Poems that Celebrate Long Marriages

By Robin Bates | Published: June 24, 2023
Eugenio Zampighi, Elderly Couple Reading

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Sunday

My wife and I renew our wedding vows today, with Julia observing that “in sickness and in health” looks different at 72 than it did at 22. While I won’t be bringing poetry into this ceremony as I did into our wedding—today’s affirmation has just been folded into the Episcopal Church’s regular service—the occasion calls for a poem here. I’ve struggled with which one to use, however.

Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife” came to mind as a poem I’ve loved ever since I encountered it in high school. In it, we see a shy young woman—she’s 14 when she gets married to “My Lord you”—grow into her marriage. Unable at first to even look at her husband so that she keeps her eyes affixed to the garden wall, she evolves to desiring that “my dust to be mingled with yours/ Forever and forever, and forever.”

She’s still a teenager in the poem, however. I wanted a longer lasting relationship.

I found one in W. B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” written to his muse Maud Gonne. Fantasizing that she will miss him some day, he claims that he is the only man “who loved the pilgrim soul in you/ And loved the sorrows of your changing face.” But I passed up this poem as well since, of course, they are not together.

Of course, there’s Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.” A popular favorite at weddings with its declaration that “Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds,” the lyrics works as a test of those early aspirations. Read early in life, it expresses a hope, read late, an assessment: Has loved indeed proved to have been “an ever-fixed mark/ That look[ed] on tempests and [was] never shaken”?

I have chosen two poems with speakers who, having themselves experienced long-term marriages, describe the impact of life’s storms on the relationship. Looking back at 40 years, Stanley Kunitz defiantly dares the tempest to do its worst: “So let the battered old willow/ thrash against the windowpanes/ and the house timbers creak.”

Whence comes this assurance? Comparing his marriage to the crickets he hears around him while gardening, he declares that brave music has poured from this “small machine,” which even after all these years is driven by “desire, desire, desire” and “the longing for the dance.” Although we have but one season and the winds are scattering our leaves, nevertheless his wife has the ability to invoke his essential core. “Touch me, remind me who I am.”

Touch Me
By Stanley Kunitz

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

If Kunitz feels like a house battered by a tempest-tossed willow, then U.A. Fanthorpe in “Atlas” lists what keeps the house from falling apart. A number of unglamorous but essential details uphold “the permanently rickety elaborate structures of living.”

By invoking Atlas, who held the world on his shoulders, Fanthorpe finds something mythical in the “kind of love called maintenance.” This aspect of marriage may not get acknowledged in the early years, but after fifty one learns to appreciate someone who

         knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting…

The poet’s partner is his Atlas. As Julia is mine and I hers.

Atlas
By U.A. Fanthorpe

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.

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Man of Property and the Dobbs Decision

By Robin Bates | Published: June 22, 2023
Soames Forsyte (Lewis) decorates his wife Irene (McKee)

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Friday

After having immersed myself in Victorian upper-class melodrama with Antony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, I now find myself reliving the Edwardian age with John Galsworthy’s Man of Property, the first book in the Forsyte Saga. I do so as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, and having that in mind has rendered certain passages in the book particularly horrifying.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has essentially told women that their pregnant bodies are the property of the state, not of themselves. (Some on the right even want to deprive women of the right to prevent pregnancy.) I agree with those who accuse the right, despite their “right to life” claims, of being far less interested in children than in controlling women’s bodies. After all, they lose all interest in caring for the children of poor mothers once they are born.

In short, they look upon women the way that Soames Forsyte looks upon his wife.

The Forsyte identity is based on owning property, and there are constant discussions in the novel of buying and selling plots of land. Sometimes, as with Nicholas Forsyte, family members do so with the money of their wives:

He himself had married a good deal of money, of which, it being then the golden age before the Married Women’s Property Act, he had mercifully been enabled to make a successful use.

In Soames’s case, property consists of more than inert things. In the passage that appalled me, we learn that he regards his beautiful wife as one of his possessions.

He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her…Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing!

Soames at one point is frustrated that he does not own his wife the way he owns his dining-room table:

Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.

“Out of his other property,” the passage goes on to say, “out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.

And further on:

His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body—if indeed he could do that, which he was beginning to doubt. If anyone had asked him if he wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want…

In a telling episode, one of the Forsyte aunts expresses puzzlement over a sermon about soul-owning. It sounds as though the minister has resorted to subtle irony to tweak his property-obsessed congregants (perhaps to be more direct would put his salary in jeopardy), but he only confuses them:

Only last Sunday dear Mr. Scoles, had been so witty in his sermon, so sarcastic, “For what,” he had said, “shall it profit a man if he gain his own soul, but lose all his property?” That, he had said, was the motto of the middle-class; now, what had he meant by that? Of course, it might be what middle-class people believed—she didn’t know; what did Soames think?

Scoles has deliberately inverted Jesus’s rhetorical question, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” But his sermon doesn’t lead to any soul searching amongst the Forsytes.

Significantly, at this point Soames overhears his wife, in another conversation, quoting the inscription that greets sinners in Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” The appropriate circle of hell for Soames would be the fourth, where groups of the avaricious incessantly push great bags of money against other groups.

Irene, who in a moment of weakness and poverty accepted Soames’s marriage offer, now finds herself trapped in this world. She is, as Galsworthy notes, “one of those women—not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race—born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living.” Ultimately, therefore, she must defy convention and break free. As Galsworthy observes in his preface, she is “a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.”

I have strayed somewhat from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision but the relevance still holds. The extreme right wants to return to a time when, as in Edwardian England, men were patriarchs who controlled their wives. If abortion is now playing a major role in American politics—preventing a red wave in 2022 and perhaps ensuring the election of a Democratic president in 2024—it is because American Irenes are refusing to let the Soameses of the world dictate their lives and their choices.

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Ukraine: What Would Leo and Fyodor Do?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 21, 2023
Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Monday

A couple of months ago I came across an illuminating article wondering how Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky would respond to the Ukraine invasion. Although Dostoevsky became a believer in Russian exceptionalism, University of Kansas Russian professor Ani Kokobobo is fairly sure he, along with Tolstoy, would be appalled at Russia’s behavior. She writes,

Seeing the rubble of a theater in Mariupol, hearing of Mariupol citizens starving because of Russian airstrikes, I wonder what Dostoevsky – who specifically focused his piercing moral eye on the question of the suffering of children in his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov – would say in response to the Russian army’s bombing a theater where children were sheltering. The word “children” was spelled out on the pavement outside the theater in large type so it could be seen from the sky. There was no misunderstanding of who was there.

Ivan Karamazov explores acts of barbarity targeting children in the “Rebellion” chapter. Confronted with unmerited suffering, he challenges the Christian vision of divine harmony. Because, as he sees it, belief in a divine plan prompts us to pass over horrors, he declares, “I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering.”

Ivan’s account of child torture gives us some insight into Russian war crimes. After describing Turkish soldiers cutting fetuses out of women’s bellies and catching babies on their bayonets, he moves on to Russian atrocities. At one point he tells a story about abusive parents:

This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans!

Ivan accompanies his report with a psychological analysis of sadism:

It’s just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain…

In her article Kokobobo also mentions Crime and Punishment, pointing out how Doestoevsky explains the toll of murder on the murderer—how, “when someone takes a life, they kill part of themselves.” How can someone who has read such a book, she wonders, “possibly accept Putin’s vision of Russia?” She feels sure that Dostoevsky, “Russia’s greatest metaphysical rebel,” would have “recoiled and rebelled against Russian violence in Ukraine.”

She says the same about Tolstoy, noting that, in his last work (Hadji Murat), he scrutinizes Russia’s colonial exploits in North Caucasus. There he shows “how senseless Russian violence toward a Chechen village caused instant hatred of Russians.”

In War and Peace, meanwhile,

Tolstoy contends that the morale of the Russian military is the key to victory. The battles most likely to succeed are defensive ones, in which soldiers understand why they are fighting and what they are fighting to protect: their home.

The novel has episodes which are only too applicable to current Russian and Ukrainian families who have lost members. There of vivid descriptions of

young Russian soldiers coming into direct confrontation with the instruments of death and destruction on the battlefield. They disappear into the crowd of their battalion, but even a single loss is devastating for the families awaiting their safe return.

And then there’s Anna Karenina. Kokobobo explains that the last part originally wasn’t published

because it criticized Russia’s actions in the Russo-Turkish war. Tolstoy’s alter ego in that novel, Konstantin Levin, calls the Russian intervention in the war “murder” and thinks it is inappropriate that Russian people are dragged into it.

“The people sacrifice and are always prepared to sacrifice themselves for their soul, not for murder,” he says.

And then there’s Tolstoy’s passage from his 1900 essay “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” It captures only too well Russia’s current situation:

The misery of nations is caused not by particular persons, but by the particular order of Society under which the people are so bound up together that they find themselves all in the power of a few men, or more often in the power of one single man: a man so perverted by his unnatural position as arbiter of the fate and lives of millions, that he is always in an unhealthy state, and always suffers more or less from a mania of self-aggrandizement.

One thinks of the close to million Russians that have fled their country since the invasion began when one hears about how Tolstoy helped a Russian Christian sect (the Doukhobors) Tolstoy avoid conscription. The proceeds from his 1899 novel Resurrection, a powerful exploration of prison life, went to help them emigrate to Canada rather than fight in the Russian army.

Kokobobo notes that the imprisoned opposition figure Alexei Navalny, whom Putin has imprisoned, quoted Tolstoy in a twitter message to his followers:

Act clearly, as Leo Tolstoy, one of our great writers, whose quote I ended my speech with, bequeathed: “War is a product of despotism. Those who want to fight war must only fight despotism.”

The article concludes by quoting Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze, who, addressing Russian supporters of the invasion, wrote, “I’ve read your f—ing literature. But looks like Putin did not, and you have forgotten.”

Even the greatest literature, sadly, cannot prevent atrocities. Nevertheless, it provides a moral compass that societies can turn to when the going gets rough.

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Trollope, Trump & Another Phrase for Lying

By Robin Bates | Published: June 20, 2023

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Wednesday

Our day-long car trip to and from our 50th Carleton reunion felt considerably shorter as we listened to the entirety of Anthony Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds. Last week I compared the scheming Lizzie Greystock’s determination to hang on to a diamond necklace to Donald Trump’s equally firm resolve to hold onto documents to which he had access while president. The major difference is that Lizzie may well have a right to the diamonds—the lawyers are unclear—whereas U.S. laws clearly state that the White House documents do not belong to Trump.

Both Lizzie and Trump share a similar relationship to truth, however. In fact, Lizzie is such a liar that she chooses her second husband based on his own penchant for lying:

She liked lies, thinking them to be more beautiful than truth. To lie readily and cleverly, recklessly and yet successfully, was, according to the lessons which she had learned, a necessity in woman and an added grace in man.

Only Lizzie does not call them lies. Fortunately for her, when the police major catches her committing perjury—she claims that he diamonds have been stolen when in fact only the box has been stolen, the diamonds having been hidden under her pillow—he provides her with a euphemism to make it easier for her to confess: she has given “an incorrect version of the facts.” Here’s their interchange after Major Mackintosh tells her what she can expect in the witness box:

“They will ask you to tell the truth.”

“Indeed I will do that,” said Lizzie,—not aware that, after so many lies, it might be difficult to tell the truth.

“And you will probably be asked to repeat it, this way and that, in a manner that will be troublesome to you. You see that here in London, and at Carlisle, you have—given incorrect versions.”

“I know I have. But the necklace was my own. There was nothing dishonest;—was there, Major Mackintosh? When they came to me at Carlisle I was so confused that I hardly knew what to tell them. And when I had once—given an incorrect version, you know, I didn’t know how to go back.”

“Incorrect version” becomes Lizzie’s preferred phrase from then on.

This puts her in a group with Kellyanne Conway, the senior counsel to Donald Trump who coined the phrase “alternative facts” to pump up attendance numbers for Trump’s inauguration and to speak about a “Bowling Green massacre” that never occurred. In his famous essay “The Politics of the English Language,” George Orwell cites such corruption of language as the means by which people “defend the indefensible.”

Lizzie and Kellyanne would be best friends.

Further thought: Lizzie also uses Trump’s delaying tactics, along with his practice of multiple, contradictory explanations, to defy a witness subpoena. The justice system finally gives up on her, which it so happens is how Trump has escaped accountability in the past.

Oh, and like Trump with his boxes of documents, transported between his Florida and New Jersey resorts, Lizzie insists on carrying her diamonds with her.

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A Memorial Service for Old Classmates

By Robin Bates | Published: June 19, 2023

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Tuesday

Julia and I returned last night from our 50th Carleton reunion, which proved to be an emotional affair. Because many of us have retired, we spent time reflecting upon our work lives. One commonality I discovered is the number of “Carls” who have committed their lives to public service, whether in medicine, education, government, religion, or other fields. Although some have achieved a fair amount of public renown while others have worked quietly within their communities, many—perhaps most—have worked tirelessly to make the world a better place. As it was a goal we spoke openly about 50 years ago, it was heartening to see how many people have followed through.

In looking back, we also remembered those we have lost. (Out of 375 people, so far Carleton’s class of ’73 has lost 55.) Our special memorial service featured, as is fitting, much poetry. As I used to tell my students, poetry is language doing heavy lifting.

While I knew most of the poems, there were a couple that I encountered for the first time. One of these was George Eliot’s “The Choir Invisible,” which was particularly appropriate as it captured our sense of service. The poet aspires to joining “the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence…

“Immortal dead” does not necessarily mean famous. If, by our presence in people’s lives, we have encouraged them to be generous or brave or high minded—if we have, with mild persistence, urged their minds to “vaster issues”—then we have lived well. In fact, Eliot tells us that “so to live is heaven.”

It is heaven because, in conducting our lives in this fashion, we breathe a “beauteous order that controls/ With growing sway the growing life of man.” Eliot credits that choir invisible as the source of the “sweet purity for which we struggled.” To be sure, this goal is sometimes difficult to achieve, perhaps because of our rebellious flesh or flawed upbringing (we may still carry around us the shame instilled in us by vicious parents). Yet because of that music that is “the gladness of the world,” we can step into our “better self.”

Therefore Eliot asks in conclusion,

May I reach
That purest heaven—be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!

Many of those we lost are in that choir invisible and many of us who are still alive are auditioning for membership.

To repeat Eliot’s reminder, “So to live is heaven.”

The Choir Invisible
By George Eliot

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
Of miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men’s minds
To vaster issues.

   So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing a beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we struggled, failed and agonized
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child,
Poor, anxious penitence is quick dissolved;
Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air;
And all our rarer, better, truer self,
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the burden of the world,
Laboriously tracing what must be,
And what may yet be better—saw rather
A worthier image for the sanctuary
And shaped it forth before the multitude,
Divinely human, raising worship so
To higher reverence more mixed with love—
That better self shall live till human Time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread forever.

   This is life to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow.

   May I reach
That purest heaven—be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

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Another Poem about Bread

By Robin Bates | Published: June 18, 2023

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Monday

As we just attended our 50th Carleton reunion, I share a poem that one of my former hall mates alerted me to. Mike Hazard, a remarkable photographer and filmmaker from the twin cities read last Sunday’s post about bread poetry and informed me that I omitted one of the best.

It’s by Tom McGrath, who grew up on a North Dakota farm and often focused on working class themes. (You can watch Mike’s documentary on McGrath on Amazon Prime.) In my bread post, I said that Jesus was a poet in the way that he used bread as a key metaphor for his ministry.  Like some of the other poems I mentioned, McGrath takes Jesus’s assertion that he is “the bread of the world” and runs with it.

The poem begins by comparing a kitchen table to “Christmas white plains” and detects the resurrection story in the image of bread rising. As with those other bread poems, McGrath moves between the earthly and the transcendent aspects of bread. For instance, after alluding to the mystery of the risen Lord, McGrath moves on to another mystery which he finds no less profound:

But we who will eat the bread when we come in
Out of the cold and dark know it is a deeper mystery
That brings the bread to rise:

it is the love and faith
Of large and lonely women, moving like floury clouds
In farmhouse kitchens, that rounds the loaves and the lives
Of those around them…

But that, McGrath adds, is a “workaday story”—and because he is writing on a Friday, he wants to emphasize the transcendent weekend dimensions of bread.

Here’s the poem:

The Bread of the World
by Thomas McGrath

On the Christmas white plains of the floured and flowering kitchen table
The holy loaves of the bread are slowly being born:
Rising like low hills in the steepled pastures of light —
Lifting the prairie farmhouse afternoon on their arching backs.

It must be Friday, the bread tells us as it climbs
Out of itself like a poor man climbing up on a cross
Toward transfiguration.

And it is a Mystery, surely,
If we think that this bread rises only out of the enigma
That leavens the Apocalypse of yeast, or ascends on the beards and beads
Of a rosary and priesthood of barley those Friday heavens
Lofting…

But we who will eat the bread when we come in
Out of the cold and dark know it is a deeper mystery
That brings the bread to rise:

it is the love and faith
Of large and lonely women, moving like floury clouds
In farmhouse kitchens, that rounds the loaves and the lives
Of those around them…

just as we know it is hunger —
Our own and others — that gives all salt and savor to bread.

But that is a workaday story and this is the end of the week.

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Song Born from Newly Freed Throats

By Robin Bates | Published: June 17, 2023
Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1875

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Spiritual Sunday

Here’s a fine sonnet sonnet by Tyehimba Jess for tomorrow’s celebration of Juneteenth. (Thanks to the blog Art and Theology for alerting me to it.) The poem is part of a sonnet sequence known as a crown, in which the last line of each poem is the first line of the next one and so on in a circle. I recently shared a John Donne poem from his own crown sequence.

Apparently it took Jess eight years to write his sequence. It’s about the famous Fisk Jubilee singers, a group organized in 1871 to raise money for Fisk College that popularized the Negro spiritual tradition. As Jess makes clear, the music that came from “newly freed throats” was a music of freedom. The poem mentions how the music grew out of slavery, how it was birthed from “storied depths of American sin” and “scored from dawn to dusk with coffle and lash” (note the musical pun). But it also emphasizes the joy of freedom, with “each note bursting loose from human bondage.”

Punning off of Psalm 96 (“O sing unto the Lord a new song”), it opens, “O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song.”

The poem appears in Jess’s collection “Olio,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Fisk Jubilee Proclamation
(CHORAL)
By Tyehimba Jess

O sing unto the Lord a new song . . . (Psalm 96)

O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song
born from newly freed throats. Sprung loose from lungs
once bound within bonded skin. Scored from dawn
to dusk with coffle and lash. Every tongue
unfurled as the body’s flag. Every breath
conjured despite loss we’ve had. Bear witness
to the birthing of our hymn from storied depths
of America’s sin. Soul-worn psalms, blessed
in our blood through dark lessons of the past
struggling to be heard. Behold—the bold sound
we’ve found in ourselves that was hidden, cast
out of the garden of freedom. It’s loud
and unbeaten, then soft as a newborn’s face—
each note bursting loose from human bondage.

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A Li-Young Lee Poem for Father’s Day

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2023
Guido Reni, St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus (c. 1635)

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Friday

For Father’s Day, which is Sunday, here’s one of the sweetest father-and-son poems that I know. I once heard poet Li-Young Lee read it at the college where I used to teach.

In the act of removing a splinter from his wife’s hand, the poet recalls a moment when his father did the same for him. He associates his father’s hands with tenderness, whether they were cupping his son’s face in his hands or bringing them together to pray for him. Perhaps the “flames of discipline/ he raised above my head” are an allusion to the Pentecostal flames since Lee’s remarkable father eventually turned to the ministry.

From a distance, it appears the father is “planting something in a boy’s palm,/ a silver tear, a tiny flame,” and in fact he is. We know that what he has planted has grown to fruition years later as Lee shows the same tenderness towards his wife.

The calming effect of the father—the adult Lee can “hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer”—keeps his son from resorting to melodrama (“Death visited here!”). Instead, the son returns to his father a gift of the same order that he has received: he tenderly kisses him.

The Gift
By Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

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McCarthy: Dark, Occasionally Hopeful

By Robin Bates | Published: June 14, 2023
Cormac McCarthy

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Thursday

Cormac McCarthy died on Tuesday, leaving behind him works that are indelibly imprinted on my mind. From the two that most stand out to me, I conclude that there were two McCarthys—one who believed that one could hold on to one’s dignity and sense of self in the face of the grimmest of challenges, the other that we all risk being annihilated by human darkness. All the Pretty Horses is my favorite in the first category while Blood Meridian still gives me nightmares as perhaps the bloodiest book I have ever read.

In Pretty Horses, 16-year-old John Grady Cole sets off for an open-ended adventure in Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. The start of their adventures, which contains a nod to the final lines of Paradise Lost (“the world lay all before them”), is positively lyrical:

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

If, like Adam and Eve, they are in fact leaving a world of innocence, they discover soon enough the darkness of the world. Eventually they see a 13-year-old boy who has joined them executed—he has killed a man to retrieve his stolen horse—and they themselves are thrown into a grim prison where they almost die. Yet in spite of it all, Grady holds on to what gives his life meaning, which is his love of horses and his love of a young woman he meets. Here’s a passage on the first love:

That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.

Later, having lost the woman but retrieved his horse, he reflects on the tradeoffs he has made:

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

In Blood Meridian we see the blood of multitudes in excruciating detail. “The Kid” finds himself a member of the Glanton gang, a group of scalp hunters who have been given carte blanche to massacre Indians and then, having been unleashed, turn their violence on all they encounter. At the core of the group is Judge Holden, a seven-foot albino psychopath who takes on mythic proportions as the book progresses. Highly educated and highly skilled, he appears the very archetype of violence, one who is timeless and impossible to kill. As the judge sees it, war is at the foundation of life:

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.

Having recently immersed myself in William Faulkner, I see the Mississippi author’s influence on McCarthy. Just as Faulkner reveals America’s dark history with regard to African Americans, so McCarthy does so with native Americans and in the settlement of the west generally. Harold Bloom, who regards the author as a worthy successor to Herman Melville (especially Moby Dick) and sees Blood Meridian as “the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed,”  says of Holden that he seems to “judge the entire earth,” one who holds sway “over all he encounters.”

McCarthy’s ability to look unblinkingly at human horror can have a cathartic effect, reports Will Carthcart, a reporter who has witnessed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine first hand. Cathcart was in Mariupol when the Russians attacked, was captured and then released, and then fled to Tbilisi, Georgia, where his pregnant wife awaited him. Cathcart writes,

Just before dawn, the Ukrainians seized a bridge that allowed us to escape. The drive out of Kherson still haunts me. So much of what I saw, heard, and smelled invoked a Cormac McCarthy novel. I had nothing else to compare it with. No one should.

Further on, quoting from McCarthy’s last novel The Passenger, Cathcart says that

Cormac McCarthy had provided me with a context, even a language, to internalize the things I saw and cannot unsee. Segments of human beings were stacked along the road between the smoking-bombed-out war machines.

“The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.”

Kherson is now free. But it will never be free of what happened. “A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.”

At this point in the article Cathcart also quotes Judge Holden:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

Cathcart sums up some of the lessons he has taken from McCarthy:

If the proper authorities ever caught wind of the narcotic potency of such novels, all books would be banned, repackaged, and sold by prescription to inhabitants of wealthy countries.

Reading The Road, Suttree, and Outer Dark on those maddening plastic mattresses hovering above the bleached linoleum was a reminder that things could be worse. If McCarthy could stash poetic elevation and transformative prose in such awful worlds, I figured I could find it.

In college, I gleaned that Blood Meridian is a life guide for the futile brutality of Western civilization. Is there anything more distinctly American than MacGyvering your own gunpowder out of piss and bat shit to kill a bunch of Native Americans?

His son having been born soon after Cathcart escaped to Georgia, he also sees specific lessons to be learned from The Road. He quotes from an interchange between the dying father and the son, who are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland:

When Ethan asks me, “What’s the bravest thing you ever did?”
I will cough and spit blood onto the road. “Getting up this morning,” I will say to the boy.
I will tell him “To carry the fire.” And when he says he doesn’t know where the fire is.
I will tell him, “Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

Dark though McCarthy seems, Cathcart sees him as an important reality check:

For 60 years, beginning with The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy has explored social decay and taboo with the radiant darkness of his poetic prose. It was up to us to find the light.

Even at his bleakest, he is holding back—leaving room for hope in the inconceivable tragedy. He provides us with the tools for us to fashion that hope or with the realization that we must let it fall into place like the ashes of a nuclear winter.

All of which leads Cathcart to a personal note of affirmation:

Once I wondered if it was insane to deliberately cause a new human. Now I wonder if it is insane not to.

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