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Monday
Sometimes, when one despairs about the state of the world (as I currently am), a poem about someone just as depressed can provide some relief. I didn’t realize I needed Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall—Sixty Years Later” until blogger Greg Olear introduced me to it.
Olear, whose substack blog Prevail periodically does deep dives into various poems, novels, plays, and other artistic works, yesterday examined a poem in which an 80-year-old Tennyson expresses his disgust. What he reports is unnervingly similar to what we today are seeing as Trump launches assaults on folks at home and folks abroad.
For instance, there’s one stanza that (Olear points out) “is a bit more topical this morning than it was 24 hours ago.” Tennyson is gazing at the grave of a warrior ancestor and seeing naught but futility:
Cross’d! for once he sail’d the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride;
Dead the warrior, dead his glory, dead the cause in which he died.
Tennyson goes on to discuss how the optimistic morning of his youth has given way to disillusion. I understand the trajectory, having once thought—this during the Obama and Biden administrations—that America could be a force for good on the world stage. For his part, Tennyson mentions how he once thought civilization was moving forward. Now, however, he discovers that “the Good, the True, the Pure, the Just” don’t last “forever” but are only temporary blips, “lost within a growing gloom”:
Truth for truth, and good for good! The Good, the True, the Pure, the Just;
Take the charm ‘Forever’ from them, and they crumble into dust.Gone the cry of ‘Forward, Forward,’ lost within a growing gloom;
Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space,
Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace!‘Forward’ rang the voices then, and of the many mine was one.
Let us hush this cry of ‘Forward’ till ten thousand years have gone.
The history of the world doesn’t have much forward motion to it, he notes, as cruelty is heaped upon cruelty. While he starts with the brutal Assyrians and the Mongol horde, he moves on to Christians, who have managed to twist Christ’s words into something resembling “heathen hate”:
Far among the vanish’d races, old Assyrian kings would flay
Captives whom they caught in battle—iron-hearted victors they.Ages after, while in Asia, he that led the wild Moguls,
Timur built his ghastly tower of eighty thousand human skulls,Then, and here in Edward’s time, an age of noblest English names,
Christian conquerors took and flung the conquer’d Christian into flames.Love your enemy, bless your haters, said the Greatest of the great;
Christian love among the Churches look’d the twin of heathen hate.From the golden alms of Blessing man had coin’d himself a curse:
Rome of Caesar, Rome of Peter, which was crueller? which was worse?
Here in America, liberals embraced the Enlightenment ideals of the founders and thought that, with growing openness to diversity, equity and inclusion, we could at last achieve something approaching a just society. Now we watch fellow citizens exhibiting the bloodlust of former ages–“passions of the primal clan”—as they cheer masked men snatching innocent people off the streets. The answer to the question Tennyson asks appears to be, “No, we have not grown beyond these passions”:
e was ever on her mountain, watching till the day begun
Crown’d with sunlight—over darkness—from the still unrisen sun.Have we grown at last beyond the passions of the primal clan?
‘Kill your enemy, for you hate him,’ still, ‘your enemy’ was a man.
Why did we ever think that we were on an upward trajectory, Tennyson asks. Sure, hope for the best, he tells us—but if you want to know “how all will end,” just read “the wide world’s annals.” Technological progress, while promising great cures, has also led to “dynamite and revolver.” He asks whether there has ever been an age so crammed with menace, madness, and written and spoken lies as the present one:
Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! who can tell how all will end!
Read the wide world’s annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.Hope the best, but hold the Present fatal daughter of the Past,
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.Ay, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise:
When was age so cramm’d with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?
Olear notes that the last line pretty much sums up “Trump Redux,” as do the stanzas that follow. He particularly likes the coinage “tonguesters,” which perfectly captures the “internet trolls and full-of-sound-and-fury MAGA maniacs—to say nothing of the small-minded (and short-fingered) monster who leads us to ill-advised war with his noisome deceit.” The fact that our tonguesters parrot the American founders’ call for freedom while opting for a dictator is a great irony:
Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game;
Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.Step by step we gain’d a freedom known to Europe, known to all;
Step by step we rose to greatness,—thro’ the tonguesters we may fall.
Not finished yet, Tennyson then “gives voice to what will become the entire MAGA ethos, presciently denouncing the United States of 2025.” Instead of choosing people with experience who could govern wisely, who valued the Constitution and worked on behalf of “we the people,” the electorate mocked Wisdom and made the man who wooed “the yelling street” their king—and he, in turn, surrounded himself with arrogant (not meek) flatterers. It’s like the dark ages all over again only without the faith and without the sense of meaning that is integral to hope:
You that woo the Voices—tell them ‘old experience is a fool,’
Teach your flatter’d kings that only those who cannot read can rule.Pluck the mighty from their seat, but set no meek ones in their place;
Pillory Wisdom in your markets, pelt your offal at her face.Tumble Nature heel o’er head, and, yelling with the yelling street,
Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet.Bring the old dark ages back without the faith, without the hope,
Break the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the slope.
As I read the line “Teach your flatter’d kings that only those who cannot read can rule,” I think of how Trump doesn’t bother to read his intelligence briefings, including those that informed him that Iran was nowhere close to creating a nuclear warhead. He goes where his feet—or his feelings—take him, not to the reasoning brain.
While I find solace in Tennyson articulating my pain, however, ultimately he gives me something more valuable. In the closing stanzas he reminds himself that he has free will (“the foundations of the Will”) and that he can choose to follow “the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine.” He believes, as I do, that “the highest Human Nature is divine” and that by following Light and doing Right, we can half-control our doom. The “deathless Angel seated in the vaant tomb” refers to the Resurrection and is a reminder that, according to Christian belief, Love is more powerful than death.
Ere she [the Earth] gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with the game:
Nay, there may be those about us whom we neither see nor name,
Felt within us as ourselves, the Powers of Good, the Powers of Ill,
Strewing balm, or shedding poison in the fountains of the Will.Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine.
Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.Follow Light, and do the Right—for man can half-control his doom—
Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb.Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past.
I that loathed, have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last.
For all his loathing for humankind and its bloody history, Tennyson places final faith in love, which winds out over disgust. His final declaration is delivered with confidence.
