Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources For Further Study |
Themes
Innocence and Guilt
The “bud” may stand “for all things” in this poem, but one of its most common associations is with “innocence.” A bud is a flower in its infancy, both vulnerable to the elements and powerful in its potential beauty. Like any infant being, it is unblemished, whole, and pure in its emergent form. Seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne exalted the delights of infancy and childhood throughout his work, and expressed innocence in images of light:
No darkness then did overshade, But all within waspure and bright; No guilt did crush nor fear invade,
But all my soul was full of light.
Some poets explore the condition of innocence through its contrasts. In the late eighteenth century, William Blake composed pairs of “songs” such as “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” whose seeming simple dualisms are challenged by a poetic voice who asks the tiger, “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Innocence is unselfconscious by definition. It is in one’s conscious “remembering” that a regeneration of loveliness and purity occurs. In his book on Galway Kinnell, Intricate and Simple Things, Lee Zimmerman compares Kinnell to Wordsworth, who “recognizes memory’s power to evoke an early or original state of completion or grace and thereby replenish the present.
The infant state is “innocent” in the original (Latin) sense of the word, in + nocens, not-hurt. To lose one’s innocence is to be “hurt,” at some level, by knowledge and experience. To be innocent also means, in many contexts, to be found blameless of hurting another. John Milton’s unforgettable portrait of Adam before the Fall in Paradise Lost(1667) provides a poignant example of mythic human innocence. In the epic’s traditional Judeo-Christian theology, disobedience and an improper desire for power cause humankind’s fall from innocence, and creation along with it, into a condition of guilt and division called “original sin.” In the context of this theology, no one can remain innocent, because no one can retain the divine wholeness of being, blamelessness, and harmony with creation that characterized life in the “first garden.”
Innocence, thus, is an original, but transient condition, the very character of infancy. A certain kind of innocence is attributed to so-called “primitive” cultures who have yet to acquire the technology and economics of “civilized” cultures. Primitive peoples are closer, we might say, to their own, and the earth’s, origins. Our own culture generally understands children to be innocent until they have reached a certain age of accountability for their own moral behavior, and are able to act upon society’s standards for right and wrong.
Kinnell’s poem explores an innocence which both includes and transcends morality. It approaches what is called a “deep morality” (as opposed to moralism) that is more spiritual than sociological. Saint Francis’s gesture restores the creature to harmony with the particulars of its own createdness, the “blessings of earth.” The sow’s “remembering” is a return, figuratively speaking, to her own “first garden,” that state of innocence where she is “not hurt” by human arrogance and perfectionism gone awry. Theologian Matthew Fox might see Francis’ compassion toward the sow as an embodiment of “original blessing,” a cosmology which counters the doctrine of “original sin” by assuming that creation is radically (“at root”) good, not corrupt.
In a sense, it is not just the sow who is retaught “loveliness” in Kinnell’s poem, but also potentially the reader. As Saint Francis blesses the sow, one’s perception is also returned to a “blessed” state, “unhurt” by the negative associations the animal has acquired and freer to accept the “perfect loveliness” not only of sow, but of self and others.
Flesh Vs. Spirit
Many of Galway Kinnell’s poems have a spiritual dimension that occasionally surfaces in religious or liturgical language, as one can see in such titles as “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” “Prayer,” and “Last Holy Fragrance.” Yet these poems never “preach” any particular religion, doctrine, or theology. They are not religious poems, per se. The spirituality of “Saint Francis and the Sow” and many other Kinnell poems, avoids religious clichés and pious sentimentality in favor of a close attention to the actual, the seemingly unlovely realities of mundane, mortal existence. Francis is a saint in the context of this poem not only because the Church has canonized him, but because he has met the pig completely, and blessed her in all her earthy dimensions.
Kinnell has said on more than one occasion that his aesthetic depends on the “physical world.” “The subject of the poem is the thing which dies,” Kinnell explains, and “poetry is the wasted breath,” not the ethereal music of the gods: “This is why it clings to the imperfect music of a human voice, this is why its verbs are imitative of bodily motions, why its prepositions pile up like crazy longings, why its nouns reverberate from the past as if they spoke for archetypes of earthly life, this is why the poem depends on adjectives, as if they were its senses, which want only to smell, touch, see, hear, taste, to press themselves to the physical world.” (“The Poetics of the Physical World”) The words of such poems will make some connection to the body and its senses, and by extension, to the body of the world. In “Saint Francis and the Sow,” there is no artificial distinction between flesh and spirit. For blessing to effect its transformations, “all down her thick length,” spirit and flesh must touch. The spirit cannot simply transcend “the fodder and slops” but passes through the rich stench on the way to the humblest place of all: the pig’s tail. Even there, heaven and earth meet in its “spiritual curl.” There is no regeneration in Kinnell’s poems without this conversation between flesh and spirit, the visible and invisible, the immanent and the transcendent. The syllables of religious language acquire an earthiness heavy as the sow in Kinnell’s sacramental relationship with the world. “It is typical of Kinnell,” comments poet Donald Hall, this “having it both ways at once.” Hall is referring to the horrible glory of “The Porcupine,” but he could be speaking as well of the play of flesh and spirit in “Saint Francis and the Sow.”
Animals
Anthropomorphism is a word which originally meant “human form” in Greek. When an animal or object is given human characteristics, we say its appearance is “anthropomorphic.” There is an element of anthropomorphism in “Saint Francis and the Sow”: the sow has a “great broken heart” and an ability to “remember” her own loveliness, traits and abilities normally attributed to human beings. Even Saint Francis’ act of compassion is a kind of anthropomorphism, since blessings, in a religious context, are typically bestowed on human beings. Not only does he put his hand on the pig’s forehead, but the saint also speaks “blessings of earth” upon her, to which she responds in a very physical sort of “remembering.” In the liturgical calendar, St. Francis’ feast day is celebrated in early October in ritual blessings of animals.
Many writers and poets are leery of giving animals human attributes for fear of engaging in a preciousness characteristic of stuffed animal toys, or of denying animals the “rights” of their distinct differences from the human. Galway Kinnell struggled over this issue in the process of revising and re-revising “Saint Francis and the Sow” for re-publication in two later volumes. At the time he was choosing poems for Selected Poems (1982), Kinnell remembers thinking “‘Can a pig really have a broken heart?’ and I changed ‘broken’ to ‘unbreakable.’” But for Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past (1993), he restored the poem’s original wording, because
Now I think I was right in the first place, and that my earlier scruple came from the harmful and surely false idea, carefully nurtured by our kind, that there is no resonance between our emotional life and that of the other animals.
It is important to notice that Kinnell says the “other” animals, thereby including the human in the animal realm. Animals are central subjects of several Kinnell poems. Their strong presence reflects that dimension of his aesthetic which is earthy and physical. In an interview for American Poetry Observed, Kinnell’s comment about animals has Franciscan overtones: “When you sense the brotherhood between creatures, you are in touch with some kind of primal, natural event — your creatureliness, or whatever it might be.” In a conversation with Gregory Fitzgerald, Kinnell suggests that the presence of animals in his poems comes from an “act of the imagination” and a desire “to see them in themselves and also to see their closeness to us.” Kinnell’s empathy with animals exemplifies the attitude in an earlier time and place described by Richard White as now at once recognizable and utterly strange. “Remembering it, we may feel like Dorothy remembering Oz. Because once, when animals were persons, the West was a biological republic. The sow in this poem is neither more human nor less animal for having been given a “broken heart.” It is the human reader who is given the opportunity to become enlarged through this intimate identification with another creature.”
Topics for Further Study
- Numerous fairy tales, such as “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Frog Prince,” involve the magical transformation of ugliness into beauty, and occasionally vice-versa. Under what circumstances are fairy-tale characters transformed? What is the difference between transformation by “magic” and by “blessing”? What definition of “beauty” emerges from fairy tales? How does it compare and contrast with modern cultural notions of beauty?
- Collect advertisements which feature pigs as part of the product’s name, appeal, or persuasion from different decades in the twentieth century. What images of pigs emerge? How does that image change over time?
- Research a saint’s life, and (a) write a one-act play, or (b) produce a short film which dramatizes both the extraordinary and the ordinary features of that person’s character and life.
- Write a poem, story, or memoir about something you either witnessed or experienced which involved remembrance and blessing.
