God's "marvellous domain"

The complexity and ambitiousness of Tasso’s projected epic poem come across clearly in a famous page from his Discorsi dell’arte poetica written when he was barely twenty years old: “Just as in this marvellous domain of God called the world we behold the sky scattered over and adorned with such a variety of stars, and as we descend from realm to realm, we marvel at the air and the sea full of fish and birds, and the earth host to many animals wild and tame, with brooks, springs, lakes, meadows, fields, forests, and mountains, here fruits and flowers, there glaciers and snow, here dwellings and ploughed fields, there deserts and wilderness; yet for all this, the world that contains in its womb so many diverse things is one, its form and essence one, and one the bond that links its many parts and ties them together in discordant concord; and nothing is missing, yet nothing is there that does not serve for necessity or ornament; just so, I judge, the great poet (who is called divine for no other reason than that he resembles the supreme Artificer in his workings, he comes to participate in his divinity) can form a poem in which, as in a little world, one may read here of armies assembling, here of battles on land or sea, here of conquests of cities, skirmishes and duels, here of jousts, here descriptions of hunger or thirst, here tempests, fires, prodigies, there of celestial and infernal councils, there seditions, there discord, wanderings, adventures, enchantments, deeds of cruelty, daring, courtesy, generosity, there the fortunes of love, now happy, now sad, now joyous, now pitiful. Yet the poem that contains so great a variety of matters none the less should be one, one in form and soul; and all these things should be so combined that each concerns the other, corresponds to the other, and so depends on the other necessarily or verisimilarly that removing any one part or changing its place would destroy the whole. And if that is true, the art of composing a poem resembles the plan of the universe, which is composed of contraries, as that of music is. (T. Tasso, Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico, edited by L. Poma, Bari, Laterza, 1964, 35-36).