Week 39: Parable
The Return Of The Prodigal Son is really seven parables in one, each teaching a different lesson with different people and all lessons leading to the same conclusion: there is a place for us!
09/23:
TWL, Lines 331-359 Thirty Good Lines
331 Here is no water but only rock
332 Rock and no water and the sandy road
333 The road winding above among the mountains
334 Which are mountains of rock without water
335 If there were water we should stop and drink
336 Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
337 Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
338 If there were only water amongst the rock
339 Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
340 Here one can neither stand not lie nor sit
341 There is not even silence in the mountains
342 But dry sterile thunder without rain
343 There is not even solitude in the mountains
344 But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
345 From doors of mudcracked houses
346 If there were water
347 And no rock
348 If there were rock
349 And also water
350 And water
351 A spring
352 A pool among the rock
353 If there were the sound of water only
354 Not the cicada
355 And dry grass singing
356 But sound of water over a rock
357 Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
358 Drop drop drip drop drop drop drop
359 But there is no water
331. THIRTY GOOD LINES: T.S. Eliot wrote to Ford Madox Ford in 1923 that there were “about thirty good lines in The Waste Land, can you find them?” Ford declined to take the bait, so Eliot answered himself in a subsequent letter: “As for the lines I mention, you need not scratch your head over them. They are the 29 lines of the water-dripping song in the last part.” See Eliot, Letters II. A few years earlier, in Reflections on Contemporary Poetry, Egoist (November 1917), Eliot had called Ford’s poem Antwerp (1917) “the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war.” Ford’s poem graphically describes “the trench of gray mud ...turned to a brown purple drain...” See note 61 for references to the war within The Waste Land.
343. LIMBO: Compare the absence of silence, of solitude and the presence of a dry thunder to the suspended state of limbo in Dante, Inferno 4.41-42 (see note 64). See also Brooks (note 330), comparing these descriptions to the different sounds and presences to come, when a third will begin to walk beside the travelers (lines 360-366) and the thunder will bring rain and words with meaning (lines 400-423).
357. THE HERMIT-THRUSH: Eliot: “This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) ‘it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats.... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.’ Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.” See Frank M. Chapman, Handbook (1896).
Lines 331-359 present the longest stretch of the poem in Eliot’s own voice without apparent allusions or the need for translation, but the hermit thrush's call at the end of this passage represents the hint of, or the longing for, a third voice. This itself alludes to the hermit thrush in Whitman, Memories:
“4.
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death's outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die.)
...
13.
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the
bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!
You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)
Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.
...
16.
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades' hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my
soul,
Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying ever-altering
song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling,
flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet
again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with
spring.
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing
with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full
of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to
keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this
for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.”
09/24:
I. The Shepherd
“What one of you who murmur,
disapproving of the company I keep,
Who grumble at these sinners
drawing near that they may hear,
Who complain about the publicans
so hungry for my words and
Would not have me receive them
at my table —which of you,
If you were a hired shepherd, and
you lost one of your hundred sheep,
Would not leave the ninety nine
in the ambles of your wilderness
To go after the one who strayed
into the mountains? Wouldn’t you
Be relieved to find your little one,
to lift him up, to carry him on
your shoulders?
And who among you, coming home
with news to share with everyone,
Would hesitate to call your friends
and neighbors round to celebrate
The simple fact that you had found
that little one that you had sought
And could restore him to the good
folds of your pasture? Tell me,
would you not?”
09/25:
II. The Housekeeper
“So will the angels cheer in heaven, and
how much more their cheering for
The one returning soul than for
the ninety nine who never wandered?”
And even as the Pharisees
continued with their murmuring, he
Kept talking to them, questioning
and challenging them with parables.
“Imagine you are a woman now
with only ten coins to your name,
And then suppose you find one day
that you had lost one of your coins:
Which of you would not turn up the lights
and sweep out your entire house,
Looking everywhere until you
found that one lost piece of silver,
And in that coin would you not find
the grounds to dance, a cause to call
Your friends and neighbors, all of them,
to share the joy with you? I tell you,
So do heaven’s angels sing and dance,
God’s very name pronounced
With celebration every time
a single sinner simply turns
around.
09/26:
III. The Prodigal Son
There was a man who had two sons
and the one who was the younger stood
Up to his father. Father, he said,
give me the part of your estate
I would inherit now, as I
can’t wait around for you to die.
And so the father, still alive,
took what he had and gave it to
his sons.
Then, with his share, the younger son,
who could have been a blessed one
And always had a place to stay,
within a week was out the door,
Taking a different road and looking for
a distant land, somewhere to waste
The substance of his portion, and
the road took him where he meant
to go,
And there he lived in riotous
abandon, spending all he had,
But then a mighty famine came
and he became a beggar of the land,
An immigrant among the citizens,
consigned to work their fields
And feed their pigs, willing to line
his belly with the husks left for
the swine.
09/27:
IV. The Road Home
But when no one gave him anything,
he started talking to himself,
Questioning, remembering
how servants working for his father
Always had enough to eat,
and bread to spare, he said, and here
Am I, so far away from where
I was, with less than I need to stay
alive.
I will stand, he said, and go back to
my father. Father, I will say,
I have sinned against the heavens, and you
have seen me. I have turned away,
But now I fall before you, one
no longer worthy to be called your son.
Instead, I beg you, let me be
one of the hired servants in
your fields.
And the son arose and started walking
back towards his father’s place,
But when he was still a long way off
the father saw the suffering of
His child and he was greatly moved.
He ran to him with open arms,
He fell on him with a strong embrace,
he held him to his heart and kissed
his face.
09/28:
V. The Celebration!
The son, just as he planned, began
to say, Father, I have sinned against
The heavens, and in your sight I am
no longer worthy to be your son,
But before he reached the begging part
to work as a servant in the fields
The father wiped his words away
and turned toward the servants he
had hired.
Bring out my finest robe, he said,
and give it to my son to wear,
Let him have rings for his fingers
and put new shoes upon his feet,
And then bring out the fatted calf,
have it quartered, chopped and cut
Into the finest veal for our table
that we may eat and celebrate
the day,
And then as they prepared the feast
and as the plates of veal were passed
The father rose and raised his glass
and gave a toast to all the house:
My son was dead, he said, but now
he is alive! My son was lost
But here again, you see, my son
is found! My little one is home
at last!
09/29:
Moleskin 5.2: Rivers
My first home was Owatonna, Minnesota, a town built on the banks of the Straight River, Straight, or Owatonna, being the name of a Dakota princess who was first healed by mineral springs on a tributary, Maple Creek. I lived there as an infant and remember nothing of it. My second home was in Billings, Montana, however many blocks away from the Yellowstone River: I was a toddler here, and I do not recall anything about my toddler years. Third was Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the mighty Mississippi courses through; we lived in a trailer park just east of the Miss, but my memories are only third party suggestions: I am told I first learned my address here, and being told this enough afterwards I still remember it. Fourth was Maddock, North Dakota, with no rivers of its own but the Big Coulee two miles west and the Sheyenne five miles south. I remember Maddock —our house anyway —but not the rivers. Fifth was New Hope, Minnesota, four miles west again of the Mississippi, still in the days before I had ever heard of Huck Finn.
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