16 pages • 32 minutes read
Lawrence FerlinghettiSometime During Eternity . . .
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1958A 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 Unpredictable Nature of Storytelling
“Sometime During Eternity” is centered around the art of storytelling and the idea of unreliable narratives—particularly oral traditions. The casual tone of the poem’s speaker is more closely modelled on contemporary American speech in the 1950s than it is on a traditional literary idiom, drawing attention to the fact that the poem itself is a story that may or may not be providing reliable information. There are also three different stories recounted by the speaker: what Jesus says about himself, the believers’ interpretation of the story about Jesus, and the latest rumor about Jesus.
These three stories illustrate the ways stories can take on different forms and interpretations over time and depending on the story’s teller. When speaking to his contemporaries early in the poem, Jesus claims to be the son of God (“the cat / who really laid it on us / is his Dad” [Lines 12-14]), and alludes to the Dead Sea Scrolls—a collection of ancient Jewish religious texts. However, although Jesus claims divine lineage, he does not explicitly identify himself as the Messiah in the speaker’s telling of the story. Yet after Jesus’ Crucifixion—when he is “stretch[ed] […] on [the Cross] to cool” (Line 35) by his unimpressed contemporaries—the speaker implies that later generations do indeed start to interpret him as some sort of messianic figure, and accordingly venerate him by “always making models / of this Tree / with Him hung up” (Lines 37-39), and regarding him as “the king cat” (Line 44, italics Ferlinghetti’s). The use of the term “king cat” (Line 44) echoes the speaker’s use of “cat” in reference to God earlier in the poem (Line 12), suggesting that Jesus has all but usurped the original God figure.
The third and final story the speaker recounts is the story of ongoing skepticism, which brings the poem full circle by echoing the original skepticism of Jesus’s contemporaries. According to this story, Jesus is “real dead” (Line 57), which suggests that the religious significance of the Crucifixion—the idea that it was a prelude to the Resurrection proving Jesus’s divinity—is simply a fiction. However, the speaker continues to draw attention to the inherently unstable nature of storytelling by crediting the story to “the usual unreliable sources” (Lines 56), suggesting either that the mythos surrounding Jesus is a story that got out of hand, or perhaps even that the interpretation of him as “real dead” (Line 57) is yet another story that may or may not be true.
The Surreal Origins of Christianity
The poem’s satirical and irreverent tone draws attention to the surreal origins of Christianity by presenting them in a humorous light. In referring to Jesus and his disciples as “some guys” (Line 2), calling Galilee “some square-type [e.g., not important or lively] place” (Line 6), and describing God as “the cat / who really laid it on us” (Lines 12-13) and Jesus’s supposed “Dad” (Line 14), the speaker humanizes both Jesus and God. In doing so, the speaker also suggests that there is something about the whole story that contains elements of absurdity—a view he claims is shared by Jesus’s contemporaries who think him potentially crazy (“You’re hot / they tell him” [Lines 32-33]). The juxtaposition this creates between Jesus’s humble origins and original unpopularity and his later hailing as a messiah by believers is all the more humorous for being so stark and unexpected. The poem thus subjects the story of Christianity to a kind of demystification process, which in turn calls into question the overarching credibility of miraculous religious origin stories across the board.
Skepticism Versus Belief
There is thematic tension throughout the poem between those who are skeptical about Jesus’s story and those who are eager to interpret Jesus and his mission as messianic and divine. Although the speaker does not say anything in particular about Jesus’s disciples, the fact that the Jesus figure turns up at the poem’s opening with “some guys” (Line 2) with him suggests he does indeed attract early followers. Likewise, later generations of believers eagerly venerate Jesus, as the speaker describes them “making models / of [the Cross]” (Lines 37-38) as relics while “crooning His name” (Line 40) and “calling Him to come down” (Line 41). This is a possible allusion to their hopes of the Second Coming, when Jesus is prophesied to return to earth for the Final Judgement and take all believers to Heaven. Such believers embrace the story of Jesus and also potentially embellish it by granting Jesus even more significance than he gave himself: According to the speaker, Jesus does not explicitly claim to be a Messiah, but his believers do credit him with supreme divine power, as “the king cat” (Line 44, italics Ferlinghetti’s).
The strain of skepticism appears both in Jesus’s own time and in the time of the poem’s speaker. Jesus’s contemporaries react against his “wailing” (Line 8) by crucifying him, something they believe necessary in order to “cool him” (Line 34), thereby putting an end to his outlandish claims. The speaker further claims that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 is not the cause of a religious revival or interpreted as any sort of proof by many, as “even then / nobody really believes [the Scrolls]” (Lines 28-29).
The speaker even concludes the poem with skepticism, repeating the claim spread “according to a roundup / of late world news” (Lines 54-55) that the Jesus believers are venerating is actually “real dead” (Line 57)—a claim that undermines the story of Jesus’s Resurrection. And yet, since the speaker personally acknowledges even this story as the work of “the usual unreliable sources” (Line 57), the implication is that the battle between skepticism and belief may never be satisfactorily resolved.
