlight. Mary blazes above all the other souls, the rose of the garden of the Incarnation, the flower around which the angelic hymn circulates. Gabriel comes circling her, singing the Ave Maria, crowning her. She ascends — the Assumption — rising into the empyrean before Dante's eyes, and the souls of the blessed stretch their flames upward after her like children reaching for a mother they cannot follow. But their love, turned back on itself, becomes a hymn: Regina Caeli. The sphere blazes.