“A Parable” is a poem in Louise Glueck’s 1985 collection The Triumph of Achilles. In “A Parable,” the poet recounts two episodes from the life of David – the killing of Goliath and his desire for Bathsheba. The verse has a double-perspective. We see David and his accession to power after killing Goliath through the eyes of the Jews that he rules. Then, we are provided with David’s emotional response to the power that he has attained. The poem’s strategy involves doubling: we interpret the two scenes from David’s life, one military and the other erotic; an interior and exterior perspective on these episodes is also provided.
Relatively short, “A Parable” is built from about 30 unrhymed lines. The poem locates the heart of David’s story in the moments of transition – from “hero to god, god to ruler.” These transitions are instants in which energy changes form. David’s power passes over a “precipice” in which “the stone is gone; now / the hand is the weapon.” The verse advises that it is these moments in which power changes form that “we don’t want to hear about.” I think this means that we are interested in hearing about exploits – that is, the death of Goliath – but, not, the manner in which this adventure becomes something else: in this case, oppressive political power. From David’s victory on the battlefield, Glueck cuts to an image of the King, now entrapped in his power and isolated amidst his own “amplified desire” watching Bathsheba “like a flower in tub”. Her face appears against “the shining city of Jerusalem”. The woman and the city are the prizes that David has won through his exploits. But he is now becalmed: he realizes that “he has attained / all he is capable of dreaming.” The poem is curiously inert and still – in the moment of transition, power, like a spark of electricity, leaps the gap between different states of being. But what seems to be important in the moment of transition is the gap itself, the silent empty space between stone and hand, between hero and god, the space between Bathsheba and David who contemplates her, the abstract serene emptiness of a dream attained.
Glueck’s diction is clear and she doesn’t litter her poem with showy descriptions of the events portrayed. Her writing takes on the scrupulous, abstract plainness of parable as suggested by the poem’s title. This plain style of discourse is made evident in Glueck’s account of David picking up the stone that he will use in his sling: (“this young boy”)...picks up a stone among the cold, unspecified / rocks of the hillside.” The word on which I wish to focus is the adjective “unspecified” – the rocks are “unspecified”, that is not identified by their “species” or kind. The lethal stone amongst them is similarly “unspecified”. It’s just a generic rock.
Two reflections on “unspecified” stone occur to me. First, there is the problem of representation. When an artist sets out to recreate a scene known from parable, inevitably details must be supplied. Such details are superfluous to the bare skeleton of the parable’s narrative. The speaker conveying the parable left out certain elements of the scene or, more likely, didn’t even bother to imagine them. The Biblical writers don’t tell us what the Virgin Mary looks like – she is a generic, “unspecified” young woman: we don’t her height or weight or the color of her eyes and hair; we don’t know what her face looks like or how she moves or whether her teeth are straight or crooked. None of these characteristics are significant to the writer’s conception of the parable or Biblical account. But when an image of the Virgin is created, all of these elements must be imagined and represented. Painted in oils, the Virgin must have a certain physical form, a shape, hair color and complexion – her eyes must be imagined and the shape of her nose and lips. A young woman may be “unspecified” in a narrative, but she can’t be a mere generic fog in an oil painting or sculpture. Similarly, Glueck’s poem begins with modest description – there’s a hillside, some flowers, a few corpses lying at “the bottom of the hill.” David is first seen as a “nobody” (that is, without specificity) moving from “one plain to another” – there is a pun on the word “plain”; the poem is about transitions from one plane to another. But as he becomes a hero and emerges into history, details have to be supplied – he can’t remain a “nobody”. The stone can remain “unspecified” at the outset, as vague as Glueck’s “nobody” protagonist, but when hero becomes god becomes ruler, the fall into history is also a descent into the specific.
There is a second broader point that arises from consideration of the “unspecified rocks”. We can glimpse this idea in the description that Glueck provides of the flowers on the hillside where David picks up the stone: they are few, “white flowers / like stars, the leaves, woolly, sage-green.” Here, a plant is named – sage. The texture of the leaves is described with considerable specificity and a simile is used to convey the appearance of the “white flowers”. Two colors are identified: white and the highly specific “sage-green.” Comparison between the “unspecified” stone and the highly specific flowers points to an interesting phenomenon in writing: in world literature, so far as I know, flowers are named and made specific; stones, by contrast, aren’t specified with respect to their nature or composition – we aren’t told whether David’s stone is metamorphic, sedimentary, or igneous; the color of the rock, it’s crystal structure and hardness aren’t made specific; in Glueck’s poem, the stone doesn’t even have a shape.
Flowers have names; a stone is just a stone. This is particularly obvious in Shakespeare. In the spectacularly flowery A Midsummer’s Night Dream in the course of one short speech, characters specify wild thyme, violet, oxlips, the sweet musk rose with eglantine. Elsewhere, Shakespeare’s figures speak of wood bine, rosemary, fennel, columbine, pansies, daisies, daffodils, savoury, lavender, mint, marjoram, marigolds “that go to bed with the sun,” veitch, poppy, plantain, parsley, pimpernal, love-in-idleness and heart’s ease. Examples can be multiplied from the poems of Milton, Wordsworth and, even, William Carlos Williams. When a plant is described, the poet takes care to make its kind known. But when the mise-en-scene requires a rock, it’s just an “unspecified” stone. Obviously, the human imagination is wired to identify plants and flowers by name. Minerals have names too and specific characteristics, but these are rarely mentioned in literature. (The situation is somewhat different in oil painting; a few artists have painted specific stones of a certain geological aspect – a notable example is Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” (1480) at the Frick Collection; Bellini seems to have painted real rock formations with great specificity to the extent that the minerals comprising the formation can be identified. Cezanne’s paintings of rock quarries have this characteristic as well.) It’s worth asking why writers take care to specify the exact types of flower imagined in a certain landscape but show little interest in the stones and sediments from which those flowers grow. Of course, stones are inert, at least across the time spans in which we are capable of observing them whereas flowers are animate: they bud, blossom, and wither. Writers tend to characterize precious metals and gemstones – topaz, agate, sapphire, emerald are, I suppose, the flowers of the mineral kingdom. But who speaks for schist, granite, sandstone, feldspar, rhyolite, quartzite, and all the other “unspecified” stones in the natural world?
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