Elizabeth Coggeshall (Florida State University)
Dante Notes / December 19, 2025
Earnest and desperate love songs are having a moment in the 2025 American pop music scene. Tearful TikTok videos about breakups and rejection are driving trends, sending new tracks like sombr’s “back to friends” and “undressed” (2025) to the top of the charts. Video makers beckon to the camera while lip-synching Ravyn Lenae’s situationship anthem “Love Me Not” (2024). TikTokers are also resurrecting older songs about longing: Charli XCX’s pandemic hit “party 4 u” (2020) and even Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” (1994) both saw viral moments in the first half of 2025, having been rediscovered by new audiences. These songs deal with the pain of your lover not coming through, leaving you alone to yearn for them in their absence.
Beyond longing, defiant songs about love and death are also surging. Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars collaborated on “Die with a Smile,” the closer on Gaga’s 2025 album Mayhem: an apocalyptic power ballad about holding your lover at the end of the world.[i] Similarly, the closer on Benson Boone’s 2025 American Heart, “Young American Heart,” recounts the tale of Boone’s near-fatal car crash in his teens. Boone joyously belts out the lyrics of the rousing chorus:
If I'm gonna die a young American
And this was the final night we'd ever have again
I'd be just fine as long as I'm wherever you are
'Cause you stole my young American heart.
On social media platforms everywhere, users swoon, responding with hearts and “Loudly Crying Face” emojis. After all, who wouldn’t want to feel a love so fierce you would die for it?
To be clear, most of us wouldn’t want that, if we thought about it. But music—especially the angst-ridden, intensely intimate, emo-adjacent lyricism that is currently enjoying a renaissance in the pop scene—is less concerned with rational argument and more invested in making you feel something. And it’s apparently working: the kids are feeling it.
While young lovers and pop-music fans might be reconnecting with the acute pains and soaring highs of love, these music-driven emotional flights of course aren’t new in 2025. Every era of pop music builds its assumptions about love into its lyrics, and young listeners often get their first taste of literary analysis as they tease apart the cryptic allusions and obscure narratives of their favorite love songs. As literature professors, we should take this seriously, harnessing young readers’ ability to analyze pop lyrics as poetry, and transferring that ability to our classrooms.
Nowhere is such a harnessing more effective than in the analysis of Inferno 5. After all, who was a bigger pop music fan than Francesca da Rimini? We often think of Francesca first and foremost as a reader, and she of course was: she tells us as much directly in the second half of her narrative.[ii] But she was almost certainly as much a listener as she was a reader: much of the poetry she weaves into her narrative she would have been equally as likely to encounter in oral performance as in writing.[iii] The jesters, minstrels, musicians, and entertainers that frequented the courts—disdained as they may have been by literati like Petrarch—were great disseminators of culture. And recent scholarship has contested the thesis of the so-called “divorce” of poetry from music in late medieval Italy[iv]: Camboni, Ciabattoni, and Lannutti, building on earlier work by Joachim Schulze, have all unearthed sufficient evidence to conclude that the distinction between poetry and music implied by the absence of musical notation in the manuscript tradition doesn’t imply the same separation in circulation.[v] In fact, there is a growing body of evidence that several of Dante’s own lyrics were written to be performed musically.[vi]
Francesca da Rimini was so taken with the lyrics of her era that not only had she committed many of the pop music anthems of her day to memory, she had integrated them into the very narrative of her life (and death) experience. “Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende,” she sings to the pilgrim, using the lexicon of popular lyrics to justify Paolo’s undying love for her and hers for him, their mutual willingness to offer their lives at the altar of passion. “Foco d’amore in gentil cor s’aprende / come vertute in petra prezïosa,” Guinizzelli’s song had insisted. Dante’s would, too, later: “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa.” The songs of the late Duecento praise the kind of feverish, almost fanatical love that ignited between Paolo and Francesca, a passion that, when unreciprocated, leaves the lover ill with longing (cue the black hearts and loudly crying faces). But, as the lyrics also make clear, the love of a cor gentil is a love worth dying for. The young Francesca had heard those songs too many times, and they came to define her expectations for what love was supposed be like: natural, intense, all-consuming, fatal.
Even if Francesca didn’t encounter these texts as music, contemporary pop music is the closest analogue to her experience of these lyrics. Young people today memorize pop lyrics in the same way that the young Francesca memorized those of the stilnovisti. Taking this thesis as my starting premise, for the last decade I have taught Inferno 5 alongside contemporary pop music, using love songs to illustrate the cultural assumptions we passively make about love. Love hurts, the songs say. Love makes you love someone even when you know you shouldn’t. Love makes you do things you otherwise wouldn’t do. Love sweeps you off your feet. Love is worth it, even if it means Hell is waiting on the other side. A great love is worth dying for. Just as Francesca did, as young listeners we integrate these assumptions into our expectations for lived experience, and—against our better judgment—we seek loves that conform to the emotional fantasies laid out in pop songs and rom-coms. In other words, we unthinkingly subject reason to desire.
The Irish singer-songwriter Hozier recently gave a gift to dantisti everywhere, with his Dante-inspired album Unreal Unearth (2023). Students are flocking to courses on the Divine Comedy as a result, eager to learn more about the voices and themes from songs they have been belting out loudly in their cars for months. Hozier’s track “Francesca” is now a classic of the loudly-crying-face-emoji genre: Directly referencing Dante’s characters, the song adopts Francesca’s perspective and her philosophy. Digging in her heels, expressing no regret for her love or the actions it led her to, Hozier’s Francesca intones:
Now that it's done,
There's not one thing that I would change.
My life was a storm, since I was born:
How could I fear any hurricane?
If someone asked me at the end,
I'll tell them put me back in it.
Darling, I would do it again, ah, ah,
If I could hold you for a minute,
Darling, I'd go through it again, ah, ah.
The hurricane effect returns sonically in a swirling round at the end of the song. As the singer lilts “I would not change it each time / Heaven is not fit to house a love / Like you and I,” overlapping lyric tracks paint the effect of a sweeping, swirling wind that engulfs the audience, placing us at the center of Francesca’s hurricane. We are swept off our feet, too.
As Hozier himself often says when introducing the song, the lyrics are designed to turn Dante’s punishment on its head: “There’s no punishment,” Hozier explains, “in spending eternity arm-in-arm with the person you would die for.”[vii] In response to the video, TikTok users report out-of-body experiences, hyperventilating, dying. One user replied, “I need that kinda love in my life,” punctuated by loud-crying-face and black heart emojis.[viii] Much like Francesca, the poster yearns for the kind of love that would overpower and dominate, a love that, as the poem makes clear, carries fatal consequences for those who neglect their social responsibilities. If asked in class, students will criticize Francesca’s choices as naïve, childish, selfish, manipulative, self-sabotaging. But would they say the same of Hozier’s “Francesca”? This is the kind of ethical reflection we do in class, and it resonates with the students long after.
My favorite song to teach alongside the canto is Lorde’s “The Louvre,” off her 2017 album Melodrama, which my students now scarcely recall from elementary or middle school. It makes similar claims about love: The song describes a giddy summer fling that is so powerful its lovers deserve a spot hanging in the Louvre—“down the back,” Lorde sings, “but who cares, still the Louvre”—where they would take their place proudly alongside other famous lovers like Francesca da Rimini. The fling starts joyfully, intoxicatingly, and, like a drug, it has its ups and downs. Eventually the singer begins to recognize the pain she’s causing to others (“Blow all my friendships / to sit in hell with you”) and to herself (“Okay I know that you are not my type—still I fall”). But she ignores her rational impulse for the “supernatural” feeling of love that rushes over her. At that point, the music swells with her feeling, whipping around the lyric “Just move in close to me, closer, you'll feel it coasting” as we hear her voice rising and falling in volume, whisking her voice closer to the microphone each time she says “close.” The swirling hurricane effect returns.
The clincher is in the chorus:
A rush at the beginning
I get caught up, just for a minute
But lover, you're the one to blame
All that you're doing
Can you hear the violence?
Megaphone to my chest
Broadcast the boom, boom, boom, boom
And make 'em all dance to it.
As she sings the word “rush,” her voice rises up the scale, climbing higher to replicate the rise in emotion. Then it falls, only to rise again on “caught up.” She paints the text tonally as we hear the ups and downs of the relationship. Then the wheeling sound returns, as she hits “you’re” twice in the next sequence, shifting the blame for that whirlwind of emotion to her lover, whose “violence” is the sound of her beating heart. Finally, she decides to make something of all this feeling: she will broadcast that violent heartbeat and make us, her fans, dance to it.
As Lorde herself says, it’s a simple song: “You know, it’s just about new love, and how complicated it can be sometimes, and how infuriating and how, like, perfect it is as well.”[ix] She is describing the experience of a young crush, a fling, new love, with its intoxications and its violence. At the same time, she’s giving just one picture of a kind of love that dantisti will find all too familiar: that love that rushes in and sweeps you off your feet, tossing you about without your reason to contain it. What’s more, she is cognizant of her role as an artist in making the kind of music that people like Francesca will fall in love to. Of the guitar sound mimicking the beating heart in the song, she says “I’m very aware of what that kind of guitar feels like to people.” In other words, she knows precisely the seductive effects of that power-pop guitar riff, and she is sending us all off to dance to it—and to imitate the passionate love her song recounts.
By transferring her violent heartbeat to a power-pop guitar riff that we will dance and fall in love to, Lorde is (unwittingly, I think) grappling with a similar question to Dante’s own: Does the poet also have a role in having made Francesca believe that you can’t resist love? Is it his fault that she believes that it’s an overwhelming force? Is he responsible for her belief that you have to return the love of a worthy lover who loves you, even if it spells pain, suffering, death? In class we close by reflecting on Dante’s responsibility as regards not only Francesca but all his readers. What if he steers us astray? What if our songs do? Francesca’s downfall was that she read (and listened) only for confirmation of what she believed, not to be changed by it. She acted out what she heard in the songs and read in the stories, and she didn’t pause to reflect on the pain she was causing herself and others. I impress this point upon the students: just as we have to read Francesca’s speech carefully and see what a part she took in her own damnation, so we have to read Dante’s poem—and pop songs, movies, novels, television shows, posts, newspapers, stories, other people’s faces—critically, not taking anything at face value.
[i] In an LA Times interview, Gaga explains what grabbed her about Mars’s idea for the song: “It was the lyrics—this idea of a song that was about what we would do if the world was ending. I just remember feeling like it was a song that people needed to hear.” Lady Gaga, in an interview with Mikael Wood, “Lady Gaga on Coachella, LG7 and the ‘slightly subversive’ ‘Die with a Smile’,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2024, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2024-12-19/lady-gaga-die-with-a-smile-bruno-mars-grammys-coachella-interview.
[ii] On Francesca as reader, particularly with reference to the second half of her narrative, see the excellent studies by Elena Lombardi, “Francesca and the Others,” in Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 154-186; and Lombardi, “Reading,” in Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2012), 212-247.
[iii] On the role of music in Italian courts, see the foundational studies collected in F. Alberto Gallo, Music in the Castle: Troubadours, Books, and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries trans. Anna Herklotz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[iv] On the “divorce” hypothesis, see Aurelio Roncaglia, “Sul ‘divorzio’ tra musica e poesia nel Duecento Italiano,” in L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento IV, ed. Agostino Ziino (Centro di Studi sull’Ars Nova italiana, 1978), 365-397.
[v] Among other studies by these influential authors, see Maria Clothilde Camboni, “Dante, Music, and Lyric,” Textual Cultures 15.2 (2022): 231–54; Francesco Ciabattoni, “Music and Dante’s Early Poetry,” Italian Quarterly 58.229-230 (2021): 5-20; Maria Sofia Lannutti, “Intertestualità, imitazione metrica e melodia nella lirica romanza delle origini,” Medioevo romanzo 32.1 (2008): 3-28; Lannutti, “I trovatori e la musica nelle corti,” in Il contributo italiano alla storia del pensiero. Musica, ed. Sandro Cappelletto (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2017), 52-59; Lannutti, “Musica,” in La lirica italiana. Un lessico fondamentale (secoli XIII-XIV), ed. Lorenzo Geri et al. (Rome: Carocci, 2021), 201-211. I thank Francesco Ciabattoni for his valuable bibliographical guidance.
[vi] See Ciabattoni: “Based on this evidence, we can conclude that in some specific cases a musical setting was possible or even desirable for the young Dante, who possessed a clear awareness of the destination and mode of reception for various poems” (“Music and Dante’s Early Poetry,” 16). See also the discussions in Camboni, “Dante, Music, and Lyric,” especially 245-254; and Maria Sofia Lannutti, “Per una preistoria dell'Ars Nova italiana: Dante e la poesia intonata,” in Filologia e interdisciplinarità. Atti del II convegno della Società italiana di Filogia romanza "La filologia romanza e i saperi umanisitici" (Roma, 3-6 ottobre 2018), ed. Antonio Pioletti et al. (Rome: Bagatto Libri, 2021) 143-56.
[vii] Hozier, in a concert video posted by user Ash (@ashhole30), TikTok, September 13, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/@ashhole30/video/7278361676775263531.
[viii] Reply by .xsram (@.xsram), December 11, 2023, to post by user Ash (@ashhole30), TikTok, September 13, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/@ashhole30/video/7278361676775263531.
[ix] Lorde, in conversation with Henry Oliver, “The Louvre,” Lorde: Behind the Melodrama, podcast audio, The Spinoff, June 10, 2021.