Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
- This section begins with a list of all the proverbs that our speaker brought back from Hell.
- The list is long—70 proverbs long, to be exact. So we won't be going through every single one (you're probably happy to read).
- We should explain, though, that a proverb is a basically a truthful saying, something that your grandma might call "words to live by," if she was a reflective sort of person.
- In this case, we get a whole slew of words to live by, but we'll just tackle a few representative examples.
- The third proverb is pretty famous: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" (4.3). Here again, our speaker is reminding us of the importance of desire to human experience. This is also something to say to your parents when they ask you why you ate your sister's entire birthday cake.
- We also get a set of animal-themed proverbs. They say that "The pride of the peacock," "The lust of the goat," "The wrath of the lion," and "The nakedness of woman" are all examples of "the work of God" (4.22-25). Our speaker sees God's handiwork in every aspect of experience—not just the restrained and devout parts.
- We're also told "The cistern contains, the fountain overflows" (4.35). In other words, motion and energy are productive. Containment and restraint are not.
- These aren't all that straightforward, though. We get a few like this one:
- "The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth" (4.48). Our best idea is that the speaker is encouraging us to use all our senses to take in the full range of the world around us, but… well, maybe he's just envisioning a weird face that he likes to call "Ol' Earthbeard."
- Later we learn that, "The crow wished everything was black; the owl that everything was white" (4.63). This could be a metaphor to mean that your original coloring can influence the way you see the world around you.
- Or, it could just be a story about a crow and an owl and their shared hatred of plaid.
- Again, these proverbs are a bit scattered in their focus. In general, though, they reinforce the speaker's idea that desire and freedom are a vital part of life.
- The speaker wraps this section up by commenting on the role of poets in first describing and naming everything in the world—lakes, cities, mushrooms, the works. Only poetry was up to the challenge of putting the world into words.
- And then along came religion. It added another level of abstraction that gave deities all the credit for ordering the world.
- As a result, according to our speaker, people forgot that all those gods actually live in the human imagination.