20 pages • 40 minutes read
Philip LevineThey Feed They Lion
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Reasons for The Great Rebellion
The generational trauma caused by the subjugation of African Americans during the Civil War has been extensively studied. During the Great Migration, many African Americans moved north to escape the Jim Crow laws of the South. Detroit, at the time, was growing into a thriving metropolis due to the auto industry and Great Lakes shipping. It was a logical destination to begin again, but low-paying jobs and racial disharmony curtailed people’s hope for a younger generation to be better off than themselves. Levine addresses this in Stanza 2, describing the “Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps […] They lion grow” (Lines 9-11).
Historical subjugation is captured in the phrase “Bow Down” (Line 22), suggesting that 19th century slavery correlates with the treatment of African Americans in 1967 Detroit. The Detroit riot was also called “The Great Rebellion”—a “Ris[ing] Up” (Line 22) against unfair practices perpetuated by police, employers, landlords, industry, and institutions willfully oppressing Black people. Despite its destructive results, this rebellion called attention to the effects of long-term racism and economic disparity. Jobs in the auto industry were low-paying, and rent was so exorbitant that many could barely afford to eat much more than “black beans” (Line 2) or pork hocks.
Levine makes it clear no one should be beholden to a system where the attitude was “Kiss My Ass” (Line 8). No wonder, he contends, African Americans were filled with “acids of rage” (Line 3) that eventually caused the “oil-stained earth” (Line 33) to burn. The aggression exhibited during the riot makes sense to Levine, and he implies, it should to the reader. How could any oppressed group not eventually “Rise Up” (Line 22)? If African Americans had been treated equally and with dignity there would have been no need to “lion” (Lines 5, 11, 18, 25, 29, 30, 33). However, since these disparities existed, it was inevitable that after multiple instances of being told to “Bow Down” (Line 22), they would “Rise Up” (Line 22).
Trapped in the Industrial Barn
Detroit’s population in 1910 was under 500,000. At its peak in 1950, it had more than tripled in size to 1.8 million due to the successful automotive industry and the city’s position as one of the largest shipping ports in the world. But such an increase in any industry comes with a price. Humanity is sometimes lost in the shuffle of pushing for growth and success.
Levine notes Detroit’s “gray hills of industrial barns” (Lines 6-7), but also indicates the “earth is eating trees, fence posts, gutted cars” (Lines 12-13), which suggests both the expanse of growth and the city’s inability to sustain itself. The use of the word “barn” (Line 7) causes the reader to wonder about the animals inside since most buildings of this type house them. This may connect to the hogs slaughtered in the third stanza and reduced to their body parts—“pig balls” (Line 14), “furred ear” (Line 16), “jowl” (Line 16), “belly” (Line 17), and “trotters” (Line 19).
It may also suggest the “lion[s]” (Lines 5, 11, 18, 25, 29, 30, 33) symbolic of the African American workers. In this way, the “industrial barn” (Line 7) becomes as firm a prison as any cage at a zoo. The workers are part of the machine, part of the “candor of tar” (Line 3), or made of “creosote, gasoline, drive shafts” (Line 4). They live in “the reeds of shovels” (Line 23) and are as disembodied as “[t]he grained arm that pulls the hands” (Line 24). Even the “earth” (Lines 12-13) in this landscape has turned against them—its “oak turned to a wall” (Line 30). The African American worker is trapped in the “industrial barn” (Line 7) while white men in their “car[s] passing under the stars” (Line 28) are free from fear. White “children inherit” (Line 29) the benefits of the African American workers, including the “full flower / of the hams” (Lines 20-21), while the workers are covered in “bearing butter” (Line 1) and animal “glue” (Line 19)—just cogs in the machine that does not benefit them.
Detroit Through the Apocalyptic Lens of Yeats
Several critics have identified the influence of Irish poet William Butler Yeats on Levine’s “They Feed They Lion.” Several call Levine’s work an American response to Yeats's “The Second Coming” (1919). The readings featuring this comparison often cite the shared apocalyptic vision of the poems. Yeats subverts his title’s hint that the “second coming” of Christ is at hand and Levine’s poem closes with the ambiguous “he come” (Line 33). Read through the bleakest lens, both poems suggest Christian redemption is undermined by humankind’s inability to ethically act and its tendency to perpetuate violence.
There are parallels in subject matter, too, as Yeats condemned the bloodshed of World War I—and Irish oppression by the English—much as Levine condemns the destruction of Detroit in the 1967 riots and white suppression of its African American citizens. In the opening image in Yeats’s poem, repetitive self-destructive behavior is represented by a falcon “turning and turning” (Line 1) into a “widening” (Line 1) vortex. Levine, too, uses imagery and anaphora—the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines—to show how repetitive injurious behavior causes increased anger and frustration.
Both poets show that without a positive direction and civic engagement, disintegration of society is inevitable. Yeats notes that the “centre [of civilized society] cannot hold” (Line 3) under such forces, while Levine states these are reasons “They Lion grow” (Lines 5, 11, 18, 25). Levine’s images of the predatory cat have also been linked to Yeats’s vengeful sphinx, which he used as a perversion of a savior in “The Second Coming.” Yeats’s sphinx is described as having a “lion body and the head of a man” (Line 14), as well as a gaze as “blank and pitiless as the sun” (Line 15). Like the anger underlying the African American citizens of Detroit, the sphinx is woken by unjust behavior. Those who could stop the mayhem, Yeats says, “lack all conviction” (Line 7), like Levine’s white populace drives its “car passing under the stars” (Line 28) into the safety of the suburbs. Yeats offers the bleak vision that instead of Christ, this “rough beast” (Line 21) will “slouch towards Bethlehem to be born” (Line 22), causing more horror. Similarly, Levine’s poem ends with birth: “they belly opened / and all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth / They feed they Lion and he comes” (Lines 31-32). Read in tandem, the poems show that the greatest undermining of human success are territorialism and oppression.
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