The Gender Battle in Pope’s Card Game

By Robin Bates | Published: February 4, 2024
18th century Whist Players

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Monday

Today I will be teaching the card game “ombre” as one of Sewanee’s “Friends of the Library” events.    I’ve written in the past about teaching the game to college classes, but this will be slightly different as the participants will not have previously spent a week studying Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714), in which the card game is played. Many of them will have attended last year’s event featuring the card game Speculation, played in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and so may come expecting a similarly simple game. Ombre is more complicated, unfortunately, but I’ve modified the rules somewhat to make it easier to play.

Here is the lecture I will be giving, along with the rules for ombre and the game as it is played in Rape of the Lock:

Alexander Pope was born in 1688 into a wealthy British Catholic family. Although you may not be familiar with his poetry, you will recognize some of the lines that he wrote, such as:

–A little learning is a dangerous thing.
–Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
–To err is human. To forgive, divine.
–Charms strike the sight but merit wins the soul.
–Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
–Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.

Pope first made his mark in his early twenties with the dazzling Essay on Criticism, which he then followed up with the even more dazzling Rape of the Lock.

The poem is based on an actual incident involving two Catholic families. The young Lord Petre, with a pair of scissors, had cut a ringlet from the head of Arabella Fermor. This serious breach of etiquette—we would call it sexual assault today—caused great commotion and led to a seemingly irreparable feud between the families. Pope’s friend John Caryll, who was also a friend of both families, came to the young poet and suggested that a comic poem might help the warring parties move past their quarrel by laughing the incident off. Pope, who would later make his fortune by translating the Iliad, decided to write up the incident as though it were an epic battle, with Arabella and Lord Petre as warriors. Their field of battle was the card game ombre.  

In the late 17th century and early 18th century, ombre was the most popular card game in Europe. Its name comes from the Spanish word for man, and its popularity lay in the fact that it was the first card game where players bid for trump. It was brought over to England from France when Charles II was restored to the monarchy, and Matthew Mitchell of Sewanee’s history department informs me that Charles’s queen, Catherine de Braganza, was a great fan. By 1674, it had become so popular in high society—and people were losing so much money over it—that there were discussions in Parliament to either pass an act against playing it or at least to limit the stakes to 5 pounds. Ultimately the issue became moot as ombre was surpassed first by quadrille, then by whist, and finally by bridge, all of which also involve bidding.

I can assure you that no one will lose any money in today’s demonstration. Nor will any locks of hair be cut.

In the poem we first see Belinda, the star of our show, dreaming of a possible encounter with the Baron. Then we see the Baron resolving that he will do anything he can to possess her. Then we see Belinda at her dressing table. and the beautification process is compared to a knight preparing for battle: “Now awful Beauty puts on all its arms;/ The fair each moment rises in her charms,” Pope announces.

Throughout his poem, Pope satirizes the glam culture and the materialist consumerism of his day. While he’s sympathetic with and even a bit dazzled by Belinda, he also thinks she takes herself far too seriously.

Belinda next takes a boat to the royal palace of Hampton Court, where the ball is being held. Once she gets there, she plays cards with the Baron and an anonymous third player who has come to be called Sir Anonyme. She wins a tightly played hand and taunts the Baron with her victory, upon which he, in revenge, sneaks up behind her when she’s bending over a cup of coffee and snips off one of her two curls. At that point everyone starts shouting while Belinda first bursts into tears and then throws a pinch of snuff into the Baron’s face. A woman named Clarissa steps forward and advises her to laugh the whole thing off but no one listens to her. In all the commotion, the lock disappears but Pope assures Belinda that it has flown off into the heavens and become a constellation.

In other words, Belinda—and by extension Arabella Fermor—has just been immortalized.

When those fair suns shall set, as set they must,
And all those tresses shall be laid in dust,
This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame,
And ‘midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.

Although he originally wrote the poem for private purposes, Pope realized that it was so good that he had to publish it, which he did. Reports are that, in the short run, Arabella Fermor was not amused, figuring that her dirty laundry was being aired in public. As she grew older, however, she came to appreciate that she had in fact been immortalized. After all, literary aficionados still know who Arabella Fermor is.

When the poem came out, the first thing that ombre players all over England did was lay out the hand as it is played in the poem. At the end of our session, I will walk you through it. But to fully appreciate Pope’s brilliance, it helps to know how to play.

I’ve promised participants that, after seeing how Pope describes the cards, they’ll never look at kings, queen and jacks the same way again. Look at a deck to check out the accuracy of the following:

Behold, four Kings in majesty rever’d,
With hoary whiskers and a forky beard;
And four fair Queens whose hands sustain a flow’r,
Th’ expressive emblem of their softer pow’r;
Four Knaves in garbs succinct, a trusty band,
Caps on their heads, and halberts in their hand;
And particolour’d troops, a shining train,
Draw forth to combat on the velvet plain.

We get even more detailed descriptions of the kings. First up is the king of spades. Everything that Pope says about the cards of his time still applies to today’s pack except for the fact that our kings do not have legs:

With his broad sabre next, a chief in years,
The hoary Majesty of Spades appears,
Puts forth one manly leg, to sight reveal’d,
The rest, his many-colour’d robe conceal’d.
The rebel Knave, who dares his prince engage,
Proves the just victim of his royal rage.

Next, the king of clubs:

Thus far both armies to Belinda yield;
Now to the Baron fate inclines the field.
His warlike Amazon her host invades,
Th’ imperial consort of the crown of Spades.
The Club’s black Tyrant first her victim dy’d,
Spite of his haughty mien, and barb’rous pride:
What boots the regal circle on his head,
His giant limbs, in state unwieldy spread;
That long behind he trails his pompous robe,
And, of all monarchs, only grasps the globe?

And finally,  the king of diamonds:

The Baron now his Diamonds pours apace;
Th’ embroider’d King who shows but half his face
And his refulgent Queen, with pow’rs combin’d
Of broken troops an easy conquest find.
Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, in wild disorder seen,
With throngs promiscuous strow the level green.

In playing the game, the two major things to know are the order of the cards and the possible bids The top three cards, known as Matadors and with each having a special name, are treated as trump:

Ace of Spades (Spadillia)
2 of trump (Manillia)
Ace of Clubs (Basto)
King
Queen
Knave
Ace
7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 (if not Manillia)

Because Spadillia and Basto are treated as trump, the other players must follow them with a card in the trump suit, not with a spade or a club (unless spades or clubs is trump).

Nine cards are dealt to each player, which means that a winning hand usually involves winning five tricks. The six possible bids are:

1. Non-spade with a partner – 5 tricks (or a dominant 4) in conjunction with a partner* with diamonds, hearts, or clubs as trump–2 pts each for bidder and partner (only the bidder loses 2 if bid fails)
2. Spade with a partner – 5 tricks (or a dominant 4) in conjunction with a partner* with spades as trump (called “color”) (4 pts each for bidder and partner (only the bidder loses 4 if bid fails)
3. Solo non-spade – 5 tricks on your own, with diamonds, hearts or clubs as trump – 4 pts (or -4)
4. Solo spade – 5 tricks on your own, with spades as trump – 8 pts (or -8)5. Tout non-spade – All nine tricks, with diamonds, hearts, or clubs as trump – 16 pts (or -16)
6. Tout spade – All nine tricks, with spades as trump – 32 pts (or -32)

*The first opponent to play a king is your partner.

Order of play

–Nine cards of the 40 (10s, 9s and 8s having been removed) are dealt to the three players, with the remaining 13 cards set aside into a pool.

–The player to the left of the dealer (Belinda in Pope’s poem) begins the bidding. She either passes or bids “non-color with a partner.” The player to her left (the Baron) says either “will you raise to ‘spade with a partner’?” If yes, that is Belinda’s new bid. If no, the bid passes to the Baron, at which point Sir Anonyme has a chance to push the bid up even further. After the bid is determined, the winner of the bid may raise (but obviously not lower) the bid—say, from “spade with a partner” to “solo non-color” or “solo spade” etc.

–The player who wins the bid is the “hombre” or “ombre” and has a chance to trade in as many cards as desired from the pool, followed by the other two players.

–The ombre begins play first.

–If the bid is “with partner,” the partner will be the first opponent to play a king. The ombre may choose to start play with a low card to bring out a king.

–Play continues until either the bid is achieved or fails. Failure is known as codille.

Sequence of cards played in Rape of the Lock

Belinda’s bid: “Solo spade.” (“Let spades be trumps, she said, and trumps they were.”) As the winner of the bid, Belinda (as ombre) leads.

Belinda                                    Baron                                Sir Anonyme

ace of spades (Spadillia)       four of spades                    six of spades
two of spades (Manillia)        five of spades                     three of spades
ace of clubs (Basto)                seven of spades*               two of hearts**
king of spades                          knave of spades                three of hearts
king of clubs                             queen of spades                knave of clubs
six of diamonds                       king of diamonds            seven of diamonds
queen of clubs                          queen of diamonds          four of hearts
queen of hearts                        knave of diamonds          six of hearts
king of hearts                           ace of hearts***                knave of hearts

*a spade must be played here because Basto counts as a trump
**devoid of trump, Sir Anonyme can throw off anything
***lower than the king, queen and knave

I’ve already read some of the action in Pope’s description of the kings. Here’s his account of the final two tricks. Remember that red aces rank lower than the picture cards:

The Knave of Diamonds tries his wily arts,
And wins (oh shameful chance!) the Queen of Hearts.
At this, the blood the virgin’s cheek forsook,
A livid paleness spreads o’er all her look;
She sees, and trembles at th’ approaching ill,
Just in the jaws of ruin, and Codille.
And now (as oft in some distemper’d State)
On one nice Trick depends the gen’ral fate.
An Ace of Hearts steps forth: The King unseen
Lurk’d in her hand, and mourn’d his captive Queen:
He springs to Vengeance with an eager pace,
And falls like thunder on the prostrate Ace.
The nymph exulting fills with shouts the sky;
The walls, the woods, and long canals reply.

In football, Belinda might be penalized for taunting. That’s certainly how the thin-skinned Baron sees it, and he probably regards her response as a personal rejection as well. But that’s not to excuse what he does, and his society certainly did not.

I can’t think of any other work that sticks so closely to an actual game, with the exception of Alice through the Looking Glass, which is based on an actual chess problem. In any event, Pope blew 18th century audiences away with his poetic wit and flawless couplets.

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The Otherworldly Cry of the Loon

By Robin Bates | Published: February 3, 2024

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Sunday

I recently came across a long and fascinating poem by Howard Nemerov in Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba’s anthology of American Religious Poems. “The Loon’s Cry,” published in The Sewanee Review in 1956 (which, for what it’s worth, was two years after my family moved to Sewanee), seems to be in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us.”

In that sonnet, Wordsworth is in despair at how capitalist society is so bent on “getting and spending” that “we lay waste our powers.” Nature has become alien to us because “we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Even when we are presented with nature’s unfathomable mysteries, we don’t respond. As Wordsworth puts it,

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.

All of which leads the poet to wish he lived in an earlier age when, looking out at sea, one saw not a scientifically explainable natural phenomenon but gods and goddesses:

                 Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Nemerov, who also has written poems decrying commercialization (for instance, “Boom!”), is having thoughts similar to Wordsworth’s as he walks alone “on a cold evening, summer almost gone.” While struck by the beauty of the scene as the sun goes down and a full moon rises, he worries that he is missing some deeper meaning. As he describes himself at “the fulcrum of two poised immensities” (the sun and the moon), I almost hear him saying (as Yeats says in “The Second Coming”), “Surely some revelation is at hand”:

On a cold evening, summer almost gone,
I walked alone down where the railroad bridge
Divides the river from the estuary.
There was a silence over both the waters,
The river’s concentrated reach, the wide
Diffusion of the delta, marsh and sea,
Which in the distance misted out of sight.

As on the seaward side the sun went down,
The river answered with the rising moon,
Full moon, its craters, mountains and still seas
Shining like snow and shadows on the snow.
The balanced silence centered where I stood,
The fulcrum of two poised immensities,
Which offered to be weighed at either hand.

Like Wordsworth, however, he laments that, instead of detecting some otherworldly significance, he is limited to mere nature viewing. “No longer a pagan suckled in a creed outworn” (to quote Wordsworth), he sees only natural science, not theology. He, like Wordsworth, has fallen from “the symboled world” where one found mysteries of meaning, form, and fate/ Signed on the sky”:

But I could think only, red sun, white moon,
This is a natural beauty, it is not
Theology. For I had fallen from
The symboled world, where I in earlier days
Found mysteries of meaning, form, and fate
Signed on the sky, and now stood but between
A swamp of fire and a reflecting rock.

In the past, Nemerov imagines, the “energy in things shone through their shapes” (he uses the image of Japanese lanterns to capture the idea). For instance, one once saw the drama of God’s war with Satan in all things. Now, however, we’ve “traded all those mysteries in for things.” One hears, at this point, Wordsworth chiming in with “a sordid boon”:

I envied those past ages of the world
When, as I thought, the energy in things
Shone through their shapes, when sun and moon no less
Than tree or stone or star or human face
Were seen but as fantastic japanese
Lanterns are seen, sullen or gay colors
And lines revealing the light that they conceal.

The world a stage, its people maskers all
In actions largely framed to imitate
God and His Lucifer’s long debate, a trunk
From which, complex and clear, the episodes
Spread out their branches. Each life played a part,
And every part consumed a life, nor dreams
After remained to mock accomplishment.

Under the austere power of the scene,
The moon standing balanced against the sun,
I simplified still more, and thought that now
We’d traded all those mysteries in for things,
For essences in things, not understood—
Reality in things! and now we saw
Reality exhausted all their truth.

However, at the very moment the speaker feels we have stripped nature of its mystery by reducing it to thingness—we reduce the world by thinking that the literal is reality and truth—he hears the cry of a loon, which is so primal that it seems invested with transcendent meaning. He feels like he is Adam, “hearing the first loon cry in paradise”:

As answering that thought a loon cried out
Laughter of desolation on the river,
A savage cry, now that the moon went up
And the sun down—yet when I heard him cry
Again, his voice seemed emptied of that sense
Or any other, and Adam I became,
Hearing the first loon cry in paradise.

That haunting cry supersedes our despair at living in a world “that seems too much with us.” With the cry, we are “blessed beyond all that we thought to know”:

For sometimes, when the world is not our home
Nor have we any home elsewhere, but all
Things look to leave us naked, hungry, cold,
We suddenly may seem in paradise
Again, in ignorance and emptiness
Blessed beyond all that we thought to know:
Then on sweet waters echoes the loon’s cry.

The cry puts the world in a new context, seeming to express its contempt at our having reduced reality to “the forms of things.” The loon batters and undermines our seemingly fixed world:

I thought I understood what that cry meant,
That its contempt was for the forms of things,
Their doctrines, which decayed—the nouns of stone
And adjectives of glass—not for the verb
Which surged in power properly eternal
Against the sea wall of the solid world,
Battering and undermining what it built…

What the loon’s cry accomplishes, the poet can accomplish as well. By “respeaking” the world, the poet aims to reawaken us to the world’s mystery, just as the loon does. After hearing the loon’s cry, the speaker is struck by how the moon rises and the stars begin to shine:

And whose respeaking was the poet’s act,
Only and always, in whatever time
Stripped by uncertainty, despair and ruin,
Time readying to die, unable to die
But damned to life again, and the loon’s cry.
And now the sun was sunken in the sea,
The full moon high, and stars began to shine.

This mention of the cold moon leads the poet to think of it as a metaphor for the coldness of our own world, at least to the extent that we have reduced it to thingness. Or in Wordsworth words, to “buying and spending”:

The moon, I thought, might have been such a world
As this one is, till it went cold inside,
Nor any strength of sun could keep its people
Warm in their palaces of glass and stone.
Now all its craters, mountains and still seas,
Shining like snow and shadows on the snow,
Orbit this world in envy and late love.

But in warning what can happen to us, Nemerov is acknowledging that all is not lost. Even though we are faced with a “burning cold,” it is as though the loon’s cry—to which Nemerov adds a distant train whistle—can restore mystery to our world. By means of “arts contemplative” (including poetry) we can read more into things than we thought. They present us with signatures that “leave us not alone/ Even in the thought of death.”

And the stars too? Worlds, as the scholars taught
So long ago? Chaos of beauty, void,
O burning cold, against which we define
Both wretchedness and love. For signatures
In all things are, which leave us not alone
Even in the thought of death, and may by arts
Contemplative be found and named again.

The loon again? Or else a whistling train,
Whose far thunders began to shake the bridge.
And it came on, a loud bulk under smoke,
Changing the signals on the bridge, the bright
Rubies and emeralds, rubies and emeralds
Signing the cold night as I turned for home,
Hearing the train cry once more, like a loon.

What began as a cold evening excursion is suddenly filled with “bright/ Rubies and emeralds, rubies and emeralds.” Whereas Wordsworth thought that he had lost forever the vision of “Proteus rising from the sea,” Nemerov assures us that poetry can find and name those things again.

Which is what both Nemerov and Wordsworth do with their poems. In other words, when the world is too much with us—or when we find ourselves standing between sunset and moon rise (“swamp of fire and reflecting rock”)—we can listen to the loon’s cry and to the poet writing about it.

At that point, the world moves from “natural beauty to theology.” Triton blows his wreathèd horn.

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T.S. Eliot Meets Groundhog Day

By Robin Bates | Published: February 1, 2024
Bill Murray and Punxsutawney Phil in Groundhog Day

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Friday

Today being Groundhog Dog, with the length of winter determined by whether or not it sees its shadow, I imagine Punxsutawney Phil having a T.S. Eliot-style existential crisis. After all, when the speaker in The Waste Land sees his shadow, it reminds him of the passage of time and his eventual death:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

In this barren landscape, the speaker hopes for something to believe in but sees only a “heap of broken images.” He longs for regenerating water such as Jesus promised the Samaritan woman at the well but sees only drought-stricken trees, stony rubbish, and the sun beating relentlessly down. And then there is the shadow, which may stride confidently behind you in the morning but ominously rises up to meet you at the close of day.

“The shadow” also shows up in Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” where it symbolizes a paralysis that falls between the idea and the reality, the motion and the act, the conception and the creation, the emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, the potency and the existence, the essence and the descent. In other words, as hollow men we cannot redeem our empty lives with meaningful action.

Interestingly, in the wonderful Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors is leading a Waste Land existence. His question to a man in a bar sums up both the plot and the theme of the film: “What would you do, if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing you could say, and nothing you could do, mattered?”—to which the man replies, “That about sums it up for me.” Further on Connors says bitterly (this to the television audience watching him report on Punxsutawney Phil), “You want a prediction about the weather, you’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.”

So if the groundhog sees its shadow tomorrow, will it think about the day that its dust will mingle with the dust of the earth and be plunged into existential despair? Or will it, like the Bill Murray character, eventually use this reminder of mortality to embrace that life it has been given and turn to poetry, music, art, community service, and love?

We have a choice in how we view six more weeks of winter. And life generally, when it comes down to it.

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A Hopeful Poem for Dark Times

By Robin Bates | Published: January 31, 2024


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Thursday

Sometimes, when we feel burdened by “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world” (to quote from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”), a visionary poem of human possibility will lift the spirit. That’s what Maya Angelou’s “A Brave and Startling Truth” does for me.

I encountered it in essayist Maria Popova’s blog Marginalian. Apparently it was inspired by a photograph of the earth taken from the outer reaches of the Solar System. In the words of Carl Sagan, the earth appears in the photo as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Sagan points out that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives” on this mote.

Of all the marvels on planet earth, Angelou tells us, none matches human beings when they are at their best. Her poem, according to Popova, is dedicated to “the hope for peace, which lies, sometimes hidden, in every heart.” 

A Brave and Startling Truth
By Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

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Taylor Swift as Snow White

By Robin Bates | Published: January 30, 2024
Taylor Swift

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Wednesday

Margaret Hartmann of New York Magazine’s Intelligencer made good use of the Grimm Brothers in a recent column about Republican rage at singer Taylor Swift. “All the talk about the pop star’s staggering popularity,” she notes, “reportedly has Trump privately fretting over the possibility that he is not the fairest one of all.” We all know the story, of course. but applying it to the former president accentuates his jealousy.

The Grimms don’t waste any time in bringing up the emotion:

A year later the king took himself another wife. She was a beautiful woman, but she was proud and arrogant, and she could not stand it if anyone might surpass her in beauty. She had a magic mirror. Every morning she stood before it, looked at herself, and said:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who in this land is fairest of all?

To this the mirror answered:

You, my queen, are fairest of all.

Then she was satisfied, for she knew that the mirror spoke the truth.

Snow-White grew up and became ever more beautiful. When she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the light of day, even more beautiful than the queen herself.

One day when the queen asked her mirror:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who in this land is fairest of all?

It answered:

You, my queen, are fair; it is true.
But Snow-White is a thousand times fairer than you.

The queen took fright and turned yellow and green with envy. From that hour on whenever she looked at Snow White her heart turned over inside her body, so great was her hatred for the girl. The envy and pride grew ever greater, like a weed in her heart, until she had no peace day and night.

Snow White is described as being white as snow, red as blood, and black as ebony. Swift has blond rather than black hair but otherwise checks the boxes.

According to Hartmann’s source, Trump is pretty much yellow and green with envy. He has “privately claimed that he is ‘more popular” than Swift is and that he has more committed fans than she does.” According to this source, Trump was particularly furious that Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year went not to him but to Swift.

Anne Sexton, in her version of the fairy tale, says of the queen, “Pride pumped in her like poison.” As a result, her rage knows no bounds:

…so she condemned Snow White
to be hacked to death.
Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter,
and I will salt it and eat it.
The hunter, however, let his prisoner go
and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle.
The queen chewed it up like a cube steak.

Channeling Dante’s Inferno, Sexton notes that the obsessively jealous create their own internal hells. As she puts it, “Oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.” This is a reference to the Grimms’ grim ending, where this literally happens:

At first [the queen] did not want to go to the wedding, but she found no peace. She had to go and see the young queen. When she arrived she recognized Snow-White, and terrorized, she could only stand there without moving.

Then they put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals. They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead.

MAGA Republicans at the moment have to go and see the young queen—which is to say, they cannot stop obsessing over Swift. Dancing the fire dance in iron shoes, they are spooling out unhinged conspiracy theories, including that the Kansas City football team is in the Super Bowl only because Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce is Swift’s boyfriend.

One beef that Republicans have with Swift is that she has been urging young people to register to vote, with 35,000 registering following an Instagram suggestion (!). Also, although she normally steers clear of politics, she endorsed Biden in 2020. But as Gil Duran of FrameLab points out, she challenges old straight white guys simply by being an independent and powerful woman who opposes racism and champions LGBTQ+ folk.

And which would you rather watch, The Eras Tour or a Trump rally?

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Trump as Captain Queeg

By Robin Bates | Published: January 29, 2024
Humphrey Bogart at Captain Queeg

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Tuesday

Yesterday I wrote about a Maureen Dowd column in which she uses two literary works to characterize Donald Trump’s performance in the recently concluded New Hampshire primary. Yesterday I focused on her comparing Trump with Grendel and complaining about his opponent Nikki Haley failing to step up as a Beowulf. Today I look at a comparison with Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Caine Mutiny (1952). It so happens that it’s a comparison I myself made in the last year of Trump’s presidency. I am reposting that essay today.

In her column, Dowd wrote that Trump was so rattled by Haley’s continued opposition that he couldn’t refrain from a “Captain Queeg rant.” At which point Dowd writes, “Ah, but the strawberries.”

It’s an allusion that, I suspect, will elude many if not most of Dowd’s readers. I’m not sure if the strawberry rant shows up in the Humphrey Bogart film—it’s been decades since I watched The Caine Mutiny—but it’s a major incident in the novel. I’ll let Wikipedia describe what happens with the increasingly unhinged captain:

Queeg’s next act of paranoia begins when over half of a prized container of strawberries is discovered to be empty. He concocts elaborate and time-consuming procedures in which to catch the thief. These occupy all of the officers and crew for long hours and further erode confidence in and respect for the captain. When Queeg’s pet theory is finally decisively flouted, he disappears into his cabin, leaving the ship in executive officer Lieutenant Stephen Maryk’s hands for days.

Here’s the novel’s version of Queeg’s action:

The captain deliberately lit a cigarette. “Gentlemen, ten minutes before I called this meeting, I sent down for some ice cream and strawberries. Whittaker brought me the ice cream and said “They ain’t no mo’ strawberries.” Has any of you gentlemen an explanation of the missing quart of strawberries?” The officers glanced covertly at each other; none spoke. “Kay.” The captain rose. “I have a pretty good idea of what happened to them. However, you gentlemen are supposed to keep order on this ship and prevent such crimes as robbing of wardroom stores. You are all appointed a board of investigation as of now, with Maryk as chairman, to find out what happened to the strawberries.”

“You mean in the morning, sir?” said Maryk.

“I said now, Mr. Maryk. Now, according to my watch, is not the morning, but forty-seven minutes past three. If you get no results by eight o’clock this morning I shall solve the mystery myself — noting duly for future fitness reports the failure of the board to carry out its assignment.”

Here are a couple of snippets from Trump’s speech as reported by Dowd, who periodically points out the Queeg parallels by inserting, “Ah, but the strawberries”:

“I said I can go up and I can say to everybody, ‘Oh, thank you for the victory. It’s wonderful.’ Or I can go up and say, ‘Who the hell was the impostor that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory?’ She did very poorly, actually.” He added: “I don’t get too angry. I get even.”

Ah, but the strawberries.

“But I felt I should do this because I find in life you can’t let people get away with bullshit. You can’t. You just can’t do that. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won.’”

As I noted in April of 2020, Trump prefers a comparison with a different captain, that being Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. After all, Bligh is a tyrant with life and death power over his crew. But Trump is more Queeg or, better yet, the captain in David Eggers’s novel The Captain and the Glory. The post was written in the early days of Covid and captures (lest we forget) the constant chaos that characterized the Trump presidency. It also shows how Trump was already beginning to throw in his lot with insurrectionists.

Reprinted from April 15, 2020

Those of us interested in cultural allusions were struck by a recent Donald Trump Tuesday tweet referencing Mutiny on the Bounty. Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s reflections on the reference alerted me to an even better one: Trump as the captain in David Eggers’s comic novel The Captain and the Glory. It so happens that Eggers’s captain is based on Trump, and the parallels are spot on.

Trump’s tweet requires some deciphering:

“Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all-time favorite movies. A good old-fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”

The governors have started setting up multi-state consortiums to address the pandemic. (When it’s working properly, the federal government should be that consortium.) So is Trump thinking of himself as Captain Bligh and perhaps New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as first mate Fletcher Christian? Is he in effect saying, in a patronizing manner, “Ah, isn’t it cute– the governors are declaring their independence when it would be so much easier just to ask me for help?”

That he sees the governors as engaging in mutiny is revealing.

Of course, they’ve more or less given up asking for help given how little good it’s done them. As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday,

We have gotten very little help from the federal government…I’ve given up on any promises that have been made. I hope something will get delivered from the federal government, but I don’t expect it anymore.

Unlike Trump, however, Bligh is an accomplished captain, even if he shares his brutishness. When cast adrift, he somehow manages to navigate a lifeboat with 19 passengers 3500 miles to safety. Would that we had someone with these abilities guiding our ship of state.

We also need a captain like Brett Crozier, who warned that authorities that Covid-19 was rampaging through his aircraft carrier and was subsequently fired for his truth telling. (One sailor has since died and 580 have tested positive.) (Update: The number is now 655, with six sailors hospitalized.)

A more accurate parallel is Trump as Queeg in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny. There we encounter a captain who freezes whenever action gets too hot to handle. At one point, Queeg flees rather than escort low-lying landing craft to their line of departure. At another, he freaks out in the face of a typhoon. Our own captain is doing all he can to avoid responsibility and escape reality.

Queeg also falls apart on the witness stand, just as Trump breaks into a rage when asked tough questions by reporters.

Milbank, however, has steered me to a much better parallel in Eggers’s novel.  Here goes:

He nudged the wheel a bit left, and the entire ship listed leftward, which was both frightening and thrilling. He turned the wheel to the right, and the totality of the ship, and its uncountable passengers and their possessions, all were sent rightward. In the cafeteria, where the passengers were eating lunch, a thousand plates and glasses shattered. An elderly man was thrown from his chair, struck his head on the dessert cart and died later that night. High above, the Captain was elated by the riveting drama caused by the surprises of his steering.

This is what it has felt like to have Trump as our president for the past three and a half years. Pray to God that the American public rises up in November and replaces him. Thankfully, electoral mutinies have the full support of the Constitution.

Further thought: I just have a new take on Trump’s tweet after seeing new tweets where he supports people defying governors’ settle-in-place orders: he imagines he is one of the mutineers (“exciting and invigorating”) rather than captain of the ship.

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You, Governor Haley, Are No Beowulf

By Robin Bates | Published: January 28, 2024

Nikki Haley

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Monday

Reader and friend Katherine Zammitt alerted me to a New York Times column by Maureen Dowd in which she sees the Republicans’ New Hampshire primary through the lens of Beowulf. This particularly caught my eye because, when I published my book How Beowulf Can Save America, I sent a copy to Dowd because I had quoted her. While she never replied, I like to think that it contributed to her column.

In any event, she contends that, while Trump may be a Grendel, Nikki Haley—his one remaining Republican opponent—falls short of heroic status.

Dowd’s point can be summed up by a riff on Lloyd Bensen’s famous putdown of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate: “I knew Beowulf. Beowulf was a friend of mind. Governor, you’re no Beowulf.”

Let’s look first at how Dowd compares Trump with the troll or ogre who attacks the Heorot mead hall every night. As she notes, Trump played the role of the monster “who keeps coming back to terrorize us” and who “was stomping around that lovely little snow-covered state, devouring his foes”:

In his lyrical translation of “Beowulf,” [Seamus] Heaney described Grendel as “the terror-monger,” the “captain of evil” and “the dread of the land.”

He wrote that the fiend “ruled in defiance of right” and was “malignant by nature, he never showed remorse.”

The “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, nursed a hard grievance,” he said, adding: “Grendel waged his lonely war, inflicting constant cruelties on the people, atrocious hurt,” pursuing “vicious raids and ravages.”

In my book, I don’t compare any individual to Grendel but rather see him as the archetype of resentment that can take over an individual or group of individuals. Trump both embodies such resentment and feeds upon it in others.

Beowulf defeats Grendel, not by wildly slashing at him with a sword (his men do this and it doesn’t work), but firmly and deliberately grasping him with an iron handgrip and refusing to let go. One stands up to bullies, I argued in my book, by refusing to be cowed by their manic energy. Instead, one takes a strong stand. It’s how Beowulf initially faces down the king’s jealous henchman Unferth upon first entering Heorot and then how he defeats Grendel. Here’s the description of that approach in the Seamus Heaney translation:

Venturing closer,
his talon was raised to attack Beowulf
where he lay on the bed; he was bearing in
with open claw when the alert hero’s
comeback and armlock forestalled him utterly.
The captain of evil discovered himself
in a handgrip harder than anything
he had ever encountered in any man
on the face of the earth. Every bone in his body
quailed and recoiled, but he could not escape.
He was desperate to flee to his den and hide
with the devil’s litter, for in all his days
he had never been clamped or cornered like this.
Then Hygelac’s trusty retainer recalled
his bedtime speech, sprang to his feet
and got a firm hold. Fingers were bursting,
the monster back-tracking, the man overpowering.
The dread of the land was desperate to escape,
to take a roundabout road and flee
to his lair in the fens. The latching power
in his fingers weakened; it was the worst trip
the terror-monger had taken to Heorot.
And now the timbers trembled and sang,
a hall-session that harrowed every Dane
inside the stockade: stumbling in fury,
the two contenders crashed through the building.

In the end, Grendel can only escape by tearing himself free of his arm, sustaining a mortal wound. In other words, he falls apart. Or to use a bad pun I used to use in class, Beowulf disarms him.

Unlike some of Trump’s opponents—say Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi–Nikki Haley has not engaged with Trump in this way. As Dowd observes,

Unfortunately, Nikki Haley was no Beowulf. She was not mighty and canny enough to rescue us from the brute. Not a single mead bench was broken in the battle. Her blade made slight cuts, but she was tentative, hoping not to drive away Trump supporters. She was on defense, not offense. She needed more of that adamantine quality that Nancy Pelosi showed against Trump.

And:

Haley did not say what needed to be said: Donald Trump should not be president because he tried to overthrow the government. We can’t have someone guiding our democracy who is undemocratic, claiming that every contest he loses is rigged. We can’t have a president who encourages violence, vomits misinformation, campaigns by humiliation and smears and, lately, portrays himself as divine.

The final result, then, was that the “Mara-a-Lago Monster,” “engorged by his victories over Haley and Ron DeSanctimonious,” just grew stronger.

Later in her column, Dowd compares Trump to Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny. But that’s a post for another day.

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Thrown and Raised at the Same Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: January 27, 2024

Caravaggio, St. Paul’s Conversion

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Sunday

This past Wednesday was “the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle,” commemorating Saul/Paul’s famous epiphany as he was on the road to Damascus. Paul was in the process of persecuting Christ’s followers, pursuing them “even to foreign cities,” when the moment occurred. As he recounts the story, it was midday when he

 saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions. When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, `Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.’ I asked, `Who are you, Lord?’ The Lord answered, `I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you. I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles– to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’ (Acts 26:12-18)

 It’s no surprise that Macolm Guite, who seems to have a sonnet for every Biblical occasion, has one for this one. The poem focuses on all the seeming contradictions that characterized Christianity’s greatest apostle.

St Paul
By Malcom Guite

An enemy whom God has made a friend,
A righteous man discounting righteousness,
Last to believe and first for God to send,
He found the fountain in the wilderness.
Thrown to the ground and raised at the same moment,
A prisoner who set his captors free,
A naked man with love his only garment,
A blinded man who helped the world to see,
A Jew who had been perfect in the Law,
Blesses the flesh of every other race
And helps them see what the apostles saw –
The glory of the Lord in Jesus’ face.
Strong in his weakness, joyful in his pains,
And bound by Love, who freed him from his chains.

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The Team Named After a Poem

By Robin Bates | Published: January 25, 2024

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Friday

Poetry lovers have an obvious National Football League team to root for this weekend as Baltimore battles Kansas City for the conference championship. As far as I know, the Baltimore Ravens are the only sports team in the world named after a poem. (Please contact me if you know any others. Allusions to Homer’s Trojans do not count.)

But what a strange work to be named after!  The poem that made Edgar Allan Poe famous is about a man depressed over his lost love Lenore, with the visitor who refuses to leave a symbol for his gloom. It’s not exactly a football drama.

I imagine Baltimore issuing dire threats to other teams: mess with us and you’ll sink into permanent melancholy. We’ll make you extremely depressed—albeit in a very poetic way.

Although Poe is associated with several cities, Baltimore was particularly important to him. As the website Poe Baltimore notes,

It was in Baltimore that Poe sought refuge when he had feuded with his foster father, John Allan, and was compelled to leave the house. It was in Baltimore that Poe found his future wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm, and in Baltimore that he placed his feet on the first steps of what would be his career for the next 17 years. Perhaps most revealing, when asked for the place of his birth, Poe turned his back on Boston and claimed Baltimore instead.

Baltimore was also where Poe transitioned from poetry to the macabre short stories for which (along with “The Raven”) he is most remembered.

Given this history, it made sense to honor Poe when owner Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, necessitating a new name. Ravens, furthermore, are ominous birds, often associated with death. If one wants to strike fear into opposing teams, it’s not a bad mascot to have.

Indeed, the Ravens have been scaring teams for some time now. The team that won the Super Bowl in 2000 featured one of the greatest defensive units ever, and the team that won it again in 2013 had the indominatable Terrell Suggs as a linebacker. The current team is similarly scary on defense. According to Jamison Hensley’s ESPN article, this past season the Ravens

became the first team in NFL history to lead the league in fewest points allowed (16.5), most sacks (60) and most takeaways (31) in a single season. Baltimore shut down this year’s best offenses, including dominating the top three – the Miami Dolphins, San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions — and quarterbacks were hit so hard five had to leave games this season. In the 34-10 divisional playoff win over the Houston Texans on Saturday, the Ravens held Houston without an offensive touchdown and didn’t let standout rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud run a play inside Baltimore’s 25-yard line.

Hensley explains that a key reason for their effectiveness is defensive coordinator Mike MacDonald, who has

devised a scheme of versatility and unpredictability where 355-pound nose tackle Michael Pierce drops into coverage, defensive tackle Justin Madubuike sometimes crashes the edge and strong safety Kyle Hamilton lines up everywhere.

In other words, when teams have threatened to score on this team, the Ravens have responded, “Nevermore.”

To be sure, the poem describes a cerebral assault rather than a full body one, but this fits the storyline as well. As the defense this Sunday goes up against the man whom some are predicting will garner even more Super Bowl rings than Tom Brady, commentators talk about the contest as a chess match. Of course, chess doesn’t involve 250-pound guys trying to pulverize you.

But it’s certainly true that the Ravens have ways of getting inside their opponents’ heads, which is what the raven does to the poor writer in Poe’s poem. This applies not only to the defense but also to its electric quarterback Lamar Jackson, who runs when you think he’s going to throw and throws when you think he’s going to run. In the poem, the “ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore” flies in and sits on a bust of Pallas Athena, informing the speaker that it will never leave. (The Raven is associated with the goddess of wisdom because Poe sees depression as an intellectual condition.) Over the years, the Ravens have set up permanent residence in the minds of many opponents.

If the Pittsburgh Steelers years ago were famed for their “Steel Curtain,” the Ravens could be called the “Purple Curtain,” filling other teams with “fantastic terrors”:

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors . . .

Admittedly, the Ravens are hardly silken, sad, or uncertain. Nor do they go “gently rapping” on your door.

But “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird[s] of yore”? Sounds right. “Bird or fiend”? Yes to both. “Thing of evil” from Night’s Plutonian shore that has been tossed by some tempest upon us? That’s been the experience of various opponents.

The weather bureau informs us that on Sunday we can expect (to apply a couple of Poe adjectives) bleak and dreary weather. Baltimore fans hope that, by the end of the game, Chief players will be begging, “Take thy beak from out my heart.”

Other Possibilities for Poetic Team Names

Here are a few inspired by other American poems that I came up with off the top of my head. Can you identify the poems. And send me other suggestions:

–The Embattled Farmers (their shots downfield are heard round the world)
–The Barbaric Yawps  (the team plays with energy and passion but individual players sing too many self praises)
–The Ragged Claws (they have the opposite problem, good team players that are plagued by indecisive leaders who find it impossible to say just what they mean)
–The Eagles of the Sea, a.k.a. Old Ironsides (they have fierce battles with their archrivals, the Harpies of the Shore)
–The Howl (the team has trouble passing drug tests)
–The Excitable Tulips (an effeminate name but the team boasts a suffocating defense)

Answer key

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
–T.S. Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood
   Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
   And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
   Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
   The eagle of the sea!
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Old Ironsides”

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…
—Allen Ginsberg, Howl

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.   
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.   
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.   
–Sylvia Plath, “Tulips”

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