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Tuesday
As hurricanes bore down on the east coast of the United States, there’s one poem that I found myself periodically reciting. We memorized Lord Byron’s “Destruction of Sennacherib” my sophomore year in high school as an example of anapestic meter (short, short, long):
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
We did not experience the poem’s happy ending, where the invading force is destroyed, not the Israelites. It is the people of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina who “lay withered and strown” (along with their leaves):
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
A retired librarian, wrote wondering whether Hurricane Milton was revenging itself on Florida for allowing a school district to ban Paradise Lost (you can read about it here). Since I’m hearing about this particular ban for the first time, allow me a momentary digression.
Back in 1994, in a fight with my Maryland school superintendent over her banning of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I imagined a Paradise Lost ban. Thinking no one would take me seriously, I noted that Milton has far worse in his epic than Morrison’s two pages of trash talk. After all, in one scene Satan rapes his daughter Sin, who is then subsequently raped by Death, their son. The birth of Death, meanwhile, tears Sin’s entrails apart in horrific style. And indeed, I was right: Paradise Lost remains untouched in St. Mary’s County, Maryland whereas English teachers to this day are not allowed to teach Song of Solomon.
I don’t know if this was the scene that triggered the Florida ban or if the censors were more concerned about Adam and Eve having sex, which was controversial even when Milton wrote the poem. In any event, one school board member asserted that Milton’s masterpiece was removed “not out of prudery but by fear of inviting trouble from the state.”
This is how bullies and fascists work—they establish an atmosphere in which people begin censoring themselves.
For the record, Milton doesn’t say that Adam and Eve have sex. He just says that did not not have sex. Here’s the passage:
[I]nto their inmost bower
Handed they went; and, eased the putting off
These troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused…
Then the author launches into an attack on 17th century versions of Florida’s censors, calling them hypocrites who are “defaming as impure what God declares pure.” After all, “Our Maker bids increase; who bids abstain/ But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?” Rightwing ideologues may talk of “purity, and place, and innocence” but they are working for Satan.
But back to hurricanes. The destruction wrought by Helene and then Milton has resembled the devastation in Heaven caused by the battle between the bad angels and the good angels in Book VI. The devils, under Satan’s leadership, have gained a temporary advantage by introducing gun powder into the fray. Never at a loss, however, the good angels respond by tearing up tree-covered hills, with which they temporarily bury the bad angels. Then these respond in their turn by start throwing their own hills. As Milton describes it in a passage that North Carolinian Appalachians will relate to,
So hills amid the air encountered hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire…
Some of these people did indeed see “the bottom of the mountains upward turned.” Here’s the battle:
But they [the good angels] stood not long;
Rage prompted them at length, and found them arms
Against such hellish mischief fit to oppose.
Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power,
Which God hath in his mighty Angels placed!)
Their arms away they threw, and to the hills
(For Earth hath this variety from Heaven
Of pleasure situate in hill and dale,)
Light as the lightning glimpse they ran, they flew;
From their foundations loosening to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops
Up-lifting bore them in their hands: Amaze,
Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel host,
When coming towards them so dread they saw
The bottom of the mountains upward turned;
Till on those cursed engines’ triple-row
They saw them whelmed, and all their confidence
Under the weight of mountains buried deep;
Themselves invaded next, and on their heads
Main promontories flung, which in the air
Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions armed;
Their armor helped their harm, crushed in and bruised
Into their substance pent, which wrought them pain
Implacable, and many a dolorous groan;
Long struggling underneath, ere they could wind
Out of such prison, though Spirits of purest light,
Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown.
The rest, in imitation, to like arms
Betook them, and the neighbouring hills uptore:
So hills amid the air encountered hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire;
That under ground they fought in dismal shade;
Infernal noise! war seemed a civil game
To this uproar; horrid confusion heaped
Upon confusion rose…
Finally God, who has foreseen all this, decides enough is enough and sends in Jesus in all his glory. The bad angels take one look at him and jump over the side of heaven, falling through Chaos for nine days before ending up in hell. Jesus’s intervention is not only a lesson to the bad angels but to the good angels as well: they cannot save themselves but need God in the end.
So yes, the hurricanes have been like the battle in heaven. Or as Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s Tempest puts it before it before jumping into the sea,
Hell is empty
And all the devils are here!
And to think, conservatives once fought to keep this poem by a dead white man in schools. I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Lyn Cheney’s National Endowment for the Humanities. Then again, Florida governor Ron Desantis and his book-hating censors are not conservative but dangerously radical.
Further thought: In her note to me, my librarian reader reported,
I encourage my grandchildren to read books that make them feel uncomfortable, and I tell them if they’re not allowed to do it in school, then they can come to my house and read the ones that I have here. I want them to open their minds to all ideas and make their own decisions without being hypnotized…
To which I responded with my gratitude to her and to all librarians, who suddenly find themselves once again on the front line of the battle for critical thinking and imaginative play.
