Dear SunWinkers:

Going through my old Gather columns, I next run into the topic of allusion. Allusion is a reference to a commonly known work of literature or piece of history or culture. As with personification, allusion lets the reader relate to your poem on a deeper, more visceral level. Namely, the reader reacts with the feeling or value judgment which he or she associates with the event or piece of literature being alluded to.

A classic example is “The Second Coming” by Y.B. Yeats.

And what rough beast, its hours come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The biblical, triumphant second coming of Christ is used ironically to lament the faithlessness of humankind:

the falcon cannot hear the falconer…
The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity…

My old poem “The Visitation” also invokes the Second Coming in a note of despair, lamenting the death of idealism. By contrast, though, this is a wild romp, a sort of surreal amalgamation of the biblical Nativity story with Easy Rider. First, the allusion to the Nativity story provides the setting for the entire poem.

(And while we’re on that, don’t you dare use the excuse “I’m not well-read enough to use allusions in my writing.” Everyone is familiar with the Nativity!)

And then, secondary allusions abound. Among them:

dog in the manger…
it’s space junk…
I bum a Camel…
voice in the wilderness…
the movement’s dead, you know. People throw babies away…
liver-colored sarcomas erupt on my face and hands…
even the Stones are crying…

Pretty much everybody is familiar with the Rolling Stones. Allusion doesn’t necessarily mean channeling T.S. Eliot and throwing in references to the ancient Greeks. Pop culture is just fine, if it serves your purpose. In “The Visitation,” line 24 alludes to the Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil” by means of a direct quotation, but woven seamlessly into the narrative:

“Please allow me to introduce myself.”

The other allusions I mentioned above should be recognizable enough. Take a minute to look at the list and ask yourself, “What is an allusion to what, here?” I’m not even sure myself half the time.

There are many other ways to introduce allusions. I might have introduced the idea of Satan (it would have been trite) by describing a character (any character) as having horns and a red tail. Yeats uses the visual image of the Sphinx (another allusion) to bring his “beast” to life, introducing it in the same way, by describing it, rather than naming it:

…somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man…

By the same token, Yeats alludes to Christ a number of times without ever naming him:

ceremony of innocence…
vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle…
slouches towards Bethlehem…

Here are a few more examples of allusion, chosen in haste and at random. Do not, heaven forfend, depend on me; you should pull your own anthologies off the shelf and see what examples you can find for yourself. And, hey, share them with us!

We had a dog once that adored flowers; no matter how briskly she went through the fields, she must stop and consider the lilies, tiger lilies, and other blossoming things along her way.

Mary Oliver “Musical Notation: 1”

Major Hoople’s always harrumfing
Egad kaff kaff all that…

Blemish me Lil Abner is gone
His brother is okay, Daisy Mae
and the Wolf-Gal…

Jack Kerouac “Orizaba 210 Blues: 42nd Chorus”

The force that through the red fuze
drove the bullet
does not drive everyone
through the City of Saint Francis

Lawrence Ferlinghetti “An Elegy to Dispel Gloom (after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco, November, 1978)”

He said, “I’ve had a vision
and you know I’m strong and holy,
I must do what I’ve been told.”

So we started up the mountain;
I was running, he was walking,
and his axe was made of gold.

Leonard Cohen “Story of Isaac”

Two roads diverge in a yellow wood.
They both look exactly the same.
“Some people do go both ways,” says the Scarecrow.

DW “The Nativity”

The Prompt

Study the examples. Find more examples of allusion in your library or go to a site like http://poetryfoundation.org or http://poets.org and browse. Share some of the cooler allusions you find here in the comments.

Write a short- to medium-length poem, or prose poem, or piece of flash fiction, incorporating at least one instance of allusion. You can allude to the Taliban or the Trojans, a movie or a Coleridge poem, the Bible or the Harry Potter books, a dreidel or a Cabbage Patch Doll. Try to make it fairly adept; don’t just say, “it was like that scene in Die Hard with a Vengeance.”

Love,

Doug

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