"Did you finish killing everybody who was against peace?"

October 23, 2021 11:18 AM

Poetry Filter: The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer "...I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor, in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught so often laughing at funerals, that was because I knew the dead were already slipping away, preparing a comeback, and can I help it? And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not be resurrected by a piece of cake..."

The poem is written and read by Wendell Berry.
Hat tip to this week's NYT Magazine.

posted by storybored (17 comments total)

Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest
way to come to the truth. It is one way.

QFT.
posted by chavenet at 12:44 PM on October 23, 2021

And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed
my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom
had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not
be resurrected by a piece of cake.

Erm

What

Terrible when your manhood gets sunk presumably into a witchy trap of a female body and not even pastry can bring it back, right?
posted by jokeefe at 12:49 PM on October 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

As above: it's difficult when work I would otherwise be delighted by is blighted by casual misogyny. So many poems have been lost to that moment when contempt finds an out, and I am no longer welcomed into the little world the poet is trying to create.
posted by jokeefe at 12:52 PM on October 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

It's a vulgar metaphor, but I interpreted that line as a condemnation of the groom's infidelity, casting doubt on the sincerity of his vows... The overall theme seemed to be "people are always full of it (so just reflexively dismissing them is a potential path to truth)." Whatever the case, I don't think the author was endorsing the subject's view.
posted by dsword at 1:04 PM on October 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

Fwiw, I read that as the groom being attracted to men
posted by cali at 1:11 PM on October 23, 2021

I think Berry was referring to the tradition, he just got down to the root of the matter.

"The wedding cake has been a part of the ceremony since the ancient Greeks and Romans. As part of the nuptials, the groom broke bread over the bride’s head. This was to symbolize her submission, the end of her purity, and to represent good luck and fertility."
posted by clavdivs at 1:23 PM on October 23, 2021

I was wondering whether the problem might be impotence, but I'm not sure the text supports that reading.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:50 PM on October 23, 2021

We have a present supersensitiveness to a lot of things that are important for us to work out given urgent current circumstances, but when we have all done that work and are feeling somewhat better about our collective culture and consciousness, this will begin to feel more gentle and profound. Where we collectively came from is part of where we collectively are now, and where we will collectively be in the future. History cannot be erased, it can only be better understood.

The best balm for all of this is for people to carefully, critically, patiently, and gratefully read a lot of history and poetry.

Plus love letters and comic strips and graffiti. And anything else that begins to move you one way or another.
posted by Scarf Joint at 3:27 PM on October 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

Given Berry's environmentalism, he might be referring to declining sperm counts and the ubiquity of synthetic estrogenating chemicals.

I kind of wish I could like Berry better, but he has always rubbed me the wrong way at best.
posted by jamjam at 5:03 PM on October 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

I also read the offending lines as either an allusion to infidelity, or, reading "manhood" as not a euphemism, that the groom is of low moral fibre and thus his wedding vows aren't something he is capable of respecting.
posted by Merus at 6:38 PM on October 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

Interesting interpretations. It didn't occur to me at all that "sunk manhood" had anything to do with sex at all. I thought he meant that the bridgegroom had sunk as a man, i.e. he was a sunk person. Isn't this more in keeping with the tone and spirit of the rest of the poem?
posted by storybored at 8:55 PM on October 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Thanks storybored for an interesting poetry filter. I like them because they can be contentious in the text and the various interpretations. storybored just stole my thunder on 'manhood'. I read it as a double entundre as the narrator contemplates the subject matter, a wedding. "Dance,’ they told me," denotes those gather i. e. society celebrates an occasion that is historically a viewpoint from male superiority.
'I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture,' interesting line as the narrator seems to come to peace with the contrariness of society, even himself. To be asked to speak and not to is the little trick with the poem perhaps the madness. oddly I agree with about every comment in here but disagree. it's not for a lack of argument but good perception.

I once had a conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks. naturally one doesn't know what to say so I said I was reading the beats and had a hard time with a lot of the outright sexuality etc. I understood that it was a time different, that your own sexuality could land you in prison never mind the fact that your skin color could get you killed for that matter both. I had a book with me it was an anthology by Poulin. she asked to see it, opened it and pointed to a section from 'a street in bronzeville, the title section' the mother' and I'll always remember the line, the second one "you remember the children you got that you did not get," then she signed the page and told me quote it's supposed to bother you unquote.
posted by clavdivs at 10:20 PM on October 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

really there's nothing like being schooled then getting an autograph in 27 seconds that says contrary.
posted by clavdivs at 10:29 PM on October 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Cool story, clavivs! Thanks for sharing. That's a great quote.
posted by storybored at 6:52 AM on October 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

The Bridegroom is traditionally Christ in Christian mysticism and the Bride is the church. The Bridegroom's manhood is that part of Christ that is human - his other half is his godhood - that is the miracle of Christ that he was both man and good simultaneously. And where he was sunk - that was the three days he was in hell before he rose again. As a Christian theologian there is no way that Berry was NOT aware of those meanings.

That said, the lines read as deeply misogynist, because the surface impressions that he is deriding the guy for being pussy-whipped, or impotent, or gay or tainted from having sex in the wrong place are all valid impressions.

The interpretation about male fertility is also a valid and intentional one. Berry is as steeped in climate science as he is in Christian mysticism.

If we survive ten gets you one that in three hundred years he will be declared a mystic saint, in large part because of his condemnation of unthinking Christian religion and the faith monolith - and thereby enfolded into it what ever it is then for unthinking people.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:05 AM on October 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

It could also be an allusion to the last few lines of Roethke's The Sententious Man:

Small waters run toward a miry hole
That's not a thing I'm saying with a sneer
For water moves until it's purified
And the weak bridegroom strengthens in his bride.

posted by jamjam at 11:44 AM on October 24, 2021

I kind of think that line about the manhood relates to promiscuity and a continuing tendancy, and that a piece of cake, doesn't work as a contract, or change a person's basic nature.
posted by Oyéah at 2:26 PM on October 24, 2021