Finally finished, not through any fault of the author or translator, but like a lot of good books it demands pause to process...
The rhyming - occasional, good, although I stumbled to find the rhythm, to satisfy the false rhymes, reading, on the left page, the original, and my Italian is near nonexistent but I know all the rhymes there are true. But that's not what it's about. It's about the images, the aspects and degrees of hell that he conjures up, the punishments he inflicts upon his enemies or those he considers worthyn- eternal and cruel in the extreme, not what you would imagine from someone so apparently enlightened. And the people - the population of hell, I miss most of them, the references often to people Dante knew himself, and so perhaps the work was as much a political satire, but this is speculation.
There's an essay there, in how our view of the world (and God) has changed, I'd always taken it for granted that like minded people with modest education thought pretty much the same, but this is not true, and we are as much a product of our times and culture as we are of ourselves.
Great book. And the translators notes are at the end, bonus, to try and puzzle what I didn't first understand.
Read a portion of it online here: http://www.purgatorio.com/divine_comedy/inferno1.html