Fall colors continue to explode in Appalachian Tennessee, leading me to this understated poem by Emily Dickinson. Given that Dickinson was famous for not following fashion—she wore only white dresses and was known locally as “the nun of Amherst”—one figures she must be deeply moved indeed by autumn foliage to “put a trinket on”:
The morns are meeker than they were – The nuts are getting brown – The berry’s cheek is plumper – The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf – The field a scarlet gown – Lest I sh’d be old-fashioned I’ll put a trinket on.
Actually, the view of Dickinson as a dainty old maid has long been exploded, at least when it comes to her internal life. After all, she wrote such poems as “My life stood like a loaded gun” and “Wild nights!” Still, externally she maintained an ascetic appearance, meaning that jewelry would have represented a passionate response.
Before them, at their very feet, was the brink of a black ragged chasm hidden by the thick grass.–Dickens, Hard Times
Thursday
I haven’t written about the environment recently so I report today on an article about irresponsible coal companies. My English professor son Toby Wilson-Bates alerted me to it and then, very smartly, linked it with Charles Dickens’s Hard Times.
The article, “The Coal Is Gone but the Mess Remains,” is both discouraging and unsurprising. According to Bloomberg reporters Josh Saul, Zachary R. Mider and Dave Mistich, coal companies have found various ways to wriggle out of their commitment to restore land that they’ve destroyed, leaving behind blighted landscapes and ruined homeowners. Their escape hatches include creative use of bankruptcy laws and the unloading of land parcels to smaller and less profitable companies. Often costs which the coal companies should have paid, including pensions and medical bills (especially for black lung) are shifted to American taxpayers. Clean-up that was supposed to happen never happens.
Which brings us to Dickens. There we see coal companies that, despite locking the city of Coketown in a perpetual “shroud…which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays,” find various ways to escape regulation. Their most potent weapon is the threat they will go out of business, which they wield the way Vladimir Putin wields the threat of nuclear strikes. I’ve posted on this in the past, but because the passage captures so accurately present-day corporate whining, here it is again:
Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.
And then, with the savage sarcasm for which he is famous, Dickens provides reassurance:
However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.
The passage Toby had in mind, however, is what happens to abandoned mines. The answer: they are just, well, abandoned, with no regard for public safety. As a result, miner Stephen Blackpool—who is hurrying back to Coketown to restore his good name—falls down the appropriately named Hell Shaft. Because the entrance is hidden in the grass, Hell Shaft also almost claims the two women who have gone looking for him.
Before Stephen passes away, however, he delivers a monologue about all the deaths that Hell Shaft has caused—first as an active mine and then as one that is “let alone”:
‘I ha’ fell into th’ pit, my dear, as have cost wi’in the knowledge o’ old fok now livin, hundreds and hundreds o’ men’s lives—fathers, sons, brothers, dear to thousands an’ thousands, an’ keeping ’em fro’ want and hunger. I ha’ fell into a pit that ha’ been wi’ th’ Firedamp crueller than battle. I ha’ read on ’t in the public petition, as onny one may read, fro’ the men that works in pits, in which they ha’ pray’n and pray’n the lawmakers for Christ’s sake not to let their work be murder to ’em, but to spare ’em for th’ wives and children that they loves as well as gentlefok loves theirs. When it were in work, it killed wi’out need; when ’tis let alone, it kills wi’out need. See how we die an’ no need, one way an’ another—in a muddle—every day!’
Blackpool, being a saintly soul, doesn’t blame anyone. As Dickens puts it, he expresses these sentiments “without any anger against anyone. Merely as the truth.” But Dickens is angry and so are the authors of the Bloomberg article. The truth about how the abandoned mines continue to disrupt the lives of West Virginia residents is shocking.
Or perhaps not shocking since few people in positions of power these days appear to be held accountable for their actions. That is certainly the case with many coal mine owners. John Stoehr, who writes a daily essay for Editorial Board, recently observed that the phrase “everyone is equal before the law” is not, and has never been, America’s reality.
Instead, he says, we must see it as an aspiration, which is not nothing. Novels like Hard Times and articles like the Bloomberg piece are driven by that aspiration.
Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri periodically hits her column out of the park, and she did so again recently when lashing the mainstream media for going soft on GOP extremism. In her introduction to the piece, she set forth two ways that news organizations approach politics. Although they sometimes “write headlines and tweets that describe events in a straightforward way,” too often they don’t:
At other times, for instance when describing Kanye West’s threat to “go death con 3 on Jewish people” as “alleged anti-semitic remarks,” or an incident where a police officer kills someone as an “officer-involved shooting,” they use another, alternative style that makes it very difficult to tell what has actually happened.
Petri then proceeds to imagine how this second approach would have handled Macbeth’s bloody rise to power. She sets the tone with an imagined headline:
King Duncan Perishes in Macbeth-involved Incident
What follows is in the same vein:
Shortly before the king’s demise, Thane of Cawdor Macbeth and his wife came under attack for alleged anti-Duncan remarks about “murther” and the need to “stop up the access and passage to remorse.” Critics of the Macbeths, known for their fiery, controversial rhetoric, linked these remarks to Duncan’s death hours later in Macbeth’s castle; others noted that it was a sign of creeping censorship to want to stop Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth from saying exactly what was on their mind.
Margaret Sullivan, former media columnist for the Washington Post, penned a recent column discussing how journalism must start reporting political news in a new way. As Sullivan observes that, during the rise of Donald Trump,
Too many times, we acted as his stenographers or megaphones. Too often, we failed to refer to his many falsehoods as lies. It took too long to stop believing that, whenever he calmed down for a moment, he was becoming “presidential.” And it took too long to moderate our instinct to give equal weight to both sides, even when one side was using misinformation for political gain.
After all, if the whole purpose of journalism is to uncover the truth, one can’t stop with what political actors claim to be the truth.
In her column, Petri moves on to Shakespeare’s witches and, in doing so, gets into the distinction between positive and normative statements. The difference is between what is vs. what should be:
Three purported witches, from whom Macbeth has yet to distance himself, also made what their critics called inflammatory remarks about Macbeth being king hereafter. The women claimed that their statements were positive, not normative, and that this was a case of listener interpretation.
Don’t blame us for predicting what will happen, in other words. We’re just telling what the future will be, not saying that it would be a good thing. That’s on you.
In Trump’s case, there’s no difference: what he claims as fact and how he believes the world should be are one and the same. He only hears what he wants to hear and makes that his reality.
The column gets better. Too avoid sounding too definite, thereby alienating potential subscribers amongst Macbeth’s supporters, Petri’s hypothetical newspaper account never clearly recounts what actually happened:
Firebrand Macbeth, who did indeed become king after Duncan’s demise in the incident — in which Duncan’s sleeping body repeatedly made aggressive contact with a dagger in Macbeth’s possession in what critics described as a “stabbing position” — waded deeper into controversy as his reign continued. Macbeth and Mrs. Macbeth announced they were launching a thorough internal review of the incident that led to Duncan’s death; the two ultimately faulted his guards for allowing his body to launch itself at a dagger in such a hostile, threatening manner. After this review, the guards also ceased to be alive in what critics again called a Macbeth-involved incident.
After the January 6 Congressional hearings, only an idiot would fail to see that Trump instigated the Capitol attack (not to mention all the other things he did in his attempt to retain power). One would also have to be an idiot not to see Macbeth as the driving force behind Banquo’s assassination. Unfortunately, too often the media, by bending over backward to be fair, plays the role of idiot. The language of Petri’s Banquo reportage sounds only too familiar. In the following two paragraphs, we see first the attack and then the Trumpian pushback:
Additionally, Macbeth’s former colleague Banquo perished in a hired-assassin-related incident, leading some critics of the king to lay the violence at his feet, calling it “a direct consequence of his rhetoric.” Indeed, in purported anti-Banquo remarks that critics labeled “asking a hired assassin to murder Banquo and his son Fleance for money,” Macbeth expressed the controversial opinion that the murderers should kill both men and that he would pay them for doing so.
Mrs. Macbeth pushed back against these allegations, telling critics to “go at once” and wondering why so much attention was paid to Macbeth’s allegedly inciting remarks and so little was paid to those critics who, for instance, said that his borrowed robes hung upon him “like giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief,” or called him a “tyrant,” a remark she called dangerously incendiary.
Lady Macbeth here is using “both-siderism” to distract and deflect critics. One version of her approach has been characterized as “deny, deflect, distance, deride,” with that last verb marking the shift from defense to offense. I’m not the racist, you’re the racist.
And then there’s the “I was only being metaphorical” defense, which is how Petri concludes her column. On Thursday, I wondered how quickly Trump confederate Roger Stone would start using that defense after being caught on camera (this immediately before election day) saying the following:
Fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence. We’ll have to start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean.
Another Trump confederate, Steve Bannon, also used metaphorical language on the eve of January 6 that could (by biased sources) that he might attempt to use as an escape hatch:
All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. Just understand this: All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s going to be moving. It’s going to be quick.
And:
It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. … And all I can say is: Strap in. You have made this happen, and tomorrow it’s game day.”
And then there was Trump’s own tweet: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
That Macbeth’s language is more direct than these calls to action wouldn’t prevent his defenders from using the same defense, Petri notes. Again, she points first to accusations from critics, then to the defense:
Macbeth’s detractors criticized his statement that “I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er,” as “obviously, the words of a murderer; you do not have normal people just rambling about how far they have stepped into blood.” Macbeth responded that they were a “metaphor.” Defenders of Macbeth noted that they were “not only a metaphor but in exquisite iambic pentameter.”
Petri’s satire works particularly well for her purposes because the Macbeths are noteworthy for how direct and explicit they are, making any defense of their actions difficult. They announce their plans to kill and then go kill. She would have gotten closer to Donald Trump’s actual M.O. if she’d turned to a different Shakespearean king, say Henry IV. We know from Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen how Trump conveys his orders through hints (thereby providing him with plausible deniability), and it is through such a hint that Henry achieves the assassination of Richard II:
Trump will similarly throw former supporters under the bus when doing so suits his needs. Always he is an innocent, not to mention a poor, abused victim.
A New York Magazine column has just applied a Dracula character Trump enablers and followers. Upon looking up the relevant passages in Bram Stoker’s novel, I discovered the allusion was even better than I realized.
The reference comes to us courtesy of Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer, professor emeritus of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College, and prominent anti-Trumper. Trump, he writes, is like a hurricane except for the fact that he can “return and destroy again.” Trump, Nichols continues is “pacing just offshore, waiting and plotting to flatten and flood our political system, perhaps for good.”
And yet, unlike our response to hurricanes, some Americans are rooting for the winds to hit us while many others have given up resisting them altogether. As Nichols puts it,
And the hell of it is, we Americans know he’s there. We know what he’s done and what he can do (again). Yet millions of us would gladly welcome his landfall again. Millions more of us have thrown up our hands in exasperation as Trump and most of his regiment of Renfields have, for now, managed to escape any consequences for their actions.
Renfield, of course, is Dracula’s realtor and agent. More on him in a moment. But first let’s let Nichols finish up:
Yesterday, in what was likely the final hearing of the January 6 committee, the nation was told, once more and without ambiguity, that Donald Trump, the commander in chief, actively sought to subvert our democratic order. My Atlantic colleague David Frum summed up the committee’s findings—and the nation’s reaction—in one tweet: “Decisive [and] irrefutable documentary evidence that the 45th president of the United States tried to overthrow the US Constitution by violence, no big deal, just another news day.”
In Stoker’s novel, Renfield has been captured and is being studied by the prison doctor. Like an ardent Trumpist, he feels empowered by his Master’s presence. The doctor reports,
He is usually respectful to the attendant and at times servile; but to-night, the man tells me, he was quite haughty. Would not condescend to talk with him at all. All he would say was:—
“I don’t want to talk to you: you don’t count now; the Master is at hand.”
The doctor compares Renfield’s infatuation to a religious mania and warns of danger:
The attendant thinks it is some sudden form of religious mania which has seized him. If so, we must look out for squalls, for a strong man with homicidal and religious mania at once might be dangerous. The combination is a dreadful one.
The good doctor would see his observation confirmed by certain White Christian terrorist groups operating currently in the United States.
Later that evening, we get more insight into what Renfield wants from Dracula. The doctor and prison guards overhear him calling out to the vampire after they track him down following a prison escape:
He was talking, apparently to someone, but I was afraid to go near enough to hear what he was saying, lest I might frighten him, and he should run off. Chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic, when the fit of escaping is upon him! After a few minutes, however, I could see that he did not take note of anything around him, and so ventured to draw nearer to him—the more so as my men had now crossed the wall and were closing him in. I heard him say:—
“I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?”
Trump followers expect no less. The fact that Trump has shown, repeatedly, that he cares for no one other than himself does not faze them. They have found their savior and nothing else matters. Like Renfield, they cry out, “I shall be patient, Master. It is coming—coming—coming!”
One of the paradoxes of today’s GOP is that, at the same time they complain that Democrats represent a threat to their freedom, they want to hand over all power to their authoritarian cult leader. Donald Trump, it so happens, is not interested in anyone’s freedom but his own. This is one of the many ways he resembles Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
To be sure, Satan talks a good game. Always he frames himself as a heroic freedom fighter contending with a tyrannical God. For instance, after having been defeated and thrown into Hell, he rationalizes to his second-in-command Beelzebub, “Here at last we shall be free.” The sentiment is repeated by another fallen angel (Belial), who says that in hell they can live
Free, and to none accountable, preferring Hard liberty before the easy yoke Of servile pomp.
Satan, however, has no desire to set up an egalitarian republic. He means to be the very tyrant that he regards God as being. If we are to find equivalents with our own situation, we could say that Milton’s God, for us, is the Constitution—in other words, a system set up to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—whereas Satan, like Trump, is a wannabe dictator.
What triggers Satan’s rebellion is God appointing Jesus as His representative. As God announces to the angels, “to him [Jesus] shall bow/All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord.” Archangel Satan, feeling that he’s been lowered a notch with Jesus’s arrival, seethes with resentment:
[Satan] could not bear Through pride that sight, & thought himself impaired Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain… …[H]e resolved With all his legions to dislodge, and leave Unworshipped, unobeyed the throne supreme Contemptuous…
Satan instills the same resentment in his followers, who make up a third of the heavenly host. They too will be lowered with Jesus on the scene, he tells them. It’s like the way White supremacists see themselves lowered if a person of color (say, Barack Obama) achieves an elevated position. Satan tells other resentful angels that their “magnific titles” will be worthless (“merely titular”) when Jesus assumes power:
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, If these magnific titles yet remain Not merely titular, since by decree Another now hath to himself engrossed All power, and us eclipsed under the name Of king anointed…
Satan emphasizing their humiliation is not unlike the way that Rush Limbaugh used to talk about Obama humiliating Whites. In Satan’s words,
Knee-tribute yet unpaid, prostration vile, Too much to one, but double how endured, To one and to his image now proclaimed?
Time to storm the Capitol, in other words. Or Heaven in this case:
But what if better counsels might erect Our minds and teach us to cast off this yoke? Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend The supple knee? ye will not, if I trust To know ye right, or if ye know your selves Natives and sons of Heav’n possessed before By none, and if not equal all, yet free, Equally free…
Notice how Satan gets a little squirrely with his language here. After all, he doesn’t want to do away with all ranks, given that he owes his leadership position to his own bestowed rank. As he puts it earlier in the poem, “Me though just right, and the fixed laws of Heav’n/Did first create your Leader.” (Recall that the very God he is rebelling against established “just right, and the fixed laws of Heav’n.”) So he must go on to say that “orders and degrees [i.e., his rank] jar not with liberty, but well consist.”
If this sounds contradictory, it is, but no more so than Trump claiming to be simultaneously a duly elected president and an authority before whom all must yield. Forget about logic here as it’s no more than a ploy to elevate Satan to top rank. And like Trump, Satan plays fast and loose with the truth. Or as Milton puts it, “[A]nd with lies/Drew after him the third part of Heaven’s Host.”
Standing up against this is the minor angel Abdiel, who speaks truth to power. Think of him as defending the Constitution in the face of Trump’s assaults. “Shalt thou,” he asks Satan
give law to God, shalt thou dispute With him the points of liberty, who made Thee what thou art, and formed the powers of Heav’n Such as he pleased, and circumscribed their being?
We know from experience, Abdiel goes on to say, how much we benefit from God’s law:
Yet by experience taught we know how good, And of our good, and of our dignity How provident he is, how far from thought To make us less, bent rather to exalt Our happy state…
Abdiel concludes, “[A]ll honor to him done/Returns our own,” and we could say that same about our Constitution. We all benefit when we honor our democracy.
Satan, needless to say, is not impressed by Abdiel’s words and proceeds to take all credit for his current elevated state. It’s like people who think they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps without acknowledging being surrounded by a system that made it all possible. “Who saw,” Satan asks Abdiel,
When this creation was? rememberest thou Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being? We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quick’ning power… Our puissance is our own, our own right hand Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try Who is our equal: then thou shalt behold Whether by supplication we intend Address, and to begird th’ Almighty Throne Beseeching or besieging.
The besieging occurs is short order as Satan, like Trump, attacks Heaven’s Capitol. Trump has not been thrown into a hellish prison–not yet, anyway–but the January 6 Congressional hearings have established beyond all doubt that, like Satan, he was the primary instigator of the insurrection.
Our own response must be to cleave to the Constitution as Abdiel cleaves to God. In Milton’s words,
Among the faithless, faithful only he; Among innumerable false, unmoved, Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal; Nor number, nor example with him wrought To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind Though single.
Here’s a Rainer Maria Rilke poem that expands both mind and spirit in eight short lines. While different readers will take away different things, for me at the moment it captures the opening up that comes with aging—or should I say, that can come with aging if we resist the impulse to close down and retreat into safe and familiar spaces.
As regards Rilke’s concluding question, I want to answer, “All of the above.” Here’s the poem:
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I will give myself to it
I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
The first stanza reminds me of the passage in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,”
I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move.
Ulysses in the poem is determined to live his life in widening circles, even though he is old (“tho’ much is taken, much abides”). Refusing to stop exploring, he resolves to continue journeying on until he either touches the Happy Isles or the gulfs “wash us down.” Ulysses, however, focuses solely on self whereas Rilke’s vision encompasses all humanity throughout all of time. We all of us have been circling something that is at once fixed and mysterious.
And unlike Yeats’s famous falcon, which cannot hear the falconer, we never lose touch with the primordial tower. Although we can never know its exact nature, we recognize it as our guide and our passion. We know that, through us, it sings a great song.
Since today the fall colors are exploding all around us, and since today is also the birthday of poet e.e. cummings, I share a wonderful autumn poem by the poet who loves playing with punctuation, line spacing, capitalization rules, and sentence syntax generally.
The poem begins with the contrast between the glory of fall colors and the dust that they are about to become. “the last immortal leaf is dead,” the poet tells us before further observing, “this is the passing of all shining things.” What has been “glory” is seen as a last spasm of life before we pass “blandly into receptive earth.”
Rather than lament our death, however, cummings counsels us to step into it: “O let us descend.” In fact, he invites “the shimmering wind” to take
these fragile splendors from us crumple them hide
them in thy breath drive them in nothingness
After all, this is how creation works, and our best response is to welcome death (“for we would sleep”), stepping into it without lingering and without a backward glance. If we enter into the “serious steep darkness” with “straight glad feet” and “glory girded faces,” we will ruin fear. Recall that the earlier reference to glory—those gorgeous fall colors—now lightens up our faces as we move into the great unknown.
the glory is fallen out of the sky the last immortal leaf is dead and the gold year a formal spasm in the
dust this is the passing of all shining things therefore we also blandly
into receptive earth, O let us descend
take shimmering wind these fragile splendors from us crumple them hide
them in thy breath drive them in nothingness for we would sleep
this is the passing of all shining things no lingering no backward- wondering be unto us O
soul, but straight glad feet fear ruining and glory girded faces
lead us into the serious steep darkness
The poem brings other poems to mind. For instance, Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” laments that passing of the glory—in this case, the glory of early spring
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
I also think of Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods” and wonder if she was influenced by the cummings poem:
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of
of light are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment…
The poem moves on from this image to one of now anonymous ponds (because no longer filled with light and color), leading the poet to conclude,
Every year everything I have ever learned
in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss…
The poem I most think of, however—in fact, I think cummings is having a dialogue with it—is Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” Like cummings, Shelley uses the word “drive” as he addresses the wind:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
The “leaves” here function as pages of poetry as well as tree leaves. Whereas Shelley imagines the dead leaves leading to new life, however, cummings wishes to remain asleep. So while Shelley ends with the rhetorical question, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” cummings appears content with winter.
In this respect, he is more like Oliver, who also embraces death when the moment arrives. Here’s how her poem continues on:
…the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it: and, when the times comes to let it go, to let it go.
However you see the future, note that all these poets believe we should fully embrace nature’s color when they are at their most intense. Which in Sewanee at the moment is right now.
Here’s a belated post in honor of National Coming Out Day, which was this past Monday. This awareness day, which encourages closeted members of the LGBTQ community to emerge into the daylight, hopes to encourage acceptance. After all, once people realize that there are far more in that community than previously thought—including friends and family members—then a new norm can be established.
Poet Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” applies to LGBTQ folk along with others who have been marginalized. As “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” (so she described herself), Lorde understood well what it means to be marginalized. In her poem, she sees herself “at the shoreline/ standing upon the constant edges of decision/ crucial and alone.”
The marginalized, Lorde says, often do not have choices in what we do (“cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice”). We must take what life offers to live our lives. Even as our own dreams die, however, we do what they can to keep our children’s hopes alive.
Unfortunately, Lorde continues, what this means is that our fear controls us. At first this fear, learnt at the mother’s breast, seems to be a friend because it appears to keep us safe. If we stay silent, then perhaps we will survive. And for a moment, that survival seems to validate the behavior. For one who was “never meant to survive,” this represents a temporary triumph.
Fear turns out to be a false friend, however, dominating and ruining every aspect of our lives. Although we stay silent on the belief that their words “will not be heard nor welcomed,” the fear remains with us even in our silence.
And if that’s the case, we may as well speak out. If it is indeed that case that “we were never meant to survive,” then we can draw strength from that. Those who have nothing to lose have nothing to fear.
As millions have discovered when they came out, the relief that comes from that act is far preferable to lives governed by fear. And by coming out as they have, members of the LGBTQ community have radically changed society’s beliefs. We are not home free yet—that’s why it’s important to continue observing National Coming Out Day—but the change in public perception has been remarkable.
A Litany for Survival
For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours;
For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid
So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
From time to time, I share material that appears on the twitter feed of my college professor son. Tobias Wilson-Bates, who teaches English at Georgia Gwinnett College, is always stimulating and always fun. (I know I’m prejudiced but others find him so as well.) Recently, he promised that, if his twitter followers reached 7000—stratospheric for a twitter feed that focuses on 18th and 19th century British literature—he would give us his top ten British poems from 1800-1900.
Having attained the 7000-follower mark yesterday, he shared his list. After apologizing for not including other traditions on his list (American, Australian, Indian), and sounding relieved that the century mark meant that he could exclude Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (which contains Tintern Abbey, “Kublai Khan,”and Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner), he came up with the following list, along with his rationale for choosing it. I’ve included the excerpts he attaches from the less familiar poems:
10. I’m immediately going to cheat with a tie at 10. Light verse often doesn’t make these kind of lists but “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1870) by Edward Lear and “Jabberwocky” (1871) by Lewis Carroll are two of the most enduring and mind-expanding poems of the century.
9. A poet mostly remembered as a novelist, who I always read instead as a poet. [After all, Emily Bronte] once wrote a prose poem so long that they called it a novel instead. Emily Bronte’s “No Coward Soul is Mine” (1846). A poem that tears at the fabric of life and meaning. Incredible.
No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven’s glories shine And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest, As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity, So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And Thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death Nor atom that his might could render void Since thou art Being and Breath And what thou art may never be destroyed.
8. George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862) 16 sonnets to grow old and die with. Lines that feel like they have left lacerations across my skin.
Sonnet 1
By this he knew she wept with waking eyes: That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head, The strange low sobs that shook their common bed Were called into her with a sharp surprise, And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes, Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes Her giant heart of Memory and Tears Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat Sleep’s heavy measure, they from head to feet Were moveless, looking through their dead black years, By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall. Like sculptured effigies they might be seen Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between; Each wishing for the sword that severs all.
7. I forgot another caveat that poets only get to appear once on the list, so sorry in advance to Keats (obvs) At 7, is this [Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” 1842] even a poem? No idea but it’s may be the most teachable and memorable poetic character of the century.
6. Recent discourse has gotten me back into wanting to reignite my research on a poem that got packaged w/ a paper cover bc it sold as pornography and by some estimates circulated 500,000 copies when that was an INSANE number. Byron’s pervert epic (or epic perv) Don Juan (1819)
5. It’s important w these lists to remember that the 20th century has been SHAMELESSLY stealing 19th century poets for years. Yeats gets remembered for 2nd Coming, but “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is arguably a much better poem.
4. ok, look, lists are hard, and I am only a baby who just learned how to read. Gerard Manley Hopkins could have at least 4 poems on this list (Windhover, Pied Beauty, Spring & Fall etc), but I personally have never recovered from encountering As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire (1889):
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
3. Same with this poet. Odes, Autumn, Beauty, Eve, Chapman’s Homer. Stunning poem after stunning poem. But Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) feels like the most POEM poem I have ever read. Surreal, shocking, lovely nightmare of a meditation.
First stanza:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
2. Ok, poems are weird, twisty objects that we encounter in our trauma and that give voice to our joy/suffering at existence. I am crying now just reading Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (1821) again. I don’t think anyone would put it here over Ozymandias, but such is life.
From Stanza LXII
He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and know In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…
1. If you have not read this poem, log off and read it. If you have read it and are in a position to make others read it, please don’t hesitate to do so. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) is the poem of the century. Funny, scary, sensuous, dazzling shape of a dream.
And then come Toby’s apologies:
OK OBVIOUS APOLOGIES TO AURORA LEIGH and IN MEMORIAM and THE PRELUDE and DOVER BEACH and DARKLING THRUSH and the list goes on and on and on and on. An impossible task. Please make your own lists!
Actually, the only poem omitted from the list that I think he needs to apologize for—given that it is also omitted from the apologies—is Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality. But okay, such lists are hard. They may be most interesting in what they tell us about the list maker.
For instance, when noting how he had to drop Lyrical Ballads from the list, Toby noted that his favorite poem from the collection is not Ancient Mariner or Tintern Abbey but “We Are Seven.” I explore here why the poem means so much to Toby, which has to do with his oldest brother, who died in a freak drowning accident 22 years ago.
Likewise, the stanza Toby chose from Shelley’s Adonais is the passage on Justin’s tombstone.
Top ten lists are also like love notes, telling our favorite poems how much we cherish them. And they work as invitations for others to express their own gratitude.
