[jasonhuff]

i'm currently reading Hecht's collected earlier poems, and there is one poem that i really like, the feast of stephen, and i'm wondering what everyone thinks about it. and maybe a little explication of it. i think there is more going on than i am getting, and hey, it intrigues me. so any thoughts, comments, opinions, etc.


The Feast of Stephen

I

The coltish horseplay of the locker room,
Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls,
With shameless blends of civet, musk and sweat,
Loud with the cap-gun snapping of wet towels
Under the steel0ribbed cages of bare bulbs,
In some such setting of thick basement pipes
And janitorial realities
Boys for the first time frankly eye each other,
Inspect each others’ bodies at close range,
And what they see is not so much another
As a strange, possible version of themselves,
And all the sparring dance, adrenal life,
Tense, jubilant nimbleness, is but a vague,
Busy, unfocused ballet of self-love.

II

If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body
Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,
Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,
And known to captains as esprit de corps.
What is this brisk fraternity of timing,
Pivot and lobbing arc, or indirection,
Mens sana in men’s sauna, in the flush
Of health and toilets, private and corporal glee,
These fleet caroms, pliés and genuflections
Before the salmon-leap, the leaping fountain
All sheathed in glistening light, flexed and alert?
From the vast echo-chamber of the gym,
Among the scumbled shouts and shrill of whistles,
The bounced basketball sound of a leather whip.

III

Think of those barren places where men gather
To act in the terrible name of rectitude,
Of acned shame, punk’s pride, muscle or turf,
The bully’s thin superiority.
Think of the Sturm-Abteilungs Kommandant
Who loves Beethoven and collects Degas,
Or the blond boys in jeans whose narrowed eyes
Are focussed by some hard and smothered lust,
Who lounge in a studied mimicry of ease,
Flick their live butts into standing weeds,
And comb their hair in the mirror of cracked windows
Of an abandoned warehouse where they keep
In darkened readiness for their occasion
The rope, the chains, handcuffs and gasoline.

IV

Out in the rippled heat of a neighbor’s field,
In the kilowatts of noon, they’ve got one cornered.
The bugs are jumping, and the burly youths
Strip to the waist for the hot work ahead.
They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,
Having flung down their wet and salty garments
At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.
He watches sharply these superbly tanned
Figures with a swimmer’s chest and shoulders,
A miler’s thighs, with their self-conscious grace,
And in between their sleek, converging bodies,
Brilliantly oiled and burnished by the sun,
he catches a brief glimpse of bloodied hair
And hears an unintelligible prayer.

[A. E. Stallings]

Well, I'm with you, Jason. There appears to be more going on here than I am catching at first glance. The Feast of Stephen is the day after Christmas--December 26th. (You remember the carol, Good King Wenceslas...). HOwever, this poem appears set in summer.

My wild, off-the-cuff guess is that some hate crime--racial or homophobic--was committed against someone with the name of Stephen. Stephen was the first Christian martyr--he was stoned to death. His martyrdom is related in the book of Acts. Saul, of course, is the name of the apostle Paul before his blinding epiphany on the road to Damascus.

Acts 22:20 (spoken by Paul):

20 And when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of them that slew him.

[Susan McLean]

What I get out of this poem is a meditation on what turns young men into basketball stars, or bullies, or Storm Troopers--and a conclusion that the three have more in common than we might like to think. The last stanza I take to be alluding to an anti-Semitic incident in which blond young men stone to death a Jewish young man named Saul (identified by implication with the Christian martyr St. Stephen). From its context, the stanza suggests that it is the same competitiveness and hormones and macho posturing that in a different context might drive the same men to be good athletes.

[A. E. Stallings]

Susan, I like your interpretation of the themes and how they braid together.

The Saul of the last stanza is almost certainly not the victim, however, but an onlooker whose guilt is that he does nothing to stop the crime. (The crime so many committed in World War 2, for instance.) This is made clear from the biblical allusion, the story in Acts which the title and the name Saul handily points us to. In fact, except for a few seemingly-modern details, the last stanza may well simply be a retelling of the story, or an up-dating, rather than merely an allusion.

They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,

(That is, they gather stones from it--the stones are loose--for the stoning. Actually, Stephen is the patron saint of stone masons!)

Having flung down their wet and salty garments
At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.

As the verse from Acts mentions, Saul actually keeps the garments of those who stoned Stephen.

[Susan McLean]

Yes, Alicia, I can see that you are right that Saul is an onlooker and not the victim, and that the poem is more meaningful if the poet adopts the point of view of another one of the culpable, instead of standing above it and saying YOU are the guilty ones. That quote from Acts is highly relevant, and I was not familiar with it.

[A. E. Stallings]

I can't say I was familiar with the quotation either. I just like researching a mystery... But this is definitely one poem where most readers would benefit from a foot note!

[jasonhuff]

it's a shame i hadn't read this poem before mr hecht guest lariated.

[jasonhuff]

it's a shame i hadn't read this poem before he guest lariated. we could have had him explicate some.

[Tim Murphy]

Jason, Your fairy Lariat grants your wish. I faxed the thread to Tony, and here are his comments:

Thanks for sending me the exchanges about "The Feast of Stephen." Much serious thought has been given to it, for which I can be nothing but grateful. Both Susan MacLean and A.E. Stallings have sound insights into the sources and subject of the poem which is about "what turns young men into basketball stars, or bullies, or Storm Troopers--and a conclusion that the three have more in common than we might like to think," as one of them said. The poem's title is meant to remind the reader of the description in Acts of the Apostles (7:58) of the martyrdom of St. Stephen, at which the Saul who would in time become St. Paul was present as a passive participant. Only the final section of the poem is clearly related to the title and the biblical passage. The first three parts merely lead up to what, at the end, becomes a lynch mob, whether of long ago or today. I remember being struck by the fact that not a few Renaissance paintings of martyrdoms presented the torturers and executioners as vigorous and athletic young men, hateful in the glee with which they set about their task, but admirable in their physiques and sturdy bearing. I had in mind such paintings as Pollaiuolo's "St. Sebastian," Luca Signorelli's "The Flagellation," and Carravagio's "Martyrdom of St. Matthew." It seemed worth meditating on what could lead men into such barbarity. And it seemed that competitiveness that begins early in comparatively innocent games, encourages youths to "beat" one another in sports; and it would not be too great a step from that to the administration of real beatings. Everything about domestic propoganda created by the Nazis for home consumption focused on images of Nordic supermen. The second section of the poem is full of puns, jokes that make pleasantries of what is potentially dangerous and sinister, and which appears without disguise in Section III. Jokes, as Freud pointed out, are a means of concealing aggression. The seed of all these dangers lies in that "self-love" mentioned in the first section which is indifferent to the condition of others, and which is purely selfish. It is a natural state of infants, and it endures for a while, and some never abandon it, remaining cruel their whole lives. The four parts constitute an account of the evolution of the persecutor.

Once again, I'm grateful for the thought and attention you have give my poem. --Anthony Hecht

[jasonhuff]

tim, thanks for faxing the thread to mr hecht. it was nice to read his explication of the poem.

jason