Virgil Explains Limbo to Dante

Midlife, ravenous in the jet wood, wore on his
poet’s whet claw; he harrowed the dross to see
some go, some not; moved on, following me
to a more lexical understanding of place
in the progress of love, our gross recessionals
of the exhausted hardhearted, hoarse to refuge
but choked and fed by his umbilical Word.