Biblical allusions have been a cornerstone in Western literature. They come in a variety of forms. This could be grand an epic as in Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Biblical events such as the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden are given epic treatment.
They could also be smaller affairs where poets link events in their personal lives to grand narratives, such as T.S. Eliot linking his conversion to the Anglican faith to the Journey of the Magi in the poem of the same name.
In this article, I define what biblical allusions are, and I look at three examples of them, namely:
Milton’s “Sonnet 23”;
T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”; and
Derek Walcott’s “Letter From Brooklyn.”
Each of these poems takes a personal approach to Biblical allusions by taking personal events in the writer’s life and linking them to Biblical events or concepts to great effect. But before we proceed to explain, let’s define what Biblical allusions are.
What are Biblical allusions?
Biblical allusions are a literary device that reference Biblical events and concepts in that don't need to be elaborated on as it is assumed that the reader has prior knowledge of what is referred to. For Biblical allusions to work, the reader should have a common cultural reference point with the writer.
Absent that, the poem should be annotated with explanations of the Biblical references to make sense to the reader.
An example of biblical allusion | The Woman Speaks to the Man Who Has Employed Her Son
Let’s take a look at an example of biblical allusions from Lorna Goodisons’ “The Woman Speaks to the Man who has Employed her Son”:
She is throwing a partner
with Judas Iscariot’s mother
the thief on the left-hand side
of the cross, his mother
is the banker, her draw though
is first and last for she still
throwing two hands as mother and
father.
She is prepared, she is done. Absalom.
The poem is about a single mother who is addressing the gangster who has employed her son as a gunman. Lorna Goodison makes three Biblical references here which she mixes with a local Jamaican money-lending custom. “Throwing a partner” refers to a Jamaican and Caribbean money-saving habit that involves a group of people pooling money together, which they periodically lend to each person in the group in turn.
The first two Biblical references are related to the crucifixion of Jesus. Judas Iscariot is the apostle who betrayed Jesus and the thief on the left-hand side of Jesus is the one who doubted Christ as the Messiah, during the Crucifixion.
The mother identifies with the mother of Iscariot as she has to pay the price of her son’s unwise choice to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver that condemn his soul. The thief on the left-hand side of the cross also condemned his soul for not believing in Jesus. This is what his son has done by choosing a profession of killing and death.
Absalom is Hebrew for “Father of Peace.” This is ironic as it is also the name of one of the sons of King David who betrayed his own father by starting a rebellion against him, and who was killed in the process. The poet ends the poem with “Absalom” to suggest that the same fate awaits her son for betraying his dad (which is the mom herself who says that she is both mom and dad).
Comparing the three poems: Milton’s Sonnet 23, The Journey of the Magi, & Letter from Brooklyn
Lorna Goodison’s poem uses biblical allegory for social commentary in her country of Jamaica. However, the three poems we are looking at use biblical allusions in the personal spheres of their lives. The Journey of the Magi by Eliot reads like a monologue with one of the Magi recounting the journey to meet the infant Christ.
“Letter from Brooklyn” by Derek Walcott is a poem about how the poet was moved to tears by a letter from a childhood acquaintance that speaks about his dad, who died while the poet was still young. I have already looked at Milton’s Sonnet 23, here. But we can quickly go over it now.
Milton’s sonnet talks about his dead wife who had died after childbirth coming back to embrace him like “Alcestis from the grave” (a reference to a classical Greek myth). The wife is portrayed as a saint and as he tries to embrace her, he wakes up, and the apparition disappears. Milton is left in darkness as he by then at that time has gone blind.
Milton’s poem is a mix of personal and biblical allusions. In fact, the central allusion is classical or “paganistic.” It refers to Alcestis who was rescued from death by the Greek hero Hercules. Nonetheless, Milton makes use of biblical references to appropriate the myth to make meaning out of the tragedy that has befallen him. Now for a summary of the other two poems.
The Journey of the Magi: Poem text and summary
Here is the text of the poem — Journey of the Magi (1927):
‘A cold coming we had of it
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces
And the silken girls bringing sherbet. 10
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly. 20
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued 30
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. 40
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
The poem is at face value a retelling of the Journey of the Magi as recounted in the Bible. They are the Three Wisemen who followed the North Star to witness the birth of Christ and bestow him with gifts. The poem has been described as Eliot dramatizing his conversion from Roman Catholicism to the Anglican faith.
The poem is divided into three stanzas. The first stanzas describe the difficulty and hardship of travelling in the “very dead of winter.” The poem emphasizes the threat to the Magi’s faith with the last two lines: “voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.”
In the second stanza, T. S. Eliot describes the eventual success of the journey and meeting the Christ child. However, it’s heavily understated: “We . . . arrived at evening . . ./ Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” Before that, he makes a biblical allusion to the betrayal of Jesus by Judas by referring to “six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver.”
He ends the poem by referring to the Magi back in their homelands and their feelings of discomfort among citizens who don’t share their new faith by describing them as “. . . no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation / With an alien people clutching their gods.”
Letter from Brooklyn: Poem text and summary
Here is an excerpt of the text from Walcott’s “Letter from Brooklyn.” The poem is under copyright, so only a small portion of it will be quoted here:
An old lady writes me in a spidery style,
Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand
Pellucid as paper, travelling on a skein
Of such frail thoughts its thread is often broken;
Please see the full poem here: The London Magazine
The biblical allusions in the poem are subtle. The poem is about Walcott reading and responding emotionally to a letter from Miss Rawlins, who now lives in Brooklyn. Miss Rawlins is writing about the poet's father, whom she knew while living in Saint Lucia, Walcott's homeland, and who died when the poet was quite young.
Walcott’s dad was a painter and Miss Rawlins describes him as being “called home” and “doing greater work” after describing his father’s art. In his mind, Walcott connects this to his own art as a poet. Miss Rawlins’ letter renews his faith in poetry, or as he puts it, “restores my sacred duty to the Word” (Line 27). The “Word” here is a reference to John 1:14.
In John 1:14, the original phrase is as follows: “And the Word was made flesh.” This is a reference to God taking on human form through Jesus. Here, Walcott is imbuing the art of poetry with holy significance. Writing poetry is the same as doing God’s work or “greater work” as Miss Rawlins says.
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Conclusion of poem comparison
All three poems are successful in terms of what they achieve using biblical allusions. However, from an artistic perspective, Eliot’s is the most successful. The poet uses the journey of the Magi as a metaphor and symbol for his spiritual journey. He buries the personal illusion of his conversion into the poem and subordinates it to the story of the Magi.
Even if we did not know about his spiritual conversion from Roman Catholicism to the Anglican faith, the story would be compelling and easy to understand. Feeling alien among your countrymen as a result of a spiritual transformation that they don’t understand or identify with is a fitting and paradoxical culmination of the poem.
Walcott’s poem is much more vulnerable and touching. It would probably prove more likable or popular than the other two poems, except for one thing. Eliot’s poem uses more simple and direct language that a modern audience would prefer to Walcott’s ornate metaphors and style.
For example, Walcott uses an extended metaphor relating to a spider’s web in Line 1 that ends with the line “till the thread is resilient steel” (Line 35). Many readers may not be able to keep up with it. However, the sensibility of the poem — a man moved to tears by a letter from an acquaintance who knew his dad before he died — would sooner touch a modern audience than Eliot’s highly intellectual poem.
Eliot’s poem has none of the vulnerability of Walcott’s or Milton’s. The poem even begins with a quotation from another intellectual. The first four lines are in quotes because they are a direct quotation. Eliot takes the opening lines of the poem from the 1622 nativity sermon by Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626). He was a famous bishop of the Anglican church who played a big role in translating the King James Bible. Here is the direct quote:
Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in . . . the very dead of winter.
The poem layers Eliot’s spiritual conversion in a historical allusion to an obscure or little-known speech and the grand symbol or allegory of the Magi’s journey. Unfortunately, this makes the poem seem cold and even artificial.
Speaking of artificial, it’s ironic that T.S. Eliot refers to Milton as artificial in his essay “Notes on the Poetry of Milton”: According to Eliot, “His Language is, if one may use the term without disparagement, artificial and conventional.” The description of artificiality better applies to his poem than any of the other two poems.
The Journey of the Magi works quite well on an artistic level. However, one wonders how much true emotion it actually reflects. Was T.S. Eliot really so moved by his conversion? Someone standing outside or even within Western Christian tradition would be puzzled to understand the differences between Christian Roman Catholic and Anglican religious traditions that would compel a man to compare the former as “the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods.”
The poem works only if we ignore the personal allusion and focus on the grander Biblical reference or story. Otherwise, it reads as something rather trivial or as a man making high art of a relatively conventional event — switching from one Christian denomination to another similar Christian denomination.
On the other hand, the poem by Walcott uses a personal allusion to link the art of poetry to sacred work and bringing meaning to life. However, it is with Milton’s poem that we see a living testimony of what Walcott only hints at. Milton wrote Sonnet 23 as a means of coping with loss. His wife has died after childbirth. He later loses the daughter born from the event and then his sight.
Instead of giving in completely to despair, he uses his art as a poet to romanticize his wife as “Alcestis from the grave,” a mythic figure from Ancient Greek legend, who gave her life to save her husband. This romanticization means that his wife did not die needlessly. She died to save him. It goes unmentioned in the poem, but Milton is recasting the myth of Alcestis into a precursor to Christ dying on the cross for the greater good of humanity.
He uses a biblical allusion to his wife being “washt from spot of child-bed taint.” This is a reference to Leviticus 12, which gives rules on how women should be cleansed from impurity after childbirth. In his mind, his wife is cleansed, and he is sure to have “Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint” (Lines 6–7). Milton does not give in completely to despair. However, he does give in to grief momentarily at the vision of wife who is now perfected in death as she:
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin'd,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
Even in his grief though, he uses all his art to romanticize his story as something greater than just a sad and pathetic tale. The last two lines are a veiled allusion to Odysseus attempting and failing to embrace the ghost of his dead mother in the Odyssey.
Through a mix of personal and Biblical allusions, Milton is using his misfortunes to portray himself as the epic hero of a tragedy with a wider sacred meaning.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, December 11). Biblical Allusions In Literature. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/biblical-allusions-in-literature |
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