A Tall Man Executes a Jig
A Tall Man Executes a Jig
Irving Layton 1963
“A Tall Man Executes a Jig” is one of Layton’s most anthologized poems, as well as one of his most ambitious and difficult. Layton himself would not argue this. In a 1963 review of Balls for a One-Armed Juggler by critic A. W. Purdy, reprinted in 1978 in Irving Layton: The Poet and His Critics, Purdy likens “A Tall Man Executes a Jig” to a parable written by God for his worshippers. He also recounts what Layton said to him about it: “‘Al, in ten years you’ll be able to understand this poem. In twenty you might be able to write one as good.’”
While humility may not be one of this poet’s virtues, he does make a valid point regarding the complexity and the quality of “A Tall Man Executes a Jig.” Like a parable, it does tell a story to illustrate a moral lesson, but that lesson is not as evident or orthodox as those found in common parables. Layton incorporates religious imagery and allusions—both Christian and Hebrew—as well as naturalist, or pagan, principles, taking his persona through encounters with each one only to be disappointed every time. This is a poem about man and his search for the knowledge of existence, the true wisdom of the earth. It is also about his power to create, to destroy, and to choose death as a means to achieve “transformation.” Animals typically figure into a Layton poem, and in this one gnats and a snake are central characters. After the tall man tries to find solace first in nature, then in Christianity, and then in Judaism, in the end he decides to lie down beside a dead snake and die too. The reptile, it seems, is the only one who has been “The manifest of that joyful wisdom.”
Author Biography
Born on March 12, 1912, in Neamtz, Romania, Irving Layton immigrated to Canada with his parents the following year. He studied agriculture, economics, and political science in college and earned his master’s degree from McGill University in 1946. During the early 1940s, Layton was writing poetry that concentrated on what he thought was an infuriating complacency in typical Canadian life. As a result, he helped found and edit First Statement, a literary journal highlighting his own work as well as that of other young Canadian writers who wanted to bring attention to the need for social and political enlightenment in their country. In 1945, Layton published his first book, entitled Here and Now, which received very little notice or respect.
For a man whose formal education was in the social sciences and whose early creative efforts were something less than encouraging, Layton became one of the most prolific, highly regarded, and consistently controversial writers of the twentieth century. He holds fervent opinions on countless issues and has never hesitated to voice them publicly. He uses his poetry to lambaste government officials, anti-environmentalists, poetry teachers, and women writers, among others. In letters to newspapers and published articles, Layton has targeted critics who have reviewed his books, and there have been many—over fifty since 1945. A typical rebuttal from Layton involves a direct personal attack on the critic. For instance, in 1964 he wrote a letter to The Tamarack Review as a reply to a critique on Balls for a One-Armed Juggler (in which “A Tall Man Executes a Jig” first appeared) by critic Gerald Taaffe. Debunking Taaffe’s statement that the poems are dedicated to “insulting persons as various as a hose manufacturer,” Layton said the critic misled readers “by fusing together two totally unrelated ideas and then planing and slanting them to make a smooth board for Mr. Taaffe’s behind so that he can slide easily into the stinkpuddle of his own making.” In a letter to The Montreal Star that same year, Layton wrote that “There hasn’t been a writer of power and originality during the last century who hasn’t had to fight his way to acceptance against the educated pipsqueaks hibernating in the universities.” He went on to say that “95% of the teachers of literature in our universities and schools would be more honestly employed cleaning toilets.”
Layton biographies are filled with the poet’s outrageous proclamations and discussions of his controversial, often sexually explicit poetry. It should also be noted that he received a Canada Council award in 1967, allowing him to travel extensively overseas, and Italy and Korea nominated him for a Nobel Prize in 1981. He was both a high school teacher and professor of English in the 1950s and 1960s (careers that some would call hypocritical), and he has been a poet in residence at several universities in Canada. While these accolades are common among accomplished twentieth-century poets and writers, any kinship Layton has with “typical” personalities ends just about there.
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Poem Summary
Lines 1–7
The first lines of the poem provide the setting for the persona’s whereabouts. It is a very pastoral scene, describing a man lying on a blanket in the grass, feeling the sunlight that seems to “push the grass towards him.” He hears flies buzzing about and the songs of “small imprudent birds.” Although “imprudent” means unwise or indiscreet, in this case it probably connotes innocence on the part of an unwary, harmless animal. The man also hears cars passing on a nearby roadway, but their sounds are “ambiguous” and indistinguishable from one another, implying the persona’s boredom with their “rumbles.” With this mixture of natural and unnatural noises all around him, the man casually looks up at the sky and becomes “aware”—the last word in line 7 and the first implication of an intellect at work amid a seemingly lazy and uneventful day.
Lines 8–11
At first it seems that the persona is “aware” only of the gnats that swarm about and that must tilt their tiny, almost weightless bodies against the wind to keep from being swept away. The insects soon become much more important as the man observes them and begins to imagine the role they play in the entire realm of nature. In the sunlight, they appear as “jigging motes,” or as little dancing
Media Adaptations
- An audiocassette of A Wild Peculiar Joy: Selected Poems 1945–89 was released by McClelland and Stewart in 1995. Layton is the reader.
- There are two National Film Board documentaries on Layton available on videocassette. One is called Poet: Irving Layton Observed (1 hour) and the other is called A Tall Man Executes a Jig (1/2 hour).
- There are many tapes of interviews and poetry readings by Layton available through A Catalogue of the Letters, Tapes and Photographs in the Irving Layton Collection, University of Calgary Press, 1993.
specks, and look like the minute flies that are attracted to various fruits, such as bananas. The man is reminded of “fruitflies,” but he thinks these creatures must be something different since “there was no fruit / About, spoiling to hatch these glitterings.” The last phrase refers to the fact that some fruit flies have larvae that hatch in plant tissue, damaging the crop.
Lines 12–14
From “jigging motes” to “glitterings” and now to “nervous dots,” Layton describes the gnats in a variety of creative ways, all designating free, spontaneous, and chaotic movement. There is no evident pattern, plan, or logic in their frenzied motion, and that is the reason for juxtaposing them against the likes of Thucydides, a Greek historian (ca. 460 B.C.), and Euclid, a Greek mathematician (ca. 350 B.C.). Both these men were known for insisting on logical analysis, whether it was in regard to recording history or developing geometry. The poet implies here that the undisciplined, pointless behavior of raw nature would be a “savage nightmare” to Euclid, in particular. Critic Milton Wilson, in “Notebook on Layton” (from Irving Layton: The Poet and His Critics) suggests that the gnats “are like the ‘nervous dots’ of punctuation which mark the missing ‘closing sentences’ of Thucydides.”
Lines 15–18
These lines are all metaphors for the “Jig, jig, jig, jig” movement of the gnats. They look like a chain being jerked around by an invisible hand or by the summer haze that amuses itself with trembling and shaking to jostle the “miniscule black links” about.
Lines 19–24
In these lines, some of the buzzing gnats spot the man’s bare arm and land on it. The “unrest” they leave to land is “orthodox” in the sense that their meaningless movement is actually an accepted standard of gnat behavior. “Undulant excitation” is yet another way of describing the wavering and dancing of their typical state of excitation. The man starts to feel more a part of the natural world as he imagines the grass and the wildflowers as “black hairs.” Just as the insects are only tiny, frenzied specks compared to the world around them—including the hairs on the man’s arm—he now sees himself as only a “maddened speck” amidst the enormity of nature. At this point in the poem, the persona is beginning to doubt his first attempt to connect with the wisdom that he hoped lay in the gnats. As he studies them further, he is uncomfortable with what he discovers.
Lines 25–28
Here, the man confesses to being “made” to feel “Glad at last” by the tiny creatures, even though he considers their flitting about among the hair on his arm as “assaults.” But he then confesses to feeling “purest joy” as they writhe and do their “frantic jiggings” under the hair on his arm. This is not the joy and wisdom he was seeking, however, because the pleasure he feels in watching them is at the expense of the gnats now trapped on his arm. Line 28 implies that the flies who left their “orthodox unrest” to land there are “changed from those in the unrestraining air.” Since it is obviously not a change for the better, the man must consider that it is likewise not better for him to think of himself as a speck amid the “black hair” of the grass, wildflowers, and all the rest of nature.
Lines 29–32
Line 29 is an apparent contradiction of line 24. In the previous, he felt himself “a maddened speck” and five lines later, “He stood up and felt himself enormous.” To emphasize his massiveness, Layton compares the persona to Donatello, the fifteenth-century Italian sculptor who lorded over his works in stone and bronze, and to Plato whose “size” was measured more in brain power and high intellect than in physical stature. The man’s feeling of enormity is also likened to that of a lover who has pleased a “lovely woman,” implying pride as well as satisfaction. Why would the sudden switch from feeling so small to feeling so big take place in the man’s mind? It likely indicates his urgency to forego a transformation into the world of the gnats. His disappointment in seeing how easily the once-free insects became prisoners in his hair makes him rethink the idea of being one with them. Now he chooses the opposite side, wanting to feel not only big again but dominating.
Lines 33–36
Line 33 continues to emphasize the feeling of largeness the tall man experiences—so tall that he “feels his forehead touch the emptied sky.” And in the sky, “all antinomies flood into light,” meaning that all of life’s paradoxes, or all the contradictions between reasonable assumptions, are exposed. The man’s finding joy in nature and then finding it in being away from nature is a paradox. He can rationalize good things about both, and yet they contradict each other. These unavoidable “antinomies” continue to weaken his faith in the gnats’ wisdom, and he returns his attention to them—the “haloing black jots”—that still swarm around his head like an angelic aura. Even though they continue to “jig jig jig,” they have now lost the unique and extraordinary qualities that so amazed and stimulated the man in the first place. Now he sees them simply “Meshed with the wheeling fire of the sun.” It is not unusual for the sun to appear as a symbol in Layton’s poetry. Often, it carries more than one connotation in the same poem, and in line 36 of “A Tall Man Executes a Jig” it alludes to the continuous flux of the gases that make up the bright star. They constantly whirl about at speeds unrecognizable to the human eye, and the similar movement of the gnats blends well with them.
Lines 37–42
The latter half of the third stanza brings an end to the man’s first attempt to find the true knowledge of life on earth and to transform into a being that can reach that level of understanding. The things of nature that move chaotically no longer appear to be caught up in a joyful dance. Now they simply exhibit “Motion without meaning, disquietude / Without sense or purpose.” The “ephemerides”—or short-lived insects, such as mayflies—are now accused of having “mottled” (marked with spots) the “resting summer air.” Their motion is an aggravation, not an enticement. The beings that once maintained their space by moving “tilted against the wind” have now been “swept” by that same wind from the man’s sight “like wisps of smoke.” Lines 41 and 42 close out the stanza with a final smack in the tall man’s face: the gnats come back with another flying creature in tow, but the bee is so disinterested in human life that it snubs the man for a flower.
Lines 43–45
Just as the insects in the previous stanza cast off the importance of the man, he, in turn, “doffed [removed] his aureole of gnats” and walks away from the field. The sinking sun in these lines symbolizes Christ, the “dying god” whose blood was shed on a hilltop. At this point in the poem, the tall man turns to a second possible route to pure wisdom—Christianity. But just the reference to Jesus as a “dying god” does not imply much enthusiasm or hope that this effort will be any more gratifying than the endeavor with the “natural” gnats—or paganism, as it were.
Lines 46–50
Lines 46 and 47 allude to human qualities and behavior. While an argument can be made for both the positives and the negatives regarding ambition, pride, sex, and “all circumstance of delight and grief,” most people would agree that these are indeed a part of the lives of men and women. The supreme beings in Christian, Jewish, and other religious faiths are considered above such attributes. The next two lines of the poem refer to the crucifixion of Christ and the metaphor of his blood washing humans clean of their sins. His blood turns into “a clear incredible pool,” symbolizing purity and grace. The mountains are “ruddied,” or red, in reference to blood, and their peaks have “pierced the sun,” in reference to the nails that pierced Christ’s flesh on the cross. Line 50 continues the metaphor of the sun equaling a dying god and the dying god equaling Christ.
Lines 51–53
The tall man has now decided to give Christianity a fair chance. He stands at the bottom of the mountain and waits, presumably for a miracle or a sign from God that this is truly the way to pure wisdom. He cannot imagine a better time for it to happen in light of all the Christian imagery that surrounds him, and so he claims that “If ever / the hour of revelation was come / It was now.” The description of the steep as “transfigured” refers to the visible change in appearance of Jesus as he stood on the mountaintop surrounded by a radiant light.
Lines 54–56
Line 54 details the disappointment that the tall man once again experiences in his quest. Even though the “sky darkened” and “Some birds chirped,” that was it. “Nothing else” happened. He imagines, sarcastically perhaps, that Christ has gone to sleep and neglected his duty to reveal truth. The tall man compares the deity to a “fakir on his mat of nails,” or a religious beggar who performs endurance feats for alms. If surviving crucifixion was Christ’s endurance feat, the tall man is not satisfied that it was a good enough performance. He has still not been transformed.
Lines 57–61
The fifth stanza is the beginning of the tall man’s third attempt to find a method for transformation—this time through Judaism. The “one hill raised like a hairy arm” has at least two references. First, it returns to the idea of the hair on the man’s arm that trapped the gnats in the early part of the poem. Secondly, it implies the outstretched arms of the Hebrew prophets Moses and Joshua. At one point in their lives as leaders of the Israelites, each was instructed by God to stretch out his arm as a signal to the people—Moses with a staff in his hand and Joshua with a spear.
Lines 62–66
The tall man’s third attempt is short lived. The “mountains” here represent Judaism, and he finds that they are “purpling and silent as time.” In other words, they lack the vitality and the enlightening qualities it will take to find the truth about life and death and the core of existence on earth that he seeks. Just as he had “doffed his aureole of gnats,” the tall man now “dropped his head and let fall the halo / Of mountains.” What he sees when he looks at the ground is the object of his search, and he appears to recognize it immediately. The “temptation coiled before his feet” is, literally, a grass snake and, figuratively, the unashamed and unflagging thirst for knowledge. In the Biblical story, it was a serpent that tempted Eve to taste the fruit of the “tree of knowledge,” and snakes have been associated with evil and temptation throughout history. But in this poem, evil is not a quality of the animal. Instead, the beast is the one who has been “violated” and who must drag “Its intestine like a small red valise” to its death.
Lines 67–70
Although the tall man realizes that the grass snake is now “A cold-eyed skinflint” about to die, he also knows that in life it was “The manifest of that joyful wisdom, / the mirth and arrogant green flame of life.” In other words, the snake represents the true knowledge of earth—of humankind’s place on it and of its glory beyond human existence. The tall man knows that “vivid tongue that flicked in praise of earth” can transform him with its wisdom.
Lines 71–77
Line 71 tells the reader that the man also knows the “vivid tongue” is about to be silenced. Pity cannot restore the snake’s life, and so he resigns himself to tell it, “‘Your jig’s up,’” an obvious play on words indicating that the creature’s time is over just like the dance of the gnats. The “kites” are predatory birds, such as hawks, that will feast on the body of the snake once it’s dead. Lines 74–77 describe in pathetic terms the last crawl of the snake. Its guts are once again referred to as burdensome luggage— a “satchel”—which holds curses for those things in nature that once comforted the creature: the earth itself, the smell of the foliage, and the sun are now appearing as a “blood-red organ” are within a body that is dying—in this case, the sky.
Lines 78–81
When the snake falls dead into the ditch, the tall man can see that its belly is “white as milk,” implying a hidden purity that is never afforded a serpent. Even in death, it receives no dignity or respect, for it is “mocked by wisps of hay” as its body becomes rigid.
Lines 82–84
The snake’s mouth opens as it dies, and the man imagines that it must scream for the injustice of its death, and even the “silent scream” is strong enough to echo throughout the dark sky. Recall that the snake took with it a satchel full of curses, indicating its anger and indignation at its fate. But “the tall man did not curse” because he now understands what he must do, and it is his choice. His own life is within his power to retain or to end, and he will make that decision for himself.
Lines 85–89
The tall man’s decision is to die beside the snake, and by positioning himself next to the creature and calling it a “fellowship of death,” he has also decided that the snake will be his vehicle to transformation. He will understand the secrets of true knowledge by becoming one with the holder of that knowledge. He closes his eyes and breathes in the odors of nature. Line 89 implies the beginning of the transformation by referring to the man’s mind as having a “flicking tongue” with which to travel back into the history of the earth. This, of course, is a metaphor that indicates a direct connection between the tall man and the serpent who also had a flicking tongue.
Lines 90–93
These lines describe a world where there are animals, rock formations, and other natural objects, but there is one noticeable absence: humans. The only remaining evidence of dead badgers and raccoons are their claws that are still “gripping the earth” after death. This symbolizes the need and desperation that pure nature has to hold onto itself—and not to perish at the hands of an un-knowledgeable and careless human race.
Lines 94–98
While the man lies beside the snake taking his mind through layers of history and into the thoughts of the creatures who inhabited it, the snake’s soul has “crept upon the sky”—or ascended into the heavens—where it appears huge, and the hard, scaly coat that it still wears glitters against the stars. The “thin wreaths of cloud” that blow across the moon may be another religious reference in comparing the wreath to the crown of thorns placed upon Christ’s head before his death. For the tall man, the snake itself becomes a wreath or crown of sorts. As he stands up (dead or alive), now weary of his mental journey, the image of the serpent is coiled above his head the same way that the gnats and the mountains had been halos above him. The difference here is that the man does not “let fall the halo” as he did previously. Instead, the snake provides a heavenly crown that he will keep. Through its death, it has transformed the man into a being of true wisdom.
Themes
Creation and Destruction
Irving Layton has been noted for his perceptions on mankind’s ability and willingness to be both a creator and a destroyer. Human beings create everything from medicine and technology to art and poetry, but they also destroy everything from mountains and beaches to each other and themselves. “A Tall Man Executes a Jig” embraces this theme in regard to the earth and its creatures, religious figures, and the man himself.
In his search to understand the meaning of life on earth and to gain the knowledge that can transform him into an enlightened being, the tall man tries to become one with nature—from the field he lies in, the wildflowers, and the gnats to “the moist odours of the night” and the “caves, mounds, and sunken ledges.” In this sense, the man is an observer of creation. He believes there is something missing in humans as they were created and that he can find it within the natural world. But the gutted grass snake reminds him of man as a destroyer. While it is true that animals fall victim to their own kind in the wild, the implication in this poem is that the reptile—the holder of true wisdom and joy— has been cut open by a human and is, therefore, a victim of human destruction.
The references to religion in the poem obviously relate to the theme of creation and destruction. While some people believe that God is a human invention, many others hold that God is the creator of human life. Regardless of which side one falls on in this debate, few would argue against the fact that histories of religions contain a story of man as a destroyer of his gods. The fourth stanza in “A Tall Man Executes a Jig” is full of references to the crucifixion of Christ and the “blood upon the mountain’s side.” The tall man is disappointed that “the hour of revelation” never comes, and so he walks away from an opportunity to find wisdom through religious belief.
The title of this poem contains an ambiguity. The word “Executes” may mean to perform or to carry out, and it may also mean to kill. In the latter sense, the tall man ends up destroying the “jig” that he encountered and enjoyed with the gnats. If the jig represents the frenzied energy of life, then the point Layton makes is that what human beings are initially attracted to may end up destroyed regardless of the attraction. When the man became disillusioned by the jig, he “doffed his aureole of gnats” and walked away. But the most noteworthy reference to man as a destroyer in this poem is in the form of self-destruction. In the end, the tall man makes a conscious decision to join in the “fellowship of death” with the snake. The power of human beings appears limitless, even when it is, ironically, suicidal.
Topics for Further Study
- Explain why Irving Layton said about this poem that it may take ten years to understand it and twenty to write one as good.
- Choose an animal or insect, and write an essay on how the creature has been misperceived by human beings and what effect this has had on its existence.
- Write an essay explaining why Layton chose the Greek mathematician Euclid to make a point about the gnats in the poem.
- Write a response to the tall man’s notion that traditional Christianity and Judaism do not satisfy the quest for wisdom but that the grass snake is the “manifest of that joyful wisdom.”
Man, Nature, and Religion
In an article titled “A Tall Man Executes a Jig,” (published in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton), Layton made these comments about his poem by the same name:
More than any other poem of mine, this one fuses feeling and thought in an intense moment of perception. Of truth. Truth for me, of course. That’s the way I feel about gnats, and hills, and Christian renunciation, the pride of life and crushed grass-snakes writhing on the King’s Highway.
If the man in the poem represents Layton himself, then the theme of man, nature, and religion is in direct correlation to Layton’s article. But when the poet says, “That’s the way I feel about gnats . . . and crushed grass-snakes . . .,” how is it that he actually feels? Some confusion occurs in considering the tall man’s responses to the gnats and to the snake. Obviously, both are a part of nature, and yet the gnats become a nuisance while the snake is heralded as the “manifest of that joyful wisdom.” What’s the difference?
Perhaps the thematic answer lies in religion— in particular, the tall man’s perceptions of the role that Christianity and Judaism play in true wisdom and human enlightenment. Gnats have no significance or recognizable symbolism in history, mythology, or religion. They may be of great interest to entomologists or biologists, but most people consider them pests to shoo away. In the beginning of the poem, the little creatures flirt with an exalted role. They grab the attention of the persona and, for a while, channel his imagination into a very thoughtful, intellectual mode. With their whizzing and jigging and “undulant excitation,” they stir up thoughts of Thucydides, Euclid, Donatello, and Plato—a lofty group for such a humble creature to bring to mind. But in the end, they are sent back to their low ground in the animal kingdom when first a breeze sweeps them away and then the tall man rids his head of the aureole they had made.
The snake plays a much greater and long-lasting role. It also has a history—usually bad— within the annals of religion and mythology. Perhaps because the serpent has so often been a symbol of evil and of temptation to do wrong, the tall man (and Layton) finds it an appropriate beast to make the point about mankind’s ironic treatment of nature. Human beings are “natural” too, but they consider themselves above everything else that constitutes nature. As it turns out in the poem, however, the lowly, feared snake is the creature that is truly one with the earth. This, of course, is directly opposed to the Old Testament story of the Garden of Eden in which the snake is only a deceitful beast with a big role in the downfall of man. The tall man finds orthodox religions dissatisfying. It is fitting, then, for him to make a godlike figure out of the traditional symbol of evil in those religions.
Style
Quasi-Sonnets
This relatively lengthy poem is actually a collection of seven quasi-sonnets, in that each stanza contains 14 lines—like a sonnet—most which are made up of 10 syllables. Of the poem’s 98 lines, 80 contain 10 syllables, 14 contain 11, and nine contain four. There is no strict adherence to end rhyming (except for the couplet that completes the second stanza and rhymes “hair” and “air”) although there are many near-rhyme endings and sporadic inside rhyming. Examples of these patterns include the apparent rhyme in lines 12 and 13: “supplied” and “Thucydides,” although the latter is broken into four syllables and is pronounced thoo-sid’-i-deez; the first two words and the last two words of line 48: “That blood,” “that flood”; the a-b-a-b pattern of lines 53–56: “steep”/“else”/“sleep”/“nails”; and the inside near-rhyme of line 84: “Adamant and fierce, the tall man did not curse.”
Alliteration
“A Tall Man Executes a Jig” is also rich with alliteration (the repetition of initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables). Examples include “whizzing” and “whistlings” in lines 4 and 5; “Motion without meaning” in line 37; the various uses of the “s” sound in “Gusts swept them from his sight like wisps of smoke” (line 40) and in “A last silent scream that shook the black sky” (line 83); and “cliffs” and “kites” in line 91. There are other examples of alliteration in the poem, but these samples make it clear that Layton was fond of using the device. In the article “A Tall Man Executes a Jig,” (published in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton), the poet states, “Formless poems give me the pips. If ideas, I want to see them dance.” Clearly, the poem that carries the same title is full of ideas and has a methodical form—as well as the ability to “dance.”
Historical Context
The setting for “A Tall Man Executes a Jig” is obvious in place but not time. Even the location is generic, in that it is an open field with mountains around, but it could be a field in Canada, the United States, China, or anywhere else. The point is that Irving Layton was writing a type of parable with an “everyman” character in the leading role, and placing him in a particular political domain during a particular year would not enhance the poem or its intentions. What, then, may have been the historical or cultural influences that played a part in Layton’s creating this work? Probably both his own experiences as a Jewish immigrant to Canada and as a Canadian citizen growing up in the early part of the twentieth century, as well as the global events that changed life forever in the form of world war.
Although Layton was only one when he left Romania, his birth there gave him a lasting link to Eastern Europe. His upbringing in Judaism heavily influenced his religious tendencies toward and struggles against orthodox faith, and his life in a rather socially sedate Quebec brought out the political rebel in him. In his forward to Balls for a One-Armed Juggler, as reprinted in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, the poet is clear about the things of the world that concern him:
Today, poets must teach themselves to imagine the worst. To apprehend the enormity of the filth, irrationality, and evil that washes in on us from the four corners of the earth, they must have the severity to descend from one level of foulness to another and learn what the greatest of them had always known: there is, [of] course, no bottom, no end. . .. What insight does the modern poet give us into the absolute evil of our times? Where is the poet who can make clear for us Belsen? Vorkuta? Hiroshima? The utter wickedness of Nazism and National Communism?. . .
The forward to the book continues for five pages in this fashion. Obviously, “man’s inhumanity to man” and religious hypocrisy figure greatly into Layton’s concerns. In “A Tall Man Executes a Jig,” the persona exemplifies the poet’s own dissatisfying encounters with various aspects of human life, as well as his contradictory behavior in regard to creation and destruction. He does not mention the notorious leaders of the world wars by name in the poem, but he alludes to the atrocities that befell—and still befall—helpless beings who are singled out for torture and degradation. In this case, it is “A violated grass-snake” that becomes a victim of some unseen hand, a hand of apparent cruelty and authority. Even the tall man himself appears fickle in his response to the tiny gnats, first showing interest and amazement in their movement and then casting them off in total disregard. His approach to and retreat from Christianity and Judaism may seem blasphemous and arrogant, but it is not necessarily a rejection of a belief in a supreme being. Instead, he questions the authenticity of religions so heavily influenced by human history and human interpretation, especially considering his skepticism about the “nature” of man in the first place.
Critical Overview
Irving Layton’s first few poetry collections achieved little success. He published his first book in 1945 and followed it with several others throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, but it was not until the publication of A Red Carpet for the Sun in 1959 that Layton became a popular voice in Canadian poetry. When he did become popular, it was essentially for the same reason that he remained un popular with many general readers and critics: his subject matter and language. Layton had no reservations about using graphic imagery and sexually explicit language in his work, nor did he hesitate to rail against social injustices, often offending everyone from government officials to college professors to members of the bourgeois or elite society. But for every critic who labeled this poet a raging egomaniac who filled his volumes with scenes of violence, death, and sex, there were many more who pointed to his unique voice and intriguing examination of the relationship between the spiritual and the physical.
After the publication of A Red Carpet for the Sun, which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1959, Layton went on to publish nearly forty more collections, each one meeting with more critical praise than condemnation. Over the years, he received several prestigious awards, including the Prix Litteraire de Quebec in 1963 for Balls for a One-Armed Juggler and the Encyclopedia Britannica Life Achievement Award in 1978. Although it is true that Layton’s poems demonstrate more love and sympathy for animals than for humans and that he spares no one a tongue-lashing when he believes it is warranted, those targeted have often been the ones to support his work. The general consensus among critics is that however one feels after reading a Layton collection, the guarantee is that he or she will feel something.
Criticism
Pamela Steed Hill
Hill has published widely in poetry journals and is the author of a collection entitled In Praise of Motels. In the following essay, she suggests that the tall man cannot achieve true transformation by nature because of his own human hypocrisy.
“A Tall Man Executes a Jig” is a somewhat complicated poem in that it is like a parable in telling a story to represent the real meaning. Also like a parable, it can often be more of a riddle that readers must “figure out” to understand and appreciate fully. In this poem, however, Layton adds further complexity by throwing in an apparent contradiction in the persona’s thoughts and behavior. As the tall man seeks to find the true wisdom of life on earth, he explores both the natural world and the metaphysical in the form of two different religions. Being dissatisfied with all three encounters, he finally stumbles upon what he has been looking for—a grass snake that has been cruelly victimized by humankind and that the tall man recognizes as the “manifest of that joyful wisdom” he seeks. If the point of the poem is that the nature of man is a, more or less, sorry one and that only the natural world is the true inheritor of the earth, then it makes sense for the tall man to exalt the serpent and condemn humanized Christianity and Judaism. But where does that leave the gnats? These tiny creatures play a starring role in the first three stanzas but are then readily cast off by the man and not mentioned again. But gnats are a part of the natural world just as snakes are, so why does the tall man exhibit such contradictory behavior toward these two creatures? The most likely answer is that he himself is a part of the mankind that he despises, and his hypocrisy is evidence of it.
To examine this theory, it is best to start at the end of the poem and work backwards. Here, the tall man not only praises the purity, knowledge, and vulnerability of animals and the earth, but he also tries to become a part of it. He is even willing to die beside the snake to be transformed to the level of existence that the creature has attained. So strong is his adulation for it that his “mind tunneled with flicking tongue” back through natural history, allowing his consciousness to take on the characteristics of a serpent and to envision the natural formations of earth: “caves, mounds, and sunken ledges / And desolate cliffs.” He recognizes the helplessness of animals and their desperate attempt to hold on to their world in the “perished badgers and raccoons” whose “claws alone remain, gripping the earth.” Finally he glorifies the snake that has “crept upon the sky” and coils above his head like a halo or a crown.
In the previous stanza, the man weeps for the snake’s horrible condition. The description of it dragging its exposed intestines off to the ditch to die is pathetic, to say the least, and points a strong finger at the savagery of mankind. The snake has been cut open and must
crawl towards the hedge,
Convulsing and dragging into the dark
The satchel filled with curses for the earth.
Its innocence is demonstrated as it falls “into a grassy ditch / Exposing its underside, white as milk, / And mocked by wisps of hay between its jaws.” As the tall man witnesses this heart-wrenching scene and looks on as the snake opens it mouth for “A last silent scream that shook the black sky,” he is overcome by the knowledge of what he must do. Taking his own human life is the only way to rid himself of the sadistic qualities that are man’s alone and to join the world of grace, innocence, and wisdom—the natural world.
Just before the man discovered “temptation coiled before his feet” in the form of the grass snake, he had been mentally wrestling with the pros and cons of religious faith. The fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem contain several allusions to Christian and Hebrew tenets as well as the prominent figures representing those religions—Jesus Christ, Moses, and Joshua. The tall man acknowledges the crucifixion of Christ and considers the possibility of following Christianity as a means to enlightenment. He looks toward the “blood-red hills” and is reminded of the sacrifice made by Christ in “That blood upon the mountain’s side, that flood / Washed into a clear incredible pool.” Perhaps the tall man thinks that the “clear incredible pool” is the place to find the pure knowledge of life, and so he decides to stand and wait for the moment of revelation to come to him. It doesn’t take long for him to surmise that his wait is useless and he decides—cynically, it seems—that “the dying god had gone to sleep” like a beggar who tires of performing duration feats for a living.
Judaism fairs no better in the mind of the tall man. For a moment he thinks one of the hills looks like the arm of Moses or of Joshua in the way it is raised as though positioned by God to do his will. But then he discovers that the hills and mountains are “purpling and silent as time.” In other words, they seem old, bruised, and not about to reveal any knowledge they may have once held. When the man “dropped his head and let fall the halo / Of mountains,” he was severing his ties completely with the notion of religious faith—at least faith as interpreted and defined by man. Neither the tall man nor Irving Layton is an atheist. The rejection of and dissatisfaction in these two religions do not imply a rejection of God. It is man that is the problem, for both the tall man and the poet. Over time, human beings fell from the grace of nature—and, therefore, of God—to the lowest levels of, in Layton’s terms, “cruelty, perversion, systematic lying, and monstrous hypocrisy,” as he points out in the forward to Balls for a One-Armed Juggler. Although the persona in “A Tall Man Executes a Jig” seems to have transcended the treacherous behavior of his own race, he too proves himself a hypocrite.
Initially, readers may assume that the lesson to be learned in this poem is that there is goodness, truth, and wisdom in the world, and if one wants to find it, he or she must look outside the human race. And no one creature in nature has ownership of knowledge and virtue, as evidenced by the tall
“Had the tall man recognized the same natural beauty in the gnats that he did in the snake, he would not have had to go through the other disappointments that he set himself up for.”
man glorifying everything from snakes, badgers, and raccoons to caves, mounds, ledges, and cliffs. Even the tiniest, arguably most annoying, creatures can hold wisdom far beyond the human mind. In the beginning of the poem, the tall man becomes enthralled by gnats, or those “jigging motes” who seem to represent the frenzied energy of life itself. The gnats are free—a quality revered, if not worshipped, by man—and the poem’s persona recognizes this as the “glitterings” whiz about his head and fascinate him with their abandonment. In this early part of the poem, the reader does not know how the tall man will end up heralding nature as the keeper of truth and knowledge, and so it does not seem inappropriate for him to begin to change his feelings toward the little flies buzzing all around.
The language of the poem—in particular, the adjectives used to describe the gnats—is a good indicator of the tall man’s weakening pleasure in the insects. They quickly dwindle from “jigging motes” and “glitterings” to “nervous dots,” “black jots,” and, finally, the dry, technical “ephemerides.” There is a hint that naturalism, or the belief that religious truths derive from nature as opposed to revelation, may lead to the enlightenment that the man seeks. His attention to the gnats is at first acute, and he contemplates the response of such great thinkers as Thucydides and Euclid to their uncanny energy. But when a few of them drop out of their wild dance in the air to land on his bare arm, the tall man ponders something darker, something disturbing. He wonders what it would feel like to see the world from a gnat’s perspective, how gigantic everything must seem to them and how insignificant they must reckon themselves to be. He imagines that the grass and the wildflowers in the field where he lies have become huge and that he is only a “maddened
What Do I Read Next?
- Scientist May R. Berenbaum takes an unusual, sometimes humorous look at the insect world in Ninety-Nine Gnats, Nits, and Nibblers, published in 1989. The book is for general readers and discusses such topics as eating habits, sex, and death among insects.
- Mary Lou Randour presents an intriguing perspective on human responsibility for animals in Animal Grace: Entering a Spiritual Relationship With Our Fellow Creatures, published in 2000. In this book, she addresses the need for a kinship between people and animals and offers many examples of how different creatures have made positive differences in human life.
- In The Creating Consciousness: Science as the Language of God by Arne Wyller (1999), the author argues that the theory of evolution and physical science may be accurate, but that there was also a pre-existing consciousness at work during creation. This is a very accessible book for the general reader.
- Irving Layton’s 1986 collection entitled Dance With Desire contains primarily love poems and is a departure from his more typical ravings on social and religious issues.
speck” among them. This is the same way the gnats must feel “In their frantic jiggings under a hair.” They have made prisoners of themselves by “Leaving the undulant excitation” of their “orthodox unrest” to become trapped on the man’s arm. He does not consider this very noble or sensible behavior, much less wise behavior, and so he loses faith in their ability to transform him.
The third stanza of the poem becomes much more important after the rest of the work is read. This is the point at which the tall man admits “antinomies,” or paradoxes and contradictions, but the significance of that is not as clear as it will be later. Not only does the man scoff at the gnats’ foolish behavior and minuteness, but he responds by becoming the opposite: “He stood up and felt himself enormous.” He goes so far as to compare himself to Donatello, Plato, and a great lover. Now when he considers the “jig jig jig” of the tiny insects, he sees them simply “Meshed with the wheeling fire of the sun,” their “Motion without meaning” and their continuous movement “Without sense or purpose.” The feeling of disillusionment seems mutual, as the bee—another member of the natural world—is so unimpressed with the human that it “left him for a marigold.” It would appear, then, that the break between man and nature is a clean one, allowing the man to turn to theology and philosophical thought for the wisdom he wants to attain.
The reader now knows, however, what happens next and that there is no break with nature for the tall man at all. Instead, he ultimately embraces the natural world, the snake in particular, as a kind of god after all his other encounters have proved disappointing. Given that, how does he justify his attitude toward the insects and the fact that he “doffed his aureole of gnats,” presumably as easily as the unknown human had sliced open the belly of the grass snake? The man finds that act a vile crime against nature and further evidence of mankind’s violent tendencies. His own similar act, however, does not seem vile to him at all. Actually, he does not even recall the gnats as he exalts other creatures and objects of the earth. People who do not see in themselves the same behavior that they criticize in others are classic hypocrites. The tall man believes he has achieved the supreme and transcendent answers to life on earth as the snake is “coiled above his head, transforming all.” But transformation hardly seems complete when hypocrisy and neglect are still a big part of the picture.
Layton’s intent in making the persona of this poem a foolish hypocrite was probably not to show how much “better” animals are than people. It may, however, cause one to consider that the road to “joyful wisdom” is not as clear as it seems even if it lies “coiled” at one’s feet or above one’s head. Had the tall man recognized the same natural beauty in the gnats that he did in the snake, he would not have had to go through the other disappointments that he set himself up for. In the end, man is not the noble creature that he imagines himself to be. He may have gotten closer, but Layton’s humans don’t usually prove victorious.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “A Tall Man Executes a Jig,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Sources
amazon.com, www.amazon.com (June 20, 2000).
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The History Channel, www.historychannel.com (June 21, 2000).
Layton, Irving, Forward to Balls for a One-Armed Juggler, in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, edited by Seymour Mayne, McClelland and Stewart, 1972, pp. 104–105.
———, Letter to The Montreal Star, in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, edited by Seymour Mayne, McClelland and Stewart, 1972, pp. 188–191.
———, Letter to Tamarack Review, in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, edited by Seymour Mayne, McClelland and Stewart, 1972, pp. 194–196.
———, “‘A Tall Man Executes a Jig,’” in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, edited by Seymour Mayne, McClelland and Stewart, 1972, p. 45.
———, A Wild Peculiar Joy: Selected Poems 1945–1982, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.
Purdy, A. W., Irving Layton: The Poet and His Critics, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978, p. 131.
Wilson, Milton, “Notebook on Layton,” in Irving Layton: The Poet and His Critics, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978, p. 233.
For Further Study
Layton, David, Motion Sickness: A Memoir, MacFarlane Walter and Ross, 2000.
This is an autobiography of Irving Layton’s son. It becomes tedious in places, but it does provide interesting insight on growing up with the unconventional poet father.
Layton, Irving, Fornalutx: Selected Poems 1928–1990, McGill Queens University Press, 1992.
As the title suggests, this book is a comprehensive look at the poet from the time he was a young man of 16 through the age of 78. Considering he did not publish until the mid 1940s, it is an interesting look at his more youthful efforts.
Layton, Irving, Dennis Lee, and Duncan Campbell Scott, Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major’s Authors, E. C. W. Press, 1993.
This book places Irving Layton’s work among several other Canadian writers, and it is a good comparison of his poetry with the more mainstream creative artists.
Mansbridge, Francis, God’s Recording Angel, E. C. W. Press, 1995.
This is a well written and accessible biography of Layton, sometimes shocking but consistently revealing of the poet and the inspiration for his work.