ABSTRACT
An allegory is presumed to point to its real subject: in the Divine Comedy, for instance, the middle-aged pilgrim is Dante and the dark wood is our world and so on. The present tense of the speaker is simultaneously the past tense of a song, of whatever kind, that is sufficiently well known to be referred to as “The one about,” a formulation that indicates general familiarity. The reference to the ancients at the beginning of the poem might well lead us to interpret the burning trees and the flattened grass as the sign of a divine apparition in a myth of some kind, and this may be the case, but it is also the case that it is the poet who appears to have caused these portents. The process of (in)digestion moves from bottom to top, a reversal—a queering—of the normal process of digestion.
