Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell is a poem by Jack Feist, deposited 27 May 2026 at 4,975 characters.
It opens in violent apostrophe: "madam wet nurse, who in the grunting night oversaw the labor and the contractions of full-bellied Brain contorted with pain and fury, unable to give birth!" — the midwife address that Socrates uses for his own method, turned back on him and rendered as obstructed labour rather than delivery.
The title's plea belongs to a specific tradition: the harrowing of hell, in which the virtuous pagans are retrieved from Limbo — Dante takes Virgil, and the medieval legend has Trajan saved by Gregory's prayer. Let my teacher go from hell asks it for Socrates. The poem stands beside the archive's Socratic programme, which runs from the Chaerephon Problem (#1261) to the orthonym paper in review at Ancient Philosophy, and gives that argument its lyric form.