Breaking Bread at Emmaus

By Robin Bates | Published: April 22, 2023
Reubens, Supper at Emmaus

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Spiritual Sunday

Today’s Gospel reading—which Julia and I hope to hear read in Coventry Cathedral—involves two of the disciples unknowingly encountering the risen Jesus as they walk the road to Emmaus. Among other things, he asks, “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Enthralled with his talk, they invite him to join them for supper, at which point he makes himself known:

So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

The physicality of the risen Jesus, emphasized by his breaking and sharing the bread, is critical to Denise Levertov. In this she seems to agree with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who (as I noted in last Sunday’s post), disagrees with Jesus for his declaration, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus he is setting impossibly high standards and not accounting for human weakness.

Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous.

Levertov does not altogether say that she needs to witness miracle, but she’s unwilling to see Jesus’s resurrection as merely a metaphor for soul awakening. In her eyes, metaphors, which ground an abstract idea in a concrete reality, are not in themselves enough. As she puts it, she can’t open herself “to symbol’s power” unless she is

convinced of its ground,
its roots
in bone and blood.
We must feel
the pulse in the wound
to believe
that “with God
all things
are possible”…

In this she differs from those “intricate minds” that can be nourished entirely on concept, just as epiphytes (think Spanish moss) derive their moisture from moisture and nutrients in the air rather than from the plants they are attached to. Resurrection for them, she suggests, is an “internal power,” not “a matter of flesh.”

I must acknowledge to being somewhat agnostic here. Sometimes I believe that Jesus came back to life after being dead in some non-ghostly form, sometimes that the story is just a symbolic way of illustrating the power of love. I don’t see myself so much as one of Levertov’s intricate minds as someone who waffles on the subject.

Levertov seems to say that this is not enough for her. As one of the “literalists of the imagination,” she needs to believe that people actually tasted

bread at Emmaus
that warm hands
broke and blessed.

Here’s the poem:

On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus
By Denise Levertov

It is for all
‘literalists of the imagination,’
poets or not,
that miracle
is possible and essential.
Are some intricate minds
nourished on concept,
as epiphytes flourish
high in the canopy?
Can they
subsist on the light,
on the half
of metaphor that’s not
grounded in dust, grit,
heavy
carnal clay?
Do signs contain and utter,
for them
all the reality
that they need? Resurrection, for them,
an internal power, but not
a matter of flesh?
For the others,
of whom I am one,
miracles (ultimate need, bread
of life,) are miracles just because
people so tuned
to the humdrum laws:
gravity, mortality-
can’t open
to symbol’s power
unless convinced of its ground,
its roots
in bone and blood.
We must feel
the pulse in the wound
to believe
that ‘with God
all things
are possible,’
taste
bread at Emmaus
that warm hands
broke and blessed.

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An Inspiring Poem for an Inspiring Leader

By Robin Bates | Published: April 21, 2023
Dublin statue of labor leader Jim Larkin

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Friday

As a result of our visits to Ireland and North Ireland, I have fallen in love with the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, who was raised on a farm with minimal education but found his way to poetry in spite of that. I share here a wonderful poem he wrote about labor leader Jim Larkin, who I found honored in both Dublin and Belfast.

In Dublin there is a large monument of Larkin gesticulating in his characteristic fashion, and there is a large poster of him in the North Ireland history exhibit in Belfast’s City Hall. Dublin appears to honor him for his commitment to Irish independence, Belfast for his contributions to the labor movement. His most notable achievement regarding the latter is his leadership of the 1913 Dublin lock-out, which historians sees as the Irish trade union movement coming of age. At stake were wages, working conditions, and the workers’ right to organize.

Larkin was famous for his energy and his eloquence, leading George Bernard Shaw to describe him as “the greatest Irishman since Parnell” (Parnell also has an impressive statue in Dublin). In his poem about Larkin, Kavanagh praises the way that labor leader could inspire workers to see beyond their working conditions to what life could be. When the poet writes that Larkin urged workers to look beyond “the serf’s grey docks” and see “the flowers are growing for you, and wonderful trees,” I am reminded of Karl Marx in his Preface to Hegel: “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”

Along the same lines, Kavanagh says Larkin persuaded dock workers to see ships, not as “dark galleys”—which is to say, working conditions that treated men essentially as prisoners—but as  potentially “pine forests under the winter’s starry plough.” Similarly, the “brown gantries” that the dock workers operate to load the ships could become, if workers were treated with dignity, “the lifted hand/ Of man the dreamer whom the gods endow.’

Kavanagh may echo Jesus when he imagines Larkin saying to the workers that “the ghost of bread/ Must not haunt all your weary wanderings home.” In other words, people do not live by bread alone. Important though life’s necessities are, they are not all there is to life.

As Kavanagh sees it, the Irish workers before Larkin were seduced away from confronting their real conditions by the sensationalist press and by sports. (He sounds here like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, members of the Marxist Frankfurt School, who saw pop culture as the opiate of the masses.) When Larkin “cried the call of Freedom and the call of Pride,” Kavanagh says, Irish workers were “cheered from out the utter degradation of their miseries” and, with the 1913 lock-out, changed labor history.

On the Death of Jim Larkin
By Patrick Kavanagh

Not with public words now can his greatness
Be told to the children, for he was more
Than a labor-agitating orator —
The flashing flaming sword merely bore witness
To the coming of the dawn. ‘Awake and look!
The flowers are growing for you, and wonderful trees,
And beyond are not the serf’s grey docks, but seas —
Excitement out of the creator’s poetry book.

When the Full Moon’s in the River the ghost of bread
Must not haunt all your weary wanderings home.
The ships that were dark galleys can become
Pine forests under the winter’s starry plough
And the brown gantries will be the lifted hand
Of man the dreamer whom the gods endow.’

And thus I hear Jim Larkin shout above
The crowd who wanted him to turn aside
From Reality coming to free them. Terrified
They hid in the clouds of dope and would not move.
They ate the opium of the murderer’s story
In the Sunday newspapers; they stood to stare
Not at a blackbird, but at a millionaire
Whose horses ran for serfdom’s greater glory.

And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin’s gutter,
Until Larkin came along and cried
The call of Freedom and the call of Pride,
And Slavery crept to its hands and knees,
And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter
Degradation of their miseries.

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Terrible Beauty Born from Easter 1916?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 21, 2023
The shell of Dublin’s post office after 1916 fighting

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Thursday

I continue yesterday’s post about visiting, at Dublin’s General Post Office (GPO), an exhibit about the 1916 Easter Rising and Yeats’s reflection about the event. I was struck when I learned that some of those who died were revolutionized by Yeats and Lady Gregory’s play Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

According to Wikipedia, play is

startlingly nationalistic, in its last pages encouraging young men to sacrifice their lives for the heroine Cathleen ni Houlihan, who represents an independent and separate Irish state. The title character first appears as an old woman at the door of a family celebrating their son’s wedding. She describes her four “beautiful green fields,” representing the four provinces, that have been unjustly taken from her. With little subtlety, she requests a blood sacrifice, declaring that “many a child will be born and there will be no father at the christening.” When the youth agrees and leaves the safety of his home to fight for her, she appears as an image of youth with “the walk of a queen,” professing of those who fight for her: “They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever.”

Although the play was written in 1902, it was revived many times, often to packed audiences. There was a performance just weeks before the uprising.

Given Yeats’s suspicion of violent nationalism, the play comes as a surprise. In his scholarly study Making the Void Fruitful: Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover, Patrick J. Keanehas an explanation: it was all the fault of the more radical Lady Gregory and of Maud Gonne, Yeats’s unrequited love and one of literary history’s great muses (up there with Dante’s Beatrice and Keats’s Fanny Braun).

According to Keane, Gonne had introduced Yeats to the leader of the nationalist Sinn Fein party in the hope that he would take the Irish literary movement and the Abbey Theatre in a more politically nationalist direction. Gonne, furthermore, had played the role of Cathleen in the play, inspiring young Irish men to the cause. Keane notes that the play was considered a “sacrament” by various nationalists, and it did in fact “send out men that were shot in the Easter Rising; in fact, the first to die was an actor cast in a revival of the play.”

While pleased by the play’s popular success, Yeats years later worried that he had blood on his hands for its effects. As he noted in “Man and the Echo,”

All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?

As Keane puts it, along with Yeats’s pride at the play’s popular success, he felt guilt “in having produced a patriotic but propagandistic play that was, at heart, a love-offering to his own terrible beauty, Maud Gonne, and a betrayal of his own better judgment.”

In the Museum of Irish Literature I came across a humorous corrective. Thinking that Yeats was being overly dramatic, poet Paul Muldoon humorously wrote,

If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead
would certain men have stayed in bed?

Offering his own corrective, W. H. Auden wrote in his elegy on Yeats,

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen…

But while poetry can’t usually be shown to have the same concrete impact as certain non-literary forms of writing—if it could, people would pay a lot more attention to it than they do—the General Post Office exhibit did point out that Irish culture and Irish nationalism fed off each other. Frantz Fanon, the father of post-colonialist theory, would describe a play like Cathleen Ni Houlihan as “literature of combat” and see it as essential to the political project. Literature may make “nothing happen” in a vacuum, but when the times are ripe, Fanon says, it changes hearts and minds.

In “Easter 1916” Yeats has a more nuanced handling of the uprising.  The poem begins with him acknowledging his personal connection with the rebel leaders. Nothing he saw in them prepared him for how (he accurately predicts) they will become legendary Irish figures. When they met, they would exchange “polite meaningless words” or perhaps a gibe—did Yeats lightly mock them for their nationalist aspirations?—but nothing prepared the poet for what happened. Instead he regarded both them and himself as nothing more than ordinary fools (we “lived where motley is worn”). All that “changed, changed utterly” with the rebellion, followed by their executions. Out of that, a “terrible beauty is born”:

I have met them at close of day   
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey   
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head   
Or polite meaningless words,   
Or have lingered awhile and said   
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done   
Of a mocking tale or a gibe   
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,   
Being certain that they and I   
But lived where motley is worn:   
All changed, changed utterly:   
A terrible beauty is born.

The next stanza is given over to some of the leaders, specifically to Countess Constance Markiewicz,  Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and James MacBride. Markiewicz’s sweet voice is the one that grows shrill through political arguments, MacDonagh was a literature teacher and poet, and Pearse was a writer and an important figure in the Gaelic League. As a sign of just how miraculous a transformation has occurred, Yeats even includes MacBride on the list. MacBride was the “drunken, vainglorious lout” whom Gonne, to Yeats’s dismay, had explicably married and who would go on to abuse both her and her daughter, so if even he can become a legend, then the uprising was indeed wondrous:

That woman’s days were spent   
In ignorant good-will
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers   
When, young and beautiful,   
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school   
And rode our wingèd horse;   
This other his helper and friend   
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,   
So sensitive his nature seemed,   
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,   
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,   
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Having described the figures in his drama, Yeats goes on to describe the fixity of purpose that characterizes many revolutionaries: they have hearts seemingly “enchanted to a stone” because they are driven by “one purpose alone.” While life  for most of us flows by, a “living stream” that is altered by “the horse that comes from the road” and by the reflections in the water of the rider and of “the birds that range/ From cloud to tumbling cloud,” the stone doesn’t change:

Hearts with one purpose alone   
Through summer and winter seem   
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,   
The rider, the birds that range   
From cloud to tumbling cloud,   
Minute by minute they change;   
A shadow of cloud on the stream   
Changes minute by minute;   
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   
And a horse plashes within it;   
The long-legged moor-hens dive,   
And hens to moor-cocks call;   
Minute by minute they live:   
The stone’s in the midst of all.

That this fixity of purpose is not altogether admirable is clear when we think of terrorists—and indeed (as I learned from the GPO exhibit) many Irish at the time saw the GPO rebels in this light. After all, they caused the death of innocent civilians and policemen and in fact killed some themselves. “Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart,” Yeats writes, and there’s a noteworthy contrast between the stone and the life connected with the stream (“The long-legged moor-hens dive,/ And hens to moor-cocks call”). When Yeats asks, “O when may it suffice?” he may be asking, “How long will Irish conditions continue to turn hearts into stone?” Perhaps he is echoing Psalm 13, “How long, O Lord?”

However Heaven may judge stone-hearted rebels, Yeats says that our human role is to murmur their names “as a mother names her child.” And to know they dreamed and died in obedience to that dream. It doesn’t even matter that the dream may have been needless as “England may keep faith”—which is to say, England may have granted Ireland home rule without the rebellion.

Indeed, the Easter uprising so polarized matters that it may have set progress back. Some even think that, without it, Ireland and Northern Ireland would not have been partitioned, although some of the historians in the videos argued that partition probably was inevitable in any event, given how vigorously unionists opposed even home rule, not to mention an independent republic.

In any event, what emerged from the uprising was a “terrible beauty”—beautiful in that it took on mythic status, terrible because of the violence. It may be that there are terrorists who regard 9-11 and other suicide missions as beautiful—or for that matter, people who see as beautiful the Confederacy’s Lost Cause or ancient Israel’s Massada rebels. The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is often a matter of perspective. In short, Yeats shows himself to be ambivalent about the uprising as his poem comes to its end:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.   
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part   
To murmur name upon name,   
As a mother names her child   
When sleep at last has come   
On limbs that had run wild.   
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;   
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith   
For all that is done and said.   
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;   
And what if excess of love   
Bewildered them till they died?   
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride   
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:   
A terrible beauty is born.

I appreciate Yeats for his willingness to explore the meaning of the uprising. He is not so sure of the rightness of the cause as he appears to be in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Contra Auden, he is making something happen, but that something is expanding our understanding of dramatic political events.

I have one other thought which may undermine the poem: there are certainly those who don’t find the Easter uprising to have been beautiful. Could Yeats be guilty of being overly impressed with the event’s drama. If so, he would not be alone. Many poets and writers between the wars were drawn to fascism, in part because it seemed more beautiful—or at least more full of life—than bureaucratic welfare democracy. (I’m thinking here of T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound among others.) And such love affairs continue today with (to cite one example) playwright David Mamet, who admires Donald Trump because of his willingness to (as Mamet sees it) cut through bullshit and speak to raw emotions. That these raw emotions include racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia doesn’t faze Mamet in the slightest. (I note in passing that Mamet’s great play Glengarry Glen Ross shows itself to be wiser than its author by exposing the void at the core of sexism.) “Easter 1916” loses some of its power if one doesn’t find beauty, terrible or otherwise, in what MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse did.

But it certainly has gripped the Irish imagination, with the hundredth anniversary having been celebrated in style seven years ago. Maybe this is the beauty that Yeats foresaw.

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The Theatricality of Martyrdom

By Robin Bates | Published: April 18, 2023
Éamon de Valera, one of the rebel leaders

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Wednesday

My favorite exhibit in Dublin has been one devoted to the Easter 1916 rebellion and housed in the very post office where the leaders barricaded themselves before being finally captured. I knew about the event from William Butler Yeats’s great poem about it, and the exhibit both filled in many of the gaps and confirmed the astuteness of Yeats’s insights.

The uprising occurred when a handful of Irish nationalists, hoping to spur Ireland into rebellion against British rule, seized various posts around Dublin, including the General Post Office. The rebellion was brutally put down, the leaders were executed, and three thousand Irish, many innocent, were thrown into prison. While most people were against the rebellion in the beginning, sympathy for the rebels swelled following the British crackdown and the republican movement took on new life. The wheels had been set in motion for independence for the southern five-sixths of the island.

The exhibit included various historians discussing the uprising, one of whom emphasized the theatricality of the event. Although it was a lost cause from the beginning, he said, it was staged so dramatically that it caught the Irish imagination. As he made his point, I thought of the Luis Borges short story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.”

In it, the author mentions a staged assassination designed to turn a political actor into a martyr so as to help the cause. Perhaps Borges had the Easter Rising partially in mind since he sets the story in Dublin.  In any event, the story has a similar outcome: “MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse” (to quote Yeats’s poem) have become mythical figures while, in the story, Fergus Kirkpatrick dies theatrically, also inspiring future revolutionaries.

Borges being Borges, there’s a twist: the Irish activists plagiarize from Shakespeare to stage the assassination of their leader Kirkpatrick, who, it turns out (and unbeknownst to him) is actually a traitor. For the sake of Irish independence, he acts the part:

The condemned man entered Dublin, discussed, acted, prayed, reproved, uttered words of pathos, and each of these gestures, to be reflected in his glory, had been pre-established by Nolan [the stage manager of the assassination]. Hundreds of actors collaborated with the protagonist; the role of some was complex; that of others momentary. The things they did and said endure in the history books, in the impassioned memory of Ireland. Kilpatrick, swept along by this minutely detailed destiny which both redeemed him and destroyed him, more than once enriched the text of his judge with improvised acts and words. Thus the populous drama unfolded in time, until on the 6th of August, 1824, in a theater box with funereal curtains prefiguring Lincoln’s, a long-desired bullet entered the breast of the traitor and hero, who, amid two effusions of sudden blood, was scarcely able to articulate a few foreseen words.

Needless to say, the Easter rebels weren’t this deliberate. But two of them were poets and their uprising captured the attention of poets, including Yeats. “A terrible beauty is born,” he wrote, and in tomorrow’s post–which I’ll be writing on the train to Belfast–I’ll dive into the powerful things he has to say about idealism and fanaticism.

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Leaving Ireland to Fight

By Robin Bates | Published: April 17, 2023

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Tuesday

Yesterday Julia and I visited Dublin’s Emigration Museum, from which I learned that Ireland’s major export has been—its people.

Since at least the 17th century, the Irish have been fleeing the island, with numbers in the millions. Sometimes the cause has been religious persecution, sometimes political, sometimes famine, sometimes civil strife, and always, it seems, poverty. Thankfully, things finally appear to have turned around in the 21st century.

Of the many options open to Irish immigrants, one has been the military, and there was a special room dedicated to Irish who have enlisted to fight for foreign powers (including England). I fully expected to see W.B. Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” somewhere in this particular exhibit but was disappointed. Perhaps the poem is too indifferent to Ireland and its fate for a museum like this. After all, the airman tells us that he’s not doing this for his countrymen, who will not be in the least affected by what he does. “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,” he tells us, “nor public men, nor cheering crowds.”

Instead he is driven by “a lonely impulse of delight,” and that impulse outweighs both past and future, even though the future contains death.

Yet for all his shrugging off of external factors, the airman is very specific about who he is: “My country is Kiltartan Cross,/ My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.” This is one thing I have been learning about Irish emigration, which was emphasized over and over by the museum: no matter how determined people have been to leave the country, they always take something of it with them.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
By W.B. Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

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Is Your Life Epic? Ask the Gods

By Robin Bates | Published: April 16, 2023
The Greek gods descending to the Greeks-Trojans battle

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Monday

My posts will be shorter this week as Julia and I are traveling in Wales and the two Irelands, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of literature. We visited two museums in Dublin today and saw up close how much the Irish value their writers. Our guide in the Little Museum of Dublin quoted verbatim from Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” and W.B. Yeats’s “Easter 1916” while the Museum of Literature Ireland practically treats James Joyce as Dublin’s patron saint. In the second venue we watched a video of two actors doing a dramatic reading from Finnegan’s Wake (shoutout to my cousin Faith Conant, who recently completed what may be the world’s most difficult work). We also saw a Joyce letter to Yeats asking for help getting Dubliners published (since, he reported, the printer had not only refused to publish it but destroyed the galleys).

Being a British 18th century literary scholar, I particularly loved all the accounts of Irish authors from that period—but I was miffed that they left out some of my favorites, such as Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan. I hadn’t realized until I visited the museums, however, that Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, C.S. Lewis, and Iris Murdoch were Irish as well.

Anyway, I came across this wonderful Patrick Kavanagh sonnet in the Literature museum. The Irish have a knack for finding the mythical or epic in the seemingly mundane, and that’s what the 20th century poet accomplishes in “Epic.” I’m assuming that “the Munich bother” is Neville Chamberlain’s futile attempt to appease Hitler in 1938 (at the expense of Czechoslovakia). But while the world is learning how a fascist can seize someone else’s land without consequence, the speaker is feeling diminished by the seeming insignificance of farmers battling over half a rood of rock (an eighth of an acre).

Or at least he thinks it’s unimportant until Homer’s ghost whispers in his ear that he himself “made the Iliad from such a local row.” After all, what makes Ballyrush McCabe’s fight with Gortin Duffy any more significant than that between Agamemnon and Achilles?

Okay, so the gods “make their own importance,” with Zeus declaring the warriors’ argument to be epic. Same thing in The Odyssey when Zeus tells us, in the opening stanzas, that the king of a minuscule island in the Adriatic is worthy of his attention.

So perhaps Kavanagh has his own Irish gods presiding over this land dispute. And if that’s the case, Irish farmers should be awarded the same respect as Greek leaders.

Epic
By Patrick Kavanagh

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided; who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

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The Stone Is Rolled–I’m Whole, I’m Held

By Robin Bates | Published: April 15, 2023
Bouguereau, Three Marys at the Tomb (1890)

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Spiritual Sunday

The story of doubting Thomas is fertile ground for poets and novelists since grappling with uncertainty is what literature does. For instance, to Jesus’s declaration, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus he is setting impossibly high standards and not accounting for human weakness.

Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous.

And:

Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him forever. But Thou didst think too highly of men therein…I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him—Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. 

In “A Doubting Thomas Sort-of-Sonnet,” Jill Alexander Essbaum finds a way to dismiss miracles of any sort and, with them, God. And then, unexpectedly, God enters. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who is the creation of the intellectually brilliant brother Ivan and who believes in human manipulation, doesn’t acknowledge this possibility.  

A Doubting Thomas sort-of sonnet
By Jill Alexander Essbaum

Sometimes I think belief is obsolete.
                  The sky is empty. God does not exist.
That there’s no point to life, and wishing it
                  won’t make it true. That miracles and feats
arrive by way of science. Cures and healings?
                  Just suave doctoring. And soul’s a quick
and nitwit way of naming all the tricks
                  our hocus-pocus human brains complete.
And death’s the end of everything, full stop.
                  And heaven’s ever-after is a ruse.
And we’re no more than broken, bloody dopes
                  who pray to ghosts. But. Sometimes something not-
myself pervades the walls of my heart’s room,
                  goes boom, then wracks and blacks and blues my bones.
The stone is rolled. I’m whole. I’m held. It’s hope.

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The Sleepy Sound of a Tea-Time Tide

By Robin Bates | Published: April 13, 2023
Anglesey, Wales

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Friday

We spent yesterday traveling around Wales with John Beech (a third cousin) and his wife Sue. I thought of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as we entered the country from the Cheshire direction since the 14th century poem was probably composed in the area, with Gawain possibly venturing into the Welsh wilderness to meet up with the Green Knight. At Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey Island we toured a 4000-year-old burial mound, and I could imagine such ancient Celtic structures inspiring the poet in his creation of “the green chapel,” where Gawain has his final showdown with GK.

But we were mostly in Wales to visit places where Julia’s ancestors had lived. Robert and John Jones (her great-great grandfather and great-grandfather) at one time resided in Llangwyfan, an out-of-the-way farming community, and we visited the church they may have attended. (There were lots of Joneses buried there but, given how common the name is, that in itself means nothing.) Today we’re in Holyhoke, from where the Joneses left for America somewhere between 1851 and 1854, ultimately ending up in Yellow Springs, Iowa. (Julia’s grandmother, Mary Jones, would marry Ira Miksch—Julia’s maiden name—and join the Grace Hill Moravian community in Iowa.) To reach Llangwyfan we squeezed our way down one-way lanes, bordered by high hedgerows, that sometimes went on for miles.

We’ll be visiting the Anglesey shoreline later today so here’s a poem by English poet John Betjeman about the bay. Apparently Betjeman was excited to learn that he too had Welsh ancestry and, like Julia, visited places where his family had lived.

The poem reminds me of W.B. Yeat’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” with the waves gently lapping (or in Betjeman’s language, sometimes sleepily slapping, sometimes sweetly susurrating). We too have seen Mount Snowdon, which is still capped with snow. As in the poem, all appears quiet and peaceful.

A Bay In Anglesey
By John Betjeman

The sleepy sound of a tea-time tide
Slaps at the rocks the sun has dried,

Too lazy, almost, to sink and lift
Round low peninsulas pink with thrift.

The water, enlarging shells and sand,
Grows greener emerald out from land

And brown over shadowy shelves below
The waving forests of seaweed show.

Here at my feet in the short cliff grass
Are shells, dried bladderwrack, broken glass,

Pale blue squills and yellow rock roses.
The next low ridge that we climb discloses

One more field for the sheep to graze
While, scarcely seen on this hottest of days,

Far to the eastward, over there,
Snowdon rises in pearl-grey air.

Multiple lark-song, whispering bents,
The thymy, turfy and salty scents

And filling in, brimming in, sparkling and free
The sweet susurration of incoming sea.

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Heaney and the Good Friday Agreement

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2023

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Thursday

Julia and I will be missing Joe Biden by a few days as we head for Ireland this weekend. Biden is currently visiting the two Irelands to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday agreement, negotiated by Bill Clinton, which persuaded the Protestant unionist parties and the Catholic nationalist parties to renounce violence and share power. Over 3500 people died during the three decades of strife, known as “the troubles,” before the agreement was signed.

In a recent Washington Post article, Clinton examined what it took to arrive at the historic agreement. In the course of the piece, he remembers turning to “The Cure at Troy,” by Irish Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, when the American president was seeking a solution.

I wrote in depth about “Cure at Troy” when Joe Biden quoted from it in one of his closing ads of the 2020 presidential race. I’m repurposing that essay here to second Clinton’s point that sometimes unsolvable problems can in fact be solved. While the future is somewhat worrisome, what with the UK’s withdrawal from the EU complicating relations between Ireland and Northern Ireland, Clinton is right to applaud how “an entire generation in Northern Ireland that has grown up largely free from the horrors of sectarian violence, free to focus on solving problems and seizing opportunities.

And indeed, Julia and I would not be traveling to Belfast without the Good Friday agreement.

At a time when Northern Ireland was still experiencing violence, Clinton cited Heaney in his bid for peace:

In 1995, when I made my first visit to Northern Ireland, I stood before a crowd of thousands in Derry and recited the lines of one of its favorite sons, Seamus Heaney: “History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.”

Now, 28 years later, Clinton cites another line from the poem:

On this anniversary, the people of Northern Ireland and all their friends around the world have much to celebrate. I hope this moment of shared memory will allow them to continue the work of peace and inspire others to believe, as Heaney wrote, in “miracles / And cures and healing wells” and find their own way forward.

“The Cure at Troy” occurs in Heaney’s verse translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (it was extracted and retitled as a separate poem). In the play, Heaney has the chorus imagining a time when, in the line beloved by both Clinton and Biden, “the longed for tidal wave/ Of justice [will] rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.” Here it is:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard,
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that the farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and birth-cry
Or new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

The line about getting hurt and getting hard recalls an earlier Irish poem about Irish fanaticism that Heaney would know well. In “Easter 1916,” William Butler Yeats writes of the Irish nationalists, “Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart.” Heaney probably had the Irish troubles in mind when he wrote his version of Philoctetes in 1991.

At the center of the play is a young man who rediscovers his principles and stands up for what is right. Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, is on a mission with Odysseus to persuade the archer Philoctetes to return to the Greeks since the Trojan War cannot be won (so they have learned) without the famed archer’s legendary bow. This after the Greeks have marooned Philoctetes on an island because his repulsive injury and incessant moans are driving everyone crazy.

The crafty Odysseus, knowing that the embittered Philoctetes will never listen to him, figures that the wounded archer may come to trust the young and innocent Neoptolemus. To that end, he persuades Achilles’s son to pretend he too has been shunned by the Greeks, thereby winning Philoctetes’s sympathy.

Because Neoptolemus considers such subterfuge a violation of his integrity, he balks at first but then reluctantly goes along. After all, what are one’s moral qualms when the fate of the Greeks is at stake? The ploy works, Neoptolemus gets hold of Philoctetes’s famed bow, and the transactional Odysseus regards the mission as accomplished. He has gotten what he wanted and now feels free to jettison the archer.

Neoptolemus, however, has second thoughts and returns the bow to Philoctetes. Odysseus is furious:

Odys: What has you so worked up? Why can we not
Just rise and go? What’s on your mind?
Neop: I did a wrong thing and I have to right it.
Odys: What was that?
Neop: I did this whole thing your way.
Odys: We were Greeks with a job to do, and we did it.
Neop: I behaved like a born liar.
Odys: But it worked!
It worked, so what about it?
Neop: Not for me.
And I’m not leaving til the thing’s put right.
Odys: It’s the bow. You’re having second thoughts.
Neop: What else?
Odys: You mean you’re going to just give it back?
Neop: The scales will even out when the bow’s restored.

Although Odysseus threatens dire repercussions, Neoptolemus remains firm.

Having reestablished trust with Philoctetes, Neoptolemus then attempts to persuade him to return to the Trojan war. The archer is understandably suspicious—is this just a new trick?—but Neoptolemus is now speaking to him as a friend. The young man tells Philoctetes that, having been so damaged by Greek rejection, so filled with resentment, he no longer can see his higher destiny—something which certainly could have been said of those Unionists and Catholic activists involved in the troubles:

Your courage has gone wild, you’re like a brute
That can only foam at the mouth. You aren’t
Bearing up, you are bearing down. Anybody
that ever tries to help you just gets savaged.
You’re a wounded man in terrible need of healing
But when your friends try, all you do is snarl
Like some animal protecting cubs.

Philoctetes isn’t buying, however, and insists on Neoptolemus keeping his promise to take him home. Having given his word, Neoptolemus agrees and the Greek cause appears to be doomed.

According to Clinton, developing trust was key to the 1998 Friday agreement. He notes that

the political leaders on all sides showed real courage in making sacrifices and compromises with their adversaries and committing to inclusivity, knowing perfectly well that they were putting their own political futures at risk. Trust was built slowly but surely through years of confidence-building measures, such as prisoner releases and cease-fires.

In Sophocles’s play, when trust has been developed at a human level, the gods intervene to bring about the desired end. Therefore, following the budding friendship of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, we have divine intervention from Hercules, a deus ex machina who tells Philoctetes that he must return to Troy.

Hercules doesn’t literally speak from the sky in Heaney’s version as he does in Sophocles’s. Rather, his words represent Philoctetes’s internal breakthrough:

Philoctete (crying out): Hercules:
              I saw him in the fire
Hercules
                was shining in the air
I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.

Hercules is thematically important as a man who has achieved divinity, and a god speaking is a sign of miraculous healing. As the chorus puts it,

If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and birth-cry
Or new life at its term.

Referring to his fabled labors, Hercules explains to Philoctetes (through the chorus),

I have opened the closed road
Between the living and the dead
To make the right road clear to you.
This is the voice of Hercules now.

Here on earth my labors were
The steppingstones to upper air:
Lives that suffer and come right
Are backlit by immortal light.

As I read these lines, I think of how emerging from the troubled decades must have felt like escaping from an abusive relationship. After facing unending threats of violence, Northern Ireland could begin to dream again. Hercules (through the chorus) tells Philoctetes that he must think higher than simply returning home to safe and sound Scyros:

So let my mind light up your mind
You must see straight and turn around.
You must complete your oath-bound course
You cannot yet return to Scyros [his home].

Go, Philoctetes, with this boy,
Go and be cured and capture Troy.
Asclepius will make you whole,
Relieve your body and your soul.

Go, with your bow. Conclude the score
And cruel stalemate of our war.

North Ireland’s troubles might not be the only conflict Heaney had in mind since apartheid South Africa was on the cusp of its own miraculous breakthrough when he wrote the play. This may be why Heaney–again departing from Sophocles’s script–warns against reprisal killings and shrine violations from the forces of liberation. Continuing with his instructions to Philoctetes, Hercules says,

            But know to shun
Reprisal killings when that’s done.

Then take just spoils and sail at last
Out of the bad dream of your past.
Make sacrifice. Burn spoils to me.
Shoot arrows in my memory.

And, Neoptolemus, you must be
His twin in arms and archery.
Marauding lions on that shore,
Troy’s nemesis and last nightmare.

But when the city’s being sacked
Preserve the shrines. Show gods respect.
Reverence for the gods survives
Our individual mortal lives.

In South Africa there would be the Truth and Reconciliation process, which sought for forgiveness and healing, even as it insisted also on accountability and justice. I don’t know if Northern Ireland has had anything comparable, but in the play Philoctetes feels like a new person when he sheds his resentments. Suddenly love of country overrides his grievances:

Philoctetes: Something told me this was going to happen.
Something told me the channels were going to open.
It’s as if a thing I knew and had forgotten
Came back completely clear. I can see
The cure at Troy. All that you say
Is like a dream to me and I obey
Neoptolemus: And so will I.
Hercules (through chorus): Then go, immediately.
The winds are blowing and the tides are high.

Meanwhile the chorus tells us that, while we should suspect “too much sweet talk”—another phrase for facile optimism?—nevertheless we should always keep an open mind:

Now it’s high watermark
And floodtide in the heart
And time to go.
The sea nymphs in the spray
Will be the chorus now.
What’s left to say?

Suspect too much sweet talk
But never close your mind.
It was a fortunate wind
That blew me here. I leave
Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk

And the half-true rhyme is love.

May we all carry the hope, as we look to the future, that a crippled trust might walk again.

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