Old Oats Is a Poem

¶ … Old Oats" is a poem about a farmer who owns two hundred acres in Sheffield, England and lives with his sister. Old Oats is probably what they called him. They adopted a boy, maybe a war orphan, to do farm work Old Oats lost his temper with the boy who was cross-eyed and "pitiable." The farmer cursed like a tyrant and a dictator ("in a Fuhrer frenzy," a reference to Hitler) at Alex. He never came back. Old Oats looks beastly like a "chimpanzee, dangle-pawed, shambling," and is ugly like a "midget ogre" or a small demon. He wears an old English frock coat with epaulets on the shoulders ("wing-stumps"). Farm work is his life. Nothing else matters. We see the farmer's fingers on the "mudguard," a flat fender over the tractor tire that vibrates ("his hand on it quaking"). We get glimpses of Old Oats working around the farm. He's angry when he sees shrapnel from World War II, where the corn has been cut ("shrapnel in the stubble"). It is "bright, startling, pretty," either shredded aluminum (used to block radar) or pieces of bomb casing made of nickel and shiny. The "Ferguson brains" is his tractor which runs on gasoline ("pink paraffin"). Old Oats gets up before dawn to milk cows, and we see his "head in the crutch," leaning against the cow where her back hind quarters meet her stomach. He stares into the bucket of milk ("foam"). In another snapshot we see the farmer lugging a heavy bucket and lantern in the late summer afternoon heat ("under the sky-burn of Sheffield"). He is ugly with his workers. He starts his old engine by pouring whiskey in the carburetor. He lifts bales of hay up into a haycock year after year.

What was it all for -- the hard work, the animals who died, the machinery that wore out? What became of Old Oats? "Somewhere you rest" means he's dead. The poem implies that Oat's life -- without love, and without reflection -- was wasted. A sour old tyrant who worked himself to death was what he was.

2. In American Pastoral, page 354 to end of chapter, Roth discusses changes in American life. "The enemy inside the gates" is trouble that has come into his home and maybe all American homes. Swede and his wife Dawn are guests of his parents at a dinner party. Another couple Orcutt and his drunken wife Jesse are there with Sheila, the therapist who treated Swede's daughter Merry for stuttering, and Marsha, a college professor. Swede keeps thinking about his daughter Merry, who ran away after she killed Dr. Conlon. Swede's wife Dawn has been unfaithful to him with Orcutt. Swede is in terrible pain. Maybe he became infatuated with Sheila to escape the pain. Sheila is calm, stable, and dignified, everything he is not. The group talks about the Watergate scandal, but the discussion heats up when his father condemns Linda Lovelace, the star of a pornographic movie. She corrupts children, he says. He calls her "scum of the earth." Swede says parents cannot shelter children forever. Marsha defends Lovelace. The father wants "decency." Marsha says, "What is so inexhaustibly interesting about decency?" (p. 359). Swede's father hates how the world is now. He brings up the impact of violence on children. But violence has already happened in his own family. Merry is a murderer. The father is in denial: "No one in this family was going to fall into doubt about Merry's absolute innocence, not so long as he was alive" (p. 365). Meanwhile, Orcutt, the adulterer with Swede's wife, acts like he's holy. Swede was there for his wife when she had plastic surgery. He paid for it, he stayed with her, he held her hand. He was always faithful. Where is the justice? Roth seems to be saying there isn't any. Bad things happen to decent people. Indecent people become millionaire porn stars.

3. In Shelagh Sevenson's Selected Plays, I chose "Five Kinds of Silence." The play is about a dysfunctional family. The father is violent and abusive. He beats his wife. He beats his daughters and he abuses them sexually. In the beginning of the play they take things into their own hands. They murder him. Abuse is a common problem today. It has always been around, but it used to be a secret. And the law wouldn't help the woman because "a man's home is his castle" was the rule. What he did inside his home was nobody else's business. Things have changed now. People are aware of abuse. In some states the police must answer calls for help immediately and by law, they must arrest the man. I know a woman whose husband came home drunk in the middle of the night when she and her four daughters were sleeping. He set the house on fire. Then he woke her up. He said, "Lady, you better wake up. Your f-ing house is on fire!" She got up in time to put the fire out.

She says that is when she realized that their lives were in real danger. Eventually, she got away from him. She didn't have to kill him to escape.

4. Mo Yan's Shifu, "You'll Do Anything for a Laugh" is a story about a man who has worked hard all his life. Just before he is to retire, he gets laid off. The factory closes. He has no job. He's too old to do physical work, but he has to survive. He has a wife to support. He gets the idea to convert an old bus into a "love nest." He rents it by the hour to lovers looking for a place to have sex. Old Ding makes a lot of money. But his conscience bothers him. What he is doing is not exactly wrong, but it's borderline. Everyday we are confronted with temptations that are borderline. We can get away with it, but is it right? His assistant gives him all the reasons why it is okay to do. At the end of the story it is winter. He rents the place one last time to a couple. They never come out of the love-nest. He pounds and hollers at the door.

He fears they have killed themselves. Finally, he goes to the police (his assistant's cousin). They have no trouble opening the door. The find the place empty. Old Ding says the couple must have been spirits. I think the couple represents his conscience at war with him. When we do things that go against our principles, perhaps in a spiritual way, we are "killing ourselves" because we silence our conscience, which is the voice of God speaking to us. If we won't listen to God, who is the Life-giver, we opt for anti-Life or death. Ding's first customer said the love-nest looked like an iron coffin. In the story it's a symbol of death -- the death of Ding's illusions, ideals. He went by the rules. He worked hard all his life thinking he would be rewarded. With the loss of his job, he lost his belief in the government, the system, and justice.