Hamlet Taught Us a New Way to Grieve

By Robin Bates | Published: November 29, 2023
Branagh at Hamlet

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Wednesday

For my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I look at what he says about Hamlet, the current focus of my faculty reading group. As Fletcher sees it, Shakespeare’s play invented a new way to grieve.

In fact, if the play proved the most popular of Shakespeare’s tragedies in the 17th century—and if it continues to pack a punch today—it’s because (Fletcher says) it aids us in this most challenging of all emotions.

Fletcher begins his discussion of Hamlet as a “Sorrow Resolver” with a look at previous plays that grappled with grief. Foremost of these are many of the great Greek tragedies. As he notes,

Greek tragedies revolved around characters who’d lost parents, siblings, children. And although those bereaved characters responded to loss in different ways, a common pattern quickly emerged: mourning took the form of a plot.

Greek audiences, Fletcher notes, especially liked the revenge plot.

I am put in mind of the words of Beowulf after watching Danish king Hrothgar lose himself in despair after Grendel’s Mother kills his best friend. “It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning,” he declares, before setting off to confront the monster in her underwater lair. Greek tragedy appeared to agree as it came up with elaborate revenge stories. For instance, there’s Agamemnon, where Clytemnestra lures her husband “into a bathtub, entangles him with a net, and then drops an axe upon his head.” From then on, Fletcher says, revenge plots “grew steadily more elaborate”:

A quarter century after the Oresteia, Athenian audiences were introduced to Euripides’s Medea, a barbarian princess who delivered comeuppance to her unfaithful Greek lover by stabbing his two sons, assassinating his new wife with a poisoned wedding gift, and finally , escaping in a dragon chariot hijacked from the gods.

The theater of Shakespeare’s time was in love with revenge plays. As Fletcher notes,

There were plots where avengers tricked their victims into kissing venomed skeletons. There were plots where revengers surprised their victims with lethal stage props. There were plots with hobnail hammers, scalding cauldrons, and falling trapdoors. There were plots and plots and plots and plots.

Shakespeare even put his hand to the genre with the gruesome Titus Andronicus. So when Shakespeare’s audience was greeted with Hamlet for the first time, it fully expected a traditional revenge tragedy. Claudius has killed Hamlet’s father so now it’s payback time.

But Shakespeare, Fletcher believes, had good reason to deliver a play that would go deeper into the mourning process than anything the world had seen. Three years earlier he had lost his son Hamnet—a name, at the time, interchangeable with Hamlet—so this play was personal. And even though three years had passed, that doesn’t mean that he had gotten over it. In fact, watching Hamlet’s response to his father death, it seems clear that Shakespeare hasn’t.

That’s because he may have been suffering from “complicated grief,” which is

a grief that doesn’t resolve itself naturally over time. Instead, it persists and even deepens, triggering psychic disturbances such as depression, detachment, and rage. These disturbances are what entangle Hamlet, inciting him to brood, to drift, and to lash out. And in Shakespeare’s play, as is typically the case in real life, the source of complicated grief is guilt.

The guilt is over feeling that what we do for our lost loved one is not enough. Fletcher notes how, from the very first, Hamlet attacks others for trying to move on with their lives. They, meanwhile, chastise him for being stuck in his grief, which his mother sees as not “common” and Claudius regards as “peevish.” Hamlet runs around the castle clothed in black, and he swears to his father’s ghost that he will do nothing other than remember him, pushing aside all other concerns:

Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven!

The play, as Fletcher sees it, finds several ways to deal with complicated grief. First, it dispenses with plot which, like Beowulf, deals with the problem of grief by doing something. But the point is that more action doesn’t end grief. Therefore Hamlet, unlike previous revenge tragedies, had “a plot that seemed to be no plot at all.” As Fletcher notes, we see Hamlet wandering around the castle with a book while delivering long soliloquies. He raves about his inner doubts and he vents his disgust at life. When the ghost tries to get him back on track with the revenge plot, Hamlet botches it. Fletcher points out,

Instead of getting revenge, he disposed of an innocent man in a stairwell, tricked two casual acquaintances into getting royally butchered, and then jumped inside a grave: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, a fellow of infinite jest.”

Although it breaks revenge tragedy conventions, however, the play does important grieving work. First of all, it acknowledges the depth of the hurt and how inadequate are our responses, including the revenge response.

It also points out the inadequacy of public testimonial, the testimonial being in this case the theatrical scene that Hamlet composes and has the players perform. As Hamlet observes, and as Shakespeare knew as well as anyone, writing a play will get you only so far in your grieving. Everything about play acting seems fake, Hamlet thinks as he watches players performing emotions—in this case, Hecuba weeping for Trojan king Priam:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? 

As we watch a tormented Hamlet realize that neither revenge nor a public performance will assuage his grief, we feel grateful to Shakespeare. He understands the depth of our own grief.

And this recognition is what finally brings relief, how Hamlet works as a “sorrow resolver.” When we realize that others are suffering as we are, something lifts. Hamlet himself comes to this realization when watching Laertes, who after all has lost both father and sister. “For the first time since his father’s death,” Fletcher writes, “Hamlet acknowledges that someone else can feel like him”:

[A]lthough Hamlet initially accuses Laertes of feigned grief, he soon comes to grasp that the young knight’s suffering is genuine: “By the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his.”

This is what happens, Fletcher says, 

when we see our grief mirrored back by other people. The mirroring reveals that we’re not alone in our sorrow; there’s a wider public that understands what it is to lose someone who can never be replaced. And with their understanding, that public helps not only support us through our bereavement, but also to relieve our anxiety that we haven’t done enough to commemorate our dead.

And so, with his dying words, Hamlet tells Fortinbras to tell the story of his own death:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

To which Horatio responds with what is, to my mind, the most beautiful farewell in all of literature. In the play W;t, Vivian’s former professor turns to the second line when Vivian succumbs to her cancer:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Now it is up to us to tell Hamlet’s story, which we return to century after century. We have found time to grieve in its “drifting, eddying, dilating story” and we have recognized our own disdain, dismay and even anger at “clichéd funerals and formulaic condolences”—and in doing so, we have been both able to honor “the uniqueness of the life departed” and found a way to move on.

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Does Hamlet Speak for Generation Z?

By Robin Bates | Published: November 28, 2023
Alex Lawther as Hamlet

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Wednesday

My faculty reading group has plunged into Hamlet, and our engagement with the work has given me insights into a disturbing story I read recently. According to Ed Kilgore of The Atlantic, Joe Biden may not have the advantage over Trump with young voters that many of us have been assuming. With the caveat that the election is still almost a year away, Kilgore fears that Trump could carry the youth vote—or if not win it outright, at least considerably shrink the margins that Hillary Clinton and Biden racked up in the past two elections.

The article put me in mind of another I read recently—I can’t find it at the moment—that believes that young people don’t have the same kind of belief in the institutions of democracy that are sacred to people like me. And because they don’t, some may be drawn to Trump’s increasingly fascistic alternative.

Now, one shouldn’t panic too early. After all, Trump and the GOP are still on the wrong side of many issues that young people care about, from abortion to student loans to LGBTQ+ rights to climate change to gun control to economic fairness. Still, we can’t foreget that Hitler managed to generate a fair degree of enthusiasm amongst disaffected young people. (Think of all you’ve heard about “Hitler youth.”) The unimaginable could happen here.

Rereading Hamlet has given me insight into our situation. The prince of Denmark returns home from college to discover that his previously stable world has been turned upside down. His revered father is dead and, instead of his mother grieving as he thinks she should, she has married his dissolute uncle. (As he puts it, “The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”). He’s in love with Ophelia but Polonius uses her to spy on him. She, obedient to a fault, goes along with her father, prompting Hamlet to wonder if all women are untrustworthy. (“Frailty, thy name is women,” he tells his mother at one point.) Two old friends, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, have also been commissioned to spy on him. There’s even a foreign threat, with Fortinbras longing to revenge Norway’s defeat at the hands of the Danes.

And to top it all off, there’s a ghost in the form of his father telling him that “murder most foul” has been committed and that he must revenge it. It’s not initially clear whether this ghost is to be believed, but Hamlet’s “mousetrap”—staging a play in which the murder is reenacted—elicits tangible truth that the ghost is telling the truth.

Still, murder is not something that one does easily, even with the facts, and young people today may be similarly confused about their options. That’s why I’m sympathetic. For the past seven years, our youth have watched Trump turn the world upside down and, with the impatience of their age, imagine that the Democrats’ measured response is a sign of weakness. After all, why is someone who tried to overthrow the government still leading the GOP. Furthermore, there are other ways that Biden (like Hamlet, Sr.) seems unable to protect them—they’ve seen the Supreme Court override him on matters of abortion and student debt. Like Hamlet, generation Z is living in a world where their elders appear helpless, hapless, and worse. Like Hamlet, they see something rotten in the state of Denmark.

In their response, we’re seeing some of the behavior we also see in Hamlet. First of all, the prince is surly with authority figures (the king and the queen). Then he feigns madness (although he may not need to do much feigning since he feels half crazed as it is). He famously contemplates suicide—or as he puts it, taking up “arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.” He curses the fact that all the responsibility seems to be on his shoulders (“Oh cursed spite, that ever I was formed to set it right”). He lashes out against his girlfriend and his mom in some ugly ways. He also lurches from underreaction to overreaction—he comes up with a reason for not killing Claudius when he sees him praying and then impulsively puts a sword through someone behind a curtain (“I took thee for thy better,” he tells the dead Polonius). His revenge against the two hapless friends who are required to spy on him is out of proportion to their actual sins.

If our young people are acting a bit mad at times, should we be surprised? I am reminded of my own days in college (1969-73). Our generation had seen multiple assassinations, witnessed Jim Crow violence, watched riots on television, and seen the suffering caused by a war that no one could explain or justify—all the while being scolded for acting out in the various ways that we did. Hysterical Hamlet spoke for us.

Hamlet does find his bearings at the end of the play and attempts to reconcile with Laertes. He learns to see beyond his own confusion into the pain of another man. As it turns out, his efforts come too late—the wheels have already been set in motion that will end in his death—but we see that madness doesn’t get the last word.

So here’s hoping that our young and disaffected will come to see where their true interests—and where democracy’s true interests—lie. It may help that the one who sits on the throne is no Claudius but one who has come to his position legitimately. Joe Biden also genuinely cares for his Hamlets as Trump never will. That, in the end, may make a big difference.

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Biden and Auden’s Unknown Citizen

By Robin Bates | Published: November 27, 2023
President Joe Biden

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Tuesday

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic has a way of voicing much of what is on my mind, and in yesterday’s newsletter he articulated a recurring anxiety: that Joe Biden will lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump because people see him as boring. Even though the president has an impressive list of White House accomplishments to his name—as opposed to Trump, who had virtually none (and who attempted a coup to boot)—Nichols says that the American voter “has come to expect celebrity and excitement from the White House, and they pay little attention to policy.”

Which brings to mind a W.H. Auden poem about a boring man. I agreed with Auden’s satiric point when I was in high school, but now, in light of rising fascism, I see it very differently.

Before getting to it, however, let’s look at some of Biden’s accomplishments. I owe the following to Up North News, a Madison WI website that follows political matters.

 When the Democrats held Congress during the first two years of his presidency, the president can be credited with lowering healthcare and drug costs (including insulin); fighting climate change; reducing energy costs; investing in mental health care; and investing in American manufacturing and infrastructure. During that time he also signed into law the most consequential federal gun safety legislation in decades, canceled up to $20,000 in federal student loans for millions of Americans, dramatically increased domestic microchip manufacturing, and reformed the U.S. postal service to ensure its long-term stability.

Oh yes, and he led the international effort to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, oversaw the reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act, nominated the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, and pardoned all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession.

I would go on and on only I’m afraid of, well, boring you. I’ll just add all those things the Biden has not done, including cost the country a million lives by botching a pandemic response, pardon cronies in jail, channel government money to himself, undermine NATO, cozy up to Vladimir Putin, stack the Supreme Court with rightwing ideologues, separate immigrant families from their children and, oh yes, incite his followers to attack the Capitol.

And if Biden is reelected, he will not try to end Obamacare, ban abortions nationwide, place millions of immigrants in camps, separate children from their immigrant families, make life hard for LGBTQ+ folk, prevent Muslims from coming into the country, and fill the Justice Department, the military, and the federal work force with rightwing extremists.

Of course, if Biden did do these things, he’d be far more exciting. But you get my point.

Now for Auden’s “Unknown Citizen.” Until I looked it up, I was sure that it was written during the 1950s, but it was actually composed in 1939, prior to World War II. “Prior” is important since I expect Auden would have been worried about other things than faceless bureaucrats once England, France and Poland started fighting the Nazis.

The poem became a hit in the 1950s when Americans were worried about faceless corporate jobs and cookie cutter housing developments. At the time we lamented that modern life and consumer culture were blotting out individuality. The idea, however, of someone who “served the Greater Community” in everything he did, who was pro-union, and who never interfered in his children’s education (in other words, assumed the teachers were professionals who could do their jobs) actually sounds pretty good these days. Here’s the poem:

The Unknown Citizen
By W.H. Auden

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Of course, one of Auden’s targets here is the surveillance state—the “we” in the poem—and that is indeed something to be concerned about. Our ability to get information about individuals far exceeds Auden’s worst fears.

Otherwise, however, the poem describes many members of what NBC’s Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation.” If we can’t appreciate these men and women, Nichols believes, it’s because “bored and sated voters are more prone to reward showmanship, overblown promises, and made-for-TV rage than competence.” Auden undervalues Unknown Citizen’s ability to do his job well.

Biden may not be, “in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word,” a saint. But he’s a lot closer than many in Washington. And as he himself is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

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Bloom: The Bard Invented the Human

By Robin Bates | Published: November 26, 2023


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Monday

For the past few weeks, I’ve been fine-tuning my book manuscript for publication. Thanks to my periodical failure to record page numbers, the endnotes alone have taken me three weeks to complete and I had to master the Chicago Manual of Style to boot. Fortunately, I now can see the finish line.

For the most part, I’ve just been line editing but occasionally I’ve seen the need to add material. I report today on what I’m saying about Harold Bloom.

I include Bloom in the chapter about cultural conservatives. Previously, I had given him short shrift by not discussing his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Since my book is about how literature changes lives and since Bloom contends that Shakespeare invented personality as we now understand it, it’s essential that I say something.

I’m intrigued by the project itself. Bloom is famous for his notion that writers are anxious about being influenced, and it’s clear whom Bloom is competing with and has anxieties about: Samuel Johnson

In 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote what his Pulitzer-winning biographer Walter Jackson Bate describes as ““one of the landmarks in the history of literary criticism.” Johnson changed the way we see Shakespeare, placing him “above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.”

Johnson is particularly impressed by Shakespeare’s characters, observing,

His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.

It’s clear to me that Bloom felt, if he were to be the Johnson of our own age, he needed to write his own Preface to Shakespeare. And in fact, it’s the same kind of book, with a magisterial introduction followed by comments on the individual plays. I sense that Bloom wants to be for our time what Johnson was to “the Age of Johnson” (1745-1798).

Bloom also follows in the footsteps of Percy Shelley, the subject of Bloom’s early studies. I think he takes to heart what Shelley, in Defence of Poetry, says about authors who change the world. At one point Shelley writes that

it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.

Thinking, like Shelley, that an author like Shakespeare can change “the moral condition of the world,” Bloom sets out to spell out how.

 Bloom contends that Shakespeare “altered life” by changing the way we think about ourselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Shakespeare created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Elaborating on what he means by this, Bloom writes,

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…

By “deplore,” Bloom is partly thinking of Shylock. Shakespeare’s powerful depiction of the Jewish money lender who literally demands a pound of flesh may, he thinks, have incited more anti-Semitism than The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the infamous 1903 Russian tract about “Jewish global domination” that played a role in the Holocaust). In other words, once Shakespeare unleashed fully three-dimensional characters upon world, they didn’t always lead to good. Shakespeare may have changed the very way we experience feelings—Bloom says that he “pragmatically reinvented” us—but those feelings could have bad as well as good consequences.

So although Bloom is like Shelley in the way he sees Shakespeare as having changed history, unlike Shelley Bloom doesn’t connect the Bard with the struggle for social and political liberation. In fact, he has derided those who embrace a multicultural canon. Bloom speaks unapologetically about Shakespeare’s ability to transcend history, something which Shakespeare’s fellow playwright also noted when he said that he “was not of an age but of all time.”

Bloom is not at all a fan of various historical approaches to Shakespeare and speaks derisively of “Feminists, Marxists, Afrocentrists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists and Deconstructors.” Calling them “the school of resentment,” he attacks them for reducing figures like Shakespeare to their own narrow agendas.

In my experience, Bloom caricatures his opposition here. Most literature teachers I know tend to be rather eclectic in their approach to texts, using whatever tools seem most appropriate for the task at hand. There are relatively few doctrinaire feminists, Marxists, etc in the academy. Likewise, those who insist on Shakespeare’s universality are no longer adverse to looking at him through historical, psychological, and other lenses as well. In fact, a play like Merchant of Venice, which Bloom has problems with, cries out for an examination of how 16th century Britain regarded Jews.

But whatever reservations I have about The Invention of the Human—for instance, I think some credit for the invention should go to the Chaucer and, before him, to the great Greek playwrights—I share his admiration for figures like Hamlet, Falstaff and others. It really does feel like such characters actually existed.

As Bloom observes, “even if we never attend a performance or read a play,” Shakespeare has “made us theatrical,” changing our ideas “as to what makes the self authentically human.”

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Our Country, a Land of Poverty

By Robin Bates | Published: November 25, 2023
William Blake illustration from Songs of Experience

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Christ the King Sunday

Today is “Christ the King” Sunday, which celebrates the prospect of Jesus reigning “over the minds of individuals by his teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one’s life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example” (to borrow Pope Pius XI’s description). As I read over today’s Gospel reading from Matthew (25:31-46), I found myself wondering what Trump-supporting Evangelicals think of the passage.

After all, the way today’s MAGA Republicans seek to slash programs for the poor while cutting taxes for America’s wealthiest—all the while cheering on a man who dreams of creating vast detention camps for the “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”—would seem to put them in Jesus’s goat category:

Jesus said, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Perhaps some combination of prosperity theology and Calvinist predestination allows Trump “Christians” to think of themselves as sheep. Perhaps they imagine that they are bound for “eternal life” because they are amongst the elect while the poor deserve their punishment.

For me, Matthew’s passage is about the here and now rather than some future life-after-death. While I don’t much care for the monarchical metaphor, I read it as a vision of the paradise we should be working towards while still alive. The deep joy that comes with reaching out to those in need contrasts dramatically with the mental hell of resentment, anger and fear that arises when one ignores or contributes to suffering. The sadistic satisfaction that comes with watching Trump vent his spleen against his enemies ultimately leaves one feeling hollow, despite its temporary high. A deep love for others and a deep love for God (a.k.a. creation) is the only way to experience genuine peace and joy.

Which brings me to William Blake, who both calls out his hypocritical Christian society and imagines a world where the sun shines and thorn-free fields produce a bounty for all. Think of the sun here as an internal state. Despite their suffering, the children catch glimpses of it while they are singing their songs of joy. As Blake’s other “Holy Thursday” poem (the one in Songs of Innocence) describes the hymn-singing children, “Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song/ Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among.” 

Although we appear to be a rich and fruitful land, when it comes to our “many children poor,” we reveal ourselves as “a land of poverty.”

Holy Thursday

Is this a holy thing to see, 
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reducd to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine. 
And their fields are bleak & bare. 
And their ways are fill’d with thorns. 
It is eternal winter there.

For where-e’er the sun does shine, 
And where-e’er the rain does fall: 
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

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Expressing Thanks Is Its Own Reward

By Robin Bates | Published: November 23, 2023
Gustave Doré, Dante’s Paradiso

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Friday

In yesterday’s Thanksgiving sermon, our seminarian Michael Sturdy spoke about God’s greatest gift to us. Reflecting on Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (9:6-15), Michael essentially said that, when we open our hearts to God, the gift we get back is an open heart. In other words, offering up thanks is not for God’s benefit. It’s for our own.

After the service, I mentioned to Michael that this is a truth that Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost fails to understand. Because he has made his ego his god and has projected this outward, Satan thinks God is a being that hungers for praise. By the same reasoning, he thinks that, when one praises God, one diminishes oneself. The passage I have in mind occurs in Book IV when, in a rare moment of introspection, Satan questions why he rebelled. After all, what could be easier than praising God?

He deserved no such return 
From me, whom he created what I was 
In that bright eminence, and with his good 
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.           
What could be less than to afford him praise, 
The easiest recompense, and pay him thanks, 
How due?

Satan, however, wants all this praise coming to him. Being, as archangel, one step below God, he longed to be the highest. He also experiences “endless gratitude” as a burdensome debt that can never be paid back. In other words, he sees God, as creator, using gifts to reinforce His/Her superiority:

Yet all his good proved ill in me, 
And wrought but malice. Lifted up so high, 
I ’sdained subjection, and thought one step higher           
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit 
The debt immense of endless gratitude, 
So burthensome, still paying, still to owe…

What Satan has forgotten, he admits, is that God’s gift doesn’t work this way. When we pay with our prayers of thanksgiving, the debt is automatically discharged. “A grateful mind,” Satan says, “by owing owes not” and so “what burden then?”

Forgetful what from him I still received; 
And understood not that a grateful mind           
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and discharged—what burden then?

We only feel like poor debtors if we’re not grateful. Once we pour out thanks, we realize that doing so brings us ecstatic joy. Which is what God (or, if you will, the universe) has wanted for us all along.

Milton takes a stab at describing this ecstatic joy in the dance of the angels. Perhaps Dante’s Paradiso (see illustration above) is Milton’s inspiration here:

No sooner had th’ Almighty ceased, but all
The multitude of angels with a shout 
Loud as from numbers without number, sweet
As from blessed voices, uttering joy, Heav’n rung
With jubilee, and loud Hosanna’s filled
Th’ eternal Regions…

And then there is there harp playing—which, as any musician will tell you, is its own reward:

[T]heir golden harps they took, 
Harps ever tun’d, that glittering by their side
Like quivers hung, and with preamble sweet
Of charming symphony they introduce
Their sacred Song, and waken raptures high;
No voice exempt, no voice but well could join
Melodious part, such concord is in Heav’n.

In short, giving general thanks for all our blessings is a lot of fun. Whereas keeping account of who owes what to whom is the quickest way to internal hell.

Or as Satan puts it a few lines later,

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide…

If you celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday, I hope you had a chance to experience the heaven that comes with expressing gratitude. And if, instead, you chose to spend the holiday in jealous resentment—well, that is the “lowest deep” that can devour you utterly.

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A Wordsworth Thanksgiving Poem

By Robin Bates | Published: November 22, 2023
Eagle’s Nest View of the Wye Valley

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Thursday – Thanksgiving

For this week’s poetry column in the Sewanee Mountain Messenger, my Thanksgiving poem was somewhat unusual. Most people don’t think of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (full title below*) as a poem about a family coming together to express gratitude. But I think it works.

Wordsworth recounts revisiting a spot overlooking the banks of the Wye River after a five-year absence. While five years may not sound like a long time, in Wordsworth’s case it feels like a lifetime. That’s because, during those five years, he has witnessed the French Revolution, had an affair and a child with a French woman, seen the Revolution morph into a reign of terror, and fled back to England.

During his time away, he talks about how, when he needed peace, he would focus on memories of the Wye River prospect. He reports how

      oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet..

Now he’s back and this time he’s not alone. His “dear, dear sister” Dorothy is with him. “In thy voice,” he says,

                                                   I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.

To which he adds, “Oh! yet a little while may I behold in thee what I was once.”

So now it’s time for his prayer of thanks. Knowing that his joy in the Wye River landscape is deep and genuine—after all, Nature never betrays “the heart that loved her”—he predicts this moment will lead “from joy to joy” for the rest of their lives.

And they will need this memory given that they will face many dark moments. Wordsworth lists them:

— evil tongues,
–rash judgments,
–the sneers of selfish men,
–greetings where no kindness is,
–the dreary intercourse of daily life.

And a little later:

— solitude,
–fear,
–pain,
–grief.

Luckily, the Wye River spot has now impressed them both with its quietness and beauty. Bolstered by lofty thoughts, the poet is confident that the bad times will never

         prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

Here’s the excerpt I shared with Messenger readers.

For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

But the poem doesn’t end here. To this point, Wordsworth has been focused more on the two of them. Now he imagines that Dorothy, in her future, will be able to recall this moment for her own needs. When she does so, she will remember standing here with her brother and recalling how much the spot meant to him as well as her—not only because of its beauty but because he stood there enjoying it with her.

Isn’t an important part of a Thanksgiving gathering the later memories we have of it? In our other gathering today, I will come together with friends that shared a Thanksgiving with my family 67 years ago. When I was growing up, three faculty families—the Bateses, the Degens, and the Goodsteins—would gather every year for a joint meal. When my mother died a year ago, the last of the older generation left us, but our Thanksgiving this year will have two additional generations. As always, we will be together in our house in the beautiful Sewanee woods.

As Wordsworth puts it earlier in the poem, “in this moment there is life and food for future years.”

Here’s how the poem ends:

Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

*Full title: “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”

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Clifton on JFK’s Assassination

By Robin Bates | Published: November 21, 2023
JFK shortly before the assassination

Wednesday

Sixty years ago, on the day that JFK was shot, I was in seventh grade in Sewanee Public School. While our classroom did not have a television, the sixth grade classroom did so I remember a number of classmates going over to watch the events although I don’t believe that I did. But I remember school being canceled the following day and experiencing a strange sense of stillness in the air.

Then the world got even crazier as the killer was himself shot. I think I heard that news when I got out of church, and it conveyed to me, even more than the assassination, that the world outside my safe enclave was chaotic and out of control. While it’s not like my childhood ended that day, something definitely shifted.

Something shifted for poet Lucille Clifton as well. In “november 21, 1988,” she finds herself, 25 years later, looking back and feeling that history that day became divided into a “before” and an “after.” “Before” was a time when “honor was honorable and/ good and right were good and right.” “After” was “the bubble clos[ing] over the top of the world.”

I interpret the bubble as a closing in. A sense of infinite possibility has given way to the grim reality of limited prospects. Until the moment in November, hope was in the air. August of that year had seen Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech.” And even though, a month later (in September), racists bombed a Birmingham church, killing four little girls, that was in reaction to a trajectory that seemed to be trending upwards.

Clifton would have been 27 at the time of the Kennedy killing, probably a young mother. I think she sensed, in a visceral way, that the forces of reaction would do anything to forestall “liberty and justice for all,” even if the president had to be killed to ensure it. (With today’s rightwing willing to tolerate a coup and Trump’s violent rhetoric, we’re much clearer about that now.) In 1988, when she wrote the poem, Ronald Reagan and the GOP were doing all they could to roll back the gains achieved by the civil rights, labor, and feminist movements. Also in the late 1980s, urban crime was soaring with the crack epidemic, talented young men were dying in the thousands from A.I.D.S., and wealthy Americans were making out like bandits. From that perspective, “this” was “not better than that.”

In short, “november 21, 1988” is a “good old days” poem. Or as Clifton puts it, “them days.”

november 21, 1988
25 years
By Lucille Clifton

those days
before the brain blew back
mottled and rusting against the pink coat
them days
when the word had meaning
as well as definition
those days
when honor was honorable and
good and right were good and right
them days
when the spirit of hope
reached toward us waving a wide hand
and smiling toward us.  Yes
those days
them days
the days
before the bubble closed
over the top of the world.  Not
this is not better than that

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Austen’s Revolutionary Style

By Robin Bates | Published: November 20, 2023
Anya Taylor Joy as Emma

Tuesday

Yesterday I wrote about how Angus Fletcher, in his work about literature’s “greatest inventions,” argues that Fielding invented romantic irony as a way to “ward off heartbreak.” Fletcher then claims that Jane Austen took romantic irony to a new level.

The problem with Fielding’s literary solution, Fletcher says, is that alternating back and forth “had yielded a half romance and a half dose of medicine.” That’s why, he believes, Tom Jones was only half as popular as Samuel Richardson’s heart-breaking Clarissa. What he needed, if he wanted to stay with his brand of irony, was a style that would allow him to be “entirely romantic and entirely ironic.” While this sounds impossible, Fletcher says that Austen pulled it off.

Her solution was “free indirect discourse,” what the French call “le style indirect libre.” Such a style involves entering into the minds of characters without the author directly signaling he or she is doing so (thus the “indirect”). An example from Madame Bovary is famous because it was used in a public indecency trial. Emma Bovary is reflecting on her adulterous liaison:

But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.  

The prosecution argued that the passage is Flaubert celebrating adultery. The defense, in response, said that these are Emma’s thoughts, not Flaubert’s. The court acquitted Flaubert but found the style guilty of misleading people.

Of course we, who are well familiar with this style now (think Hemingway), have no difficulty in sorting things out.

Fletcher admits that Austen didn’t invent free indirect discourse. He cites an instance of it 2000 years ago in the Roman author Horace. Chaucer, meanwhile, uses indirect irony to masterful comic effect in Canterbury Tales. Fletcher, however, claims that Austen was the first to write “ironic romance that inspires us to care about its characters. Or in other words, a satiric love story that genuinely touches our heart.”

(Actually, Chaucer gets me to care for the Wife of Bath. But, okay, not in a love story way.)

Austen uses the free indirect style most extensively in Emma. Check out the following example (cited by Fletcher) where we are informed that Emma’s beloved governess has just gotten married:

Sorrow came—a gentle sorrow—but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness.—Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor’s loss which first brought grief.

Of course, it is only Emma who is sorrowful. Fletcher notes that, in the novel, there are “hundreds of these light pivots toward Emma’s personal sentiments.”

As always, Fletcher provides us with the neurological effects of this new literary technique:

[A]s Austen discovered, we’re perfectly capable of experiencing irony and love simultaneously. That’s because irony and love exist in different parts of our brain. Irony occurs in the perspective-taking circuitry of our outer cortex…, while love dwells in the inner emotion zones of our amygdala. So by focusing our cortex and our amygdala on different narrative objects, literature can inspire a neural mix of wry perspective and romantic feeling.

This, Fletcher contends, is very healthy for us:

The resulting cortex-amygdala blend draws us into experiencing an intimate human connection alongside a wry detachment from the greater world. Which is to say: it opens our heart to other people without duping us into mistaking our own desires for the laws of reality.

The ultimate result of reading Austen, Fletcher goes on to say, is that doing so eliminates

the friction and resentment that come from expecting our loved ones to be perfectly in sync with our own desires. And you might even say that it carries us a step closer to true love. Because isn’t that what true love is? Forgetting our self-involved fantasies to embrace a different heart?

I have two things to add to Fletcher’s literary history. First, he reports that, early in life when she was being courted by Tom Lefroy, both she and Tom loved Tom Jones. It was this love of a satiric romance that prompted Austen to innovate with indirect style. Yet I have always understood that Austen far preferred Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, which isn’t ironic at all. Indeed, in Northanger Abbey, she makes the loutish John Thorpe a Tom Jones fan while both the heroine and her sensible mother prefer Grandison.

Thorpe undoubtedly likes Tom’s drinking, womanizing, and possibly dueling whereas Grandison does none of these things. And in fact, the heroes in Jane Austen’s novels are generally more like Grandison, the villains more like Tom (only without Tom’s good heart). Thus, we see a preference for Tilney over Thorpe, Darcy over Wickham, Brandon over Willoughby, and Edmund Bertram over Henry Crawford. Maybe Austen’s own heartbreak over Lefroy led her to treat romance somewhat satirically. And if she and Lefroy, like Marianne and Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, read Cowper and Sir Walter Scott together, maybe that’s she satirizes those poets later in her fiction. Maybe Jane Austen was Marianne until she had her heart broken.

And speaking of romance without a hint of satire, Fletcher says that one of the most famous instances of “Samuel Richardson’s swoon-inducing offspring” is Jane Eyre. With this in mind, Charlotte Bronte’s comments on Austen are revealing. When an admirer of both Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice persuaded Bronte to read P&P, she got back the comment, “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

In Bronte’s mind, Austen plays it too safe. Ironic distance allows one to do that. At the same time, I can imagine Austen shuddering at Jane’s unbridled passion, how she at one point turns Rochester into her god. (How Austen would respond to Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, meanwhile, is beyond imagining.) At times, Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw are reckless in the way the way that Marianne Dashwood is reckless. Catherine dies and Marianne and Jane almost do.

So yes, Austen could well have invented “valentine armor” as a way to stave off a broken heart. Perhaps it’s even a way to have love and protection at the same time. But one loses something when one guards the heart, which may be why Charlotte Bronte doesn’t care for Austen.

I, on the other hand, feel blessed that I can turn to both authors. It all depends on whether I’m more in the mood for all-out romance or romantic comedy.

Bonus example of Austen’s free indirect style: My favorite line in all of Jane Austen provides us with a great example. In Sense and Sensibility, by getting disinherited, Edward Ferrars and Elinor Dashwood are able to escape having to live “on the best terms imaginable” with Mrs. Ferrars, John and Fanny Dashwood, and Lucy (Steele) and Robert Ferrars, all of them execrable people. Telling us what happens to them all in the future, Austen simultaneously takes us into their perspective and provides us with a satiric laugh:

They settled in town, received very liberal assistance from Mrs. Ferrars, were on the best terms imaginable with the Dashwoods; and setting aside the jealousies and ill-will continually subsisting between Fanny and Lucy, in which their husbands of course took a part, as well as the frequent domestic disagreements between Robert and Lucy themselves, nothing could exceed the harmony in which they all lived together.

I can hear more than one of the characters saying that “nothing can exceed the harmony of how we live together.” Of course, “setting aside” is doing some heavy lifting here.

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