The Decision to Stay or to Leave

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2022
Ukrainian refugees entering Poland

Tuesday

Ilya Kaminsky, the Ukrainian-American poet whose poem “We Lived Happily During the War” I shared last week tweeted four days ago that a friend in Kyev was translating Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s poem “City,” even as the city was under bombardment. While the choice of the poem didn’t at first make sense to me, I put it in dialogue with an Adrienne Rich poem and now think I’ve figured out why the poet turned to it.

Cavafy’s poem touches on a choice that many Ukrainians are agonizing over at the moment: do I stay or do I leave? If “City” didn’t at first seem applicable to Ukraine’s current situation, however, it’s because the poem essentially makes the point that leaving for a better life will do you no good if you remain the same person. It’s a theme graphically explored by Milton in his Paradise Lost description of Satan that I wrote about yesterday:

…from the bottom stir
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more than from himself can fly
By change of place…

 Here’s the poem, which has been translated by Edmund Keeley:

City

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

While the poem is grim, I hear something else in it when I think of the Ukrainian translator turning to it. Perhaps the city being attacked and the people being attacked reminds him or her—let’s say her—just how precious she finds both city and life. Perhaps she considers staying because she is reconnecting with a heart that she realizes she has buried. The prospect of death can do that.

Comparing the poem with Rich’s makes clear how much one has a choice, even in the most adverse of circumstances. Here’s Rich’s poem:

Prospective Immigrants: Please Note

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.

It is only a door.

Unlike Cavafy’s poem, Rich’s deals specifically with people leaving the country under external duress. Somewhat like Robert Frost in “The Road Not Taken,” Rich notes that it’s not clear which decision is better: each has a cost. One might think that, if one’s life is threatened, the choice is automatic, but Rich notes that this is not so:

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

And in fact, I’ve seen interviews with Ukrainian women choosing to stay (fighting-age men do not have a choice). They may realize that, even in the face of death, they can live worthily, maintain their attitudes, hold their positions—and if they must die, die bravely. If, before the invasion, they felt they were wasting their lives, this threat to their independence has restored perspective. Recalling that freedom is worth fighting for and even dying for can help people rediscover a purpose to their lives.

Further note: Just yesterday Kaminsky tweeted again that a friend—perhaps the same one—was translating Seamus Heaney’s poem “Casualty,” which is about 13 Northern Irish Catholics who were shot in a 1972 protest march. Kaminsky wrote,

A friend in besieged city of Kyev is translating Seamus Heaney right now, while there are explosions outside: “It was a day of cold raw silence, wind-blown” And that is how it is this afternoon.

The entire stanza is only too relevant as it describes the coffins emerging from a church and of the mourners bonding “like brothers in a ring.” Here it is:

It was a day of cold   
Raw silence, wind-blown   
surplice and soutane:   
Rained-on, flower-laden   
Coffin after coffin  
Seemed to float from the door   
Of the packed cathedral   
Like blossoms on slow water.   
The common funeral   
Unrolled its swaddling band,   
Lapping, tightening   
Till we were braced and bound   
Like brothers in a ring.  

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Putin, Like Satan, Assaults Humankind

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2022
Satan in Gustave Doré’s Paradise Lost

Monday

My Dante discussion group, which is now discussing Milton’s Paradise Lost, has slowed to a crawl since we’ve had so much to say about the first four books. As we read the passage where Satan, in the form of a cormorant, gazes from his tree hiding place at Adam and Eve, we couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Putin eyeing Ukraine. “Make sure you write about this in your next blog,” my friends counseled me.

While Ukraine is not the Garden of Eden, it is a democracy, however imperfect. I subscribe to the theory that, as such, it poses an existential threat to the autocracies around it, especially Russia and Belorussia. After all, if word gets out that one of the former Soviet republics is thriving after having slipped the grasp of Russia kleptocrats and their puppets, then the people in other republics (Belorussia, Kazakhstan,  Georgia, Russia itself) might start getting ideas. Therefore, Putin must pull Ukraine back into the fold, even if that means destroying it utterly.

Satan has similar plans for Adam and Eve. When he first looks down at them, he is struck dumb by their beauty. But because he has forfeited Paradise himself, he is tortured by their happiness and so determines that they will share his misery. First, his envy:

O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold,
Into our room of bliss thus high advanced
Creatures of other mold, earth-born perhaps,
Not Spirits, yet to heav’nly Spirits bright
Little inferior; whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love, so lively shines
In them divine resemblance, and such grace
The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured. 

Then, almost like a cartoon villain, he rubs his hands together and promises to bring hell down on their heads. Imagine Putin similarly chuckling when he gave his own troops the order to advance, little envisioning the resistance they would encounter:

Ah gentle pair, ye little think how nigh
Your change approaches, when all these delights
Will vanish and deliver ye to woe,
More woe, the more your taste is now of joy;
Happy, but for so happy, ill secured
Long to continue…

Satan is no more impressed with Eden’s defenses than Putin was with Ukraine’s, describing Eden as “ill fenced”:

[A]nd this high seat your Heav’n
Ill fenced for Heav’n to keep out such a foe
As now is entered…

Then, sounding like Putin insisting that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, Satan promises a similar friendship with Adam and Eve. Note his gloating sarcasm:

…League with you I seek, 
And mutual amity so straight, so close,
That I with you must dwell, or you with me
Henceforth; my dwelling haply may not please
Like this fair Paradise, your sense, yet such
Accept your Maker’s work; he gave it me, 
Which I as freely give; Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two, her widest Gates.
…[T]here will be room,
Not like these narrow limits, to receive
Your numerous offspring…

For Ukraine, this is like being invited to join the wide expanses of autocratic Russia rather than settle for its (relatively tiny) democracy. In his “invitation,” Satan uses a rationale very much like Putin’s. Putin is eager to restore the vast Russia of the Soviets or the czars, in which imperium Ukraine (especially Kyif and Odessa) has always had a special place. Satan, meanwhile, blames his butchering on the demands of empire. Milton calls this “the tyrant’s plea”: to excuse his actions, Satan must say he’s carrying out his leadership responsibilities. He claims he will hate inflicting misery on the pair but must do so because it’s his duty to enlarge his kingdom, thereby evading personal responsibility:

[Y]et public reason just,
Honor and empire with revenge enlarg’d,
By conquering this new world, compels me now
To do what else though damned I should abhor.

So spake the fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.

Satan’s next move is to figure out which animal he will inhabit in order to start corrupting the pair. Although he will eventually choose a snake, at first he considers lions and tigers, which was Putin’s choice. After all, why use snake-like subtlety when you (or so Putin thought) can just reach out and grab your prey by force?

A Lion now he stalks with fiery glare,
Then as a Tyger, who by chance hath spied
In some purlieu two gentle Fawns at play,
Strait couches close, then rising changes oft 
His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground
Whence rushing he might surest seize them both
Gripped in each paw…

Satan’s tigerish ways will win in the short run but lose in the long. That’s because, with Jesus’s resurrection and the promised second coming, Sin and Death will be no more. Likewise, while Ukraine may yet prevail, it will suffer much suffering and heartbreak before the forces of democracy win out.

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My Lenten Reading: The Faerie Queene

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2022
Red Cross Knight and Una in Faerie Queene

Spiritual Sunday – First Sunday in Lent

Lent is a time when, taking my cue from poet priest Malcolm Guite, I immerse myself in an extended work of poetry. Guite says that Lent is a good time for poetry since, through poems, we can arrive at “clarification of who we are, how we pray, how we journey through our lives with God and how he comes to journey with us.” Guite draws on Seamus Heaney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to make his point:

Lent is a time set aside to re-orient ourselves, to clarify our minds, to slow down, recover from distraction, to focus on the values of God’s Kingdom and on the value he has set on us and on our neighbours. There are a number of distinctive ways in which poetry can help us do that…

Heaney spoke of poetry offering a glimpse and a clarification, here is how an earlier poet Coleridge, put it, when he was writing about what he and Wordsworth were hoping to offer through their poetry, which was

“awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

In the past, I have spent various Lents reading the collected poetry of George Herbert, John Milton’s Paradise Regained, the religious poems of T. S. Eliot, and Dante’s Paradiso. This year I am immersing myself in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

I’ve just been introduced to Red Cross Knight, whom Spenser, purposely using an archaic form of English to sound like Chaucer from 200 years earlier, describes as follows:

And on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead as living ever him ador’d:
Upon his shield the like was also scor’d,
For soveraine hope, which in his helpe he had:
Right faithfull true he was in deede and word,
But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad;
Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.

Like Dante, Red Cross (along the Lady Una, who stands for the one true Church and whose cause he has taken up) finds himself lost in a dark wood and will soon be battling the monster Error:

They cannot finde that path, which first was showne,
But wander too and fro in wayes unknowne,
Furthest from end then, when they neerest weene,
That makes them doubt their wits be not their owne:
So many pathes, so many turnings seene
That which of them to take, in diverse doubt they been.

The tangled wood of theology and disputed dogma is indeed daunting, so that even the most well-intentioned souls can find themselves lost. I’ll report from time to time on how Spenser’s various adventurers handle it. Stay tuned.

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Vladimir Putin as Sauron

By Robin Bates | Published: March 3, 2022
Sauron from Lord of the Rings

Friday

As commentators reflect upon Russia’s Ukraine invasion, a number of them—both Russians and non-Russians—say they should have realized the threat Vladimir Putin posed to the world years ago. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, but it’s also true that experts like former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul have been pointing out Putin’s evil for decades. In any event, when I heard these observations, a passage from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings came to mind.

It occurs during Elrond’s council in Rivendell as the “fellowship of the ring” comes together. The elf lord informs the gathering that, in the early days, men and elves failed to recognize the danger that Sauron posed:

Then all listened while Elrond in his clear voice spoke of Sauron and the Rings of Power, and their forging in the Second Age of the world long ago. A part of his tale was known to some there, but the full tale to none, and many eyes were turned to Elrond in fear and wonder as he told of the Elven-smiths of Eregion and their friendship with Moria, and their eagerness for knowledge, by which Sauron ensnared them. For in that time he was not yet evil to behold, and they received his aid and grew mighty in craft, whereas he learned all their secrets, and betrayed them, and forged secretly in the Mountain of Fire the One Ring to be their master.

In our case, perhaps it was Europe’s eagerness for Russian oil and natural gas that ensnared them. Or his claim that, when he was leveling Chechen cities, he was actually leveling Muslim terrorists. In any event many ignored the warning signs. Fortunately for the elves, there was a Michael McFaul in their ranks:

But [elf lord] Celebrimbor was aware of him, and hid the Three [rings of power] which he had made…

There are two stages in the battle against Sauron. In the first, there is “the last Alliance of Elves and Men,” which temporarily defeats Sauron and seizes the ring of power. But instead of throwing it into “Orodruin’s fire” (Mount Doom) then and there, King Isildur takes it for himself, which gives Sauron a chance to come back. Some blame Putin’s rise on NATO’s expansion following the collapse of the Soviet Union, regarding it (similar to Isildur) as a quick grab for power.

My own thoughts on the subject, however, are that Sauron was going to Sauron, regardless of what America and western Europe did. If those border countries applied for NATO membership, it was because they knew only too well Russia’s long history of territorial expansion. There’s a reason why even Sweden and Finland are now considering NATO membership.

Whatever the cause of Sauron’s rise, it takes Frodo, with his western and Christian values, to take the tyrant down a second time—just as western democracies must come together in their own fellowship to stop Putin. The outcome is still in doubt and, in the meantime, Russian forces are (for those of you who know your Tolkien) trying to turn Minas Ithil into Minas Morgul.

I’m referring here to the once thriving Gondorian city that Sauron’s minions transform into a place of desolation and evil. Faramir, serving as a guide for Frodo and Sam, describes what happened to the city once it fell under enemy control:

As you know, that city was once a strong place, proud and fair, Minas Ithil, the twin sister of our own city. But it was taken by fell men whom the Enemy in his first strength had dominated, and who wandered homeless and masterless after his fall. It is said that their lords were men of Númenor who had fallen into dark wickedness; to them the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they were become, terrible and evil. After his going they took Minas Ithil and dwelt there, and they filled it, and all the valley about, with decay: it seemed empty and was not so, for a shapeless fear lived within the ruined walls.

Later Frodo and Sam get a view of the city, which reminds me of some of the bombed-out apartment complexes we are seeing in Ukraine:

A long-tilted valley, a deep gulf of shadow, ran back far into the mountains. Upon the further side, some way within the valley’s arms high on a rocky seat upon the black knees of the Ephel Dúath, stood the walls and tower of Minas Morgul. All was dark about it, earth and sky, but it was lit with light. Not the imprisoned moonlight welling through the marble walls of Minas Ithil long ago, Tower of the Moon, fair and radiant in the hollow of the hills. Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing. In the walls and tower windows showed, like countless black holes looking inward into emptiness…

The resemblance between Putin and Sauron, incidentally, is not entirely accidental since Tolkien had Hitler and Stalin in mind when he was composing his trilogy while Putin models himself on both men. In fact, the attack on Ukraine resembles both Hitler’s invasion of Poland and Stalin’s invasion of Finland.

We don’t know how our story will end. In the novel, however, we know that Sauron will eventually make his way to the Shire if he isn’t stopped earlier.

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Finding Lyrical Beauty in the Midst of War

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2022
Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan

Thursday

The website Literary Hub has been running articles on Ukrainian poets, including this one on Serhiy Zhadan. Zhadan wrote the following lines when the Russians were annexing Crimea in 2014:

How did we build our houses?
When you’re standing under winter skies,
and the heavens turn and sail away,
you know you’ve got to live somewhere
you aren’t afraid to die.

Translator and scholar Amelia Glaser notes that Zhadan’s subject was the Crimean Tartars, whom Stalin deported en masse from Crimea in 1944 and who were displaced again by Putin. The passage is only too relevant to today as the Russians begin shelling Ukrainian cities, including Zhadan’s home city of Kharkiv. Glaser reports that the writer has been helping coordinate volunteer opposition and relief efforts.

Glaser includes some other Zhadan poems in her article, written in the fall and winter of 2021. Although she says that they are “more meditative” than Zhadan’s war poems, she observes that, in all of his work, “Zhadan’s poetic voice seeks truths about the human condition.” In his gorgeous lyric “A brief history of snow,” we encounter a haunting melancholy that must owe something to Ukraine’s dark history when first Stalin and then Hitler and now potentially Putin committed mass slaughter. And yet, the poet also tells us that those who defended the city will “come out to its walls/ and call after the bad weather/ that fell on the shoulders of their dead” And that “our singing will follow you. “When the poet writes that “we plant the seeds of a sigh/ in the black soil of breath,” we sense that tyranny will not get the last word. Follow the deep tracks of hunters, he tells us, and we will find where fear meets courage.

A brief history of snow,
as told by eyewitnesses
mimicked by a chorus
collected from passers-by:
give me a chronology of the snowfall,
let me hold the thread that leads
to the borders of winter,
to a blizzard’s blue outskirts.
A brief description of what fills
the space between eastern dunes
and western lowlands,
a brief stop in winter’s long expedition.
All those who defended this city
will come out to its walls
and call after the bad weather
that fell on the shoulders of their dead:
You go first, snow, go,
once you’ve stepped forward, we’ll follow,
as you go out to the field
our singing will follow you.
After all, we’re the ones singing on a quiet night
when it’s silent downtown,
we plant the seeds of a sigh
in the black soil of breath.
Snow, fall on our childhood—
the safe haven of loyalty and noise,
here we were friendly
with the dark side of language,
with the deepening tenderness,
here we learned to collect voices
like coins,
you go first, snow, go first,
fill up the deep sadness of the well
that opened for you,
like a metaphor.
Past the last gasps of childhood behind the station wall
and the amateur blueprint of a Sunday school,
past the houses on a hill, where boys’
fragile voices break at the stem,
go ahead of us, snow, mark us present
in the book of comings and goings,
in the nighttime registry of love,
you go first, don’t be afraid of getting lost in the field
because we know you won’t get beyond the boundaries of sound,
beyond the boundaries of our names,
the world is like a dictionary, it preserves its own depths,
shares it with school teachers
and their students.
Your night is like prison bread, hidden in a pocket,
like the oblique silhouette of someone walking, the wax that’s shaped into the moon,
your path is a reinvented chronicle of cities,
the slope leading to the square,
the deep tracks left by hunters,
where fear meets courage.
--Trans. from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk
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A Poem for Ash Wednesday

By Robin Bates | Published: March 1, 2022
Basilica of the Annunciation, Nazareth

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent—which is to say, the first day of a season when Christians reflect upon their mortality (“ashes to ashes and dust to dust”) and their longing for God. The transition from dust to resurrection is famously captured in T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” which was one of the first poems the poet wrote after his Christian conversion. While much of “Ash Wednesday” seems a continuation of such bleak poems as “The Hollow Men” and “The Waste Land,” with its images of dust and bones, it differs from those earlier works in that it ends on a note of hope. (I’ve written about it here and here.) Although, in the final stanza, he may still be sitting “among these rocks,” the Virgin Mary has given him a glimpse of peace and divine connection:

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

While I admire Eliot, I love Denise Levertov, who deals with similar themes. In “The Poem Rising by Its Own Weight,” she argues that Christ is only to be found when we face up to our frailty and vulnerability. (The poem appears in her collection The Freeing of the Dust.) Levertov is generally allergic to those who are smug about their faith, and in this poem she imagines such people, after confidently performing a high wire act over a dark pit, taking a tumble.

Pride, we could say, cometh before the fall as we find ourselves rolling “over and down a steepness into a dark hole.” Only after we have fallen, she states, does the miracle walk in, “on his swift feet, down the precipice straight into the cave.”

It’s interesting that Levertov frames this this drama is put in terms of poetic creation (“The Poem Rising by Its Own Weight). Poets too are tightrope walkers juggling fiery knives, and sometimes the poem emerges when it all appears that all is lost. Or as Levertov puts it, it rises by its own weight:  

The Poem Rising by Its Own Weight
The poet is at the disposal of his own night—Jean Cocteau

The singing robes fly onto your body and cling there silkily,
You step out on the rope and move unfalteringly across it,
And seize the fiery knives unscathed and
Keep them spinning above you, a fountain
Of rhythmic rising, falling, rising
Flames,
And proudly let the chains
Be wound about you, ready
To shed them, link by steel link,
padlock by padlock–

but when your graceful
confident shrug and twist drives the metal
into your flesh and the python grip of it tightens
and you see rust on the chains and blood in your pores
and you roll
over and down a steepness into a dark hole
and there is not even the sound of mockery in the distant air
somewhere above you where the sky was,
no sound but your own breath panting:

then it is that the miracle
walks in, on his swift feet,
down the precipice straight into the cave,
opens the locks,
knots of chain fall open,
twists of chain unwind themselves,
links fall asunder,
in seconds there is a heap of scrap-
metal at your ankles, you step free and at once
he turns to go —

but as you catch at him with a cry,
clasping his knees, sobbing your gratitude,
with what radiant joy he turns to you,
and raises you to your feet,
and strokes your disheveled hair,
and holds you,
holds you,
holds you
close and tenderly before he vanishes.

The poet acknowledges that the comfort she experiences is only momentary. Like the disciples when they see Jesus’s transfiguration, they can’t hold on to the moment, no matter how much they would like to, but it’s enough that there has been this moment of radiant joy. Or to cite another Biblical passage, after falling, the poet imagines herself as the woman who knelt at Jesus’s feet. Jesus’s promise is that he will hold, hold, hold us, closely and tenderly.

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Longfellow, 19th-Century Rock Star

By Robin Bates | Published: March 1, 2022
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tuesday

I wrote last week of Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club (2003), a literary murder mystery starring poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and their publisher J.T. Fields. Pearl plays with these legendary figures as a child plays with dolls or toy soldiers imagining them interacting and conversing as they work on a controversial translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I wrote in my earlier post about how Pearl thinks America would have responded to Dante in the year 1867. Today I share some of his other observations of literature’s impact.

For instance, he has Ralph Waldo Emerson show up and speak slightingly of Longfellow’s poetry:

Emerson straightened the papers had had brought to Fields in order to show that the purpose of his visit was completed. “Remember that only when past genius is transmitted into a present power shall we meet the first truly American poet. And somewhere, born to the streets rather than the athenaeum, we will come upon the first true reader. The spirit of the American is suspected to be told, imitative, tame—the scholar decent, indolent, complaisant. The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Without action, the scholar is not yet man. Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams. When I read Longfellow, I feel utterly at ease—I am safe. This shall not yield us our future.

The man that Emerson in fact believed was “the first truly American poet” is mentioned by publisher Fields in a conversation with a junior partner:

“Do you know, Osgood why we did not publish Whitman when he brought us his Leaves of Grass?” He did not wait for a reply. “Because Bill Ticknor did not want to call down touble on the house over the carnal passages.”

“May I ask whether you regret that, Mr. Fields?”

He was pleased with the question. His tone modulated from employer’s to mentor’s. “No I don’t, my dear Osgood. Whitman belongs to New York, as did Poe.” That name he said more bitterly, for reasons that still smoldered. “And I’ll let them keep what few they have. But from true literature we mustn’t ever cower, not in Boston. And shall not now.”

Fields’s animus against Poe is never explained. (Maybe he explains it in his 2006 novel, The Poe Shadow.) It’s worth noting, however, that not everyone shares Emerson’s dismissal of Longfellow. In fact, he is seen as a rock star. One woman, in awe of him when he shows up in her house looking for the murderer, explains what a boon he is to her life. She explains he also soothes her husband, who is suffering from Civil War PTSD and whom she recites Longfellow’s Evangeline to at night:

She tried her best to explain her wonderment [at Longfellow’s appearance]: explained how she read Longfellow’s poetry before going to sleep each night: how when her husband was bedridden from the war she would recite Evangeline aloud to him; and how the gently palpitating rhythms, the legend of faithful but uncompleted love, would soothe him even in his sleep—even now sometimes, she said sadly. She knew every word of “A Psalm of Life,” and had taught her husband to read it as well; and whenever he left home, those verses were her only release from fear.”

I had to look up “A Psalm of Life.” Longfellow explains that it is “what the heart of the young man said to the psalmist”:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
   Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
   And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
   Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
   Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
   Find us farther than to-day.

Evangeline, meanwhile, opens with:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

One other Longfellow note. We encounter the poet’s daughters, whose names I grew up knowing from having read “The Children’s Hour”: “Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, and Edith with golden hair.” It is to Edith that the poet, whenever he is feeling tender, recites the final stanza of his poem “Children”:

Ye are better than all the ballads
  That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
  And all the rest are dead.

In short, Pearl has written a novel in which he can imagine poetry playing a far more prominent role in people’s lives than it does today.

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A Call to Resist Oppression

By Robin Bates | Published: February 27, 2022
Goya, Third of May

Monday

Social media has been passing around this poem by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky. It is not, as first appears, a criticism of the west for refraining from direct involvement in Ukraine’s war. In fact, the poem appears to be set in America, not Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the question of whether Americans could do more to stop oppression is always a good one. We are, at least, imposing sanctions on Russia that have some bite to them—and since those sanctions could have some impact our own lives, the very least Americans could do is stop complaining about rising gas prices. We could also stop making apocalyptic statements about minor matters. A vaccination mandate is not Holocaust-level oppression. The Russians invading your country is real oppression.

We Lived Happily During the War
By Ilya Kaminsky
 
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house
by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money
in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

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Transfiguration’s Promise and Its Cost

By Robin Bates | Published: February 27, 2022
Raphael, The Transfiguration

Spiritual Sunday

As it is the last Sunday before Lent, today we hear the account of the transfiguration. Poet Mark Jarman has a poem about the moment when the veil between the material and spiritual worlds is, for a moment, removed so that Jesus and the disciples come face to face with divinity. I like the poem because it imagines Jesus as human enough to resist what the prophets of old are telling him. After all, if they are informing him of the resurrection, they would also be informing him of the crucifixion.

Jarman imagines Jesus resisting and then being transfigured by the resistance. The great spiritual breakthroughs do not come without a struggle.

First, here’s Luke’s version of the incident:

Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”–not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.

Here are the first and final sections of Jarman’s lengthy poem:

Transfiguration
By Mark Jarman

And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses and they were talking to Jesus. (Mark 9-2)

They were talking to him about resurrection, about law, about
the suffering ahead.
They were talking as if to remind him who he was and who they
were. He was not
Like his three friends watching a little way off, not like
the crowd
At the foot of the hill. A gray-green thunderhead massed
from the sea
And God spoke from it and said he was his. They were
talking
About how the body, broken or burned, could live again,
remade.
Only the fiery text of the thunderhead could explain it.
And they were talking
About pain and the need for judgement and how he would
make himself
A law of pain, both its spirit and its letter in his own flesh,
and then break it,
That is, transcend it. His clothes flared like magnesium,
as they talked.

1

7

I want to believe that he talked back to them, his radiant
companions.
And I want to believe he said too much was being asked
and too much promised.
I want to believe that that was why he shone in the eyes
of his friends.
The witnesses looking on, because he spoke for them,
because he loved them
And was embarrassed to learn how he and they were
going to suffer.
I want to believe he resisted at that moment, when he
appear glorified.
Because he could not reconcile the contradictions and
suspected
That love had a finite span and was merely the comfort
of the lost.
I know he must have acceded to his duty, but I want
to believe
He was transfigured by resistance, as he listened, and
they talked.

Further thoughts: Because my youngest son and two youngest grandchildren were with us all day yesterday, I didn’t have time to say all I wanted about Jarman’s wonderful poem. In sections 2-6, he elaborates on what he believes is involved in the process of transfiguration, which according to Webster’s means a “change in appearance or metamorphosis” and “an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change.” In section 2, the transfiguration is medical: Jarman talks how about his mother, suffering from severe medical and mental problems, is restored through a medical procedure. The family has brought their mother to a doctor, but Jarman frames it as though they are bringing her to Jesus. And indeed, modern medicine can seem miraculous:

When we brought our mother to him, we said, “Lord,
she falls down the stairs.
She cannot hold her water. In the afternoon she forgets
the morning.”
And he said, “All things are possible to those who believe.
Shave her head,
Insert a silicone tube inside her skull, and run it under her
scalp,
Down her neck, and over her collarbone, and lead it into her
stomach.”
And we did and saw that she no longer stumbled or wet herself.
She could remember the morning until the evening came. And
we went our way,
Rejoicing as much as we could, for we had worried many years.

In section 3, imagining that conversation that Jesus is having with Moses and Elisha that has transfigured him, Jarman speculates that they are talking about the miracle of life itself. These include “the complexities of blood and lymph,” matted hair and lice, and above all the brain/mind:

And they were talking about the lamp burning in the skull’s niche.
They eyes drinking light from within and light from without.
And how simple it is to see the future, if you look at it like the past.
And how the present belonged to the flesh and its density and
darkness
And was hard to talk about. Before and after were easier. They
talked about light.

In section four, the poet talks about another miracle, although not a medical one this time. Someone who has been blind since his wedding day is restored to a certain kind of sight–we’re not sure if it’s literal or not–when some miracle worker tells the man to begin remembering his parents. The man remembers so much that “suddenly his sight came back and blinded him, like a flashbulb.”

In section five, Moses and Elisha are talking to Jesus about law and how lawgiving should be

Like rainfall, a light rain falling all morning and mixing with dew–
A rain that passes through the spiderweb and penetrates the dirt
clod
Without melting it…

Eventually, however, the law can become cumbersome. It is at that point, the poet imagines, that Moses and Elisha tell Jesus that

you hurled judgement into the crowd and watched them
Spook like cattle, reached in and stirred the turmoil faster,
scarier.
And they were saying that; to save the best, many must
be punished,
Including the best. And no one was exempt, as they
explained it,
Not themselves, not him, or anyone he loved, anyone who
loved him.

By section 6, Moses and Elisha are getting down to brass tacks. They have confirmed Jesus’s foundational spiritual change but now are telling him that suffering is the inevitable consequence. If anyone else were in such a situation–told that the transformative feelings were real and that the voices would be with there to prepare him or her for the end–then that person too would “seem transfigured”:

Take anyone and plant a change inside them that they feel
And send them to an authority to assess that feeling.
When they are told
That for them alone there waits a suffering in accordance with
the laws
Of their condition, from which they may recover or may not,
Then they know the vortex on the mountaintop, the inside of
the unspeakable,
The speechlessness before the voices began talking to them,
Talking to prepare them, arm them and disarm them, until the
end.
And if anybody’s look, they will seem transfigured.

So returning to the concluding section (7), we now understand the whirl of emotions and thoughts going through Jesus’s head. We can imagine him replying to Moses and Elisha that “too much was being asked and too much promised”–not only of him but of his followers. The poet even imagines him struggling with the contradictions–about whether love was eternal or merely momentary, “the comfort of the lost”–so that while Jesus in the end “accede[s] to his duty,” it’s not only the promise but the struggle that changes the appearance of his face so that his clothes appear to be dazzling white.

Jarman, in other words, tries to relate to Jesus’s encounter with the numinous by putting it in terms he can relate to. Doing so, after all, is one of poetry’s basic jobs.

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