Who Utters Him?

I admire Lafferty’s verse. It's often the reactor core of his imagination, where he puts so much pressure on the carbon of his imagination that it becomes diamonds. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, but my current choice has held its place for the last few months.

And if the babe is less than ten,

He's given to a woman young

Who utters him anew, and then

(For benediction splits his tongue.)

What matters if from gallows-tree,

I dangle on a rope?

I hold me fast to virtue three,

The greatest one is hope.

I wondered what musical genre could best capture how this poem affects me. I settled on the blues because of how Lafferty's irregular meter, wounded suffering, and redemptive defiance square with the blues’ melancholy and perseverance. Fracture becomes a condition of creation. Here is the best I could do:

The irregular meter, I think, is a deliberate aesthetic choice by Lafferty, reflecting the thematic disjunction between restricted freedom, order, and transformation.

The first stanza gives us innocence. The “babe” undergoes a violently forced linguistic metamorphosis. The whole “given to a woman young” is powerful and scary. It's not just the sisters making you do Reed-Kellogg diagrams.

Then comes the rupture—“utters him” and “splits his tongue for benediction” with the cross-Latin pun on "good/better diction." There are many ways to take it. Is it creative re-articulation or subjugation? The phrase opens onto a landscape of violence and necessity, where speech itself is imposed, carved into the flesh. And what does this mean for Lafferty as a writer? This poem seems to say so much about him as a person and as an artist and the role of hope in his fiction.

The second stanza moves from the bodily to the metaphysical. 'Dangling from a gallows-tree' is a metonym—it signifies the Crucifixion, martyrdom. If the poem is about Lafferty himself, it places him within the paradigm of martyrdom. His adherence to 'virtue three' (faith, hope, and charity), with hope exalted as preeminent (contra 1 Corinthians 13:13), serves as a counterpoint to suffering.

This is Roman Catholic orthodoxy at its most difficult. It’s the moment of thinking: You have said the yoke will be light, but why does it feel so heavy? I have a dear friend with an autistic son in his twenties, and she once said: It’s one thing I will want to know—what He meant when he said this. It is merited vs. unmerited suffering.

It’s just a terrific poem by Lafferty. He didn't write enough of these. He is fun, but here we are in the depths.