Make a woman of me,
You prayed to a dark deity,
When the virgin seed crisply cracked
Between you and me.
Your eager body leaned,
You couldn't help,
Like a tree bent back
In a strong ripping wind.
The mountain shook,
The earth floor moved.
You craved and moaned,
Scratched by the fingers of the dark.
You came like a vicious sin
Bursting banks at the vital seam.
The seed crackled to leaf
And we giggled ourselves silly,
Thanking our accomplishment,
We walked off with but a tinsel trophy.
4 comments:
The innocent looking poem contains some dangerous cross-current in it. It has its root fertility cult. In vegetation myth, we know, the union of the earth goddess with her mortal yet divined lover confirms the continuity of life on earth. Here, the ‘dark deity’+ subjective ‘I’= the lover of the earth goddess= a corn god. They are separate at first, but we find the dark deity engaged in the act in 12th line (‘fingers of the dark’). In the poem, the woman is ‘like a tree’. In the myth of Attis, tree is the symbol of the mother earth. The word ‘seed’ also refers to the vegetation myth. In the Egyptian fertility cult, Osiris, the corn god, receives corn seeds from Isis, the goddess.
What is more subtle in the poem is its balance of power. In the fertility cults, the goddesses play an active role. They are the actress, the corn gods are acted upon. But, the poem opens with the line “Make a woman of me”. It should not be read as, “Make me a woman.” which suggests resourcefulness, authority of the speaker, and invites an equal partner. Unlike this, the first line reveals utter powerlessness. However, the passivity is balanced in 13th and 14th line (‘came’ and ‘bursting’) where the female figure assumes her full vigor. In the 14th line, the poet craftily inserts two words into the phrase ‘banks’ and ‘vital’. Well, have I told yet that water is also linked with vegetation myth? The word ‘vital’ originates from Latin ‘vita’ meaning ‘life’. These two lines are the real enigma of the poem. They can mean ‘life through sin’ referring the Christian mythology. Or it can refer to the myth of Attis, where Cybele, the earth goddess, being his mother, comes to him like a sin. Or I am reading to far!!!
The last three lines bring about a change in tone with the use of ‘giggle’, ‘silly’, ‘accomplishment’, ‘a tinsel trophy’. In the vegetation myth, sexuality is sublime, and the whole poem except the last three lines is adorned with the same ritual description. We have seen the same kind of movement in the other poems of the poet: from sublime to commonplace. The title ‘Trophy’ invites a playful rivalry, and when someone plays for the trophy, the total game becomes an interim period suggesting nothing. That’s why the word ‘accomplishment’ is used that ironically. Here, the poet refers the recent devaluation of sexuality. This is the beginning of the discussion……, I think............
I’m delighted to see Krishna’s comment; delighted to see somebody dragging the poem out of its physical form and stretching it over human knowledge and human perception in general. There’s not a single direct hint at the mythological development of thought in the poem other than the word ‘deity’; yet, Krishna proves that it’s possible to look at the poem with vegetation myths in mind, and it makes sense. Well, this is one essential aspect of mythology: it accounts for the essential human tendencies, tries to puzzle out inborn human mysteries. So, myths are prevalent as long as man lives his life on earth. A seed cracking to leaf is what is going on from eternity, through eternity, to eternity; we can, therefore, call it a universal human condition.
Krishna has pointed out the assumption of authority by the female in line 13 and 14; I think it occurs even before when she ‘craved’ in line 11. Krishna’s remark on the poet’s tendency to move from the sublime to the commonplace is also very interesting! Can we call it the result of an ironic point of view of life? What do you say, Krishna?
shourabh pothobashi
Joyce is known to have said that, the writing done, the author retires from the scene of representation and files his or her fingernails. A work of art achieves its sovereignty when it gains freedom from its creator and finds new creators among its audience.
I'm pleased to see that my readers have taken over the poem , and continue to create it and do the essential business of reading, that is, pushing its frontiers of implications. Krishna's massive approach with its mythological angle on the poem corroborates Shourav's remark that it drags it into new areas of interpretation. While writing the poem,I remember, I did have at the back of my mind the fertility stuff flagged by images like 'seed', 'tree', and so on. But that was eastern, not western. I think, in a branch of Indian philosophy, particularly in the Tantric school, man is the male force while prakriti is the female principle, and the fertility of the latter is proved only by the union of the two, which my mind consummated in the poem at the time of writing. Man is always infertile and woman fertile, and no evolution has ever caused any novel mutation. Now I wonder why I used 'giggle’, ‘silly’, ‘accomplishment’, ‘a tinsel trophy’ etc. with a dry laugh. Perhaps because I thought that the big philosophy was really insincere at the moment, and what was really honest was the instinctual drive that gripped the lovers with a terrific energy of urgency. At such moments, isn't logic a rhetorical pretext for illogic? Just as the speaker in Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' speciously and apparently civilly argues to achieve his very personal end. We can discover and recognize our true selves better, clear of the naughty tangle and dense thicket of our impossible philosophic past if we adopt a nimbler gait and write in a lighter vein. My end-of-the-poem frivolity ( or should I say,'sad infertility'?)is a travesty of that longed-for emancipation. I'm desperate to cast off my dung face.
I would be ignorant as the dawn
That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach
Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses;
I would be- for no knowledge is worth a straw-
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
William Butler Yeats
Well….. It may be out of ‘an ironic point of view of life’, or ‘a nimbler gait’ or ‘write(ing) in a lighter vein’. But our most immediate reaction, however queer they may seem at first, never fails to follow a pattern. And to Freud, we can have peep through our unconscious from our simple reaction. Wait.......I am not going to murder the poem by my poor psychoanalyses. I have some pity, you know. In the reply on my critique of ‘Rhapsody on a Moonlit Night’, the poet turned me over to Foucault saying, “Centuries of mishandling has dirtied and soiled it (sex) into something nasty and noisome, advisedly avoidable.” Foucault, in his ‘History of Sexuality: 1’, says that the European governments tried to reduce sex of its pleasure principle and “to transform the sexual conduct of couples into a concerted economic and political behavior” some 200 years ago. Now, In mythology sex is seen as sacred. And it has been ‘dirtied’ in the present. In the ‘Trophy’ and the ‘Rhapsody on a Moonlit Night’, there are two types of time, one is mythic and another is the present time and both collide and cancel each other. I want to say that the poet’s concept, attitude towards sex remains the same in both poems: the poet loves what he loathes and vice versa.
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