Back to one song for this circle of Hell, and one of my favorite songs on the album, too! The fact that Canto 6 and Dante’s third circle of Hell correspond to the sins of the gluttonous makes a whole lot of sense just from looking at the song’s title.

(It is funny to me that I’ve seen people on first pass interpret this song as being about…a certain sex act, when actually it’s very political. I think the former interpretation would bump it back to the second circle!)

A song called Eat Your Young by an Irish singer draws obvious parallels to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, a satire in which Swift recommends the Irish to pull themselves out of poverty by selling their children as food to the economic elite. It’s also connected to Hozier’s much earlier song Run, which itself references Joyce’s quote about Ireland being “the old sow that eats her farrow,” i.e. Ireland itself devours its own people. The idea of consumption, self-consumption, and infanticide are all very knotted together in this song, making it glutted on metaphors about gluttony.

I need a breath after jogging through that paragraph.

To me, this song has broad condemnation outside Ireland specifically, evoking images of global warming and capitalistic races to the bottom. Global warming in particular takes decades to wreak its worst effects on the human race, so those who suffer from it are the children (or grandchildren) of those that caused it. “Pull up the ladder when the flood comes,” indeed.

(I also love that Hozier has said that the phrase “Seven new ways that you can eat your young”—which I misheard as “So many ways”—is a goof on Buzzfeed article titles. I think for a lot of people, the increased in clickbait and decrease in attention spans caused by these kinds of articles feels like it goes hand-in-hand with the concept of late-stage capitalism, even if we can’t quite articulate why.)

Oh, and in this level Virgil feeds Cerebus dirt so he’ll let them pass instead of eating their souls. Lot of consumption (negative) all around here.

Let me know below if you have anything else to add!