Pausing only to gather a few leaves for souvenirs
We continued to where the wood thinned then stopped
And came upon a sterile plain, the fire sears
Endlessly it seems it dropped
away from the wood’s edge
And scattered about cursed souls rolled and flopped
From the rain of fire that covered all that ledge
falling eternally down
A very symbol of God’s pledge
of vengeance on a very evil town
And the townfulls of them writhed and ran
Except for one who wore an iron crown
And I said “that one’s no ordinary man”
And he said “you got that one right
I’m not one any measly fire storm can
cause to foam and twist and bite
I’m dead and I’ll not give the satisfaction
of suffering under His sight”
And T.S. Eliot, noting my reaction
said “here’s one to notice my son
Mr. Quintessential man of action
will not wriggle even one
toe, and all for purest spite of God
His answer gives the reason
For the question that seems to make a fraud
of all the so called heavenly grace
Yes the question of the unsparing rod
of Almighty retribution in this place
The fire is an illusion
The suffering the eternal trace
of evil that remains, of pestilent confusion
There it is so it is anyway
Don’t be so quick to draw conclusions
For we must go further in today
And so we pass the fire and continue
Along this narrow way”
A rivulet of blood from the river ran through
the circles, through forest and over plain
And along a burning slope cut a view
to another lower tier, the vein
of misery formed a fused bank
where the fire was cooled and the pain
of traveling was curbed upon that narrow plank
That led to a new place of regretting
And the poet said “you might do well to thank
The Power that is for the course we are setting
This stream that leads so far away to the waves of forgetting”
This song is part of a series loosely based on Dante's Inferno. You can read an essay about this series here. You can read a more general explanation of the origin of these lyrics here
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