Sometime During Eternity . . .

“Sometime During Eternity” is centered around the art of storytelling and the idea of unreliable narratives—particularly oral traditions. The casual tone of the poem’s speaker is more closely modelled on contemporary American speech in the 1950s than it is on a traditional literary idiom, drawing attention to the fact that the poem itself is a story that may or may not be providing reliable information. There are also three different stories recounted by the speaker: what Jesus says about himself, the believers’ interpretation of the story about Jesus, and the latest rumor about Jesus.

These three stories illustrate the ways stories can take on different forms and interpretations over time and depending on the story’s teller. When speaking to his contemporaries early in the poem, Jesus claims to be the son of God (“the cat / who really laid it on us / is his Dad” [Lines 12-14]), and alludes to the Dead Sea Scrolls—a collection of ancient Jewish religious texts. However, although Jesus claims divine lineage, he does not explicitly identify himself as the Messiah in the speaker’s telling of the story. Yet after Jesus’ Crucifixion—when he is “stretch[ed] […] on [the Cross] to cool” (Line 35) by his unimpressed contemporaries—the speaker implies that later generations do indeed start to interpret him as some sort of messianic figure, and accordingly venerate him by “always making models / of this Tree / with Him hung up” (Lines 37-39), and regarding him as “the king cat” (Line 44, italics Ferlinghetti’s).