May 1, 2008
-
For the First of May:
Back from
the Shadows
“I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me” – The Waste Land, lines 423-424
Eliot’s note on line 424 –
“V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance;
chapter on the Fisher King.”
From Ritual to Romance,
by Jessie L. Weston,
Cambridge University Press, 1920,
Chapter IX, “The Fisher King”–“So far as the present state of our knowledge goes we can affirm with certainty that the Fish is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and the title of Fisher has, from the earliest ages, been associated with Deities who were held to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life.”
Weston quotes a writer she does not name* who says that “the Fish was sacred to those deities who were supposed to lead men back from the shadows of death to life.”
* The Open Court, June and July 1911, p. 168
Today’s Doonesbury
(a flashback) –
“Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that
you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing
and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of
the lake.”– Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
