20 pages • 40 minutes read
They Feed They Lion
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Levine’s poem is comprised of 33 lines of lyrical verse that do not employ a consistent rhyme pattern nor have a definitive meter. These lines are divided into five stanzas. By using anaphora and cataloguing, Levine creates a rhythm of repetitive phrases and social wrongs to show the oppressive conditions in which African Americans in Detroit lived. As Levine told The Atlantic, he was interested in recreating the rhythm employed in a poem by 18th-century poet Christopher Smart: “We only have a fragment of [Smart’s poem]. It's a sort of call-and-response poem—very incantatory. I said, ‘That's the rhythm I'm going to try and use.’” (See: Further Reading & Resources).
Levine was also inspired by the Black dialect of his coworker who he described as “a black guy named Eugene.” Spreading car parts over old bags, Eugene “held up a sack, and on it were the words ‘Detroit Municipal Zoo.’ And he laughed, and said, ‘They feed they lion they meal in they sacks.’” Levine noted that he thought, “This guy’s a genius with language. He laughed when he said it, because he knew that he was speaking an English that I didn’t speak, but that I would understand.” After viewing the damage in Detroit, Levine used the chanting quality of Smart and his coworker’s diction to create a voice to create both a sense of speed and an authentic vernacular.
Anaphora & Cataloguing
“They Feed They Lion” heavily relies on anaphora, which is generally employed to make the poem seem like a chant, song, or sermon. After traumatic events, those affected often question why. Using anaphora and cataloguing—listing items in a poem—Levine identifies the reasons why the riots were inevitable. The list gives the reader nearly 50 reasons and creates an answer to what may have festered to exploding on the night of July 23, 1967.
The poem begins with the repetition of “out of the”:
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow (Lines 1-4).
It moves to the “from x comes y” construction:
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion (Lines 26-30).
These phrases both indicate that x caused y. The oppression, Levine suggests, went on for decades, wearing away at the fabric of peace to inevitable violence. Without the anaphora, the pain may be diminished.
The Flexible Use of “They” and “Lion”
The flexibility of the words in the titular phrase “They feed they lion” is an essential technique to make the reader engage with the problems the poem explores. Levine uses the word “they” in the title to mean both “[the] feed of [the] lion” as meals and/or nourishment given to the animal, and “they feed [the] lion” to indicate who gives that meal.
In the first reading the word “they” functions as an article; in the second interpretation the word “they” is a pronoun. This makes the reader think about both what the big cat is being fed, and by whom. “They” implies the white systems that operate and fail to nourish the Black citizenry, thus causing their anger to “grow” (Lines 5, 11, 18, 25).
“Lion” (Lines 5, 11, 18, 25, 29, 30, 33) can also be perceived as a verb, particularly in Stanza 5, in that once the cat is fed, it behaves in leonine fashion. “They lion grow”—the variation on the title used as the refrain throughout—shows the cat’s increase of strength and that there is more than one animal: It is a member of a tribe. “They” in that construction becomes these to indicate several. The phrase “[t]hey lion grow” refers to how the white status quo enhances the anger of the cats, which symbolically stands for African Americans in most of the poem. However, beginning in Stanza 5, the refrain is changed to “they lion” (Lines 29, 30, 33) suggesting that the group is the African American citizenry enraged enough to lash out. This group “feed[s]” (Line 33) on the fact that “white sins [are] forgiven” (Line 27).
The concluding line “They feed they lion and he comes” also offers several meanings due to the indications of prior uses of the term. Either the African Americans are “feed [until] they lion” (Line 33) and “come” (Line 33) to “Rise up” (Line 22), or white America “feed[s] they lion” (Line 33) until “he comes” (Line 33) to roar a warning or maul the city.
Finally, the “he” (Line 33) in the final line could also be an arbitrary party—like Justice or Christ—who can mete out retribution. The deliberate double meanings of the phrase cause the reader to grapple with what or who has nourished the strife resulting in the riot.
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By Philip Levine
