Here’s a lovely end-of-the-year poem that gets at how multiple cultures have used religious symbols to capture the triumph of life over death. The occasion is Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing to Egypt to escape King Herod’s massacre of the innocents, but Christianity is far from the only religion to find significance in the darkest days of the year. In fact, Christianity borrowed freely from a multitude of religions to capture the immensity of the occasion.
Scott Bates imagines the Holy Family traveling through the lands of the Zoroastrian god Mithra (god of light) and Dionysus (earth god), two gods who show up in the nativity scene as the ox and the ass. They then reach Egypt, which includes two sky gods, the falcon god Horus and the goddess Hathor, either Horus’s mother or consort and daughter of the sun god Ra. She is also known as the “sovereign of the stars” and is connected with the star Sirius. (Think of role played by Bethlehem’s star.)
Jesus’s family also travels beneath gaze of the sphinx of Gizreh, who guards the realm of the dead, and past a temple of Isis, a fertility goddess associated with the dove (also a nativity scene participant) who is connected with women and children. In other words, we see represented the polarities of sky and earth and death and life.
The journey into the west has mythic resonance in Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, where pilgrims in search of sacred texts would undergo suffering to achieve wisdom. The flight to and return from Egypt also echoes Judaism’s account of the Israelites’ journey there under Jacob and their return under Moses.
I’m not sure of the significance of the unicorn in the final line but it may have to do with Christianity’s insistence that there is only one god. All religions draw on other religions, however—it’s called syncretism—even the ones that claim to have a monopoly on truth. In my opinion, to think of Mary as a Hathor or Isis figure and of Jesus as a solar god doesn’t detract but rather adds to the power of the nativity story.
For me, the poem captures the mystery of this time of year. The days may be short, but we are promised new life. It’s a vision that should enthrall us all:
Flight into Egypt
The falcon’s eye above the pyramid Moves with the weary travelers far below, The queen, her consort, and the solar god, As through the desert on their beast they go
Beneath the sphinx of Gizeh guarding the dead, Past Isis in her temple nursing her child, Her silver serpent turning his diamond head To see them riding westward, into the wild
Land of Mithra and Dionysus, far From the stable and the kings of Behtlehem, No dove above them like a guiding star-- But Hathor on the horizon watching them,
Her forehead crowned with stars and double horn, As they ride towards her on their unicorn.
During the Reagan presidency (in 1983) I remember being shocked when Attorney General Ed Meese came to the defense of Scrooge, arguing that he “had a bad press in his time. If you really look at the facts, he didn’t exploit Bob Cratchit.” Now conservatives make such arguments so frequently that former Senator Phil Gramm and lobbyist Mike Solon, writing “In Defense of Scrooge, Whose Thrift Blessed by World” for the Wall Street Journal, elicits no more than a resigned shrug.
Meese was part of an administration that was (among other things) targeting free lunch programs and arguing for such cost-cutting measures as redefining ketchup as a vegetable. His argument was that
Cratchit earned 10 shillings a week, a good wage at the time, his family could enjoy a good Christmas meal, and he was fortunate to be able to read and write because there was no public education at the time in which the story was set, the 1840s.
No word about Tiny Tim’s eventual death due to the lack of affordable health care:
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”
“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.”
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Amazingly, we’ve been hearing a version of this “surplus population” argument from some on the right regarding the Covid crisis. Laissez faire herd immunity (No more than two million killed, tops!) would involve culling the elderly and unhealthy, many of whom are conveniently people of color. But back to the Gramm and Solon article.
I rely on an account of the piece by Graham Dockery of Irish public television since I don’t have a WSJ subscription:
[T]he pair argued that Scrooge would have served society better had he hung onto his wealth and used it to fund Britain’s industrial output, which, when Dickens penned A Christmas Carol in 1843, had already made Britain the world’s only superpower.
“Scrooge’s wealth accumulation would have benefited far more people than anything he gave to charity after his reclamation, and many times more than the government would have helped had they taken his wealth and spent it,” the pair wrote.
Gramm and Solon describe Ebenezer as a prototypical magnate, the kind who oversaw Britain’s transition from a rural society to an urban one. Between 1840 and 1900, they pointed out, wages nearly tripled, life expectancy rose by 20 percent while the mortality rate plummeted, and children – who, a century earlier, had risked life and limb in Britain’s first factories – were enrolling in school in ever-growing numbers.
I have voiced my own disagreements with Dickens’s approach to social reform, which relies on rich people turning benevolent rather than oppressed workers uniting to demand better conditions. Dickens focuses on the Cratchit family and a few charities while, in Hard Times, he excoriates trade unions for exerting pressure on factory owners. The mob violence depicted in Barnaby Rudge and Tale of Two Cities shows us Dickens’s view of the oppressed taking charge of their own fate.
While I disagree with Dickens’s politics, however, I don’t question his heart. I do question Gramm, Solon and many of America’s upper class being willing to support a sociopath for president on the grounds that he keeps their taxes low. Pre-reform Scrooge would fit right in and, although he is stingy with his money, I can imagine him–out of self interest–contributing to Trump’s reelection campaign.
Dockery, incidentally, points out that it was not laissez faire capitalism that improved the living standards of 19th century Bob Cratchits:
[Th]e Scrooges of the day didn’t always make the lives of their workers better by choice. Trade unions were legalized only in 1871. The government, not factory owners, mandated health & safety and sanitation rules in factories in 1866, and it would be another eight years after that until the employment of children under 10 in textile factories was outlawed.
Dockery also does the math, noting that our modern-day Scrooges dwarf the original one:
Scrooge’s profession isn’t mentioned in the story, but we do know that Cratchit was a clerk. Working in one of the better-paying banks at the time, he could have hoped to bring home an annual salary of £60. Meanwhile, bank owner James ‘Jemmy’ Wood – a Scrooge-like character known as ‘The Gloucester Miser’ – died in 1836 leaving a fortune of £900,000, at the time making him Britain’s wealthiest commoner.
The average worker at Amazon last year made $28,836, while CEO Jeff Bezos sits on a fortune of $199.7 billion. That’s nearly seven million times the average yearly wage at Amazon. By contrast, Wood’s net worth in 1836 was just 15,000 times more than a London bank clerk’s salary.
We are currently undergoing a Christmas where millions are unemployed and in danger of losing their homes, where long lines form to pick up groceries, and where many are sick and dying of Covid. Republicans, who ran up the debt to a trillion dollars with their generous tax cuts for the rich, are now squawking that a $600 relief check for average Americans will bust the budget. No wonder Wall Street Journal columnists are defending Scrooge.
Donald Trump really does pervert everything he touches. We are in the season of forgiveness so, on the one hand, he hands out pardons like a mob boss and, on the other, speeds up executions. One of those executed was a man who, while present during a murder, didn’t actually pull the trigger. Even members of his jury felt he didn’t deserve the death penalty.
My friend Glenda Funk suggested comparing him to Chaucer’s Pardoner, an excellent idea. For good measure, I also compare him to the Pardoner’s execrable friend and companion, the Summoner.
Trump has been pardoning war criminals, Republican grifters, and people who have committed perjury to cover up for him. Undoubtedly more pardons are on their way, including preemptive pardons for his family, his close associates, and possibly even for himself. According to Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and Lawfare blog’s Matthew Gluck, “The vast majority of the 94 people who have received clemency from Trump have a personal or political connection to him.”
The Pardoner is one of Chaucer’s most reprehensible pilgrims. He makes his living selling indulgences, which is to say, papal pardons. Since most people seeking forgiveness couldn’t see the pope directly, the system of indulgences was devised. The pardoners who sold them kept a cut for themselves while remanding the rest to Rome. The system was so corrupt and such a cash drain on parts of the Holy Roman Empire that it contributed to the German princes supporting Martin Luther’s breakaway movement.
The Pardoner is a conman worthy of Trump. Noted for his flamboyant hair, he passes off pigs’ bones as though they were saints’ relics to draw in penitents. As a result, he makes far more than the Parson, one of Chaucer’s exemplary pilgrims:
And in a glass container he had pigs’ bones. But with these relics, when he found A poor parson dwelling in the countryside, In one day he got himself more money Than the parson got in two months; And thus, with feigned flattery and tricks, He made fools of the parson and the people.
For contrast’s sake, here’s Chaucer’s Parson, who knows who he is working for. Think of him as the equivalent of the public servant who puts country over self:
He knew how to have sufficiency in few possessions. His parish was wide, and houses far apart, But he did not omit, for rain nor thunder, In sickness or in trouble to visit Those living farthest away in his parish, high-ranking and low, Going by foot, and in his hand a staff. He gave this noble example to his sheep, That first he wrought, and afterward he taught. He took those words out of the gospel, And this metaphor he added also to that, That if gold rust, what must iron do? For if a priest, on whom we trust, should be foul It is no wonder for a layman to go bad; And it is a shame, if a priest is concerned: A shit-stained shepherd and a clean sheep. Well ought a priest to give an example, By his purity, how his sheep should live.
The Pardoner is particularly Trump-like in the openness of his grift. Just as Trump sold “Trump Steaks” without bothering to remove the previous labels, so the Pardoner openly admits to his fellow pilgrims that his relics are fakes. And like Trump in 2016 openly boasting of cheating the system, the Pardoner wants to be admired for his craftiness:
My theme is always the same, and ever was — ‘Greed is the root of all evil.’ First I pronounce from whence I come, And then my papal bulls I show, each and every one. Our liege lord’s seal on my letter of authorization, I show that first, to protect my body, So that no man be so bold, neither priest nor clerk, To hinder me from (doing) Christ’s holy work. And after that then I tell forth my tales; Indulgences of popes and of cardinals, Of patriarchs and bishops I show, And in Latin I speak a few words, With which to add spice to my preaching, And to stir them to devotion. Then I show forth my long crystal stones, Crammed full of rags and of bones — Relics they are, as suppose they each one.
The Pardoner delights in showing how he bamboozles his suckers—or as Trump calls them, “the poorly educated”:
By this trick have I won, year after year, An hundred marks since I was pardoner. I stand like a clerk in my pulpit, And when the ignorant people are set down, I preach as you have heard before And tell a hundred more false tales. Then I take pains to stretch forth the neck, And east and west upon the people I nod, As does a dove sitting on a barn. My hands and my tongue go so quickly That it is joy to see my business. Of avarice and of such cursedness Is all my preaching, to make them generous To give their pennies, and namely unto me. For my intention is only to make a profit, And not at all for correction of sin. I care not a bit, when they are buried, Though their souls go picking blackberries!
Most impressive is the way the Pardoner then goes on practice his grift on the very pilgrims with whom he has shared his trade secrets. Following a magnificent story about avarice—one of Chaucer’s best—he targets his fellows. Suddenly the pigs’ bones have become saints’ bones again:
If any of you will, of devotion, Offer and have my absolution, Come forth straightway, and kneel down here, And meekly receive my pardon… I advise that our Host here shall begin, For he is most enveloped in sin. Come forth, sir Host, and offer first right now, And thou shall kiss the relics every one, Yea, for a fourpence coin! Unbuckle thy purse right now.
The Pardoner should have chosen a meeker pilgrim. Would that Republicans took a page from the Innkeeper’s response:
Thou would make me kiss thine old underpants, And swear it was a relic of a saint, Though it were stained by thy fundament! But, by the cross that Saint Helen found, I would I had thy testicles in my hand Instead of relics or a container for relics. Have them cut off, I will help thee carry them; They shall be enshrined in a hog’s turd!”
Whew!
I add the Summoner because, like Trump, he has two systems of justice for his own pardon system. A medieval police officer who is charged with summoning law breakers to court,he will allow a man to keep his concubine with a wine bribe or escape excommunication with a hefty sum. “A man’s soul [is] in his purse” is how he puts it:
For a quart of wine he would allow A good fellow to have his concubine For twelve months, and excuse him completely; Secretly he also knew how to pull off a clever trick. And if he found anywhere a good fellow, He would teach him to have no awe Of the archdeacon’s curse (of excommunication) in such a case, Unless a man’s soul were in his purse; For in his purse he would be punished. “Purse is the archdeacon’s hell,” he said.
He also employs secret information to exert control over young people, perhaps to exact sexual favors:
In his control he had as he pleased The young folk of the diocese, And knew their secrets, and was the adviser of them all.
In other words, despite our having a democratic republic constructed upon such enlightenment principles as the rule of law and public accountability, it has taken no more than one man and a complicit party to return us to the Middle Ages. Chaucer would have had a field day with our president.
For the first Sunday of Christmas, I share two poems written from the point of view common people who viewed the holy family. The normally satirical Dorothy Parker is unexpectedly tender as she imagines herself as the maid-servant at the inn. The light she sees that reminds her of the nativity star 30 years before is presumably connected with the resurrection. As to whether “all is well with them”? Well, it wasn’t but then it was.
The Maid-Servant at the Inn
“It’s queer,” she said; “I see the light As plain as I beheld it then, All silver-like and calm and bright– We’ve not had stars like that again!
“And she was such a gentle thing To birth a baby in the cold. The barn was dark and frightening– This new one’s better than the old.
“I mind my eyes were full of tears, For I was young, and quick distressed, But she was less than me in years That held a son against her breast.
“I never saw a sweeter child- The little one, the darling one!- I mind I told her, when he smiled You’d know he was his mother’s son.
“It’s queer that I should see them so— The time they came to Bethlehem Was more than thirty years ago; I’ve prayed that all is well with them.”
The second poem, by Scott Bates, takes the vantage point of a soldier who refuses Harad’s order to carry out the massacre of the innocents. Like the innkeeper’s daughter, he wonders later about the family he encountered:
Witness
When it came down from HQ The order to shoot the kids We were stunned I mean really rocked And I remember saying Jesus we can’t do that and some of us Felt like walking out but you don’t do that In the army you don’t quit without a court-martial So that was it we had to do it And a lot of us did and it got very messy And not pretty at all but we had to follow orders You got to have discipline or you can’t do anything Except me I couldn’t bring myself to do it I couldn’t explain it I knew I was disobeying orders Maybe it was because I have three kids myself and one Of them is under two so when I found these poor people Hiding in a barn with a new baby I couldn’t do it I sure as hell couldn’t do it I told them to cool it hit the road take off For Egypt or somewhere and fast and not go back for anything I took off pretty fast myself because the rest of the patrol Was coming back and I would have got it for insubordination And no questions asked bothers I would have had it I mean for good But I’m not sorry I’m not sorry at all He was a cute kid I hope they made it
Painting in Church of the Shepherds Fields, Bethlehem
Friday – Christmas
John Heath-Stubbs’s “On the Nativity” is an exquisite Christmas poem, capturing all the paradoxes we associate with the occasion but with arresting new images. “Infinite Godhead” has entered the world, yet it “circumscribed hangs helpless at the breast.” A “strange Star has fallen, to blossom from a tomb.” “Material kind Earth” receives divinity, “yet out in the cold he lies.”
I love the setting described by the poet: the “cold airs are musical, and all the ways of the sky/ Vivid with moving fires.” Heath-Stubbs may be echoing Blake’s “Jerusalem” when he writes of “the hills where tread/ The feet—how beautiful!—of them that publish peace.”
Merry Christmas.
Shepherds, I sing you this winter’s night Our Hope new-planted, the womb’d, the buried Seed: For a strange Star has fallen, to blossom from a tomb, And infinite Godhead circumscribed hangs helpless at the breast.
Now the cold airs are musical, and all the ways of the sky Vivid with moving fires, above the hills where tread The feet—how beautiful!—of them that publish peace.
The sacrifice, which is not made for them, The angels comprehend, and bend to earth Their worshipping way. Material kind Earth Gives Him a Mother’s breast, and needful food.
A Love, shepherds, most poor, And yet most royal, kings, Begins this winter’s night; But oh, cast forth, and with no proper place, Out in the cold He lies!
My father, who died seven years ago at 90, loved Christmas. Each year he wrote a Christmas poem, in his later years often taking on the persona of Mrs. Santa Claus, whom he named Aurora Borealis. A committed environmentalist, feminist, pacifist, birdwatcher, and literature lover, Aurora uses each year’s Christmas letter to envision a better world.
The activist organization Greenpeace was one of my father’s favorite causes so he entitled the collection Merry Green Peace.
Dear Friends
You ask what I do here the rest of the year while Nick and the boys are making the toys and the snow is so deep that we’re holed up like seals Well frankly I barely have time to eat breakfast since I’m working for Greenpeace and helping the whales
and then there are polar- bear poachers and traps dams and developers rights of the Lapps not to mention the plight of the caribou!
When Blitzen and I ride out on our jobs we never know whether we’ll be dive-bombing wolf-hunters or air-lifting cubs or giving a ride to a lost Eskimo
But it’s a good life with so much to do and living with Nick in the midst of a zoo as big as the world makes me feel absolutely on top of the world
So I wish you the same And Support the cause! Aurora Borealis (Ms. Santa Claus)
My father became a committed pacifist and supporter of the War Resisters League after serving as a translator in World War II. He would allow my brothers and me to have even toy guns when we were growing up. Here’s his alternative, with a shout-out to peace activist and sublime short story writer Grace Paley:
Dear Friends
Here's a wish
For the end of the year
And a note abut how
Things have changed around here
Since the news from the south
When we finally got
The message about
The War Toys Boycott
It seems that the folks are
Fed up with grenades
All the Joes and Rambos
And the monster brigades
So we had a long serious
Talk with the boys
And designed a new line
of ANTI-war toys...
Starting of course
With a big Gandhi Doll
With a real spinning wheel
And a green parasol
And following up with
A Greenpeace Saint Nick
Who zaps the whale pirates
With his Magic Peace Stick
And turns them to birdwatchers
A Mother Theresa
A Hopi sun temple
On top of a Mesa
A Russian-American
Outer-space station
A Hiroshima Doll
With a Peace Celebration
And thousands of Japanese
Paper cranes
A fabulous Phoenix
Who shines when it rains
And our New Special Line
Called the Peaceable Zoo
With Bambi and Faline
And Winnie the Pooh
And a Horton-and-Egg
And a Ratty that rows
And a Rambling Rudolph
Who glows as he goes
And a whale you can ride
And a Chinese dragon
And a flying E.T.
That looks like Carl Sagan
Well or course there's lots more
But I'll finish this up
With a wish for next year
That our PLO Pup
Will be playing in peace
With our Israeli Cat
That our Peace Trading Cards
Will be selling and that
When your kids with their lasers
Are pains in the necks
You'll swap them a Tutu
For a Malcolm X
A Jones for a Muste
A Parks for a King
Or give them our Powerful
Grace Paley Ring
So here's to World Friendship
And here's to you all
May you have all year long
A (non-violent) ball
And here's to the Cats
With the Peaceful Paws
Yours truly
Aurora
(Ms. Santa Claus)
And here’s one more, reflecting the fact that books have always predominated at our Christmases:
Dear Friends
I wish I had time To tell you of how I'm riding with Greenpeace And working for NOW
With our Reindeer Warriors In the arctic nights How we're fighting for whales And for women's rights
But I'll tell you instead Of our new reading kick... When the factory work Gets too hairy for Nick
And he gets really tired From making the toys He comes to the castle With Blitzen and the boys
And we sit by the fire As the blizzard blows Reading aloud With the fawns and the does
We eat cookies and hay As we read to ourselves Our favorite books From the library shelves
Here are the things We especially like
In Animal Farm When the animals strike
When Mowgli lets in the jungle And Tigger finds Winnie the Pooh When Sophie the Seal gains her freedom And Dolittle opens his zoo
When Ferdinand stages his sit-down And the Princess beds down with the Frog And Faline is courted by Bambi And Bard puts an arrow through Smaug
When the Snark turns into a Boojum And Toad is cured of his cars When the Whos get rescued by Horton And The Little Prince travels to stars...
We're having a ball And we wish you the same May the Animals win In the Whole Earth Game
It’s hard to figure out where the presidency of Donald Trump has done the most damage, from wholesale corruption to attacks on democracy itself. I suspect, however, that his failure to address the problem of climate change—indeed, he has been promoting the extraction and burning of fossil fuels—will have the longest lasting consequences. I found myself thinking of our climate future the other day while reading Neil Gaiman’s account of the Norse apocalypse in Norse Mythology.
Ragnarok, or “Fate of the Gods,” is how the Scandinavians once saw the world ending. It doesn’t entirely describe our own possible climate fate in that the Norse world gets colder. That being acknowledged, however, our extreme weather events swing both ways, with unusual cold snaps existing alongside melting ice caps. Ragnarok, in fact, features fire and rising oceans along with cold. To reference Robert Frost’s poem, the Norse world ends in both ice and fire.
In the myth, poison is unleashed as sea levels rise, bringing to mind oil spills and other lethal pollution:
There will be flooding too, as the seas rise and surge onto the land. Jormungundr, the Midgard serpent, huge and dangerous, will writhe in its fury, closer and closer to the land. The venom from its fangs will spill into the water, poisoning all the sea life. It will spatter its black poison into the air in a fine spray, killing all the seabirds that breathe it.
There will be no more life in the oceans, where the Midgard serpent writhes. The rotted corpses of fish and of whales, of seals and sea monsters, will wash in the waves.
Then, as the Negro spiritual quoted by James Baldwin puts it, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign/ No more water, the fire next time”:
The misty sky will split apart, with the sound of children screaming, and the sons of Muspell will ride down from the heavens, let by Surtr, the fire giant, holding high his sword, which burns so brightly no mortal can look upon it. They will ride across the rainbow bridge, across Bifrost, and the rainbow will crumble as they ride, its once-bright colors becoming shades of charcoal and of ash.
There will never be another rainbow.
Cliffs will crumble into the sea.
The fire giant, anticipating the forest fires of Australia and Caifornia, appears to have the last word:
Now Surtr, the burning giant, who was there before the beginning of all things, looks out at the vast plain of death and raises his bright sword to the heavens. There will be a sound like a thousand forest burning to flame, and the air itself will begin to burn.
The world will be cremated in Surtr’s flames. The flooding oceans steam. The last fires rage and flicker and then are extinguished. Black ash will fall from the sky like snow….
Soon after, the swollen ocean will swallow the ashes as it washes across all the land, and everything living will be forgotten under the sunless sky.
That is how the worlds will end, in ash and flood, in darkness and in ice. That is the final destiny of the gods.
As Pope observes, however, “hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Out of the ashes a new world will be born:
From the gray waters of the ocean, the green earth will arise once more.
The sun will have been eaten, but the sun’s daughter will shine in the place of her mother, and the new sun will shine even more brightly than the old, shine with young light and new.
The woman and the man, Life and Life’s Yearning, will come out from inside the ash tree that holds the worlds together. They will feed upon the dew on the green earth, and they will make love, and from their love will spring mankind.
So maybe humanity will bounce back, just as it will bounce back from four years under Trump. Better not to go there in the first place, however.
My University of Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake sent me a smart poem about Covid quarantining, author unknown, that has been circulating through social media. Not only does it capture our frustration at our restricted movement, but it works as a literature quiz.
I’ve counted 11 poetic allusions, beginning with William Butler Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” All the poems long for wider horizons, which means that the poets feel stuck in an unsatisfactory present. Yeats is standing on “pavements grey,” Wordsworth is lying depressed on his couch…but I won’t go on as you may want to make the identifications on your own. I’ll just note that such longing is a common theme in British literature, expressed nowhere more clearly than in Wind in the Willows.
The three major animal characters, at one time or another, feel the urge to throw over domestic life and follow their longings. Toad is intoxicated by the open road, and Ratty at one point is utterly entranced by the tales of a seafaring rat. Mole must apply force to prevent Ratty from running off to join him:
Poor Ratty did his best, by degrees, to explain things; but how could he put into cold words what had mostly been suggestion? How recall, for another’s benefit, the haunting sea voices that had sung to him, how reproduce at second-hand the magic of the Seafarer’s hundred reminiscences? Even to himself, now the spell was broken and the glamour gone, he found it difficult to account for what had seemed, some hours ago, the inevitable and only thing. It is not surprising, then, that he failed to convey to the Mole any clear idea of what he had been through that day.
Then Ratty does what British poets have been doing for centuries: he articulates his longings through verse:
Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow.
“It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,” he remarked. “You might have a try at it this evening, instead of—well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down—if it’s only just the rhymes.”
The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole took occasion to leave the room, and when he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.
I’ve identified seven of the poems alluded to but had to google the other four. You can find an answer key at the end. Let me know if I’ve missed any:
I won’t arise and go now, and go to Innisfree (1) I’ll sanitize the doorknob and make a cup of tea. I won’t go down to the sea again (2); I won’t go out at all, I’ll wander lonely as a cloud (3) from the kitchen to the hall. There’s a green-eyed yellow monster to the North of Kathmandu (4) But I shan’t be seeing him just yet, and nor, I think will you. While the dawn comes up like thunder on the road to Mandalay (5) I’ll make my bit of supper and eat it off a tray. I shall not speed my bonnie boat across the sea to Skye (6), Or take the rolling English road from Birmingham to Rye. (7) About the woodland, just right now, I am not free to go To see the Keep Out posters or the cherry hung with snow (8). And no, I won’t be traveling much, within the realms of gold (9), Or get me to Milford Haven (10). All that’s been put on hold. Give me your hands, I shan’t request, albeit we are friends (11) Nor come within a mile of you, until this virus ends.
1. In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Yeats dreams of an idyllic rural setting from his vantage point of urban grayness.
2. In John Masefield’s “Sea Fever,” maybe England’s most popular poem, the land-bound speaker feels the sea’s call, which “may not be denied.” I feel certain that Masefield’s 1902 poem influenced the seafaring chapter in Wind in the Willows (1908).
3. In Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the speaker recalls a field of daffodils as he lies on his couch “in vacant or in pensive mood.” He elaborates on his couch state in Tintern Abbey when he writes of living “in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din/ Of towns and cities.”
4. I didn’t know the poet J. Milton Hayes or his poem “The Green Eye of the Yellow God” until I googled them. Sounding very Kiplingesque, the poem is an instance of the British exoticizing the East. Mad Carew, smitten with “the Colonel’s daughter,” steals the gem from an idol’s eye to win her favor, only to be rejected and then mysteriously murdered. (“’Twas the “Vengeance of the Little Yellow God,” we are informed.) The poem begins and ends with the following stanza:
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu, There’s a little marble cross below the town; There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew, And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
5. I wrote recently about an episode of The Crown in which Lord Mountbatten uses Kipling’s “Mandalay” (1890) to capture British nostalgia for the dwindling empire at a time of economic upheaval. In the series he contemplates a coup until the queen talks him out of it.
6. Those who have watched the television series Outlanders have encountered “The Skye Boat Song,” which opens every episode. Composing lyrics for an old Scottish tune in the late 19th century, Sir Henry Boulton celebrates the escape of Bonnie Prince Charles, the “lad that’s born to be King,” following the disastrous Battle of Culloden. While Charles’s defeat ended Scottish hopes of restoring the Stuarts to the throne, and while he did not in the least deserve the legendary status that was accorded him, it fits our theme of frustrated dreaming:
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing Onward! the sailors cry Carry the lad that’s born to be King Over the sea to Skye
Loud the wind howls, loud the waves roar Thunderclaps rend the air Baffled, our foes stand on the shore Follow they will not dare
Revising the lyrics, Sir Robert Louis Stevenson stripped out Charles but kept the longing. Outlanders, incidentally, uses the first and last stanzas of the Stevenson version but changes “lad” to “lass”:
Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye….
Billow and breeze, islands and seas, Mountains of rain and sun, All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone.
7. G.K. Chesterton’s “The Rolling English Road” goes even further back in British history, to a time before “the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode.” The speaker informs us that, in the days before order was imposed on Britain, “the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.”
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire, And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire; A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
8. A. E. Housman’s beloved “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” like many of the poems in Shropshire Lad, captures the wistful longing for “the land of lost content” (to quote another nostalgic poem from the collection). The speaker may be only 20, but he has a vivid sense that the cherry blossoms will soon be gone:
And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
9. I think the Keats reference is the only allusion the poem gets wrong, largely because one can in fact travel to the “realms of gold” during the pandemic. That’s because the “goodly states and kingdoms” are not geographical but literary. In “Upon First Reading Chapman’s Homer,” the poet is excited to be encountering The Iliad for the first time.
Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
If nothing else, the pandemic has offered us golden opportunities to lose ourselves in books. Some of us may have discovered Homer and felt like a watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into its ken.
10. The pandemic is also keeping us from Milford Haven, the Welsh seaport that Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton says surpasses any to be found on the Spanish or French coasts. “So highly Milford is in every mouth renowned,” Drayton tells us, that “there was not a port the prize durst undertake.” Who knew?
11. Puck’s farewell concludes Shakespeare’s well-known play about dreaming from Midsummer Night’s Dream:
If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend: And, as I am an honest Puck, If we have unearned luck Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call; So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.
Given how much we have all been offended this past year, we can only wish that this past year had been but a dream.
That being said, Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play about dreaming beyond one’s dreary present, with Bottom leading the charge. Covid is giving us more incentive to dream.
Today being December 21st, I post the most famous poem ever set on “the darkest evening of the year”—which also happens to be America’s best-known poem (although Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” runs a close second). What strikes me this time upon rereading Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is the importance of “promises to keep.”
Whatever the woods signify to the speaker, it seems clear he would turn his back on various obligations were he to yield to their temptation. As I watch a president who, governed by personal gratification, appeals to America’s dark id, I see special value in promises. They are what keep a society from degenerating into barbarism.
One would think that conservatives would value such commitments. The tug of war between social tradition and individual liberty has long been what marks the conservative-liberal tension, which at its healthiest is a balancing act. The GOP gave up genuine conservatism a while back, however, choosing instead irresponsible libertarianism.
There have been times, over the past four years, when those appalled by GOP shenanigans have been tempted to, as it were, lie down in the snow and give up. Thankfully, a sense of commitment to something beyond themselves kept them moving on. When yielding looks this inviting, it takes a hard resolve to keep going.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
