Gospel & Universe 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid

The Miller

The Chorus 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Miller on the High Seas

The Chorus

The explicit carpe diem of the first stanza seems to disappear in the two-line chorus, which on the surface has nothing to do with partying, drinking, or the camaraderie of beer pitchers. I’ll argue, however, that there is a deep connection to the party atmosphere. I’ll also argue that the chorus kicks off the deeper philosophical themes that dominate the rest of the lyric.

The chorus may be seen as a vague reference to an unknown bar-tale, or it may be seen to contain two deeply-layered themes: 1. the historical break with religion, suggested by the miller’s tale, and 2. the mortifying effects of the loss of essentialist meaning, suggested by the woman’s pallid face. These themes are evoked by layers of association, and by key terms that resonate with centuries of culture, literature, and philosophy. In making this argument, I take a reader response approach to the lyric, in which a critical reader’s interpretation can be as important as that of the author. While the notion of intentional fallacy may be relevant here, I would substitute it with the notion of the authenticity of both intention and critical interpretation.

Before I give my reading, I’d like to stress that my view of the miller doesn’t change the two basic points I make: 1. the lyric is ambiguous, and a more casual and down-to-earth reading is equally valid; 2. seeing the miller’s tale in a less grandiose light still leaves the heroine in the same situation, albeit without quite so much literary and historical baggage.

The opening line of the chorus prepares us in a very roundabout manner for the highly charged and resonant themes of religion and existentialism. The line, “And so it was that later,” may seem innocuous in terms of its surface meaning, yet the line has tremendous contextual, emotional, and musical clout. It’s one of the most characteristic and haunting moments of the song, even more so because of it being repeated numerous times. The word so serves as a general link to whatever is implied in the stanzas which precede it. The word later creates an indeterminate temporal gap, which seems short but could be years. It allows the reader to ask, How long does it take for philosophical disillusionment to be fully realized? The reason I say fully realized, edging from pessimism to optimism, is that in the context of the song disillusionment takes on a sagacious depth. Also, the deeper the disillusion, the more heroic the will to carry on. The heroine is in the process of sounding an even deeper truth that is raw and unnerving, and this truth is turning her face, which was already ghostly with bleak philosophic insight, an even whiter shade of pale. Her will to soldier on despite the existential realization of meaninglessness and absurdity can be seen in her will to create her own meaning: she ends her shore leave and sets sail for the deep. “And so it was that later” seems innocuous enough, yet it links to the heavily-laden scenarios in the stanzas that come before and after it, and it also leads directly into the puzzling heart of the chorus.

The next line, “As the miller told his tale,” may seem exceptionally vague to those who aren’t familiar with English literature, yet to those who are it’s one of the most powerful allusions in the entire song. Seeing the lyric’s miller as the miller from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales makes sense in its immediate context and also makes sense in the larger philosophic direction the lyric takes. Just as the poet refers to Neptune in order to represent the forces of nature, so he alludes to Chaucer’s miller in order to represent social order, democratic rights, and the power to question everything. As I will explain in detail below, the miller’s tale in Chaucer is inextricably connected to freedom of expression, and by extension to freedom of thought. The paradox in this case — that is, in the case of the postmodern world, as opposed to Chaucer’s Middle Ages — is that the freedom to question everything brings with it the angst and absurdity of never getting a final answer.

There are several reasons why seeing the lyric’s miller in light of Chaucer makes sense.

The line “As the miller told his tale” is very easily connected to Chaucer’s miller, but not easily connected to anyone else. The most obvious literary equation of tale + miller = The Miller’s Tale. What else might tale + miller suggest? The use of the definite article the also suggests a particular miller who is already known. Of course the only miller who is generally known for telling a tale is Chaucer’s miller. The provenance and identity of Reid’s miller is otherwise completely mysterious.

Because the poem is already literary in a historical sense — it refers to Classical figures and to a line by Shakespeare — linking it to Chaucer isn’t a stretch. Reid refers in the fourth stanza to Shakespeare’s “If music be the food of love,” which is from the opening of Twelfth Night. Shakespeare and Chaucer are arguably the two greatest writers in the language, and therefore references to both great writers isn’t in any way incongruent or surprising. The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous collections of poetic narrative in the world, and “The Miller’s Prologue” and “The Miller’s Tale” are two of the most famous texts in the collection.

Also, both “The Miller’s Prologue” and the lyric highlight the effects of alcohol. Chaucer’s miller admits that he’s drunk when he proposes his tale. Likewise, Reid’s poet is drunk in a bar. Although we don’t know exactly where Reid’s miller is, it seems he’s either in the bar or talking to the woman who he meets there.

My next point is somewhat more complicated, as it involves the larger sweep of intellectual history, from Medieval religious belief to Modern skepticism, agnosticism, atheism, and existentialism. I should premise this point by repeating that my overall argument about the poem doesn’t rest on it, but is only enriched by it.

“The Miller’s Prologue” and “The Miller’s Tale” are milestones in the history of free expression, especially as this pertains to the expression of marginal, vulgar, common, sexual, or anti-religious views. Along with Milton’s Areopagitica and Mill’s On Liberty, Chaucer’s “Prologue to the Miller’s Prologue” is a key referent in the history of free speech and freedom of the press. Through the drunken miller and his bawdy, humorous tale, Chaucer makes his anti-censorship point in a way that also leads historically toward secularism and skepticism. Chaucer skillfully orders it so that his anti-censorship point precedes the type of sexual and irreverent story that’s likely to be censored by the Church. In “The Miller’s Prologue” the host argues that people should be free to read whatever they want, however counter to religion or morality it may be. In “The Miller’s Tale” he suggests that it’s foolish to reenact biblical stories, as his carpenter John does when he builds an ark to protect himself from what he imagines to be the imminent wrath of God.

The full import of Chaucer’s miller can be seen in the lyric on the condition that one reads the heroine’s response to the miller’s tale in terms of the big meanings embedded in the Bible, as well as the questioning and collapse of these big meanings, which is a paradoxical, liberating destruction that free enquiry eventually brings in its wake.

Even if one were to accept that Reid is alluding to Chaucer’s miller, still one might ask why his tale makes the protagonist’s face turn more white. Chaucer’s tale itself is funny, and it debunks seriousness in many ways. One could argue that the heroine is being too serious and perhaps even self-important. Yet she’s the one who sadly downplays her power over Neptune (or Nature), and she’s the one whose face is ghostly to begin with. So if whatever she feels is intensified by what the miller says, and if we accept a serious existential bent in her words and actions (she asserts that “There is no meaning” and she directs our attention to an ocean over which she claims no dominion), then it seems reasonable to assume that it’s this bent that’s being intensified by the miller’s tale. While it’s not conclusive that Reid is referring to Chaucer, and while it’s not conclusive that this miller’s tale leads further into existentialism, there’s a strong circumstantial case for both of these possibilities.

The Miller and the Mariner: Authorial Intention

On the other hand, there’s also good reason to doubt that Reid is alluding to Chaucer’ miller, although this reason relies on a prescriptive view of authorial intention to which I don’t subscribe. In an interview with Songfacts (here) Reid says, “I’d never read The Miller’s Tale in my life. Maybe that’s something that I knew subconsciously, but it certainly wasn’t a conscious idea for me to quote from Chaucer, no way.” In an interview with Karen Dalton-Beninato for Huffpost (here), Reid also distances himself from Chaucer:

As the Miller Told his Tale - is that line inspired by Chaucer?

Not at all.

Really? That was my ringer question.

No way. I had never read the Miller’s Tale. I knew who Chaucer was but can’t say I read him. It’s not a quote in any way whatsoever. People said, ‘You’re very into the Miller’s Tale by Chaucer,’ but I can’t say I was that bookish.

That’s going to shock the hell out of fellow English lit majors.

I used my imagination.

While it’s clear that Reid didn’t consciously refer to Chaucer, there are several reasons why Chaucer is still deeply relevant to the meaning of the lyric.

Reid says that he didn’t consciously refer to Chaucer’s miller. In the Songfacts interview he seems to imply that he may have referred to the miller subconsciously, although his statements in Huffpost seem to suggest otherwise. Whatever his view on unintentional creativity, it isn’t hard to believe that he might have subconsciously drawn on Chaucer, since his miller is, like his Wife of Bath, an iconic fictional figure who represents an important historical development — proto-feminism in the Wife of Bath, and democratic expression in the miller. One could, for instance, subconsciously write something that alludes to Odysseus or Penelope without having read the Odyssey. One could subconsciously write something that alludes to the psychological quality of a Sherlock Holmes, Captain Ahab, Raskolnikov, or Iago without having read Doyle, Melville, Dostoevsky, or Shakespeare. Famous characters become archetypal, and one doesn’t have to believe in Jung to see that writers can evoke these archetypes without consciously realizing that they’re doing so.

A work of art is what it is, what the artist says it is, and also what the audience and critics say it is. If Michelangelo had meant to depict the Virgin Mary in his Mona Lisa, we would still wonder what kind of woman she is. If Reid had subconsciously written “the mariner” instead of “the miller,” and then said he’d never read Coleridge, we’d still be looking for an albatross.

Indeed, Coleridge’s mariner fits the context so well that it’s hard to imagine Reid didn’t have it somewhere in the back of his mind. Yet as the miller told his tale reads more smoothly than as the mariner told his tale. While I realize that I’m doing alot of unauthorized diving into the poet’s subconscious imagination here, I wonder if he rejected mariner because it was too obviously connected to Coleridge — to the unnerving skinny hand of the mariner and to his demented gaze which mesmerizes the wedding guest. One might also note a similar existential bent in nautical metaphor: Coleridge’s reluctant audience returns home after hearing the mariner’s harrowing story, in which the mariner’s “soul hath been / Alone on a wide wide sea: / So lonely ‘twas, that God himself / Scarce seeméd there to be.” Finally, there’s a temporal connection between Coleridge’s poem and the lyric, a lag in time which emphasizes the sobering effect:

The Mariner, whose eye is bright, / Whose beard with age is hoar, / Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest / Turned from the bridegroom’s door. // He went like one that hath been stunned, / And is of sense forlorn : / A sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn.

Just as the guest wakes up later a “sadder and a wiser man,” so “later” the woman’s face turns “a whiter shade of pale.” In the third stanza of the lyric the heroine smiles “so sadly / That [the protagonist’s] anger straightway died.”

Reid’s assertion reminds me somewhat of when Chris Cornell stated (here and here) that there “was no real idea to get across” in “Black Hole Sun” (1994). He says, “lyrically it’s probably the closest to me just playing with words for words’ sake, of anything I’ve written.” And yet the song’s allusive symbolism (to the snake, to his disgrace, to Heaven sending Hell away, etc.) can easily be seen as depicting a chaotic, guilt-ridden journey into sin and despair. The vague ideas swirling melodiously in the minds of poets may not be the ideas that others take from their words. Authorial intention must be taken into account, yet the more allusive the writing, the less intention defines or restricts critical response.

Chaucer’s miller fits into the song better than any other known miller in terms of setting, action, narrative, and theme. What other miller makes nearly as much contextual sense? Some miller that we don’t know anything about, one dropped into the song without any context? Chaucer’s miller, on the other hand, has an abundant and coherent context. He’s also extremely well-known, especially in the realm of English literature, which Reid grazes with his Shakespeare quote and with his many nautical references — to seasickness, virgins leaving for the coast, shore leave, being at sea, the mermaid that takes Neptune for a ride, and diving to the ocean bed. Nautical references are central to the entire epic tradition, from the early Sumerian and Biblical flood narratives, The Odyssey, Argonautica, The Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy (where Dante uses sailing metaphors even when travelling into the skies), to Byron’s Don Juan, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Eliot’s Prufrock and Waste Land (both of which end with the danger and promise of the sea). While Reid says in his Huffpost interview that he “wasn’t that bookish,” elsewhere he says that the lyric “was influenced by books, not drugs” (Songfacts). Chaucer’s miller fits with the lyric’s bar-room environment (Chaucer’s miller professes to be drunk, pre-emptively blaming his ungodly tale on the ale of Southwark), and also with its existential theme, since “The Miller’s Tale” engenders skepticism (or at least a sense of playfulness) about the old religious stories (especially Noah’s Ark) that people have used for centuries to give their lives meaning.

Reid says that he wasn’t thinking of Chaucer’s miller but simply using his imagination. What do we do with this, given that referring to an unspecified miller doesn’t add any clear or deep meaning to the lyric? We have to speculate more widely to see meaning in an unspecified miller than to see it in Chaucer’s miller. For instance, a miller grinds grain, which is used in making things like bread. But speculations in this direction have little value: they lead us to things like working conditions and sociology (millers traditionally being wealthier than peasants or workers) or to products like bread, which can be connected to basic survival à la Les Misérables, or to spiritual symbolism like the eucharist. These speculations may in themselves be full of meaning, yet they’re difficult to sustain within the context of the lyric itself. By contrast, Chaucer’s miller fits very well with Reid’s use of the definite article (it’s the miller, not a miller), his use of Shakespeare, and with the presence of alcohol and drunkenness (which dominates the first stanza bar-scene, which is the main setting for the entire lyric). Chaucer’s miller also brings with him the context of free expression, free inquiry, and the freedom to play with and question sacred tales such as the story of The Flood. All of these freedoms are fundamental to the sad paradox of existential freedom, summarized most succinctly in Sartre’s phrase “l’homme est condamné à être libre / “man is condemned to be free.” This melancholy dominates the lyric and can be heard in the mournful keyboard, the ponderous and hypnotic rhythm, and the tone of voice which is world-weary, doleful, powerful, perhaps even nostalgic for the certainty of belief.

What are we to conclude when a lyricist says that a plausible and enriching explanation doesn’t fit with his intention, and yet he doesn’t offer a satisfying alternative? We can conclude that listeners are wrong and that no explanation, or a less meaningful explanation, will have to do. Or, we can decide on the placement of the words and music before us, reasoning that obscure lyrics aren’t necessarily an invitation for a lyricist to decide what they mean. We could argue further that by the time we listen to a song, the work of the lyricist is already done. If the lyricist hasn’t made himself clear in the finished product, in its final fusion of verb and note, then an off-stage voice of definitive clarification can hardly be added to the track. Or, to put it in a more complimentary way, would Reid really mind if I argue that he’s more brilliant and psychologically profound than he thought he was?

Obscure lyrics are an invitation for listeners to speculate about what they might mean. In this case, strict correlations or logical conclusions are pipe dreams; what’s more appropriate is an insightful and contextual reading. While it would be overstepping to apply the term intentional fallacy here, one can more safely say that the most coherent readings are those that make most sense of the text, regardless of what the author intends. It’s important to respect the views writers have of their own work. Yet one can also respectfully disagree with them. In this case, I’m not so much disagreeing with Reid as I’m asserting that while he had no intention of alluding to Chaucer’s miller, he ended up invoking him anyway.

While it may seem perverse to some, I would argue that because people understandably see Chaucer’s miller in the lyric, and because Reid has to keep denying that it’s Chaucer’s miller, it seems likely that Reid was using an archetypal figure without intending to. And because this archetype fits so well with the context and meanings of the song it seems fair in this case to allow the notion of reader-response to have at least as much weight as the notions of biographical criticism and authorial intention. I’ll conclude this section with my own reader-response credo: the value of poems is what readers can get out of them, as well as what poets believe they put into them.

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“As the miller told his tale” is an ingenious phrase, given the several things it does at once. First, it introduces another character, another point of view, to compliment the two main ones. It also suggests that this third character is somehow wise, as if steeped in Ecclesiastes. He’s thus something of a counterpoint to the poet, who seems mostly interested in seducing the antagonist. On yet another level the miller intimates the course of history toward secularism and existentialism. He suggests that the effect of alienation from meaning is, as Sartre points out, as much horrifying as liberating. For it’s at the very moment the woman hears the miller’s tale that her face goes from “ghostly” to “a whiter shade of pale.” I would argue that the reason for the degrees of horror — from “ghostly” to “pale” — is that she’s beginning to take the miller’s tale to its logical and historical existential conclusion.

In the next section, “Neptune,” I’ll argue that the heroine understands this post-Naturalist, post-Darwinian conclusion, and that despite some of the heroic things Sartre and Camus say about existentialism, there’s no triumph in it; there’s only consolation. In three final sections I’ll then argue that despite this grim situation, poetry and paradox can nevertheless give a secular and redeeming dimension to the human condition.

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Next: Neptune

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