Tuesday
High school English teacher extraordinaire Carl Rosin has several times contributed essays to Better Living through Beowulf, usually writing about his students grappling with ethical issues through a literary lens. (Carl recently served on the National Humanities Center Teacher Advisory Council.) In today’s post we learn about his class exploring what it means for killers to quote classic poetry. I love how he called a “Poetry Emergency.”
By Carl Rosin, English Department, Radnor High School
Readers have long struggled over poetic interpretation. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins warned us against torturing a poem “to find out what it really means,” but many of us resist that advice.
The El Paso mass shooting once again presents us with a killer’s published screed that purports to explain why he (whom I will not name or link to) committed that heinous act. This brought me back to a previous murderer’s screed: the one from Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. That man (whom I also will not name or link to) explicitly wrapped his arms around two famous poems from the British tradition: Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” and William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.”
My British Literature seniors here at Radnor High School had recently encountered both poems. When tragedy hit, I interrupted the ongoing unit to interpose a “Poetry Emergency”: a call to face and assess the terrorist’s use of these poems. As Prof. Bates’s “better living” model might suggest, we dug deeper into the man’s grotesque application of literature. Did his linkages make sense? If not, why not? If so, what does that mean to us?
Today’s post focuses on the Thomas poem, which opens the Christchurch screed. A future post will focus on the Henley poem, which closes it. A question underlying both posts: to what extent can we insulate poems from being used and misused in defense of immoral actions? That question reminded me of a separate terrible incident.
After four members of the white supremacist “Rise Above Movement” pleaded guilty to conspiracy-to-riot charges following the 2017 Charlottesville, VA conflict, I asked myself, “How would I respond were a spokesperson for ‘Rise Above’ to defend the group by quoting Maya Angelou’s famed poem ‘Still I Rise’”? After all, the poem, which I read with my 9th grade English students, includes passages like
Did
you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Sounds like a pretty good evocation of steadfastness in the face of apparent defeat.
Angelou was obviously the exact opposite of a white supremacist, and her poem ends with two stanzas that cannot be misinterpreted. But thoughts like this have been in my head since hearing about the Christchurch killer’s use of Thomas and Henley.
Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber reported on the literary connection immediately, noting that the terrorist
could have turned anywhere in Western culture for other odes to lonely, steely bravery—among the most common story tropes there are…
Kornhaber found it no coincidence, however, that the man “drew specifically from the dead-white-male literary canon.”
We cringed to hear about the evil that the terrorist did. I, as a teacher and defender of art and poetry, cringed a second time to hear about beautiful works being sullied by their mere association with this man’s loathsome act. My visceral desire was to purge the connection. My students cringed with me.
We wanted to say that the terrorist misinterpreted “Do Not Go Gently.” We all want evildoers to remain as inhuman as their acts.
The students were disappointed that we couldn’t easily dismiss the killer’s reading. Alana observed that “the language is broad and extremely applicable” in several ways. Julia conceded that “Do Not Go Gentle” is a poem about clinging to your vitality in the face of your impending demise. Suhaylah zeroed in on the call not to be “gentle” when fighting this existential fight.
Many students pointed out that the word “rage” certainly reflects the hatred that this man and his fellow white supremacists seem to embody, specifically about the prospect of being supplanted or removed. We may dispute the legitimacy of the white supremacists’ fears of “replacement” by an “invasion” of non-Aryan non-Christians, but that is the perception within that subgroup. Adam commented that, in the supremacist’s worldview, “‘dying of the light’ refers to the perceived ‘dying’ of western culture as it is being ‘invaded’ by ideologies from other [cultures] by becoming more diverse, while more and more people are not assimilating.”
Graham added an unpleasant but reasonable connection about Thomas’s second stanza, which reads
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
“Because we are here for such a short time,” Graham wrote, the stanza suggests that it is natural for us to want to
leave an impact. The gunman decided that his mark would be a sick and twisted massacre. He wanted to grab everyone’s attention with the massacre to say, ‘look at me and my beliefs.’ He interpreted from the poem to say that to ‘rage against the dying of the light’ meant not to take the shortness of life lying down, but rather to leave something people will remember you by.
Blake and Marina, the girls who led the discussions of “Do Not Go Gentle” in my two sections, were understandably appalled to read about the screed. Marina reflected,
I used to read this famous piece of literature with my dad when I was in elementary school. From a young age I always saw the poem as a beacon of light, encouraging people to make the most out of life.
Blake mourned,
the whole meaning of those lines are now skewed because of the gunman’s disgusting ideology…. The poem meant [to inspire] people who have given up and let life pass them by. It is not to authenticate radical propaganda against a group of people just because they believe in a different religion.
As we read deeper, we started to pick out ways in which the killer’s surface link was shaky. Blake reminded us of context and the logical fallacy known as cherry-picking. The poem is a villanelle, which requires five three-line stanzas plus a concluding quatrain, and is best known for the repetition of the first line (in this case, “Do not go gentle into that good night”) and the third (“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”). Between the first and third lines, Thomas’s narrator asserts, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day”; this, combined with the final quatrain’s climactic focus on the narrator’s father, sets the apparent context in terms of addressing an elder’s facing of his death. This is unhelpful to the Christchurch killer.
However, the poem has been used uncontroversially in situations that don’t match the Aging Father context, a famous one being from the film Interstellar, where it is also massaged into its position by some selective editing. The killer’s ignoring of this aspect bothered us much more.
There’s also the problem of the “good night”: death is not evil in the poem’s conception, certainly not to the extent that “raging” against it might be compatible with any sort of violence against others. The poem surges with oxymorons like “blinding sight” and “sad height,” and the wise men recognize that “dark is right.” Like all great poetry, the villanelle is powered by nuance and feeling that undermines any simplistic reading.
Part of our readerly reaction was spurred by a sense of injustice. Luke railed against quoting a poem “in a way that follows what the poem means on the surface while degrading its true meaning.” He added, “While the [Christchurch] gunman might think that he is the one who must fight, believing that his people are being overrun by Muslims, while in reality the poem he uses seems to support the Muslims more than him.” The terrorist and similarly deranged individuals “are not on the verge of death; by using the poem as a rationale to kill, they are degrading the poem for all those who really need to rage against the dying of the light.”
Nicole agreed: “The poem has such a positive message that certainly doesn’t align with the views of a terrorist.” Grace Y. wrote about “[t]he recurring use of the word ‘rage’ in the poem,” which, somewhat ironically, “encourages people to believe in goodness, to live our lives meaningfully, and to be alive with passion. The poem never wanted to emphasize death or killing.”
Alana picked up on this idea about intent:
Obviously, I don’t agree with the propaganda method or the cause, but I can understand it, and it’s a smart way to market a set of values…. I’m sure his goal wasn’t for people to shrug at his references and say, “Well, any interpretation is possible.” His goal was more to simply use art to inspire people and unify a cause, regardless of how the art is actually interpreted….
This brings us back to the poet’s intent, which I find more interesting than the killer’s. Kornhaber’s article focuses on this, his analysis rooted in study of Thomas’s and Henley’s biographies. It is widely known that Thomas was writing with an eye toward his own father’s demise. Explicit though the first line of the concluding quatrain is – “And you, my father, there on that sad height” – readers insist on their own interpretations.
We lack the power to pin every poem to its context: a work of art becomes an object that won’t stay in its place. This serves humorously in the modern world of meme-generation, controversially in debates about racism (as I wrote earlier about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and other social issues, and disturbingly here. So what do we do?
The influential 20th century New Criticism movement featured commentators who emphasized textualist beliefs. Robert Daseler illuminated this in his L.A. Review of Books essay about Prof. John Farrell’s The Varieties of Authorial Intention (2017):
William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley published an essay entitled “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), asserting that a poem, once it is published, belongs to the public, not the author. “It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public,” they wrote, “and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge….” Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that the “intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of art.”
Daseler summarized Farrell’s rebuttal:
The author’s intentions, even when confidently known, do not wholly explain or justify a literary work, but they do more or less illuminate it, and to rule them inadmissible is perverse and foolhardy. “However difficult it may be to discover what the author intended, his intentions do provide a stable object for interpretation, and interpretations that do not accommodate that intention cannot be correct.”
T.S. Eliot, that great icon among the New Critics, produced the modernist poetic masterpiece The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which features a disconnected narrator who does not rage against anything. He does not dare disturb the universe, or even to eat a peach. The line that rings out to me from that poem, however, is an unnamed one’s stammered, repeated insistence that “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all.” We are talking past each other – in Prufrock, the modernist confusion is swallowed but still depressing. Even our art, our blooming, introspection-giving, awe-inspiring art, fails to be shared in an affirmative way.
Almost all of those 35 seniors who reviewed the poem with me last spring are starting college this week. I wish that their world were not overrun by killers, but I can’t control that. I hope that they are able to be skeptical and critical when they hear someone make a challenging claim. Last spring, they did something that I hope they continue to do: dig into texts in a rational way and feel deeply enough to care about art.
What feeling people can’t bear to do is nothing. Perhaps we can correct flaws. Perhaps all we can do is acknowledge man’s inhumanity to man. Perhaps something in between. Perhaps – and this is the method I prefer – we can write and think and talk openly about it, urging ourselves and our friends and peers and teachers and students through the dialectical process of coming to understand more about what is and what is not.