Jane Hill

Department of English

State University of West Georgia

Carrollton, GA 30118

The Fisher King on the Edge of Appalachia: David Bottoms

and the Reconfiguration of Eliot’s Waste Land

[Paper delivered at the Appalachian Studies Association,

Unicoi, GA, 15 Mar. 2002]

The two poems that close Armored Hearts, David Bottoms’s 1995 volume of selected and new poems, “My Perfect Night” and “Allatoona Evening,” characterize with a profoundly simple beauty the end of his poetic persona’s quest for spiritual serenity in the postmodern reality of his rapidly changing North Georgia world. Bottoms defines his “perfect” night as one in which “. . . I follow a trail by the river, / and my shadow on the water / looks deep and alive” (139). By positioning his poetic protagonist on a trail by a river and by emphasizing his shadow and its vivacity, Bottoms invites readers to remember the closing image of T. S. Eliot’s twentieth-century epic The Waste Land, in which Eliot’s protagonist, a modernist embodiment of the Fisher King of Arthurian legend, finds himself along the banks of London’s Thames, waiting patiently for signs of fertility and renewal to emerge from the river’s post-World War I sterility and decay.

Like Eliot’s protagonist, the characteristic first-person speaker of Bottoms’s poems is a man who has lived through a period of enormous social upheaval and cultural revision. For the Bottoms protagonist, the era is the 1950s and ‘60s, and his geographic position is not London, but the southern rim of Appalachia. Middle-aged by the time “Allatoona Evening” articulates his ultimate response to having lived through his own version of a wasted land, this speaker takes his cue from the lake’s waters. He hears its call as an admonition “to lay down / [his] anger” and to realize that “Nothing is more beautiful than [his] emptiness” (140). These images—of anger and emptiness—share the decidedly guarded nature of the optimism that ends Eliot’s poem. At the end of Armored Hearts Bottoms has not found all the answers, or even an answer per se. He has, however, found that he must precisely position himself both physically and psychologically if he is to experience the renewal, or resurrection, that is the object of his quest.

Although Bottoms resists the notion of Eliot, at least as a source of study for his students, an examination of the body of work that he has produced since he first began publishing poems in the 1970s makes the links between the two poets inescapable. In his famous theory of poetic relationships, The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom argues that all poets must confront their powerful precursors in order to emerge as mature poets themselves. His approach is primarily psychological, figuring influence as an aesthetic Oedipal contest of sorts, built upon six possible relationships, or revisionary ratios, as Bloom terms them, that might exist between precursor and younger poet. Of the six, the one that best describes the relationship between Eliot and Bottoms is Tessera, defined by Bloom as “completion and antithesis. . . . A poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough” (14).

Reading The Waste Land as the parent-poem for Bottoms’s collection (which I read as a multi-poem account of a single protagonist’s experiential journey) through the lens of the Bloomian concept of Tessera, we then can conclude that Bottoms moves beyond the point in the journey at which Eliot leaves his Fisher King and moves his speaker deeper into the lived experience of the redemption that Eliot’s protagonist has only just decided to anticipate with hope. In that sense, Bottoms’s persona does move beyond Eliot’s; Bottoms is able to render a next stage in the journey that Eliot, in The Waste Land, does not or cannot articulate.[1]

Eliot’s poem is divided into five sections: “The Burial of the Dead.” “A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” Death by Water,” and “What the Thunder Said.” Examining the devastated landscapes—literal and psychic—of post-war Europe through the framework of the Grail legend with the Fisher King as its protagonist, Eliot builds a complex mosaic from medieval legend, Christian allegory, and literary allusion. The natural and manmade worlds are represented as decayed and un-nourishing; relationships between men and women, citizen and state, and humans and God are portrayed as broken and unattended; the world of the poem is a world without meaningful life. The questing hero, the man trying to find a reason to go on in this sterile, corrupt world peopled largely by the living dead, seeks, at the simplest imagistic level, water to quench his thirst. Through the literal trash strewn along the dried-up riverbed that has become a playground for rats and other vermin and the psychological and spiritual garbage of meaningless relationships and corrupt human exchanges, Eliot moves his Fisher King, who finally comes to a “decayed hole among the mountains,” where “the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves” and where there is an “empty chapel, only the wind’s home” (1391). Here, in this less than hopeful setting, the Fisher King finds thunder, rain, and a message, in Sanskrit, which translates: “Give, sympathise, control” (1391).

Accepting this supernatural advice delivered by nature, Eliot’s hero understands his position in the universe through a boating metaphor:

. . . The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands. (1392)

Having come to this recognition, the Fisher King ends the poem by saying,

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

These fragments I have shored against my ruins. (1392)

The intertextual relationship between The Waste Land and Bottoms’s poetry is far too extensive for me to examine thoroughly in the context of a conference paper. Eliot’s post-war cultural breakdown and decay manifest themselves in Bottoms poems about vandalism such as “Wrestling Angels,” Smoking in an Open Grave,” and “Light of the Sacred Harp,” in “The Hard Bargain,” in which a pawn shop serves as repository for the sad relics of individual lives and a culture fallen on hard times, and in a poem such as “Hurricane,” where nature sweeps through northern Florida, leaving behind a war-like scene of devastation but also the possibility of cleansing and redemption. The speaker and his companion come in “In the Wilderness Motel” to “fill a vacancy” (59) in an “abandoned” (60) world populated by rats, weeds, garbage, and concrete literally fragmenting because of the pressure exerted by pine roots and marked by a burnt-out neon sign. There they will be able to “. . . celebrate / the comfort, the company of ruin” (60).

The breakdown in male-female relationships that is central to Eliot’s poem, especially to “A Game of Chess” and “The Fire Sermon,” appears throughout Bottoms’s work as well. In “The Farmers,” one of his rare poems not in first-person, Bottoms writes of rape from the defensively detached perspective of the victim. “In a Pasture under a Cradled Moon” and “In a U-Haul North of Damascus” deal with miscarriage and its effect on a marriage, just as Eliot explores abortion and its effect in the second scene of “A Game of Chess.” “Warbler at Howell’s Drive In” evokes the illicit sexual desperation of several scenes in “The Fire Sermon” just as the non-communication between the speaker and his wife in “The Guitar” recalls the couple in the first scene in “A Game of Chess.”

Eliot’s blending of high art and popular culture (as evidenced in his use of the nursery rhyme about London Bridge quoted above) also appears in Bottoms’s work. In “Jamming with the Band at the VFW” the speaker ponders the master’s degree in literature stored under his hat as he dances with women in a scene that reminds him of Lawrence Welk. In “Crawling Out at Parties” the divide is even more pronounced, with the speaker trying to negotiate a sophisticated party scene as his primal side seeks to exert itself when he tries to engage women.[2] As the Bottoms protagonist begins his slow journey back to a sense of meaning and connection with cultural roots that he believes to have been destroyed, important figures in his return, or rebirth, are various icons of that culture—musicians Little Roy Lewis and Lester Flatt and potter Lanier Meadows, all of whom have poems written in homage to them. Thus, like his famous precursor, Bottoms seizes upon fragments of a culture under siege by the forces of modernity, or in his case perhaps postmodernity, in order to stave off personal ruin.

The images of fire and water so central to Christian mythology as well as to Eliot’s epic also play a crucial role in Bottoms’s poems. The speaker and a group of his friends vandalize a church in “Light of the Sacred Harp.” Drunk and cold, they light a fire with hymnals in a trashcan, only to have the fire spread until it destroys the church. From this destruction, however, the speaker comes to a reconfirmed sense of the truths he’s been taught all his life. He realizes that “. . . men do rise from dust / and ashes” (44), a recognition that makes this fire a key element in the reconstruction of self that is the project of Bottoms’s quest.

Even more significant is the image of water, which permeates the work and directly associates Bottoms with the figure of the mythic Fisher King. Often water and drowning are linked, as they are in the fourth section of Eliot’s poem, “Death by Water.” For example, in a poem titled “The Drowned,” the speaker comes upon a body while fishing, and in “The Voices of Wives Dreaming” the drowning death of neighborhood child haunts the dreams of the women in the speaker’s suburban enclave. Perhaps most significant of all the drowning poems, though, are those that focus on the speaker’s father, who almost drowns during a naval battle in World War II. “Naval Photograph: 25 October 1942: What the Hand May Be Saying,” “The Anniversary,” and “A Sunday Dinner” (from Bottoms’s most recent collection Vagrant Grace) all reference this crucial event in his father’s life. Not only do his father’s rescue and ultimate recovery from life-threatening wounds constitute a resurrection of sorts for him, but the speaker is also hyper-conscious of the connection between this resurrection and his own existence, for he speaks as a child conceived after these traumatic war-time events.

A poem from early in his career, “Under the Boathouse,” links the Bottoms speaker himself to the drowning and resurrection myth. Spontaneously diving into a lake as he and his wife arrive for a vacation at a cabin, the speaker finds himself “caught by the unknown” at the bottom of the lake and almost drowns. When something “gives” at “the other end” and he rises to the surface to live again, he realizes that he has a hook through his left hand. He has, in essence, become a fish rather than a fisherman, and his experience is comic and even a bit shameful in comparison to his father’s heroic self-sacrifice. “Under the Boathouse” also evokes another early poem that connects Bottoms to water and fishing, but in an equally ironic way. “The Catfish” finds the speaker trapped in traffic jam on a bridge at Saint Simons, where, from his car, he observes a fisherman packing up for the day and throwing “a catfish too small to keep” onto the pavement. As the speaker watches the fish “straining to gill air,” he decides to act, takes a towel from his backseat, gets out, picks up the struggling fish, and throws it over the railing and back into its natural element, which he describes as “the current of our breathable past” (23).

Thus, we can make a turn from the perhaps arbitrary use of such imagery, or from its appropriateness to the cultural experience of a man of Bottoms’s age who grew up in the rural foothills, to the ways in which such imagery positions Bottoms within an archetypal system that connects him to the current of his literary past. As a relatively young man in both these poems, he reveals himself as a comic figure, fish or even bait, as opposed to serious sportsman/seeker and as a mock hero at best, capable only of returning a tiny catfish to the water. We might even say that the heaven he imagines in “Under the Boathouse,” littered as it is from his perspective beneath the water, with “plastic knives and forks / . . . a can / of barbequed beans, a bottle of A.1, napkins” (49) from the grocery bags his frightened wife spills, is a comic inversion of the earthly hell that Eliot describes in his poem.

In “Hiking toward Laughing Gull Point,” another poem from early in his career, Bottoms portrays his speaker as a man who makes a ritual walk each year past assembled fishermen and lifeguards “[dreaming] of salvation” (32), searching for a “point / [that] keeps drifting farther away” (32). Using these three poems, then, as a point of departure, it is possible to trace the spiritual growth of Bottoms’s speaker throughout his career by looking at what I will call his fishing poems. Perhaps no other single image is so prevalent in his work; if we expand the image beyond fish and water poems to include other “watery” environments and creatures, the pervasiveness of this imagery is truly startling.

“Hiking toward Laughing Gull Point” adds an element of existential angst to the comic self-deprecation of the boathouse and catfish poems. In other early poems, such as “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump,” in which the speaker and his friends, again drunk, kill rats paralyzed by their headlights for sport, Bottoms acknowledges a malaise articulated by Eliot’s protagonist when he says, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing” (1389). But Bottoms ends “Shooting Rats” with an ominous note of recognition, saying that the rats “crawl / for all they’re worth into the darkness we’re headed for” (5), the darkness of death. This insight, this conscious understanding of his own mortality as he finds himself unable to connect to the cultural roots that would provide a soothing explanation about the possibilities for immortality through grace, again makes Bottoms a descendent of Eliot’s speaker, who promises to show his listener “fear in a handful of dust” (1381).

What does this middle-class boy/man from Canton, Georgia, have to fear? Without taking time to make the case with detailed evidence from the poems, let me say that he fears the breakdown of his culture: of religion, of family life, of gender roles, of social mores, of his natural environment itself. David Bottoms resides on a number of borders: the border between Appalachia and suburban Atlanta; the border between modernity and postmodernity; the border between the separate before-and-after worlds created by the sexual revolution, the drug culture, the civil rights movement, the post-industrial economy, the women’s movement. This particular cultural position is an accident of his birth, of where and when he came into the world, of the inescapable tension created for a person born to a very specific set of values, then drawn toward the counter-values of his own generation’s take on the world they inherited.[3] Nonetheless, the similarity of these circumstances to those that faced Eliot in the 1920s is worth noting. Eliot wrote his epic in part while institutionalized for a psychological breakdown, suggesting that many men/poets have found themselves more baffled by the forces of their cultural place and moment than has Bottoms. My point regarding Bottoms’s work and his cultural identity is simply that, while rendered in clear, accessible narrative forms that suggest the autobiographical, his poems are, like Eliot’s, more productively read through the lens of cultural inquiry than biographical curiosity.

The question then becomes how does Bottoms evolve from the fearful, ironically self-deprecating, perhaps embarrassed (by his inferiority to his father) and definitely depressed young vandal into the man who can position himself by the water in “My Perfect Night” and “Allatoona Evening” to receive the redemption he now believes to be possible.

In several early poems the speaker’s sense of the natural world echoes the pessimism of Eliot’s nature imagery in The Waste Land. In “Gigging on Allatoona” the speaker and his companions “huddle on a ruined dock” (51); in “The Copperhead” he moves among a “cluster of stumps” and a “half-buried trunk,” his boat on an “edge” of stumps “like the ruins of an old pier” (52). He navigates “among river trash bogged in the scum of algae” (55) in “Wakulla: Chasing the Gator’s Eye,” but even this early he understands the importance of taking a position in this environment, of placing himself here:

And if you approach as a part of this river, give over

to your truest self, something

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . you can see. . . . (55).

The next poem in Armored Hearts, “In a Jon Boat during a Florida Dawn,” picks up on this sensibility:

For now, there are no real colors, only tones

promising change, a sense

of something developing, and no matter

how many times you have been here,

in this boat or another,

you feel an old surprise surfacing

in and around you. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

you would give yourself completely

to the holding. (56)

Written in English that creates the illusion of the colloquial, rather than in Sanskrit, these lines nonetheless suggest pretty much the same thing that “Give, sympathise, control” suggests in The Waste Land.

“Sounding Harvey Creek,” the next poem in the collection, has its speaker pondering “the floor of broken shells” that lies beneath the water he has positioned himself beside. Having unfolded the legs of his fishing chair and taken up residence on a dock, the speaker describes his “wrist whipping air with a switch of black graphite” and goes on to say “I concede my ignorance of fishing” (57). At this point in his spiritual trajectory (a little more than one-third of the way through Armored Hearts), the speaker is approaching the poems about miscarriage and his abandonment of his marriage. Only “In the Wilderness Motel,” in which the couple celebrates “the comfort, the company of ruin” (60), separates these three key fishing poems from the miscarriage poems. Thus, in admitting that he is ignorant about fishing, the speaker is revealing that fishing must then be a metaphor for him rather than an athletic endeavor engaged in for the thrill of conquest and whatever other ESPN-ish clichés we might rely on. Fishing becomes then a metaphor for spiritual seeking, which Bottoms makes even clearer in “Sounding Harvey Creek”:

What I love about water is mystery

the something unknowable

. . . the thing lost

sinking with each current

deeper into the sludge,

the obscurity of depth

and the infinite variety of oddities

crawling out of that depth

to reveal nothing. . . . (57-58)

This is still an existential angst being expressed, but the difference in tone and attitude between this expression and that in “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump,” for example, is significant. This speaker relishes “. . . the hours of awesome ignorance / enough possibility to make me reel” (58)[4], and he is content to “. . . listen for absolute silence / in the unsoundable depth of all water” (58).

At the end of “In a U-Haul North of Damascus,” the second of the miscarriage poems, the speaker, having packed up his belongings and left his marriage behind, examines his dilemma through a series of overtly spiritual questions that clearly suggest an inclination to reconnect with his Christian heritage:

Could I be just another sinner who need to be blinded

before he can see? Lord, is it possible to fall

toward grace? Could I be moved

to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved? (65).

The first fishing poem to come after these questions (fourteen poems intervene, including “Hurricane” and a series of poems that characterize a surrender to the suburban discontent of an unhappy marriage—poems that echo the first section of Eliot’s “Game of Chess”) might be read as the metaphoric beginnings of his answer. “Awake,” which comes directly after the three poems in homage to the folk artists of his region, places Bottoms’s speaker in early spring, the season in which Eliot’s poem begins with its famous declaration that “April is the cruellest month” (1380), and the speaker is setting out on the first fishing trip of the year. The weather holds “a promising stillness,” so he “take[s] [his] rod and tackle box” and heads out, where “. . . Underground / something is stirring, climbing through the veins” (90). Compare this with Eliot’s characterization of April’s “. . . mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain” (1380). Once at the the suburban pond that is his destination, the speaker achieves a sense of peace, a connection to place that promises the potential for renewal via traditional routes. Here, as in “The Farmers,” Bottoms uses second-person to create a kind of detachment from the self (also an Eliot technique), but this you has a completely different feel—a complete absence of fear and defensiveness—than “The Farmers” creates with its you. Bottoms writes that you “stand in the weedy mire bordering the shallows, / ease your fly onto the surface” (90) and sense the possibility that you can be moved, that you can fall toward grace.

The poem that follows “Awake,” “Gar,” reiterates the motif of awakening in a spiritual sense by having the speaker dream of fish with stinging kisses whose painful nibbling rouses him from a sweaty sleep in a river house he is visiting. Clearly, “Gar” suggests that the possibilities acknowledged in “Awake” have not been nor will they be easily and immediately realized, for there is an element of fear, panic even, as the speaker here says, “I rose dazed and found my clothes, / my line and tackle” (91). The poem ends with an image of desperation rather than peace, with the fisherman’s line becoming “a sawblade from the old world, hacking / like a memory at the light” (91).

Despite the desperation, however, the speaker has made an important leap forward in his progress toward the ultimate goal of redemption, for here he perceives several things crucial to his success. First, the image of hacking indicates that his will have to be an active rather than a passive role. He will have to work his way to the goal. Second, the idea that the sawblade will sever parts from a whole reverberates with the recognition in Eliot’s poem that a man living in the world being depicted must work with fragments, that pieces of the whole are what is left to us at this point in human history. Finally, the references to the past and memory solidify the necessity of making connections, however difficult and hard-fought they might be, to the past—one’s personal past and the collective cultural past. The successful quester cannot ignore this imperative regarding the past.

In all variations of the Fisher King legend, the king is wounded. The sources of the wound, its severity, and other variables differ considerably, but the wound itself is a given. In “Rats at Allatoona” Bottoms presents an important contrast to the destructive mayhem of his earlier “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump” and also gives his speaker the necessary wound. Again drunk, the speaker again stands on a deck and listens to rats climbing rusty trashcans. From his distorted perspective, the rats are engaged in a grotesque communion, and he longs for “shreds of their sacrament,” leading him to imagine giving of

. . . my body, whole

and broken, having taken from the feast

and given to it, the tip of a thumb,

the lobe of an ear. (93)

From this crucial turning point, the progress toward redemption seems almost inevitable. From another fishing boat, the speaker sees a tree covered with vultures, but instead of reading them as a symbol of darkness, death, evil, he perceives them as “transfiguring angels” (94). In “On the Willow Branch” he is again in a boat on the water and realizes that “suddenly you’re ashamed of your loneliness” (95).

Heading out to fish in “In Louisiana,” the speaker trips and falls unconscious to have a vision of his father rescuing a boy from a swamp. In light of Bloom’s psychological explanation of poetic influence and of the impact of the poems in which Bottoms records his own father’s war experience of near-drowning, this particular vision becomes fraught with significance. Of what becomes his own personal parade of the dead, a vision that Eliot’s protagonist must face and deal with as well, the speaker says,

Always I’ll remember

that gaped mouth drooling sludge, those dull fish eyes

wide in the new light

like the stunned eyes of the dying. (104)

The vision is so frightening that he acknowledges that he is now “looking for . . . / . . . anything in the world to clutch” (104). If we take the ordering of poems in the collection as significant, which I obviously do, what he clutches is his father: the next poems are the ones about his war experience. His father is resurrected in the poet’s imagination as a possible source of his own redemption. He can become a different man. He can be moved, in the direction of his father and his father’s values.

Here we might say is where the Tessera occurs. Eliot leaves his Fisher King at the point of looking, waiting for the thing to which he can clutch to reveal itself. Bottoms’s speaker moves on, having reached the psychological epiphany regarding his father and, I would argue, the solid Applachian values his father represents to him, to a state of earthly grace, at least. He has repositioned himself in relation to God, as he makes clear in “Last Nickel Ranch: Plains, Montana”: I think of prayer / and the humility necessary for prayer” (124). This humility is clearly a different thing than the embarrassment about his silly drowning and resurrection in “Under the Boathouse.” In “Paper Route, Northwest Montana” he is able to envision death from a new, less threatening perspective. He understands that no one is supposed to be able to “[glimpse] / the dead without shuddering” (125). And, finally, in “Last Supper in Montana” the speaker connects his realization with the imagery of Christian mythology: “and finally I could see how a wound could bleed / for centuries, could trickle enough / to fill this cup” (128). Grace, he understands, in “Free Grace at Rose Hill,” “swirls where it wants to swirl / If it touches us, / it touches us” (132). He, like Eliot’s protagonist, has learned that someone else’s hand steers to the boat.

If fertility is one indication of renewal and redemption, Bottoms’s speaker enjoys another advantage in his quest that Eliot’s Fisher King does not experience. Near the end of Armored Hearts the speaker has remarried and become a father. “Sleepless Nights” recasts the angst of earlier sleeplessness into fatherly concern for a sick child, and in the midst of the fear that accompanies such illness in “A Daughter’s Fever,” the speaker continues to know the hard-won peace and tranquility that is the reward for his journey. “My Perfect Night” and “Allatoona Evening” follow the daughter poems and serve as the collection’s coda, reminding us as the speaker reminds himself that the most significant element of his newfound knowledge is the necessity of positioning himself in that space defined by Eliot: by the water, fishing gear in hand, giving, sympathizing, and demonstrating the control that allows us to surrender to the greater control.

In his 1999 collection Vagrant Grace Bottoms offers a poem that underscores the connection between his own poetic vision and the image of the Fisher King. Dedicated to his daughter Rachel, “The Fisherman and the Little Fish” recounts an early morning fishing expedition by the speaker while his wife and daughter remain sleeping in their vacation cabin. The imagery is familiar, the man is familiar, the peace attained in the earlier poems dominates the tone. But time passes and he doesn’t catch a fish. He fears he will have to come back empty-handed to the women who will soon be rising. But then there is a strike and a catch, but the fish he holds in his hand seems to speak to him, to argue that it is too small, should be thrown back—like that long-ago catfish on the Saint Simons bridge. He thinks of the child waking up in the cabin, and he makes a choice:

He eased the fish into his cooler.

Hardly pan-size, true, but she’d never tasted trout . . .

and this one was a rainbow,

what she’d wished for

yesterday as they waited out the downpour. (30)

Note that the speaker has adopted third person here, suggesting that the story of this fisherman that we’ve been following is not merely a personal story, although it is clearly a personal story of great significance. The shift to third person suggests the larger mythic structure of the narrative we’ve been following, its broader universal application. And the choice that the third-person fisherman makes suggests a more realistic myth, a myth a man of Bottoms’s generation might actually be able to live in and live up to. The expectations are not so much diminished in size, like the fish, but redirected in purpose. The healed Fisher King is now prepared to assume his role as sovereign, to attend to the needs of the little fish that awaits him, who believes he can bring her a rainbow.

In “A Walk to Carter’s Lake,” also in Vagrant Grace, the speaker positions himself and a companion on “the edge of the millennium” and points out some “green blurs / stitching among the leaves” (59), saying somewhat wryly, “I don’t imagine / you’d call them anything as archaic as angels” (59). But he then goes to suggest that they are “agents of a sort” and tells his companion to lay down his or her pack and give what he is saying a chance. The speaker is revealing his resurrected self here, is taking the chance of telling the truth about who he has become:

I’m glad I’ve stopped pretending

to love people

and the cities where people can’t love themselves.

This is what the quiet accomplishes,

and the water trusting

the shadows to eventually peel back to the trees. (59)

Eliot was not a mountain boy, nor meant to be. But Bottoms here reveals, I think, that he is a foothills boy, one who has come to manhood on the edge of a region embattled by change but who has finally understood that he must lay aside his anger at all the cultural and personal upheaval and learn to live according to the values of his cherished childhood in the world of the new and to speak his conviction to that somewhat skeptical new world. Here Bottoms comes closer to the vision of America’s other great epic poem, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” in which the speaker promises his companion that he will stand and wait until the companion can catch up with him.

Bottoms is out there, waiting for us, volunteering to be our guide. This healed Fisher King is quietly moving toward the fulfillment of the range of responsibilities that come with his mythic powers of language and vision.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York:

Oxford UP, 1973.

Bottoms, David. Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Port

Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1995.

---. Vagrant Grace. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1999.

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. Norton Anthology of American Literature.

5^th ed. Vol. 2. Eds. Nina Baym and others. New York: Norton,

1998. 1380-92.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” Literature of the Western World.

Vol. II. Eds. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan,

1984. 1039-85.

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[1] If one reads Eliot’s work in the way I am suggesting that we read Bottoms’s, however, later poems, particularly The Four Quartets, suggest that Eliot’s poetic alter-ego also experiences this “next stage” of the spiritual journey. In the four long poems that make up The Four Quartets Eliot works from the perspective of the Anglican faith to which he converted after he wrote The Waste Land. It is interesting to note that Bottoms, like Eliot, converted to Anglicanism, or, in Bottoms’s case, Episcopalianism, in mid-life.

[2] Here Bottoms’s speaker is perhaps more reminiscent of Eliot’s earlier protagonist, J. Alfred Prufrock, than he is of the Fisher King. However, the male image here is not significantly different from that of various awkward, bumbling men who appear in The Waste Land, the young man carbuncular, for example, or Mr. Eugenides.

[3] For a detailed analysis of how these cultural shifts manifest themselves in Bottoms’s poetry, see my earlier articles on his work: “’To Own My Father’s Name’: Not Hiding the Masculine in the Poetry of David Bottoms” (Studies in the Literary Imagination) and “If It Touches Us, It Touches Us: The White Southern Male Struggle with Race in the Poems of David Bottoms” (pending at Appalachian Journal).

[4] The use of reel here is a characteristic Bottoms pun, but it also suggests how intently the fishing metaphor has become forged with the speaker’s psychological sense of himself at this point in the collection.