First Lady Olena Zelenska visits Kyiv’s annual book fair in 2024
Wednesday
Why have a book festival in the middle of a war? Why have a war in the middle of a book festival?
So begins an inspiring essay by historian Timothy Snyder on a Ukrainian book fair held in the face of ongoing Russian attacks. On May 24 alone, Snyder reports, Russia launched more than six hundred missiles and drones at the capital city of Kyiv and environs. Nevertheless, Book Arsenal, Kyiv’s annual festival, continued on.
Book publishing apparently is currently undergoing “an extraordinary renaissance” in Ukraine. Over 100 book publishers showed up for the fair and tens of thousands visited the 240 events. This year’s motto was “Bear your freedom.”
As for the missiles, Snyder’s contact informed him that one waits for them to pass and then goes on as usual:
Air raids are an interruption; when they are finished, participants in Book Arsenal go back to talking about books. People in Kyiv are frustrated by these interruptions, or angry, or sleepless; but after four years these Russian war crimes become a part of life, to which one adapts.
Snyder says that the danger can be judged and navigated thanks to apps and Telegram channels, which alert people to impending air raids. Nevertheless, four were killed and a hundred injured in the May 24 bombings. On June 1 another 18 died as Russia fired 700 missiles and drones at Dnipro and Kyiv.
Russia has particularly targeted cultural sites, publishing houses, archives, libraries, and museums. In occupied zones, Russians collect and burn Ukrainian books, and the 2024 Arsenal Festival featured an exhibit on “Books Destroyed by Russia.” “Genocide,” Snyder observes, “is about eliminating a people, and it includes the attempt to eliminate their ability to think for themselves, as themselves, in their own language.” Therefore, book publication is seen as self-defense and reading as a form of resistance. The historian states that
good books liberate us from the obvious and prepare us for the real. It might seem like, at the edge, where life meets death, we should put the books down; this is not what one sees in Ukraine. The last time I went to the front I rode with soldiers who were bringing books to other soldiers.
The Roman stoic philosopher Seneca is particularly popular at the moment, especially his essay “On the Shortness of Life.” In it he argues that life is long enough if we do what is important.
Along these lines, blogger Matt Labash recently alerted me to a poem about those who do what is important in the face of death. It takes a poem to do justice to these “Local Heroes” because, Labash says, poetry stands up “when prose fails to answer the call.” Author Thomas Lynch, who is a Michigan undertaker, has a particular perspective on “what matters and what doesn’t.”
Local Heroes By Thomas Lynch
Some days the worst that can happen happens. The sky falls or weather overwhelms or The world as we have come to know it turns Towards the eventual apocalypse Long prefigured in all the holy books — The end times of floods and conflagrations That bring us to the edge of our oblivions. Still, maybe this is not the end at all, Nor even the beginning of the end. Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows, To be added to the ones thus far endured, Through what we have come to call our history: Another in that bitter litany That we will, if we survive it, have survived. Lord, send us in our peril, local heroes, Someone to listen, someone to watch, Someone to search and wait and keep the careful count Of the dead and missing, the dead and gone But not forgotten. Sometimes all that can be done Is to salvage one sadness from the mass of sadnesses, To bear one body home, to lay the dead out Among their people, organize the flowers And casseroles, write the obits, meet the mourners at the door, Drive the dark procession down through town Toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre. It’s what we do. The daylong news is dire — Full of true believers and politicos Old talk of race and blame and photo ops. But here brave men and women pick the pieces up. They serve the living tending to the dead. They bring them home, the missing and adrift, They give them back to let them go again. Like politics, all funerals are local.
Ukrainians undoubtedly know well what Lynch is talking about. Thousands of them are local heroes.
MSNOW legal commentator Barbara McQuade, the Michigan lawyer fired by DJT after successfully prosecuting the underwear bomber and a Detroit mayor, has just published The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. In her interview about the book with Rachel Maddow, McQuade used a literary analogy to succinctly sum up what has happened to Trump’s Department of “Justice”: “The Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry of Magic.”
The allusion, of course, is to the final book in the Harry Potter series and captures how dire our situation has become. The Ministry of Magic is the governing body for the magical community, and while frequently inept and sometimes corrupt, it nevertheless provides some protection against the forces of evil. Harry, Dumbledore, and Hogwarts can wrestle with their immediate challenges without worrying about Voldemort seizing executive authority. Even Vernon Dursley, upon suddenly finding his family pulled into the wizards’ war, shares this view:
“I thought there was a Ministry of Magic?” asked Vernon Dursley abruptly. “There is,” said Harry, surprised. “Well then, why can’t they protect us? It seems to me that, as innocent victims, guilty of nothing more than harboring a marked man, we ought to qualify for government protection!” Harry laughed: he could not help himself. It was so very typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the establishment, even within this world that he despised and mistrusted. “You heard what Mr. Weasley and Kingsley said,” Harry replied. “We think the Ministry has been infiltrated.”
And so in fact it has. We learn in the opening chapter of Deathly Hallows that a Voldemort henchman has placed an Imperius Curse on Pius Thicknesse, the Ministry’s Head of the Department of Magical Law, thereby making him Voldemort’s puppet. The goal, now, is for Thicknesse to convert other ministers so that they can overthrow Minister Rufus Scrimgeour. Voldemort warns that the coup must be successful as “one failed attempt on the Minister’s life will set me back a long way.”
The signs of infiltration have been there for a while as Harry, the Weasleys, and others see Voldemort making inroads. “Harry,” Hermione says at one point as his scar begins giving him visions of Voldemort, “he’s taking over the Ministry and the newspapers and half the Wizarding world! Don’t let him inside your head too!” Still, the news comes as a thunderbolt, akin to America’s election night news on November 8, 2016 and again November 5, 2024: “The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.”
Having already lost Dumbledore, now Harry, Hermione, and Ron have lost the protection of Hogwarts and are on their own as Voldemort seizes the instruments of governing. Putting it in our own terms, he now controls Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the military. Because Trump has made significant inroads into all four, we can relate to what life is like under Voldemort, which we learn when Neville reports on life at Hogwarts.
First of all, he tells them about Death Eaters who have joined the faculty. We can think of the Carrows as ICE agents with free use of the detention system:
The other teachers are all supposed to refer us to the Carrows if we do anything wrong….We supposed to practice the Cruciatus Curse on people who’ve earned detentions.
While Neville sustains a deep gash in his cheek for refusing to do so, the Carrows, like the Department of Homeland Security, find willing accomplices. “Some people are into it,” Neville notes. “Crabbe and Goyle love it. First time they’ve ever been top in anything, I expect.”
Like many school systems in the American south, Hogwarts has also changed its curriculum, with “Defense Against the Dark Arts” becoming “the Dark Arts.” Meanwhile, now that the school is no longer constrained by DEI, Critical Race Theory, or Black History Month, Muggle Studies (i.e., the study of humans) is taught in a whole new way:
“We’ve all got to listen to [the teacher] explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drove wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished. I got this one,” [Neville] indicated another slash to his face, “for asking her how much Muggle blood she and her brother have got.”
When Ron worries that Neville is taking unnecessary chances, he replies with words that we’re hearing these days from protest leaders: “The thing is, it helps when people stand up to them, it gives everyone hope. I used to notice that when you did it, Harry.”
The Death Eaters even have a version of going after the immigrant parents of American citizens. Neville again:
The only people in real danger are the ones whose friends and relatives on the outside are giving trouble. They get taken hostage. Old Xeno Lovegood was getting a bit too outspoken in The Quibbler, so they dragged Luna off the train on the way back from Christmas.
For a while, the Hogwarts rebels resort to graffiti until it becomes too dangerous. “We used to sneak out at night and put graffiti on the walls: Dumbledore’s Army, Still Recruiting, stuff like that.” Now, they are in hiding, awaiting the best moment to strike.
For years the American right has had fever dreams about a leftwing takeover, making movies like Red Dawn, complaining incessantly about big government, and pushing for increased accessibility to firearms. Who knew that, when they themselves took over, they would engage in wholesale roundups of brown people, extrajudicial killings without accountability, and a black helicopter attack on a Chicago tenement? The left may have “policed” racially insensitive speech, but “police” for them was only a metaphor, not actual militias with access to lethal weapons, pepper spray, armored vehicles, extrajudicial warrants, and virtually unlimited power to arrest, detain indefinitely, and sometimes send to foreign prisons.
So yes, the Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry of Magic. But we can share Neville’s hope that resistance isn’t altogether futile and Rowling’s vision that Harry’s non-violent response to Voldemort will triumph in the end. The weapon that the Dark Lord hurls at Harry rebounds upon him so that he is brought down by his own machinations.
For that to happen, however, Harry must enter the dark wood and stand up to him. The King’s Cross episode shows Harry wrestling with his doubts—when all seems lost, should he continue on?—and his decision to return to action is the decision before us all. As the ghost of Dumbledore tells him in this netherworld,
By returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart. If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say good-bye for the present.
In this moment, Potter also discovers that behind the face of evil is an unloved, whimpering toddler. Or put another way, the Great and Powerful Oz is a little man behind a curtain, even if his face and name are plastered all over Washington.
Sol Eytinge, Jr., Mr Carker, the smiling sycophant from Dombey and Son
Monday
I’ve just finished listening to Dombey and Son, thereby completing my life list of Dickens novels. (I exempt the Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Dickens didn’t finish. And yes, I’ve read Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit.) While Dombey is far from the author’s best work, its depiction of a tyrannical boss and his smiling enabler pretty much captures what we’re seeing in the White House these days.
Dombey is the proud and autocratic head of a thriving business. After his first wife dies, he essentially buys a second, a beautiful woman who is just as proud, and sparks fly when she refuses to cater to his whims. Not confident of handling her himself, he turns to his sycophantic manager to sort out matters. Imagine Dombey as Trump and James Carker as Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, or, well, pretty much anyone in his current administration:
“Now, Carker,” said Mr Dombey, “I do not hesitate to say to you that I will carry my point. I am not to be trifled with. Mrs Dombey must understand that my will is law, and that I cannot allow of one exception to the whole rule of my life. You will have the goodness to undertake this charge, which, coming from me, is not unacceptable to you, I hope, whatever regret you may politely profess—for which I am obliged to you on behalf of Mrs Dombey; and you will have the goodness, I am persuaded, to discharge it as exactly as any other commission.” “You know,” said Mr Carker, “that you have only to command me.” “I know,” said Mr Dombey, with a majestic indication of assent, “that I have only to command you.”
Dombey goes to complain that Edith does not adequately appreciate him for having elevated her to the eminent position of his wife:
“[A]t present I do not conceive that Mrs Dombey does that credit to it, to which it is entitled. There is a principle of opposition in Mrs Dombey that must be eradicated; that must be overcome: Mrs Dombey does not appear to understand,” said Mr Dombey, forcibly, “that the idea of opposition to Me is monstrous and absurd.”
Compare this to how Trump is prepared to punish those in his own party who do not fully acknowledge his importance (Tom Massie, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn). The results, as we have seen, are cabinet meetings that function like North Korea-style groveling sessions.
But enough of Trump as I’m more interested in the Carkers of the world. The manger, whose “two unbroken rows of glistening teeth” are always “on parade,” gets more than a paycheck and prestige from his association with Dombey. Like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and numerous others, he gets an opportunity to carry out his own sadistic fantasies.
In this instance, Dombey has instructed him to humble his wife, and Carker points out that his being employed as intermediary will itself be a form of humiliation as Edith detests him. When Dombey queries whether Carker will feel degraded in his role, the manager responds that degradation is impossible when he is carrying out his boss’ wishes. Dombey first:
“But I have not supposed, I confess, that any confidence I could entrust to you, would be likely to degrade you—” “Oh! I degraded!” exclaimed Carker. “In your service!” “—or to place you,” pursued Mr Dombey, “in a false position.” “I in a false position!” exclaimed Carker. “I shall be proud—delighted—to execute your trust. I could have wished, I own, to have given the lady at whose feet I would lay my humble duty and devotion—for is she not your wife!—no new cause of dislike; but a wish from you is, of course, paramount to every other consideration on earth.”
He goes on to assure Dombey that Edith is sure to be “converted from these little errors of judgment,” which I suspect has its modern equivalent in Trump’s sycophants assuring him that the public will be brought around to seeing that we are indeed enjoying the greatest economic boom in American history.
One wonders whether they also harbor Carker’s secret resentment: his assumption that everyone in the office is hypocritical when they express concern at Dombey falling from a horse reveals his own hypocrisy. Inwardly, he seethes over how Dombey makes him bow and scrape and is only sorry that his boss doesn’t die in the accident. He gets his revenge, or so he thinks, when he kisses Edith and persuades her to run away with him, thereby thoroughly humiliating her husband. His own side hustles, made without Dombey’s knowledge, have given him financial independence.
Many note that standing up to Trump is the best response, and it is an effective way to handle his enablers as well. In an immensely satisfying scene, Edith faces down Carker, putting him in his place at the very moment when he thinks he has achieved power over her. He thinks she has run away from Dombey to be with him, but she sets him right:
“In every vaunt you make,” she said, “I have my triumph. I single out in you the meanest man I know, the parasite and tool of the proud tyrant, that his wound may go the deeper, and may rankle more. Boast, and revenge me on him! You know how you came here tonight; you know how you stand cowering there; you see yourself in colors quite as despicable, if not as odious, as those in which I see you.”
Dickens tells us that if Edith had faltered for an instant, Carker would have pinioned her but that “she was as firm as rock, and her searching eyes never left him”:
He would have sold his soul to root her, in her beauty, to the floor, and make her arms drop at her sides, and have her at his mercy. But he could not look at her, and not be afraid of her. He saw a strength within her that was resistless.
Carker dies when a nightmarish train runs him down, and, given the staggering levels of corruption we are seeing, a metaphorical train may have our current crop of sycophants in its sights. Rick Wilson’s maxim—“ETTD: Everything Trump Touches Dies”—has proved wondrously predictive so far.
Further thought: A friend of mine told me that her mother, raised in a fundamentalist household, was a book that provided examples from David Copperfield to teach her How To Be a Christian Woman. While David’s Dora was held up as positive in that she is ultra feminine, she was critiqued as being too infantile so that one should aspire instead to be like the more mature —and even more nurturing and self-sacrificing–Agnes. Both women, however, resemble the “angel in the house” celebrated in the Coventry Patmore poem of that period.
In Dombey and Son, I found myself wincing at how Dickens celebrates sweet Florence for essentially being, unlike her (more interesting) stepmother, a self-sacrificing doormat. The cloying portrayal helps explain why Dombey is not more highly regarded.
That being noted, however, I did find myself cheering characters who choose morality and sacrifice over convenience and self-gratification. I thought of all those civil servants who went into government because they love their country and now are being pressured to pledge allegiance to Trump. Dickens reminds us of what integrity under fire looks like and how one can choose to respond. Fundamentalists may hold up Dickens women as exemplars, but Dickens’s Christianity resembles that of Texas Democrat James Talarico much more than that of Trump’s fundamentalist idolaters.
Last week I mentioned how versions of the Holy Spirit’s descent appear in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. Today I turn to C.S. Lewis’s handling of the Genesis creation story, which is often read on the first Sunday after Pentecost. I turn for assistance to The Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm, written and just released by my friend and colleague John Gatta.
I’ve previously written about Gatta’s The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation and Green Gospel:Foundations of Ecotheology. In both he challenges those who insist on human dominion over or even stewardship of nature because such framings separate humans from nature. Rather, animals, plants, and minerals are also involved in God’s unfolding creation. Such a vision, Gatta says, is to be found in The Magician’s Nephew, where Aslan sings Narnia into existence. I start with the well-known opening of Genesis:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good…
Through the use of magic rings Polly and Digory, along with several others, have been transported to a formless void of their own. Then Aslan appears:
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.
With the singing, stars begin to shine in the heavens, followed by much more:
The lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could now be heard ruffling the grass. Soon there were other things besides grass. The higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley. Digory did not know what they were until one began coming up quite close to him. It was a little, spiky thing that threw out dozens of arms and covered these arms with green and grew larger at the rate of about an inch every two seconds. There were dozens of these things all round him now. When they were nearly as tall as himself he saw what they were. “Trees!” he exclaimed.
And:
Can you imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot? For that is really the best description of what was happening. In all directions it was swelling into humps. They were of very different sizes, some no bigger than mole-hills, some as big as wheelbarrows, two the size of cottages. And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, and the crumbled earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an animal…. The panthers, leopards and things of that sort, sat down at once to wash the loose earth off theirhind quarters and then stood up against the trees to sharpen their front claws. Showers of birds came out of the trees. Butterflies fluttered. Bees got to work on the flowers as if they hadn’t a second to lose….And now you could hardly hear the song of the Lion; there was so much cawing, cooing, crowing, braying, neighing, baying, barking, lowing, bleating, and trumpeting.
To Gatta, Aslan singing Narnia into existence is the most memorable feature of Magician’s Nephew, something “beautifully consonant with the way other imaginative writers–ranging from the authors of the Book of Job, Dante, and Shakespeare to J.R. R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, John Muir and Wendell Berry –have expounded upon the music of creation.”
In both Genesis and Magician’sNephew, Gatta observes, creation stems “not from any intrinsic necessity, but in a spirit of pure, radically expansive love, exuberance, and joy.” Where the two stories diverge is that Aslan’s song “culminates in the birth not of our own human species, but of animals gifted with intelligible speech who will become the land’s central consciousness.”
This is important, Gatta says, because it moves us past the dominion/stewardship conversation. Although “humans from elsewhere” will play a role in Narnia’s future, the focus is initially on non-human creation. Gatta points out,
After Aslan as Singer sounds the keynote, other beings—including trees, stars, waters, horses, rabbits, moles, beavers, leopards, and sundry wild beasts–are drawn to join their voices in glorious harmony with that keynote, and with “the voice of the earth herself.” It’s a symphony that echoes the Book of Job and other biblical texts, wherein the morning stars join with countless other forms of being, both visible and invisible, to sing God’s hymn of ongoing creation.
By calling out, ‘“Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. . . . Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters,” all created beings are “called to consent to their full emergence.” Nor is that all. The Creator expects them to take an active part in their own being and becoming, as well as “in promoting the health of their larger community of creation.” Gatta explains the significance of this:
The creatures Aslan addresses here have already come to birth but still need to awaken to a fuller, second stage of their creation. That participatory stage calls for them to respond to the gift of life with a sign of their acceptance. It is phrased in strikingly direct, penetrating language.
“Creatures, I give you yourselves. . . . and I give you myself.”
Accentuating his point, Gatta says that Aslan is expecting his creatures “to develop an involvement and responsibility in their own creation, conceived as an ongoing process.” By the declaration, “I give you myself,” the creator lion “confirms his own sustained engagement in the process.” He further confirms it by touching noses with each of the animals.
God, in short, has “a personal, intimate investment in the process of Creation.”
Unfortunately sin has also entered Narnia in the form of Uncle Andrew, who dreams of monetizing the new world, and Queen Jadis, who wants to assert dominion over it (and ultimately will do so as the White Witch). They are incapable of hearing the voice of the Lion. As Aslan says of Andrew, “If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings,” before adding, “Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”
For those humans who harken to the Lion’s song, however, a vision of heaven on earth opens. “Gawd!” says the cabdriver. “Ain’t it lovely?”
“Whoever has ears,” Jesus said, “let them hear.”
To sum up Gatta’s argument, Magician’s Nephew shows a divine Creator who is integrally involved in “the continuous creation of things” and a Creation that is called upon to play an active role in the process. Rather than thinking of God as one who has set up Creation and then ducked out, only to return disgusted when humans messed things up, Gatta says we should see God as an on-going, ever-changing, and never-ending journey. The question is whether we will get on board.
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 36th Installment
I was blessed beyond all measure to have had a career teaching at a public liberal arts college whose mission I believed in and where I had the flexibility to teach a wide variety of literature and writing courses. Whenever, as a faculty member, I was asked to fill out a “job satisfaction” survey, I could never reply with anything but the highest marks. I put a tremendous amount of time and effort into creating and teaching courses, so much so that other areas of my college service suffered. (For instance, I was a so-so department chair, except when it came to hiring good faculty, and an indifferent contributor to faculty meetings.) Serving students struck me as a sacred duty, and I was always grateful to competent administrators for allowing me to focus on my teaching.
As I am nearing the end of this memoir, I look back at the courses I taught in search of what they tell me about myself.
Every semester we taught three four-credit classes. Usually we taught either Composition or Intro to Lit, along with a 200-level survey class and a 300 or 400-level period/author/elective class. In my later years we added two-semester senior projects and first-year seminars.
Being a small college, we could teach our grad school specialty only once every two years—a Restoration and 18thCentury British Literature course in my case. Since a normal semester had us teaching a general education course and a survey class, this meant we had three extra courses to play with in a two-year-cycle. The senior projects, for their part, had their own variety, and over the years I supervised projects on Beowulf, the Arthurian tradition, Charles Dickens, the Faustus/Faust tradition, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Stoppard, Tom Robbins, Milan Kundera, and Gail Godwin (to name a few), along with a number of film projects. The senior projects were very hands-on as I required my students to meet with me weekly.
By the end of my 36 years, I had taught all three of the Literature in History surveys multiple times. These comprised British Literature to 1700 (the class I taught most often), British and American Literature in the 18th and 19th centuries, and English-language literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. The surveys were among my favorite courses. I turned the first two into “greatest hits” courses and, for the third survey, found a work that could represent each significant historical period (Wilfred Owen for World War I, Great Gatsby and The Waste Land for the Twenties, Grapes of Wrath for the Thirties, Catch 22 for World War II, The Things They Carried for Vietnam, Handmaid’s Tale for feminism, Things Fall Apart and God of Small Things for post-colonialism).
For Intro to Lit, which I also loved, I initially chose a fantasy literature focus (for which I included The Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Midsummer Night’s Dream) but eventually moved to a Nature focus after the college received a grant from the Pew Foundation.
My favorite course was my Restoration and 18th Century Literature course. I had chosen the period in graduate school on the grounds that any era that produced Tom Jones: History of a Foundling was worth studying, and I taught Henry Fielding’s novel every two years, challenging though that massive work proved to be. The author is a comic genius and fit nicely into the “Couples Comedy” theme that I ultimately settled on, as did Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In the course we explored the dark anarchistic comedy of the Restoration and the milder comedy of the later “Age of Sensibility.” In one assignment I had the class apply different theories of laughter to the Restoration works. In another, they were to compare and contrast one of the 18th century works (which also included Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Fanny Burney’s Evelina) to a modern rom-com.
Later, once the school initiated first-year seminars, I spent several years teaching “Jane Austen and the Dating Game.” Oh, and I once taught an upper-level author class on the works that Austen’s characters are reading. (Austen is critical of most of them.)
What does it say about me that I have always preferred comedy to tragedy, including Shakespeare’s comedies to his tragedies? I think of Northrup Frye, who saw in plays like As You Like It, Midsummer, and The Winter’s Tale “the old ritual pattern of the victory of summer over winter” and “the death and revival of human beings.” Talking of the “New Comedy” of the Roman playwrights, he theorizes,
In all good New Comedy there is a social as well as an individual theme which must be sought in the general atmosphere of reconciliation that makes the final marriage possible. As the hero gets closer to the heroine and opposition is overcome, all the right-thinking people come over to his side. Thus a new social unit is formed on the stage, and the moment that this social unit crystallizes is the moment of the comic resolution. In the last scene, when the dramatist usually tries to get all his characters on the stage at once, the audience witnesses the birth of a renewed sense of social integration. In comedy as in life the regular expression of this is a festival, whether a marriage, a dance, or a feast.
My commitment to community and my general optimism probably leads me to love comedies. Perhaps my love also stems in part from my own privilege—I can afford to believe that all will come out right—although I have found myself questioning this preference. Towards the end, I fell a little out of love with Tom Jones, coming to see Fielding’s satire, especially at the expense of women and the lower classes, as arising out of a sense of gentry entitlement. In my last year, knowing that I would never again teach the course, I used the three weeks that I usually reserved for Tom Jones to instead teach, for the first time, Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem. Still, one could do worse than embrace Fielding’s wit and his open-hearted love of life.
I’ve written about how my love of fantasy as a child never left me, providing me a way to simultaneously escape from while indirectly engaging with a threatening world. In my final years, I started teaching courses in both American and British fantasy. In the American Fantasy class, I identified two strains of fantasy running through American literature, dark and light, with the interrelation of the two defining us as a country. (On the one hand, there is Poe, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Anne Rice, on the other L. Frank Baum and Disney.) I concluded the course with Louise Erdrich’s magical realist novel Tracks, which coming from a Chippewa author from a different tradition resisted this neat bifurcation.
With British fantasy, meanwhile, I would begin with The Tempest, move on to Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes, and then plunge into the rich fantasy creations of the Victorians before concluding with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Angela Carter, and Terry Pratchett.
In the spring of 2018 I wanted to teach an entirely new course before I retired and so created a course devoted to Magical Realism. My “world literature” course began with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and then moved on to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I chose this last because I became enthralled with what I characterized as the Japanese author’s “existential fantasies.” I also chose Murakami as the topic of my final first-year seminar.
For years I taught the department’s Literary Theory class, eventually focusing just on the reader. (Before I had divided the class into theories of text, context, author, and reader.) This became an immensely important course for me and served as the foundation for my book. As we worked our way from Plato and Aristotle to W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum, I had my students try out the different theories. We explored why audiences went ballistic over the subtitle of Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman and examined how Oscar Wilde’s opposing trial lawyer attacked Picture of Dorian Gray. For the class’s final essay, as I describe in my book, the students chose literary works that had “caused a commotion” and figured out why. I road-tested early versions of my book on the class.
There were a few other courses sprinkled among these: a “Literature of Madness” course team-taught with a psychologist; multiple film classes (including composition courses with a film theme); a “Technology and the American Dream” class, team-taught with a sociologist; “Literature of Revolution” and “Sexual Politics of the Novel” classes (taught in my earlier, more political days); Black Literature; Minority Literature; Victorian Novels; and Feature Writing.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether my wide-ranging interests signaled a dilettante at work. Certainly, the path I took didn’t lend itself to my producing scholarship in my field of specialty, which is what people do at research universities. I was fortunate to be at a college that valued teaching over scholarship although St. Mary’s required some publications, and by the end I had 20 articles and a self-published book. But they were all stand-alone projects. My most significant publication, Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History, I completed after I retired.
I sometimes wonder how my academic life would have been different had I focused on my “reader response” interests from the very first. I now realize that studying the impact of works on readers has been the throughline of my college teaching, even though I didn’t always realize it. So do I look back with Robert Frost’s regretful sigh about the wandering path that I chose?
A little. I am certainly proud of my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, who is far more focused than I ever was and who is producing ground-breaking work on Victorian time machine literature. My father was similarly focused in his work on the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. I, by contrast, look like someone who could never make up his mind.
And yet, I carry so many rich memories of reading and teaching these works that my regrets exist only in a minor key. Furthermore, as my blog has become my classroom since retiring, I can see how my wide range provides me with a tool for almost every occasion.
Given that I haven’t stopped filling my toolbox—once I finish listening to Dombey and Son, I will have completed my collection of Dickens’s novels (excluding the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood)—it appears that I will stick to my eclectic approach to reading. Maybe, after all, this was the pathway I was destined to follow. I was just fortunate enough to find a college that allowed me to do it.
Thanks to Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film, The Odyssey is having a moment. Elon Musk once again displayed his racism by decrying the casting of Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o (she also holds U.S. citizenship) as Helen of Troy, and Jay Kuo, one of my favorite political bloggers, has invoked Sylla and Charybdis in discussing Trump’s Strait of Hormuz dilemma. And then (although this isn’t connected with the film), a friend alerted me to a news item that basketball legend Shaquille O’Neil earned an advanced degree in Sports Management with his thesis “Interdisciplinary Approach to Mentorship through the lens of the epic poem The Odyssey.” But this last one will have to await a future post.
Blogger Noah Berlatsky, another fine political blogger, lays out the fascistic foundations of Musk’s bigotry and then explores its dangers. To “racist pseudo-intellectuals like Musk”—and, one could add, to the Nazis–the Greeks were “not just white, but transcendental icons of white culture.” For them, therefore, Nolan’s casting decision is “an insult to whiteness, and a sign of Hollywood’s assault on Western purity and honor.”
In his article, Berlatsky parallels this aesthetic with Hitler’s attack on Jewish art and notes that Musk has the same genocidal aims as the Fuhrer. For Hitler, he notes,
genocide was not just about eliminating and murdering human beings. It also involved a thoroughgoing effort to remove, destroy, and discredit art which he believed was “degenerate”—especially art by Jewish, Communist, and avant garde artists (groups which Hitler indiscriminately and compulsively conflated.) Under the Nazis, the work of Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were banned. Jewish musicians were barred from performing. Jewish artwork (or art that Hitler claimed was Jewish-influenced) was ridiculed in an infamous “degenerate art” exhibition. Jewish directors and actors were expelled from German cinema.
Musk, who has expressed an admiration for Hitler, obsesses over the fact that non-whites outnumber whites. Unfortunately, also like Hitler, he at one point had the power to carry out a genocidal project. His wholesale attack on USAID and other global aid programs last year led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans, mostly children, of malnutrition and preventable disease. Berlatsky points out that the end of aid has also contributed to a dangerous increase in African violence. “If aid is not restored,” he writes,”researchers believe preventable deaths because of Musk’s genocide will reach 14 million by 2030.”
In The Secret War against Hate, Steven J. Ross—interviewed by Rachel Maddow Monday night—notes that there has been an active fascist strain in nn life for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. One must see Musk’s attack on Nolan and Lupita Nyong’o in light of that strain. Unlike political correctness and DEI programs on the left—which are often attempts to address racial inequalities—violent erasure is the end goal of America’s fascists. Attacking multiracial art is integral to their project. Bertlasky observes,
For Hitler, a painting that didn’t appeal to him was not just a painting that didn’t appeal to him. It was a deliberate, violent attack on his nation and all that he held dear. Decadent art, Jewish art, was framed as an essentially genocidal assault on Germany, its culture, and its people. The destruction of such art was part of the effort to erase Jews from Germany, but it was also a justification of that effort. The ridicule of Jewish cultural production, and the framing of Jewish visibility in culture as an existential threat, served to dehumanize actual Jewish people and to legitimize their mass murder.
Over the past 18 months, we in America have becoming increasingly aware as to how far authoritarians are willing to go once they seize the reins of power. Whether it’s unleashing ICE agents on American cities, banning books, purging school history curricula, or attacking a Black actress, it is all in service of white Christian fascism.
Jay Kuo takes his use of Odyssey in a different direction. I start first with the passage he alludes to in his discussion of the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike Trump with his war of choice, Odysseus is forced to navigate a dangerous strait if he is to get home. Both men, however, learn that a price must be paid once they are enmeshed. The island goddess Circe sets forth the problem, starting with the six-headed serpentine Scylla:
That is the den of Scylla, where she yaps abominably, a newborn whelp’s cry, though she is huge and monstrous. God or man, no one could look on her in joy. Her legs— and there are twelve—are like great tentacles, unjointed, and upon her serpent necks are borne six heads like nightmares of ferocity, with triple serried rows of fangs and deep gullets of black death. Half her length, she sways her heads in air, outside her horrid cleft, hunting the sea around that promontory for dolphins, dogfish, or what bigger game thundering Amphitrite feeds in thousands. And no ship’s company can claim to have passed her without loss and grief; she takes, from every ship, one man for every gullet. (trans. Robert Fitzgerald)
To avoid her, however, a ship would have to deal with a whirling maelstrom:
On the opposite point seems more a tongue of land you’d touch with a good bowshot, at the narrows. A great wild fig, a shaggy mass of leaves, grows on it, and Charybdis lurks below to swallow down the dark sea tide. Three times from dawn to dusk she spews it up and sucks it down again three times, a whirling maelstrom; if you come upon her then the god who makes earth tremble could not save you.
Circe advises Odysseus to choose Scylla:
[H]ug the cliff of Scylla, take your ship through on a racing stroke. Better to mourn six men than lose them all, and the ship, too. ..
This is what Odysseus does, even though, in a futile gesture, he tries hacking at Scylla as she grabs his men. The scene is heartrending:
Then Scylla made her strike, whisking six of my best men from the ship. I happened to glance aft at ship and oarsmen and caught sight of their arms and legs, dangling high overhead. Voices came down to me in anguish, calling my name for the last time. A man surf-casting on a point of rock for bass or mackerel, whipping his long rod to drop the sinker and the bait far out, will hook a fish and rip it from the surface to dangle wriggling through the air; so these were borne aloft in spasms toward the cliff. She ate them as they shrieked there, in her den, in the dire grapple, reaching still for me— and deathly pity ran me through at that sight—far the worst I ever suffered questing the passes of the strange sea.
Now for Kuo’s application. First, there’s the Scylla option, which would involve America cutting its losses and rowing like hell to get out of the entanglement.
For Trump, the Scylla of Hormuz is the giant loser of a “peace deal.” Steering toward it means accepting a brutal political accounting: Trump started a war that sent oil prices surging 40 percent above pre-war levels, drove inflation to its highest point in three years, and cost innocent lives, including 13 Americans and over 120 Iranian school children. Under the current proposal, Iran would be in a stronger position than it was in February. Even more humiliating for Trump, Iran’s uranium stockpile—which he repeatedly cited to justify the global economic pain inflicted by the war—would remain intact. And to top things off, Iran would retain de facto control of the Strait.
As bad as this is, the Charybdis option is even worse since it would involve
a full resumption of the war. It would require more U.S. military strikes and more economic pressure, all in the hopes of finishing what Operation Epic Fury started. But a wider conflagration risks pulling in an already volatile entire region, setting neighboring nations’ oil refineries ablaze, sending oil above $200 a barrel, and inflicting economic damage on an unprecedented scale. Once caught in its vortex, no one would return from that whirlpool, and Trump seems finally to recognize this.
Those Republicans worried about a shellacking in the November elections are opting for Scylla:
For all their bluster, Trump’s officers on deck remain in a trap they cannot escape. The party fears becoming the sacrificial vessel, politically devoured by Scylla from a terrible and humiliating deal. But they understand that there is no better deal to be had.
There are Congressional war hawks, however—including Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham—who are arguing against the Scylla option. To do so, however, they are refusing to openly acknowledge that the whirlpool of all-out war is the only alternative.
Say that Trump, like Odysseus gets through the strait—which is to say, that he walks away and pretends that the Iran debacle never happened. If one goes by the story, although he himself will survive, his party won’t. Kuo draws the continuing parallels:
Six of his party had been devoured by Scylla, and the rest had grown restless. They were warned by the gods not to slaughter the sacred cattle of the sun god, but they proceeded anyway, with hunger, exhaustion and the collapse of discipline doing what Scylla and Charybdis could not.
As punishment, Zeus destroyed the ship. Every last member of his party perished, and Odysseus had to survive on his own, the wreckage of his vessel now his life raft.
Tidy though the comparison is, Kuo needs a second Greek myth to round out his story. This one, like so many Greek stories, involves hubris, and I can’t think of a more perfect story to sum up Trump, not only with regard to Iran but to the United States as well:
Yet to compare Trump to Odysseus is to flatter him beyond recognition. The figure from Greek mythology Trump more closely resembles is Phaethon, the vain mortal son of the sun god Helios, who demanded to drive his father’s celestial chariot across the sky to silence those who doubted his divine bloodline. His father warned him, begged him, enumerating every danger, every reason Phaethon was unqualified for the task.
Phaethon grabbed the reins anyway, certain that his stature accorded him what greater beings had mastered through long experience. He lost control almost immediately. The chariot lurched and careened. The earth scorched, and rivers boiled. Whole civilizations burned below while he clung to the reins. He was unable to halt the conflagration he’d lit, and unable to admit he never should have begun it.
Zeus finally struck him down with a thunderbolt, not to punish him, but to stop the terrible damage he was inflicting on everyone else.
Kuo concludes with a punchy moral:
Were this Ancient Greece, we’d say the gods are being sorely tested by Trump’s hubris and recklessness. And their patience is wearing thin.
With Trump’s all-out assault on efforts to address climate change, the story works literally as well as metaphorically. God help us all.
I bring your attention to an essay that expresses something I have long thought. In writing about Donald Trump’s response to Stephen Colbert’s final appearance on CBS’s Late Show, Editorial Board’s John Stoehr reflects that Trump, for all his power, is “the loneliest, most miserable man in America.” As such, he hated Colbert’s joy.
In making his case, Stoehr cites a Robert Hayden poem and also references Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Trump pressured CBS to fire Colbert and then, following the final show, posted a putdown that doubled as a self-description. Colbert, Trump wrote,
is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!
Colbert, of course, has always refused to be dragged down to Trump’s level, and I learned from Stoehr that he once quoted the first stanza of the following Hayden poem:
We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us.
Reclaim now, now renew the vision of a human world where godliness is possible and man is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike
but man
permitted to be man.
The major monsters of abstraction currently threatening us are race-based, but Hayden generalizes beyond African Americans to include Vietnamese, whites, Italians and Jews. His poetry was criticized by Black activists in the late 1960s, who engaged in their own abstracting (some even called him an Uncle Tom), but today we are facing white fascism’s far more lethal abstractions. To counter them, Hayden tells us, we must hold on to a vision of humanity “where godliness is possible.”
Stephen Greenblatt’s 2018 book about Shakespeare’s tyrants helps Stoehr understand Trump’s loneliness. The eminent Shakespearean, writing with Trump in mind, has this to say about Richard III:
What excites [the tyrant] is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.
His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him. At first that knowledge energizes him, making him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies. But it soon begins to eat away at him and exhaust him.
Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage. It would have been better had Richard never been born.
Alone and panicking as his enemies close in, Richard calls out, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” By this point in the play, however, he has alienated practically everyone and there is no one to come to his aid.
Writing for the satiric website McSweeney’s, Mark Paglia smartly and wittily takes down Chief Justice Don Roberts, the man largely responsible for shielding Donald Trump from responsibility, for attempting to return America to the Jim Crow and back-alley abortion era, and for unleashing big money and irresponsible corporations on America. Entitled “Excerpts from Chief Justice John Roberts’ High School English Essays,” the article imagines how a teenage Roberts would respond to literary classics. Here are some of my favorites:
— Rather than tilting at a windmill, the proper procedure would be for Don Quixote to file suit to abolish all windmills, ideally in the Fifth Circuit.
— Huck shows great disrespect for the Court’s precedent in Dred Scott when aiding the fugitive Jim, presumably due to liberal indoctrination by the Widow Douglas.
— Simply wearing a small red letter A is no great burden, and it would infringe upon the free speech of the rest of the town were Hester Prynne not to wear it.
–The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass relates only his own views on slavery; we cannot properly assess the merits of his book without giving equal time to his slave owner.
— It is the prerogative of the government of Oceania to determine each day whether Eurasia or East Asia is the enemy, and congressional approval would unjustly constrain Big Brother.
— Iago says that he has no reason for hating Othello, and it would be wrong of us to impute any racist anti-Moor motivation on his part.
— Despite The Jungle’s focus on the possibility of rats or the occasional factory worker winding up in a hot dog, the true horror would be higher meat prices due to an overprotective nanny state.
— Packing Bertha Mason into the attic of Thornfield Hall while allowing Jane Eyre to use the rest of the house is permissible because it is based on restricting her proto-feminist hysteria, not her Creole racial identity.
— By being such a miser, Scrooge saves enough money to cure Tiny Tim of the diseases caused by Scrooge not paying his father enough in wages, demonstrating that privatized health care and non-union labor are self-correcting.
The piece concludes with Roberts presenting a doctor’s note that excuses him from reading The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. The reason: “It could cause acute psychological distress and fainting spells.”
In this spirit, I could imagine this teenage Roberts
–arguing for the entail that makes Mr. Collins heir to the Bennet estate;
–defending the workhouse policies that starve and beat Oliver Twist and then make him a child apprentice to an undertaker;
–endorsing the 18th century pamphleteer’s modest proposal for preventing the children of the poor people of Ireland from being a burthen to their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the public;
–contending that it is no big deal for the Baron to cut off a lock of Belinda’s hair (“rape?!! puleez!”);
–arguing that Anna Karenina and Tess of the d’Urbervilles deserve what they get; and
—declaring that no one has the right to subpoena Humbert Humbert’s diary.
To get serious about the Chief Justice, Roberts infuriates me the way that Blifil in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones does—which is to say, he is sanctimoniously self-righteous and oh-so-innocent, even as he presides over the worst Supreme Court since the 1857 Roger Taney court. Here he is complaining about the criticism:
I think [people] view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. Certainly, those aspects are open to debate and people should talk about them, but we’re not simply part of the political process and there’s a reason for that and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.
Blifil claims to look with more sorrow than anger at the accusations directed against him. When Squire Allworthy’s landlady defends Tom, Blifil responds “with one of those grinning sneers with which the devil marks his best beloved.” “As for my character,” he says, “I perceive, by some hints she hath thrown out, he [Tom] hath been very free with it, but I forgive him.”
Recent evidence has come to light that, for all his lofty talk, Roberts has been striving to dismantle the Voting Rights Act ever since he clerked for rightwing justice William Rehnquist and served in Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice. As an article in Slate puts it, “The justice bent the law to meet his will,” and with SCOTUS’s Louisiana v. Callais decision—which will allow legislatures to oust African American legislators from office throughout the south, he has finally succeeded.
The McClellan Arch at Arlington, on which are inscribed lines from Theodore O’Hara’s “Bivouac of the Dead”
Monday – Memorial Day
Donald Trump wants to build a triumphal arch near Arlington Cemetery, which along with dwarfing the Lincoln Memorial would also dishonor the military dead in a manner consistent with all the other ways he has done so. As Benjamin Parker of The Bulwark observes, there’s already an arch at Arlington, the much more “human scale” McClellan Gate. Better yet, on it are eloquent lines taken from Theodore O’Hara’s “Bivouac of the Dead.”
On the east side of the arch can be found the closing quatrain of the opening stanza: “On Fame’s Eternal Camping Ground Their Silent Tents Are Spread and Glory Guards With Solemn Round the Bivouac of the Dead.” On the west, meanwhile, is a quatrain from the penultimate stanza: “Rest on Embalmed and Sainted Dead, Dear as the Blood Ye Gave; No Impious Footsteps Here Shall Tread on the Herbage of Your Grave.”
This is not a day to dwell on how Trump’s impious footsteps have violated the cemetery with tasteless photo ops. What strikes one is just how beautifully the cemetery honors those who lie buried there. The simple gravestones bring to mind Donne’s “The Canonization,” in which he believes a poem, which he compares to “a well-wrought urn,” does more honor to his love than a vast monument would. He is talking of burial because he imagines that he and his mistress have died for love:
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs…
O’Hara wrote his poem in 1847 to honor Kentucky volunteers who died in the imperialistic war that took Texas and California from Mexico. For the poet to complain about “the vengeful blood of Spain,” therefore, sticks in the craw. The best parts of “Bivouac for the Dead,” however, focus on how the dead are “free from anguish now.” I’m pretty sure that the poem was inspired in part by Sir Walter Scott’s “Soldier Rest”:
Soldier, rest! thy warfare o’er, Dream of fighting fields no more: Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking, Morn of toil, nor night of waking.
No rude sound shall reach thine ear, Armor’s clang, or war-steed champing, Trump nor pibroch summon here Mustering clan, or squadron tramping.
Here’s “Bivouac for the Dead” in its entirety:
Bivouac of the Dead By Theodore O’Hara
The muffled drum’s sad roll has beat The soldier’s last tattoo; No more on life’s parade shall meet That brave and fallen few. On Fame’s eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards, with solemn round, The bivouac of the dead.
No rumor of the foe’s advance Now swells upon the wind; Nor troubled thought at midnight haunts Of loved ones left behind; No vision of the morrow’s strife The warrior’s dream alarms; No braying horn nor screaming fife At dawn shall call to arms.
Their shriveled swords are red with rust, Their plumed heads are bowed, Their haughty banner, trailed in dust, Is now their martial shroud. And plenteous funeral tears have washed The red stains from each brow, And the proud forms, by battle gashed Are free from anguish now.
The neighing troop, the flashing blade, The bugle’s stirring blast, The charge, the dreadful cannonade, The din and shout, are past; Nor war’s wild note nor glory’s peal Shall thrill with fierce delight Those breasts that nevermore may feel The rapture of the fight.
Like the fierce northern hurricane That sweeps the great plateau, Flushed with the triumph yet to gain, Came down the serried foe, Who heard the thunder of the fray Break o’er the field beneath, Knew well the watchword of that day Was “Victory or death!”
Long had the doubtful conflict raged O’er all that stricken plain, For never fiercer fight had waged The vengeful blood of Spain; And still the storm of battle blew, Still swelled the gory tide; Not long, our stout old chieftain knew, Such odds his strength could bide.
Twas in that hour his stern command Called to a martyr’s grave The flower of his beloved land, The nation’s flag to save. By rivers of their father’s gore His first-born laurels grew, And well he deemed the sons would pour Their lives for glory too.
For many a mother’s breath has swept O’er Angostura’s plain — And long the pitying sky has wept Above its moldered slain. The raven’s scream, or eagle’s flight, Or shepherd’s pensive lay, Alone awakes each sullen height That frowned o’er that dread fray.
Sons of the Dark and Bloody Ground Ye must not slumber there, Where stranger steps and tongues resound Along the heedless air. Your own proud land’s heroic soil Shall be your fitter grave; She claims from war his richest spoil — The ashes of her brave.
Thus ‘neath their parent turf they rest, Far from the gory field, Borne to a Spartan mother’s breast On many a bloody shield; The sunshine of their native sky Smiles sadly on them here, And kindred eyes and hearts watch by The heroes sepulcher.
Rest on embalmed and sainted dead! Dear as the blood ye gave; No impious footstep shall here tread The herbage of your grave; Nor shall your glory be forgot While fame her records keeps, Or Honor points the hallowed spot Where Valor proudly sleeps.
Yon marble minstrel’s voiceless stone In deathless song shall tell, When many a vanquished ago has flown, The story how ye fell; Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter’s blight, Nor Time’s remorseless doom, Shall dim one ray of glory’s light That gilds your deathless tomb
