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Friday
Several months ago Mel Endy, my former dean and colleague, sent out this Wendell Berry poem, which helps explain for me some of the “lonely, eager hate” that we are seeing from Trumpists. As grim as the poem may seem, I find it uplifting in the way it grounds me in my core belief that love is “the only world; it is Heaven and Earth.” It also points to the emptiness of those define their lives by resentment:
Sabbath Poems, #4
By Wendell Berry
Hate has no world.
The people of hate must try
to possess the world of love,
for it is the only world;
it is Heaven and Earth.
But as lonely, eager hate
possesses it, it disappears;
it never did exist,
and hate must seek another
world that love has made.
The poem reminds me of Satan’s soliloquy in Book IV of Paradise Lost. Gazing down at Eden and then up at the sun, Satan recalls the good old days when he was God’s archangel. It is his betrayal of his better self that fuels his anger. Addressing the sun, he tells how he “hate[s] thy beams,”
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Sphere;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav’n against Heav’ns matchless King…
While ruminating, he realizes that it is resentment of God’s love that fuels his anger:
Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less then to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good prov’d ill in me,
And wrought but malice…
In the end, he embraces his hatred, even though he knows it is making him miserable:
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep…
Trump has followers who, even as his policies make their lives harder, would rather suffer and hate than accept people unlike themselves. Their inner misery propels them to destroy worlds that love has made. Or as Satan says elsewhere in the poem, “For only in destroying I find ease to my relentless thoughts.”
