Musical Version by Lex McKee
Cetus and Jonah’s Lament
“And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant. But God
appointed a worm when dawn came the next day, and it
attacked the plant and it withered.” —Jonah 4.5
When I think now of you, great Cetus—Whale—
And me inside such times so long ago;
How I survived’s a miracle at all—
Under whose Presence I think, we both know.
But there you are, up there, still shining hard,
Not indigested by my wraith within
Your sturdy frame, me babbling as I’m wont
To do, obsessed with trespass and my sin.
How glorious are the stars, and how they shine:
Their lights no darkness ever snuffs or dims;
And through the figures of the night sing out
One sonic, long and everlasting hymn
Of praise—could we but hear their sound (not just
Glimpse their light) what healing would there be!
And I could leave sad Nineveh at last—
Though they are glad: of mercy more than me;
For I—beneath this withered tree—am fixed,
Trying to understand just what went wrong:
I preached the word, as faithful as I ought,
Why, then, was not destruction released, sprung?
Who knows the mind of that great One above
Who no-one calculates, or can upset
His plans—those plans for good, and plans for life?
How hard the sun beats, as rain is not yet;
But hard as the sun is, but harder still’s
That destiny not wanted, entertained—
So unlike Cetus’: you abroad—at sea—
Across the vast sky your bright outline’s veined,
And you exactly are where you should be.
But me? Still here, in failure uppermost;
They laugh and mock the prophet whom God sent;
On Earth your opposite—no sign, but lost.
So, waiting, waiting, how long must I wait?
What in Your purpose needs must I endure?
Then I remember those guts I was in:
Their acid’s cleansing, stripping, making pure;
And how from spew, albino-white, washed up,
You gave me voice to wander and astonish:
Women and men who knew not left from right
But saw quite clearly, remains from the fish
That shone celestial. Wait I will, then wait
Some more: for this I know—that He who made
That mighty whale, upheld him in the sky,
As if one small finger poised his full weight,
Will turn at the appointed time for me.
Yes, He will turn, and His eyes will behold:
His man from out the whale’s stuck misery—
Softly, I’ll hear Him whisper … truth be told.
Poet’s Note: Cetus, the Whale, is one of the largest constellations in the sky, lying near Aquarius, Pisces, and Eridanus. Visible from both hemispheres, it’s best seen from late autumn to early winter, using Taurus and Orion as guides. Though later known as a sea monster slain by Perseus in Greek myth, Cetus likely began as a mythic whale—a creature of awe and mystery for the ancient Mesopotamians who first looked up and named it.
James Sale has had over 50 books published, most recently, “Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams” (Routledge, 2021). He has been nominated by The Hong Kong Review for the 2022 Pushcart Prize for poetry, has won first prize in The Society of Classical Poets 2017 annual competition, and performed in New York in 2019. He is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. His most recent poetry collection is DoorWay. For more information about the author, and about his Dante project, visit https://englishcantos.home.blog. To subscribe to his brief, free and monthly poetry newsletter, contact him at [email protected]
James, there is great depth of poetic portrayal of the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. It seems to me Jonah had more to lament than Cetus, perhaps that is what you meant. The predicament Jonah found himself in was caused by his attempt to run away from preaching sin. Wishing upon the Cetus constellation of the stars, and wishing he could hear a few hymn bars, was like when Jonah was interred in the whale and deciding that God’s mission should prevail. Your poem was masterful, no doubt. I’m glad that you could spew it out.
Thanks Roy – spewing it out is not quite the metaphor I had in mind with this poem! But in all things let us all attempt to be ‘masterful’!
James, I know you know the story of Jonah and the whale and the gourd plant (or whatever kind of plant it is in the most accurate recent Bible translation). The plant verse as your epigraph suggests you’ll find your unique interpretation with it. You have plenty of references to the vexing nature of Jonah’s vocation as he sees it. And you give him varied angles from which to contemplate the matter. He’s called to an unwanted mission, succeeds and fails at it, but “obsessed with trespass and my sin” can’t leave watching over it. The poem as a whole is his lament addressed to the heavenly whale constellation, in which he sounds almost as petulant and uncomprehending as ever. Cetus does, however, give him a mysterious someone to talk to as he wanders through his soul. That is, in its immense size and starry glory, Cetus enables you to present Jonah as capable of more serious contemplation. You do beautiful work there. The reluctant missioner remains himself, yet comes to a conclusion the same and different from what the sacred author has him say about the plant. Wait, and wait still more for the appointed time and the divine whisper. You create a lovely lament over the awesome unknowability of the divine plan for a chosen individual.
When you refer to “a lovely lament over the awesome unknowability of the divine plan for a chosen individual,” you have it: that’s it – the awesome unknowability; the mystery we have to enter into. Thank you for such a perceptive reading.
James, I think anyone who enjoys the scriptures has to love this poem. You weave the scriptures into this new look at Jonah and trust your audience to follow along. That’s what poetry is all about. Great stuff.
Excellent Mike – so pleased you like it!!! Thank you.
Excellent Mike – really glad you liked the way I weave this story. Thanks.
How bright the stars would be after three days in the belly of a whale. Only a writer who is truly in character would think of such a detail. Well done!
Yes, Michael – the brightness is even brighter once one has been in the darkness! Really glad you appreciated this small detail.
I’m not going to talk about spiritual journeys, mythic parallels or anything like that. This poem speaks for itself and has raised telling comments from other readers. I want to talk about some truly amazing metrical fluctuations employed in this poem.
Already in the fourth line of the first stanza:
“Under whose Presence I think, we both know.”
I defy anyone to scan this as iambic pentameter. Foot by foot, I can do this in precisely this way:
1st foot: trochaic substitution
2nd foot: iamb
3rd foot: pyrrhic substitution
4th foot: trochaic substitution
5th foot: spondee substitution
Even Milton was somewhat shy when it came to overriding standard norms, but Sale is not for sale.
Always good to hear from you CB – and thanks for these highly informative analytical scansions of my verse. One can never justify one’s own poetry – people are either going to like it or not. But I would outline my ‘poetics’, as it were, so that at least you are confident that I am doing this deliberately. The thing is: since Milton’s time and the greater standardisation of the English language, there has been so much more verse in iambic. So on a yin-yang scale, to write perfect metrical verse is yang; to write free verse is yin. On the site of the SCP we need to err on the side of yang; but, too much yang leads to a kind of sing-songy verse that becomes tepid by its very regularity. Each poet must decide for themselves where that balance point is: I am firmly with the ‘yangers’ in that I want metrical verse, but I also want to avoid a symmetry that dulls the meaning. The key thing, then, that is even more important than the meter is the syntax, because the syntax is what really gets you thinking and feeling about what is being said. This is the mastery of Milton: the syntax, which relentlessly drives you on. I cannot claim to have that syntax, but it is what I aspire to. But as Macbeth said in another context, But what if we fail? And his wife said, ‘We fail’.
You’ve taken on a difficult task, James, and I hope it goes well for all of us. There is a bit of broken syntax here, but a good reader should be able to make the necessary connections. When I was in college, I sewed a ying/yang patch on the breast of my dungaree jacket. I also wore garish bandanas.
“A good reader should be able to make the necessary connections,” says C. B. Anderson regarding any broken syntax of yours, James. This is the case, certainly so in this well-spoken lyric with identifiable backdrops in the Bible and in the heavens. It’s also true of rough meter. Again, Anderson agrees to a degree, saying that your verse can be scanned as standard iambic, but not according to a template a rational person would follow. Nonetheless (still quoting him), your meter takes care of itself.
As a reader of English where the accentual stands out more than the syllabic, I tend to look for stresses in any purportedly iambic line, and thus I’m satisfied with pentameter when I discover five. Your meter, as you intend, is far from perfect (and that need not be sing-songy). It’s understandable from your preference to focus on meaning and feeling. In “Cetus,” I would choose the very line C. B, has singled out as the roughest spot. Interestingly for our syllable-counters, it has ten and thus meets their criterion. But with a pyrrhic substitution, there are only four stresses. I have a suspicion that Milton created few lines similar to it because he made use of inversions–but these sound archaic and you, James, like to be straightforwardly conversational in a bardic way. In any case, I don’t insist on the suspicion about Milton.
What makes your meter acceptable, though rough to some expectations, is use of what Daniel Kemper calls poetic voice as opposed to prose voice. Kemper theorizes that in poetry there is a baseline of stress for verse lines, with syllables falling above or below that intensity–sometimes very slightly above or below. The good reader recognizes a syllable as stressed even if nothing but perceptible meter applies the stress. It might even be perceptible meaning that applies stress, with a word or syllable important to the flow. But the reader needs to apply poetic voice, and not read as if the array of words were prose. For example, the word “intensity” in a scientific paper would have only one stress, as it does in the dictionary. In an iambic line it almost always gets two, the stress on the final syllable being light. It’s less a matter of yang and yin alone than a perception of levels of yang and yin. Your poetic meter, James, bends readers to think and feel more as you do, or they just don’t like the poetry. Still, it’s there to discover. The means of finding your meter is simple, but unusual to writers and readers in form, especially as they react to free verse that may ask for prose voice reading.
Dear Margaret, thank you for this extended meditation on the prosody. I like it; I am not aware of Daniel Kemper per se and if he has a book out on this topic, you have made it sufficiently interesting for me to want to buy it! Do let me know. Hopefully my readers won’t react as if it were free verse – which would horrify me – and I think there is enough regular meter in it to alert them not to: I mean lines like “And me inside such times so long ago” is so, so regular. But as you rightly and perceptively point out, my meter “bends readers to think and feel more as you do, or they just don’t like the poetry”. I think I am what they call in England a bit of a Marmite character: you either love the product or you hate it! I love Marmite myself! Thanks again.
You bring up a fascinating subject, C.B. You use the word “amazing” above, to describe James’ metrical fluctuations. I especially noticed this line: “Then I remember those guts I was in.” The line sounds to me like dactyls; my analysis of the reason for this change, is that the thought itself is quite distressing, and therefore not given to regularity. (Is this something like what you intended, James?) I like the way unexpected fluctuations can sometimes be used to lend a certain emphasis. An example I love is from Donne’s Sonnet 7:
“All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, ….”
So many spondees, especially in those last two lines — and I think they are brilliant, because of the way they pile up on each other, both sonically and thematically, to emphasize their strong and serious theme.
I’m not sure whether I’m saying something similar to what you’re saying (it depends on how we’re using the word “amazing”.) An interesting tangent as a result of my reading your comments: I had to refresh my memory on the word “pyrrhic”. Timothy Steele’s definition (from “All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing) includes this: “pyrrhics are rare in English and are, moreover, largely unnecessary and confusing to the metrical analysis of our verse.” I’m not sure what I think about that.
Thanks Cynthia – you are right in saying it is what I intended, in that mimetic is one of my favourite words and concepts (Onomatopoeia is simply one aspect of mimeticism relating to sound). The example from Donne is another example where spondees pile up and create this emphatic sense of things happening. Diction, sound, syntax are all incredible ways that poets can ‘enact’ the meaning of what it is they want to say: Gerard Manley Hopkins would be another superb example of a poet with this tendency. Essentially, I feel, poets in this category most want to wrestle with words – as Herakles wrestled with Antaeus!
Very nicely done, James. I was shocked years ago when it first occurred to me that Jonah must have suffered horrid bodily harm inside the fish, as well as the many weeks (months?) of painful healing afterwards. You captured it in the ninth and tenth stanzas. But how did he breathe for the many hours inside the fish? It’s almost impossible to conceive of this story, which is why many deem it a concocted tale. Your poem also captures what were certainly some of Jonah’s broodings.
Thanks Jeff – the issue of being inside the whale vexed me too; hence the ‘albino’ reference. As for breathing, I am not clear. A whale is a mammal of course and so inhales as mammals do – does oxygen reach their stomachs? More modern translations like to call it a ‘big fish’ rather than whale, which changes the equation again. There is mystery everywhere we look!
The undulating narrative and the constantly shifting perspectives create a mood unlike any I remember having felt before. And the metrical dexterity (innovation?) here is a masterclass in neo-Miltonic prosody. Just try to scan these lines as standard iambic — just try! It can be done, but you won’t come up with anything that looks like a plan (template) a rational person would follow. The point is that Sale gets all the words right, and the meter takes care of itself, as it should. The most important thing is to communicate sense, and here we see what that looks like.
CB – you are almost becoming my best friend: I may have to quote this – “here is a masterclass in neo-Miltonic prosody” – on the cover of my new book, The Burning Word, coming out shortly! And I am so pleased it created “a mood unlike any I remember having felt before”. That is one thing I think poetry should do – and each one of us looks back on ‘classics’ that did precisely that for us: Frost’s Stopping By Woods, I remember reading for the first time and found myself haunted by it. Really appreciate your comments – thank you.
It’s funny, James, but after I posted my first comment, I let my laptop turn itself off, and when I went back I couldn’t find my comment so I tried to recreate it from memory — you see how that went. In any event, you are welcome to the blurb. Mood, as you imply, is very important. Look what it did for, say, Poe.
I love a good dramatic monologue, James, and this is sensational — and I mean that in a double sense, for it is both wonderfully wrought but also rich in sensory impressions ranging from visions of the macro (the metaphysically-sensed constellation) to the micro (the confinement within the belly of the whale.) Add to that the fact that this is biblically themed and FRESH and you know that you have crafted a truly special piece.
You’ve demonstrated what I believe is an important aspect of how to write exceptional poetry on biblical themes. Anyone can take an incident from Scripture and simply rewrite it so that it rhymes. But I don’t think that accomplishes much. It’s static. The Bible already tells its stories and tells them superlatively. How do you compete with that? And why would you want to? My answer is: you don’t rewrite something simply for the sake of rewriting it. Better to offer fresh insights. Here, for example, you fill in the blank spots of Jonah’s story with beautiful language and inspired character insights. This is exactly what I hope for. You offer us a dramatic monologue (you call it a lament, though I read it more as a meditation) which is deeply original and offers insight and something new for us to ponder. You don’t give us Jonah’s story (which the Bible already does.) You give us Jonah’s heart. Bravo, James.
Well, Brian – thank you so much – I really appreciate your comments on this poem, especially as you yourself are a master of dramatic monologues! And yes, one of the key aspects of writing them is the question of ‘insight’ – if that is missing, what is the point? I should say publicly at this point that I am doubly in your debt – my new collection, The Burning Word, coming out soon, has an introduction written by you and I know it’s going to be full of ‘insights’ that I will learn from. Thanks – aside from being such a fine poet yourself – for being such a tremendous champion of other poets and of the SCP – you are exemplary.
What a sophisticated treatment of this subject, so much going on here. After reading the piece several times and thinking rather deeply about its various effects, I listened to McKee’s musical version with my girlfriend. The song was not at all what I was expecting from such a contemplative poem. It was so good, so lively, it gave us goosebumps. My gf is a professional dancer (among other things) and started bouncing around the living room. Needless to say, I was entertained on multiple levels for four minutes. What Coats refers to as a “lovely lament” has been interpreted by McKee as a joyous jig.
Lex (McKee) here – you have made my day! Bless you for that!
Some people make me laugh a lot – whether it is through their wonderful poetry (eg. Legends of Liberty) or their litotic (has that word been coined yet?) suggestiveness: “Needless to say, I was entertained on multiple levels for four minutes.” Ha ha ha!!! Well, I am so pleased that you have been entertained ABB – that really is a hoot. (And PS – if you had any decency, you would have videoed it for all our mutual delights!)
This is a finely-crafted and deep poem that requires several readings to appreciate fully. ABB’s description of “sophisticated” is apt. You link the constellation to the biblical account and provide an inner reflection through the mouth of the prophet to which each of us almost certainly related. It is also a delicious read, with wonderful phrasing and pacing — “spew, albino-white, washed up” struck me as both a vivid image and a memorable turn of phrase.
Thanks Adam, particularly pleased you liked the word ‘albino’ in the description: trying to picture what that hell would be like is stretching!
James, I put off commenting for a while because I had to consider the poem from several angles. On one hand it alludes to and partially retells the Jonah myth, and on the other hand it is not so much concerned with the big fish that swallowed Jonah as it is with the celestial constellation of Cetus. In fact, as the poem proceeds it seems that these two things are conflated, as if to make a point about the relation of the real to the ideal. We have real living animals on earth, and we have those imagined animals that we have conjured up by looking at the stars and projecting some kind of pattern on their positions. What relation is there between what we physically see and experience, and what we think and fantasize and dream up? This is, of course, the prime philosophical question — inevitably asked by every human generation, but never fully or convincingly answered.
How does this relate to the scriptural story of Jonah? Well, I think there are a few possibilities. Jonah’s basic complaint here seem to be 1) a sense of his own failure and inadequacy; 2) his bafflement over what God requires of him; 3) vexation over the fact that Nineveh was not destroyed; and 4) an expression of ultimate faith in God, but in rather tenuous and hesitant language, as if he were still undecided about the entire business. We see Jonah trying to put together the pieces of an epistemological puzzle, and asking how he can be assured that what he sees and what he thinks and believes are in harmony.
As I read this poem, it strikes me as very modern in its revelation of the speaker’s tortured uncertainty, and his agonized self-questioning. Jonah is not really sure of anything, even after his experiences. He consoles himself with a pro forma declaration of faith in an all-powerful God, but it has the same forced and silent acceptance that we see in Job when God speaks to him out of the whirlwind. You can’t argue with overwhelming strength, so you just grit your teeth and bear it.
Your poem ends with the words “truth be told.” I take this as a key. If “truth” is the correct alignment of thought with things, then it seems to me that Jonah is still waiting to receive some final and definitive confirmation that the alignment will be made clear to him.
Thanks Joe for a very thoughtful response, and I don’t disagree with anything you are saying. You are right too, from my perspective, to pick out the terse, almost abrupt final three words ‘truth be told’ as the key to the poem. It’s a subjunctive passive construction that could be re-phrased as ‘if the truth were to be told’; that said, although grammarians may disagree, there is also a sense of the imperative with ‘be told’ and future with an ellipsis of ‘will be’. Speculative readings, perhaps, but I think it contributes to a sense of mystery that I wished to invoke.