THEY FEED THEY LION by Philip Levine (1968)
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden
dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to
stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained
earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
Notes:
5 stanzas, 4
ending with ‘They Lion grow’ except the concluding stanza which ends with ‘They
feed they Lion and he comes’
What is it? It comes ‘out of …’ – as in rising from the ground – out of Detroit, motor city,
also Motown Records
‘Lion’ is both
noun and verb
Stanza 1
‘Burlap’ - hessian
Industrial
materials and chemicals – industrialization
‘Creosotes’ –
carbonaceous chemicals used as preservatives and antiseptics
Stanza 2
Pollution
both literal and figurative is everywhere – in the hills, barns, rain, ‘bus
ride’, under the ground in burials
‘Gutted cars’
– in motor city, Ford and Pontiac chew up everything
In bones and
muscle – ‘sharpen’ bones (strong imagery), ‘muscles’ to stretch’
Stanza 3
Contaminated
(mother) earth consumes all
The unnerving
call of earth to her ‘little ones’
Image of pig
(processed ‘ham’ in the next stanza) – comes the ‘repose of the hung belly’,
fit for ‘purpose’, ‘They Lion grow’
Worker = pig
– means to an end, led to market – perversion of getting a spiritual lift from
dead animals – ‘burned essential oil’, ‘head eating head to let us be’ (Levine)
‘Ferocity’
turned to ‘holiness’
Stanza 4
‘Trotters’ –
pigs foot used as food, once used for trotting the dirt (the shit)
From feet, to
fist, to ‘the full flower / Of the hams’
‘Thorax of
caves’ – ribs
“Bow Down” –
submission, but also religious overtone – to submit
And then to
“Rise Up” – both in quotation marks (ironic, moronic), both words capitalized
‘They’ rise
from the ‘reeds of shovels’, implements work the grimy, contaminated soil
Stanza 5
Personal ‘my’
‘white sins’
– skin colour, but also the problem of the indefiniteness of white
Think of
Melville –
Is
it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of
annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that
as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color;
and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that
there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a
colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
The Albino
whale, and where do so many industrial products come from? (lamp fuel,
lubricants, candles, perfumes, soaps – also whalebone or baleen for corsets,
whips, umbrellas)
Nature
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the
charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the
mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of
light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without
medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its
own blank tinge…. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.
The
inheritance of ‘They Lion’, passed down from generation to generation, from the
ground up
The
transformation of matter – ‘from the oak turned to a wall’ – but the wall blocks
the process
What we carry
(‘sack’) ends up in what we consume (‘belly’) – it was a ‘hidden burning on the
oil-stained earth’
It’s the oil
(fuel, petroleum) that feeds the Lion – ‘and he comes’
Levine on They
Feed They Lion - ‘It is, I believe, the most potent expression of rage I
have written, rage at my government for the two racial wars we were then
fighting, one in the heart of our cities against our urban poor, the other in
Asia against a people determined to decide their own fate. The poem was written
one year after what in Detroit is still called “The Great Rebellion” although
the press then and now titled it a race riot. I had recently revisited the city
of my birth [Detroit], and for the first time I saw myself in the now ruined
neighborhoods of my growing up not as the rebel poet but as what I was,
middle-aged, middle-class, and as one writer of the time would have put it
“part of the problem.” Out of a dream and out of the great storm of my emotions
the poem was born’ (PL)
The title
breaks with conventional language and syntax. It’s the voice of the street, of workers,
of the negro. The poet in praise of their courage and resilience.
Sources of inspiration for the poem in 2 dreams -
In a garage
in Detroit, while sorting universal joints, Eugene (Levine's co-worker) said - ‘They feed they
lion they meal in they sacks’ – reduction of third person pronouns to the
singular ‘they’. This incident returned to Levine many years later – in a dream
And before
the poem was written, there was another dream – ‘I dreamed I was hired by the
boss of the same grease shop to serve as a night watchman. In the dream I said
good night to the boss and to Eugene and took up my duties to patrol a large
fenced yard behind the shop in which the company's one truck was parked.
Outside the fence in the dark were gangs of jeering teenagers, but none dared
invade the property because I had as helpers not guard dogs but an enormous lion
and an even larger elephant. The two animals walked ahead of me, and the
teenage boys scattered in every direction, and then suddenly the elephant
stopped and let go an enormous turd. And I awakened. And for some reason I
remembered Eugene's astounding sentence’
They lion
grow – (sounds like) they lie and grow
The lion is a
bestial totem. The beast of civil unrest. The exploitative spirit, as an
insatiable hungry animal ‘anthropomorphized by a blind greed only humans can
recognise’ (Charles Molesworth)
Yeats’s sphynx
from the Second Coming -
somewhere
in sands of the desert
A
shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A
gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is
moving its slow thighs […]
And
what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches
towards Bethlehem to be born?
The Spaniards,
writing about ‘powerful centers of feeling’ even if these were not understood –
the personal and political -
‘Lorca
inherited an aesthetic that allowed him to write about anything -- even what he
didn't understand. And that was one of the wonderful things that I got from
him, and later got from Pablo Neruda -- the idea that you could go after these
very powerful centers of feeling in you, even if you couldn't parse them’
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