SOURCE: "Saul and David in the Early Poetry of Yehuda Amichai," in The David Myth in Western Literature, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, Purdue University Press, 1980, pp. 170-78.

[In the following essay, Flinker examines Amichai's use of the biblical figures of Saul and David in his poetry.]

In a series of poems first published in 1958, a modern Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, revised the traditional stories of Saul and David to make these public, national heroes figures in the private world of an introspective speaker. His myths contrast markedly to the popular folk traditions about Saul and David that abound in the Israeli cultural landscape, extending from names of streets and hotels to the many folk songs and associated dances that sound the praises of these biblical heroes. Amichai focuses on their individual human qualities, while making only passing reference to the various traditions about Saul and David that the reader must keep in mind. The poems articulate a complex attitude toward the past by means of ironic tensions that neither embrace nor entirely reject the traditional details to which they allude.

"King Saul & I," "Young David," and "Mt. Zion" preserve the original historical continuity of selected biblical details from poem to poem, but the sequence presents a modernized view of them and thus elicits a contemporary identification with the ancient past. The David poem, at the center of the sequence, forms its focus. The longer Saul poem sets up a series of comparisons implicitly applicable to the Davidic focus. Young David's perceptions qualify those of "King Saul & I," just as they hover in the background of "Mt Zion." All the poems sound echoes in the author's mind. Together they are a poetic portrait of an inner landscape.

Amichai's sequence begins with a comparison between Saul and a contemporary first-person speaker ("King Saul & I"). The speaker uses Saul's career as a means of measuring and understanding himself. In the first stanza the speaker compares himself to Saul through three consecutive images, followed by a statement of their brotherly connection:

    They gave him a finger, but he took the whole hand
    They gave me the whole hand: I didn't even take the little finger.
 
    While my heart
    Was weightlifting its first feelings
    He rehearsed the tearing of oxen.
 
    My pulse-beats were like
    Drips from a tap
    His pulse-beats
    Pounded like hammers on a new building.
 
    He was my big brother
    I got his used clothes.

Amichai's initial presentation of Saul contrasts with the biblical story where the future king's shy, retiring personality has him hiding "himself among the stuff" when Samuel wanted to make him king. The modern poet stresses Saul's strength in the images which move from the physical power associated with "hand," to a gymnastic workout (or "rehearsal" in this translation), and finally to pulsebeats. The "tearing of oxen" appears as an example of apparently random violence. The biblical context for this particular detail is simply ignored in the poem. In general, Saul's appearance in the first stanza projects a sense of power with ambition, aggression, and seething in qualified violence.

The contemporary first-person speaker contrasts himself pointedly with Saul. Although offered an entire hand, he refuses even a little finger. In the gym, he works out his primal feelings while his blood pressure remains low. But while these lines seem to suggest the total opposition between Saul and the speaker, the stanza concludes by making them brothers. The reader is left puzzled about the nature of those "used clothes." Implicit is a sense of connection with Saul's power and activity. If these qualities are his clothes, perhaps their being "used" conveys a lessening in the violence underlying his taking "the whole hand," or "tearing of oxen," or pounding "like hammers on a new building," but the basic nature of Saul's power and activity is not changed by use. The stanza thus ends with a contradictory sense of conflict and harmony between King Saul and "I."

Stanza two is entirely devoted to Saul. Here the seething violence of the first stanza is seen under greater control:

     His head, like a compass, will always bring him
     To the sure north of his future.
 
     His heart is set, like an alarm clock
     For the hour of his reign.
     When everyone's asleep, he will cry out
     Until all the quarries are hoarse.
     Nobody will stop him!
 
     Only the asses bare their yellow teeth
     At the end.

Saul's head is attuned to the future, much as the compass is in accord with the earth's magnetic field. There is something mechanical about Saul's attitude to the world, but with it comes the ability to deal with the realistic political situation in a firm, purposeful way. The next image, more mechanical still, compares Saul's heart to an alarm clock. There is not an immediate cosmic connection here between device and nature, such as that between compass and earth; clocks artificially measure time while compasses point direction by conforming to natural forces. Like an alarm clock, Saul has set his heart on being king, so that at the right time he can cry out to awaken the nation. Almost like God, who occasionally threatens to do something "at which both the ears of every one that heareth it shall tingle" (I Samuel 3:11), Saul's shouting, by echoing back and forth, makes the quarries hoarse. This sort of power and drive is not to be stopped. Nevertheless, the stanza concludes with a proleptic hint of Saul's tragic end. When the asses "bare their yellow teeth" at the end of his path, Saul's control over fate and destiny will be gone. The lost asses, which once brought Saul to Samuel, become, in Amichai's poem, a reminder of the final destruction of a formerly exalted leader.

Stanza three returns to Saul's rise to power, after a few apparent digressions into the speaker's present:

     Dead prophets turned time-wheels
     When he went out searching for asses
     Which I, now, have found.
     But I don't know how to handle them.
     They kick me.
 
     I was raised with the straw,
     I fell with heavy seeds.
     But he breathed the winds of his histories.
     He was anointed with the royal oil
     As with the wrestler's grease.
     He battled with olive-trees
     Forcing them to kneel.
     Roots bulged on the earth's foreheads
     With the strain.
     The prophets escaped from the arena;
     Only God remained, counting:
     Seven … eight … nine … ten …
     The people, from his shoulders downwards, rejoiced.
     Not a man stood up.
     He had won.

The first-person references at the outset of the stanza are central to the poem, since they remind the reader of the relation between Saul's biblical past and the reality of contemporary existence. This relation is quite complicated and is presented here in terms of biblical images that unexpectedly reappear in a modern Israeli landscape. Like so many archaeological artifacts, the "asses," the "straw," and the "seeds" present an ambivalent attitude toward the past.

The lost asses are first mentioned in the Bible when Saul's father sends him to look for them (I Samuel 9:3). Later, Samuel predicts that two men will meet Saul and tell him: "The asses which thou wentest to seek are found" (10:2). In the previous stanza of the poem, the asses are a premonition of Saul's failure, and here he has "time-wheels" bring them to the contemporary speaker. The herd has had offspring. The inability of the speaker to handle them may at first appear as an indication of contemporary ineptitude in contrast to a past heroic age; yet, at the end of his path, Saul himself does not seem to be much more adept at handling the asses than the modern speaker, who gets kicked.

At this point Amichai adds another kind of biblical image in order to balance the comparison. "Straw" and "heavy seeds" are biblical metaphors, charged with traditional meaning and values. Separating wheat from chaff by winnowing on a hill takes on spiritual significance in Isaiah: "They shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind" (17:13). For the prophet, God's enemies are likened to the worthless chaff (the same Hebrew word that is translated "straw" in the poem) that is blown to the winds. The metaphor implies that the speaker's inability to deal with the kicking asses is not as derogatory as first appeared. Having found the asses, he is raised with the chaff but falls with the wheat, while Saul, "like the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that rob us" (Isaiah 17:14), is blown away. On one level, Amichai reverses the biblical metaphor, with falling as negative and blowing in the "winds of his histories" as positive, but on another level it is Saul who is found wanting in this traditional trope for distinguishing the good from the worthless. Thus, before describing Saul's rise to power, Amichai compares him with the modern speaker in rather ambivalent terms that present them almost as equals, with Saul's superiority less clear after the reversal of the wheat-chaff image.

The rest of the stanza treats Saul's anointment in images that recall the physical power and violence of stanza one. Anointment oil, probably an olive product, is associated with wrestler's grease ("oil" in Hebrew), which leads to a wrestling match with olives. Saul forces the olive trees to bow down, but then his opponent, Proteus-like, seems to change shape. The strain of the struggle, seen on the earth's forehead, is on the one hand a realistic impression of the soil of an olive grove, where the thick roots of the trees bulge within the soil much like blood vessels on a forehead. On a more metaphorical level, this struggle expands Saul's conflict into a Herculean wrestling match with the Antaeus-like olive grove, taking on some of the characteristics of a mythic personification of nature. With the flight of all the referees but God (the Hebrew shoftim, rendered "prophets" in the translation, literally means "judges" and is used for "referee" in contemporary sports events), the struggle is faintly reminiscent of Jacob's wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32). Although his victory is more complete than Jacob's, the rejoicing of the inferior crowds and the absence of a real opponent places Saul in a less heroic light. He is victorious, but it remains unclear just whom he has defeated.

The fourth stanza places all this in a contemporary perspective. Saul's kingdom, justice, and ultimate historical verdict are juxtaposed against the day-to-day weariness of the speaker:

     I am tired,
     My bed is my kingdom.
 
     My sleep is just
     My dream is my verdict.
 
     I hung my clothes on a chair
     For tomorrow.
 
     He hung his kingdom
     In a frame of golden wrath
     On the sky's wall.
 
     My arms are short, like string too short
     To tie a parcel.
 
     His arms are like the chains in a harbour
     For cargo to be carried across time.
 
     He is a dead king.
     I am tired man.

Here it is clear that Saul's energy and violence in the first stanza were not included in the "used clothes." Nevertheless, the tired speaker is not dead, like Saul. Saul's hanging "his kingdom / In a frame of golden wrath / On the sky's wall," as opposed to the Philistines, who "fastened his body to the wall of Beth-Shan" (I Samuel 31:10), is Amichai's version of the end first intimated by the bared yellow teeth of the asses. He thus avoids the interests of an earlier poet, Shaul Tchernichovsky, who interpreted Saul's last moments on Mt. Gilboa in heroic, nationalistic tones. Saul's glory is manifest in Amichai's image, but it is juxtaposed against the speaker's prosaic hanging of clothes on a chair. Amichai's interest here is primarily in the speaker. Saul's final act is envisioned with ambiguous grandeur (whose wrath—Saul's? God's? David's?), but with a definite tone of finality. "He is a dead king" whose arms reach out across time to the tired speaker. The latter, despite his weariness and short arms, is in a position to wear his older brother's used clothes, and by using the harbor chains to lengthen the string, can participate in carrying the cargo of Saul's history into his own life.

"King Saul & I" thus articulates a view of biblical myth that makes a connection with contemporary consciousness possible. Despite his power, control of destiny, and initial victories, Saul was reduced to windblown chaff, at least in his final defeat, while the weary contemporary speaker, heavy like the wheat, is still capable of germination. The tired speaker, asleep and dreaming on his bed, sees himself as reliving, in miniature, Saul's regal career. The justice of the modern kingdom is achieved as a dream that acts as an imaginative leap beyond the realism of clothing and chains. Brotherly connection with Saul provides the speaker inspiration for imaginative activity that enlarges the significance of contemporary daily existence.

Once Amichai has reduced Saul's heroic stature to terms that make him relevant to his contemporary speaker, he moves on to "Young David," the giant killer, in a poem that probes the conquering hero's feelings upon returning to Saul's army with Goliath's head:

     David came back to the boys
     (Cheers still in his ears)
     And the noisy ones in armor
     Were terribly mature.
 
     They slapped him on the back, they laughed,
     Hoarse, and one cursed and a couple
     Spat. But David was lonely and felt,
     For the first time, that there were no more Davids.
 
     And suddenly he didn't know what to do with
     Goliath's head, he'd forgotten it, still
     Held by the curls.
     It was heavy. Who needed it, now?
     And like the birds of blood, flying far, he
     No longer heard the crowd roar.

The octave describes David's return in colloquial language that imitates the talk of the young soldiers and then suddenly registers the hero's loneliness and sense of superiority. The sestet presents David as stunned before the roaring crowd, uncomfortably aware of the pointlessness of carrying his enemy's head. His loneliness at the conclusion of the octave is matched by the ambiguity of the final line of the sestet, where it is unclear in the Hebrew whether it is David or Goliath who, like the birds of prey, doesn't hear the crowd. In a sense, David is like his victim for an instant; and he is like Saul before the inferior crowd that rejoiced in their king's victory. The common people are merely able to shout, whereas their heroic kings feel both their own superiority and the near absurdity of the crowd's raucous noise.

There was a disparity in Saul's poem between the images of glory attendant on his rise to power and the ironic retrospective on the end of his story—"only the asses bare their yellow teeth / At the end"—which the modern Israeli, knowing the whole story of Saul and the subsequent history of his own Israeli, cannot escape: "He is a dead king. / I am a tired man." David thus stands in contrast to both Saul and the speaker. In his poem, we glance into his mind to see that he, unlike Saul, is aware of the distance between the popular response to his dead and the real, almost embarrassing significance; it's just a dead head in his hand. And unlike the speaker, David was truly great. His irony was the irony of the strong man who could see in his hands the little (if real) value of real, brave deeds. The speaker's arms, we recall, "are short, like string too short / To tie a parcel." The irony that David commands is the center of the sequence.

The crowd's noise shifts to confusion with the beginning of "Mt. Zion," the final poem of the sequence:

     As confusion tosses things up
     Suddenly, facing the closed wall,
     The psalms, the stairs, the cemetery stones
     And the barbed wire and the dark cypresses—they also
 
     Knew everything, but said nothing as
     They shot wailing rounds from
     Their prayer posts. And then the rams' horns
     Broke the silence past
 
     Repair. The wall stood, only the wall,
     And monks sang in Mary's Church,
     And the mosque tower pointed into
 
     The sky until it got cut off.
     But they covered their David with warm carpets
     Even though he wasn't there.

The confusion is everywhere. The Jewish worship with psalms, weeping, and rams' horns is mixed with the chanting of the Christian monks and the palpable silence of the Moslem mosque. The ungrounded spiritualities weave in and out of the windings of wire and patterns of bullets, which their conflict with one another somewhat resembles. The cacophony of sound and purpose reaches a climax as the mosque tower is "cut off" in the sky. This failure to reach heaven seems characteristic of the organized efforts of all three religions at the site. The final sentence strikes a blow at the national myth that made David's supposed tomb into a Jewish and Israeli holy place, charged with representing the national ethos. His absence adds a degree of absurdity to the confusion.

Some things to make one hopeful do survive, however. There is an implicit longing for the time when the old city was open. And if David is gone and the three religions similarly ignore this in their worship, still there is among them a common groping toward some more universal myth. (All three shrines are actually on Mt. Zion.) The poem offers no plan for composing such a myth, but its tone perhaps softens the denial of David's presence into an expression of longing and loss. This might be the necessary preamble to an agreed upon opening of hearts and gates in the future, when David's clear understanding of the precise worth of things might be more universally enjoyed.

Amichai's sequence is primarily concerned with the contemporary relevance of biblical heroes such as Saul and David. His version of the biblical myth focuses attention on a few highly selected details in order to stress the ways in which Saul and David can help direct present thinking. In this way, in T. S. Eliot's terms, Amichai has "the past … altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." The biblical materials are reshaped, with Saul as ambivalent hero against whose reduced public personality a private modern can view his own inner life. David's more extended popular reputation is reviewed through the musings of a quiet introvert who presents a very different image than the mythic king of Jewish tradition. Paradoxically, David's absence at the conclusion of the sequence helps to register a longing for Old Jerusalem, the city of David. Amichai's treatment of these biblical heroes reduces their traditional stature somewhat, to refashion a new, more acceptable view that can lend meaning and spiritual substance to the emptiness of daily existence. Saul, young David, and Mt. Zion must all be purged of certain traditions that blur their contemporary relevance. Then the alienated Israeli can attempt to see himself, both individually and collectively, in terms of the new tradition, which is itself a collage of ambivalently mixed details and feelings.