Riddling Allegories in Music: Carole King's "Tapestry"
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Riddling Allegories in Music:
Carole King’s “Tapestry”
When songs
and poems haunt us, enticing us to return over and again, they have served the
writer’s purpose: to have us read and
re-read their words.
Sometimes
the enticement is the beauty of the words or the music or both. Sometimes
the enticement is the emotion and memories that the song or poem evokes. And
sometimes the enticement is the riddling mystery that surrounds the work. We long to decipher the maze of words.
The best
writers tell us everything and nothing.
They reveal even as they veil. And thus we
have “Tapestry”, the 1971 song and album by Carole King.
A Little History
The album Tapestry is ranked 35th by Rolling Stone list of the top 100 albums
of all time. It also is second on the
Billboard’s longest-running albums list (Number 1 is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon).
What is an Allegory?
First, an
allegory depends upon an extended metaphor.
We have a comparison which has multiple points for linkage.
A tapestry
creates an image stitched with bits and pieces of different-colored
threads. The canvas upon which it is
built is blank; the needleworking artist
creates the image as she stitches. The
threads can be pulled out, removing the created image.
The allegory
works by following through the extended metaphor > life = tapestry. However, in an allegory, a story is
told. The elements of the story link to
the points of the extended metaphor, each as interconnected as the threads in a
tapestry.
How to Write a Riddling Allegory
In
“Tapestry”, King does not bother with the usual refrain. Each stanza serves a disparate purpose: the first to build the metaphor, the second
and third and fourth to work out the parts of the story, the last to connect
the story to herself (and us) and conclude the metaphor.
To help tie
the lines together, she uses alliteration:
o
1st
stanza :: rich / royal, vision / view, wondrous / woven, bits / blue
o
2nd
stanza :: soft silver sadness / sky,
torn / tattered, coat / colors
o
3rd
stanza :: what / where, and perhaps hanging / hand
o
4th
stanza :: rutted road / river rock, turned / toad, seemed / someone / spell
o
5th
stanza :: gray / ghostly, deepest darkness / dressed
With the
allegory creating the obvious writing skill, the song depends upon a simple
paired couplet structure for each stanza.
The rhyme scheme is the simplest of all, AABB. The last stanza has five lines instead of
four (a neat echo to the stanza), but the very last line is a repeat of the
last part of the line before.
In the song
itself, King chooses to conclude with a piano repetition of the last stanza,
unvocalized.
So, a seemingly
simple structure for her allegory. However,
King is extremely clever with the elements of her story.
How King Writes a Riddling Allegory
Like the
Moonspinners of Greek mythology, the speaker in “Tapestry” is weaving different
threads together to create an image of her life. The Fate Clotho spins the thread; her sister Lachesis measures it; their fellow
triplet Atropos cuts the length with her dreaded shears.
We are our
own Moirai, controllers of our fate. We
select the colors for our lives, of “rich and royal hue”. In the paradox of the antithetical repetition
“everlasting” and “ever-changing”, we construct meaning in the disparate parts
of constancy and change. Our lives seem
to push steadily onward even as they alter visibly and invisibly. When we end, our souls continue to a new
existence.
This is the
magic, the miracles that we often don’t recognize.
The last
line contains yet another seeming paradox:
“A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold.” If we can feel it, how can we not hold it in
our hands? Ah, we have a dual meaning of
feel ~ touch and emotion.
Riddling Starts in the 2nd Stanza
The
allegorical story begins in the second stanza with the entrance of the
tatterdemalion drifter, each bit and piece symbolic of his wanderings.
He wears a
coat of many colors, like the biblical Joseph, forced to leave his homeland
because his brothers sold him into slavery.
Joseph had to make the best of his situation—just as we should when we
sell ourselves into the slavery of work rather than pursuing our dreams.
Much Mystery in the 3rd Stanza
This drifter
“moved with some uncertainty” We often
don’t understand our purpose. I’m sure
Joseph had many years when he wondered why he was where he was. In our pursuit, we reach for a golden item,
unnamed, unclassified—yet something which we desire, the ultimate
treasure. Like Adam & Eve, eating of
the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Yet his hand
grasps nothing. He reaches for his treasure,
reaches for the knowledge of his desire.
He hasn’t found it yet. Like the fairy
tale of the Enchanted Song Bird in a gilded cage in a tree, we desire songs of
love—but how often do we find such love?
King merely
hints at this allusion, yet it fits best with her other wide-ranging allusions.
4th Stanza Reveals at it Veils
On the rutted
road of his journey, the drifter takes his ease on a river rock only to fall
victim to a curse. He becomes the frog
prince, transformed by a wicked spell—as we all are transformed when our
desires are put off, again and again, dreams deferred as in Langston Hughes’ “Harlem”.
Yet who
created this wicked spell? Why is the
drifter cursed? Would anyone have been
cursed? Or was the spell intended for him
alone?
And inferred
is that he needs his princess, to kiss him and remove the curse. He will be trapped in his toad-eous form
until he receives that kiss from someone both inherently great and innately
kind.
5th Concludes and Continues the Riddling
An unknown
figures enters the tapestry, one that the speaker recognizes as a companion
even as she questions who he is. Is he the
Reaper? Death (as in Donald Justice’s “Incident
in a Rose Garden”)?
Before she
can discover, the tapestry and life is unraveling; the Moonspinners’ thread is done.
Riddling to Truth
The
Moonspinners who provide the threads to weave the tapestry are from Greek
myth. Joseph is biblical while the
golden treasure in the tree could be the Enchanted Songbird story from the
Orient. The Frog Prince is a European
fairytale, and Death—gray and ghostly, sometimes dressed in deepest black—comes
from many cultures’ mythologies.
What is this
journey to find the greatest treasure of all, a journey that makes us so weary
we might fall into a wicked spell of non-pursuit? Is the drifter Perseus, bringing back a
gorgon’s head? Is the songbird the
golden nightingale that heals the dying emperor? Or is it the golden bird sought by the young
prince who constantly makes mistakes and needs the fox’s avuncular help?
Like the
best of the ancient balladeers, King doesn’t give us all the answers—deliberately,
she does not.
These questions
keep us returning to decipher the clues she has given us.
Her allegory
draws from every where and every when and every what, just as we do.
We don’t
have all the answers
.
We keep
returning to our own story to decipher the clues we are given.
Clues we may
never decipher.
Writing Riddling Allegories
When
constructing your own poems, play with the idea of the allegory. Set up your extended metaphor, and guide your
story through it.
Use a
comparison that is universal. When story
speaks to everyone in every time, story endures.
Use simple
methods to tie your lines together. Use
clever methods to develop your story.
King is clever with her use of allusions to develop her structure and
story.
And leave
enough clues so that your readers, like Hansel and Gretel, will journey back to
your work, over and again.
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