19 pages • 38-minute read
Lot's Wife
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Themes
Crime and Punishment
The traditional Christian narrative states that Sodom and Gomorrah’s great sin is sex between men. Genesis 19:5 bears multiple translations to this effect. The New International Version says that Lot’s neighbors “called to Lot, ‘[w]here are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them’” (NIV), while the King James Version says, “[b]ring them out unto us, that we may know them.” The New King James translates the verse as: “Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally.” So great is the offense in this verse that Lot tries offering his own daughters to the assembled crowd instead of the angels disguised as men. This is the last straw for God, and He informs Lot that He will destroy the towns due to “wickedness.” So prevalent is this interpretation that the words “sodomy” and “sodomite” derive from the so-called actions of Sodom.
Some contemporary scholarship holds that the great sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, the so-called wickedness, isn’t sex between men but inhospitality. Before visiting Lot, the angels visited Abraham and received due hospitality. Lot also offered his hospitality when they visited him next, but Lot’s neighbors did not. The Jewish account of Idit suggests that Idit didn’t want to host the angels. She intentionally let her annoyance be known to her neighbors.
Hecht would argue that humanity’s great shortcoming is also inhospitality. In many of Hecht’s poems, there is a distinct apathy present in humanity. People die or are abused, a woman such as Lot’s wife is turned to salt for looking back at their burning hometown, yet all humans do is look on in the face of these catastrophes. God, too, looks on, and He is often the cause of the punishment. Hecht would expect readers to know the story of Lot’s wife, and so naming his poem as he does causes readers to also be guilty of standing by, of literally reading poetry, while God punishes a woman for the crime of being human.
Like Lot’s wife and her transgression, or Lot’s neighbors and their so-called transgression, humankind has fallen far and continues to do so, Hecht’s poetics suggest. His verse points out that humankind—readers and speakers and poet alike—are guilty of an inhospitality that borders on if not outright spills into immorality. To appease God and the angels, Lot offers his virgin daughters to a group of lustful, angry men. Lot heeds the angels’ decree and leaves his friends, neighbors, and sons-in-law to burn. Later, he gets so drunk that he sleeps with his daughters. Yet Lot’s wife, who looks back for a mere second, becomes a pillar of salt for her disobedience. Hecht asks not only if the punishment fits the crime but if any of us could act differently in the face of such tragedy.
Formalist Versus “Matterist”
Despite Hecht’s place in the Western literary canon as a redoubtable Formalist, many critics such as David Yezzi take issue with labeling Hecht a strict Formalist. To Yezzi, “the way that critics celebrate Hecht often strikes [Yezzi] as both backhanded and wholly typical of the current climate in American poetry”; in viewing Hecht solely as “an accomplished Formalist,” many rank-and-file critics unintentionally cast Hecht’s work as “elegant but irrelevant” (Yezzi, David. “The morality of Anthony Hecht.” The New Criterion. April 2004). Yezzi believes this narrow branding is discursive to what Hecht’s poetry really focuses on, which is subject matter above almost every other indicator of craft.
Formalism as a label suggests quaint, archaic, and even trite poetry, poetry more obsessed with form and tradition than with content. Hecht, however, focuses on morality as a motif and thematic concern in his poetry, which makes him a “Matterist,” not a strict Formalist. (Yezzi’s use of the term Matterist is perhaps a tongue-in-cheek critique on labeling in general.) In “Lot’s Wife,” Hecht foregoes a traditional verse form altogether and focuses on the act of looking back. By tying the act of recollection to a religious event, Hecht further underscores how central morality and the human condition are in investigating truth.
Critics often cite Hecht’s work as tragic poetry, or public poetry with a tragic slant. The term “public poet” is also a moniker that can cause poetry to feel outdated. Fireside poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell became household names due to public-facing poetry that, though adhering to traditional forms, was easy to memorize. Other famous poets such as William Wordsworth believed that the role of the poet was to educate and inform the public. Contemporary poetry eschews this grandiose approach in favor of hyper-personal poetry that erodes the line between private and public.
Hecht, however, uses public poetry to indict himself and readers in the public events on display, an act that arguably makes his poetry even more personal than some critics assume. Hecht borrows from Auden’s playbook by using a public tone to investigate universal morality. Like Auden, Hecht uses complicated forms to do so.
The Act of Looking
Hecht never mentions Lot’s wife in his poem by the same name, but the lines—especially the last line—imply her presence by focusing on the act of recollection, which is also the act of looking back. By titling the poem “Lot’s Wife,” Hecht makes her actions and resulting punishment a central concern of the poem. This focus on failed humanity is something Hecht pays special attention to in many of his poems, and Hecht emphasizes this tragic streak by both exploring morality and indicting humankind for its lack.
In analyzing Hecht’s finger-pointing, Yezzi says:
If there exists one overarching concern, one touchstone for testing all of Hecht’s poems, it is his abiding moral sense. The poems seethe with Hecht’s grim appraisals of human failure, and no institution or endeavor—not art, religion, culture, politics—escapes indictment, whether satiric, bitter, or melancholy […] (Yezzi, David. “The morality of Anthony Hecht.” The New Criterion. April 2004).
Yezzi quickly points out that Hecht also includes himself in the rebuke of humanity. In “Lot’s Wife,” Hecht includes both the reader and himself in Lot’s wife’s plight: “Who can resist” (Line 16), he says in the poem, but what he means is, who wouldn’t have looked back if they were in Lot’s wife’s place? Recollection is a human drive, so the poem suggests that readers would most likely do the same in Lot’s wife’s shoes. Hecht even includes Proust in this act of looking back. If Proust’s unnamed narrator in Swann’s Way looks back because tea and a madeleine transfix him, Lot’s wife, faced with the fullness of God’s power and wrath, would certainly look back if her known world were being suddenly and horrifically destroyed.
The sense of nostalgia conveyed in the poem, as well as what readers likely feel upon reading the poem’s relatable memories (and in doing so, perhaps recalling their own fond childhood memories) underscores the humanity Hecht conjures in the poem’s lines. Readers can’t pass judgement on Lot’s wife because they would most likely make the same choice she made. Readers in fact make this same choice by reading through the poem (as Hecht does by writing the poem). Conversely, readers can in fact pass judgement on Lot’s wife, Hecht suggests. In doing so, however, readers must admit that they too are guilty of looking back. Readers would also be judged and destroyed by an omnipotent being who favors absolute allegiance over mortal subjectivity, form over matter.
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