Gospel & Universe 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid

The Queen of Love

Stanza 4 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Framework of Logic 🧜🏽‍♀️ Johnny Walker Wisdom

Stanza 4

The final verse is the most perplexing verse in the lyric, for it presents a paradoxical or enigmatic conclusion. The stanza has a poetic logic to it, one that operates within a framework where the ideas are so condensed that they appear surreal and illogical. This apparent surrealism can, however, be pieced together, and it makes sense within the overall love story and nautical journey/quest. Moreover, the stanza brings to a satisfying conclusion the tension between existential meaninglessness and the types of meaning often explored by poets like Dante, Blake, and Khayyam.

I’ll end this section by comparing the final stanza to Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time,” which has a similar bar-room setting and a similar mix of idealism and sensuality. This will lead into the final chapters, “Beyond Alienation” and “Myth & Mysticism,” where I’ll extend the comparative analysis in order to show that the form and content of the lyric — and especially the final stanza — is far from atypical for Reid. From this point of view, the nautical imagery in the lyric lies between “A Salty Dog” and “Crucifiction Lane,” and its surreal poetical style lies between “Cerdes” and “Homberg.”

The Framework of Logic

The final stanza of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” starts off in a fairly simple manner. Yet like the lyric itself, it gets increasingly complex as a result of a dense and obscure intertwining of allusions, scenarios, and suggestions. The poet starts the stanza by quoting part of what Duke Orsino says in Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Here love is a general thing and also something of an anthropomorphized figure such as we find in Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Reid then radically diverges from Duke Orsino’s shallow, disillusioned take on love. Instead, love is raised to mystic heights and connected to deep motifs that reverberate throughout the poem. Unlike the love Dante celebrates, the poet doesn’t turn this love into a fully anthropomorphized figure, yet he nevertheless connects it to the physical world and to sexuality.

In a fairly logical yet creative order, the poet argues that “If music be the food of love / Then laughter is its queen.” Here there’s a condition as well as a situation that follows from the condition: “If music be the food of love, then laughter is its queen.” The poet connects an emotional, aesthetic experience (music) to a very practical thing (food), which is then connected to a regenerative, emotional experience or state (love) which exists between two figures (the King and Queen of Love). The emotional, artistic form of music thus nourishes the highest and most precious human experience, love. If the aesthetic sustains the high ideal of love, then laughter, a positive emotional state, naturally accompanies this high state, just as a queen accompanies a king. This pairing fits with the romantic encounter found throughout the poem, and the laughter reminds us of the opening bar scene, with its communal party atmosphere. The focus on the queen’s laughter also fits with the feminism in the song, since the emphasis here isn’t on the king or his character, but rather on that of the queen.

And this queen is no ordinary queen. This isn’t a dour or imperious queen of history, nor is she the bossy queen of Alice in Wonderland. Rather, she’s the queen of love. This type of queen echoes more deeply in time, back to mythic figures such as Ishtar and Venus. The figure also resonates with the previous Classical references to the vestal virgins, Neptune, and the mermaid. Exactly how we identify this queen is up to us.

A further possibility is that the poet is returning obliquely to his previous reference to cards, the queen of love here standing in for the queen of hearts. In the second stanza, he looked through his playing cards to see if he could define or control the heroine to his romantic advantage. This time around, he seems to have given up on that type of goal, and instead gives her a more lofty status.

The references to art as sustenance and to the queen of love are then likened to a more perplexing notion dealing with vertical hierarchy and moral propriety. Complicating this obscure scenario is the fact that the third stanza is part of the larger downward trajectory of the lyric, which started in the bar with the ceiling flying away, continued through various vertical and horizontal nautically-inspired scenarios, and will end with a precipitous dive to the ocean bed. The linkage between these scenarios could lie in the paradoxical equation of high (the bar ceiling) and low (the ocean bed), in the poetic or mystical notion that a fall can be a rise. This is where we get into deep and difficult water, where listeners might be tempted to throw up their hands and see this final stanza as surrealistic or psychedelic nonsense.

After referring to art as sustenance and to the queen of love, the poet says that this is similar to another situation, which is again presented to us within the framework of the conditional tense: “And likewise if behind is in front, then dirt in truth is clean.” Here we are presented with two hierarchies, one about power and the other about morality or value: 1) who’s in front and who’s behind, or who’s first and who’s last, and 2) who’s clean and who’s dirty, or who’s pure and who’s impure. Normally, people think of behind and unclean as negative. Yet art, which is the food of love, can transform perception so that we no longer sees things within such a strict hierarchy. Indeed, art can work in an egalitarian religious sense, so that belief trumps wealth and outward status, as in the famous notion from Matthew and Luke: many who are last [behind] will be the first [in front].

In the opening stanza the room hums and the ceiling flies away but the bar patrons keep on partying; in the closing stanza the poet’s words slip like cardboard through his head but he and the heroine seize the moment and dive to the ocean bed. The ceiling and the ocean floor both represent the line between known safety and an intoxicated movement into the riotous and dangerous unknown, be it bliss or oblivion, or both.

Johnny Walker Wisdom

One might object and say that the poet and heroine are just having sex, not climaxing into some quasi-mystical annihilation. Yet for some poets and mystics that’s a false dichotomy. Blake’s famous phrase, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,” can be combined with another of his well-known phrases, “the lust of the goat is the glory of God.” This combination can be found in a more recent poem which also has a bar-room encounter, “Closing Time,” by Leonard Cohen. The love interest here isn’t a beautiful young woman, but rather an old woman, yet the magic of music and intoxication turn the crone into an angel: his “very close companion” is “a hundred but she’s wearing something tight”… “She’s the Angel of Compassion” and “She’s rubbing half the world against her thigh.” The poet’s sensibility brings together the physical and spiritual: “I loved you for your body / There’s a voice that sounds like God to me / Declaring, declaring, declaring that your body’s really you.”

The ocean bed may be earth or dirt, yet diving toward it isn’t unclean or impure. Instead, it’s the mirror or corresponding tangent of the opening image of the room humming and the ceiling flying away. Just as the extremes of sky and sea come together, from ceiling to ocean floor, so the extremes of our sensitivity about sex — purity and impurity — come together when dirt in truth is clean. The sky is the great beyond and the ocean bed is the great below. Dirt and the dust of angels are of the same unknown substance: infinity, annihilation, oblivion.

This idealism can be weighed against the heroine’s earlier statement, “There is no reason,” which could suggest that there’s no intrinsic meaning in their final actions. This line casts a sober light on the whole poem, perhaps even suggesting that the journey of the vestal virgins to the coast may be doomed as well. The poet and heroine may think they’re acting heroically, yet the epic space through which they eventually dive is controlled by Neptune, not by them. This may be the import of the miller’s tale: just as no one can take Neptune for a ride, so no one can be sure about the greater forces of the cosmos. Despite this sad wisdom (whatever that wisdom is, and however it turns her face a whiter shade of pale), they decide to dive into the fullness of life, even if this action leads to death.

One might return to “Closing Time” here, since Cohen refers to a “Johnny Walker wisdom” that goes beyond vaunted esoteric wisdom: “I lift my glass to the Awful Truth / Which you can’t reveal to the Ears of Youth / Except to say it isn’t worth a dime.” Instead of trying to explain what he means by “the Awful Truth” (capitals and all), Cohen takes another drink and continues sitting and dancing with his companion, even after the lights come on and everybody in the bar sees themselves in the bright glare. The important thing to him is, “The Gates of Love they budged an inch.”

The two songs share some striking similarities: both take place in a bar, both idealize the woman in the relationship, both end with the couples having sex, and both refuse to see this sexuality in a negative light. In both cases, the poet has given up playing games and trying to control the woman, and instead accepts that she, like Beatrice, will be his guide. In both case, however, the female guide doesn’t go on about purity, in the manner of Dante’s paragon. Rather, this Beatrice is more like the skeptic Khayyam, or the existentialist Camus: she appreciates the Awful Truth — that the grand things we imagine our lives to be are transient and small — and yet she still takes an active part in music, food, drink, song, the riotous bar, and the beauty of love.

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Next: Beyond Alienation

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