The final vision is described above all by what is missing. In canto XXXIII, after Bernard's prayer and Mary's consent in her eyes, Dante looks at the eternal light and says that his seeing, from then on, was greater than the telling shows, and that memory yields to such excess. What remains is like the emotion that stays after a dream.
In the depth of the light he sees gathered into one volume, by love, what is scattered through the universe: substances, accidents, and their modes, as if fused. In the clear substance of the high light three circles appear to him, of three colors and one measure, and the middle circle shows the human image. Dante, like the geometer who wants to measure the circle, does not find the principle he needs.
He does not solve the enigma on his own: his mind is struck by a flash in which its will reaches where it wanted to go. The poem ends, then, without naming God and without Mary. The power of high fantasy fails, but Dante's desire and will already turn, like a wheel moved evenly, by the love that moves the sun and the other stars. It is the same word, stars, with which the other two canticles end.