This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in IMAGES for September 9, 2021, East Bernard Express, East Bernard, Texas.
Having grown up in Dime Box where we raised several cows, and familiar with all kinds of animal fodder, including hay, I remember being appalled by a scene from Dr. Faustus. We read this famous Elizabethan play about Dr. Faustus’ selling his soul to the devil in an English class I was taking back in those days.
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe was based on a German legend about a Dr. Faust selling his soul to Lucifer in exchange for all worldly knowledge and pleasure. Near the end of the drama, after Faustus has sold his soul and as a human-once-created-in-the- image-of-God, deteriorates from the consequences of this sale, (in the version we read; not all versions include this scene), he begins to eat hay like a horse or a cow.
After years of feeding hay to the cows and watching them munch on it greedily, I was appalled by the thought of a person eating dried grasses. Some scholars believe that a director later added this scene to the play, because it seemed too silly for Marlowe, but, whether an added scene or not, it caught my attention!
Not all hays are equal; some are better for cows than others, — this was a fact I grew up knowing, and as a young, curious student I wondered what kind of hay Faustus was eating. As a kid, I learned that there are quite a few plants that should not be fed to cows, sweet clover is one of them. Also, Johnson grass can be toxic to cattle, and so I wondered if Johnson grass grew in England. And sorghum, which does grow in England, is not healthy for cows.
As a country boy, I focused on this bizarre little scene in this classic tragedy, and no doubt missed out on the deeper theology and philosophy to be gleaned from the play. Age has dimmed my memory, but I am sure I got in a discussion with my teacher over cattle food, wondering if she knew that a cow could eat 4 to 5 tons of hay in one year. I also wondered whether she knew that yellow corn would fatten up a cow. If Faustus had been shown eating yellow corn in that scene, it wouldn’t have been so bizarre. And why was he eating hay rather than grazing on fresh green grass? A lactating cow needs more nutrition than what it would get from grazing on grass, but Faustus was no lactating cow.
My experience reading this play as a student kept me from being surprised when, in later years, as an English teacher, my students missed the point of plays and poems by focusing on a minor segment which intrigued them.
The other day one of my Facebook friends posted a photo of farmers baling hay on my wall, with the caption, “You don’t know what hard work is until you’ve baled hay in this Texas heat.” Lots of people, including myself, agreed with him. My memories of farm work brought back the reality of how hard it was, picking cotton by hand to me much harder than baling hay.
After many years of being a semi-refined (the emphasis on ‘semi’) “gentleman” artist and poet, I, like others of my ilk, tend to romanticize the rusticity of country living. One of my photographer friends emailed me a photo she took of round bales of hay dusted with snow, in a breath-taking snowscape caused by our February blizzard. To an artist and poet, round bales of hay are far more aesthetic than square bales, and they inspire us to write poems and paint pictures, forgetting about any hard work involved in producing those bales. Maybe that’s a good thing, because it emphasizes the beauty of rural living in spite of its hardships.
Van Gogh and Monet, two of the greatest of the French Impressionist painters, must have been fascinated with haymaking, because they churned out huge numbers of oil paintings, depicting hay-making scenes. No bales back then, of course. Just stacks. I love Van Gogh’s haymaking, hay stacks scenes, but I could never understand why Monet’s are worth small fortunes, as they never interested me like Van Gogh’s did. I have a hunch that Van Gogh actually had experienced working with farmers to produce those stacks, — they were so full of energy! The fact that aristocratic Parisian ladies eagerly bought Monet’s haystack paintings and hung them on the walls of their elegant homes seems to reveal the love for simple, healthy rural life hidden within all of us. If I may paraphrase Mark Twain, “That’s fodder for thought.”
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Ray Spitzenberger is a retired WCJC teacher and a retired LCMS pastor, and author of two books, Open Prairies and It Must Be the Noodles.