Oliver’s Hard-Earned Vision of Life

By Robin Bates | Published: August 18, 2026

Wednesday

Hillary Kelly of the Atlantic recently penned a “defense” of Mary Oliver, a poet I have taught frequently, blogged about many times, and once dined with. If you like her poetry, perhaps you didn’t know she needed defending.

Apparently it’s her very popularity that motivates some of her detractors. As Kelly notes, she is “today’s still-reigning poet laureate of Pinterest”: 

Her juiciest bits of guidance bounce around on social media like Mel Robbins quotes and are sold on mugs and T-shirts. There’s the burgundy corduroy cap that reads LET THE SOFT ANIMAL OF YOUR BODY LOVE WHAT IT LOVES and the bumper sticker (from the official Mary Oliver Shop) emblazoned with JOY IS NOT MADE TO BE A CRUMB.

Kelly also quotes a review by David Orr, who 

snidely remarked of Oliver’s poetry, “One can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it”; he also declared, “There’s a bunch of talk about using poetry to overcome personal challenges (if it worked as self-help, you’d see more poets driving BMWs).”

It’s this last point that I want to address given the utilitarian bent of my blog. I like Kelly’s response to Orr:

But poetry, like any other writing, is allowed to work toward a goal—so long as it doesn’t lose its structural integrity. Perhaps the problem isn’t that poetry fails to help one overcome challenges, but that its reputation doesn’t give it enough credit for that very thing.

Once having staked out this position, Kelly follows up with, “Even after allowing that poetry can of course offer advice, the question of whether Oliver’s advice is any good is worth debating.” If the advice is facile, then the answer would be “no,” and Kelly provides a couple of examples. For instance:

I quibble with her notion that one could easily give up worrying: SSRI-usage rates are too high for that to feel possible. And I wonder what she means, exactly, by “good” when she says, “You do not have to be good,” in “Wild Geese”—her next line likens it to walking “on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting,” but surely the matter of goodness involves a more complicated definition than just self-flagellation. Other lines seem so undoubtedly true that it’s no wonder they’ve ended up on apparel. She ends her poem “When Death Comes” with, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” Do any of us? If poetry is, at least partly, the art of minute observation, Oliver’s work might come off as trite when it expounds so universally.

After this “quibbling,” however, Kelly then proceeds with her defense. If appearing on coffee mugs were enough to dismiss a poet, she says, then what are we to do with John Keats’s “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” For that matter, what about Eliot’s “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” or Pope’s “A little learning is a dangerous thing” or the hundreds of memorable quotes from Shakespeare? “The medium has always been delightfully co-opted this way,” Kelly observes before adding, 

when a line of poetry zooms off from the rest of its body, it can’t lift up the whole of the genre with it—and poetry, with its quiet place in the literary firmament, would probably like all the boosterism it can get.

The real question, Kelly goes on to say, is whether Oliver’s advice is “hard-earned,” which I see connected with the question of structural integrity. Do her insights grow organically out of her exploring? Before addressing this, however, I want to expand on the issue of poetry offering advice.

Kelly notes that “there is an (often unspoken) assertion that poetry ought not to give advice, that it should exult in the ambiguous.” She adds that poetry, “perhaps more than any other writing genre, is unfairly assigned a value that is in direct opposition to its usefulness.”

I take up the issue in my book, noting how the New Critics in the 1950s and 1960s were fond of quoting W. H. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen,” William Carlos Williams’s “it is difficult/ to get the news from poems,” and even Oscar Wilde’s “All art is quite useless.” In response I write, 

By cordoning off life from literature, they ceded too much ground. By seeing poetry as only existential or spiritual, not pragmatic, they underestimated the many down-to-earth ways people use poems and stories to enhance their lives.

Referencing a recent documentary on Oliver, Kelly contends that her poetry is indeed hard-earned, beginning with a difficult childhood. The story arcs found in her poems remind me of George Herbert while her project is similar to Henry David Thoreau’s. Like Herbert, she too struggles through bleak moments before breaking through and like Thoreau she is intent on finding what makes life worth living. Kelly concludes,

Oliver’s poetry was not an act of ease; instead, she rebelled against the way that life presses our head down, away from the wonders of the world. Her advice, for all of its lucidity, is not uncomplicated or effortless. It’s to do something so difficult that most people don’t even attempt it: to notice when we’ve wandered away from how we want to live and to nudge ourselves back. “There are things you cannot reach. But,” she writes, “you can reach out to them, and all day long.”

In my years of teaching Oliver’s Pulitzer-award winning American Primitive in Intro to Lit, I discovered that Oliver does this and more. For instance, she proved very good at reaching my students struggling with depression, which she suffered from as well. Here’s from a post where I shared a student’s essay on “A Poem for the Blue Heron”:

When we are hunkered down in our misery, my student said, we need to tend to whatever little fire we have. In the poem, the blue heron is wading in “the cold ponds of November,” pecking around for meager gatherings with its gray hunched shoulders. It feels itself hardening, like the ice, in the cold. For some reason it has decided not to fly south, perhaps because a warmer and easier life seems a bit complicated, what with its swirling clouds.

Or at least, that’s how the south appears to one who has been conditioned to ratchet down expectations: “Not everything is possible; some things are impossible.”

But although one may only hunker down at the onslaught of winter, there’s something noble about the decision not to die. If the cold wind of depression “shoulder[s] against/the black, wet/bones of the trees,” we need to tend to what little fire we have. I sometimes find myself in awe of those students who suffer from depression (there seem to be an increasing number of them) and yet manage to hang tough.

In the poem, the poet gathers whatever comes to hand when she is in her black periods. Drawing inspiration from her fellow sufferer in the marsh, she has found a cave she can hide in and live. She lights fire after fire after fire.

In “Cold Poem,” another depression poem (discussed here), she talks about what is to be learned from the dark times:

In the season of snow,

in the immeasurable cold,

we grow cruel but honest…

When my best friend was dying in a Bronx hospital, I turned to Oliver’s “University Hospital, Boston”:           . 

I look into your eyes
which are sometimes green and sometimes gray,

and sometimes full of humor, but often not,

and tell myself, you are better,

because my life without you would be

a place of parched and broken trees.


When we lost our environmental literature professor, I turned to “In Blackwater Woods,” reading the concluding stanzas at the memorial service. 

But where Oliver most showed her worth to me was the night after my own son died and I awoke at 2 am confronting the absolute horror of it all. Two lines, including another with the image of a broken tree, came unbidden to my mind and I hung on to them as to a life raft. Appearing in “The Lost Children” (although I didn’t realize that at the time) they were “pain picked him up and held him in her gray jaw” (about a desperate father) and “when loss leans like a broken tree.” Poetry, of course, was not enough for the occasion but it was all I had.

The documentary compares Oliver to Emily Dickinson and that seems right. In both Massachusetts poets one finds moments of wild ecstasy, moments of dark depression, and moments of spiritual revelation. As Kelly puts it, like Dickinson Oliver “set herself apart from the world in order to make better sense of it on paper.”

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Pratchett on the Danger of Happily Ever After

By Robin Bates | Published: August 17, 2026

Tuesday

In recent years I’ve written a lot about Terry Pratchett, an author whom I think is underappreciated by people who take comedy less seriously than melodrama or tragedy. I find that he has profound things to say about the nature of authority, our dark impulses, and (my subject today) the power of narrative. In Witches Abroad he explores the tyranny that can arise from attempting to force reality into a predetermined story.

Yale scholar Peter Brooks opens his book Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (2022) with a quotation from Game of Thrones: “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” The heroic witches in Pratchett’s novel, however, are out to defeat the archetypal story of “happy ever after.” 

In the opening chapter the author spells out what they are up against: 

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling…stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, an evil Pueblo witch tells a dark story and, when the other witches beg her quash it, she informs them that “it can’t be called back.” Pratchett recounts how a story picks up steam as it goes along:

And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other works of that story that have ever been.

This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

Pratchett then gives examples that are reminiscent of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces:

So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknown actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.

It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has do far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.

Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.

To fight this life form, Pratchett gives us Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, two witches who provide essential services to the citizens of the tiny kingdom of Lancre. “It takes a special kind of person to fight back,” the author tells us, “and become the bicarbonate of history.”

As a specialist in fairy tale fantasy, Pratchett is intimately acquainted with the power of traditional stories, and in much of his fiction he simply turns them upside down. For him, elves are bad and witches (most witches anyway) are good, as are (also with exceptions) werewolves, vampires, goblins, and trolls. Pratchett is well aware how, throughout history, some of these figures have served as stand-ins for scapegoated marginalized groups. Old women living in rural solitude have long been vulnerable to bouts of witch hysteria, and in Lord of the Rings Tolkien uses goblins to articulate his anxieties about the industrial working class. In those Pratchett novels featuring the sprawling urban jungle of Ankh Morepork, the author uses a variety of traditional monsters to explore the exciting potential of multicultural society. Trolls and dwarfs, werewolves and humans learn to overcome their differences and work together.

In Witches Abroad, Weatherwax, Ogg, and newly minted witch Magrat must go up against a fairy godmother (Lilith) who is determined to transform the populace Genoa into her own happily-ever-after reality. She turns mice into coachmen, rats into horses, and frogs into princes while the population is pressured into behaving like Disneyland props. Woe be to the tavern keeper who is not fat and jolly!

The Lancre witches must rescue Embererella (“Ella”), the rightful ruler of Genoa, from marriage to a frog prince. In so doing, they act as counter-godmothers, there to assist Ella to escape the marriage plot and become her own individuated self. As Weatherwax explains it, “We’re the kind [of godmother] that gives people what they know they really need, not what we think they ought to want.”

To which Pratchett adds, “Among the fascinated crowd several pairs of lips moved as people worked this out.”

Weatherwax is more clear in a subsequent statement, declaring that Ella “might be quite good at ruling. She might be bad at it. But she’s got to find out for herself. With no interference from anyone.”

This means no interference from a predetermined story.

Mirrors play a significant role in Witches Abroad, especially mirrors set up against each other so that an infinite number of worlds appear. Pratchett’s point, I think, is that we can lose sight of who we really are as we imagine (thanks to stories) all those selves we think we ought to be. In a final showdown between Weatherwax and Lilith, where each finds herself in a limbo world, Weatherwax triumphs because she knows who she is:

Granny Weatherwax looked out at the multi-layered silvery world.

“Where am I?”

INSIDE THE MIRROR…

“When can I get out?”

WHEN YOU FIND THE ONE THAT’S REAL.

“is this a trick question?”

NO.

Granny looked down at herself.

“This one,” she said.

At which point she returns to reality. Lilith, by contrast, never escapes but simply runs on, forever, “through the endless reflections.”

While Pratchett isn’t writing about America today, his book nevertheless speaks to us. We are living at a time where our president lies non-stop while he and his minions systematically attack the arbiters of truth, whether they be journalists, scientists, doctors, judges, lawyers, professors, economists, or civil servants. Increasingly MAGA Republicans spin outlandish fables—lies—for which they are never held to account, whether it be about the climate or vaccines or immigrants. They see what they want to see in an endless hall of mirrors.

Is there a limit? The great literary Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, debating the post-structuralists, used to say that history wasn’t subject to endless deconstruction. In the end, he asserted, “history is what hurts.” We are seeing this to be increasingly the case as temperatures, measle cases, and gas prices all soar. Even some of those most committed to Trump’s fables are beginning to have doubts.

In such discussions, I always quote Salman Rushdie, who has written that, “as far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real.” Pratchett uses fantasy to enhance this understanding. 

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DJT Replays Scene from Dead Zone

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2026
Imagined meme of DJT hiding out while using reporters and staff as decoys

Monday

I owe today’s essay to a recent Tom Nichols observation. When a reported Iranian assassination plot had DJT being secretly whisked away from his plane in a catering cart, with accompanying journalists and staff members left behind as decoys, the national security expert for The Atlantic recalled two scenes from cinema before settling on a Stephen King reference.

First, he mentioned the escape scene in the first Fab Four film:

One of the more charming moments in the deliriously charming 1964 Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, has the boys in the band trying to evade screaming fans and the paparazzi. They duck in alleys, they dodge around corners, and in one scene, they all jump into a taxi and then climb out the other side and get in a different taxi. It’s a wonderful, exhilarating sequence.

“It seems less fun,” Nichols adds, “when the president of the United States does it.”

At the thought of Trump climbing into a catering container with “three of his White House footmen,” Nichols’s mind then shifts to the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera before ending at our master of horror and suspense:

When Trump ducked out of that 747, he was not channeling John Lennon or Groucho Marx. Instead, he affirmed that the character he most resembles is Greg Stillson, Stephen King’s cowardly presidential contender in the novel The Dead Zone. Stillson’s candidacy ends when he tries to shield himself from an assassin by holding a child in front of him.

I checked out Dead Zone after reading the comment and discovered it was all too close to our own situation. That’s largely because it too features a huckster—a former Bible salesman, now a mayor—who is on the political fast track upwards. While possessing immense charm, Stillson has a vicious streak and at one point, unseen, kicks a dog to death. (This brings to mind what Kristi Noem did to curry favor with Trump—boasting about shooting her dog Cricket apparently helped her become Trump’s director of Homeland Security and overseer of ICE operations.) The novel’s protagonist, who has developed second sight after a childhood accident, foresees that Stillson will one day become president and unleash nuclear Armageddon on the world.

The novel therefore presents us with a classic ethical question: If you knew the future and had the means and opportunity, would you kill Hitler before he rose to power. After much internal debate, Johnny Smith does indeed decide to shoot Stillson but is killed by his bodyguards before getting off a shot. He dies thinking he has failed.

Nevertheless, he accomplishes his goal when a photographer gets a shot of the scene Nichols mentions. Here’s the scene:

Stillson moved with good speed for such a big man. The dark-haired young woman Johnny had noticed earlier was about hallway up the center aisle, holding her crying son in her arms, still trying to shield him with her body. And what Stillson did then so dumbfounded Johnny that he almost dropped the rifle altogether. He snatched the boy from his mother’s arms, whirled toward the gallery, holding the boy’s body in front of him. It was no longer Greg Stillson in the front sight, but a small squirming figure…

At that point Johnny lowers his gun, even though he knows the future of the world is at stake.

As Nichols notes, however, Stillson has been exposed and knows it. “Never mind this guy,” he says to his bodyguards. “Find the son of a bitch that took that picture. Smash his camera.”

Only they don’t succeed. And when the dying Johnny reaches out and touches Stillson—touching the subject is necessary to activate his second sight—he realizes that “everything had changed.” Because of the incriminating photo, Stillson’s political career will end:

Touching Stillson this time had been like touching a blank. Dead battery. Fallen tree. Empty house. Bare bookshelves. Wine bottles ready for candles.

It sounds like a description of DJT’s interior landscape.

His version of “smash his camera” may be ordering the Department of Justice to investigate the reporters who revealed that his Qatari jet, despite the millions spent on it, was not yet ready for prime time. He even accused them of treason. Nichols explains he didn’t want the truth to come out

because it makes him look cowardly and puts the lie to all his happy talk about the war. Trump has crowed—as he did at the time in Turkey—that the Iranians are beaten and pleading for a deal. In truth, the Iranians might have been planning to blow the president of the United States and some of his top officials to smithereens.

While we have no photo of Trump in a catering container, memes imagining him in various cowering positions have exploded on social media (see above for an example). Along with the scene in Dead Zone, it also brings to mind the moment when Jimmy Carter, out fishing in a boat, scared away a swamp rabbit swimming towards him. A headline in the Washington Post announced, “Bunny Goes Bugs: Rabbit Attacks President” (it must have been a slow news day), and Ronald Reagan would later use the photo to contend that Carter was a wimp who couldn’t stand up to world threats. 

Unlike Stillson, Trump became president. Still, the catering container memes may further undermine his crumbling authority. 

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Helen Keller in the Garden of the Lord

By Robin Bates | Published: August 15, 2026
Helen Keller

Sunday

I came across Helen Keller’s wonderful poem “In the Garden of the Lord” when I was thumbing through A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Apparently she loved working in her garden, once writing to a friend,

I have great joy in the tulips and lilacs which make my garden “look like the waking of Creation.” O the potent witchery of smell! Leaves opening delicately on tree and rambler and rose-bush tell me God has passed this way, and I forget the disturbing nearness of the city in the eternal miracle of a tiny garden great with wonders.

Of course, she cannot actually see what the garden looks like, but, denied sight and hearing, she is all the more attuned to the other senses. These show up in the poem as the “playful winds that blow the scent of rose and jessamine in eddying whirls” and “the sun that kindles all the place with radiant life.”

Like the blind man that Jesus heals, Keller is so overwhelmed by the experience that it is as though her eyes were touched with light. She feels compelled to glorify the Lord–”there was laid upon my lips a flame of fire”—and she laughs, shouts, and, in the last instance, prays. 

In the Garden of the Lord
By Helen Keller

The word of God came unto me,
Sitting alone among the multitudes;
And my blind eyes were touched with light.
And there was laid upon my lips a flame of fire.
I laugh and shout for life is good,
Though my feet are set in silent ways.
In merry mood I leave the crowd
To walk in my garden. Ever as I walk
I gather fruits and flowers in my hands.
And with joyful heart I bless the sun
That kindles all the place with radiant life.

I run with playful winds that blow the scent
Of rose and jessamine in eddying whirls.
At last I come where tall lilies grow,
Lifting their faces like white saints to God.
While the lilies pray, I kneel upon the ground;
I have strayed into the holy temple of the Lord.

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My Childhood Encounter with Wind in the Willows

By Robin Bates | Published: August 14, 2026

Friday

I have a new idea for Friday posts. Since I had so much fun traveling down memory lane for my memoir, I’ve decided to revisit favorite stories, poems, and plays, one per entry, recalling the first time I encountered them. It’s another way of examining how literature has shaped my life.

I got the idea from a Terry Pratchett essay I was reading from the collection of his essays that Neil Gaiman, who knew him well, put together after his untimely death. 

In “Let There Be Dragons,” which was “a speech in defense of fantasy” that he gave at a Booksellers Association Conference dinner, Pratchett talks about his childhood encounter with The Wind in the Willows. “It was the first book which, at the age of ten, I read because I was genuinely interested,” he wrote.

Pratchett acknowledges (but not really) that “it is totally the wrong kind of book for children,” what with it having only one female character (a washerwoman), a classist dismissal (and fear of) the lower class weasels and stoats, and how it avoids talking frankly about the homosexual attraction between Mole and Ratty. In fact Pratchett, if he were to write Wind in the Willows himself, would give the weasels and stoats their own culture and equal status with the others, just as he does with goblins and trolls, and the washerwoman would be elevated to a heroic witch.

Part of the attraction, Pratchett says, was that “it wasn’t parents or teachers who were recommending the book,” and he recalls reading it “from end to end, all in one go. And then I started again from the beginning, because I had not realized that there were stories like this”:

There’s a feeling that I think is only possible to get when you are a child and discover books: it’s a kind of fizz—you want to read everything that’s in print before it evaporates before your eyes.

“Fizz” is probably the right way to describe my own experience with Wind in the Willows. It was my father’s favorite book—I’m holding at this very moment the version that he read to us—and if the 1933 reprint date is any indication, he got the book when he himself was ten. He identified with Ratty, the dreamer poet whose mind will periodically wander off, but I felt more of a kinship with Mole. I experienced his thrill when he emerges from an intense bout of housecleaning and sees the wide, wonderful world for the first time. “Something up above was calling him imperiously,” the author tells us, and so 

he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, “Up we go! Up we go!” till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

The 1930 editions would be the first illustrated by E.H. Shephard, already famous for the Winnie the Pooh books, and I found magical the sight of Mole dancing in the meadow. (The illustration in my book contrasts dramatically with the textual account of the scratching and scrabbling, which descends the page in ever shorter lines until entirely giving out four fifths of the way down, allowing the picture to take over.). The author captures the moment with gorgeous prose:

“This is fine! He said to himself. “This is better than whitewashing!” The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side. 

I remember feeling something similar as a child when I awoke one early May morning, felt the cool breeze coming in at the window, and remembered it was the first day of summer vacation. Perhaps having read this passage added to the wondrousness of moment, framing and confirming it. Of course, many people experience this joy, but literature has a way of intensifying it.

Mole goes on to establish a firm friendship with Ratty, and I recall responding intensively to one moment where, jealous of Ratty’s carefree rowing—Ratty has just told him he needs to practice before trying to do it himself—Mole seizes the oars, pulls vigorously at them, and upsets the boat. While, in his shame, he feels like a “squashy, pulpy lump of misery”—and as a child, I remember feeling this way much of the time, perhaps because my mother worried constantly about how others would judge us—Ratty shrugs it off. Although Mole believes he has ruined everything and abjectly apologizes, Ratty replies,

“That’s all right, bless you!” responded the Rat cheerily. What’s a little wet to a water Rat? I’m more in the water than out of it most days. Don’t you think any more about it.”

This absolution feels like that bestowed by the Green Knight on Gawain, which is my favorite moment in that work as well. In other words, having a friend who cleanses you of your guilt seemed miraculous.

The incident in the boat reminds me of a similar incident that happened around this time. When I would walk home from school with Chris(tine) and John Mayfield, who lived in the apartment above ours, I would envy them for their bicycles. When we reached the big hill separating University Avenue from Alabama Avenue—those who know Sewanee will recognize Mitchell Avenue—I would envy how they flew down the incline and then pumped madly to see how far they could get up the other side. So one evening, without asking, I took John’s bike and set off to fly down the hill myself.

Unfortunately I hit a pothole, badly skinning myself and damaging the bicycle. I remember walking the bike home, crying all the way, mostly out of pain but also because I felt I was being punished for my “theft.” My mother bandaged me up but, somewhat miraculously, no one scolded me or even made mention of my taking the bike. The parents must have talked and figured I’d been punished enough. There was tacit forgiveness.

Children, for all their apparent innocence, have complex inner lives. Our greatest children’s authors acknowledge those lives and couch them within compelling stories.

If I identified so strongly with Mole, it was because I was an effeminate boy—I didn’t fight or play football– and Mole often takes on the more traditional female roles in his relationship with Ratty. I remember one scene where his lack of assertiveness almost turns tragic. While walking through a snowy wilderness with Ratty, he senses that they are close to his underground home—he hasn’t been there since the opening pages—but he can’t communicate his sense of urgency to his friend, who is determinedly plowing on ahead. Finally he breaks down and starts crying.

At that point Ratty does what a true friend does: he realizes he’s been insensitive and rectifies the situation by bolstering Mole, insisting that they find his home and, once there, on finding everything necessary to make a good fire and a feast. What follows is a magical Christmas Eve moment, complete with caroling field mice, and Mole ends the day wonderfully happy:

The weary Mole also was glad to turn in without delay, and soon had his head on his pillow, in great joy and contentment. But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancor. He was now in just the frame of mind that the tactful Rat had quietly worked to bring about in him. He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

I write this post from the house I inherited from my parents—not the apartment complex we shared with the Mayfields, which has been replaced (significantly) by the university library, but one to which I have returned to every Christmas since the 1970s—so I relate to how a home can function as an anchorage. That anchorage, when I was a child, was my family and the books we read together, which I knew I could always count on, even though I also knew I would one day need to leave it behind and enter the larger stage. To be sure, I never left it entirely, despite essaying a career as a journalist for two years, as I became a literature professor like my father. When Julia and I had our own family, we used books to create anchorage for our own sons.

They too left home immediately after college, and while they return only once or twice a year, they know the importance of building such a stable base for their children.

I haven’t mentioned Toad in all this. He was too anarchistic for my liking, and Grahame’s nostalgic reestablishment of the landed gentry and the old class system—under assault from weasel and stoat modernity—is his dream of stability, not mine. (Grahame wrote Wind in the Willows in 1908, six years before the world fell apart as World War I changed England forever.) But I liked the role that Mole played in the reclamation of Toad Hall, which in Toad’s absence has been seized by denizens of the Wild Wood. What follows is a reenactment of Odysseus ridding his house of the suitors (without the killing), and the chapter is entitled, “The Return of Ulysses.”

The attack succeeds largely because Mole, accessing his inner woman and disguising himself as a washerwoman, has informed the stoat guards that hundreds of badgers, rats and toads will attack the hall that night. While Toad chides Mole for blowing their cover, Badger realizes that Mole has given the four companions an important psychological advantage and compliments him with words I imagined being applied to me:

“Mole,” said the Badger in his dry, quiet way, “I perceive you have more sense in your little finger than some other animals have in the whole of their fat bodies. You have managed excellently, and I begin to have great hopes of you. Good Mole! Clever Mole!”

In short, Wind in the Willows understood me as a child, affirmed me, and assured me I was capable of heroic action.

I mention one more way that the book has shown up in my life. My best friend in graduate school Norman Finkelstein, now a noteworthy poet and literary scholar, has written a poem about “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” the episode where Mole and Ratty encounter the great god Pan. It’s my favorite of all Norman’s poems and you can read what I’ve written about it here:

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
By Norman Finkelstein

We little animals living by the river banks
burrowers and swimmers by sandy shores:
was there ever a time when the bird’s song,
giving way in evening to the flight of the bat,
failed to presage a momentary chill,
even on summer days?

The warm folds of forgetfulness
are meant to be comforting:
but how soon they cease to soothe us,
haunted as we shall always be
by the absent music, the departing hand.

Yes, we are full of Panic life;
it flows deep within us, nor are we out of touch
with the powers that watch us survive.
But the banks get crowded
or fall away steeply,
and someone is always getting trampled or drowned.
It’s then that the music, seeming to have gone,
glides through the reeds on its sinuous way.

And though we are not its destination,
neither are we bystanders happening along the path.
We are neither forgotten nor remembered,
but somehow have been included:
we know that for us it always comes to good
and that must be enough. 

The poem gives me insight into Norman, my father, and poets generally, how they are straining to catch notes that are always just out of reach. While I myself am no poet, I am grateful in my deepest core for how they put me in touch with mystery.

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Poison Ivy and the Spoon River Citizens

By Robin Bates | Published: August 12, 2026
Ambiguous super villain Poison Ivy

Thursday

I’ve been suffering from a severe case of poison ivy, caused by whacking weeds while wearing a short-sleeved shirt. I’ve always been highly susceptible—I was hospitalized with it once as a child—and both arms currently look like raw meat. After a week of applying every ointment I could find, I finally surrendered and went to my doctor for a shot. 

My next predictable step was finding a poem or two about poison ivy. Google took me back to a speaker in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1914), which I hadn’t read since high school.

It’s very different reading the poems now. Growing up in a town resembling the idealized Mayberry of the Andy Griffith Show, I didn’t see the darker sides of small town life until I was a reporter on two weekly newspapers, once for the Pine City Pioneer (in Minnesota), once for the Winchester Herald Chronicle (in Tennessee). There I witnessed both the best and the worst of people, early signs of MAGA in Minnesota, cockfighting and the KKK in Tennessee.

Masters’s poems appeared as regular installments in the St. Louis literary journal Reedy’s Mirror. They came as as heady shock since many Americans shared my childhood idealization of small towns. When his characters, speaking from the grave, reveal that “real Americans” are just as capable of corrupt double dealing as those who live in cities, the country took notice. So did the town of Lewiston, Illinois, the source of the Spoon River characters, which which banned the collection for decades.

It was as if (thinking of my poison ivy scars), Masters had ripped the scab concealing the pus. A young wife who died in childbirth, for instance, exposes the lie of a happy couple:

Amanda Barker

Henry got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband’s love
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.

Another of the dead complains about his epitaph:

Cassius Hueffer

They have chiseled on my stone the words:
“His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.”
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
“Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life
In the which he was slain.”
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

It makes sense, then, that one of the graveyard residents would mention innocent-looking poison ivy.

Before turning to it, here’s another poem that mentions the plant’s misleading exterior. I stumbled across Martha Lavinia Hoffman’s “Poison Ivy” and was struck by how she admires its “graceful sprays and glossy shoots” and how its strong aerial roots clamber up “the gnarled old tree-trunks.

A Utah, California nature poet living in the second half of the 19th century, Hoffman then shifts gears and delivers her warning: 

Yet beware, and think how often
Earth’s most charming loveliest things.
Hide beneath a fair exterior,
Poisonous sap, or cruel stings,
Touch not, ’tis the poison ivy;
Spurn its festooned haunt with care;
Trust not, ’tis a fair deception,
Hidden guile is lurking there.
Type of many another nature,
False, untrue, yet passing fair.

Back to Spoon River’s Calvin Campbell, a speaker who shares Masters’s view of the town. How is it, he wonders, that the air and soil of the picturesque hillside can produce both the sweet elixirs and colors that become the arbutus (the madronas or strawberry tree) and the poison that becomes poison ivy. But don’t blame Fate or Spoon River, he goes on to say, but rather “the will in you that feeds itself” and makes us dockweed, jimsonweed, dandelion or mullein—which is to say various toxic, invasive, and nuisance weeds.

Given that we have free will, why don’t we draw on the same soil and air to become jasmine or wisteria?

Calvin Campbell

Ye who are kicking against Fate,
Tell me how it is that on this hillside,
Running down to the river,
Which fronts the sun and the south-wind,
This plant draws from the air and soil
Poison and becomes poison ivy?
And this plant draws from the same air and soil
Sweet elixirs and colors and becomes arbutus?
And both flourish?
You may blame Spoon River for what it is,
But whom do you blame for the will in you
That feeds itself and makes you dock-weed,
Jimpson, dandelion or mullen
And which can never use any soil or air
So as to make you jessamine or wistaria?

I don’t blame the woods around me for producing poison ivy, just myself for not being more careful. Meanwhile, I am appalled by those people in life who hide poisonous sap “beneath a fair exterior.”

Aspire to be wisteria.

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We Know Which Portia Casket DJT Would Choose

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2026
Trump’s gilded Oval Office

Wednesday

Yesterday I discussed DJT’s urge to gild everything he sees with gold leaf, including the Oval Office. I should also have mentioned the two bronze “Arts of War” statues located next to the Lincoln Memorial, “Valor” and “Sacrifice,” that the president had covered with 24-karat gold leaf for a mere $5.1 million.

More significant even than the cost is the symbolism. In an article in Architectural Digest on “The Political History of Gilding,” architect and historian Gary Lawrence observes that the wealthy in “the gilded age” (the label was coined by Mark Twain) used gold trim to signal their power. “Gold always represented a person’s status and was often overused in the homes of newly wealthy people,” he notes. “It was also used on exterior viewable things like carriages, horse fittings, and servants’ uniforms.”

Art historian Seem Rao, meanwhile, contends that “Trump’s faux gold work looks classy to someone who doesn’t know the historic markers of wealth.” Borrowed from Europe’s monarchical palaces, the gilding clashes with Washington’s neoclassical style, which was designed to invoke Athenian democracy and the Roman republic. 

When I think of Trump’s love of gold trim, I fantasize about candidates for the presidency being subjected to the Portia test. This is the test in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that suitors must pass if they are to win Portia’s hand. Involving a gold, a silver, and a lead casket, the test has been set up by her now-deceased father to ensure that she gets a worthy husband. One of the three contains her portrait and comes with the promise of marriage

As the Prince of Morocco, the first of her three suitors, sums up the choices, 

The first, of gold, who this inscription bears,
“Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire”;
The second, silver, which this promise carries,
“Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves”;
This third, dull lead, with warning all as blunt,
“Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.”
How shall I know if I do choose the right?

Morocco figures that “many men” desire both gold and Portia and so chooses the gold casket. Inside he finds a picture of a skull and the following poem:

All that glisters [glitters] is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.

Second suitor Aragorn figures he is too deserving to be grouped with “many men,” explaining, 

I will not choose what many men desire,
Because I will not jump with common spirits
And rank me with the barbarous multitudes.
…Well, but to my choice:
“Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.”
I will assume desert. Give me a key for this,
And instantly unlock my fortunes here.

His reward is a “portrait of a blinking idiot,” which is as much as he deserves.

Protagonist Bassanio rejects the gold and silver caskets, observing that “the outward shows be least themselves” because the world is too often “deceived with ornament”:

In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts…

He concludes,

Therefore, thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee;
Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge
‘Tween man and man: but thou, thou meagre lead,
Which rather threatenest than dost promise aught,
Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence;
And here choose I; joy be the consequence!

Although DJT, thinking himself to be the most deserving, might be tempted for a moment by the silver casket, he would undoubtedly go for “what many men desire,” starting with himself. I feel fairly confident that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris would choose the lead casket as all are capable of setting aside ego for the good of the nation. Indeed, no president in American history would score lower on the Portia test than DJT.

Portia’s description of gold shows up in Gandalf’s letter to Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring, delivered to him by the innkeeper Butterbur. Its purpose is to assure the hobbits about Strider/Aragorn:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

While the poem describes Aragorn, it also describes Frodo, a commoner who grapples with the corrupting desire for power and prevails. 

Both have deep moral roots. Neither is sidetracked by glitter. 

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DJT as a Harpy, Befouling All That Is Good

By Robin Bates | Published: August 10, 2026
Bartolomeo Pinelli, the harpies in the Aeneid

Tuesday

First there was Caesar Augustus, who boasted, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” Then there was Christopher Wren (among others), who after the great fire of 1666 transformed London from a city of wood into a city of stone. Now we have Donald Trump, who found Washington, D.C. a city of classic monuments and is leaving it—well, the word “enshittification” comes to mind. 

Everywhere we look, we see Trump’s ravages, from demolishing the White House East Wing to paving over the Rose Garden so that it resembles his Mar-a-Lago patio to gilding the West Wing so that (in the words of Rick Wilson) it “looks like Liberace and Saddam designed a 19th New Orleans century whorehouse, without the taste and elegance.”

And then there’s the failed renovation of the reflecting pool, which prompted Tim Walz to tweet,

Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell

If Trump were only ruining D.C. architecture, it would be bad enough, but he’s attempting to do the same to the country as a whole, from the Department of Justice and Intelligence services to our national parks to our coastline, waterways, and air quality to our world-class health organizations to our foreign aid efforts (which have saved millions of lives) to our international alliances to American democracy itself. I’ve noted in past posts that a line from Bob Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” comes constantly to mind. Oue Nobel-winning bard says of diamond-mine owner Big Jim, “He took whatever he wanted and he laid it all to waste.”

There’s also a classical image of befouling what is good. In The Aeneid, the hungry Trojans, reeling from the destruction of their city, believe they have found refuge on an island filled with sleek herds and flocks of goats. Just as they are setting up couches “for a savory feast,” however, this happens:  

But instantly, grotesquely whirring down,
The Harpies were upon us from the hills
With deafening beat of wings. They trounced our meat,
Defiling everything they touched with filth,
And gave an obscene squawk amid the stench.
We tried again. In a secluded gorge
Under a cliffside, in thick shade of trees,
We set our tables up, relit our altars.
But the loud horde again, from another quarter,
Came out of hiding, swooped down on the prey
With hooked feet, hunched to feed, and spoiled our feast.

Oliver Wendell Holmes makes memorable use of the harpy image in his poem “Old Ironsides” about plans to turn the proud old warship into scrap metal:

The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

So think of DJT as a harpy, befouling everything he touches with filth. The only difference is that the harpies at least are defending their island from the Trojans. DJT is spoiling our feast simply to show us that he can.

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On Raccoons and Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2026

Monday

One of the things that stood out to me as I was reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was how life in India—at least as described in Kiran Desai’s novel—is constantly interacting with nature. Bandicoots in Goa steal bars of soap, and when one is taking a shower, tree frogs whiz “from wall to ceiling all over the bathroom, joyous in the wet.” Sonia must check her night water glass before drinking because she never knows if a moth will be found therein, and a few mosquitoes always find their way through the netting. Meanwhile, mold blossoms on walls during the monsoon season and leaks in roofs ruin books. Accustomed as many Americans are to sealing themselves off from nature, the difference is noticeable. 

Not that I myself have been feeling all that sealed. For a while we had woodpeckers attacking our house (they were after carpenter bees, we discovered), and squirrels were eating the siding. Periodically, there’s a power outage because squirrels have found a way into power boxes, and a rainy summer has meant that suddenly our kitchen is being invaded by tiny ants. In addition, twice a year hordes of Japanese ladybugs visit our house (I vacuum them up, sometimes forty or fifty at a time), which local farmers have imported to attack aphids.

The animal that is most attracting my attention, however, is a raccoon that has found its way into our supposedly raccoon-proof bird feeders. For years we’ve been feeding nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, five different varieties of woodpeckers, purple finches, grosbeaks, goldfinches, cowbirds, and cardinals, and I was proud that I had found feeders that would frustrate squirrels. Racoons, however, are an entirely different matter.

Demonstrating a combination of cleverness and acrobatic agility, these critters have frustrated every attempt to fend them off. At one point, after I had used wires to keep the feeders out of reach, they broke the wires. It appears that I will have to leave off feeding the birds—all but the hummingbirds—because the raccoons will not be denied. 

A recent Annie Lowrey article in The Atlantic helps me better understand the problem. The raccoons, she explains, 

are intelligent, having long memories and a knack for problem-solving. “If you give them a puzzle and change the rules, they go with it,” Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at UC Berkeley, told me. “They have this creativity.” On top of that, they are dexterous enough to shuck oysters, unscrew jars, unlatch gates, and pick knots.

Unlike other animals, raccoons tolerate close proximity to humans (I’ve noticed this with our raccoon), and in addition to birdseed and suet they love human food. They are also, according to a raccoon biologist interviewed for the article, “incredibly destructive”:

“They’re so smart compared to cats and dogs—wildly, wildly intelligent—and because of that, they are very, very hard to keep entertained.” Captive raccoons require specially designed, large enclosures and “puzzle after puzzle” to work on, she said. “They like textures, they like to pick at things, they like to tear things apart, and it’s fun for them.”

The article notes that, while they are half-domesticated already, they can never be fully domesticated. The idea of a domesticated raccoon made me think of a passage in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The prince is looking for a friend and approaches a fox, who informs him that they can only be friends if it is tamed:

“What does that mean– ‘tame’?”

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

The fox then explains how it will benefit from being tamed:

“My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”

Now, I am not interested in taming or domesticating this raccoon—I just want it to leave our feeders alone—nor do I think that the relationship we have developed is helping it move on beyond boredom. I now wonder, however, if the elaborate mechanisms I have set up to keep it at bay are a source of entertainment. Maybe it’s not only after the food.

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