The Case for Memorizing Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: August 19, 2020
Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy Dit Geo, The Children’s Class

Thursday

Julia alerted me to this Atlantic article about how we should memorize poetry for when times get tough. But not just any poetry. Eliot A. Cohen recommends “robust” poems such as “Invictus,” which John Lewis turned to as a child. (See my post on that here.) He also mentions Longfellow’s “The Building of the Ship,” Arthur Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth,” and Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”

I, who spent a sizable amount of childhood time memorizing poetry, take issue with Eliot’s selection. But more on that after we hear his argument.

In a time of “acute anxiety,” Eliot says, robust poems are a good antidote to the “posture of victimhood and one of its more dangerous variants, fragility, [which] have become characteristic across the left and the right.” When you’re feeling sorry for yourself, just recite a robust poem and it will buck you right up:

Robust poems committed to memory can counteract the corrosive effects of self-pity. They can offer a different way of viewing the world, particularly to generations that did not suffer the buffetings of the early and mid-20th century, and are now bewildered by the calamities that seem to arise from nowhere, and leave them powerless.

I enjoy some of Eliot’s stories. For instance, he recounts how Roosevelt sent Churchill a Longfellow verse in the early days of World War II and then how Churchill cited both that verse and also an excerpt from “Say Not the Struggle” shortly thereafter.

“The Building of the Ship” arrived early in 1941, along with a note that the stanza “applies to you people as it does to us.” Roosevelt was in no position to offer England active assistance—it would take the Pearl Harbor attack to get America into the war—but he could use the poem to convey his sympathy. It was written in 1849, a time when tensions between the north and the south were reaching a boiling point.

Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Churchill’s poem has similar sentiments. Interestingly, the conservative Churchill would have actively opposed Clough’s pro-Chartist (communist) sympathies. Written in 1849, the poem was directed to those witnessing the failure of the 1848 revolutions. I share the entire poem although Churchill only read the last two stanzas:

Say not the struggle nought availeth,
     The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
     And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
     It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
     And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
     Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
     Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
     When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
     But westward, look, the land is bright.

Of course, Eliot can’t leave out “If” from his selection of robust poems , quoting the muscular quatrain from the third stanza. While I found the poem hackneyed when I was a high school freshman, I do indeed find it bolstering in this age of Trump:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on

It’s noteworthy that many of these poems are from the days of the ascendant British empire, evoking will power and firm determination. Kipling’s ringing conclusion to his “if/then” poem confirms this:

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it
And--which is more--you’ll be a Man, my son!

Perhaps realizing that he’s been favoring macho male poems to this point (although he makes a side reference to Maya Angelou’s “I Rise”), Eliot cites Edna St. Vincent Millay’s best-known lyric. He commends it for its absence of self-pity but it still doesn’t fit with the others poems he mentions, focused as it is on her bohemian life style in 1920s New York rather than on some kind of triumph of the will:

My candle burns at both ends;
   It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
   It gives a lovely light!

Would he regard this as robust when read in the light of the poem that follows (in her 1922 collection From Figs to Thistles):

SAFE upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
  Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Eliot continues his article with two more robust poems:

To add to the social and political turmoil of the moment, the anger and the fears, come now sheer weariness. As the shutdowns of the coronavirus continue, we all tire of Zoom calls, Netflix bingeing, and even, perhaps, attempts to tackle once again War and Peace or Moby-Dick. Perhaps, then, it is not a bad time to turn to poetry—and particularly to give those children who will have to go to school online in the fall and are driving their parents to the edge some valuable educational successes. Get them to memorize some poems and declaim them, then talk about what they mean. And do not shrink from giving them Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” to know what it is to lose a great leader, or W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” at a time when it often seems that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

I must say I don’t see “Second Coming” as a good bolstering poem in our age of anxiety. As I’ve noted in the past, too often it is used by people in a kind of “a plague on both your houses” way. In the current American climate, this suggests a false equivalency between a party that is interested in responsible governance and the party that has become a cult. Looking at the Democratic National Convention, I see many admirable people who have both conviction and passion. We don’t have the luxury of fatalistically surrendering to the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

But that being said, I’m very much in favor of memorizing poetry. Although my American teachers didn’t require us to do so when I was growing up (my French teachers certainly did), I memorized many poems on my own.

I didn’t memorize poetry because it was robust, however, as I associated boyish robustness with a disdain for the arts. Rather, memorized poetry brought mystery into a world that seemed bereft of imagination. I memorized such poems as Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Sir Walter Scott’s “Soldier Rest” (“hands unseen thy couch are strewing”), and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

Although Eliot and I recommend different poems, however, I love the point he makes through the Emily Dickinson lyric with which he concludes his article. Memorized poetry can serve as a kind of scaffold of character, he asserts. We may case to recollect “the auger and the carpenter” that built us, but the solidity of our structure—of our soul— testifies that they have done good work:

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter –
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life –
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness – then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul –

I suppose the props could be education in general, but poetry is particularly effective at soul construction.

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Wanted: A Pragmatic Idealism

By Robin Bates | Published: August 18, 2020

Wednesday

I’ve fallen in love with the novels of India’s Amitav Ghosh and at the moment have Circle of Reason, his first novel, rolling around in my head. It functions as a good cautionary tale for those intellectuals, idealists, and ideologues who get so stuck in their heads that they lose touch with reality and become vulnerable to those who care only about money and power. We who believe in clean government and science-guided policy need to pay attention.

The novel follows two generations of Indians. First there is Balaram, a schoolteacher who becomes obsessed first with phrenology (the study of skulls) and then hygiene. Then there is his nephew Alu, a skilled weaver who has a prophetic vision of cleanliness that grips an immigrant community in Al Jazirah, United Arab Emirates. In both instances, a genuine but naïve idealism is depicted as nefarious and destroyed by corrupt officials.

After several years as a teacher in a rural school, Balaram sets up his own “School of Reason.” In the “Pure Reason” track the villagers are taught basic literacy and in the “Practical Reason” track they learn weaving and sewing. The school flourishes and starts making money, but Balaram has higher aspirations, as he explains to the students and teachers:

A school, like Reason itself, must have a purpose. Without a purpose Reason decays into a mere trick, forever reflecting itself like mirrors at a fair. It is that sense of purpose which the third department will restore to our school. It will help us remember that we cannot limit the benefits of our education and learning to ourselves—that it is our duty to use it for the benefit of everybody around us. That is why I have decided to name the department the Department of the March of Reason. It will remind us that our school has another aspect: Reason Militant.

Inspired from an early age by René Vallery-Radot’s The Life of Pasteur, Balaram decides that Reason Militant’s first project will be to eradicate the village’s germs, and he purchases barrels of carbolic acid, an antiseptic.  A local politician with his own agenda, a character I’ve compared to Trump, convinces the authorities that the school compound is a terrorist bomb factory. In the subsequent police raid, the acid catches fire and everyone but Alu dies.

Labeled a terrorist, Alu flees to Al Jazirah, where he works in the country’s underground economy while living in the Ras, an immigrant community. When a shoddy construction project collapses upon him, he has a vision as he awaits help. This he shares with others in the Ras. Having been raised by his uncle, he begins by telling them about Pasteur:

Purity. Purity was what [Pasteur] had wanted, purity and cleanliness—not just in his home, or in a laboratory or a university, but in the whole world of living men. It was that which spurred him on his greatest hunt, the chase in which he drove the enemy of purity, the quintessence of dirt, the demon which keeps the world from cleanliness, out of its lairs of darkness, and gave it a name—the Infinitely Small, the Germ.

But where do germs originate? Pasteur doesn’t know but Alu’s vision has provided him with the answer:

Money. The answer is money.

The crowd gasped, and while they were still reeling he shouted again: We will wage war on money. Are you with me?

And the whole crowd shouted back: Yes. Yes. Yes.

No money, no dirty will ever again flow freely in the Ras. Are you with me.

And again the crowd roared: Yes.

We will drive money from the Ras, and without it we shall be happier, richer, more prosperous than ever before.

The vision manifests itself as communal sharing and, for a while, it works. People do in fact make more money than ever before, and those few businesses who resist the communal contract are boycotted until they surrender. To celebrate, community members organize a grand shopping expedition and also carry ropes and utensils to salvage two old sewing machines that Alu was trying to rescue when the building collapsed.

Once again, however, good intentions are misinterpreted or deliberately distorted by the authorities, who see a riot rather than an innocent excursion. Riot police attack and Alu, already labeled a terrorist, barely escapes. Everyone else is either killed or, lacking work permits, expelled from the country.

The danger of Reason becoming a circle that cuts one off from the messiness of humanity is an idea I first encountered in a sophomore French Revolution course at Carleton College. Carl Wiener assigned us J. L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, in which he argues (I’m relying on a 50-year-old memory here) that Rousseau’s Enlightenment ideas led to Robespierre led to the reign of terror led to various 20th century totalitarianisms. Reason becomes a hermetic circle because it focuses more on its defining principles than on the people who are supposed to act reasonably. Classic conservatism, which can be more realistic about our flawed natures than idealistic liberalism, works as a necessary corrective.

Talmon points out that, if reasoners attain power, they sometimes punish those who don’t fit into their neat little boxes. On the other hand, if they don’t achieve power, idealists can be crushed by those who cynically manipulate revolutionary idealism—or the reaction against it—for their own ends. In some instances, as Arthur Koestler points out in his novel Darkness at Noon, idealists may assent to their own annihilation, mistaking Stalinism for the revolutionary ideals they dream of rather than as a movement coopted by a mass-murderer.

I’ve written about New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik disputing a version of this thesis. The liberalism of Voltaire and Rousseau did not lead to fascism, he convincingly argues. Whatever the case, the immigrants in Circle of Reason have no real power and suffer dire consequences.

Fortunately for Alu, he has a pragmatic friend in an Indian woman named Zindi, a force of nature who foresees the outcome and saves him, along with the prostitute Kulfi and the baby of a woman who is killed.

They flee to Algeria, where we encounter a third circle of reason. The refugees are adopted by Dr. Uma Verma, an Indian doctor who wants to use Kulfi in an ancient India play she is directing. She finds opposition to her project in a colleague, the ultra-rational Dr. Mishra, who doesn’t believe in (as he sees them) superstitious rituals or religious customs.

Because of his upbringing, however, Mishra is thoroughly versed in both and incessantly critiques first Verma’s theatrical project and then, after Zulfi dies in rehearsal, her determination to have a Hindu cremation. If one is going to observe such rituals, he believes, they must be done by the book (another form of purity). The follow interchange occurs after Verma begs some ghee from Mrs. Mishra, having learned from Mishra that Indian butter is ritually essential:

So you’re really going ahead with this? he said. You’re going to broil her on rotten wood and baste her with rancid butter? It’s shameful. It’s a travesty. Can’t you see that?

The times are like that, Mrs. Verma said sadly. Nothing’s whole anymore. If we wait for everything to be right again, we’ll wait forever while the world falls apart. The only hope is to make do with what we’ve got.

The cremation occurs in spite of all Mishra’s objections, and even he must admit that something special has happened. From a purist’s standpoints, the cremation may be a travesty, but in a world where purity and idealism are invariably tainted or crushed, one does the best one can.

The Democratic Party at the moment appears to have learned this lesson and is now willing to blend idealism with pragmatism, welcoming a wide range of political allies into its tent. “If we wait for everything to be right again, we’ll wait forever while the world falls apart. The only hope is to make do with what we’ve got.” Which in this case is Joe Biden.

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Poems in Praise of Strong Women

By Robin Bates | Published: August 17, 2020
Sojourner Truth

Tuesday

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the amendment giving women the right to vote, I’ve been looking through Ain’t I a Woman: A Book of Women’s Poetry from Around the World (Wings Books, 1993). The title is taken from a speech delivered by former slave, abolitionist and suffragist Sojourner Truth, which Erelene Stetson has versified. Along with “Ain’t I a Woman” I’ve chosen poems by a Jamaican-American woman (in honor of Kamala Harris) and a Chinese woman.

Truth (1797-1883), an American giant, was actively involved in the 19th century women’s rights movement. Although no transcript exists of the speech she delivered at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1852, there were notes, which Stetson draws on for the following:

Ain’t I a Woman?

That man over there say
   a woman needs to be helped into carriages
and lifted over ditches
   and to have the best place everywhere.
Nobody ever helped me into carriages
   or over mud puddles
      or gives me a best place…

And ain’t I a woman?
   Look at me
Look at my arm!
   I have plowed and planted
and gathered into barns
   and no man could head me…
And ain’t I a woman?
   I could work as much
and eat as much as a man--
   when I could get to it--
and bear the lash as well
   and ain’t I a woman?
I have born 13 children
   and seen most all sold into slavery
and when I cried out a mother’s grief
   none but Jesus heard me…
and ain’t I a woman?
   that little man in black there say
a woman can’t have as much rights as a man
   cause Christ wasn’t a woman
Where did your Christ come from?
   From God and a woman!
Man had nothing to do with him!
   If the first woman God ever made
was strong enough to turn the world
   upside down, all alone
together women ought to be able to turn it
   rightside up again.

Given that many of our most effective governors, legislators, mayors, state delegates, and others are women, Truth’s assertion is being borne out. To be sure, there are also many women, including my state’s junior senator Marsha Blackburn, that are as bad as any man. Gender doesn’t automatically make one special. Many women, however, are more interested in good governance than in ideology, which is a plus these days.

Few women have been as outspoken as Truth, and Jamaican-American poet Christine Craig talks about how much she owes to the silent women who came before her. While her “grandmothers and their mothers” could not openly declare “I, me, I am a free black woman,” nevertheless they

nourished and infused such a line,
such a close linked chain
to hold us until we could speak
until we could speak out
loud enough to hear ourselves
loud enough to hear ourselves
and believe our own words.

Craig says that though her foremothers had to play a “game of deference/ and agreement and pliant will,” their silence was a way to “compost up their strength”:

The Chain

I no longer care, keeping close my silence
has been a weight
a lever pressing out my mind.
I want it told and said and printed down
the dry gullies
circled through the muddy pools
outside my door.
I want it sung out high by thin-voiced elders,
front rowing murky churches.
I want it known by grey faces queuing under
greyer skies in countries waking
and sleeping with sleet and fog.
I want it known by hot faces pressed against
dust-streaked windows of country buses.

   And you must know this now
   I, me, I am a free black woman.
   My grandmothers and their mothers
   knew this and kept their silence
   to compost up their strength,
   kept it hidden
   and played the game of deference
   and agreement and pliant will.
   It must be known now how that silent legacy
   nourished and infused such a line,
   such a close linked chain
   to hold us until we could speak
   until we could speak out
   loud enough to hear ourselves
   loud enough to hear ourselves
   and believe our own words.

The last poem is by Ch’iu Chin (1879?-1907) and translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. I like the way it mentions women who have served as generals (“The wild strokes of their swords/Whistled like dragons and sobbed with pain”) and envisions a world in which the world will abandon “jewelled dresses and deformed feet”:

To the Tune “The River Is Red”

How many wise men and heroes
Have survived the dust and dirt of the world?
How many beautiful women have been heroines?
There were the noble and famous women generals
Ch’in Liang-yu and Shen Yun-yin.
Though tears stained their dresses
Their hearts were full of blood.
the wild strokes of their swords
Whistled like dragons and sobbed with pain.

The perfume of freedom burns my mind
With grief for my country.
When will we ever be cleansed?
Comrades, I say to you,
Spare no effort, struggle unceasingly,
That at last peace may come to our people.
And jeweled dresses and deformed feet
Will be abandoned.
And one day, all under heaven
Will see beautiful free women,
Blooming like fields of flowers,
And bearing brilliant and noble human beings.

Beautiful free women! That what these struggles are all about.

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In a Dark Time, Beowulf Was My Virgil

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2020

Monday

Last week I wrote about how Dante found comfort in Aeneas’s underworld journey when he found himself exiled and depressed (lost in a dark wood). I now realize that I relate strongly with that reading experience because I similarly found consolation in an ancient epic in my darkest moment.

The time was the weeks following the death of my oldest son from a freak drowning accident. The literary passage was Beowulf’s underwater journey to face Grendel’s mother, an episode that some scholars think was also influenced by The Aeneid. In any case, returning to Beowulf gave me a powerful image for my grief, making it easier to bear.

As I interpret Grendel’s Mother (GM), she is the archetype of vengeful grieving. I also associate the poem’s dragon with grief, seeing the two monsters as coin-side manifestations of the emotion: whereas GM lashes out in hot anger, the dragon withdraws into cold depression. Yet each monster can morph into the other: GM, after killing Hrothgar’s best friend, withdraws into her underwater cave, and the dragon, when aroused, emerges from his cave and burns alive anyone who gets near.

Throughout the poem there are instances of vengeful GM’s (particularly Hengest, who kills Finn) and depressed dragons (particularly the last veteran and Hrethel, who crawls into his bed after losing his eldest son and dies there). Either behavior in an Anglo-Saxon leader would have spelled doom for Britain’s fragile king-dependent tribes.

After Justin’s funeral and the departure of family and friends, I returned to a book I was writing on Beowulf and other British classics. After all, it was summer vacation and one must do something. I still remember the moment when I recognized myself in Beowulf descending through the monster-infested waters. I’m on my own epic journey, I thought, and while I don’t know how it’s going to end, I must become a hero like Beowulf. I must face whatever horror lies within these depths.

Not until years later did I realize that my journey was a metaphorical equivalent of Justin’s own journey into watery depths. At the moment, I was just comforted that I could see myself in the poem’s narrative. I was no longer a helpless victim thrashing around in emotional chaos.

The poet informs us that a deer chased by hounds would rather be torn apart on the shore than leap into GM’s lake. That’s how hard it is to face up to the feelings triggered by loss, and Beowulf proves a hero in his readiness to jump into that lake. The journey is a hard one, however, as GM and other sea monsters strike at his chest armor, which protects the heart. We fear that this organ will fly apart:

Quickly the one who haunted those waters,
who had scavenged and gone her gluttonous rounds
for a hundred seasons, sensed a human
observing her outlandish lair from above.
So she lunged and clutched and managed to catch him
in her brutal grip; but his body, for all that,
remained unscathed: the mesh of the chain-mail
saved hm on the outside. Her savage talons
failed to rip the web of his warshirt.
Then once she touched bottom, that wolfish swimmer
carried the ring-mailed prince to her court
so that for all his courage he could never use
the weapons he carried; and a bewildering horde
came at him from the depths, droves of sea-beasts
who attacked with tusks and tore at his chain-mail
in a ghastly onslaught

The monster is gendered female because such feelings are traditionally associated with women, given that men aren’t supposed to give way to soft emotions. Once in her lair, GM aims her knife at Beowulf’s chest armor. It’s only a matter of time before she will penetrate it:

The sure-footed fighter felt daunted,
the strongest of warriors stumbled and fell.
So she pounced upon him and pulled out
a broad, whetted knife…

Beowulf, meanwhile, finds that conventional sword play doesn’t work on GM. Perhaps resorting to swords is going about business as usual, the way that some, hoping that business as usual will protect them, return to their jobs immediately following a tragedy. All this while, however, GM is pounding at Beowulf’s chest.

Nor can he resort to the strong grip he used on Grendel, which we can think of as firmness of will. In fact, such mental gymnastics are part of the problem. A Vietnam combat vet, knowing of my story, once told me that it took him years before he could face up to the grief he felt over seeing fellow soldiers blown apart, his strong mental shield becoming a PTSD trap. The Beowulf poet, well acquainted with warriors, would have understood this.

What finally works is a great sword, forged by warrior giants in the golden age before the flood, that Beowulf finds in the underwater hall. Since this hall is his own mind, the message is that, deep within us, we have what we need. For Beowulf, that sword is the warrior ethos, which enables him to overcome his grief-stricken psyche. In my case, my giant sword was my need to be strong for my children, my wife, my students, and my friends. It was up to me to be a Beowulf warrior.

Struck with the force of revelation, I went off to read the episode to Julia. I was sobbing so that I almost couldn’t get through it as some deep blockage was released. If this was an epic journey, then I had but to accept it, diving into the waters and riding my sorrow wherever she took me. Grieving now had a shape and it would dispense wisdom along the way.

What kind of man would emerge I did not know. I was just determined that he be more like Beowulf than grieving father Hrethel.

Once the depressed Dante returned to his Virgil, he proceeded to embark on one of the most spectacular journeys in literary history. Grappling with his inner doubts and fears, he emerged, in the end, into celestial light. My own journey has not resulted in The Divine Comedy, but it did make me a better father, a better husband, a better teacher, and a better human being. Above all it made me better able to respond, sensitively and effectively, to the suffering of others.  

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A Love Beyond Knowledge & Fame

By Robin Bates | Published: August 15, 2020
Domenico Fetti, Pearl of Great Price

Spiritual Sunday

As classes begin tomorrow at Sewanee and other colleges around the country, here’s a George Herbert poem that refers to higher learning. As the poet sees it, even the most dazzling knowledge does not surpass our love for God.

The poem takes its title from Jesus’s “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-46), which I wrote about recently:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

Like the merchant, Herbert is already wealthy, boasting of knowledge (first stanza), honor (second stanza), and sensual pleasure (third stanza). Because of this wealth, his simple declaration “Yet I love thee” is all the more powerful. Elaborate argumentation is offset by these four words.

The opening lines are a reference to the head and the heart. Europe is just entering the age of modern science, with “reason” laying bare the secrets of nature (and sometimes rediscovering previous breakthroughs). William Harvey has discovered the workings of the heart (“the pipes that feed the press, and make it run”). explorers are entering “new-found seas,” and Francis Bacon is formulating the scientific method (the “laws and policy” of learning). The poet possesses the keys to “cause and history.” “Yet I love thee”:

I know the ways of learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the press, and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of itself, like a good huswife, spun
In laws and policy; what the stars conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forc'd by fire;
Both th'old discoveries and the new-found seas,
The stock and surplus, cause and history;
All these stand open, or I have the keys:
Yet I love thee.

The poet also know all about honor including courtesy, wit, and the pursuit of glory. He understands the spirit required to “sell my life unto my friends or foes.” “Yet I love thee.”

I know the ways of honour; what maintains
The quick returns of courtesy and wit;
In vies of favours whether party gains
When glory swells the heart and moldeth it
To all expressions both of hand and eye,
Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie,
And bear the bundle wheresoe'er it goes;
How many drams of spirit there must be
To sell my life unto my friends or foes:
Yet I love thee.
Pleasure involves hot blood and brains, mirth and music, love and wit. The poet is no aesthete, telling us that his “stuff is flesh, not brass” and that “his senses live.” After all, they outnumber him 5-1. “Yet I love thee.”

I know the ways of pleasure; the sweet strains
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot blood and brains;
What mirth and music mean; what love and wit
Have done these twenty hundred years and more;
I know the projects of unbridled store;
My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,
And grumble oft that they have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:
Yet I love thee.

It is because Herbert is so blessed with these riches that he appreciates God, fully understanding (like a merchant) “both the main sale and the commodities.” He concludes the poem by observing that he didn’t figure this out on his own, however. In one last image of finery, Herbert says that God has shown him the way with a silken rope, reminiscent of Herbert’s pulley:

I know all these and have them in my hand;
Therefore not sealed but with open eyes
I fly to thee, and fully understand
Both the main sale and the commodities;
And at what rate and price I have thy love,
With all the circumstances that may move.
Yet through the labyrinths, not my groveling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heav'n to me
Did both conduct and teach me how by it
To climb to thee.

The poem may be autobiographical, with Herbert explaining why he abandoned a promising court life to become rector at a small rural church. It is all the more admirable when read in that light.

Further thought: Yesterday Julia and I attended, via Facebook, the funeral of William Boyd, who lived with us for six years and helped us bring up our children. (I recently wrote about William here.) Like Herbert, William could have had other careers, either as a charismatic gospel singer or as a well-compensated bank administrator. Instead, he chose to become a pastor of an impoverished Baltimore church. Listening to accounts of his ministry, I had no doubt that he had focused on the pearl of great price.

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The Moment Has Come to Decide

By Robin Bates | Published: August 13, 2020
James Russell Lowell, author of “The Present Crisis”

Friday

In a week when schools should be getting underway, I turn to a New York Review of Books interview with one of America’s leading educators. Diane Ravitch, an ardent public education defender and charter school skeptic, cites among her favorite poems two that reflect the high sense of mission that motivates many teachers.:

“I confess that I love the golden oldies,” she said, “like [Felicia Hemans’s] ‘Casabianca’ (‘The boy stood on the burning deck: Whence all but him had fled…’) and James Russell Lowell’s ‘The Present Crisis’ (‘Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, / In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side’). I sent that last stanza to Senator Lamar Alexander, who was secretary of education when I worked in the first Bush administration, during the impeachment hearings earlier this year, but it fell on deaf ears.”

These poems, both from the 19th century, don’t get read much any more, but “Present Crisis” is only too timely in the age of Trump. Turning first to the melodramatic “Casabianca” (1826), perhaps it appeals to Ravitch because it is about a child struggling with a moral quandary. “The boy” is so obedient to his captain father that he chooses not to abandon his post upon a burning boat because he hasn’t received permission:

The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle’s wreck,
Shone round him o’er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though childlike form.

As the poem progresses, we learn that the father has died. Not knowing this, the boy displays his fortitude—or, if you prefer, his blind obedience:

He called aloud – ‘Say, father, say
If yet my task is done?’
He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.

‘Speak, father!’ once again he cried,
‘If I may yet be gone!’
– And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames rolled on.

Several years ago a student of mine wrote about the 19th century’s fascination with child death, and I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t mention this poem. The climactic final scene is worthy of the death of Charles Dickens’s little Nell or Charlotte Bronte’s Helen Burns:

And shouted but once more aloud,
‘My father! must I stay?’
While o’er him fast, through sail and shroud,
The wreathing fires made way.

They wrapped the ship in splendor wild,
They caught the flag on high,
And streamed above the gallant child,
Like banners in the sky.

There came a burst of thunder sound –
The boy – oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strewed the sea!

With mast, and helm and pennon fair,
 That well had borne their part,
But the noblest thing which perished there,
Was that young faithful heart.

I suppose the poem affirms to children that they too are capable of heroism—it certainly advocates for delaying gratification—but I remember encountering parodies when I was in middle school. For instance,

The boy stood on the burning deck
Eating peanuts by the peck

And:

The boy stood on the burning deck
He had this foolish whim
Not because he was stout of heart
But because he could not swim.

Still, “Casabianca” got me to wrestle with substantive issues at a young age. Maybe that’s what educator Ravitch appreciates.

The poem by Lowell, an ardent abolitionist, has appeared dated in the past but it has circled back to relevance. The stanza that Sen. Alexander ignored, to his everlasting shame, used to be part of an Episcopalian hymn. It got dropped in the 1982 hymnal revision because it is so stark and uncompromising:

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.  

I remember singing the hymn as a member of the Otey Parish children’s choir in the early 1960s and thinking, “Wow, God really means business.” Much about the church seemed dark to me in those days, including a confessional which had us recite, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” God seemed to me to be pissed off all the time, and I’m not surprised that I dropped religion with a feeling of relief when I got to high school. I didn’t return to the church until I was in my forties.

And yet, for all that, these poems are buried deep within me, enforcing a sense of social duty and moral obligation. Doing what is right, I have always assumed, is necessarily hard, and if it weren’t, there would be no virtue in doing it. As I say this, I think of Hester Prynne momentarily imagining that she can jettison the scarlet letter, only to be called back to religion and law by her daughter Pearl throwing a fit.

But enough of me and Ravitch for the moment. Lowell wrote his poem when his nation was grappling with slavery, and as we are once again facing dire threats to the nation, we need Lowell’s reminder to step up. Which principle will prevail, white minority rule or “all men are created equal”?

Like many abolitionists (including Julie Ward Howe in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), Lowell resorts to apocalyptic Biblical language. On the one side stand Evil, wrong, and falsehood, on the other right, Truth, and God. Which side are you on, Lowell asks:

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,   
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?       
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong,      
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng           
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong. 

While these days it’s generally the Christian right rather than the Christian left that mixes politics with apocalyptic religion, I recognize in Lowell’s concluding stanza my own moral compass:

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;         
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;     
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,           
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, 
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.

In the current battle, those who see a clash of civilizations square off against those who see Trumpism threatening the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty and our existence as a multicultural democracy. Like Lowell, I believe the moment has come to take sides. No cowering slaves allowed.

One last thought. Despite some very grim images, including a corpse crawling around unburied, the poem isn’t altogether grim. In the opening lines, we see the joy of devoting one’s life to a noble cause. The slave in this stanza is the previously cowering citizen who, feeling an “energy sublime,” bursts full-blossomed into manhood (and, we should add, womanhood):

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast 
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,         
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb 
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime        
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.

In short, do what you can as we move towards the election.

And another note: Thanks to Wikipedia, I recently learned the poem provided the title for the NAACP’s Crisis newsletter and that Martin Luther King cited if often. It’s more evidence that we need it today.

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Kamala Harris, a Phenomenal Woman

By Robin Bates | Published: August 12, 2020
Kamala Devi Harris

Thursday

What times we are living through! At the same moment that we experience an endless pandemic and a crashing economy, we see one of the two major parties nominate for the vice presidency a charismatic woman of color. This in the same month that we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights bill and the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

We could even add to that—although Kamala Harris is of South Asian descent, not East Asian—the 75th anniversary of the ending of World War II and of the internment of Japanese Americans, one of American history’s most shameful episodes. Joe Biden’s selection of his running mate is a celebration of America’s immigration history, featuring in this instance Jamaica and India.

My 94-year-old mother, an Elizabeth Warren supporter who is nevertheless as excited about Harris as my wife and I, now sees a second message in the poem she chose this week for her “From Bard to Verse” column in Sewanee’s weekly newspaper. She had picked Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” to celebrate passage of the 19th amendment, but the poem’s celebration of sassiness and what men regard as haughtiness applies as well to Harris. We already see “bitter, twisted lies” and “hatefulness” being directed her way:

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Apparently, some around Biden were worried about Harris’s ambitious nature, a concern that doesn’t arise about male politicians and that in the end he ignored. For his part, Donald Trump is calling her a “nasty” woman, his preferred adjective for strong females who stand up to him. As a response, let’s turn to a different adjective, featured in another Angelou poem that gets at the power Harris exudes:

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size   
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,   
The stride of my step,   
The curl of my lips.   
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,   
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,   
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.   
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honeybees.   
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,  
And the flash of my teeth,  
The swing in my waist,  
And the joy in my feet.   
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered   
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,   
They say they still can’t see.   
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,   
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.   
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.   
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,   
The bend of my hair,   
The palm of my hand,   
The need for my care.   
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Harris, like Angelou, is comfortable in her own skin, which is why some of her most powerful moments (such as examining William Barr and Brett Kavanaugh) have been quiet ones. She walks into a room “just as cool as you please.”

At the same time, one can see

the fire in my eyes,  
And the flash of my teeth,  
The swing in my waist,  
And the joy in my feet.  

And also

the arch of my back,   
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style. 

Kamala Devi Harris, a phenomenal woman and the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee.

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Better Living through Virgil

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2020
Gustave Doré, Virgil and Dante in the 9th circle of Inferno

Wednesday

I have joined a faculty group to explore Dante’s Divine Comedy. This past week four of us met—properly social distanced of course—and made our way through the first two cantos. (For those of you who know Sewanee, the group includes retired English faculty John Reishman and John Gatta and Renaissance scholar Ross MacDonald.) Given my view of literature, I focused on how reading came to Dante’s rescue at one of his darkest hours.

Dante turns to his favorite author when he is lost in his dark wood. Think of it as Better Living through Virgil. When I was writing about Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, I looked at a character who uses Robinson Crusoe to solve every problem that comes his way, and Dante is doing something similar. Virgil, after all, describes Aeneas journeying through the afterlife at a stage in his life where he’s uncertain about which way to turn. Dante is in a comparable situation and uses the underworld journey as his model.

To dramatize Dante’s situation, I turn to Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus when he is experiencing a dark woods moment of his own. Having cut himself off from God, Faustus is suicidally depressed, but his pride won’t allow him to repent. If it weren’t for the poetry of Homer (the story of Alexander/Paris and Oenon, whom he jilted) and the music of Orpheus, Faustus would find a weapon to “dispatch” himself:

My heart’s so hardened I cannot repent!
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,
But fearful echoes thunders in mine ears,
“Faustus, thou are damned”; then swords and knives,
Poison, guns, halters, and envenomed steel
Are laid before me to dispatch myself:
And long ere this I should have slain myself,
Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep espair.
Have I not made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander’s love, and Oenon’s death.
And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
Made music with my Mephastophilis?
Why should I die then, or basely despair?

In other words, art as suicide prevention.

Dante may not be suicidal, but he’s very, very low at the point where Virgil comes to his aid. First there is deep depression:

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.

Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!...

How I came to it I cannot rightly say,
so drugged and loose with sleep had I become
when I first wandered there from the True Way.
(John Ciardi trans.)

In this state, he catches a momentary gleam of God’s love:

But at the far end of that valley of evil
whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear!
I found myself before a little hill

and lifted up my eyes. Its shoulders glowed
already with the sweet rays of that planet [the sun]
whose virtue leads men straight on every road

and the shining strengthened me against the fright
whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart
through all the terrors of that piteous night.

Despite his resolution to march up the hill—to leave his funk and open himself to God—Dante then encounters three beasts that drive him back into his dark woods state. Think of them as symbols of his sins and sense of inadequacy:

She [the She-Wolf] brought such heaviness upon my spirit
at sight of her savagery and desperation,
I died from every hope of that high summit.

And like a miser—eager in acquisition
but desperate in self-reproach when Fortune’s wheel
turns to the hour of his loss—all tears and attrition

I wavered back; and still the beast pursued,
forcing herself against me bit by bit
till I slid back into the sunless wood.

It is at this point that he remembers his beloved Virgil, although he at first doesn’t recognize him. After a lifetime of reading, we know there may be someone out there who understands our condition, even if we’re not at first sure who it is. Gradually it comes to us:

And as I fell to my soul’s ruin, a presence
gathered before me on the discolored air,
the figure of one who seemed hoarse from long silence.

At sight of him in that friendless waste I cried:
“Have pity on me, whatever thing you are,
whether shade or living man.”

Our most beloved authors are both shades and living people, shades in that they play an outsized role in our imaginations. Virgil reassures Dante that he will help him grapple with his inner darkness:

Therefore, for your own good, I think it well

you follow me and I will be your guide
and lead you forth through an eternal place.
There you shall see the ancient spirits tried

in endless pain, and hear their lamentation
as each bemoans the second death of souls.

Virgil has one drawback: having lived before the birth of Christ, he can’t guide Dante fully into an understanding of God’s redeeming love. He has an inkling, however: Dante believes that Virgil’s Eclogue anticipates Christ’s vision. He captures this by having Virgil report he has been sent by three heavenly ladies: the Virgin Mary, Dante’s muse Beatrice, and the figure Lucia, representing Divine Light.

The combination of Virgil’s worldly knowledge and Christianity’s divine love will lead Dante out of the woods and into the light.

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Trump as Aesop’s Frog

By Robin Bates | Published: August 10, 2020
Donald Trump has fantasized about his profile on Mt. Rushmore

Tuesday

We’ve had bad presidents before but never one who wore his neediness and insecurity as openly as Donald Trump. Recently he complained that Dr. Anthony Fauci was more popular than he was (“Nobody likes me”), and his envy of President Obama has pretty much defined his presidency. And then there’s his desire to have his profile joining Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore.

Think of him as the frog in Aesop’s fable, which La Fontaine versified, inspiring a Scott Bates version. Here’s La Fontaine:

A Frog had an Ox in her view;
His bulk, to her, appeared ideal.
She, not even as large, all in all, as an egg hitherto,
Envious, stretched, swelled, strained, in her zeal
To match the beast in overall size,
Saying, "Sister, lend me your eyes.
Is this enough? Am I not yet there, in every feature?"
"Nope." "Then now?" "No way." "There now, as good as first?"
"You’re not anywhere near." The diminutive creature
Inflated still more, till she burst.

The world is full of folk who are as far from being sages.
Every city gent would build chateaux like Louis Quatorze;
Every petty prince names ambassadors,
Every marquis wants to have pages.

And here’s my father, the version appearing in his An ABC of Radical Ecology:

F Is the Fable of the Frog and the Ox
after La Fontaine

A Frog saw an Ox
and was impressed

He thought he was a creature of stature
worthy of emulation

He turned on

He got so excited in fact that he swelled up
and puffed up
and turgesced
in an attempt to approximate the dimensions of the beast

                               saying

Hey look at this Charlie just
feast your eyes on Big Fred
Is this big enough
Have I made it yet

Nope

How about this

Not at all!

NOW I’ve made it I bet

You haven’t even made it to first

The little flop
blew up so big he burst

The world is full of people who are just about as dumb
Every used-car salesman thinks he should run General Motors
Every two-bit politician wants 100% of the voters
Every two-star general wants the Bomb

If not 100% of the voters, Trump wanted at least a popular vote count bigger than Hillary Clinton’s, along with a bigger inauguration turnout than Obama’s. He’s a failed businessman and former reality tv host who thinks he can run the world’s biggest economy and a commander in chief who has fantasized about dropping the big one. I’d say that Vladimir Putin is the ox he wants to emulate except that I consider Putin to be a frog as well.

Could we say that Trump’s self-destructive behavior is his version of bursting? The problem is that he has surrounded himself with people and commands a television network that unceasingly tell him that he is, in fact, as big as the ox.

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