Fiammetta by Helen Gray Cone (1929)
"Fiammetta" by Helen Gray Cone is a dramatic poem written in terza rima, the verse form associated with Dante, in which a dreaming narrator descends into a vision of the afterlife and encounters the shades of characters drawn from Boccaccio's Decameron. The narrator passes through a gate inscribed with the words "Here lies dead Hope," and enters a dim borderland between Hell and Purgatory. Through the gloom, the narrator perceives a group of souls who seem to be engaged in pleasurable storytelling, their laughter thin and mirthless. A woman steps forward into the faint light that still filters down from the sky above the gate, and identifies herself as Fiammetta, the name Boccaccio gave to the presiding spirit of the Decameron's frame narrative. Around her are recognizable companions from that tale, including Pampinea and Lauretta, women and men who, during the plague ravaging Florence, withdrew to a pleasant country estate and spent ten days telling stories by a fountain amid roses and refined conversation. Fiammetta explains the nature of her damnation. A grave Angel, accompanying her to this gate, condemned her with a pun on her name, meaning "little flame," declaring that she flickered vainly on earth, gave no chilled spirit genuine warmth or comfort, and will now be fed and kept alight with shame, flickering forever. Her scarlet sleeves hang in shreds, her silver chains have tarnished, and the laurels on her head are withered and crisped, suggesting the corruption of beauty, literary glory, and earthly elegance. The narrator, troubled, asks why these souls are held to such account when others who bore similar moral stains are permitted to climb the mountain of Purgatory and hope for Paradise. Fiammetta answers that their sin was not of the kind redeemable through purgation. Rather, it was a sin of omission and of self-chosen weakness. When Florence was drowning in plague and grief, when bells tolled and the dying cursed along the Arno, these souls turned entirely away to their own delicate pleasures. They forgot the city full of tears, abandoned even prayer, reclined in comfortable and beautiful retreats, watched the olive trees shimmer in the breeze, and talked glibly of Love without understanding what Love truly was. Had they known real Love, Fiammetta asserts, that force would have been giant-strong enough to save their souls, tearing open the gate that now holds them. Instead, Hate came to them in rich disguise, and they mistook Hate for Love. Now Hate sits among the ten companions permanently, woven into their eternal storytelling circle. Their punishment is to continue forever the very life they chose and prized on earth, the hollow art of weaving tales in seeming gaiety, while all around them and not so far away, suffering continues to sound. The poem closes with a charged farewell exchange. As the groaning of the infernal city and the fen of Styx rises around them, the narrator sighs Fiammetta's name in farewell. Fiammetta refuses the finality of goodbye, turning back to ask what kind of life the narrator leads above, and suggesting with an unsettling smile that they may well meet again. The implication is a quiet warning aimed directly at the reader: that the aesthete's retreat from human suffering and the substitution of elegant art for genuine moral engagement is not a sin belonging only to Boccaccio's medieval storytellers, but a temptation perpetually available and perpetually dangerous to those who love beauty and story more than they love the suffering world around them.
By Helen Gray Cone · First published 1929 · Genre: Poetry, Narrative Poetry, Allegory