If snow is currently blasting you and paralyzing all your movements, I have just the poem for you. To fully appreciate Ezra Pound’s “Ancient Music,” however, it helps to first read the poem he is parodying. “Summer Is Icumen In” is one of my favorite medieval poems, largely because its intense nature imagery makes it feel so alive. For a moment, therefore, imagine yourself in warmer circumstances. Then you can return to your cold reality:
Sumer is i-cumin in— Lhude sing, cuccu! Groweth sed and bloweth med And springth the wude nu. Sing, cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb, Lhouth after calve cu, Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth— Murie sing, cuccu! Cuccu, cuccu, Wel singes thu, cuccu. Ne swik thu naver nu!
If you want a translation, you can go to my blog post on the lyric. “Bullock leaps, buck farts, merry sings cuckoo,” however, is probably all you need for the moment.
Ready for some winter storm therapy? Take it away, Ezra:
Ancient Music By Ezra Pound
Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, An ague hath my ham. Freezeth river, turneth liver, Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm, So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm, Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
King in Charleston, 1967, delivering the speech I heard him give
Monday– Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
When I was 17, my father took me to Charleston to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. The year was 1967, the summer before King died (July 30), and Esau Jenkins, a successful Black businessman and key civil rights figure in his own right, was sponsoring a workshop on John’s Island. We arrived the day before, spent the night at Jenkins’s school, and the morning discussing issues that the activists in attendance were experiencing, and then went into the city that afternoon for King’s speech/sermon.
A lot of the details are hazy. At the workshop, I remember someone talking about using the non-violent tactics of Saul Alinsky to pressure banks to invest in minority communities. I remember singing freedom songs. Someone was recording the affair and I would love to get my hands on the cassettes. As it was, I was too young to really know what was going on.
I remember King’s speech, however. Charleston County Hall was surrounded by national guardsmen. Local officials were sure there would be violence, seeing no difference between King and the rioters who had burned Newark and Detroit a few weeks before. But there was not even a hint of anything amiss. In fact, it was a pretty tame crowd. Many people had come straight from church as most of the women wore hats, white gloves and white dresses and the men coats and ties.
In fact, the words I remember most from King were his pushback against those activists to his left. Using the call and response style, which I’d never encountered before, he pointed out that the Black communities were the real victims of the riots, not Whites. He noted that he was against violence, whether in America or in Vietnam. The moment I remember most is when he said, “Therefore I say to you, not Burn, Baby, Burn, but Build, Baby, Build.” As slogans go, it wasn’t the catchiest. It revealed that he felt himself outflanked by Black radicals. They saw a difference between him and them, even if white segregationists didn’t.
I witnessed the segregationist mentality the following spring after King was shot. I remember walking into my American history class at the Sewanee Military Academy, taught by an ardent segregationist, who said, “He lived by the sword and he died by the sword.” I didn’t get up and walk out, as maybe I should have. I just pretended that I hadn’t heard him.
Anyway, today we remember a man who gave his life to make our country better. King saw the best in us, even when we couldn’t see the best in ourselves. As he said at one point in the talk I heard, “Ye shall know the truth,” to which the audience came back with, “and the truth shall make you free.” Gwendolyn Brooks understands all this in the poem she wrote about him:
Martin Luther King, Jr. By Gwendolyn Brooks
A man went forth with gifts.
He was a prose poem. He was a tragic grace. He was a warm music.
He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes. His ashes are reading the world.
His Dream still wishes to anoint the barricades of faith and of control.
His word still burns the center of the sun above the thousands and the hundred thousands.
As we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday (yesterday his birthday, tomorrow the day we celebrate it), it’s worth reflecting on how oppressed groups have found sustaining narratives in Christ’s message, even as purported Christians have used those same texts to keep them down. (Check out how Harriet Beecher Stowe describes this happening.) With this in mind, I turn to Langston Hughes’s “Christ in Alabama,” written during the Scottsboro affair.
The “Scottsboro boys,” as they were called, were nine African-American teenagers, from 12-19, who were accused to raping two white women in 1931. Although they were innocent of the charges (there was medical evidence that no rape had been committed and one of the accusers later recanted), they would be dragged through the courts for years and barely escaped being executed. It was during this time that Hughes wrote his poem:
CHRIST IN ALABAMA
Christ is a Nigger, Beaten and black – O, bare your back.
Mary is His Mother – Mammy of the South. Silence your mouth.
God’s His Father – White Master above, Grant us your love.
Most holy bastard Of the bleeding mouth: Nigger Christ On the cross of the South.
Hughes later recounts the reception the poem received in his essay “My Adventures as a Social Poet.” He wrote the poem after visiting the men in prison, after which some students published it:
Contempo, a publication of some of the students at the University of North Carolina, published the poem on its front page on the very day that I was being presented in a program of my poems at the University in Chapel Hill. That evening there were police outside the building in which I spoke, and in the air the rising tension of race that is peculiar to the South. It had been rumored that some of the local citizenry were saying that I should be run out of town, and that one of the sheriffs agreed, saying: “Sure, he ought to be run out! It’s bad enough to call Christ a bastard. But when he calls him a nigger, he’s gone too far!”
Hughes reports a mixed reaction from the university:
The next morning a third of my fee was missing when I was handed my check. One of the departments of the university jointly sponsoring my program had refused to come through with its portion of the money. Nevertheless, I remember with pleasure the courtesy and kindness of many of the students and faculty at Chapel Hill and their lack of agreement with the anti-Negro elements of the town. There I began to learn at the University of North Carolina how hard is to be a white liberal in the South.
Of course, African Americans growing up in the Jim Crow south had far more in common with Christ than white sheriffs. In his imagery, Hughes bestows a kind of sainthood on those crucified by lynch mobs. “Most holy bastard of the bleeding mouth” could well be a riff off of Christ’s bleeding heart—bleeding for fallen humanity—while Mary has become the “mammy of the south” who mourns her son.
“God the Father” comes off less well in the poem, standing in for the white slave masters who raped their slaves, producing mixed race (and profitable) bastards. If God is an old man in a white beard, Hughes wants nothing to do with him.
Jesus and Mary, however, he can relate to. And once one fully acknowledges that Jesus is God incarnate, then the human narrative about God starts changing as well.
Tobias Wilson-Bates, my youngest son, is a 19th century British Literature specialist who teaches in the English Department at Georgia Gwinnett College. He is also the funniest member of our family and one who has mastered the art of Twitter. I combed through some of his best literary tweets over the last few months and lament that I must pass up the ones with visuals, which are among his best. You can find him at Tobias Wilson-Bates@PhDhurtBrain.
Some of my favorites are imagined conversations with famous authors or characters. For instance:
Tolkien: I’ve got some great character names, Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf CS Lewis: Nice! Really getting into the spirit of fantasy! Tolkien: Right?! Also Sam.
Tolkien (brainstorming): Names are tough, hmm, what would a secretive influential political actor be called who wants to ingratiate himself with a ruler. Something inconspicuous. I’ve got it! Wormtongue!
Gollum: … Therapist: I see, yes, so, is this “precious” in the room with us right now?
Toby has a lot of fun with the Brontes. For instance, this one on Jane Eyre:
Editor: so it’s like the Bluebeard story but in the end Jane marries Bluebeard? Charlotte Bronte: yes. Editor: do you think the readers will like it? Charlotte: yes. because I will tell them to.
And on Villette:
Editor: I think we need to have a romantic ending Charlotte Brontë: like, he dies at sea and she gets to run a school however she likes and read all day? Editor: well Charlotte: also her enemies suffer enormously
You can kind of see why Anne Bronte is Toby’s favorite Bronte from the following allusion to Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
Anne Bronte: the story needs something exciting Emily: a ghost? Charlotte: a mad ghost? Emily and Charlotte: a mad person disguised as a ghost but there’s also really a ghost! Anne: look, I’m just gonna make the husband have a drinking problem
At one point Toby gets into a twitter exchange with Liz Miller, who was his dissertation director at the University of California at Davis. Miller is referring to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s famous thesis that heroines in Victorian novels only have two options, marriage or death:
Liz Miller – Ladies, if he proposes in Chapter Three, wants to marry before the novel is over, and isn’t particularly concerned w/ waiting til novelistic closure to consummate your relationship, either he’s a villain or you’re about to die of consumption.
Toby: Chuckling for the thousandth time of @ecmille1’s observation that getting married before the end of a novel is the worst thing a character can do.
And then later in the thread:
Toby: At this point, if two central characters seem headed towards matrimony, I compulsively check how many pages are left and shake my head sadly if it’s a lot.
Speaking of villainous husbands, here’s Toby in a twitter thread on fairy tales:
Bluebeard is the best fairy tale bc it’s about extreme domestic violence and is so clear in the location and logic that even Disney hasn’t figured out how to sanitize and monetize it.
Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty are all iterations of the same morphological structure that almost always had a rapist king or the woman’s own father intent on raping her and the fairy godmother allowed her to escape in disguise. All profoundly sanitized by Disney.
All that’s left is the phantom of nonconsensual intercourse now romanticized as a kiss that awakens the princess from slumber.
I like how, in another tweet, Toby imagines the eye test in the movie Bladerunner being administered to Victorian authors. In the movie, if the eyes don’t emotionally widen at the question about a turtle getting hit in the road, then it’s a replicant and not a human:
Bladerunner agent using the Voight-kampff test on Victorian authors Agent: would you kill a child for a greater social good? Gaskell: little Tom goes first from starvation, then I get both twins with typhus before moving onto the-
To which another tweeter imagined Thomas Hardy’s response:
Thomas Hardy: question: does it *have* to be for the greater good?
And Toby following up on the Thomas Hardy suggestion:
If they suffer through childhood and then die as adults? Or, alternately, what if one of the children kills all the others? Do I still get those points?
In another tweet on Hardy, Toby mentions the very dark George Gissing:
“Nobody in the 19th century is as bleak as Thomas Hardy” *George Gissing cracks his knuckles menacingly
Here’s an imagined interchange between the author of In Memoriam and the famous author who snatched her husband’s heart out of the funeral fire:
Tennyson: my grief was so great that I — Mary Shelley: kept his preserved heart in a box! Tennyson: — wrote a poem MS: erm, oh, haha, yes, that’s, uh, how we grieve…
And here’s another imagined interchange, this one between the author of Christmas Carol and the noted social realist novelist Elizabeth Gaskell:
Dickens: and when he looked in, he saw the tiny crutch, but Tiny Tim was gone Gaskell: because the opium wasn’t enough to conceal his collapsing immune system and his smallpox infection was inevitably escalated by chronic malnutrition, right? Dickens: umm, well
And another Dickens reference:
Scrooge: what day is it, boy? Boy: tis Christmas Eve 2021 Scrooge: and what is the minimum wage? Boy: $7.25, sir Scrooge: wow. This really seems more of systemic issue than something that can be solved with guilt philanthropy Boy: right??
Here’s one I like:
Dickens (staring into the camera): $1 million dollars by midnight tonight or I add another character.
Moby Dick makes an appearance from time to time:
Ahab: guys, guys, I, uh, wanna apologize about that whale business Crew: whew! *scattered applause Ahab: from now we’re Bitcoin mining and investing in crypto!!! Crew: Noooo!! *screams, *sound of bodies hitting the water
Here’s another, which every teacher will relate to:
*nailing a gold doubloon to the wall “to the first one that sees the end of the semester!”
Here’s an interchange between Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous characters:
Dr. Jekyll: chain me here to end this madness! Utterson: I shall! Dr. Jekyll: also, just a small note, under no circumstances should you call him Dr. Hyde. That’s my credential!
Sometimes Toby imagines himself in the conversations:
Patient: doctor, I’m feeling depressed Me: read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame Patient: wait a second, what kind of doctor are you?! Me: *smoke bomb!
And another with a similar ending:
Me: not all books are novels! Student: how do you define the novel? *the student looks up to find the classroom empty. wind whispers through the open window.
And then there are a number of stand alone observations, witty and smart both:
Charge of the Light Brigade is a poem about a lot of people dying for no reason that gets people excited about the prospect of dying for no reason. Like if Eye of the Tiger were a song to get you excited about being eaten by a tiger.
The more I think about the terrible fates of everyone on Odysseus’ crew, the more I think the Lotus Eaters had it right.
Will never not be impressed by Samuel Johnson saying the canon is made up of the works that have stood the test of time, while writing prefaces for a publisher to convince people that the works the publisher owned were in fact the canon.
Among its many interesting features, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair combines the author’s prodigious ability to skewer character flaws against the background of social class with an almost childish naïveté about how debt and empire function.
Make William Blake part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you cowards!
In response to the Virginia student who complained about Toni Morrison’s Beloved giving him nightmares—put in an ad, this incident helped Republican Glen Youngkin win his gubernatorial race—Toby made a point I make in my book. Sometimes literature is not supposed to be comfortable:
Begging the media to do interviews with Reader Response theorists. Literally an entire field ready to tell you about how having nightmares from reading Beloved is not a “bad” response.
To an article entitled “The Easy Seven-Word Phrase Every Woman Needs to Know to Exit Uncomfortable Conversations,” Toby responded with a line from Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
And finally, looking at the medium of Twitter itself:
Twitter is a lot like being a grad student bc it’s a lot of watching people have intense conversations about things you have only heard of in passing.
Toby doesn’t only write about literature. Since he’s the father of four, there’s a lot about parenting, and also about student debt, the state of academe, Covid, politics in general, and other interests of his. I’ll end with a tweet about my two oldest granddaughters because—well—they’re my granddaughters:
Was a bit confused this morning until my kids explained that they call words written in cursive “curse words”
Shades of Art Linkletter, for those of you old enough to know who he was.
Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers lauding Atlas Shrugged
Thursday
I see that Novak Djokovic has joined the company of those elite athletes who are intent on extending the Covid pandemic. Like Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers, Djokovic thinks he is justified in playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to vaccinations. While Rogers misled people into thinking he’d been vaccinated, Djokovic assured Australian authorities he hadn’t been traveling, when in fact he’d been flying around the world—as well meeting sans mask with various reporters and fans, even though he knew he had Covid.
From a literary point of view, Rogers interests me more since he recently revealed his favorite novel. In light of his behavior, I should have been able to guess that he is a fan of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
I’ve written multiple times about Rand (for instance, here and here) so I won’t go into detail. The novel’s hero John Galt thinks that rules are for wusses and that real men pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. At one point he declares, “I swear—by my life and my life of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” The successful entrepreneur is a combination of victim complex (“They don’t appreciate me”) and revenge fantasy (“The world’s going to fall apart when I’m gone and then they’ll be sorry”). Blogger John Rogers has delivered one of the great indictments of Atlas Shrugged, noting how it appeals to stunted fantasies:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
I can somewhat understand how premier athletes like Rogers and Djokovic are aided by megalomanic, Galt-like illusions of their superiority over others. That supreme confidence—which comes to their aid when even the least little smidgen of self-doubt could result in defeat—also leads them to shrug off their responsibilities to lesser mortals. It took such confidence for Djokovic to overcome two match points, with Roger Federer serving, to win Wimbledon in 2019. If the world falls apart when Rogers and Djokovic shrug, well too bad for the world.
I contrast them with Lebron James, who—as much of a health nut as Djokovic—was also initially hesitant about taking the vaccine. James changed his mind, however, when he realized that getting the shot would protect the people that he loved. Because thoughts about others balanced out his focus on himself, he became a model to be followed rather than a pariah.
John Galt doesn’t acknowledge the many ways that society contributes to the success of people like him. Nor, according to reports, did Ayn Rand. According to Gene Bell-Villada’s excellent book on her, Rand received all kinds of aid from others, even though she proudly proclaimed, “No one helped me,nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me.” Bell-Villada details this aid, including (I quote from one of my earlier posts),
her mother’s jewels that financed her trip to the United States; the free room and board, money and reference letter she received from her American relatives; the subsidized housing she got at the Hollywood Studio Club; to… The list goes on and on, all the way to the cancer surgery that would have bankrupted her had it not been for Medicare.
I’m willing to grant that Rand’s novel contributes to Rogers’ preternatural calm when 250-pound linebackers are bearing down upon him. But I also think of those whom he influenced who have ended up in ICU wards and on ventilators.
Congratulations to the University of Georgia for winning the national football championship Monday night, holding back Alabama’s “Crimson Tide.” In other words, they did what King Canute was unable to pull off. (Let me know if you get this reference, which I explain below.) I’ve written in the past about Alabama’s impressive run of championships (here), applying the Lord Byron’s line, “Roll on though deep and dark blue ocean roll,/Ten thousand ships sweep over thee in vain.” Saying something about the Georgia Bulldogs is a little tougher.
That’s because I can’t find any literary references to bulldogs. Now, I have a personal story about one: when I was growing up in Sewanee in the 1950s, a bulldog named Hrothgar (Beowulf alert!) roamed the campus, sometimes entering classrooms and once my family’s apartment. I guess he felt that every mead hall was his. There are stories of classroom doors being slammed left and right when professors heard Hrothgar’s snuffling in the hall. I also remember Hrothgar being painted purple once (Sewanee’s team color) during Homecoming weekend. Anyway, it was years before I learned that he was named after a fictional Danish king.
But back to Georgia. The closest I can get to a bulldog in literature is a bull terrier. They’re not the same but indulge me because this dog, like the team, is truly fearsome. His name is Bull’s-eye and he belongs to the brutish Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist. Sykes at various times uses Bull’s-eye to terrify Oliver. In one episode he serves as an accessory in the boy’s kidnapping:
“Give me the other [hand],” said Sikes, seizing Oliver’s unoccupied hand. “Here, Bull’s-Eye!”
The dog looked up, and growled.
“See here, boy!” said Sikes, putting his other hand to Oliver’s throat; “if he speaks ever so soft a word, hold him! D’ye mind!”
The dog growled again; and licking his lips, eyed Oliver as if he were anxious to attach himself to his windpipe without delay.
“He’s as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn’t!” said Sikes, regarding the animal with a kind of grim and ferocious approval. “Now, you know what you’ve got to expect, master, so call away as quick as you like; the dog will soon stop that game. Get on, young’un!”
Bull’s-eye wagged his tail in acknowledgment of this unusually endearing form of speech; and, giving vent to another admonitory growl for the benefit of Oliver, led the way onward.
At another point Nancy, Sykes’s lady friend who assists in the kidnapping, unexpectedly reveals a soft side as she protects Oliver against the dog:
“Keep back the dog, Bill!” cried Nancy, springing before the door, and closing it, as the Jew and his two pupils darted out in pursuit. “Keep back the dog; he’ll tear the boy to pieces.”
“Serve him right!” cried Sikes, struggling to disengage himself from the girl’s grasp. “Stand off from me, or I’ll split your head against the wall.”
“I don’t care for that, Bill, I don’t care for that,” screamed the girl, struggling violently with the man, “the child shan’t be torn down by the dog, unless you kill me first.”
And then there’s the scene where Bull’s-eye actually goes after his master, which Dickens observes doesn’t happen often:
Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by their masters; but Mr. Sikes’s dog, having faults of temper in common with his owner, and laboring, perhaps, at this moment, under a powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth in one of the half-boots. Having given in a hearty shake, he retired, growling, under a form; just escaping the pewter measure which Mr. Sikes levelled at his head.
“You would, would you?” said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand, and deliberately opening with the other a large clasp-knife, which he drew from his pocket. “Come here, you born devil! Come here! D’ye hear?”
The dog no doubt heard; because Mr. Sikes spoke in the very harshest key of a very harsh voice; but, appearing to entertain some unaccountable objection to having his throat cut, he remained where he was, and growled more fiercely than before: at the same time grasping the end of the poker between his teeth, and biting at it like a wild beast.
This resistance only infuriated Mr. Sikes the more; who, dropping on his knees, began to assail the animal most furiously. The dog jumped from right to left, and from left to right; snapping, growling, and barking; the man thrust and swore, and struck and blasphemed; and the struggle was reaching a most critical point for one or other; when, the door suddenly opening, the dog darted out: leaving Bill Sikes with the poker and the clasp-knife in his hands.
Unlike the Georgia Bulldogs, however, Bulls-eye comes to a bad end. After Sykes, in a strange turn of affairs, accidentally hangs himself in an attempt to escape, the dog fatally seeks to rejoin his master:
A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards on the parapet with a dismal howl, and collecting himself for a spring, jumped for the dead man’s shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the ditch, turning completely over as he went; and striking his head against a stone, dashed out his brains.
Many in the past have dashed out their brains—metaphorically—against Alabama’s fabled teams. Not this time.
Canute episode: Legend has it that the 11th century English king Canute, piously worried that his courtiers were worshipping him as a god, had them place him on the beach. When, despite his commands, the tide kept rolling in, he had made his point that earthly power is vain compared with God’s supreme power.
Sewanee has asked me to teach a “Composition and Literature” class, so tomorrow, for the first time in two years, I’ll be getting to know a new class. For a fleeting moment, it crossed my mind to give them a twitter questionnaire—“Never Have I Ever”—that has gone viral. I quickly realized, however, that I really shouldn’t be asking about their sex lives and drug use. So scratch that.
Still, I share it here, along with my own answers, so as to introduce new aspects of myself to readers of this blog. I promise that there’s a literary tie-in.
The questionnaire asks you to assign yourself a point for each of the activities you haven’t done. After that, it’s up for debate what the score means. If you get a high score, does it mean that you’re a boring person who hasn’t lived life to the fullest? If a low one, that you’re reckless and irresponsible? Maybe but not necessarily.
Anyway, feel free to take the test and tell me your score, as I will tell you mine (along with elaboration):
Instruction: Assign yourself one point for each one of the following activities you haven’t done:
1. Skipped school 2. Gotten drunk 3. Had a one-night stand 4. Taken drugs 5. Appeared on television 6. Gone skydiving 7. Fired a gun 8. Been on a cruise 9. Sung karaoke 10. Met a celeb 11. Skinny dipped 12. Smoked a cigarette 13. Broken a limb 14. Gotten a body piercing 15. Gotten a tattoo 16. Received a ticket 17. Gotten arrested 18. Gone ziplining 19. Been in a limo 20. Ridden a horse
Okay, so even though I’m a fairly buttoned-down person, I got a five, and the score would have gone lower if I’d ever sung karaoke (weird that I haven’t) and were a woman (in which case I would probably have pierced my ears). The other three are skydiving, smoking a cigarette (ugh!), and getting a tattoo. Since the last two are fairly minor, I’m not that far from a 1.
But lest I sound like a swinger—okay, so I probably don’t—I probably should mention that I only smoked pot once, which was right before seeing Casablanca (it was my first time) as a junior in college. All the way through the film, my foggy mind kept asking, “Isn’t someone supposed to say, ‘Play it again, Sam?’” Of course, no one does. When I emerged from the film, I was so angry that pot had messed up my first encounter with this classic that I vowed never to indulge again. Indeed, intellectual capacity is so important to me that anything that messes with it (like drugs) I regard with horror.
Same with getting drunk, which I did at a Carleton beer ball game my senior year. I had a terrific headache the following morning and kept gagging into the phone when my saintly Victorian grandmother (born 1886) called. (Fortunately she didn’t hear it.) So again, never again.
The one-night stand happened at Carleton but we didn’t go all the way, so maybe that doesn’t count. Although the so-called sexual revolution may have been underway, I was a lowly foot soldier.
More striking was getting arrested, which I did along with 80 fellow Carleton and St. Olaf students and professors. The occasion was the 1970 Kent State shootings, and we blockaded the Minneapolis induction center with the full intent of getting peacefully arrested. And so we were. Paul Wellstone, my political science professor and later a senator, was one of our group.
I fired a gun as a high school student at Sewanee Military Academy as part of their ROTC program and never again after that. I skipped school once, but that was on senior day at SMA, when the whole class skipped. (I stayed at home working on an essay.) I broke my leg playing wiffle ball (I leaped into a cedar tree to catch a ball) so that’s not exactly an instance of bold risk taking.
I’ve ridden a horse once, in Yellowstone, and went ziplining with Julia three years ago in the Smokies (because we’d never done it). I loved the ziplining and look forward to doing it again.
The television story is the most interesting of the lot. When I was in newly-liberated Slovenia in 1995, I was asked to read Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” as part of their Victory in Europe (VE) celebration. (I describe that experience here). The poem was chosen because Jimmy Carter sent it to Yugoslavia when Tito died. So that was really cool.
Okay, now for the literary part. When I first read the “met a celeb” question, I didn’t think I had. But then I recalled that I had had poet Lucille Clifton as a colleague for 15 years. Not only that but, because she invited all her friends to campus, I met and had dinner with Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver, Amiri Baraka, and Philip Levine. I have also been to intimate poetry readings with Joy Harjo, Amiri Baraka, Toi Derricotte, Robert Haas, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, W.S. Merwin, Mark Doty, Carolyn Forché, Li-Young Lee, and Naomi Shihab Nye. And a large reading with Toni Morrison. Sadly, I was out of the country on sabbatical when Denise Levertov came. So if poets count as celebs, I’ve met celebs.
On the other hand, my counting poets as celebs may make me as uncool as my various tepid transgressions. My relatively low score, in other words, is not like other low scores.
Firemen administer to a victim of Sunday’s Bronx fire
Monday
Because there were nine children among the 19 people who died in yesterday’s horrific Bronx fire, Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” came to mind. I’ve written about the poem before but I’m repurposing that post to apply to the tragedy.
The conflagration appears to have been caused by a malfunctioning space heater, and the fire is being described as one of the worst in the city’s history. Another 12 inhabitants are still in area hospitals, with 63 having been injured in all.
As Thomas intends, readers are initially horrified by the sentiment expressed in the poem’s title. The poet uses this strategy to get us to focus on the victim.
That’s because normally, when we hear of a tragedy, we fit it into a recognizable category. In doing so, we remove some of the sting, but in the process we also distance ourselves from it. While not exactly dehumanizing the victims, we check a kind of mourning box and then move on.
At the risk of appearing heartless, the poet rejects this approach. He wants us to rethink our conventional responses to how we react to “the majesty and burning of the child’s death”:
I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth.
Keep in mind that Thomas is referring to a tragedy that dwarfs the Bronx fire tragedy. Almost 40,000 Londoners were killed by the London Blitz during World War II, with another 50,000 seriously injured. One of these was the girl mentioned in the poem, who comes to stand in for everyone.
How does “a grave truth” murder “the mankind of her going”? Perhaps fatalistically pointing out that we will all inevitably encounter the truth of the grave diminishes the death. So does a conventional elegy, which is sure to mention her innocence and youth. As we read the poem, we find ourselves struggling to put into words what is beyond words.
The poem’s final line also resists comfortable containment as it can be read two ways. Does “After the first death, there is no other” refer to Christianity’s vision of eternal life? Christian language can be found throughout the poem, including in the “stations of the breath” (cross) that we use to articulate our grief. Or does it express atheism’s belief that when we die, we just die?
The opening stanzas don’t make it any clearer. With images of our making and our final silence, Thomas could be referring to the Book of Genesis and Revelation. But maybe not. In any event, our own momentous life cycle—momentous at least to us—is just as momentous for this girl.
Despite the title, I sense that both the child and all who died along with her are indeed mourned. I find something comforting in her being with those who have gone before, as well as with nature in its eternal cycle. The Thames may not mourn, but we do. As with other great elegies (I think especially of Shelley’s Adonais, where he mourns Keats), we watch the poet struggle with meaninglessness. As with other great elegies, this one doesn’t allow this unnamed girl to slip easily from memory once we have put in the requisite mourning.
As I say, Thomas’s poem gets me to think more fully about all those who have died in the Bronx fire.
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Burning, of a Child in London By Dylan Thomas
Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead And the synagogue of the ear of corn Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other.
I repost today an Epiphany poem by my father, one of my favorites, along with my previous notes on it. Epiphany is when Christians celebrate the entry into the world of the radical new idea that love is more powerful than death. To call the idea counterintuitive is a spectacular understatement. Fear can rule our lives, which is why we need constant prayer and worship to rekindle our faith. The notion that love can trump death didn’t originate with Jesus, but he embodied it so powerfully that it caught on.
Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar, the three wise men, stand in for the greater world. They also represent mystical wisdom. Perhaps we could say that the shepherds who came to see the infant Jesus have the simple faith of the heart whereas the magi have the higher wisdom of the head. (This is how Auden sees it in a poem I have posted on in the past.) Neither is complete without the other.
In the past I have written about T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” where one of the kings recalls the moment, years ago, when he saw the Christ child. He remembers that the journey to Bethlehem was hard but worth the suffering. Since that time the vision has clouded over, and he is “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods.”
Today’s poem, considerably lighter, takes the vantage point of one of the camels. Rather than lamenting the loss of belief (a nonstop Eliot theme that eventually becomes tiresome), the poem tells us to be good community citizens. Regardless of where we live and what we do, we can live in love and service. That, the camel tells us, is how Christ’s love manifests itself in the world.
There is an implied criticism in the poem of the kings for not having stuck it out with the Christ child–that’s why the camel has to slip away–so perhaps the poem does echo Eliot’s. We once were in touch with divinity before returning to our normal lives.
Then again, as I said, we all of us lose the vision and must rediscover it. Again and again.
You’ll probably recognize the Biblical allusion in the final stanza but, in case you don’t, it’s Jesus’ assertion (Matthew 19:24) that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.” “Effendi” is Arabic for “Master.”
Here’s the poem:
Fable of the Third Christmas Camel By Scott Bates
(Editor’s note: The following poetic fragment, evidently an overlooked scrap of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was recently discovered near Jerusalem, stuck to the bottom of an empty bagel can. We offer here an approximate translation into modern English of this invaluable historical document.)
I went all the way But on the return trip I gave the caravan The slip
One desert night Quit Balthazar With all his frankincense And myrrh
And headed out Across the sand It was dawn when I came To this strange land
And found this family Living here Without a camel Because they were poor
So I stayed with them Carried their hides Gave all the kids Free camel rides
Sat with the baby Worked with the man Sang them ballads Of Ispahan
Carried the water Pulled the plow Loved my neighbor Who was a cow
I like it here I’m staying with them As I wanted to stay In Bethlehem
With that other Family I knew Which proves Effendi That passing through
The eye of a needle Is an easier thing For a camel Than a king
