[Carl Copeland]

I’m actually a little envious of the reception you’ve been getting, Glenn. The few poems I write often sink after a few kind pats on the back. Sometimes I think I’d prefer any reaction to “ho-hum.” My apologies and thanks, of course, to those who have given me invaluable and occasionally harsh criticism, but my poems don’t provoke the volume of discussion that yours do. It’s a precious learning experience even if you reject some of the comments.

[Glenn Wright]

Thanks, Carl—
I do appreciate the time and thought that goes into the honest criticism that I receive and find it very helpful to know how readers react to my work. Thanks to all who have posted responses.
Even in efforts that are ultimately unsalvageable, I learn from the considered critiques and suggestion you provide.
Glenn

[Glenn Wright]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

And it doesn't help that you announce a "moral" at the end which isn't a moral at all, since it doesn't emerge from anything the poem says (God's son isn't mentioned in the poem, and prefiguring does not constitute a moral).

I’ll try one last time. . .

Isn’t it clear that I am not offering the “Christian allegory moral” as a satisfactory interpretation of the story? My point is that it can’t possibly make sense to Abraham or Isaac. From their perspective, God’s demands are at least incomprehensible and at worst, criminally insane. From Isaac’s perspective, his God and father have betrayed his love and trust, torturing him for no apparent reason. The fact that God makes a joke out of it should lead us to conclude that God is sadistic and untrustworthy. So the poem invites the reader to try to make sense of it. What is God revealing about Himself in this story? Why do Abraham and Isaac remain faithful to Him? Maybe if the title was “What the Hell Is This Story Doing in the Bible?” And don’t tell me not to presume to know God’s nature. He’s a character in a story whose actions scream for a human explanation. Put your religious preconceptions aside and just approach Him as a character. If all you can come up with is “God is so alien that humans can never hope to understand him,” you’re being lazy. You might as well say, “Raskolnikov is so alien that readers can never hope to understand him.” Try making that the thesis of your next literary essay and see if your literature professor buys it. Whatever the “moral” of the story is, it’s dark, deeply disturbing, and you’re not going to like it.

[Julie Steiner]

Glenn,

The Judaic and Christian attempts to overcome cognitive dissonance from this story go way, way back. But this poem ignores all of those other struggles and purports to present The One True Interpretation. The phrasing of this poem's questions seems to point toward a particular conclusion (as in prose), rather than leaving things more open to the reader's interpretation (as in poetry).

Although presumably being narrated from a Christian perspective, the glaring omission of Paul's famous take on Abraham's mindset at Hebrews 11:17-19 seems like determination to see the story in a particular way, because that's the way the narrator was taught it "in church" (perhaps by the sort of horrible, hyper-conservative housewife that often taught my own CCD classes, with free rein to frighten kids into unquestioning reverence for authoritarianism?).

BTW, if you're interested — although I sense from the poem that the narrator cares only about what "we learn in church," and doesn't really want to do a deep theological dive — the Talmud and Midrash (commentaries and interpretation in the rabbinic tradition, called "the Oral Law") contain a lot of material on the Binding of Isaac that would be relevant to the questions raised in this poem. As Christians, the narrator and whoever "in church" instructed him have ignored all that.

But the fact is that Christians can't look at the Old Testament (the Torah, the "Written Law") and think that that's enough to understand the story from a Jewish point of view, because most practicing Jews look at the Talmud and Midrash (the "Oral Law", commentaries and interpretation in the rabbinic tradition) in addition to the Torah. These other sources contain sometimes-conflicting alternative ways of looking at things in the Torah.

For example:

R. Levi said [in explanation of 'after these words']; After Ishmael's words to Isaac. Ishmael said to Isaac: 'I am more virtuous than thee in good deeds, for thou wast circumcised at eight days, [and so couldst not prevent it], but I at thirteen years'. 'On account of one limb wouldst thou incense me!' he replied: 'Were the Holy One, blessed be He, to say unto me, Sacrifice thyself before Me, I would obey', Straightway, God did tempt Abraham. — Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin, Folio 89a

In one Talmudic or Mishradic version, I've forgotten which, Isaac was so well-informed and cooperative that he even asked his father to bind him more tightly so he wouldn't flinch despite himself and mess up the sacrifice.

In some versions, Isaac is definitely a boy. In others, he's 37 years old.

I guess my point is that there is general agreement that the story is hard to digest. And there's nothing wrong (in my heretical opinion) with re-imaginings and new takes on Biblical stories. But this poem purports to present, and then to reject, The One True Version That We Learn In Church...and in doing so spends too much time behaving like prose, rather than behaving like a poem. The questions it raises point in one particular direction, shutting down alternative interpretations.

Poems usually open out into other meanings, rather than narrowing down into one.

I suspect that the narrowness of that perspective, more than agreement or disagreement with the particulars of its religious content, is the problem most readers here seem to be having with this poem.

[Glenn Wright]

Wow! You really provide a lot of valuable context, Julie. It’s clear that I completely failed to convey my own uncertainty about the meaning of the story in the narrator’s presentation of it. For some reason not clear to me, you and everyone else who read the poem are convinced that the narrator is trying to foist the Christian interpretation on the reader. I thought it was clear that the narrator was questioning and rejecting that view. I guess I’m going to just let it go. Thanks for the detailed response.

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

I’ll try one last time. . .

Isn’t it clear that I am not offering the “Christian allegory moral” as a satisfactory interpretation of the story? My point is that it can’t possibly make sense to Abraham or Isaac. From their perspective, God’s demands are at least incomprehensible and at worst, criminally insane. From Isaac’s perspective, his God and father have betrayed his love and trust, torturing him for no apparent reason. The fact that God makes a joke out of it should lead us to conclude that God is sadistic and untrustworthy. So the poem invites the reader to try to make sense of it. What is God revealing about Himself in this story? Why do Abraham and Isaac remain faithful to Him? Maybe if the title was “What the Hell Is This Story Doing in the Bible?” And don’t tell me not to presume to know God’s nature. He’s a character in a story whose actions scream for a human explanation. Put your religious preconceptions aside and just approach Him as a character. If all you can come up with is “God is so alien that humans can never hope to understand him,” you’re being lazy. You might as well say, “Raskolnikov is so alien that readers can never hope to understand him.” Try making that the thesis of your next literary essay and see if your literature professor buys it. Whatever the “moral” of the story is, it’s dark, deeply disturbing, and you’re not going to like it.

Comments like this one give me the impression that you really, really want to argue with someone who doesn't share your view of the story. No one in this thread said anything like the strawman arguments you are lashing out against in the above paragraph.

That anger seems to have been the muse of the poem, which is fine, but it's a posture that seems to push all readers away, even if they actually agree with the poet that "Well, this is perfectly explainable as a prefiguring of Christ's death" would of course not have crossed Abraham's or Isaac's minds, and therefore would of course not have been any sort of consolation to them (even if some Christians find that it makes the bitter pill of this story somewhat easier to swallow).

My own muse is often anger, and my own approach is often didactic rather than poem-like, and my own results often get pretty much the same response as this one did. Rhyme and meter don't automatically make something a poem. I speak with the authority of someone who has often missed the mark, and will probably continue to miss the mark on a regular basis. All part of the process of limping toward the right direction.

Above, you asked for concrete suggestions. I'll offer that if you used the Binding of Isaac as a metaphor for something else, as Owen did, that would give the reader more room to apply their own interpretation of a well-known story to a different situation. About ten years ago I read a poem about a teenaged girl whose mentally ill grandmother held a knife to her throat because the girl wouldn't stop dating a boy from a different religion, and was therefore (in her view) bound for hell unless the grandmother took drastic measures like murder in order to "save" her. When the Binding of Isaac was evoked in that context of religiously-justified violence, it felt new. And that approach also underscored some of the criminally insane aspects that you wanted to underscore in your poem, but in a more oblique way.

[Glenn Wright]

Thanks for the kind guidance, Julie, and for sharing your own experience. I am really learning to appreciate the value of workshopping in developing as a poet. When lots of people whose opinions I value tell me the same thing, I need to consider what they are telling me. I’m going to shelve this poem for the time being. Maybe I’ll come back to it someday, but it is clear to me that it is not working in its present form.

[W T Clark]

Of course, that Owen poem makes no sense. Again him and I are "at war". What does this mean:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
As I know of it: the first world war did not kill any son one by one, but massacred them from entrenched weapons of annihilation. How disfiguring it is to those dead soldiers to twist their truth into a rhyme-driven couplet!
"The pity is in the poetry", — ughhhh!

[Joe Crocker]

Originally Posted by W T Clark

What does this mean:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
As I know of it: the first world war did not kill any son one by one, but massacred them from entrenched weapons of annihilation. How disfiguring it is to those dead soldiers to twist their truth into a rhyme-driven couplet!

I think Owen is saying that rather than sacrifice their ram of pride, the fathers of the first world war chose to slay their own sons. The final rhyming couplet is a perfectly calculated ending, echoing the click of a rifle bolt as fathers kill their sons over and over and over again.

[W T Clark]

How can the pity-poet be "perfectly calculated" when he lies in his very couplet. It may reflect the sound of a rifle, but it does not reflect the truth. Machine guns killed soldiers by the hundreds, not "one by one".