Intro

Fables & poetry share at least two traits, their use of imagery and their nature as snapshots of reality. Fables, like poetry, have traditionally contained word play and cultural allusions. Many fables have been put into verse, made into poetry, and many poets have written poems that are fables. In fact my Dictionary of Poetic Terms includes the term “Fable”:

(from Latin for “to talk, to discourse”) a short unadorned story, often using animals as characters who exemplify human morality or behavior. Fables, thought to have originated in the allegories of tribal societies, were orally

passed on and were often improved in the hands of skilled writers. Aesop, a sixth-century-B.C. Greek about whom very little is documented, is

renowned for his beast fables which offer lessons... The oldest known f. is

Hesiod's poem of the hawk and the nightingale (eight century B.C.)...

Fabulists throughout history, include... American 20^th-century poets such

as Marianne Moore and Russell Edson.

In Appendix 2, under figurative expressions, fable is included in a list of “figures of similarity and dissimilarity”, which includes allegory, metaphor, parable, and symbol among others. I think the Dictionary of Poetic Terms has accurately and efficiently got right to the center of why I think fable is so important and intertwined with poetry. Poetry and fable build reality out of symbolic terms. Both poetry and fable are self-aware because metaphors & symbols, the stuff of language, cannot reach the level of the real truths they are pointing to.

The more I research the more I am aware that fable has been important to poets from the earliest recorded poetry to the most recent, even those considered “avant-garde.” Several Greek poets after Aesop put his fables into verse, Socrates included. Possibly the oldest love poem known to us (4000 B.C.) works within myth and fable. Mysticism and surrealism are connected at their earliest roots to myth, fairy tale, and fable.

Though now associated with children, fables have long been the material of philosophers: Hesiod, Socrates, Leonardo DaVinci, and Emerson, just to name a few.

A fable after all is a story that cuts to the chase, slices right through to a sudden truth about reality. Though modern readers may consider this truth a neat little moral, the actual beauty of a fable is its ability to portray reality as it really is: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Instead of building characters, the fable calls upon archetypal images onto which a society already loads significant meaning.

Fables exist within a light-hearted world of fictional talking animals, which is largely why modern readers associate them with children. However, fables are talking serious philosophy; they are trying to show both the justice and the injustice of the world, and this is something our society sometimes misses.

On the other hand, does it? Folklore long thought of as the stuff of childhood is now being reinvented to contain the gravity it once represented. Fairy tales like “Pan’s Labyrinth” are set in the midst of dark historic circumstances, in this case a grisly Spanish Civil War. People question whether the Harry Potter series should even be classified as children’s literature. Mythically-minded super heroes are being considered on deep philosophical levels in both television shows like Heroes, and movies like the Dark Knight. And the heavily mythical works of JRR Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Pullman are being made into movies that are as theologically serious as they are magical.

I think each poet has a fable, a fairy tale, a myth that holds significant meaning for her or him. My calling is “The Man and the Satyr.” I would like to start out by reading a widespread version of this fable.