Elizabeth Bishop "The Prodigal" - Notes LC 2013

Form

Background

Theme and development

Parable of the Prodigal Son

The use of 'But' signals another perspective on the situation.

Strong, sensuous images describe the squalor in which the prodigal lives

The brown enormous odor he lived by

was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,

for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty

was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.

Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,

the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--

even to the sow that always ate her young--

till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.

But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts

(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),

the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red

the burning puddles seemed to reassure.

And then he thought he almost might endure

his exile yet another year or more.

Elizabeth Bishop said that this poem originated from her thoughts

when one of her aunt’s stepsons offered her a drink of rum in the pigsty at about nine o’clock in the morning during her trip to Nova Scotia in 1946. Perhaps that was the final spark that engendered the poem, but the theme could never have been far from her thoughts, as she herself struggled with alcoholism all her life.

About the time of her thirty-eighth birthday, on 8 February 1949, she fell into a deep trough of depression. In an effort to rally out of it she went on a holiday to Haiti, from where she wrote to Marianne Moore to say that she had finished some poems, including ‘The Prodigal’. Ironically, on her return from Haiti she went into a long and heavy drinking bout.

‘The Prodigal’ was published in the New Yorker on 13 March 1951.

But evenings the first star came to warn.

The farmer whom he worked for came at dark

to shut the cows and horses in the barn

beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,

with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,

safe and companionable as in the Ark.

The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.

The lantern--like the sun, going away--

laid on the mud a pacing aureole.

Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,

he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,

his shuddering insights, beyond his control,

touching him. But it took him a long time

finally to make up his mind to go home.

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop "The Prodigal"

1951

The poem is structured as two sonnets of a rather loose nature. They each

have the requisite 14 lines and the first one maintains the conventional octave–

sestet division, but the rhyming schemes are eccentric, if not absent altogether.

The rhythm is a mixture of iambic pentameter

v - v - v - v - v -

(The brown enormous odor he lived by)

and four-stress lines

v - v - v - v v v -

(to shut the cows and horses in the barn)

This poem deals with the exile of the alcoholic. Like all good poetry, it functions at the level of the individual in the narrative but also at a universal level, exploring the metaphorical exile of alcoholism: the isolation, the skulking, the deception and hiding, the lack of control, aspirations rather than action.

There is enormous human understanding in this poem. Despite the

physical dirt of odour and ordure, the heart can still lift to the religious impulse (‘the lantern – like the sun, going away – | laid on the mud a pacing aureole’) or thrill to the romantic beauty of nature (‘the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red; | the burning puddles seemed to reassure’). In fact, the prodigal seems to retain a particularly benign relationship with nature, appreciating the delicacy of even these animals (‘Light-lashed … a cheerful stare’) and maintaining a comfortable domesticity between animal and human (‘The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored’). Nature here is a bringer of wisdom. The bats’ ‘uncertain staggering flight’ is the spur to his self-awareness, his moment of ‘shuddering insights’, and so his eventual turning back.

The poem is depressingly realistic in its evocation of filth and human

abasement:

even to the sow that always ate her young –

till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.

But it is noble and uplifting in its awareness of the spark of soul that still

flickers even in the most abject circumstances.

Shows the prodigal's acceptance of his situation. However, he self-deceives hiding the evidence from even himself. The prodigal is bound up in his self-delusion as a secret drinker.