Words Per Mile

A name drop! Yes, Francesca is a character in Inferno, along with her lover, Paolo. The entwined lovers are whirled about in the second circle of Hell—the place for the lustful—described as such by Dante in Canto 5:

The infernal hurricane that never rests

Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine

This coincides pretty clearly with Hozier’s lead-in to the first chorus of Francesca:

My life was a storm since I was born

How could I fear any hurricane?

In Inferno, Francesca tells the story of her and Paolo’s doomed love affair and how she doesn’t regret it; Hozier has said in interviews that his song Francesca is actually from Paolo’s perspective, to give him a voice (he has no dialogue in Inferno) and affirm that he, too, would do everything again and suffer the same fate for their love.

(There’s a lot of doomed love in both the text and the album. Songs and passages we’ve already seen, plus this canto mentions Helen and Paris and other famous doomed loves. In Purgatorio, Virgil tells Dante that all sin is born of corrupted love.)

Francesca and Paolo are a pretty dictionary definition of lustful sinners, but what about the second song, I, Carrion (Icarian)?

(Oof, that’s hard to write and punctuate in a sentence.)

The first and most obvious conclusion is that Icarus is doomed by his lust for more—Daedalus warns him against going too high or too low with his wings, so it’s want, not ignorance, that dooms him.

The story of Icarus is referenced later in Inferno in Canto 29, which discusses the eighth circle of Hell, home of those guilty of fraud. In this eighth circle is a man who promised another man that he could give him the power of flight:

“…’Tis true I said to him, speaking in jest,

That I could rise by flight into the air,

And he who had conceit, but little wit,

Would have me show to him the art; and only

Because no Daedalus I made him, made me

Be burned by one who held him as his son…”

This comes in a section where Dante is encountering fraudsters and alchemists, who dared to try and reach limits that only God can reach (flight, transmuting metals, etc) and were punished for it. Again, this ties in with the idea of lust—wanting something so badly that one will commit other crimes to attain it.

Am I reaching here? Maybe. But I find the repeated textual reference interesting, and I, Carrion (Icarian) is such a beautiful song that I don’t mind spending some extra space on it. Let me know what you think below!