The structure of Dante's Paradiso is a mediating sign of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Each time Dante the pilgrim moves to a higher sphere, his visionary power grows, passing through successive formulations of God's love. The growing beauty of Beatrice's smile measures his advance, and at several points (Par. x, xxiii, and xxviii) her words or her reflecting eyes explicate the semantic function of what Dante sees, thus projecting him one step closer to the Beatific Vision, to which all the signs refer. Finally, the pilgrim transcends Beatrice, just when her beauty transcends the poet's power to render it. In the last canti the pilgrim confronts a reality transforming itself in direct response to his visionary power, while the poet and we find vestiges of that reality in the transformations of his language through metaphor. This final dialectic of vision and language suggests themes of modernist poetry.