What makes the realm of hell – hell?
It certainly cannot be the towers nor the gates
For the tolling of the dreaded anvil bell

Could easily be the counter of souls in their haste
To flee the wrath of Him whom they ignored
While here on earth they marveled at the waste

They could inflict on what His Law extolled—
The basest glance, the least attention
And never could recall a punishment at all.

The cursed horror is now their constant tension
Between what could have been
And what for all eternity Divinity has mentioned

Doomed sinner, nay - child of the Lord you’ve seen
The role of vassal to His Law you did refuse
So why not reign as master of the damned in joy unseen.

The Bulletin, Green Meadow Waldorf School, January 5, 2009, page 12.

As part of our examination of Dante’s Inferno, we were required to write a poem on any topic that the epic suggested. The work touched every emotion, and every vice we could imagine; yet, for me, the concept of Hell was fascinating. That is to say, the categorization of sin and punishment as well as the coldness of the innermost center of the inferno stirred my imagination.

In some ways, this poem was the product of a study of Dante’s Inferno and a brief life of some 16 years in which I witnessed the collapse of The World Trade Center (Towers that I had ascended some seven times with my nonna, and countless times with my parents) and hundreds of news images of the brutality of human beings towards fellow human beings. Sunday sermons, cartoons and folk songs all pictured hell and the devil in different ways: scary, doomed, funny, goofy or ridiculous.

In reading the Inferno, what I found was a common thread, not at first, but after much stumbling about. The evil of the murderer or the destroyer of another’s reputation was clear. The betrayer of Christ or a usurper is clearly evil. That same evil, even though it was motivated by love, in the illicit affair between two lovers was harder to see.

What slowly emerged was the presence of an eternal, immutable standard, a law against which action and behavior – whether of omission or commission, was measured. That measure was based not on just the action, but on the presence of a free choice. The individual had to be capable of recognizing what was the right and what was the wrong behavior. That was not a social standard but a universal one.

In this light, the punishment consisted of not just physical pain, rather the punishment was composed of three distinct parts: the realization that it was the direct result of the willful violation of a Divine Standard; that it represented the enthronement of selfish good over the Divine Good; and, the physical punishment. These three elements were combined with two other components that truly made them hellish: their eternity and more frighteningly, the absence of the presence of God for all eternity.

For me, my poem represents a distillation of these elements. It still resonates with me today.