La Sestina de Popeye

John Ashbery's "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" represents the classic sestina; six stanzas of six lines, with a tercet conclusion.

A visual representation by Shelby Surdyk of "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape"

The poem itself is based on the characters of the Popeye comic. On the surface, it is a dramatic scene within Popeye's apartment, involving the Sea Hag, Whimpy, Swee'pea, Olive, and Popeye, as represented in the image above. The Sea Hag, a seemingly ugly woman as her cleft chin is described as having a solitary hair, lays on the couch of Popeye's apartment. Whimpy, who seems very concerned with eating spinach, seems to feel constrained by the apartment that the Sea Hag is comfortable in. An unexpected arrival of the character Swee'pea shakes things up a little further, as he has a note 'pinned to his bib'. The note itself seems threatening in nature, perhaps to discourage the sea hags presence there. Suddenly a fourth character, Olive Oyl, enters the apartment via the window. She announces that Popeye 'heaves bolts of loving thunder', which thunder within and around the apartment. Olive threatens the Sea Hag, saying she would only have darkness and thunder to grow old to, then grabs Swee'pea and exits. The Sea Hags seems perturbed at first by the interupption, and even 'fearful', but quickily finds comfort again within the darkness, the thunder, and Popeye's apartment. In the end, it is discovered that Popeye watches from a distance, as thunder overtakes the apartment.

However, one must assume, by the 'mysterious' nature of the piece, and the technically difficult aspect of creating the sestina, that author intends for the reader to see something deeper.


Some meaning can be extracted from the title itself: "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape". Rutabagas used before pumpkins to create jack-o-lanterns, symbols of trapped souls. Farm Implements could mean techniques, reasoning, and 'laws' of farm life, or equipment needed for farm life, or both. Farm- a symbol for 'rural', 'simple', or perhaps 'uncivilized' life. So, the title seems to be suggesting that the poem is about trapped souls, the items necessary for 'farm life', and simple-minded reasoning all within one landscape, one scene, the apartment.


The repeating words of this poem are (in order of how they are in the first stanza): thunder, apartment, country, pleasant, scratched, spinach.