[Clive Watkins]

The Butcher's Wife

While her husband made home deliveries
she made love to swine, boys,
and unshaven beggars
in the back room of the meat shop,
hand rolled sausages tighter than
roman candles ready to explode.

While he cut the heads off chickens
and watched them do their frantic
headless dance, she danced naked
in the village square during the ringing
of the Angelus under a baking sun.
But never without her wide brimmed hat.

Al Ferber

…

Most experienced readers, on opening an anthology of pre-twentieth-century verse, find that, at a glance and without reading any poem through, they are able to form reliable judgements about the forms of the poems displayed on the page before them. The clues include the anthology itself: it can be assumed that most poems written before 1901 were written in established metrical forms or common variants of them. What is more, forms have their characteristic shape on the page. A page of sonnets looks different from a page in common measure or ottava rima. Moreover, it may be possible to tell from their lay-out whether the sonnets are Shakespearean or Petrarchan. If they are sonnets, the best guess will be that they were written in iambic pentameter for the simple reason that most sonnets are: a sonnet in hexameters may for a moment disconcert even a competent reader (as one of mine did recently). All of this is simply an instance of our human inclination to find patterns everywhere; it is how we strive to make sense of the world. (Note 1). Those who assert the primacy of sound in verse sometimes overlook the importance in our literary culture of the shape the poem makes on the page, which is where – still - most lovers of poetry encounter their verse. It was a point not lost on Hardy, a committed metrist and one who was well aware of the role of sound in his poems. (Note 2).

What can we tell about Al Ferber’s poem at first glance?

The poem is in two stanzas of six lines each. The lines seem to be of similar lengths throughout, with the exception of lines 2 and 3. Each stanza ends (in the version I was sent) with an italicized line. Both stanzas start with the same construction, a temporal clause introduced by the conjunction “While”. Each stanza forms one complete sentence. This is a high degree of apparent symmetry and surely licenses a reader to ask what expressive purposes it serves. It seems reasonable to enquire, for instance, what the relationship is between the two italicized lines – parallelism, perhaps, or contrast – and what implications their being highlighted in this way has for what preceded them in each stanza and therefore for the relationship between the lines not in italics. These questions seem likely to be related to the syntactical symmetry of the stanzas.

In each case, the italicized line comes as the culmination of the previous action. For the first stanza, this is the woman’s sexual escapades in the “back room of the meat shop”. The innuendo of the last two lines is clear enough and relates in an obvious way to what preceded it. The conclusion follows in a direct narrative line from what went before (sexual engagement leading to orgasm). From this little story we might deduce with some certainty that the woman was sexually rapacious and had odd tastes; with less certainty, we might suppose that her husband was not able to satisfy what she saw as her needs or that – and this is pure speculation unsupported by the text – his “home deliveries” gave him the opportunity to indulge in sexual escapades of his own.

In the second stanza, however, the relationship between the conclusion and what went before is less clear - or perhaps I should say more complex. While the butcher sets the headless chickens frantically dancing, his wife dances naked in the square. The chickens cannot help but dance: it is a neural response. (I remember seeing this myself as a boy at my grandparents’ place.) It seems unlikely, however, that the woman has no choice, though this is not completely impossible: she might be unbalanced and subject to some kind of compulsive illness. After all, the sexual conduct apparently attributed to her in the first stanza falls, in one respect at least, outside the range of the normal. On the other hand, it is possible to read her dancing as a bizarre contribution to their marital dialogue, perhaps a way of embarrassing her husband by publicly repudiating conventional sexual mores (implied by the reference to the angelus) and affirming the vigour and claims of the flesh. As to the syntax, a shift occurs in the force of the conjunction, “While”. As it first appears, its primary function is to assert a coincidence of time: her husband is out, and she entertains her lovers. In the second stanza, it has acquired a causative quality: one thing leads to another - because of her husband’s behaviour, she dances naked in the square. Several things occasion this shift. One is the symmetry itself. Encountering the repetition, I feel inclined to wonder whether it is casual, no more than a verbal ornament, and begin to believe it is not. The second is the interplay of “dance” and “danced” within a single line: “headless dance, she danced naked”. The third is the fact that the two different kinds of dance are observed - that of the headless chickens by the husband and, by implication by the wife, who, so we might imagine, knows about her husband’s beheading of the chickens, and the woman’s dance by the inhabitants of the town. (Both, of course, are observed by the narrator, a point to which I shall return.)

In the last analysis, however, I am not sure the poem allows us to form any clear view about the relationship of the protagonists and about their motivation, and this seems to me a flaw. All we have is two bizarre though it may be comic episodes.

So, what about those italicized lines? The first, “ roman candles ready to explode, is a contrastive simile for the sausages referred to in the previous line, themselves a metaphor for the tumescent phallus the woman’s ministrations induce in her lovers. But there is a problem about this. A Roman candle, like an erect phallus, erupts from its tip, whereas, though sausages may burst from one end, in my experience they most often erupt through a longitudinal split. To some, this may seem a pedestrian and unimaginative and therefore irrelevant point to make, but it is not.

Here is a passage from an essay by Robert Graves, published initially under the title “Poetry’s False Face” and later re-issued as “Technique in Poetry”. It concerns Tennyson’s well-known poem “The Eagle”. I apologise for quoting at some length; I suspect the passage will not be available to most members; the whole essay from which it comes is most instructive:


…The Eagle is subtitled “A Fragment”, suggesting that a longer poem went wrong and that he destroyed all but six sound lines. Whenever this happens to a poet, he should justify by careful craftsmanship the publication of what is salved. But has Tennyson done so?

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTHe clasps the crag with crooked hands;
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTClose to the sun in lonely lands,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTRing’d with the azure world, he stands.

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTThe wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTHe watches from his mountain walls,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTAnd like a thunderbolt he falls.

My minimum requirement of a poem is that it should make prose sense as well as poetic sense; one main difference between prose and poetry being that prose engages only a small part of the reader's attention….Here, Tennyson's technique has been deliberately impressionistic - he has, in fact, taken no pains to say what he means - and, although his resonant voice with the slight Norfolk burr might have persuaded his hearers that these two stanzas make prose sense (the ear being easily deceived), the reading eye rejects them….

…when, in a Victorian three-line rhyming stanza, four c's appear in a row – clasp, crag, crooked and close - followed by the two l's of lonely lands, we expect the last line to yield an important and equally alliterative statement:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTHe clasps the crag with crooked hands
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTClose to the sun in lonely lands. . . .

Yet,

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTRing'd with the azure world he stands. . .

disappoints expectation, and adds nothing to the picture. Since the eagle perches on his crag close to the sun, a background of blue sky has already been presumed. Besides, it is not the world which is blue, but only the sky. And why “he clasps the crag with crooked hands”? Though few men are born with prehensile feet, “hands” might still have passed muster in a portrait of this humanized eagle, had Tennyson not followed it with “he stands”. If the eagle stands on his hands, then his wings must necessarily be feet. . . . [ellipsis in original]

Once one thinks along these lines, the poem collapses. Crooked is unnecessary: eagles' claws are always crooked. Lands is seen to be a rhyme chosen to go with hands and stands; for the eagle can stand only in one land, not several….

(Robert Graves, Mammon and the Black Goddess, London: Cassell 1965, pages 75-77)


Graves is accusing Tennyson, rightly in my view, of allowing himself to reach for a convenient image without scrutinising carefully either its accuracy or its coherence within the context. The last two lines of the first stanza of “The Butcher’s Wife” suffer in the same way, reaching for two conventional but cliché-ed images for an erection – a sausage and a firework, the first suggested by the locale, a butcher’s shop, and springing from a slang sense of the word “meat” - without considering whether they are well-adjusted to one another. To the objection that, as I have admitted, sausages sometimes do erupt at the end, I would simply point to the fact that, under normal circumstances, erect penises and Roman candles never erupt longitudinally.

In any case, do Roman candles “explode”? According to the OED, a Roman candle is a kind of “cylindrical firework that throws out a succession of stars” or, as Webster has it, one “(generally held in the hand), characterized by the continued emission of a shower of sparks, and the ejection, at intervals, of brilliant balls or stars of fire which are thrown upward as they become ignited”. What we in the UK - by a coincidence which is curious in this context – call “bangers” certainly explode; so do “air-bombs” and other kinds fireworks; but not – usually – Roman candles, which are among the gentler forms of pyrotechnic. For this kind of imprecision to occur at the first climax of the poem is a shame. As Graves remarks, “Once one thinks along these lines, the poem collapses.”

What of the second italicized line – “But never without her wide brimmed hat”? This conjures up the picture of a woman keen to protect her head and face from the rays of the sun whilst not apparently caring that her naked body is unprotected and, more to the point, exposed to the gaze of her neighbours. The effect is appealingly comical but also pathetic; my earlier speculations about her mental state are perhaps relevant. But apart from the bizarre energy of the scene, I am not sure what I am supposed to make of it. The first stanza ended with a line which was a simile extending a metaphor. The equivalent line here is a piece of direct description, implying something not altogether clear about the woman. In the first stanza, the tumescent sausages and the Roman candle were attributes of her lovers; in the second stanza, the detail concerns instead the woman herself.

My overall feeling is that the apparent symmetry of the two italicized lines, rather than a sign indicating some real correspondence, is an illusion. Oddly, perhaps, the sense I am left with is rather like that which Shekhar Aiyar’s poem “Moths” left me with: that, in terms of its form, a dynamic was in play which seemed to offer a coherent resolution, when in fact such coherence was missing and that, furthermore, the lack of coherence was not itself the expressive point being made.

I referred above to the existence here of more than one observer. It seems to be implied that the wife knows about her husband’s work – the home deliveries, his beheading of the chickens. We must assume that he knows she dances naked in the square: his neighbours would surely have told him, even if he had not seen it for himself. The neighbours, too, must know these things. The story of the poem is told by a narrator who is aware of all of these matters, and this brings me to the question of its tone.

Despite the (perhaps) comic energy which the poem presents, there is a kind of teasing prurience about the narrator’s attitude to the tale told. This is evident in the sly sauciness of the last two lines of the first stanza, a kind of revelling in the shock these disclosures are apparently expected to cause. It is evident in the archness and violence of the last word of the first stanza, “explode”. The highlighting by italics of lines 6 and 12 adds to this effect, as does the ungrammatical full stop at the end of line 11, which implies that the last line should be uttered in a particularly resonant way, as if it were charged with a significance that can only be hinted at and had better be left unsaid. I am not sure quite what to make of this. Wordsworth once defended one of his worst poems, “The Thorn”, by arguing, briefly in the Advertisement to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads in which it first appeared and at greater length in his 1800 Note to The Thorn, that the point of the poem was to display the character traits of its narrator. I am not sure that such a defence can be mounted for “The Butcher’s Wife”. It is too brief and lacks the reflexive qualities that might encourage us to read it ironically and in persona.

Before I end, let me mention a few minor points. In line 2, “swine” might be misread by some as being simply an abusive term for an unpleasant person. It becomes apparent, I think, that a literal sense is meant. The momentary confusion might be worth ironing out by choosing a different word. In line 5, “hand rolled” should have a hyphen, thus: “hand-rolled”; so should “wide brimmed”, thus: “wide-brimmed”. In line 6, “roman” should have an initial capital.

In sum, then, I find this disappointing. In a response to a comment offered by a member when this was being workshopped, I see that the poet remarked, “Now don't you go lookin' for subtleties where there ain't none.” (Note 3) The problem is that the poem is organized in such an overtly artful way that readers are surely to be forgiven for doing exactly that. Its comic picture of a kind of animal vigour is marred by the arch tone in which it is presented; at crucial points, there are incoherences in the structure of the imagery; the formal symmetries, attractive though they seem, turn out to be largely cosmetic.

Clive Watkins

…

Notes

1. An amusing instance of this inclination was reported in the English newspaper <u>The Daily Express</u> in the nineteen sixties. Apparently a group of Hollywood critics applauded what they thought was the avant-garde title credits of the Peter Sellers film, BoBo. Then they realized that a gaping hole had been accidentally torn in the screen by a workman’s ladder. (Recorded in a personal notebook for 1968 – Unfortunately, I did not note down the precise date and details of the item.)

2. Denis Taylor in his book Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (Oxford, 1988) has several interesting things to say about Hardy’s understanding of the importance of the visual clues which the printed page affords for a reader’s sense of metrical shape and the connexion of this phenomenon with the rise of non-metrical verse. (See, for instance, page 191 et seq..)

3. I had, till this point, resisted looking up the workshop commentaries.

[Kate Benedict]

The central question involves the poet's intent here, which I take to be gleefully light-hearted. I think he just wants to create a weird scenario, a fractured fairy tale by way of Fellini. If it doesn't quite come together, it is for the reasons Clive points out. Elements need to cohere and make "prose sense" even when the point may be nonsense.

This is the kind of subject matter that requires a poet to pull out all the stops; it also requires a perfect marriage of form and theme. I think, myself, that this poem cries out for rhyme and meter. E.g.:

When the butcher delivered the pork and the ham,
the turkeys, the pheasants, the mutton, the lamb,
guess who would dally with beggarman Sam?

Guess who would straddle the mystified hog…

Well, that might be an off-the-wall suggestion since this thread is all about nonmet poetry... but even if you stayed with a nonmet technique, you could still have so much more fun with this, Al.

[Al Ferber]

Clive,

Thanks for you learned commentary on this poem. You obviously spent some time and research to validate your observations. I got the impression that you've read a lot of books.

Al

Just had a PS thought:

roman candles ready to go off

Would that be less cosmetic and more in keeping with your literal multi-definitions? Other than that possible change I stand by the poem as written.



[This message has been edited by Al Ferber (edited February 11, 2004).]

[Lo]

[quote]Originally posted by Clive Watkins:
[b]The Butcher's Wife

While her husband made home deliveries
she made love to swine, boys,
and unshaven beggars
in the back room of the meat shop,
hand rolled sausages tighter than
roman candles ready to explode.

While he cut the heads off chickens
and watched them do their frantic
headless dance, she danced naked
in the village square during the ringing
of the Angelus under a baking sun.
But never without her wide brimmed hat.

Al Ferber

I've read all of the *Clive Crits* with much interest and some trepidation. Whenever I read crits of this magnitude, I am reminded, once again, of how little I know and how much I will probably never learn.
It amazes me that people read so much into poetry at times. I am a simple person with simple reading skills, apparently. I either like it, or I dont, and I seldom stop to ask myself what the poet meant to say.
This commentary, as well as the others, forces me to realize that I either need to change my way of reading or quit reading altogether....unless I dont mind looking like an idiot, which may very well end up being the case.
I found this take on Al's poem most interesting of all Clive's wonderously detailed crits......enough so that I went back and re-read the poem and tried to think of what *I* saw in it, and if there was any similarities in the visions.
What I saw was fairly black and white (to me, of course )
I saw a woman, neglected by her husband in favor of his career.....could be any woman, could have been me at one time.......I saw a preoccupied and ambitious man with a singular purpose and a woman who wanted to BE that purpose and wasnt.....and so she sought her validation elsewhere...
I did not find it humerous, I found it sad....and I found the wearing of the hat the saddest of all.
In my mind, and where I come from, ladies wore hats.....not common women, just ladies I have no idea if a butcher's wife is considered one of the ladies, or if she just WANTS to be one of them.....but that's what I get from it.
Perhaps she felt she was not a common adultress in her heart if she remained a lady in her appearance.
I dont think it mattered to her if the town knew she was lonely and looking for distraction, I think it mattered to her that her husband knew....and he didnt, and somehow, I dont think he's gonna catch on.
Mostly because it doesnt seem like he wants to.
I'd be interested to hear Al's explaination....if there is one. Sometimes I write things which have none, and so, if this is one of them, I perfectly understand.
Clive, you've given me a whole new way to look at things......and words.....and what they may or may not mean.
And now I'm afraid to write ANYTHING....

Lo



[This message has been edited by Lo (edited February 12, 2004).]

[epigone]

Originally posted by Al Ferber:
Clive,

Thanks for you learned commentary on this poem. You obviously spent some time and research to validate your observations. I got the impression that you've read a lot of books.

Al

Just had a PS thought:

roman candles ready to go off

Would that be less cosmetic and more in keeping with your literal multi-definitions? Other than that possible change I stand by the poem as written.

The first part of this response, unless I misread you, is snide, and the second part -- and here there is no possibility of misreading -- is belligerent. And this from one of the "stars" of the non-met board. This reinforces my concern that the majority of participants in that board haven't the foggiest notion of what how poetry workshop works.

epigone

edited to more properly characterize the first part of the response as "snide" rather than sarcastic.

[This message has been edited by epigone (edited February 12, 2004).]

[eaf]

This is interesting. I've got no comment on the sarcasm piece other than I don't recall seeing Al react unfavorably to previous crits.

To me, the interesting part is that Clive has given a good critique of the poem, but I'm of the impression that the poem is meant to be a fun-throwaway kinda thing without a whole lot of significance to it. Maybe we should have asked Clive to focus on a more ambitious piece? No offense to Al intended (I got a kick out of the poem) but asking Clive to crit this is like using a howitzer to hunt squirrels.

-eaf

[VictoriaGaile]

I was very pleased to see that Clive had selected this poem for comment, because it is one that I had found striking and memorable, but I couldn't articulate exactly why. It seemed to me during the active workshopping of this piece, that I was not alone in this reaction - it is my recollection that several of us kept coming back to this piece, unable to explain what was drawing us.

Clive's structural analysis of the poem has helped me identify what it is that works for me, even though I respectfully disagree with his conclusion, although not all of his points.

The key to this piece, for me, is that it is neither comical (Clive) nor nonsensical (Kate) -- it is surreal. I am not well read in surreal poetry, (perhaps someone who is could post some examples for comparison, here or in mastery?) but it seems to me that in surreal literature, some of the considerations of normal, everyday logic (such as that the townspeople would see her, and of course they would tell the husband, and how would the husband react; or what could possess the woman, might she be mentally disturbed, and so on) are suspended, so as to focus only on the picture that is presented.

Given that, then, I see the "While" of the second stanza as being primarily coincidental, and secondarily contrasting - not causative at all. "Running around like a chicken with its head cut off" indicates frantic, graceless action that accomplishes nothing. In contrast, we are presented with the woman's dance - clearly deliberate, apparently making a statement (during the Angelus), and graceful.

I say "graceful" because of the hat. The hat makes the poem for me. Others have commented on the protective properties of the "wide brimmed hat", but I see that as quite secondary. If the point were protection from the sun, it might have been "but never without her sunblock" or "but never without her parasol".

But a hat -- a hat is stylish. It makes a fashion statement. It completes an outfit. I can picture this hat - black with a wide rigid brim, and a colorful ribbon tied in a bow with the ends dangling onto the brim, or just a bit over it. A woman dancing naked, wearing nothing but a hat, has quite deliberately accentuated her state of undress.

It's also true that women were for centuries required to cover their hair (their "crowning glory"), often with a hat, when entering a church. Even today, many women have special Sunday go-to-meeting hats and Easter bonnets - so here the proximity to the church is relevant.

I am also intrigued by the mention of the Angelus, which is a retelling of the story of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and says to her, "Hail, highly favored one!" This is the music to which the butcher's wife is dancing.

I notice with pleasure the use of the word "baking" to describe the sun, since "butcher" and "baker" are often opposed.

So the butcher is presented as wrapped up in his conventional ordinary job, and perhaps as fairly passive (after he cuts off the chickens' heads, he just sits back and watches them). In contrast, the butcher's wife is presented as very active (it's slightly unusual for a woman to be portrayed as the actor, rather than the recipient, in the phrase "make love to") and bursting out of conventional ordinariness.

Hm. One last thought. It is possible, I suppose, that this is a very devout village, and that no one sees her dance because they are all either at home (keeping cool, away from the baking sun), or *in* church for the Angelus. I would be interested to know, Al, how you envisioned this scene: Were there other people in the square? people peeping out their windows at her? Or was she, in your mind's eye, unobserved? I think the scene is more compelling if she is unobserved, and I wonder if you might clarify that in the poem.

[Kate Benedict]

I do find the poem comic, darkly comic, but I heartily agree that it is essentially a surreal scenario, one that resists interpretation. For me, the second stanza works better than the first; the image of the naked dance is so arresting and the syntax is stronger here too. I like the short sentence following the long one, and would love it if S1 could be recast in exactly that way. Another thought is that S2 could stand alone, comprise the entire poem.

The Angelus bells rang three times a day and people stopped what they were doing and said the prayer--so I picture the village square as being populated, populated with villagers bowing their heads in prayer in spite of the woman's display.

[Fred Longworth]

The gist of Clive's comments -- for this reader and writer -- has implications far beyond what is said of Al's poem particularly. It is that especially if one intends the poem to be read by aesthetically mature readers one needs to account for all of the piece's denotations, connotations, allusions, openings & closures, as well as the rhymic structure of the piece.

Put another way, a poem with a few loose ends and discordant elements may find closure and concordance to the average audience, while at the same time it may disappoint a better reader.

Better readers such as editors of better journals in which we seek publication!

Fred

[Lamar Jones]

If you could account for everything meaning, where would the mystery be. If I had to crit my own poems half as well as Clive does here, they would never leave my desk; I'd discovered all the flaws in my pieces and hit writer's block for life.

I've read Clive's comments and can see and even agree with some of his points, but the wide-brimmed hat, and The Butcher's Wife who wears it, still transcends the poem's flaws; making me giggle and dance with glee.

Lamar