Wednesday
Since last March, I’ve been FaceTime tutoring my Washington, D.C. grandson in poetry. Alban enjoyed the sessions so much that we continued them through the summer and haven’t stopped. Following last week’s horrific Capitol insurrection, I decided to focus on poetry as civics lesson.
Not that this eight-year-old is all that aware of what is going on. His parents, worried about frightening him, are calling the insurrectionists “protestors” rather than what they really are. They haven’t told him about the violence or the deaths.
Nevertheless, I figured it was important to emphasize certain national core values. I chose Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “A Nation’s Strength,” and Lanston Hughes’s “I Too Sing America.”
I remember a music teacher from my elementary school days teaching us a musical version of “New Colossus.” The lines found on the Statue of Liberty made an impression on me, and they seemed to resonate with Alban as well. We talked about how America is an immigrant nation and how Alban’s mother, adopted when a South Korean baby, was part of that history.
To set the stage of Lazarus’s poem, I told Alban about the Colossus of Rhodes and we talked about how the Statue of Liberty, looking over Alban’s Manhattan birth place, was our own great statue. We discussed the hopes that America would be a beacon to all who are suffering:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Moving on to Emerson, I asked Alban what makes a nation strong. His answer—everyone working together—is not far from the poet’s answer. To prepare him for the poem’s structure, I engaged in a little call and response. Are we strong because we are so wealthy? No! Are we strong because we have the world’s strongest military? No! Are we strong because we feel we are special? No. Why are we strong? Because we work together.
What makes a nation’s pillars high
And its foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor’s sake
Stand fast and suffer long.Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly…
They build a nation’s pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.
Emerson’s vision of heroic self-reliance appealed to Alban, who wants to do the right thing. He thrills at the prospect of challenge.
Alban’s favorite poem of the three was Hughes’s “I, Too. ” Less formal than the other two, it speaks to his vision of working together. It speaks to a different kind of strength:
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
Hughes doesn’t regard himself as “wretched refuse” but, no less than Emma Lazarus, he aspires to America’s golden door. Or as he calls it in multiple poems, the “dream deferred. From our lesson Alban received a vision of opening ourselves to others and standing strong for truth and honor.
America needs all of us to affirm these values during these perilous times.