My family recently found itself riveted by the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher. Like everyone who has seen the film, we gained a new respect for octopuses, leading me to search the internet for poems about the creature.
This Susan Jarvis Bryant poem does a pretty good job of capturing what we saw on film. At one point in the film Craig Foster’s octopus does indeed prove herself a “Houdini of the blue” with a miraculous escape from a shark. “Your skill’s immense” is no exaggeration.
If you subscribe to Netflix but haven’t seen the film, put it on your list.
Ode to an Octopus By Susan Jarvis Bryant
Shape-shifter of the sea, I’ve come to love Your strange sophistication; out of place In liquid labyrinths—your form sings of Odd creatures from the sphere of outer space. Yet here among anemones and fish, An ocean star shines beautiful and bright. Your flirty skirt of legs skims past a reef In colors conjured by an inner wish To hide your blushing pulse of pure delight, As awestruck eyes look on in disbelief.
Houdini of the blue, you shrink and slink Through crevices defying common sense. Contortion and a dirty squirt of ink Hoodwink eel and shark. Your skill’s immense! From jiggle-jelly soft to craggy rock, You morph from smooth to rough with ease and speed, Invisible to those who crave your taste. The predators, they circle, and they flock; Your flesh so sweet, they’re driven by their greed— A frenzied greed your guise will lay to waste.
Some see you as a gorgon of the waves; A devil of earth’s salty, surging swell, A digger of dead sailor’s briny graves, A slimy siren crooning men to hell, A Kraken sucking rasping gasps of breath From lungs that burn for draughts of quenching air. Once I feared you. Now I understand. I see a soul, defying threat of death With triple-hearted grace and wicked flair, Fair mollusk of the surf and golden sand.
Today I grapple with a children’s classic that I loved as a child but that I have essentially “canceled”—by which I mean, I do not read it to my grandchildren. Many on the right would accuse me of being “woke” as I grapple with Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, so this essay gives me the opportunity to address their attacks as well as grapple with my own conflicted feelings.
Productive cancel conversations can only occur with people who enter them in good faith, and few of those complaining right-wingers appear interested in good faith. For them, cancel culture is just a stick with which to beat up the left, not to explore ideas. This becomes clear when we see how readily they cancel anyone who doesn’t agree with them, from the Dixie Chicks to San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick to any Republican who does not back Donald Trump 100% (including Mike Pence and Liz Cheney). They aren’t interested in free speech for everyone, just free speech for themselves. The Editorial Board’s John Stoehr lays out the problem in a mantra he shares with his political science students:
“You can’t get anything done when fascists are sitting at the table of democratic politics.” A democratic community can tolerate a vast array of opinions. However, it cannot, and should not, tolerate opinions in which democratic politics is the problem. If it does, then nothing needing to get done gets done—and everyone suffers.
So having established that, here’s the thinking behind my painful decision not to read Little Black Sambo to my grandchildren.
It’s painful because I absolutely loved this story as a child and loved reading it to my own children. The protagonist is an Indian boy, son of Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo, who gets a new outfit, complete with green umbrella and “purple shoes with crimson soles and crimson linings.” (I don’t have to return to the book since I still have it memorized.) While out proudly walking in his new attire, he is accosted for four successive tigers, each of whom says, “Little Black Sambo, I’m going to eat you up.” In each case, Sambo barters for his freedom with one of his new items. When complications arise—how can a tiger carry an umbrella? what use are two shoes to a four-footed animal?—Sambo ingeniously figures out solutions. (“You can use your tail.” “You can wear them on your ears.”) Following the bargain, each tiger strides off declaring, “Now I’m the grandest tiger in the jungle.”
While his life has been spared, however, Sambo has been stripped of his finery and cries bitterly. Fortunately for him, the four tigers fall to fighting with each other over who is the grandest. Each grabs the tail of another and they whirl around a tree so quickly that they churn themselves into butter (“or ghi, as it is called in India”). Sambo dons the clothes they have cast aside prior to their fight, and Black Jumbo, coming across the ghi, gathers it up. The book concludes with pancakes for dinner:
So [Black Mumbo] got flour and eggs and milk and sugar and butter, and she made a huge big plate of most lovely pancakes. And she fried them in the melted butter which the Tigers had made, and they were just as yellow and brown as little Tigers.
And then they all sat down to supper. And Black Mumbo ate Twenty-seven pancakes, and Black Jumbo ate Fifty-five, but Little Black Sambo ate a Hundred and Sixty-nine, because he was so hungry.
There’s a complicated psychological drama concerning autonomy and identity going on here. The child in new clothes steps out into the world confidently, only to discover that there are forces that will negate this new-found assertiveness. The threat of “eat you up” is heard by children as sending them back as undifferentiated members of the family unit (and of the parents) with no independent self. In each case, however, Sambo problem-solves his way out of difficulty, proving that he is in fact his own person. The story ends in a revenge fantasy where the forces that threatened to negate his individuality themselves become undifferentiated and the prey becomes predator. The pancakes are “just as yellow and brown as little Tigers.”
The book was fun to read to my kids. “Little Black Sambo, I’m going to eat you up,” I would growl to Justin, Darien and Toby, and they would squeal in delighted terror as I hugged them—which is to say, as I symbolically swallowed them up, denying them their autonomy—but in a way that reassured them that all was well. In other words, they experienced their anxiety as a game, one which they knew would conclude with a happy ending.
Freud described the process in Beyond the Pleasure Principle after observing a nephew in a crib playing a “fort-da” (away-here) game with a spool attached to a string. The nephew would throw the spool out of sight while calling out “fort” and then bring it back while saying “da.” Freud interpreted this as him playing out abandonment anxieties, the most primal of all fears. The disappearing spool was his mother leaving, and by turning it into a game, the child was reassuring himself that he was not helpless but had symbolic mastery over this most frightening of events.
Elsewhere Freud says that stories are more complicated versions of this mastering anxiety drama. In his essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Freud writes that, when we grow up, we turn to daydreams, which authors transform into literature:
As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure when he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects: instead of playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams. I believe that most people construct phantasies at times in their lives. This is a fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has therefore not been sufficiently appreciated.
Little Black Sambo is a child’s level fantasy, powerful in that it deals with core identity issues but elementary. We demand more complicated stories when we get older.
So why am I not reading it to my grandchildren. The reasons are mainly cultural.
First, the book recalls the pickaninny image from America’s slave and Jim Crow eras. Second, Sambo too is a diminutive caricature for mixed race people of those times. Finally, the emphasis on the color of Sambo’s skin draws special attention to a colonialist distinction. We see Bannerman, an English woman living in India, focusing on the way Indians differ from her.
My daughter-in-law Candice, who is from Trinidad, told me that she grew up not thinking about skin color because pretty much everyone around her looked like her. Only when she came to the United States did she come to think of herself as a woman of color. It doesn’t matter that Bannerman is not judgmental in her use of the world “Black.” What comes through is her colonialist perspective.
I understand that a 1996 version of the book has authentic Indian names and has been retitled The Story of Little Babaj (his parents now are Mamaji and Papaji). That addresses some of my issues. Yet I can’t get out of my head this English woman marveling at the (from her reserved English perspective) gaudy displays of the colonized (“red shoes with crimson soles and crimson linings!”) Exoticizing the other is still going on.
Or not. I acknowledge this may be a gray area and that I may be overly sensitive. I’m willing to have difficult conversations about the matter. But only with people who are interested in genuine dialogue rather than in wielding ideological cudgels. Only those truly concerned that our children grow up with open minds and a healthy sense of self-respect will I take seriously.
I love this Easter poem by Oscar Wilde, who knows with unerring instinct how to pare away the extraneous from Christianity and bring it back to its roots. In this case, he begins with Vatican Easter pageantry—which itself will be pared down this year due to Covid—but ends with the simple messenger who brought God into the world.
The poem ends with an allusion to Matthrew 8:19-20:
And one of the scribes came to Him and said, “Teacher, I will follow You wherever You go.” Jesus replied, Foxes have dens and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.”
In other words, you think you can follow me to pomp and majesty, but my true home is with those who wander wearily, bruising their feet. Do you still want to follow me?
Easter is a joyous day, but it quickly becomes meaningless if we focus on power rather than those who suffer.
Easter Day By Oscar Wilde
The silver trumpets rang across the Dome: The people knelt upon the ground with awe: And borne upon the necks of men I saw, Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.
Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam, And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red, Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head: In splendour and in light the Pope passed home.
My heart stole back across wide wastes of years To One who wandered by a lonely sea, And sought in vain for any place of rest: ‘Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest, I, only I, must wander wearily, And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.’
John Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward” is a good poem for all those Christians who, having jobs to do, cannot give their full attention to the day. In Donne’s case, he is traveling to Wales (“I am carried towards the west”), even though his “soul’s form bends to the East” (toward the Holy Land).
As he does in other poems (“Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “Sun Rising”), Donne turns to astronomy for key metaphors. Our souls are like spheres—which is to say, perfect in their roundness—but our individual souls are “subject to foreign motion.” Whether Donne has in mind the gravitational pull of the sun or the ancient world’s music of the spheres isn’t clear, but it doesn’t matter since the metaphor works in both cases. In any event, our individual souls are “whirl’d” by “their first mover,” even though Donne himself is going in a contrary direction.
He says he’s almost glad this is the case, however, because focusing on the crucifixion would overwhelm him:
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see That spectacle of too much weight for me. Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die ; What a death were it then to see God die?
But though he is turning his back on Christ—literally by traveling west, metaphorically by not opening up his heart fully—yet Christ and Mary “are present yet unto my memory.” Turning his back also suggests that he is inviting Jesus to whip him into shape:
I turn my back to thee but to receive Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave. O think me worth Thine anger, punish me, Burn off my rust, and my deformity
Here he repeats an idea found in his famous sonnet “Batter my heart, three-personed God” where he asks God to batter through his resistance since he finds his free will operating against his best interests:
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
If God, by His grace, restores His image to the poet—thereby showing that He knows him—then the poet will turn back again. Unlike the speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” who laments that he does “not hope to turn again,” Donne assures God that his faith will be renewed. Eliot lived in a more pessimistic age.
Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward
By John Donne
LET man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this, Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is ; And as the other spheres, by being grown Subject to foreign motion, lose their own, And being by others hurried every day, Scarce in a year their natural form obey ; Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it. Hence is’t, that I am carried towards the west, This day, when my soul’s form bends to the East. There I should see a Sun by rising set, And by that setting endless day beget. But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall, Sin had eternally benighted all. Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see That spectacle of too much weight for me. Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ; What a death were it then to see God die ? It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink, It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink. Could I behold those hands, which span the poles And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes ? Could I behold that endless height, which is Zenith to us and our antipodes, Humbled below us? or that blood, which is The seat of all our soul’s, if not of His, Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn By God for His apparel, ragg’d and torn ? If on these things I durst not look, durst I On His distressed Mother cast mine eye, Who was God’s partner here, and furnish’d thus Half of that sacrifice which ransom’d us ? Though these things as I ride be from mine eye, They’re present yet unto my memory, For that looks towards them ; and Thou look’st towards me, O Saviour, as Thou hang’st upon the tree. I turn my back to thee but to receive Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave. O think me worth Thine anger, punish me, Burn off my rust, and my deformity ; Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace, That Thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face.
Carl Rosin, an occasional contributor to this blog, uses its philosophy in his English classrooms at Radnor High School in Radnor, PA. We enjoyed serving on a panel together at the 2019 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) national convention in Baltimore, along with Jennifer Fletcher, Glenda Funk, and Carol Jago.Carl left a software engineering job to become a teacher and has won various local and regional awards along with PLATO’s (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) national high school Philosophy Teacher of the Year award for 2014-15; he also served on the National Humanities Center’s Teacher Advisory Council for 2018-2019. Since the pandemic began, he has bolstered his reading as a member of the #CanonChat group on Twitter.
By Carl Rosin, English Dept., Radnor High School, Radnor PA
“Dickinson at the top of the stanza, pivots to a new image…em-dash, slant-rhyme, and BANG she takes the lead! Oh, her pacing is exquisite!”
Nope. Poetry does not “score” that way.
Evaluation is easy in basketball, as in most sports: certain actions yield points, and if you score more points, you win. The single-elimination NCAA basketball tournaments bring the thrills because of the high level of play in both the men’s and women’s draws, with the season’s accumulations of wins and quality of those wins approximating the quality of each team, so that the best are competing. Still, upsets abound, which brings even further excitement. On a given day, a given team may outplay a “better” team, as quantified by score.
Evaluation in art is dicier. Art lacks the objective quantifiability of points scored; even the less-objective scoring systems of ice skating and gymnastics do not apply well. Great art exists, however…and if it does, some poems can be assessed as greater than others. Or can they?
My three 11th grade AP English Language & Composition sections have been skirmishing with this question. We have read over 40 great American poems so far this school year; I organized them (by unit) into a tournament draw, and the kids have been voting on them, in parallel with the NCAA’s basketball tournament action. Like many teachers of English across the country, I have been doing this for a few years, using the mode to reacquaint us with poems we read earlier and to introduce the complex, higher-order thinking skill of evaluation. And to have a little fun. Perhaps the tournament can – as competition so often does – give us some valuable information about the literature we read.
Each student votes for the one poem that they consider superior in each matchup, starting with the 32-poem draw. As if that’s easy, or even possible. Well, yes, it is, at least in theory.
Before we began, I talked about aesthetic judgment. Imagine a line, with subjective at the left edge and objective at the right. Subjectivity means taste, opinion; subjectivity is relative. Objectivity suggests measurableness, an absolute that will be perceived the same way by all viewers. I love olives and dislike prunes, and no amount of argument can convince me to alter my opinions about them, nor will my contrary argument convince you if your tastes are opposite to mine, because the subjective field is not where argument is fought. On the objective end of the line: regardless of what you think about rhyme and meter, they are either present or not.
The large grayish area between those two edges is the region about which one can make a normative claim, where evidence- and logic-based argument does hold sway. The evaluator attempts to approach the poem in a disinterested way, to assess normative claims about its values: beauty, mellifluousness, harshness, irony, drama, innovation, terror, emotional power. Disinterestedness does not exclude heart from its ultimate consideration.
Next, we practiced with Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-Headed Calf”:
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.
We tossed around some subjective descriptors, some objective ones, then moved on to normative claims. Gilpin’s poem, which I love (a subjective claim), is free verse in plain diction (objective), peaceful yet heartbreakingly sad (normative).
Now to the tournament. “Try to judge each contest on which is the superior poem,” I asked.
Two weeks later, our tournament, now whirling toward its conclusion, has illuminated a pattern that interests me: some students’ preference for what I might call straightforward poems over more ambiguous ones. I hadn’t thought deeply about this straightforwardness-ambiguity axis in the past. The values measured on that axis now struck me as appearing to correlate with popularity for a certain set of readers. Professor Bates recently took a swing at what might be a related topic in the arena of prose fiction. He pondered how more “lightweight” popular fiction compares to literary fiction.
The simplest aesthetic judgment we can draw is the mere assertion that some artistic products are more straightforward and some are more ambiguous. Seeking the proper terms for talking about this was an early conversation for my classes. It arose in January when we considered the work of National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, whose inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” is likely to remain the most memorable element of President Biden’s inauguration. Gorman, at the tender age of 22, is already an experienced occasional poet, having performed not only at the Capitol on January 20 but a few weeks later at the Super Bowl. She has mastered the venue: when one reads aloud to an audience who do not have access to the text, one’s approach must be commensurate with that context. Gorman’s approach is rooted in repetition, sound devices, wordplay, an affirmative tone, and her engaging delivery. The audience is always oriented. Her poetry epitomizes what I term straightforwardness.
Those whose definition of art assumes the predominance of complication, subtext, and openness to interpretation might think that this is a damning term. I’m not one of them. The 32 poems in our March Madness Poetry Tournament include many poems that are exquisite and relatively straightforward: “Still I Rise,” by Maya Angelou, “Gate A-4,” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” by Walt Whitman spring to mind – all have been popular with the students, with “Still I Rise” one of the only two poems to make the Final Four in all three of my sections’ tournaments.
“Gate A-4” starts with a Post-9/11 shiver: the Arab-American narrator, at an airport, hears an announcement requesting help from someone who speaks Arabic. Afraid of what this might mean, she arrives at the gate to find a distraught older woman whose lack of fluency in English has led to a misunderstanding. Kindness alleviates the conflict, treats are shared, and by the end of the lovely, understated poem, a community has formed:
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
Like the better-known “Still I Rise,” which I would argue is even more earnest and unequivocal, “Gate A-4” leads the reader easily to a stable understanding. The trajectory at the end is unmistakeably upward, with a hopeful and even didactic tone.
The tournament success of these poems, along with “The Hill We Climb,” led me to this hypothesis: for most readers, straightforwardness is a positive value, making a poem that is more readily assimilated into the reader’s mind and thus more readily remembered. For many readers, clarity is a virtue.
The psychologist and writer Maria Konnikova, author of the recent best-seller The Biggest Bluff, might agree. “Human minds don’t like uncertainty and they especially don’t like ambiguity,” she says. “Our cognitive-processing capacity is taxed beyond belief.” This poses a challenge for consumers of art, even more so for producers of art. If readers desire a psychologically satisfying experience, and that assumes a sense of closure, does that necessarily condemn ambiguous art to a niche audience? Is that akin to something that sports doesn’t do: have the players and fans leave the game with the result unclear? Or is analogizing art to sports simply unhelpful?
Straightforwardness/ambiguity indeed seems to be an axis that tells us something useful about poetry. I look back over my Norton Anthologies to dig up examples. In addition to Angelou and now Gorman, some notably straightforward poets include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Rudyard Kipling. This does not mean that their work is devoid of complexity in theme or language or structure – a quick look at Hopkins makes that clear.
On the ambiguity side, my mind leaps to names like Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, Philip Levine, and Robert Hayden. Hayden’s beloved sonnet “Those Winter Sundays” comes through in the voice of a man remembering the sacrifices his fierce father made when the narrator was a child. The narrator reveals his youthful ingratitude, his memory of
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
The penultimate line echoes with regret, nearly keening in its suggestion that he recognized that ingratitude too late, missing the opportunity to make up for it. The conflict remains unresolved here, in a way that doesn’t characterize the earlier poems. That open-endedness offers a place where the moral and emotional imagination can play. It also can frustrate.
Poems that fall on the ambiguity side of the chart have also found success in this year’s tournament. Rita Dove’s “Rosa” (and her even more ambiguous poem “Demeter’s Prayer to Hades”) left its mark on the students, as has Lucille Clifton’s “i am accused of tending to the past” and (the only poem that has been as successful so far as “Still I Rise”) the recently-deceased Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “The World Is a Beautiful Place.” Wandering away from the left margin, as Ferlinghetti’s poems tend to do, it quickly dives from the optimistic title toward an unsettling undercurrent:
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing all the time.
Three stanzas that take these darkly humorous turns prime the reader for them, at which point the fourth rejects this trend in a pleasant way, following through with Beatnik effervescence about “living it up.” Just as suddenly, the short fifth stanza takes a blunt shift back to how “right in the middle of it / comes the smiling / mortician.”
It would be disingenuous to suggest that the literary establishment – whatever that is – respects straightforwardness and ambiguity equally. Straightforwardness has tended to be associated with relatively neutral descriptors like “explicit” and “earnest” and decidedly negative ones like “simplistic” or “inelegant” or “clichéd.” This is the world of pop music lyrics and extremely popular poems like Kipling’s “If” and William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.” It is often assumed to lack depth, and, indeed, many terrible poems do share some of the worst of these characteristics, especially cliché. Many would say that a robust intellectual experience requires less black-and-white, more gray.
Ambiguity may be thought to correspond to psychological vitality, intellectual complexity, and the ability to engage us, but it comes with its own perceived burdens: “inaccessible” (check out some Wallace Stevens…), “abstruse,” even “pompous.”
Many poets, perhaps even most, defy the easy dichotomy. Langston Hughes wrote nuanced classics like “The Weary Blues” and “Harlem” along with many much simpler ones. William Wordsworth, whose Preface to Literary Ballads promoted use of “a selection of language really used by man,” notable for being “plainer and more emphatic,” was famed for both the relatively straightforward “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” and more ambiguous pieces like “The World Is Too Much With Us.” The theme of the latter may not be hard to discern, but it ends, like Hayden’s poem does, in a minor key.
Does one or the other kind of poetry tend to win in your tournament?
What does our answer to such a question like this say about us as readers? Nothing determinative, although there are hints. Last year, my two tournaments were both won by Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” “Invictus” was a strong contender, but more ambiguous poems like Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning” were equally popular. At that time, the pandemic was fresh and especially frightening; perhaps we are looking for something different as this spring rolls around. This year, Gorman and Dickinson – poets on the opposite ends of the straightforwardness graph – booted “Those Winter Sundays” in early rounds. My back-of-the-envelope tally suggests that 76% of the victories went to the more straightforward poem across our two tournament “Regions” that were comprised of a general collection of great American poems. The other two “Regions” are dedicated specifically to themes about justice and nonconformity, and in those contests only 12% of the wins went to the more straightforward poem. Does this suggest that ambiguity compels us more when certain topics are under examination? In our “Nonconformity” region, with its collection of Transcendentalists and Beats, only 1 of the 21 decisions so far have gone to the poem that seemed more straightforward.
I also consider this through my teacher-lens. Like a good coach, I should find ways to attune my students to appreciate ambiguity, which seems less common than appreciating straightforwardness is. Konnikova writes in The Biggest Bluff, “[I]f ‘less certainty, more inquiry’ is your guiding light, not only will you listen; you will adjust. You will grow” into self-awareness and self-discipline. Letting ourselves bathe comfortably in uncertainty prepares us for adapting to a world full of it. It also opens us up to the pleasures of many new artistic insights.
John Wooden, who coached the most Men’s NCAA championship teams in history, believed in poetry and found it useful in his coaching of young athletes. He loved Shakespeare, but the texts he applied ran to Rudyard Kipling and Grantland Rice, not William Carlos Williams and Gwendolyn Brooks. No coach’s pep talk springs from Natasha Trethewey’s “Southern History” or Sarah Freligh’s “Wondrous,” although those are two of the essential poems published in our current century. Meanwhile, Amanda Gorman and Maya Angelou hold fast to the public pedestal they have earned. A poetry tournament does not certify what makes a poem exceptional, but it can shine a light on what we admire and love in art.
My 95-year-old mother has difficulty going up and down stairs—two years ago she broke a vertebra and a rib while doing so—so Julia and I now insist on accompanying her up and down the seven-step staircase that joins her split-level ground floor. But because, for admirable reasons, she fiercely guards her independence, sometimes she tackles the stairs without alerting us. At those moments, I find myself internally reciting A. A. Milne’s “Disobedience.”
The “disobedient” party in this case is the mother of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree. I’m the judgmental three-year-old.
Disobedience
James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree Took great Care of his Mother, Though he was only three. James James Said to his Mother, “Mother,” he said, said he; “You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don’t go down with me.”
James James Morrison’s Mother Put on a golden gown. James James Morrison’s Mother Drove to the end of the town. James James Morrison’s Mother Said to herself, said she: “I can get right down to the end of the town and be back in time for tea.”
King John Put up a notice, “LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED! JAMES JAMES MORRISON’S MOTHER SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID. LAST SEEN WANDERING VAGUELY: QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD, SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN TO THE END OF THE TOWN – FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!”
James James Morrison Morrison (Commonly known as Jim) Told his Other relations Not to go blaming him. James James Said to his Mother, “Mother,” he said, said he: “You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me.”
James James Morrison’s mother Hasn’t been heard of since. King John said he was sorry, So did the Queen and Prince. King John (Somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?”
(Now then, very softly) J.J. M.M. W.G.Du P. Took great C/0 his M***** Though he was only 3. J.J. said to his M***** “M*****,” he said, said he: “You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town if-you-don’t-go-down-with-ME!”
The poem appeared in When We Were Very Young, published in 1924. In other words, it was written at a time when British women were agitating for the right to vote—the Equal Franchise Act would pass four years later—and during the jazz age, when women enjoyed increased independence and sexual freedom. I mention these historical facts because they help us understand some of the currents flowing through this otherwise whimsical poem.
Basically, James’s mother is abandoning her sacred childcare duties to fulfill her own desires. The golden gown is a sign that she is at least going dancing, with a hint of more, and the fact that she takes a car speaks to the newfound sense of freedom that many women experienced with the automobile. My former colleague Michael Berger, who studies the history of cars, once wrote an article about how women driver jokes stemmed from male anxieties about this freedom.
And then there’s “town,” which stands in contrast with bucolic rural England and traditional values. (Some rural Americans see our cities in the same light.) Once women start going to town, the slippery slope to moral anarchy has begun. “If people go down to the end of the town–well, what can anyone do?” King John asks helplessly. No wonder he’s offering a forty-shilling reward!
What the reigning power structure regards as “wandering vaguely, quite of her own accord” may not be vague at all. Maybe James’s mother is Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier from The Awakening (only hopefully without the final suicide). In any event, she appears to have other things in mind than serving tea.
I love the imperiousness of the three-year-old James. Milne captures perfectly the bossiness of children at that age. After all, for them the whole point of mothers—and everyone else, actually—is to take care of them. The fact that this three-year-old has an over-the-top pompous name reinforces his sense of his own entitlement.
“You must never go down the stairs without consulting me?” How about if we just engage in a reasonable discussion about the matter?
So apparently that (relatively) tiny bulldozer and those (relatively) tiny tugboats played an important role in freeing the gigantic container ship stuck in the Suez Canal, leading my friend Glenda Funk to tweet out an allusion to The Little Engine That Could. The story, which celebrates the power of positive thinking, functions as American folklore, with no one individual able to take credit for it.
I’ve always found the little engine a bit too smug at the end of the story, but I think that’s because I was brought up not to pat myself on the back. If you do your job, a quiet satisfaction is all the reward you need. Even a triumphalist “I thought I could” isn’t allowed.
I’d make a lousy politician.
Christmas toys were not at stake in the Ever Given debacle. Billions of dollars, on the other hand, have apparently been lost.
As I thought about the ship being freed, various poems about whales came to mind. After all, the Ever Given was meant for the vast vistas of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, not beached in a narrow canal. Scott Bates’s poem about soaring whales comes to mind:
Whales
Whales have a tendency to move heavily On land it’s all that blubber Keeps Whales from skipping down the street like little girls Or balls of rubber
For if by chance a Whale you should encounter Lumbering Down Madison Avenue On the first day of Spring
You would perhaps be reminded of The New York Public Library Trundling through the park On a midsummer’s eve surrounded by children Or of Noah’s Ark
Or of the Pennsylvania Station But if you should become a Gull Drifting quietly over the Antarctic Ocean Illimitable and cool
You would see Whales below like Swallows dance Like Swallows on a pond They would skip off lightly across the green water And soar without a sound
The Ever Given is (relatively speaking) soaring now, not lumbering or trundling. Our spirits, strangely, have been lifted.
Another appropriate whale poem: I’ve been reading Harry Eyres’s Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet, and came across a poem that Eyres wrote that fits the Ever Given even more–at least when it was still stuck.
It’s a strange poem to include in a book like this since it has only an elliptical connection with the Roman poet. Horace’s actual name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, so the “flaccid” descriptor for the whale appears to apply to the poet as well. Horace was apparently short and fat and his ribald verse–which grew out of his own sexual appetites–immortalized him as the whale’s penis immortalizes the great beast. The giant whale’s skeleton, like Horace’s immense poetic achievement, lives on forever.
Whale Burial
Flaccid, beyond recognition, your soft remains are littered on the beach.
Flung up on this coast between continents a week ago, you had form and substance.
People came to inspect your unearthly proportions.
Once a generatin such a marvel happens, you give names to places.
You began to dry and rot simultaneously
You sagged and aged, a shi-sized bag of bones and juices.
Downwind it smelled like a fish factory, but you retained vestiges of yourself.
Now the dissolution has gone too far, it has become a public nuisance.
A small army of men, the burial party, a grave as big as a house.
The earth-scooper scrabbles ineffectualy, trying to trasp your slippery secretions.
It spreads you out farther and deeper.
Part of you seep into the sand, membranous sacs of blood and semen.
Your skeleton is distributed among the people.
Your jaws will be rejoined as an arch through which air and pilgrims pass.
Your penis will be hung up in a bar, a lewd and leathery baton
No reliquary can hold your bones, but still I am thinking of tht beach,
and those men, too many for the job, staring, with their hands in their pockets,
This past year, many have written essays about plague literature, most of them focusing on how people respond to social breakdown. (You can find links to all my own essays on the subject here.), including this blog. Now that an end is in sight, New Yorker’s Jill Lepore asks the follow-up question: what does plague literature teach us about how people respond to the return to normalcy.
To answer this, she sets aside those works where either everyone dies (as in Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” or where humans are reduced to brutes (as in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark). “Lately, waiting for a shot of a vaccine,” she writes, “I’m hoping for another ending. Do the humans get to be human again?”
One such work is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, where the sole survivor of global pandemic
sets off in a boat whose scant stores include the works of Homer and Shakespeare. “But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me,” he writes, in the book’s last lines, “and in any port I can renew my stock.” He disappears in his “tiny bark,” as if the world were beginning all over again.
Many plague stories, Lepore notes, end similarly,
with a new beginning, a Lockean blank slate—and, sometimes, even a hint that the evils of the old ways might not come back. As Biden’s campaign put it, “Build back better!”
Among these is Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, where the end is celebrated as an unexpected miracle, after which life prepares to continue on as though there had been no interruption. Lepore writes,
The disease retreats so suddenly that people “cast off all Apprehensions, and that too fast.” One man, venturing forth, sees a crowd and throws his hands into the air, saying, “Lord, what an alteration is here! Why, last Week I came along here, and hardly any Body was to be seen.” Another man cries, “’Tis all wonderful, ’tis all a Dream.” Defoe, too, finishes his “account of this calamitous year” by giving thanks; his book is, like the lifting of the plague, “a visible Summons to us all to Thankfulness.”
We may find ourselves thanking the scientists and companies that developed the vaccines along with God, but I can very much imagine looking back at 2020 as though it were a dream. But if that’s the case, then the ending of Camus’s The Plague is particularly relevant to our situation.
First of all, there’s a character who can’t stand the return to normal. Will we have our own versions of Cottard, whom Lepore describes as follows:
The death count keeps dropping, but one greedy and hard-hearted man, Cottard, who has profited from the plague, and failed to help the plague-stricken, begins to panic. “Do you really think it can stop like that, all of a sudden?” he wonders. The people of the town inch toward what they call “a return to normal life,” like animals emerging from a cave after a storm. Not Cottard. “He seemed unable to resume the obscure, humdrum life he had led before the epidemic. He stayed in his room and had his meals sent up from a near-by restaurant. Only at nightfall did he venture forth to make some small purchases.” The gates of the city are about to be opened. The people are rejoicing. “But Cottard didn’t smile. Was it supposed, he asked, that the plague wouldn’t have changed anything and the life of the town would go on as before, exactly as if nothing had happened?” Cottard gets out a gun and begins shooting at people in the street. He has gone mad.
It’s a grim fact of life in America that our normal includes mad men shooting people, so in our case we can’t attribute this to the plague. Camus’s novel does raise the issue, however, as to whether people will go mad when suddenly presented with a Covid-free society. What will happen to those Cottard-like grifters who have been making money off of our collective misery?
We make a mistake if we focus on them, however, since Camus doesn’t believe that they represent the true face of the plague. While it’s true that both Camus’s plague and our own has “pulled back the mask that hides the selfish, ruthless, viciousness of humans,” this is “not the last mask.” Beneath lies
a true face, the face of generosity and kindness, mercy and love. At the end of The Plague, its narrator unmasks himself: he reveals that he is a doctor, who, having cared for the disease’s sufferers, resolved to write, “so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
Our plague was not as deadly as most of those featured in plague literature but, even so, many have stepped up and done admirable things. We should indeed memorialize them.
I love this Marge Piercy Passover poem, which talks about the courage it takes to leave something familiar, even if that familiarity involves your slavery. It is, as Piercy puts it, “the courage to walk out of the pain that is known/ into the pain that cannot be imagined.”
In the course of the poem, Piercy expands her focus from the Israelites escaping from Egypt to Jews fleeing Russian pogroms and Hitler’s death camps. “We Jews are all born of wanderers,” Piercy writes, “with shoes/ under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours/ raining down.”
Even when successful, the journey to freedom has mixed results. They become strangers in a strange land and give birth to children “who could look down/ on them standing on their shoulders for having/ been slaves.” Nevertheless, on this night that is like no other night, “we honor those who let go of every-/ thing but freedom.”
“Maggid,” incidentally, is an itinerant preacher. The maggidim, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, were less scholarly and more associated with the multitude than the establishment rabbis. Piercy, attuned to the almost invisible pains suffered by an uprooted people, may see herself as a kind of maggid.
As you read the poem, think of those Central American migrants who have given up everything to make the long journey to the United States. The Jewish story is a universal story.
Maggid By Marge Piercy
The courage to let go of the door, the handle. The courage to shed the familiar walls whose very stains and leaks are comfortable as the little moles of the upper arm; stains that recall a feast, a child’s naughtiness, a loud blattering storm that slapped the roof hard, pouring through.
The courage to abandon the graves dug into the hill, the small bones of children and the brittle bones of the old whose marrow hunger had stolen; the courage to desert the tree planted and only begun to bear; the riverside where promises were shaped; the street where their empty pots were broken
The courage to leave the place whose language you learned as early as your own, whose customs however dan- gerous or demeaning, bind you like a halter you have learned to pull inside, to move your load; the land fertile with the blood spilled on it; the roads mapped and annotated for survival.
The courage to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain that cannot be imagined, mapless, walking into the wilderness, going barefoot with a canteen into the desert; stuffed in the stinking hold of a rotting ship sailing off the map into dragons’ mouths,
Cathay, India, Siberia, goldeneh medina leaving bodies by the way like abandoned treasure. So they walked out of Egypt. So they bribed their way out of Russia under loads of straw; so they steamed out of the bloody smoking charnelhouse of Europe on overloaded freighters forbidden all ports—
out of pain into death or freedom or a different painful dignity, into squalor and politics. We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage,
who walked into the strange and became strangers and gave birth to children who could look down on them standing on their shoulders for having been slaves. We honor those who let go of every- thing but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought, who became other by saving themselves.
