Quintets For Robert Morley - Analysis

Climbing Parnassus, Remembering the Body

The poem begins by staging a comic but pointed confession: the speaker has been hyper-ventilating up Parnassus and may have forgotten to pay tribute to something older and more basic than literary ambition. Parnassus, the mountain of poetry, is a place of strenuous ascent and thin air; the joke is that the speaker’s breathless climb has made him overlook the fat, whom he calls a Stone Age aristocracy. That phrase sets the poem’s main claim in motion: fatness is not merely a personal trait or a modern problem but a long human achievement with social consequences, a kind of embodied history that the speaker wants to rehabilitate without pretending it is innocent.

A Counter-Myth: Fatness as Early Civilization

The poem invents a deliberately grand origin story: We were probably the earliest / civilized, the first to win leisure and even sweet boredom. Fatness becomes evidence of surplus and protection, which means it also becomes a marker of culture: the life-enhancing sprawl that can require style. The speaker’s tone here is mock-heroic, but the argument is serious underneath the swagger. He reverses the usual moral hierarchy where lean bodies signify discipline and virtue; instead, the fat body is linked to the conditions that make art and thought possible: time, security, stored energy, and an ability to rest.

Protected by the Tribe, Inventing the Self

One of the poem’s sharper moves is the claim that fat people were spared and cared for by Tribesfolk for good reasons, then the sly correction: Our reasons. The line is both funny and slightly ruthless; it suggests fatness is not only nurtured by the group but also capable of negotiating its own survival. The poem then escalates the myth into philosophy: Out of self-defence / we invented the Self. That is an audacious connection between bodily vulnerability and modern inwardness. If you are conspicuous, slower, more at risk, you may need to become reflective, strategic, socially legible. The poem flatters, but it also implies that identity is born from pressure and threat, not from pure freedom.

Venus, Theology, and the Big List That Half-Mocks Itself

The middle section piles on inventions attributed to fatness: some of love, much of fertility (with the wink to the Willensdorf Venus), parts of theology like divine feasting and Unmoved Movers, even the ox-cart and self-deprecation. The list is intentionally too much, almost baroque, and the excess is part of the point: the poem enacts abundance while also teasing its own grandiosity. Yet even the jokes have teeth. Connecting fatness to divine feasting acknowledges how often power and holiness have been imagined as entitled to consumption; connecting it to self-deprecation admits the social skill fat people may learn in order to survive ridicule. The poem keeps praising while quietly showing the costs of needing to be charming, funny, or magnanimous.

War, Shame, and the Problem of Authority

The speaker refuses to let fatness be merely gentle or aesthetic. He notes that pugnacity is not lacking in stout fellows, invokes Sumo, and claims that in heroic war fat people become specialists and generals. The picture is unsettling: the body associated with peace and comfort is also suited to command and calculation at a distance. Then comes a political assertion in plain imperative: Never trust a lean meritocracy, and especially not the leader who has been lean. The poem suggests that lifelong bigness teaches a kind of balance, a knack for wedding / greatness with balance. But that idea carries a tension: it treats bodily history as moral education, which is itself a kind of stereotype, even if it is a stereotype meant to counter a harsher one.

The Turn: Abundance Looks Different in the Heat

The poem’s emotional hinge arrives when the speaker’s celebratory myth meets the real world: Our having life abundantly / is equivocal, especially in hot climates where the hungry watch us. The tone changes here from bravado to uneasy self-awareness. He admits, I lack the light step then too, echoing his earlier talk of light feet as an initiation the impostor fat man has not earned. Now heaviness is not a proud emblem but a moral burden under scrutiny. The line How many of us walk those streets / in terrible disguise? suggests tourism, privilege, perhaps even the daily masking that lets the comfortable pass through others’ hunger without being forced into reckoning. The poem doesn’t resolve the contradiction; it insists on living inside it.

A Sharper Question Hidden in the Praise

If fatness once meant being spared by the tribe, what does it mean now to be spared by global inequality? The poem’s earlier confidence about being reasonable rulers is tested by the image of the hungry watching. The praise begins to look like self-justification, or like a wish that embodied comfort could certify ethical comfort. That discomfort is the poem’s honesty: it lets the speaker’s argument implicate him.

Newton’s Apple and the Search for an Ampler Physics

The ending returns to climbing and gravity, but now the metaphor is philosophical: So much climbing, on a spherical world. The speaker jokes that if Newton were not a mere beginner at gravity, he might ask how the apple got up there in the first place. The point isn’t to correct Newton; it’s to widen the frame. The poem wants an ampler physics for human bodies and human judgment: not just the downward pull (shame, stigma, appetite, mortality) but the prior forces that place us where we are (history, protection, scarcity, power). After all the comic mythmaking, this last move is quietly serious: moral understanding requires tracing how abundance is produced, not only condemning those who have it.