Georgia Douglas Johnson’s speaker describes love as a Hell she keeps re-entering. She says she “lived in Hell the other day,” wrapped in angry flames, but those horrors faded like ghosts. Then she says she lived there again even today—yet the fierce flames die away as soon as she is “submerged with kisses.” Johnson captures a painful cycle: love burns and frightens her, but closeness briefly puts the fire out. Still, the final line complicates that relief. The tears on her pillow remain, so the suffering hasn’t ended.
The mood is intimate and unsettled, mixing desire, fear, and sorrow. Hell here feels less like a distant punishment and more like a state she can’t escape because the same force that hurts her also comforts her. The short lines swing quickly between torment and forgetting, which leaves the reader inside that instability.