# A Fable for Feasters explained — Poetry

> Chapter companion for Poetry by T. S. Eliot.

## What happens

A humorous narrative poem set in England before Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. A wealthy abbey of merry friars is plagued by a mischievous ghost who disrupts their feasts. Determined to enjoy a ghost-free Christmas, the Abbot purchases relics and douses everything in holy water, but the ghost still breaks in and carries the Abbot up the chimney. The monks later become devout, and the Abbot is canonized despite rumors of his fate.

## Themes in this chapter

### Spiritual Crisis and Desolation

The Abbot's desperate attempt to bar the ghost with relics and holy water, and his eventual disappearance, reflects a hollow religiosity and a crisis of faith masked by ritual.

### Fragmentation and Modernity

The poem's abrupt shifts from feasting to ghostly abduction, and the ironic canonization of the Abbot, mirror a fragmented world where sacred and profane collide.

## Character check-ins

### Unknown Narrator

The narrator recounts the fable from an old manuscript, providing a detached, ironic commentary on the monks' gluttony and the ghost's antics.

## Key lines

> The doors, though barred and bolted most securely, Gave way—my statement nobody can doubt, Who knows the well known fact, as you do surely— That ghosts are fellows whom you can’t keep out;

No matter how well you lock the doors, ghosts always find a way in—everyone knows that.

_The narrator asserts the inevitability of supernatural intrusion, undercutting the Abbot's precautions._

> The Abbot sat as pasted to his chair, His eye became the size of any dollar, The ghost then took him roughly by the hair And bade him come with him, in accents hollow.

The Abbot was frozen in terror, his eyes wide as coins, as the ghost grabbed him by the hair and commanded him to follow.

_A vivid, comic depiction of the Abbot's helplessness before the ghost._

> But the church straightaway put to his name the handle of Saint, thereby rebuking all such scandal.

The Church quickly canonized him, using sainthood to silence any gossip about his true fate.

_The poem ends with a cynical note on how institutions cover up scandal with sanctification._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/poetry_21_se/chapters/a-fable-for-feasters
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/poetry_21_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/poetry_21_se/chapters