Fifty Males Sitting Together by Robert Bly
"Fifty Males Sitting Together" is a poem by Robert Bly that explores the complexities of masculinity within Western culture. First published in 1981, the poem reflects Bly's broader thematic concerns regarding male identity and the historical shifts from matriarchal to patriarchal societies. Bly posits that early human cultures revered the Great Mother, a symbol of life and nature, but as men began to assert dominance, they distanced themselves from these nurturing aspects, leading to feelings of detachment and loneliness.
In the poem, a young male observes a night-time ritual involving fifty older men by a dark lake, representing a deeper exploration into the psyche. However, feeling out of place in this masculine world, he chooses to retreat to nature, which Bly metaphorically depicts as an ascent, yet ironically suggests it is a retreat from true self-awareness. The young man's journey illustrates the challenges younger males face in connecting with their elders and understanding their own identities in contemporary society. Ultimately, the poem signifies a yearning for healing and recognition of the inner struggles faced by men, while highlighting the disconnect in generational male relationships.
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Fifty Males Sitting Together by Robert Bly
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1981 (collected in The Man in the Black Coat Turns, 1981)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
Bly’s poem “Fifty Males Sitting Together,” first published in The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), embodies a theme that occupied him throughout most of the 1980’s and beyond: the significance and inadequacies of being male in Western culture. In a preface to The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Bly claims that in its poems he had “fished in male waters, which [he] experienced as deep and cold but containing and nourishing some secret and moving life down below.” Bly’s concern with maleness stems from his anthropological study of the Great Mother. It is Bly’s contention that for the first forty thousand years or so of human existence, humans lived primarily in matriarchal cultures in which women retained the bulk of social, political, and religious power. These primitive cultures worshiped the Great Mother, symbol of the forces in nature and of life itself.
According to Bly, recorded history began when men began to fight against the Great Mother, asserting their superiority instead, the superiority of masculine thinking (logic and reason) over more natural (even more divine) patterns. This movement away from the Great Mother has left humans detached from nature, unsure of their strength, and intensely alone.
How this historical process manifests itself in modern life has preoccupied Bly since early in his career. He writes often of the male’s relationship to the father, writing of it in terms of frustration, incongruity, and disunity. His own relationship with his father had been nonexistent, remarked Bly during an interview with Bill Moyers for a 1988 Public Broadcasting Service documentary titled “A Gathering of Men,” until he realized—later on in life—that he had been involved in a sort of conspiracy with his mother to exclude his father. Once he realized this, he began a dialogue with his father that continued until his father’s death. The problem, according to Bly, was that older males have very few ways in which to initiate younger males into society. Initiation—the integrating of the younger generation into the mainstream of cultural life—has become so haphazard and arbitrary in modern society as to be nonfunctioning. Part of the purpose of the seminars and symposia Bly organized across the United States was to enlist older males to be initiators of their younger brethren; he also sought to encourage younger males to understand their shared dilemma.
In the poem “Fifty Males Sitting Together,” Bly describes a young male witnessing a ritual of descent—shadowy in nature—which takes place by a dark lake at night. Fifty males participate in the ritual, while the wives wait at home. Because he is of the woman’s world, and because the darkness of the masculine ritual frightens him, the young male cannot participate in the older males’ descent into the darker regions of the psyche; he “loses courage” and turns to nature instead. Using poetic irony, Bly refers to this turn as an ascent, but in the world of Bly’s imagery, ascent is a defeat—true self-awareness and knowledge can come only from the psychic descent. When the young man turns away, he moves far away from the world of men and feels cut off from them, alone. Yet in a last line, characteristic of Bly, the young man looks back and sees the night descending on the other shore, as if to say that even though he cannot participate, he is at least aware of what he needs to heal his wounded psyche.
Bibliography
Altieri, Charles F. “Varieties of Immanentist Experience: Robert Bly, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara.” In Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960’s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979.
Davis, William Virgil. Understanding Robert Bly. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
Friberg, Ingegard. Moving Inward: A Study of Robert Bly’s Poetry. Goteborg, Sweden: Acta University Gothoburgensis, 1977.
Harris, Victoria. The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Lensing, George S., and Ronald Moran, eds. Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination: Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.
Malkoff, Karl. Escape from the Self: A Study in Contemporary American Poetry and Poetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Nelson, Howard. Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Peseroff, Joyce, ed. Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1985.
Robert Bly Web site. www.Robertbly.com.
Smith, Thomas R. Walking Swiftly: Writings and Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly’s 65th Birthday. New York: Perennial, 1991.
Sugg, Richard P. Robert Bly. Boston: Twayne, 1986.