Wanted: An Elegy to Mourn Covid Victims

By Robin Bates | Published: January 4, 2022
Jules Charles Boquet, Mourners

Wednesday

In these days of Covid horror when over 800,000 Americans have died—a number impossible for the mind to grasp—a couple of Washington Post writers are telling us that we need poetic elegies. After asking “what cultural forms and expressive practices can bear these absent lives with us into the future?” David Sherman and Karen Elizabeth Bishop make a case for this ancient poetic genre:

Elegy is where we figure out how to do this work. Elegiac poetry helps us hold vigil over the dying and bear the dead to a resting place. The form has long offered symbolic versions of these defining human acts, surrogate ways to fulfill existential obligations when we are rendered passive and mute by another’s death.

The writers mention Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—they could also have mentioned his “O Captain, My Captain”—and note how the poet grapples with unanswerable questions. “O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? / And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?” the poet asks in the first of the poems. Sherman and Bishop observe,

Whitman wrote these lines fora slain president and a nation devastated by civil war. In a pandemic, when a flood of statistics threatens to swallow the singularity of every death, contemporary elegies — about the dead, for the dead, in place of the dead — offer us new ways for our grief to work its way past silence. Elegy performs an essential caretaking, both intimate and public, of our dead. Poetry is a labor of survival.

They then turn to a poem that poet Nick Laird wrote about his father when, cut off from family, he was dying in a hospital. I recommend reading the poem in its entirety—you can find it here–but below are some of the key passages:

… This morning
the consultant said your father now is clawing
at the mask and is exhausted and we’ve thrown
everything we have at this. It’s a terrible disease.

And:

On Sunday they permitted us to Zoom
and he was prone in a hospital gown
strapped to a white slab.
The hospital gown split at the back
and the pale cold skin of his back was exposed.

He lifted his head to the camera
and his face was all red, swollen,
bisected vertically by the mask,
and we had to ask Elizabeth the nurse
to say his words back to us –
he sounded underwater –
it’s been a busy day but not a good day.

And:

When I phoned the hospital this afternoon
to say goodbye, though you were no longer lucid,

Elizabeth the nurse held the phone against your ear
and I could hear your breathing, or perhaps the rasping

of the oxygen machine, and I said what you’d expect.
I love you, Dad, and I want you to keep on fighting,

but if you are too tired now, and in too much pain,
then you should stop fighting, and let go, and whatever

happens it’s okay. I love you. You were a good father.
The kids love you. Thank you for everything.

Then I hung up. And scene. Impossible to grieve
and not know the vanity of grief. To watch one

self perform the rituals that take us. Automaton
of grief, I howled, of course, by myself

in my office, then sobbed for a bit on the sofa.

The poet then has some words about the significance of elegies:

An elegy I think is words to bind a grief

in, a companionship of grief, a spell
to keep it safe and sound, to keep it

from escaping.

Sherman and Bishop observe that, because covid makes touch impossible, Laird

labors to make sure his father is seen and his death de-sequestered. The poem struggles with how to be present from a distance, how to witness the ravages of the pandemic from the inside out. In this final gift of elegy, his father is isolated, but not alone, as he drifts into death’s cold waters.

Elegies, the writers note, are often addressed to the one who has died, “as if they might help us make sense of their absence and our own, now uncanny, survival.” But they add that the form of address is meant for others to overhear. We “inhabit this space alongside the poet,” they point out, meeting in “a fertile borderland between being and nonbeing, or a time zone between is and was.” Later in the piece they say that elegiac language “is a territory that the living and dead inhabit together.”

Unlike the death of Lincoln or Laird’s father, covid presents a special challenge since it involves mass death. Whitman spoke to a grieving nation and Laird attempts to sort out his own individual grieving, but how speak of mass death?  Sherman and Bishop point out one way when they cite South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon (trans. Don Mee Choi) attempting to pen a response to the hundreds of school children who died in the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster. The poet, they report,

hallucinates impossible rites of commemoration: “a four-ton bronze bell with a thousand names of the dead engraved on it dangles from the helicopter / The helicopter flies over a tall mountain to hang the bell at a temple hidden deep in the mountains,” or “A thousand masks float on the thousand rivers of the north, south, east, west.”

As a result, Hyesoon’s imagination

inscribes the sky, water and land with their absence, remaking and remapping the world in their wake. Her poetry teaches us about the combination of imagination and courage we need to create commemorative spaces for the millions who have died, and are dying, of covid.

While elegy cannot, of course, change the fact of death,

somehow we are stronger in both knowing that the terms of death are nonnegotiable and still insisting, on the page and in our voice, on negotiation. … Poetry helps us gather the remains of the dead, even across great distance, and offer them a place.

This was certainly true in my case. After I lost my son, I rummaged through a number of the world’s great elegies, such as Lycidas and In Memoriam, before settling on a passage from Percy Shelley’s Adonais to post on Justin’s gravestone. The poem is Shelley’s elegy to the poet John Keats. Here’s the passage I chose:

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…

The Washington Post authors are right: elegies have an immense power to address our grief. Some of the craziness that we are seeing in America right now might stem from the covid pandemic. Will a poet arise from the ranks and help us collectively mourn our covid dead the way Whitman helped the nation mourn for Lincoln?

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Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 3, 2022

Tuesday

Sewanee experienced its first snow of the year yesterday, taking me back to memories of Sewanee snowfalls in the 1950s. While the six-inch snowfall is quite a lot for us, I was sure it was dwarfed by the snowfalls of my childhood. I found myself asking, with the great medieval French poet François Villon, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

In the semi-autobiographical movie Amarcord, Federico Fellini depicts snow from his childhood that has piled up so deep that the townspeople must make their way through a system of tunnels. Again, memory has deepened the drifts. Dylan Thomas’s memory works similarly in A Child’s Christmas in Wales. As he notes in the opening paragraph, “I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” The prose poem proceeds from there:

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows – eternal, ever since Wednesday…

“Eternal, ever since Wednesday”—that pretty much sums up the tension between mythical memory and reality.

Thomas recounts his memory to a small boy, who has his own memories of past snowfalls. Thomas, feeling pressured to compete, insists that his snow was more spectacular:

But here a small boy says: “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”

“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.”

Thomas’s childhood snows expand to mythical proportions:

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying “Excelsior.” We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. 

For Thomas, the past is mystical and holy—and that is how the recollection ends:

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

I too, as I prepare to go to sleep tonight, will turn down the gas (yes, we have gas heat), crawl into bed, look out into the darkness, and fall asleep. Who knows where memory will take me then?

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Let Love Clasp Grief Lest Both Be Drown’d

By Robin Bates | Published: January 2, 2022
Michelangelo, Pieta

Monday

My son recently alerted me to a heart-rending post by Dalhousie University English professor Rohan Maitzen, who on Thursday lost her son Owen to suicide. He sounds like he was a wonderful young man, intelligent, loving and creative. Unfortunately, crippling depression overrode everything else. I report on the case because of the following passage:

Inevitably, fragments of poems have been coming to me ever since he left us. Stop all the clocks. Remember me when I am gone away. Smart lad, to slip betimes away. Farewell thou child of my right hand and joy. They mean everything and nothing when it’s your own loss. Right now, the line I keep returning to is “Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d.” My love and my grief feel boundless right now; they are the same. I want to remember him with happiness. I really do think that’s what he wanted. It is such grace that he left us feeling love and loved.

I can’t say enough how much I relate. When my eldest son died in a freak drowning accident 21 years ago, my mind visited all these poems. At such moments, we flail around, grabbing at whatever can sustain us.  Scraps of poetry function as life buoys when the horror threatens to overwhelm.

You may recognize the poems but, if not, here they are:

W. H. Auden, “Stop All the Clocks”
Christina Rossetti, “Remember”
A. E. Housman, “To an Athlete Dying Young”
Ben Jonson, “On My First Son”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Section I

I also understand what Maitzen means about the poems meaning “everything and nothing.” On the one hand, words are inadequate and we feel their full inadequacy. But they are also all that we have. As Tennyson puts it in Section V,

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

In my own case, I remember waking up at 2 am following the death and, unable to fall back to sleep, repeating over and over a line from Mary Oliver’s “Lost Children”: “Pain picked him up and held him in her gray jaw.” At the time, I didn’t recall that the line describes a man looking frantically for his missing daughter. I was just grateful that someone seemed to understand what I was going through, that I wasn’t alone in my grief. Poets have been speaking to suffering parents since the dawn of time, and somehow seeing myself in that long line made things a little more bearable. The pain didn’t go away, of course, but for a moment I was able to step outside it.

For several months following Justin’s death, I became obsessed with Tennyson’s In Memoriam, including the line that Maitzen mentions: “Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d.” Each day, when I returned home from the college, I would randomly open my copy of the poem and read two or three pages. I could understand why the poem helped Queen Victoria survive the death of her Prince Albert. The ups and downs that Tennyson goes through following the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam—he composed the poem over a 17-year period—are what many people experience.

In her autobiography, novelist Jeanette Winterson has this to say about poetry:

[W]hen people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it’s irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

I discovered this after Justin died and now Rohan Maitzen—God bless her—is discovering it.

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Night Is Past and Lo It Is Day

By Robin Bates | Published: January 1, 2022
Simon Vouet, Father Time Overcome by Love, Hope, and Beauty (1672)

Spiritual Sunday

To welcome in the new year, here’s a Christina Rossetti poem doing the same. At first, however, she’s more weary than glad. As she observes, the Old Year has left her tired—“Stripped of favorite things I had,/ Balked of much desired.” Yet she is prepared for the “somewhat sad” New Year to meet her, whether it brings her harm or grace, because her journey through time brings her closer to God.

Imagining herself as one of those who watch for God’s coming—as Jesus says in Matthew 24:42, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come”—the poet imagines herself keeping vigil on the last night of the year. She also imagines angels watching with her and wondering why God is taking so long. Yet she is sure that today’s pain will give way to tomorrow’s delight. The lines remind me of a passage from the familiar hymn “The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord”:

Yet saints their watch are keeping,
their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.

We’re not home free yet, however. The poem notes various ways in which the World, like the Old Year, passes away. For instance,

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:
With its burden of fear and hope, of labor and play;
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.

Then, however, we have Easter morning as Christ the bridegroom makes his appearance:

At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the bridegroom shall come and shall not delay:
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answered: Yea.

Rossetti, seeing herself as the spouse, concludes with joyous images drawn from the following passage in Song of Solomon (2:10-13):

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Or as Rossetti puts it,

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.
Tho’ I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray.
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.

Here’s the poem:

Old and New Year Ditties
By Christine Rossetti

               1.
New Year met me somewhat sad:
     Old Year leaves me tired,
Stripped of favorite things I had,
Balked of much desired:
     Yet farther on my road today
God willing, farther on my way.

New Year coming on apace
     What have you to give me?
Bring you scathe [harm], or bring you grace,
Face me with an honest face;
     You shall not deceive me:
Be it good or ill, be it what you will,
It needs shall help me on my road,
My rugged way to heaven, please God.

               2.
Watch with me, men, women, and children dear,
You whom I love, for whom I hope and fear,
Watch with me this last vigil of the year.
Some hug their business, some their pleasure scheme;
Some seize the vacant hour to sleep or dream;
Heart locked in heart some kneel and watch apart.

Watch with me, blessed spirits, who delight
All thro’ the holy night to walk in white,
Or take your ease after the long-drawn fight.
I know not if they watch with me: I know
They count this eve of resurrection slow,
And cry, “How long?” with urgent utterance strong.

Watch with me, Jesus, in my loneliness:
Tho’ others say me nay, yet say Thou yes;
Tho’ others pass me by, stop Thou to bless.
Yea, Thou dost stop with me this vigil night;
Tonight of pain, tomorrow of delight:
I, Love, am Thine; Thou, Lord my God, art mine.

               3.
Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty and youth sapped day by day:
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to gray
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:
With its burden of fear and hope, of labor and play;
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the bridegroom shall come and shall not delay:
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.
Tho’ I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray.
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.

I am reminded of Helen Hunt Jackson’s “New Year Morning,” where she says every night should be treated as an occasion for “confession and resolve and prayer” and that very morning should be seen as a sacred awakening of renewed hope. It is her own way of keeping eternal watch:

All nights are sacred nights to make
Confession and resolve and prayer;
All days are sacred days to wake
New gladness in the sunny air.
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.

Let us all answer: Yea.

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Quiet Hopes for the New Year

By Robin Bates | Published: December 30, 2021
Robert Bruce Crane, The Fall Season

Friday – New Year’s Eve

W. S. Merwin has a lovely New Year’s Day poem, one that contrasts dramatically with, say, Tennyson’s “Ring out, wild bells” (from In Memoriam) in that Merwin’s new year enters quietly. “With what stillness at last you appear in the valley,” the poet observes, speaking to the new year. Later, after he hears the voice of a mourning dove calling plaintively, he remarks, “so this is the sound of you here and now whether or not anyone hears it.”

The poem seems to veer between a quiet melancholy and a quiet acceptance. Many years of experience have taught the aging poet to tamp down his New Year expectations. He is no longer convinced that accumulated knowledge will usher in great changes, and perhaps he thinks he no longer hopes. At any rate, whatever hopes he once entertained have become so evanescent as to be “invisible before us.” And yet, just because he can no longer see these hopes does not mean that they aren’t there. Because they are invisible, they are untouched and, because untouched, perhaps still possible.

To the New Year
By W. S. Merwin

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

Further thought: The hush that Merwin mentions reminds me of a favorite episode in a favorite children’s book of mine, the early morning boat excursion in Wind in the Willows where Rat and Mole sense the presence of the great god Pan. The preternatural stillness presages something momentous, but they can’t grasp what:

Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a different look; the mystery began to drop away from them. A bird piped suddenly, and was still; and a light breeze sprang up and set the reeds and bulrushes rustling. Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.

“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

“Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.”

And yet another thought: I’ve only just realized that I reported on this poem once before. It was read at the memorial service for the 2010 victims of the Tucson, Arizona shooting along with the following Merwin observation:

Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments. People turn to poetry in times of crisis because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language.

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Wanted: Poets to Fight Climate Change

By Robin Bates | Published: December 29, 2021
Gustave Doré, illus. from Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Thursday

This week I have been look at posts I wrote in 2021 about what I regard as the three major news stories of the year: the continuing Covid pandemic, rising authoritarian movements (including the January 6 insurrection), and (today) climate change. The large number of extreme weather events that we witnessed this past year left few parts of the globe unmarked, from (in the United States) west coast droughts and wildfires to east coast hurricanes to Southwest cold snaps to Midwest and Midsouth tornadoes.

In the following post, which I wrote August 11, 2021, I look at how poets can help us deal with the climate crisis.

Reprinted from August 11, 2021

I continue to write about the Romantic imagination for my book (Better Living through Literature), exploring how the movement helped change the way we see nature. As we deal with the dire consequences of climate change—the recent U.N. report should scare the bejesus out of all of us–I find it useful to review the role that literature can play in spurring us to action.

I’ve visited the issue regularly in this column but I look today at the origins of poetic warnings. The 18th century’s scientific and technological breakthroughs, which allowed allowed humans to control nature in unprecedented ways, also led to a separation. It’s easier to regard Nature as an object of Romantic reflection, after all, when it’s not starving, freezing, or otherwise killing you. Poets picked up on our growing separation from nature early, with William Blake talking of “dark Satanic mills” befouling England’s “green and pleasant land” and Wordsworth lamenting that we are out of tune with nature because “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is particularly illuminating because it foregrounds the interaction between environmental poet and public. In the poem, an apparently mad prophet enters the scene and tells a compelling story about our alienation from nature. The story is so powerful that the young man he picks out as his audience “cannot choose but hear.”

The Mariner recalls when he himself was young and caught up in the excitement of exploring new lands. In that spirit, he and the crew set out on a journey to the southern hemisphere. This apparent openness to new experience, however, the Mariner contradicted with an act of domination: he gratuitously killed a wandering albatross that the sailors had befriended. Having thereby announced his separation from the natural order, he experienced a spiritual sterility:

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

Living a nightmarish death-in-life with his heart “as dry as dust,” the Mariner found himself unable to pray. His shipmates, meanwhile, hung the albatross around his neck to punish him, and it functions as a sign of the internal weight he is carrying. He was saved, however, by the sudden realization that he had a kinship with even the foulest of Nature’s creatures. In this transformation, the slimy things became marvelous creatures moving in shining tracks:

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Having had this epiphany, he feels compelled to share his insight with others:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

In this particular instance, he has chosen a callow youth to hear what he has to say, a member of a wedding party who is intent on drinking and carousing. The Mariner’s message has a Sunday school simplicity to it:

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Were he to deliver the message without the narrative or the poetry, it would fail to impress and we could not expect a change in behavior. It is the poetic imagination that draws the young man and holds him transfixed:

He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

We also learn that the Mariner’s story has had an impact:

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

In exploring humans’ relationship with nature, the Romantic poets increased our awareness of what it means to be human. In the rich tradition of nature literature that has followed, along with the exciting field of ecocriticism, our thinking has moved beyond daffodils and storms (Wordsworth, Byron) to what ecocritics call an “earth-centered approach.”

As a result, we no longer makes simple distinctions between the environment and culture, between “the natural” and the human, but examine how they are inextricably linked. If today we have an ever-growing list of authors using the full powers of the imagination to address the challenges of a rapidly changing environment—Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Margaret Atwood come immediately in mind—it’s because poems like Rime of the Ancient Mariner showed the way.

Literature alone won’t save us, of course. In the five-alarm fire we are confronting, we need all hands on deck, civic leaders, scientists, academics, activists, business leaders, military leaders, etc.  The fate of our species hangs in the balance. But poets too have an important role to play, conveying the urgency in ways that other forms of rhetoric may not. May it lead all of us to rise sadder and wiser men and women.

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Sadly, “1984” Remains Relevant

By Robin Bates | Published: December 28, 2021
Still from 1984

Wednesday

As I look back at important political developments in 2021, the continuing rise of authoritarian governments around the world ranks up there with Covid-19. While the United States experienced the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s continuing takeover of the GOP, countries like Hungary, Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, Nicaragua, China and others experienced strong men attempting to assert their will while silencing their opponents.

In other words, George Orwell’s 1984, written in 1948, remains only too relevant. Here’s the post I wrote about the novel on May 11.

Reprinted from May 11, 2021

Thursday

Tim O’Brien of Bloomberg had a perfect response to a threat the other day from Lindsey Graham, Trump sycophant and senator from South Carolina. He simply tweeted out a passage from George Orwell’s 1984:

Targeting Trump’s opponents, including his Republic opponents, Graham had written,

The people who are trying to erase him are going to wind up getting erased.

To which O’Brien tweeted:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.

Those who most loudly decry “cancel culture” are the most interested in canceling others.

While we’re on the subject of the novel, let’s remind ourselves of one of its most important observations: autocrats lie, not because they expect to be believed, but to test their followers’ loyalty. Donald Trump tested his followers with his 30,500+ lies while president, and now GOP politicians must sign on to the Big Lie about a stolen election (or at least not publicly dispute it) if they want to remain in the party. As Orwell puts it,

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Orwell would understand well why the GOP is currently attempting to don a populist mantle while, at the same time, opposing labor unions, minimum wage hikes, and higher taxes on the wealthy. Orwell has Stalin’s Soviet Union in mind as he describes the Party’s hypocrisy:

The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty.

We’re getting such policy incoherence from the GOP across the board at the moment: they are for and against free trade, for and against big deficits, for and against a strong executive, for and against free speech, for and against law and order. It all makes sense, however, if their real aim is power. As Big Brother explains to Winston,

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

I once remember contending, in a 1984 faculty panel on 1984, that Orwell’s dystopia was no longer relevant. It struck me at the time as hysterical and overly gloomy. I now consider it an indispensable account of how autocracies and autocratic thinking work. Orwell studied Hitler and Stalin and got it right.

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Virgil Would Have Understood January 6

By Robin Bates | Published: December 27, 2021
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Procession of the Trojan Horse

Tuesday

2021 began tumultuously, of course, with Trump supporters attacking the Capitol in an attempt to stop Vice-President Mike Pence from certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory. I wrote a number of posts about the insurrection, along with subsequent GOP attempts to perpetuate “the big lie” that the election was stolen. Two essays I wrote drawing on The Aeneid seem particularly on point.

In the first, we see Neptune doing what Trump refused to do, which is stop chaos from happening. Hera, seeking to thwart Aeneas, has sent the god of the winds to destroy the Trojan’s ships. Neptune, who is responsible for the sea, is furious at the chaos and brings the riotous winds to order. Here’s the passage I quoted:

Neptune himself raises them [the Trojan ships] with his trident,
parts the vast quicksand, tempers the flood,
and glides on weightless wheels, over the tops of the waves.
As often, when rebellion breaks out in a great nation,
and the common rabble rage with passion, and soon stones
and fiery torches fly (frenzy supplying weapons),
if they then see a man of great virtue, and weighty service,
they are silent, and stand there listening attentively:
he sways their passions with his words and soothes their hearts:
so all the uproar of the ocean died, as soon as their father,
gazing over the water, carried through the clear sky, wheeled
his horses, and gave them their head, flying behind in his chariot.

Virgil undoubtedly has Rome’s ruler Caesar Augustus in mind when he writes of  “a man of great virtue and weighty service”—which is to say, Trump is no Caesar Augustus. In fact, we are becoming increasingly aware (I wrote this post on May 27) that Trump was acting the role of Hera, stirring up the chaos and then, reluctantly, bringing it to a close only when he realized that it didn’t help him achieve his objectives.

In the other Aeneid application, written June 1, 2021 and reprinted below, I suggest that GOP measures to “protect voting integrity”—which are premised on Trump’s big lie about a stolen election—are a Trojan horse designed to overthrow American democracy.

Three other posts worthy of mention are one comparing Trump to Parolles in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well; one comparing Trump supporters undermining free and fair elections to the Telmarines who unfairly intervene in Peter’s fight with Miraz in C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian; and one on the exhilaration, described in H. G. Welles’s Invisible Man, of acting with impunity while escaping all accountability. The latter applies not only to Trump but to those confederates who helped plot his coup. They appear to believe they can defy Congressional subpoenas and may be right. After all, unlike those who actually stormed the Capitol, they don’t appear to be under investigation by the Justice Department.

Reprinted from June 1, 2021

It’s unsettling to reread The Aeneid in the months following Donald Trump’s January 6 attempted coup. In Book II we see the Trojans celebrating victory after a ten-year war (the 2020 election campaign felt like it was ten years). After twelve or so hours of euphoria, however, their walls are breached and their city and themselves destroyed.

We who thought democracy had been saved by Joe Biden’s victory have been greeted with a rude shock—first by the January 6 insurrection, then by the 147 Republican Congress members who voted to overturn the election, then by the incessant calls for vote recounts (leading to shady business in Arizona), then by a wave of voter suppression laws, then by the refusal of Republican Congress members to investigate the Capitol attack. In the latest developments, we have Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn calling for a Myanmar-type coup and Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz gesturing towards armed insurrection (this latter at a fascist “America First” rally).

While Flynn and Gaetz—one out of jail only because he was pardoned by Trump and one possibly facing indictment—may seem fringe figures, time and again we have seen the fringe move to the center in today’s Republican Party. Who could have foreseen, for instance, that Congress members who experienced the Capitol attack first hand would now be describing it as “a largely peaceful protest” (Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson) and “a normal tourist visit” (Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde). No mention of all those killed and injured and all the property damage.

Recounting the fall of Troy to Dido, Aeneas talks about the amazing moment when Trojans discover that the Greeks have (apparently) left:

We thought they’d gone,
Sailing home to Mycenae before the wind,
So Teucer’s town is freed of her long anguish,
Gates thrown wide! And out we go in joy
To see the Dorian campsites, all deserted,
The beach they left behind.
(trans. Robert Fitzgerald)

They also see an immense wooden horse, and debates break out about what to do with it. Some see no danger. Thymoetes, for instance, “shouts/ It should be hauled inside the walls and moored/High on the citadel.” Think of him as West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who apparently believes that the Senate Republicans can be reasoned with. For instance, he sees no reason to abolish the filibuster, even though doing so would allow Democrats to pass legislation protecting future elections.

Others warn that the GOP has become a de facto authoritarian party, prepared to trash democracy and establish minority rule. Might these be Virgil’s “wiser heads” who want to do away with the horse?

“Into the sea with it,” they said, “or burn it,”
Build up a bonfire under it,
This trick of the Greeks, a gift no one can trust,
Or cut it open, search the hollow belly!”

One of these is the priest Laocoon, whom the Trojans choose not to believe. Laocoon reminds me of warning us, and being ignored, that January 6 was just a dress rehearsal for what is to come. His words fall on deaf ears:

Men of Troy, what madness has come over you?
Can you believe the enemy truly gone?
A gift from the Danaans, and no ruse?
Is that Ulysses’ way, as you have known him?
…Some crookedness
Is in this thing. Have no faith in the horse!
Whatever it is, even when Greeks bring gifts
I fear them, gifts and all.

Had we only listened to him, Aeneas says, “Troy would stand today—O citadel of Priam, towering still!”

The Trojan optimists breach the city walls so the horse can be dragged in, and they ignore the sound of weapons clanging inside the horse’s belly. They also ignore Cassandra, the seer who is cursed never to have her accurate prophecies believed:

There on the very threshold of the breach
It jarred to a halt four times, four times the arms
In the belly thrown together made a sound—
Yet on we strove unmindful, deaf and blind,
To place the monster on our blessed height.
Then, even then, Cassandra’s lips unsealed
The doom to come: lips by a god’s command
Neer believed or heeded by the Trojans.

Adding credence to the deception is a liar so skillful that he would put Donald Trump to shame. Sinon, who pretends to have escaped his fellow Greeks after they intended to sacrifice him, vouches that the horse is not a trick. Think of him as those Republicans who assure us that they are not actually suppressing the vote but rather working to insure its integrity.

Here’s a taste of what happens next. I choose the scene where Achilles’s son Pyrrhus storms Priam’s palace because it reminds me of the attack on our Capitol. Unlike the Trump insurrectionists, however, Pyrrhus actually “hang[s] Mike Pence”:

Pyrrhus shouldering forward with an axe
Broke down the stony threshold, forced apart
Hinges and brazen door-jambs, and chopped through
One panel of the door, splitting the oak,
To make a window, a great breach. And there
Before their eyes the inner halls lay open,
The courts of Priam and the ancient kings,
With men-at-arms ranked in the vestibule.
From the interior came sounds of weeping,
Pitiful commotion, wails of women
High-pitched, rising in the formal chambers
To ring against the silent golden stars;
And, through the palace, mothers wild with fright
Ran to and fro or clung to doors and kissed them.
Pyrrhus with his father’s brawn stormed on,
No bolts or bars or men availed to stop him:
Under his battering the double doors
Were torn out of their sockets and fell inward.
Sheer force cleared the way: the Greeks broke through
Into the vestibule, cut down the guards,
And made the wide hall seethe with men-at-arms—

Virgil then turns to an epic simile to capture the power of the moment. It brings to the mind Trump supporters swarming up the Capitol walls and pouring into the halls:

A tumult greater than when dykes are burst
And a foaming river, swirling out in flood,
Whelms every parapet and races on
Through fields and over all the lowland plains,
Bearing off pens and cattle.

Our Laocoons and Cassandras are telling us that January 6 was prelude, not finale. Will we listen to them?

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More Time Spent in the Covid Sewers

By Robin Bates | Published: December 26, 2021
Harry Baur as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (1934)

Monday

This week I am reposting my favorite essays on major developments from this past year. Covid-19, of course, once again was a major concern, and this essay applying Victor Hugo’s masterpiece to the pandemic seems even more appropriate now than it did when I ran it originally. That’s because we, like Jean Valjean, thought we were nearing the end of our misery in March. Most of us didn’t foresee the rise of vaccine resistance and two highly infectious variants, delta and omicron—just as the former convict lost in the sewers doesn’t foresee the bars at the end of his journey or Javert waiting to nab him once he gets through.

Valjean, however, experiences a moment of grace at the last moment as Javert violates his training and allows him to escape. Here’s praying that Covid-19 does the same with us.

Reprinted from March 10, 2021

Tuesday, as I was awaiting my first Covid shot (!), I was listening to the scene in Les Misérables where Jean Valjean is groping his way through the sewers of Paris. The elation I felt upon receiving the shot bears some resemblance to what Jean Valjean experiences upon seeing the glimmer of the exit light after his nightmarish trek. In fact, the entire episode is a fitting image for the world’s Covid experience this past year.

Jean Valjean’s first descent into the sewer is as disorienting as the early days of the pandemic:

By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion. It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

When I was 11 and visiting Paris sites with my family, the boat trip we took through the sewers of Paris was a far cry from Jean Valjean’s experience. As he carries the unconscious Marius, he encounters a patrol that fires at him, a rat that bites him, and quicksand that very nearly swallows him up. This final ordeal almost proves too much, even though he manages to escape:

However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed to have left his strength behind him there. That supreme effort had exhausted him. His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall. Once he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter Marius’ position, and he thought that he should have to remain there. But if his vigor was dead, his energy was not. He rose again.

At this point, however, he literally experiences a glimmer of hope. Think of it, perhaps, as the moment we learned that a successful Covid vaccine had been developed:

He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with the wall. He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. He raised his eyes, and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him, he perceived a light. This time it was not that terrible light; it was good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet.

Despite his extreme fatigue and hunger, Jean Valjean is buoyed up:

A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt. It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that radiant portal. Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no longer felt Marius’ weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran rather than walked. 

He is not home free yet, however, as he discovers an impenetrable grating barring his accent. Some governors are also prematurely rejoicing, lifting mask mandates and dropping indoor gathering restrictions:

It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.

The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.

On the other side of the grating is (in our case) prospects of neighborhood July 4th barbecues, visits to grandchildren, and normal Thanksgivings. Jean Valjean imagines escaping both the military patrols that are hunting down revolutionaries and Inspector Javert, who has been dogging his steps for years. Ahead is a return to his beloved adopted daughter Cosette:

Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore, very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris, that gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon, liberty. On the right, downstream, the bridge of Jéna was discernible, on the left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would have been a propitious one in which to await the night and to escape. It was one of the most solitary points in Paris…

Fortunately, in an unexpected twist, he escapes the sewers, and life returns to normal, with a heartfelt reunion and a wedding. Our own Paris awaits us, but we must stay patient and disciplined for a few more months.

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