David Lynch, In Heaven (Lady In The Radiator)

Richard Strauss, Im Abendrot (sung by Jessye Norman)

Cut by Sylvia Plath

For Susan O'Neill Roe

What a thrill ---
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man ---

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump ---
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

Gustave Courbet, The Calm Sea, 1869

Edvard Munch, The Death Chamber, 1896

David Roberts, Colossal figures in front of the Great Temple of Aboo-Simbel, 1838

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Jubilee Street

George Bellows, Club Night, 1907

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Umbrellas, 1886

Throbbing Gristle, Hot on the Heals of Love

Arnold Newman, Pablo Picasso, Cannes, 1956

Raymond Depardon, Glasgow, 1980

Ivan Aivazovsky, Shipwreck, 1856

Wilco, The Lonely 1

Leonora Carrington, The Ancestor, 1968

Wilco, Misunderstood

Echo & The Bunnymen, Ocean Rain

At the base of the well, Dante finds himself within a large frozen lake: Cocytus, the Ninth Circle of Hell. Trapped in the ice, each according to his guilt, are punished sinners guilty of treachery against those with whom they had special relationships. The lake of ice is divided into four concentric rings (or "rounds") of traitors corresponding, in order of seriousness, to betrayal of family ties, betrayal of community ties, betrayal of guests, and betrayal of lords. This is in contrast to the popular image of Hell as fiery; as Ciardi writes, "The treacheries of these souls were denials of love (which is God) and of all human warmth. Only the remorseless dead center of the ice will serve to express their natures. As they denied God's love, so are they furthest removed from the light and warmth of His Sun. As they denied all human ties, so are they bound only by the unyielding ice." This final, deepest level of hell is reserved for traitors, betrayers and oathbreakers (its most famous inmate is Judas Iscariot).

Gustave Doré, Dante and Virgil in the Ninth Circle of Hell, 1861

Joe Coleman, Faith, 1996

Titian, Tityus, 1548