Hell
Sorry to disappoint you, but unlike Dante's Inferno or Milton's Paradise Lost, "A Season in Hell" is not literally taking us down into Hell. Instead, the hell from which our speaker is broadcasting...
The Criminal
So we know the speaker is not in Hell, but he likes to say he is. By the same token, he's not actually a criminal, but he sure enjoys describing himself in this way. In line 6 we learn, the speaker...
The Worker
Like his vacay in hell or his criminal background, the worker is used by the speaker as a kind of symbolic self-description. In this case, however, the speaker's a lot more ambivalent about identif...
Escape
Wanna get away? Our speaker sure does. We guess that's a pretty natural reaction to, you know, being stuck in Hell. Early in the poem, he says, "Here I am on the Breton shore. How the towns glow in...