Friday – July 4th Weekend
July 4th should be a time when Americans look both back and ahead, back to the founding ideals and ahead to how they can continue to be true to those ideals in the face of a changing world. This past week I have been writing about how strong nations experience trouble when they become overly nostalgic about a certain vision of the past, which is some of what we’ve been seeing in Trumpism. Percy Shelley’s “Hellas” is therefore an appropriate poem for this Independence Day.
Shelley wrote the play Hellas, best known for the poem below, in support of the Greek fight for independence from the Ottoman Turks. Among other issues, Shelley was concerned that the Greeks would rely too heavily upon past glory—and by past he meant the Athenian Golden Age 1200 years earlier. He’s not against celebrating “the glory that was Greece” (to quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Helen”) but he wants an update. If that happens, “the golden years” may indeed return.
Note how, in “Hellas,” all the adjectives are comparative: a “brighter Hellas,” a “loftier Argo” (Jason’s famous boat), a “fairer Tempes” (the garden of the Greek gods), a “sunnier deep” for the Cyclade islands. If Greece is to prevail, there must be a “new Peneus” (a legendary Greek river), another Orpheus, a new Odysseus on a new quest to leave Calypso and return home. “Another Athens” must arise.
“Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,” Shelley tells the Greeks—don’t keep looking back to your greatest military victory and all the buried bodies (with earth functioning as “Death’s scroll”). In fact, don’t glorify feats of arms at all. The reference to “Laiain rage” may be to Oedipus killing his (unbeknownst to him) father King Laius in a fit of road rage. (They have a fight over who has right of way.) He doesn’t want such emotions contaminating “the joy which dawns upon the free.”
After the killing, Oedipus goes on to solve the riddle of the sphinx, which has been terrorizing Thebes, so maybe Shelley is saying that modern political riddles, asked by a “subtler Sphinx,” are harder to solve. It certainly feels as though our current “riddles of death” are more challenging than those encountered by our own mythic founders.
When Shelley writes that the new Athens should bequeath, “like sunset to the skies,” the “splendor of its prime,” I think he’s saying that we can’t relive the splendor of the past. Our future may not match up with our rosy vision of the American Revolution, but we can still recreate a republic that is continuous with yet distinct from the past. The golden age of Saturn and the reign of Love can “burst” out again.
But not, Shelley cautions, by means of money and violence. Instead we need “votive tears and symbol flowers.” Which is to say, we need July 4th to celebrate genuine democracy, including those who have shed blood, sweat and tears to preserve it. January 6 insurrectionists who claim exclusive rights to America’s revolutionary past are not welcome.
A new America cannot arise if “hate and death return.” If they do, we can indeed prophesize a bitter future. Although both Greece’s and America’s glory were forged in blood, the world is weary of that particular past. In Shelley’s vision, strife, whether from the right or from the left, will not lead to a new “great age.” In place of “faiths and empires,” which are like “wrecks of a dissolving dream,” think of the renewal of spring.
When Shelley asks, at the end of “Ode to the West Wind,” “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” there’s critical debate over whether he’s asking a rhetorical question (as in, “Of course, spring isn’t far behind”) or a genuine question (as in, “I honestly don’t know”). This is the first July 4th in our history where the loser of the previous year’s presidential election has not yet conceded so I don’t know if renewal is in our immediate future or not.
When I’m feeling pessimistic, Matthew Arnold’s must-cited passage from “La Grande Chartreuse” come to mind. Visiting an ancient monastery in the Alps and contemplating his age’s loss of faith, Arnold describes himself as
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head…
But for this July 4th, I am choosing to believe that democracy, despite the battering it has taken recently, is shedding her old snakeskin and being born again. Certainly, Joe Biden is doing all he can to bring America back after a year that ranks amongst our very worst. Those who wish the best for America should hope he succeeds.
Hellas
By Percy Shelley
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death’s scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdu’d:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.
Oh cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh might it die or rest at last!