"Jonah and the Whale" by Viola Meynell

The second stanza starts off with the imagery of the “old corroding iron [the whale] bore”, this shows that the weapon hurled by the seamen into the whale was a rusted metal weapon. The poet uses the word “corroding” to symbolize something that is dirty, impure, or sinful. The corroding iron can also symbolize Jonah because he is not willing to listen to God and therefore is sinning.  The personification of the weapon “journeyed through his flesh” creates an interesting imagery in which the weapon is on a journey to ‘find’ the whale’s source of ‘life’ which is its heart. Readers are relieved because the whale was not injured by the weapon. Meynell then continues to describe another weapon by describing the imagery of: “Another lance he wore/Outside him, pricking in a tender spot.” A lance is a weapon with a metal arrow head. The image of the whale “wearing the lance” can be analogous to Jesus Christ wearing the crown of thorns. When the whale wears “the lance”, it is like a humiliation.  

The third and sixth stanza juxtaposes the whale’s personality as being ignorant with the fourth and fifth stanza when it is described as being omnipotent. In the third stanza, even as the whale was injured, it doesn’t seem to feel the pain because his “parts” could not even send a stronger message to his brain, it was as it its nerve system was not working efficiently. This is parallel to Jonah’s stubbornness to refuse God’s will, Jonah is not understanding that God loves everyone and would like to save everyone by giving them a chance to repent. However, Jonah is selfish in that he refuses to help God “save” others. The whale’s ignorance is reiterated once again in the sixth stanza by Meynell’s use of the words “sluggish brain” and no thought ever arouse”. “Sluggish” means slow and this means that the whale takes a long time to process his thoughts. “Sluggish brain” is also an analogy to Jonah’s mind, because Jonah is slow to realize the purpose of what God assigned him to do. The whale never has any thought, gleams, or visions that “brought/Light to the dark of his old dreamless mind”. The word “light” was chosen to mean knowledge while the juxtaposed word “dark” was used to represent ignorance. “Light” can also mean God and “dark” means sins. Once again, the poet reiterates that Jonah is “in the dark” or being sinful and is refusing to accept the will of God, which is “light”.

Meynell then shows the authority of the whale in the fourth and fifth stanzas. The whale’s “play” and every moment causes “storm in a calm sea” because it has a huge body in that whenever it moves, the still sea will be disturbed into movement. From the touch of the whale, the little sea creatures might turn out being “wrecks” that lay scattered. Meynell then describes an image where “The Moon rocked to and fro his watery couch”; the water that sprays out of his blowhole is described as a “watery couch” that appears to be ‘holding’ the moon. “His hunger cleared the sea” because when he’s hungry, he will have a huge appetite and devour all those sea creatures in the sea as if “clearing the sea”. “Where he passed, the ocean’s edge lifted its brim”. As the whale passes through a body of water, naturally, the water will rise up due to the weight of the whale. “Ocean edge” and “brim” are words used to describe the surface of the ocean. So wherever the whale passes, the surface of the ocean will rise. “Sea-floor” and “garden” were words used to describe the sea bed. The “harvest ripe” on the sea bed can be described as the food for the whale.

Finally the last two stanzas describe the time when Jonah enters the whale. “Half-hints of knowledge” burst upon the whale as if it was experiencing an epiphany. This epiphany was suggested by the poet as coming from God. Maybe God was trying to inform the whale that it has to swallow Jonah to help God teach Jonah a lesson. This was further proven when the whale has glimpses of the three components of the world: Time, space, and change. “Something greater than his might” suggests that a powerful deity has control of the whale’s mind and Jonah. In the last stanza, the whale swallows Jonah and is hit with the “blinding Truth”. In the Bible story, Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights; during that time, he finally understands that he should do what God asked him to do and is grateful to God for saving him from drowning.