Julia, my wife of 47 years, turns 70 today (I follow in four months), so here’s a Christina Rossetti sonnet to celebrate our relationship. I like how it gets at the way love grows stronger over time. The poet has a friendly debate with her loved one about who loved earliest, who loved deepest, and whose love is most solidly grounded. She concludes that “weights and measures do us both a wrong,” however, because, with time, their loves have become so intertwined as to be indistinguishable:
For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’ With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done, For one is both and both are one in love:
Rossetti’s first epigraph, from Dante’s Paradiso, is Dante hoping that his poem about the love that is Paradise, albeit just a little spark, will prompt other poets to do the topic full justice. Petrarch, menwhile, points to how, in the presence of love, all else falls away. In other words, once love has been sparked, we are lost in its immensity and all our previous quibbles fall away.
That’s what it’s been like to be married to this wonderful woman I met in college. The early debates appear utterly irrelevant in the face of “the love which makes us one.:
A great flame follows a little spark. –Dante
All other things, all thought must go, And only Love remains there with you. –Petrarch
I loved you first: but afterwards your love Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove. Which owes the other most? my love was long, And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong; I loved and guessed at you, you construed me And loved me for what might or might not be – Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong. For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’ With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done, For one is both and both are one in love: Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’ Both have the strength and both the length thereof, Both of us, of the love which makes us one.
We’re on the verge of a major ice storm here in the Tennessee mountains–we’ve already lost power once–so I’m reposting an essay from a decade ago. I’m praying it gets out before our power goes out again. Given the number of trees we have and the way ice is already cascading off of trees–the temperature is currently 33 and a steady rain is falling–I fully expect to return to darkness any moment now.
Frost’s intention in “Birches” is to write about swinging on birches as a boy. But train of association leads him to go off topic and reminisce about ice storms for the first 20 lines. Thematically, however, it is not a digression at all, as we will see. Here’s how the poem begins:
When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay. Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves: You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground, Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. But I was going to say when Truth broke in With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm, I should prefer to have some boy bend them As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Although his conversational style makes it appear as though he has digressed, the “matter-of-fact about the ice-storm” is getting at a darker reality: the storms of life drag us down. This sad truth is hidden by the breath-taking beauty of the ice storm and by the lovely image of girls drying their hair in the sun. Nevertheless, it is there: “once they are bowed/So low for long, they never right themselves.” This poet, who writes frequently about the weight of the world and is one who has been “much acquainted with the night,” is doing so again here.
After these dark thoughts, he recovers and thinks of an alternative, albeit less plausible, explanation: the trees are bowed over because a boy has been swinging on them:
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone. One by one he subdued his father’s trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise To the top branches, climbing carefully With the same pains you use to fill a cup Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
That is a joyous image drawn from his childhood. The image comes to him at precisely those moments when he needs buoying up:
So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be. It’s when I’m weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over.
Having written recently about Sir Gawain’s grim slog through the forest as he is being pelted by frozen rain, I offer this as another image of existential crisis. But Frost is careful to qualify his wish. He’s not saying that he wants to quit life altogether, hard though it may be. In fact, the lines that follow contain one of the most life-affirming passages in American literature:
May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree— And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back.
And then, as though he has revealed too much of himself in this ecstatic declaration of love, he retreats back into Yankee reticence:
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
As you think about this poem, recall times when you have felt dragged down to the withered bracken by the ice as it piles up. When have you stumbled through the forest, an eye crying from a branch having lashed across it open? Frost tells us that, for all our suffering, we can learn to love this life.
One could argue that his climbing the trees is also a metaphor for his poetry, climbing black sentences up a snow-white page. Through the human imagination (which includes childhood memories), we are able to soar above our difficult lives. But our poetic souls start with those lives (Yeats called them “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”) and must return to them. It’s good to go and it’s good to come back.
Addendum: Years ago, when I was teaching Robert Frost’s poetry to a group of high school English teachers in Slovenia, I met one who had been a swinger of birches as a child. The teacher was from the Bela Krajina region, known for its birches, and the poem brought back good times.
Another Frost poem brought back much darker memories. In “Mending Wall” Frost famously writes that “good fences make good neighbors.” The teacher said that, when she was a girl, a boundary dispute involving a few meters led a neighbor to hit and kill her father with a shovel. The family could no longer take care of the farm and had to move to the city of Ljubljana.
One can never anticipate the stories that a poem will elicit from a reader.
When Barack Obama was president, the Christian right targeted Barack Obama, declaring him a Muslim and a foreigner. While they haven’t been able to get the same traction against Joe Biden (at least ot yet), they have found a surrogate in our vice president. According to Anne Branigan in The Lily, fascist preachers have been calling Kamala Harris a “Jezebel.” As we have learned to our sorrow over the past 12 years, symbols like this must be taken seriously lest we be caught unawares.
A healthy response might be to cite Tom Robbins’s celebration of Jezebel in his novel Skinny Legs and All. Let’s look first, however, at the Biblical story and at how rightwing preachers are employing it it.
The Phoenician queen of Israel king Ahab, Jezebel finds herself involved in multiple power struggles, first with the prophet Elijah and then with his successor Elisha. There are many twists and turns but the final result is a gory death:
Then Jehu went to Jezreel. When Jezebel heard about it, she put on eye makeup, arranged her hair and looked out of a window. As Jehu entered the gate, she asked, “Have you come in peace, you Zimri, you murderer of your master?”
He looked up at the window and called out, “Who is on my side? Who?” Two or three eunuchs looked down at him. “Throw her down!” Jehu said. So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot.
Jehu went in and ate and drank. “Take care of that cursed woman,” he said, “and bury her, for she was a king’s daughter.” But when they went out to bury her, they found nothing except her skull, her feet and her hands. They went back and told Jehu, who said, “This is the word of the Lord that he spoke through his servant Elijah the Tishbite: On the plot of ground at Jezreel dogs will devour Jezebel’s flesh.[f]Jezebel’s body will be like dung on the ground in the plot at Jezreel, so that no one will be able to say, ‘This is Jezebel.’” (2 Kings 9:30-37)
The story is particularly chilling when read in light of the recent Capitol insurrection where Trump cultists sought out those members of Congress who didn’t share their faith, perhaps to kidnap or kill them.
Branigan alerts us to how the Jezebel story is being used:
Two days after Vice President Harris was sworn in as the nation’s first female vice president, Tom Buck let it out.
“I can’t imagine any truly God-fearing Israelite who would’ve wanted their daughters to view Jezebel as an inspirational role model because she was a woman in power,” tweeted Buck, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Lindale, Tex. In the days leading up the inauguration, Buck had quoted scripture about “evildoers” alongside criticism of President Biden’s stance on abortion rights.
Following criticism, Buck didn’t back down:
For those torn up over my tweet, I stand by it 100%,” Buck wrote. “My problem is her godless character. She not only is the most radical pro-abortion VP ever, but also most radical LGBT advocate.”
Branigan notes that
Buck wasn’t the only Southern Baptist preacher to refer to Harris as a Jezebel, a biblical character who has become shorthand for an amoral, wantonly sexual woman. Weeks earlier, before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Steve Swofford, head of the First Baptist Church of Rockwall near Dallas, made a similar statement. Delivering a videotaped sermon, Swofford called Biden “cognitively dysfunctional.”
“What if something happens to [Biden] and Jezebel has to take over?” Swofford asked in the sermon. “Jezebel Harris, isn’t that her name?”
Branigan explains the significance:
The “Jezebel” reference is…highly specific, a trope that speaks to deeply entrenched views about power and what is “normal” or “traditional” in American culture, especially when it comes to racial and gender hierarchies….
Calling Harris a Jezebel accomplishes multiple things: It delegitimizes her power and dehumanizes her. Jessica Johnson, an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of William & Mary, said the term has historically been used as a justification for racial violence against Black women. But the pastors’ rhetoric had an additional level of danger.
Johnson has been researching Christian nationalism, an ideology rooted in the belief that the United States is a Christian nation and that Christians must both maintain and advance their privileged status. The Christian nationalist movement shares many of the same beliefs as the white nationalists,including an attachment to an “authoritarian father figure” running the country, Johnson explained. Calling Harris a Jezebel foments their worst fears: that they will be replaced; that their fate is in the hands of a godless, amoral Black woman.
Tamura Lomax, author of Jezebel Unhinged, adds, “She never did anything sexual. They hated her for her power.” Lomax explained to Branigan that it was
Jezebel’s breach of the social order that led followers of Christianity to accuse her of being immoral. The sexual connotations were tacked on afterward to both undermine her and further highlight her deviance.
Fundamentalists also invoke Jezebel’s name in Robbins’s novel. After fundamentalist preacher Buddy Winkler catches his daughter wearing lipstick and attending a life drawing class in her college, he and other members of the congregation set upon her, scrubbing her face until it’s raw while calling her a Jezebel. Robbins fights back with a historial explanation of Jezebel’s real crime. The queen, he writes, worshipped the earth goddess Astarte, who was
the Goddess, the Great Mother, the Light of the World, the most ancient and widely revered divinity in human history. Shrines to her date back to the Neolithic Period, and there was not one Indo-European culture that failed to remove with its kiss the mud from her sidereal slippers. In comparison, “God,” as we moderns call Yahweh (often misspelled “Jehovah”) was a Yahny-come-lately who would have approached her enormous popularity. She was the mother of God, as indeed, she was the mother of all.
It’s no surprise, then, that, when
King Ahab’s Phoenician bride started building shrines to Astarte, and when the Israelites started flocking to those shrines—the populace apparently favored Astarte’s voluptuous indulgence over Yahweh’s rigid asceticism—the patriarchs reacted violently against her.
Robbins provides an interesting side note:
[O]ne of the crimes charged to Jezebel, according to the historian Josephus, was the planting of trees. Since the Goddess always has been honored in sacred groves, it is understandable that patriarchs, then as now, leaned toward deforestation.
Because the devotion to Astarte was “contagious,” Robbins writes, because “it weakened the grip of the Yahweh cult, “Jezebel” was slandered, framed, and finally murdered.” Robbins gives his own account of her death:
When the moment arrived, Jezebel was thoroughly aware that she was to be assassinated. She put up her ergot-black hair, donned her tiara, rouged her cheeks and lips, applied kohl to the lids of her huge Phoenician eyes, and went to face her killer with the style, dignity and grace befitting a reigning queen. So much for painted hussies.
For many Americans, Kamala Harris, with her infectious laugh and her multicultural background, represents an important step in America achieving the dream set forth in the Declaration of Independence and posted on the Statue of Liberty. We need to be aware, however, that, with others, she is triggering hatreds that go as deep as those directed against Obama and Hillary Clinton.
At the end of Skinny Legs and All, Buddy Winkler attempts to strangle a Middle Eastern woman dancing the dance of the seven veils, with each veil representing one of the ways we blind ourselves to the richness of life and human possibility. Such men were active in Jezebel’s time and they remain a lethal threat today.
As Valentine’s Day this year falls on a Sunday, I choose this opportunity to explore the relationship between Love’s physical and spiritual sides. That it has these two sides has long been regarded with suspicion by those Christians who see a commingling of the bestial and the angelic. Dante and Milton surprise, however, by finding a way to reconcile these supposed opposites.
Erotic love is a key component in The Divine Comedy, with Beatrice Portinari, a woman that Dante idealized from afar and who died young, serving as his guide through Paradise. As Dante came to see it, erotic love does not take us away from God but rather gives us an inkling of divine love. “The glory who Him who moves all things/ Impenetrates the universe,” Dante writes to open Paradiso. To catch a glimpse of this force, Dante draws on the love he feels for Beatrice.
Classical reason, represented by Virgil, won’t allow him to look directly at the sun. But Love will.
I’ve been reading a blog essay by one Mark Vernon, a psychotherapist, who believes a key turning point in Dante’s understanding of love occurs in Canto 9 of Purgatorio. There, at the threshold of Purgatory, Dante dreams a lustful dream but is then carried up into Purgatory by Lucia, one of three women looking out for him (the Virgin Mary being the third). As Vernon sees it,
The implication is that the transformation of eros from its dark manifestations to its true character requires him to work on his perceptions. He must hold in mind both images — one of violent and lustful snatching, the other of divine embrace and carriage. In so doing, the possessive character of eros that currently dominates his mind is revealed by the dream, and it might give way to the dominant character of divine love, which is of dynamic participation. As it is summarized by the famous last line of Paradiso, this is “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”
We see the shift in Paradise Lost, only in the other direction.There, however, we don’t just see love as the idealization of a woman. We also see it as actual sex.
In Book IV Milton describes Adam and Eve arriving at their special bower holding hands and, of course, naked. The first action is to offer up spontaneous prayers to God (“adoration pure/ Which God likes best”). Their next is to make love. As Milton circuitously puts it, they do not refuse the rites mysterious of connubial love—which is to say, they do not not have sex:
Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood Both turned and under op’n sky adored The God that made both sky, air, earth and heav’n Which they beheld…
This said unanimous, and other rites Observing none, but adoration pure Which God likes best, into their inmost bower Handed they went; and eased the putting off These troublesome disguises which we wear, Straight side by side were laid, nor turned I ween Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the Rites Mysterious of connubial Love refused…
Because of orthodox Christianity’s suspicion of sex, Milton at this point gets defensive. It’s only after Adam and Eve eat of the fruit, he insists, that beautiful sex becomes evil lust. Before, it’s all good. “Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain/ But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?,” he declares defiantly. Then he delivers a paean to wedded love,
Hail wedded Love, mysterious Law, true source Of human offspring, sole propriety, In Paradise of all things common else…
Later in the passage he calls the marriage bed a “perpetual fountain of domestic sweets” and romantically says,
Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels…
Today being Valentine’s day, I point out that their love bower is a florist’s dream:
[T]he roof Of thickest covert was inwoven shade Laurel and myrtle, and what higher grew Of firm and fragrant leaf; on either side [ 695 ] Acanthus, and each odorous bushy shrub Fenced up the verdant wall; each beauteous flower, Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought Mosaic; underfoot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay Embroidered the ground, more colored then with stone Of costliest emblem…
Along with flowers and “sweet-smelling herbs,” they even have the ultimate stereo system:
Here in close recess With flowers, garlands, and sweet-smelling herbs Espoused Eve decked first his nuptial Bed, and heavenlyly choirs the Hymenaean sung, What day the genial angel to our sire Brought her in naked beauty more adorned More lovely than Pandora, whom the Gods Endowed with all their gifts…
The music, we learn, is creation singing its joy to God. Although Adam and Even could hear this music clearly before the fall, Milton assures us we can still hear it if we listen closely enough:
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep: All these with ceaseless praise [God’s] works behold Both day and night: How often from the steep Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive each to others note, Singing their great Creator? oft in bands While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk, With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic number joined, their songs Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven.
As Jane Hirshfield writes in the poem I shared last Sunday, the spiritual shines through the physical if we open ourselves to it, and the same can occur with the act of sex. Milton may have been a puritan, but his poetic insights look him deeper into the nature of the universe than theological doctrine. Same for Dante.
My Americanist colleague John Gatta has found unsettling parallels between the demagoguery that incited Trumpists to invade the Capitol and Melville’s Captain Ahab enlisting his crew in his revenge quest. After watching repeated footage of Trump’s speech during the Senate trial and then rereading the Moby Dick chapter, I can report that John is spot on. Both Trump and Ahab are masters at manipulating crowds.
In this drama, first mate Starbuck would be those Republicans who attempt to resist the former president. As it turns out, the first mate proves no more effective than Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney.
Ahab, mystifying his three mates, assembled the entire crew on deck and holds what we could call an Ahab rally. The captain begins with a dramatic silence, which has the effect of focusing everyone’s attention.
When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men…
Just as Trump employed call and response tactics to pump up his audience (“Who’s going to pay for it?” “Mexico!”), so does Ahab. The effect is to excite those in attendance, pulling them into the speaker’s orbit:
“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
“And what do ye next, men?”
“Lower away, and after him!”
“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marveling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
At this point, Ahab goes for a prop, giving his audience something tangible to hang on to:
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
Ahab goes on to describing losing his leg to Moby Dick, immersing them in his inner drama. He has everyone but Starbuck in the palm of his hand:
“[I]t was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”
“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog.
Only a smattering of Republican members are openly declaring that they have larger responsibilities than gratifying the ego of a single man. Ahab’s first duty should be to the commercial enterprise and the Pequod’s owners, just as Trump’s should be to responsible governance and the Constitution. Starbuck attempts to remind Ahab of his proper mission:
I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
At this point Ahab goes epic, sounding a little like Macbeth, a little like Milton’s Satan, a little like an existential figure from Sartre or Camus, as he voices the vengeful rage that gives his life purpose:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.
Then, in a little two-step that is also used by Trump—rile up the crowd but then defuse the critics by telling them it’s all just theatre—Ahab makes a feint towards conciliation:
But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go.
Ahab follows this up, however, by playing the trump card that the former president also employs: I must be right because I have the public behind me:
The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck!
Ahab interprets Starbuck’s subsequent silence as acquiescence. He does not hear him say, under his breath, “God keep me!—keep us all!”
Ahab’s egotistical quest takes the ship of state—to use the Longfellow metaphor employed Wednesday by one of Trump’s lawyers—and runs it into disaster, causing the death of everyone on board. Unfortunately for us, Republican attempts to save us from the same fate have heretofore resembled that hurricane-tossed sapling.
While the impeachment trial may not put an end to Trump’s noxious influence, if enough Republicans follow Starbuck’s lead and stand up to him, they can at least dampen it. That’s what’s at stake.
Further thought: In Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of a Nuremberg rally, the director at one point shows Hitler giving a little smirk directly after delivering a particularly effective line. We see that smug satisfaction, the joy in manipulating an audience, in Ahab and Trump as well. Ahab says, in a passage that Melville actually introduces with a stage direction,
(Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.
Poetry began and ended the first day of Donald Trump’s Senate trial, and it may be significant that both poems were written during a time of factionalism reminiscent of the present day—which is to say, in the years leading up to the Civil War.
In his opening prayer, Senate Chaplain Barry Black quoted the well-known lines from James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis.” Furnishing the words to a once popular hymn, it impressed me as a member of the Otey Parish children’s choir–as in, “Wow, the church really means business.” Here’s the stanza from which Black quoted, with the lines he used bolded:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
On the one hand, although written in the trenchant tones of abolitionist Christianity, the sentiments seem unexceptional enough. The senators have a momentous decision before them.
On the other, there’s no question about how Lowell would have responded to the white supremacists who, at the direction of the president, stormed the Capitol. The poem as a whole is filled with slavery images, and while many of these are metaphorical, their frequency indicates that Lowell has the literal oppression of slaves on his mind. Here’s a sample stanza:
Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;— Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?
If the GOP doesn’t vote against a president who embraces racists, fascists, and anti-Semites, the Lowell would see them choosing the evil path.
The Biblical goats/sheep allusion, incidentally, is to Matthew 25:31-46, which has become a touchstone passage in battles between rightwing white evangelicals and liberal Christians, with the latter asking why fundamentalists support a president who tears children from their parents and strives to strip the needy of health care. The Biblical parable involves a king visiting his people and making judgment:
Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
The goat side is the evil side in this drama:
Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
In the other poem, Trump’s defense attorney concluded his case against the impeachment trial by citing stanzas from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Building of the Ship,” also written pre-Civil War.” The lawyer, attempting to reclaim the mantle of Lincoln for the GOP (since Lincoln liked the poem), essentially accused Democrats of factionalism for bringing Trump to trial in the first place. “This trial will tear the country apart, perhaps like we’ve only ever seen once in history,” he proclaimed.
In other words, by attempting to hold the president accountable for what happened on January 6, the Democrats are the fractious ones. Why can’t they just overlook the storming of the Capitol and “sail on.” The lawyer was in tears (“the moistened eye, the trembling lip”) as he punctuated his peroration with two passages from the Longfellow poem.
First this one:
Sail forth into the sea, O ship! Through wind and wave, right onward steer! The moistened eye, the trembling lip, Are not the signs of doubt or fear.
And then this one:
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o’er our fears, Are all with thee, — are all with thee!
Poetry, well used, packs a punch, whether for good or for ill. As one twitter wag commented, however, “If my lawyer read a poem and then cried, I would just assume I’m getting life in prison.”
The devil apparently can cite verse as well as Scripture for his purpose. Patriotic poetry, the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Further thought: David Corn of Mother Jones notes that another line from the Longfellow poem–a call for the country to “prevail o’er angry wave and gust”–“could well justify the proceedings at hand.”
This past Monday, when my Dante Discussion Group was comparing The Divine Comedy to Paradise Lost, I recalled a passage that applies to Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. Watching Satan make his way toward Eden, omniscient God tells his angels what will happen once Adam eats the forbidden fruit. “Die he or justice must,” he says sternly.
In other words, as hard as this is for some Republicans to grasp, justice requires accountability. Trump must face consequences for his behavior or justice dies.
Trump struck at the very foundations of our democracy when he sought to overturn the election and assume dictatorial powers. Adam, meanwhile, violates the foundational contract with God, attempting to take on god-like powers himself. Here’s what God has to say on the matter:
Man disobeying, Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins Against the high Supremacy of Heaven, Affecting God-head…
What must he do to “expiate his treason”? God says there is only one answer:
To expiate his Treason hath naught left, But to destruction sacred and devote, He with his whole posterity must die, Die he or Justice must…
Fortunately for humankind, there is a way out. God’s son will take on the sin himself, thereby giving humans a second chance. To achieve this second chance, however, humans must be genuinely repentant, as Adam and Eve prove to be. By contrast, it’s a point of pride with Trump never to say he’s sorry.
Following our Dante discussion, John Gatta, an Americanist, mentioned that he had been thinking about mobs in Hawthorne after reading my blog post on mob action in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” He mentioned the people who gather around Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale at the end of The Scarlet Letter.
Although Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold and confesses his sin, revealing a scarlet “A” that has somehow appeared on his chest, there are those in the audience that refuse to see it. John noted that we are seeing such denial amongst Trump’s defenders:
It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant’s. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any, the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter.
Instead, these “highly respectable” witnesses (sarcasm alert) weave intricate theories that allow Dimmesdale to escape accountability. They say he must have just been speaking metaphorically, lumping himself in with all sinners. Surely he couldn’t have been actually admitting to adultery:
According to these highly respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying,—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels,—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man’s own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind’s spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike.
This leads Hawthorne, as it should lead us, to reflect upon cultic loyalty:
Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale’s story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man’s friends—and especially a clergyman’s—will sometimes uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.
Trump, who never confesses to any failing whatsoever, is of course no Dimmesdale. He is as far from being a holy soul as it’s possible to be, despite his holding up a Bible in front of a church. Nevertheless, as with Dimmesdale, his crimes are as clear as the mid-day sunshine. We have witnessed him pressuring election officials and state legislators to overturn electoral votes, and we saw him on television inciting a mob to attack the Capitol and pressure a Republican Congress and vice-president not to certify Biden’s victory.
If we were to compare him to a Scarlet Letter character, I nominate Chillingworth. Trump is as vindictive as Hester’s husband and Dimmesdale’s tormentor, although Trump’s grudges are more visceral and less guided by a malign intelligence.
Incidentally, there’s another use for Chillingworth in the impeachment proceedings. I see that Trump’s legal team is accusing Democrats of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase first used against Democrats opposing George W. Bush and then against Republicans opposing first Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton. I think some of the accusations are more legitimate than others, but for a literary description of the phenomenon, check out Hester’s cuckolded husband.
Chillingworth is so obsessed with his grievance against Dimmesdale that he makes it his lifelong missing to torture him. Now that’s derangement! This also means, however, that his fate becomes linked with the preacher’s, so that Dimmesdale denies Chillingworth his reason for being when he publicly confesses:
Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale’s death, in the appearance and demeanor of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy—all his vital and intellectual force—seemed at once to desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shriveled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge; and when, by its completest triumph and consummation, that evil principle was left with no further material to support it, when, in short, there was no more Devil’s work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanized mortal to betake himself whither his Master would find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly.
To keep from being a Chillingworth, focus on policy differences and justice, not on humiliation and destruction. Regardless of one’s beliefs, one is not deranged as long as one keeps the eyes on the higher principles at stake.
In other words, strive for the stance God assumes with Adam and don’t let ego gratification drive your opposition.
Unless you were a Tom Brady fan or geographical loyalties to Tampa Bay, you had to look elsewhere for thrills during Sunday’s Super Bowl. Who would have predicted that, for many of us, a poem would be the event’s main highlight?
Amanda Gorman’s Super Bowl poem isn’t at the level of the one she read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, in part because it features far less imaginative word play and intricate symbolism. To be sure, she once again drops rhymes, half-rhymes, and internal rhymes into her free verse format, and she has some of her characteristic alliteration, as in,
Let us walk with these warriors, Charge on with these champions, And carry forth the call of our captains!
Titling her poem “Chorus of the Captains” in the context of a sport events was a nice touch. And, once again, her delivery was magnetic. As the poem’s purpose was to honor front-line workers, it did its job just fine.
But in many ways, Gorman’s presentation was bigger than the poem itself. As the Washington Post, quoting poet Toi Derricotte, noted, Gorman
has taken an art form that felt inaccessible to some and made it universal. “She seems to have awakened the spirit of poetry the way I think it was intended to be, to be a voice of the people.”
Columbia English professor Sharon Marcus, meanwhile, told that Post that “we’re overdue for a poetic mega idol”:
“There have been celebrity poets for a long time. It’s more unusual to not have a celebrity poet — to have long periods of time where there aren’t celebrity poets — than to have celebrity poets,” said Marcus, who is also the author of The Drama of Celebrity:
Take Walt Whitman. (“A very celebrated, well-known persona. People knew what he looked like.”) Take Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (“Nobody reads him now, I mean his big poem, ‘Hiawatha,’ is like a nightmare of stereotypes about native peoples,” Marcus said, but he was “known around the world.”)
“The poet has always been this figure of not just writing, but speech and rhetoric and oration,” Marcus added, and there have “always been links between poetry and politics.”
So, she wasn’t surprised to hear of Gorman’s Super Bowl performance.
“Poets used to be kind of like rock stars,” she said, and “who performs at the Super Bowl? Rock and pop stars.”
Here’s the poem:
Chorus of theCaptains
Today we honor our three captains For their actions and impact in A time of uncertainty and need. They’ve taken the lead, Exceeding all expectations and limitations, Uplifting their communities and neighbors As leaders, healers, and educators. James has felt the wounds of warfare, But this warrior still shares His home with at-risk kids. During Covid, he’s even lent a hand Live-streaming football for family and fans. Trimaine is an educator who work nonstop, Providing his community with hotspots, Laptops, and tech workshops So his students have all the tools They need to succeed in life and in school. Suzie is the ICU nurse manager at a Tampa Hospital. Her chronicles prove that even in tragedy, hope is possible. She lost her grandmothers to the pandemic, And fights to save other lives in the ICU battle zone, Defining the frontline heroes risking their lives for our own. Let us walk with these warriors, Charge on with these champions, And carry forth the call of our captains! We celebrate them by acting with courage and compassion, By doing what is right and just. For while we honor them today It is they who every day honor us.
In observance of Super Bowl Sunday (I write this not knowing who won), I am repurposing a Super Bowl post from nine years ago when American households faced a dilemma very similar to one found in the Tom Robbins novel Skinny Legs and All (1990). In addition to being very funny, Skinny Legs has a great reflection on importance Americans attach to football’s championship game.
The conflict in America in February, 2012 was between the Super Bowl and a season finale of Downton Abbey. Just as Eli Manning was driving the Giants down the field for the come-from-behind win over the undefeated New England Patriots—a drive that included David Tyree’s immortal helmet catch—Downton Abbey was just wrapping up its season. For some, the conflict was excruciating.
In Robbins’s novel, the conflict is just as excruciating, pitting as it does the Super Bowl against a belly dancer. I can’t begin to do justice to this whacky, bawdy, and immensely enjoyable work, but to set up the scene quickly, a remarkable middle eastern dancer is so moved by a painting by protagonist Ellen Cherry Charles that she agrees to do the fabled dance of the seven veils:
This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history’s tragic glitter, where Delilah practiced for her beautician’s license, the room in which Salome dropped the seventh veil while dancing the dance of ultimate cognition, skinny legs and all.
Each of the seven veils represents something that keeps humans from happiness, including politics, religion, money, and fear of sex.
The dance occurs in an Israeli-Palestinian restaurant, co-owned by a Jew and a Muslim, that is located across the street from the United Nations and that is periodically bombed by fundamentalist Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Reading Skinny Legs in 1990 was my first introduction to the unhealthy union between end-of-days Christians and Israeli nationalists.
The patrons of the restaurant are thrilled at the prospect of Salome’s dance as the dancer has developed an immense fan base. Unfortunately, there’s a catch: she will be dancing exactly at the time of the Super Bowl. She can’t do otherwise as the stars, not she herself, decide. In other words, a brutal and overly commercialized sport is contrasted with the prospect of world peace.
Here’s Robbins:
Conflicts flared almost instantaneously. On the one side, there were those for whom the legendary Dance of the Seven Veils had taken on the proportions of fabulous personal fantasy—romantic, erotic, opulent, mysterious, resonant with long-lost exotica, secrets of the Bible and secrets of the East: they would have crawled ten kilometers on a carpet of dog poop and razor blades to witness it, were it the genuine article; and with this devastating nymph who called herself Salome, there was no question of authenticity. On the other side were those for whom the Super Bowl was the most anticipated event of each and every year, the culmination of five months of thrills, endless statistics, ego boosts, and severe disappointments; a major holiday, if not the major holiday, a day when routine and care were suspended; when they nation, the world, came together as one; a festival that cut cross national, racial and religious boundaries; a ritual during which no time existed except the artificial time on the game clock, a symbolic battle in which only token blood was shed and for the duration of which the grip of death on the human psyche was relaxed and put aside: Issac and Ishmael’s still had the biggest, sharpest television screen in midtown Manhattan, and this group had every intention of watching the game on it.
A few people think they’ll be able to move between both, but they are wrong. It’s one or the other. At the end of the novel, a Christian fundamentalist—today he would be a Trump supporter—attacks the dancer but is shot by a policeman who has become a Salome enthusiast.
Those who see the dance have life-altering revelations while those who watch the Super Bowl just watch the Super Bowl. I won’t say that those who watched Downton Abbey nine years ago had their lives changed, but it’s impressive that, during the football game, there was only a 10 percent drop-off from regular PBS viewership.
It’s okay if you watched the Super Bowl yesterday. Just keep it in perspective.
