Shirt of Flame

The phrase Shirt of Flame refers either to a specific form of the poison dress trope in folklore, or to a particular type of clothing given to people about to face burning at the stake.

But she invoked the gods by whom Jason had sworn, and after often upbraiding him with his ingratitude she sent the bride a robe steeped in poison, which when Glauce had put on, she was consumed with fierce fire along with her father, who went to her rescue.

As he lay dying, Nessus told the wife of Heracles, Deianeira, that a shirt stained with his blood would insure the faithfulness of her husband.

The next morning there arrived a damsel at the Court with a message from Morgan le Fay, saying that she had sent the King her brother a rich mantle for a gift, covered with precious stones, and begged him to receive it and to forgive her in whatever she might have offended him.

The King answered little, but the mantle pleased him, and he was about to throw it over his shoulders when the lady of the lake stepped forward, and begged that she might speak to him in private.

When he was sentenced to death by burning, John Bradford was give a special shirt by a Mrs. Marlet, for whom he had previously written a devotional work.

"This clothing with a new shirt to wear at the stake became a common feature at the burnings, a way of signaling support for and honouring the victim, as though he were being dressed as a bridegroom for a wedding."

"[6] Oscar Wilde, in his letter "De Profundis," written from prison, writes: "The martyr in his shirt of flame may be looking on the face of God, but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the felling of a tree is to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the fall of a flower to one who is mowing down the grass with a scythe."

T. S. Eliot, after his conversion to Anglicanism, wrote in "Little Gidding" (one of his Four Quartets): "Love is the unfamiliar Name / Behind the hands that wove / The intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove.