Poem of the Week 2024/28

Return

After a few centuries

we prodigals came home in August.

London lowered her skies.

The fatted calf withdrew

into sullen pasties.

People in pubs backed off.

We had lived among swine.

Only the small country churches

opened their dim doors to us

like ancient aunts.

Half blind, they mistook us

for their lost congregations.

– Virginia Hamilton Adair

Adair was an American poet, but whatever autobiographical incidents crystallized into this poem about a return to London don't really matter to us, its readers, & probably didn't matter much to her, either, as the very first line, with its capacious time frame of centuries, lets us know that this is not a literal travelogue.

There's a comic slant to the juxtaposition of the grand centuries with the very specific month of August. Why that month? It's a standard time for vacations, though this trip, with its centuries & the Biblical weight of prodigals, doesn't seem like an ordinary vacation. August is full-on summer, & your feelings about that time of year will vary depending on how you feel about heat, humidity, sweat, & flies. Despite the heat, it's the month that starts to signal the approach of autumn & then winter, a standard poetic trope for old age & death: grasses dying out, a breeze that's cooler than expected, brown leaves starting to fall on the sidewalks & roads more frequently; darkness is starting to fall a littler earlier each day. It's the month of things getting late, of the end approaching.

Prodigals in the second line is likely to put the reader in mind the strange parable of the Prodigal Son (found in Saint Luke, 15: 11 - 32), in which, to give it a slightly nonstandard (but I suspect common) reading, the dutiful younger son is taken for granted while the older, the Prodigal, goes out into the world, burns up the money he cajoled out of his father by living the high life, & then returns, repentant through poverty, to that father, who celebrates his return by fêting him with a fattened calf. The dutiful among us are going to find this deeply unfair & even troubling. Meanwhile, there's glamor & excitement to the Prodigal's life, even in his misery: he's burning the candle of his inheritance at both ends & winds up in a picturesque plight as a herder of that unclean animal, the swine: this isn't a grinding, scrimping poverty, a careful making-do-with; it's as romantic in its way as his wild parties.

What makes the poet prodigal? We never quite find out, nor do we find out who accompanies her (it's we who come back). Since she is an American, there is a suggestion that England is in some way, if only language, the "Mother Country"; anyone who writes poetry in the English language, even those with no genetic link to the island, is bound to see the language-source as, in some sense, a home. Is it simply her Americanness that makes the poet a prodigal, her country's separation from its original colonizers, the assumed wealth & carelessness of her country, or maybe just a feeling that one has strayed, done wrong carelessly with & in one's life, & needs to return to one's source?

London's greeting is not quite that of the father in the Biblical parable: the skies (the heavens, if you will), are lowered. Literal storm clouds? A more metaphorical reluctance in the greeting for the returned ones? The mention of the fatted calf confirms for the reader that the switch flipped by prodigal was correct: the poem is playing off the parable. But the effect, starting with the verb lowered in the first line of the stanza, is clearly going to be more subdued, less dramatically colored than the Biblical story. There is no Father here, rejoicing in his son's return; instead, rather than being slaughtered to feast the returned Prodigal, the Fatted Calf withdraws itself on its own volition, & fills its assigned role duly & dully in the form of sullen (dark, glum, moody, morose; anything but welcoming) pasties. A pasty is a traditional British meat pie, the sort of "heritage food" you would order while visiting a foreign place, in order to convince yourself you were having an "authentic" experience. The locals know this, & produce them for the tourist trade. This may be part of the sullenness; there's no indication that the pub pasties are tasty. And contrary to the stereotype of the welcoming pub crowd, here the returned Prodigals are given the cold shoulder – even more than that, they are actively avoided. They are tainted rather than made romantic by their degrading time among the unclean pigs. They are back,  but still outsiders, perpetually. The contrast with the parable underlines that this is a world without the guiding if perhaps puzzling & paradoxical ancestral faith that led the Father in the parable to welcome back his erring son.

In the final stanza, the poet has moved from one standard tourist attraction, London & its pubs, to another, the old churches dotting the countryside. And here the prodigals are welcomed, though not quite with full comprehension: the churches are small, their entrances are dim, they are like older relatives who, half-blind, can't quite remember who you are: yet they let you in anyway, giving some sort of welcome, at least more of one than the prodigals received in the grander venues of the capital. Again there is a sense that the past's faith-based ways & assumptions have mostly vanished, just like the congregations the churches have lost (has the faith died out? is it just that customs have changed, & regular church-going is no longer the signifier of respectability? have the churches, content in their old ways, failed to react wisely to the modern world?).

Is the title of this poem a noun, indicating the fact of a trip back to some sort of originating place, or is it a verb, an injunction urging us to go back to such a place? The Prodigal was certainly in a bad place when he decided to return, & we can assume that the poet, a self-proclaimed Prodigal, is also in some sort of place of need (perhaps emotional more than physical). In a modern world devoid of its long-time religious & related social customs, & in an ambiguous, disappointed way typical of adult life, the returned prodigal finally finds welcome, of a sort. It may not be enough, but it's what she gets.

I took this poem from Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems by Virginia Hamilton Adair.